The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Once Upon A Time, Her Majesty Paid A Visit To A Village That It Had Taken

Posted on | July 26, 2015 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Category: Hillary Clinton, humor

Notes on Survival Amid the Madness

Posted on | July 26, 2015 | 282 Comments

 

We live in an Orwellian dystopia, where the Thought Police constantly monitor our every word for evidence of any tendency we might have to think for ourselves. We are supposed to think only what government school officials teach us to think, and expected to believe whatever the Democrat-controlled entertainment/media industry wants us to believe. If we begin to doubt — if we “Question Authority” as the old hippie bumper sticker urged us to do — we find ourselves confronted with insanity. Without a quasi-religious faith in liberalism, an hour’s worth of watching CNN becomes an ordeal, psychologically traumatizing, and MSNBC is like shock therapy, or perhaps a lobotomy.

Mental toughness is necessary to withstand the constant psychic assault we must daily endure in a world gone mad. Having spent years diving head-first into the swirling cultural vortex of a society descending into chaotic lunacy, I’ve learned the secrets of survival:

  • Focus — Keep your mind on your chosen or assigned task. You cannot cover every story or worry about every problem in the world. If you let yourself be constantly distracted by whatever Big Story is headlined on the Drudge Report or getting wall-to-wall coverage on CNN, you will find yourself whiplashed back and forth, and risk becoming disoriented and overwhelmed by it all.
  • Objectivity — No one is ever actually objective about anything. We all have our opinions. However, if we are to survive inside the 21st-century asylum, we must maintain some kind of emotional distance from the events and people we write about. I once said that, in the news business, objectivity is just a way of saying “I don’t actually give a damn about these people.” You have to imagine the daily work I did as a news editor years. Six people killed by tornados in Oklahoma? Grab the AP story off the wire, cut it down to two paragraphs, stick it in the National Briefs column and move on to the next story. “File it and forget it,” as they say. There is no time to mourn the dead or become emotionally involved with the suffering of those Oklahoma tornado survivors. Your job is not to care about them, your job is to put their stories in the newspaper. Murder, mayhem, war, famine, disease — these are just so many column-inches of news copy with which to fill the pages. Fit the headlines, write the captions, crop the pictures, and get it all done by deadline. The news business is not the Red Cross. It’s not the Peace Corps. Learning not to care is part of the job.
  • Reality — The problem of the 24-hour news cycle and the constant connection of the online environment is that we are easily tempted to think of that (the stories in the news) as “real life,” so that our own actual flesh-and-blood existence seems unimportant. More than once during the 2012 presidential campaign, I noticed how reporters at rallies were glued to their iPhones. Instead of observing the event they were assigned to cover, they were checking their emails or scrolling their Twitter feeds. To be at a major rally and see political reporters all staring into their phones was disturbing to me. What’s the point of being “on the scene” if you’re not paying attention to the scene? By the same token, now that I’m back home doing the blog thing,  I find it necessary to remind myself that real life (my home, my wife, my children) is actually more important than, for example, the problems of queer feminist artists on Tumblr. That is to say, blogging is what I do to pay the bills, thus enabling me to enjoy real life. It’s important to be able to tell the difference, or else you can’t enjoy real life at all.

All of this is preamble to discussing the #cuckservative furor that has erupted in online warfare in recent days. This is a distraction to me — at a time where I’m racing a book deadline next month — even though, on the other hand, it involves subjects which I am perhaps uniquely qualified to address as a conservative journalist. I am personally familiar with many people on what is called the “New Right” or the “alt-right.” In the past couple of days, I’ve made phone calls to some of these sources/friends, and one of them informed me of the proximate origins of the #cuckservative swarm. In the past six months, there was a bitter schism among the so-called “neo-reactionary” (NRx) online community, with purges and counter-purges. It was a multi-faction quarrel. Certain ultra-traditionalist Catholic/Orthodox activists were involved, as were various European nationalist types and futurist “singularity” devotees.

After months of this factional infighting, somehow the Donald Trump presidential candidacy — especially Trump’s controversial remarks about immigration — became a rallying point for many of these “alt-right” people and, amid this, the slur “cuckservative” was coined to describe the cowardice of mainstream Republicans.

