Bob Geiger, who probably knows more about the Senate than most Senators, has a great analysis of the GOP's Senate only "success" this past session - killing Democratic initiatives:
Of all the nauseating tactics used by the Republican party in the 2006, midterm election campaign, one of the more galling was their continued insistence that Democrats had "no plan" for national security. To provide cover for that bogus claim, the Senate's GOP leadership made damn sure that, on September 13, 2006, they killed 528 pages of a national-security blueprint, proposed by Democrats, called the Real Security Act of 2006 -- and then went around for the next six weeks saying the Democrats had no plan.Didn't matter how vital the legislation was. The GOP killed it. Geiger provides a list of some of the bills that Frist and company deemed necessary to destroy. They were an especially vindictive bunch. Every time the choice was politics over sound policy, politics won. But, in the end, they lost the Senate.
That legislation, dumped on an almost-straight party line vote, was one of many Democratic-sponsored measures to die in the Republican-controlled Senate in 2006 and part of a whopping three-quarters of Democratic initiatives squashed over the two years of the 109th Congress.
An analysis of all Senate roll call votes in 2006, shows that, true to the form they established the previous year, the GOP killed most legislation proposed by Senate Democrats. In all, Democrats were able to scrape together a handful of Republican votes to pass just 28 pieces of legislation in all of 2006.
It's a whole new world on Capitol Hill. Imagine a Congress that actually passes legislation that is in the nation's best interest. What a concept.
