Petulance not rewarded today
Democrat boycott of Price, Mnuchin hearings fails; GOP OKs both without them
Congratulations to Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee. They have achieved an almost impossible goal: They refused to show up and do their jobs, and yet they somehow managed to fail at not doing them.
As a result, that nominations of Tom Price for Secretary of Health and Human Services and Steve Mnuchin for Secretary of the Treasury are on their way to the full Senate for likely confirmation. The Democrats' gambit was boycott the Finance Committee votes on both nominees, thus preventing the Republican majority from taking a vote because the rules say there has to be at least one Democrat present. Cute idea. And it failed. The Republicans simply suspended the rules and took the vote any, which is
exactly what they should have done:
Under pressure from their political base to block President Donald Trump's nominees, Democrats stayed away from the meeting for a second day running. This normally would have stopped action, but Republicans plowed ahead by voting to suspend the rule that required at least one Democrat to be present for business to be conducted.
Republican members of the committee, who were all present, then approved the nominees 14-0. The nominees are considered likely to be confirmed by the Republican-majority Senate.
"We took some unprecedented action today due to some unprecedented obstruction on the part of our colleagues," said the panel's chairman, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who was furious over the Democrats' no-show. He said he had obtained approval from the Senate parliamentarian for the move suspending the rule.
Democrats were also unhappy.
"It's deeply troubling to me that Republicans on the Finance Committee chose to break the rules in the face of strong evidence of two nominees' serious ethical problems," the Finance Committee's top Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, said in a statement.
This wasn't quite as brazen as the stunt pulled a few years back by Wisconsin Democrats, who not only refused to show up for work but actually left the state in order to present a quorum conundrum for Republicans in the Legislature trying to pass Scott Walker's collective bargaining reforms. That trick ultimately failed just like this one did, because no one is afraid of pushing aside people who simply refuse to show up and do their jobs.
Needless to say, Ron Wyden's expression of outrage is impossible to take seriously.
If Wyden wants more information on either nominee, the way to get it is to show up and demand it as part of the record. The reason he didn't really do that is that he knows these "serious ethical problems" are nothing of the sort, especially in the case of Price, who
we've already explained did nothing more than report a simple transaction of a handful of shares, executed by his broker.
When Democrats are going to be this unserious about the process of confirming nominees, they deserve to have the committee go on without them.
In fact, given their performance of the past few weeks, I'd say they deserve to have the country go on without them. Permanently.
View Comments