Frankly, I’ve been paying as little attention as possible to the 2016 campaign, because (a) I spent 18 months covering the 2012 campaign so it’s “been there, done that,” (b) I’ve been busy working on the Sex Trouble project, and (c) my gut hunch is that, when the dust settles, Scott Walker will be the Republican nominee. I like Walker, who thrice defeated the full power of the Left in Wisconsin, and think he will be good enough to beat to Hillary next fall. If my hunch is correct, therefore, it will not be necessary for me to become directly involved in the fight for the GOP nomination. Walker obviously knows a thing or two about winning tough campaigns, so that if he wins the 2016 Iowa caucus, it should be green lights all the way to the nomination for him, and I don’t have to worry about it at all.

So I’ve made up my mind to ignore the campaign to the greatest possible extent and, if my hunch is correct, the Trump candidacy will ultimately prove to be a flash in the pan except for this: By proving how popular a blunt-talking “get tough” approach to immigration enforcement is among GOP primary voters, Trump is pushing the borders/sovereignty/culture discourse onto center stage. The sheep will be separated from the goats, and the Open Borders candidates (e.g., Jeb Bush) will be flushed out of their hiding behind vague talk about “comprehensive reform.”

Well done, Mr. Trump. Well done, I say.

This has happened without me having to lift a finger, and I’ve barely even commented about it. Yet this #cuckservative thing sprang up, Ace of Spades commented on it, and when I took notice, people started attacking me, as if I were some kind of Chamber of Commerce shill or RINO Establishmentarian. So I blogged about it, and the comments exploded with trolls, and among the comments I offered this explanation:

You see that racialists (of whatever persuasion) must always impute dishonorable motives to their critics. This is a mirror-reverse of the way that the Left is forever accusing the Right of racism. The fact that I have been hate-listed by the SPLC does nothing to defend me from the accusation by racialists that I am, somehow, insufficiently aware, lacking “racial consciousness.”
Caught between the Devil of the SPLC and the “deep blue sea” of racialism, I have no answer except to say that (a) I am profoundly interested in facts, and (b) I consider the conservative cause to be a defense of American liberty. On the latter point, I consider that our liberty is threatened both by cultural decline and by the remorseless expanison of federal authority. These are related, because as immorality flourishes, the people are less able to govern their own passions and to provide for their own material needs, so that government expands to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of organic institutions, i.e., faith, family and community.
As to point (a), we ought to be able to candidly discuss the facts regarding human behavior without being required to endorse any particular theory to explain these facts. For example, liberals look at facts about racial groups and attribute observable differences to discrimination, prejudice and historical oppression. Conservatives, while not denying that any of the factors cited by liberals are relevant, insist that what is important are the (equally real) opportunities available to individuals in a free and prosperous society. Even before the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s, many black Americans were remarkably successful, even in the segregated South. As a matter of fact, Thomas Sowell has pointed out that many socioeconomic measures show the black community was (generally) advancing more before the mid-1960s than afterwards. Sowell attributes the problems that affected the black community after the 1960s to the vast expansion of the Welfare State that began under LBJ’s “Great Society.”
Of course, Sowell’s analysis is more complex than that brief summary suggests, and we are under no obligation to endorse Sowell’s analysis. My point is that the Left/Right argument over the causes of racial problems in America is about ideas — it is a debate over public policy — and is not (as the Left claims) a matter of the Right’s “racism.” And really, why should it matter whether or not anyone is “racist” in any sense of that word? This word has become a mere epithet, a slur used to silence critics of liberalism, so that liberal policies can be enacted without any real debate over the efficacy of those policies.
Perhaps I am more “racist” than some people and less “racist” than others, but what does this have to do with anything in terms of debating public policy? Why are we expected to subject ourselves to a sort of public psychoanalysis where it is to be determined (by whom?) whether we pass the Not-a-Racist Test?
The attempt to debate public policy (or to discuss social and cultural problems) is not helped when you have a swarm of avowed white racialists insisting that any conservative who does not adopt racialist rhetoric (and subscribe to whatever theorythis rhetoric expresses) is a coward, a “race traitor.”
Three words: Bull. Fucking. Shit.
Just as I will not let feminists dictate to me what I can or cannot say about sex, neither will I let anyone (Left or Right) tell me what to think about race. I will say, in concession to the “New Right” (or “alt-right” as they sometimes style themselves) that they are essentially correct that discourse about race is hemmed in by artificial constraints imposed by Cultural Marxism. Anyone attempting to talk about race relations is required to tiptoe around a minefield where any false step produces explosive accusations from the Left that one has exposed his own racism. The mainstream Right frequently cooperates with the Left in this project by periodically purging someone (e.g., Sam Francis, Trent Lott, John Derbyshire) who has transgressed the boundaries of permissible racial discourse. I myself was targeted for such destruction, and miraculously survived, because I had watched what happened to Sam Francis (whom I knew personally) and learned a lot about the tactics of the Left.
Notice this: I have never apologized for anything, and this drives the Left insane. How could someone hate-listed by the SPLC manage to continue a career in conservative journalism with such remarkable success? The Left’s theory, of course, is that my success proves that everybody on the Right secretly endorses the racism of which I am accused. Yet the truth is that my friends on the Right know I was unjustly accused — that I am not the hateful bogeyman depicted by the SPLC — and so the Left is confronted with its failure to destroy me. Grant that I have been harmed by the Left’s attack, it was my destruction they had in mind, and I am manifestly not destroyed. This example of the Left’s impotence might encourage others to defy the Thought Police, and I hope this possibility troubles their sleep.

