Plumbing Ever Further Depths

Test Ticker

Please support Mother Jones with a year-end donation. The truth is, we're a long way from our $600,000 goal, and we have to get as close as we can by Tuesday so we don't have to make hard decisions come January. If you value our reporting, please consider pitching in today.

$600,000

We still need to raise 400,000: Whether you can give $5 or $500, it all matters.

Please support Mother Jones with a year-end donation. We need to raise $600,000, or get as close as we can, by Tuesday so we don't need to make hard decisions come January. Whether you can give $5 or $500, it all makes a difference.

Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.

Just when I thought Republicans had plumbed the final depths of playground-level obstruction, they somehow manage to take things to yet another level. There is, it turns out, a rule stating that Senate hearings can’t go past 2 pm unless there’s unanimous consent to continue them. This consent was routine until this week. Amanda Terkel reports:

Today, during a Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing on transparency, Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) announced that he had to stop the proceedings because of Republican blocks….The AP also reported today that Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) had a hearing on the bark beetle canceled today “after Republicans angry over the passage of health insurance reform legislation blocked it by using an obscure Senate rule requiring a unanimous consent to hold hearings scheduled after 2 p.m.”

What’s next? Complaints on Fox that Democrats are using all the good hangars in the cloakroom? A refusal to come to order until Spongebob is over? To call this behavior childish would be an insult to children everywhere. Are we really expected to take a party like this seriously?