When the United States Senate actually deliberates, it remains undefeated.
Last Tuesday, mere hours after Senate Republican Leader John Thune finally acquiesced to conservative calls for an open-ended floor debate on national voter ID legislation, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—who for months condemned the SAVE America Act as “Jim Crow 2.0”—told reporters that, lo and behold, Democrats are fine with requiring voters to show a photo ID. Days earlier, Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic Whip, also admitted as much.
If you followed the debate over floor strategy for the SAVE Act over the last six weeks, you know that Schumer’s admission was supposed to be impossible. With Olympian certainty, leadership aides and former ones-turned-corporate-lobbyists dismissed conservatives’ proposal for an open floor process. After all, everyone knew that the Democrats’ opposition to voter ID was absolute; that debating the SAVE Act was a waste of time and a threat to the sanctity of the filibuster; and that voter ID was dead on arrival in the Senate.
It turns out that all of the things “everyone knows”…are false.
One cannot fault leadership and K Street for their faux-sophisticated posturing. Their livelihoods depend on affecting possession of double-secret insider knowledge and gaslighting everyone else about the futility of questioning “the experts.”
The same cannot be said about journalists covering the debate on Capitol Hill. For the last month, supposed “reporters” have repeatedly leapt down from the press gallery and into the debate, presenting the opinions of their establishment sources as facts, outing themselves as anti-democracy corporate shills.
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