Here is how the pork cuts across party lines and the Senate gets nothing done in the process. It wasn’t just porkstar Democrats like John Murtha.  Alabama Senator Dick Shelby, a Republican who dabbled in birtherism, showed everyone that he will hold up Senate business in the name of pork for his state.

How’s that for tea in your eye?

[continued]

What's a guy got to do to get a little pork?

With all the talk of tea parties, it’s easy to forget that fiscally reckless Bush Republicanism is still with us, and that if Scott Brown is anything he is an untested moderate who won an anomalous election.  Ron Elving’s column was spot-on about Shelby:

Shelby has placed a blanket “hold” on 70 nominations pending before the Senate, nominations for federal agency jobs and seats on the federal bench. Does he have a case against each and every one of the 70? No, he isn’t really talking about any of them.

His problem has to do with a couple of government contracts he wants to see benefit his home state of Alabama. To date, these Shelby “earmarks” have not come to pass, and the senator wants to change that. He is tired of being stiffed. He wants to force the Senate and the Obama administration to cede to his preferences for the granting of these contracts.

That they allow this chicanery in the Senate procedural rules is without doubt evidence that both parties fail at doing the people’s business.  Shelby released some holds Monday night amid a growing public uproar, but he still has retained others and continues to threaten to do so.

These are bad times!  Don’t hold up the business of the people because you aren’t getting your earmarks:

What is this mysterious power to place a hold on appointments and bills? How is it that one senator can delay or even cancel the filling of these jobs? The hold is simply a senator’s way of notifying the majority leader that he or she intends to use the right to extended debate against that name or bill. It is an implicit threat to filibuster, in a time when such threats are as effective as filibusters themselves ever were.

In this case, Shelby’s communications director tells us, the issue is the coddling of terrorists. The Obama administration has not yet granted a certain contract for the building of tanker planes to refuel U.S. warplanes in midflight. And the Obama administration has not let a contract for a lab that will analyze forensic evidence from bomb-making materials found in Iraq and Afghanistan. The communication from the senator’s office suggests this shows a lack of commitment to anti-terrorism.

It neglects to mention that both these contracts involve, or might involve, large business interests in the state of Alabama.

Let him filibuster.  Let them filibuster.  Let the filibusters begin should be the new mantra of the Democrats as people watch Dick Shelby stop government to filibuster his pork.

Read Ron Elving’s Washington Watch post at NPR, Why All Americans Should Thank Senator Shelby, and the New York Daily News op-ed about this abuse of process.

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