People need to calm down and get a grip. Either we are doomed, or else the American people will come to their senses. Either way, the Cuckservative Crisis is a controversy ginned up by people with too much time on their hands, and my plan is this: File it and forget it.

I am an objective journalist. I don’t give a damn about these people.




 

Category: Immigration, Neutral Objective Journalism, Racism

About the #Cuckservative Thing: By Whom Is the ‘New Right’ Being Trolled?

Posted on | July 25, 2015 | 625 Comments

My temptation is to name names of “New Right” friends who can vouch for my bona fides, but why help the SPLC connect the dots, eh?

When Ace of Spades called attention to the #cuckservative hashtag attack on conservatives, I was puzzled. WTF is this?

Well, today they started jumping up in my Twitter mentions, and I began to investigate. There is a definite “walks like a duck” vibe with these trolls. When I encounter people (a) attacking Republicans from the Right who (b) seem to view Jewish influence as a problem within the GOP, I become concerned. This is toxic politics. People have a right to their own opinions. I’ve actually been accused of “hate” for defending people’s right to their own opinions. If America is a free country, our liberty must include The Freedom to Hate. I hate Auburn University and Canada, not necessarily in that order. I am and have always been a philo-semite and am perhaps more Zionist even than Netanyahu.

However, I do not expect everyone to share my opinion on these matters. If you’re Canadian, I realize that you can’t help the fact you were born in The Worst Country in the World. And if you’re an Auburn fan, it’s not my fault you’re wrong.

Thus, also, you don’t necessarily have to like Jews or be pro-Israel to be my friend. But if you start making noises about “international bankers” or “neocons” or otherwise signaling to me that you have a paranoid hostility toward Jews — what I call conspiratorial anti-semitism — well, no, I can’t hang with that. The Politics of Paranoia is always doomed to fail; your hostility and your fear are both equally misdirected, and a politics based on such sentiments will not save American liberty from destruction. In fact, if you go down that road, you’re likely to destroy yourself and do more harm than good to the cause of American liberty.

Genesis 12:3 — you want the blessing. You do not want the curse.

Having said all that, I’ve hung out with some hard-core types whom I consider friends and whose idiosyncratic opinions don’t make them Bad People in my book. Basically, I favor a broad coalition strategy as the only way we’re ever going to defeat the Left. I’m a uniter, not a divider. If the Republican Party can appeal to both religious conservatives and gay libertarians — as it arguably does — there is no reason why it can’t get votes both from Jews and from people who don’t like Jews. There may be feasible limits to the ultimate reach of a broad coalition on the Right, but look at the Democrats. How they got 69% of the Jewish vote for the most anti-Israel president in history, I don’t know, but they did. And how do they get half the Catholic vote for the Party of Planned Parenthood? Is the RNC staffed by chimpanzees?

