Permanent Recess

What’s neglected in all this is the Senate’s insistence on ignoring or killing legislation passed by the House. As far as Republicans are concerned, we have a do-nothing Democratic Senate. For instance, the Senate hasn’t passed a budget in 1,000 days. In 2011, it voted against the House-passed budget, then declined to offer one of its own. Faced with Republican threats to disrupt the Senate, Reid allowed a vote on Obama’s budget. The Senate rejected it 97-0.

The stack of bills the House dispatched to the Senate last year is large. It includes 16 measures to reduce the regulatory burden on various industries, 5 to spur entrepreneurship, and 5 to “maximize” domestic energy production. For those bills, the Senate is a morgue.

As usual, Republicans get no help from the media. GQ magazine’s recent list of “the 50 most powerful people in Washington” ranked House majority leader Eric Cantor first and Senate minority leader Mitch
McConnell second. The implication was Republicans run both houses of Congress. Harry Reid? He didn’t make the list.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.