In a beautiful, if perhaps unintended, exposition of the hypocrasy of the McConnell legislative obstruction program in the Senate, a New York Times "Congressional Memo: "Muscle Flexing in Senate: G.O.P. Defends Strategy," quotes the Senate Majority Leader today as follows:

I think we are being consistent here against higher taxes, consistently against greater regulation, consistently against creating new causes of action in bill after bill after bill. It's a positive message of our vision of America.

It is a reiteration of last week's Times article, All the Makings of a Carnival, Except the Fun that we highlighted in Cirque du Senate.

So, how well is the McConnell program working? "We have a pretty good sense that the public has figured out they are not too happy with this new Congress." That is, very well indeed. Positively.

Another budget deal was scuttled with nine legislative days left in the year when the White House issued a veto threat over the weekend on the "split the difference" approach. It's plus ca change all over again. The only sound you hear, once again, is House Appropriations Chair David Obey, sick and tired of negotating with himself:

"In my view, it's time to fish or cut bait. I'm tired of debating table scraps, and it's clear to me that the White House does not intend to compromise; they intend to sit back like Buddha and keep expecting us to compromise with ourselves. I'm done with navel-gazing. I'm not going to sit here and enable them to chisel domestic money down, down, down, down, so you wind up getting $5 billion bucks in return for $50 [billion] or $90 [billion] or whatever the hell it is they want for the war.

Obey's new "strategy" is to agree to every last spending level requested by President Bush back in February. Oh, minus any earmarks. That really hurts.

Democrats have vowed that if they must cut back on their spending plans, they will attempt to make the GOP pay a political price. "Actions have consequences," said a senior Democratic Senate aide, accoridng to CQ.

So far, there haven't been any.

Les Mots Justes about Enough concerning an almost dysfunctional institution are offered by today's New York Times:

Here... there is trash-talking, whining and finger-pointing, bickering and, occasionally, brief flashes of serious disagreement on policy. But with the clock ticking swiftly toward the end of the year and a stack of stalled legislation piling up, little is getting done in the Senate these days.

...

There is no deal on the federal budget, which is needed to prevent a shutdown of the government. The House and Senate remain divided over how to fix the alternative minimum tax, which will drill a hole in the wallets of 23 million Americans next year... A much-heralded energy bill, which the House approved on Thursday, was expected to fail in the Senate on Friday.

Democrats blame Republican obstruction. "They are filibustering as if they are on steroids," [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid said.

The repeated experience of seeing legislation passed by the House during the 110th Congress go directly into the Senate Cemetary prompted this scholarly opinion:

"As an amateur student of constitutional history and as a member of Congress, I have come to the conclusion that the Senate was a historic mistake," said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the No. 4 Democrat.

All Quiet on the Budget Front

The quiet that has descended over Washington amid the cold war on the budget has almost nothing to with the blanket of snow that fell on the town steadily all day yesterday. Instead, we heard essentially the same thing we've been hearing for the last several weeks.

We heard that the soft-spoken White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and Mr. Invisible, OMB Director Jim Nussle ventured through the snow yesterday to the Capitol for meetings with congressional leaders on both sides of Capitol Hill. "None of the principals would comment, but sources said the meetings with Democratic leaders yielded no negotiations on overall spending levels," Congress Daily reported.

No negotiations? Even though only one of the twelve budget bills has been signed and we are into the third month of the budget year? Despite widepsread concern about the budget impasse and government shutdowns?

Who needs bipartisan negotiations when you have House Appropriations Chair David R. Obey (D-WI) negotiating -- against himself? "There's a Plan A. There's a Plan B. There's a Plan C," Obey explained yesterday. "But there's no point in talking about it because you just undercut your first preference."

You've noticed that, have you? If you keep splitting the difference, pretty soon there will be no difference.

The lead editorial in today's New York Times, The President's Cynical Budget War, details President Bush's "attempt to repair the Republican Party's threadbare fiscal reputation" by stonewalling the FY 2008 budget process, vetoing every appropriations measure that's hit his desk thus far this year -- except for the spending bill funding the Pentagon.

Mr. Bush is clearly hoping that the public will somehow forget that he is the one who spent the last seven years running up huge deficits and debt with his off-the-books war in Iraq and serial tax cuts customized for his affluent political base. Mr. Bush's Republican allies on Capitol Hill are also hoping that the voters will forget how they abetted the president through all those years. Those fiscal turncoats are now scrambling to pose once more as budget hawks to survive in next year's watershed election.

In all this, the President is ably aided and abetted by his co-conspirators in Congress. As we've learned (see The Filibuster and Fiscal Policy), a party with as few as 41 Senators and sufficient unity can stymie the majority's efforts to perform Congress' only constitutionally mandated responsibility: to provide the federal government with an annual budget, and the money to execute its laws.

Yesterday, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) took to the Senate floor to describe a spectacle that, sadly, has become all too common:

I sat here for a while this afternoon and saw something quite stunning. My colleague stood up and said, on the appropriations bill that passed the Senate by a wide margin, over 80 votes on transportation-housing and so on, she wanted to bring the conference report up to the Senate. There was an objection by the Republican leader of the Senate: I object.

Then, immediately afterwards, Senator Cornyn from Texas stood up and said: I do not understand what all of the problem is, the way the majority is running this place, why do we not get appropriations bills to the floor of the Senate?

This was immediately after his side had already objected to bringing an appropriations bill to the floor of the Senate. It is as if they think no one is watching. These are illusionists who provide no illusion.