So, yeah, I know a lot of radical “New Right” who think the Republican Party is hopeless, and some of them have rather idiosyncratic opinions on certain other issues we need not further belabor here. However, the anti-Jew vibe coming off the #cuckservative hashtag is just a bit too blatant. And the thought crossed my mind: agents provocateurs.

There was an old joke down in Georgia that if five guys show up for a KKK meeting, at least three of them are working for the FBI, and I’ve got a hunch something like that must be behind this #cuckservative thing. My bullshit detector is pretty reliable, and if I had to bet money, I’ve got $20 that says either Justice Department informants or Democrat Party dirty tricksters have infiltrated the “New Right,” because this #cuckservative thing is just way too perfect to be a coincidence.

As James Carville says, if you see a turtle sitting atop a fence post, you know it didn’t crawl up there by itself and — in case nobody told you yet — Team Hillary is playing for keeps. Don’t be a chump. Know who you trust and trust who you know. Beware of dirty tricks.

If we can’t defeat Team Hillary, America is doomed and deservedly so.

 

Category: Politics

FMJRA 2.0: Common People (William Shatner ST:TOS Video Remix)

Posted on | July 25, 2015 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Is the ‘Male Feminist’ Cuckold a Hoax?
Watcher of Weasels
Viewpoints of a Sagittarian
Grumpy Opinions
Rotten Chestnuts
Living In Anglo-America
A Voice for Men
Noisy Room
Trevor Loudon
The Right Planet
EveryJoe
Ask Marion
Nice Deb
Independent Sentinel
A View from the Beach

Congratulations, ‘Dishonest Fascists’ — #GamerGate Destroys Max Read
Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog
Dark Brightness
The Noisy Rogue
Neoreactive
Instapundit

FMJRA 2.0: Balls To The Wall
The Pirate’s Cove
BlurBrain

‘Rape Culture’ or ‘Libel Culture’? Lawyers for Rolling Stone Blame the Victim
H2O Positivo
A View from the Beach

Feminism as Totalitarian Ideology
Regular Right Guy

Rule 5 Sunday: Insert Clever Title Here
Regular Right Guy
Ninety Miles from Tyranny
A View from the Beach
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox, 07.20.15
A View from the Beach
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox, 07.21.15
A View from the Beach

Random Feminist Craziness
Regular Right Guy
The Pirate’s Cove

In The Mailbox: 07.22.15
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox, 07.23.15
A View from the Beach

Feminist Tumblr: She Loves Your Tears, You ‘Whiny’ #GamerGate ‘Baby Men’
Rotten Chestnuts
Gay Patriot
Citizens News
Living In Anglo-America

Lesbian Divorce Gets Nasty
Constantinople Not Istanbul

Ted Triumphantly Treads Titanium Testicle Territory; Casually Cruises Cadmium Cojones Country First Street Journal
The Lonely Conservative

Top linker this week:

A View from the Beach (7 the hard way)

Thanks for all the linkagery, and special thanks to the Watcher’s Council, which voted Is the ‘Male Feminist’ Cuckold a Hoax? into a tie for fourth this week with a column by the eminent Thomas Sowell! Clearly, we’re still having problems with WordPress being randomly hateful to certain sites, so if you’ve been passed over recently, send your links to me before noon on Saturday, August 1.

And now, for your amusement, William Shatner singing Pulp’s “Common People”, with video from Star Trek: The Original Series.

Has Been

Category: FMJRA Award

Hulk Hogan Pulls ‘Bigger Digger Trigger’

Posted on | July 25, 2015 | 38 Comments

by Smitty

The Hulking One has apparently pulled the ‘Bigger Digger Trigger‘. That word, which, uttered by anyone of European extraction not named Quentin Tarantino, (why didn’t I name a child ‘Quentin’, so that he could be privileged so?) engenders (better use that verb before the SJWs have it cut off of the language) vast hormonal outpourings across the vast, grand cultural canyon carved by That One Guy who was supposed to fill it.

