Democrat Math, or Why Their Budgets Don’t Add Up, Either Update: What Reid didn’t mention

posted at 6:40 pm on April 15, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Our good friend Duane “Generalissimo” Patterson, producer for the Hugh Hewitt show and my co-host every Friday, exposes Senate Democrats as mathematical illiterates. What do the numbers 73 and 65 have in common? That’s how many Republican “filibusters” Democrats claim have hampered their work. Which is the right number? None of them actually know:

With the assistance of C-SPAN, it is clear that majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Chuck Schumer of New York, senior senators of their respective states, had senior moments today. ….

Why the discrepancy, you ask? The Democrats seem to have a living, breathing definition of the word filibuster. It seems if the Democrats block judicial nominations, Reid and Schumer count it as a Republican filibuster. If Chris Dodd, Democrat from Connecticut, filibusters the FISA reform bill, Reid and Schumer count that as a Republican filibuster. If Democrats vote unanimously or near-unanimously with the Republicans to uphold a filibuster and beat a bill, as has happened on almost a dozen occasions, that counts as a Republican filibuster.

Go see the pictures. According to Reid and Schumer’s track record on these claims, the Republicans would have had to stage seven or eight anti-filibusters for them to be correct this week. I think it’s even less complicated than Duane suggests; this pretty clearly shows that Reid and Schumer just like to pull numbers out of their nether regions.

And perhaps Reid can explain why this is the President’s problem:

“Mr. President, someone wanting to visit the Capitol today, there is no place for them to gather. They gather -it used to be out on the East Front – now they gather on the West Front. And the people who work here joke about you can always tell when it’s summertime because you can smell the visitors. And what we mean by that Mr. President – they stand out there in the high humidity, heat, sweating, and it’s really – there’s no place for them to go. The bathrooms in this facility are almost nonexistent. There is one on this side, one on the other side, both very small.”

Well, shouldn’t Congress do something about that? Which branch allocates funds? Congress. Which branch creates legislation to authorize construction projects? Congress. Which branch runs the Capitol building? Congress. Which branch of the government do the Democrats run? Congress.

Harry Reid’s the Senate Majority Leader, for crying out loud. He hasn’t figured this out yet? Of course, this is the same man who insisted that the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution so that Congress could create pork-barrel projects. He obviously missed a few sessions in his civics class.

Next time you visit the Capitol in Washington DC, remember which branch keeps you outside in the heat. And remember that Harry Reid and his colleagues talk about how we stink while you’re there.

Update: The correct count of cloture votes is 72 — but what Reid doesn’t tell you is that he filed 65 of the motions for them himself.

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