Very Nice

Looks like the Dems are pulling an end-run around the Republicans to get a lobbying bill passed, according to Kagro X at The Daily Borg.

(Ok, Kos. But the assimilation's the same.)

One of the reasons why the Republicans have been able to get away with their obstructionism is that they haven't really been filibustering bills per se. What they've been blocking is attempts to take bills to "conference": the meeting between House and Senate representatives that hammers out the differences between a House and Senate version of a bill. Because they aren't blocking the passage of a bill, the magpie attention span of the media doesn't really alight upon them, and they can get away with it.

The Dems are solving that by simply not running the conference. If both bodies pass the same bill, there's no need for the conference, so they're just working out a jointly-acceptable bill ahead of time and are pushing the bill through both houses at the same time. In the House, they're using "suspension of the rules" to shut down all those stupid procedural tricks the Republicans are trying to exploit, and in the Senate, the Republican face the prospect of having to explain to their constituents why they're actively filibustering the passage of an ethics bill. While there's no guarantee the Dems will get their 60 votes, it's FAR more likely now.

Nice work.