The only way out of this dilemma, obviously, will be for Donald Trump to nominate The Hulkage for Vice President.

Trump / Hogan 2016

Because they ain’t no such thing as “Peak Absurdity”

Update: If only Hulk Hogan had been Jonathan Leibowitz.

Category: Uncategorized

Off The Shelf

Posted on | July 24, 2015 | 11 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Could have sworn I did a book post last week, but apparently I was wrong. This fortnight’s haul from the library includes a couple of regrettable graphic novels, one of the Laundry novels by Charles Stross, a nice debut novel by Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi, and the definitive Churchill bio by his son Randolph and the late Martin Gilbert.

The best of the lot is clearly Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, the first book in a trilogy about the post-human thief Jean le Flambeur. When we first meet him, le Flambeur is an inmate in the Dilemma Prison, where the Archon pursues a form of re-education where his prisoners are required to kill each other every day or (less frequently) cooperate to avoid being killed. Our hero gets sprung from the prison and taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, to complete his last theft. The Oubliette is a fascinating society where time is the only currency and those who run out of time become the voiceless Quiets, who maintain the city and defend it from the feral phoboi. In the meantime, they exchange memories (or bits of memory) while maintaining fierce independence and anonymity through use of the gevulot, high-grade cryptography that can literally make people faceless or unrecognizable. It compares very well to Stross’ disastrous Glasshouse, which deals with a similar post-human prison, and Stross admits as much in a rather gracious cover blurb. This was a very good read, and I’m looking forward to reading the next two.

Speaking of Stross, I finally found The Rhesus Chart at the library, and while I enjoyed MOST of the novel, I am furious at Stross for reintroducing Bob’s sociopathic ex-girlfriend Mhari, who is now a [SPOILER], breaking up [SPOILER], and worst of all, HE KILLED OFF [SPOILER]! I can’t remember being this pissed off at an author since Poul Anderson killed Dominic Flandry’s fiance in A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows. I am assured by a fellow fan of the series that it’s really all for the best, but I am Not Pleased.

The man who could have been Duke of London was not always the beloved bulldog hero of his people, as one rather quickly discovers when reading Winston S. Churchill: Youth, 1874-1900, the first in the eight-volume series begun by his son Randolph and completed by the late Martin Gilbert. The first two volumes could have been a stultifying trudge through letter after letter from and to Winston and his contemporaries (including his parents) but is a rather easy read instead, as well as being an excellent history of England during Churchill’s time. A short but very necessary overview of Winston’s father Randolph’s meteoric rise and tragic fall in included, and properly so, since it is impossible to really understand Winston’s career without it. I was fortunate enough to get all eight volumes for free on the Last Lion’s birthday this year when Hillsdale College released them in Kindle format, but they are well worth the current price and then some.

I was very disappointed in Serenity: Those Left Behind and Serenity: The Shepherd’s Tale, even if Joss Whedon wasn’t. I found the first confusing and the second one suffering from a major continuity error, and was damned glad I hadn’t bought either one myself. YMMV.

This weekend I’m going to fill out my Hugo ballot, and I’ll post that next week in case anyone is interested. There’s still time to sign up for a supporting membership, get the packet, and vote, by the way.


Category: Books

Lesbian Divorce Gets Nasty

Posted on | July 24, 2015 | 22 Comments

WNBA star Glory Johnson (@MISSVOL25) and her ex-wife @BrittneyGriner

One positive thing about legalizing gay marriage is that it gives the rest of us the opportunity laugh about gay celebrity divorces:

Brittney Griner shockingly filed to annul her marriage with Glory Johnson just 28 days after the same-sex couple wed and one day after Johnson announced she was pregnant by using donated sperm. At the time, Griner cited “fraudulent statements” made by Johnson and pressure into marriage “under duress” in the original June 5 paperwork. . . .
The amended documents reveal that Johnson was texting an ex-boyfriend while the two were engaged. The amended documents also detail Griner “recently discovering” Johnson’s “sexual relationship with a man” while the couple was dating.
Griner’s claims of Johnson’s unfaithfulness from the court documents are detailed in full below. . . .

Petitioner [Griner] just recently learned that Respondent {Johnson} was not completely faithful during their courtship leading up to the engagement. Respondent intentionally concealed her sexual relations with a man to whom she was simultaneously in a relationship with from 2013 to July 2014; said relationship between Respondent and this man was unbeknownst to Petitioner. Petitioner had no idea that Respondent was sexually and emotionally involved with another individual at the same time she was sexually and emotionally involved with Respondent. Had Petitioner been aware of Respondent’s relationship with another person, she would have never proposed, let alone marry Respondent. Upon information and belief, Respondent not only deceived Petitioner, but also the man to who Respondent was in a relationship with.

Griner contends she was pressured into marriage as well as agreeing to start a family with Johnson, who announced she’s having twins from in-vitro fertilization using donated sperm; Griner has no biological relationship to the unborn children. A motion filed on June 29 details Johnson’s request that Griner pay $20,000 per month in spousal support in addition to a $10,000 advancement toward attorney fees.

These two women are saying about each other the same thing every divorced guy says about his ex-wife: “That evil bitch is crazy!”

(via Memeorandum.)

Remember: This Is What a Feminist Looks Like.

UPDATE: Consider this story:

On Friday the 13th of January 1989, Catherine [Rouse], former manager of Lysistrata — the celebrated feminist restaurant that existed for five years (1977-1982) in Madison, Wisconsin — took a gun purchased a few days before, drove to the house of her ex-lover Joan [Kebick], who had recently ended their relationship, and shot her three times, dead. . . . She did not find Joan’s new lover. She then drove home, answered the phone. It was her sister, a university dean of students who, worried, had set up emergency counseling for her. Catherine said, “Thank you very much,” did not mention having shot Joan, hung up the phone, and shot herself, dead.

That account is from Professor Claudia Card’s 1995 book, Lesbian Choices. Professor Card also tells the story of Annette Green who, on Oct. 30, 1988, “shot and killed Ivonne Julio, her lover of eleven years, at their home in Palm Beach County, Florida.” Green pleaded self-defense, claiming her partner had battered her, but was convicted of second-degree murder. Professor Card, herself a lesbian feminist, cites two books, Naming the Violence: Speaking Out About Lesbian Battering by Kerry Lobel (1986) and Violent Betrayal: Partner Abuse in Lesbian Relationships by Claire M. Renzetti (1992). Curious readers might also be interested in Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape? by Lori B. Girshick (2002). In that book, Professor Girschick “discusses how the lesbian community has silenced survivors of sexual violence due to myths of lesbian utopia.”

This myth of lesbians enjoying conflict-free relationships has become a sort of propaganda deployed by feminists who wish to blame males for everything everything wrong in heterosexual relationships.

Anyone who knows anything about human nature knows better than to believe these things, but just as the gay-rights movement has sought to suppress negative information about the LGBT community, feminists have sought to suppress positive information about heterosexual males. This has produced a distorted perception of the world which, all things considered amounts to a propaganda of hatred, which Professor Daphne Patai called Heterophobia. However, when anyone — particularly a heterosexual male — tries to balance this one-side propaganda, he is invariably accused of sexism and homophobia: “How dare you suggest some women are not entirely sane?” or, “How dare you suggest some homosexuals are not entirely honest?”

You will be accused of promoting ignorant stereotypes, you see. The only stereotypes acceptable to liberals are ones that disparage men, particularly white heterosexual men. Liberals hate white heterosexual men the way Nazis hated Jews.

If it weren’t for hateful lies, how could Democrats ever win elections?

 




 

Category: Gays

Ted Triumphantly Treads Titanium Testicle Territory; Casually Cruises Cadmium Cojones Country

Posted on | July 24, 2015 | 47 Comments

by Smitty

Ted Cruz has been made an utter fool over the Export-Import Bank, and seems maybe a tiny bit hacked off on the point. Watch and weep:

“This Senate operates exactly the same [as the Reid era].”

More at Ace.

UPDATE: Ted doubles down on the Mark Levin show. Cruz is on after 16:10.

“The McConnell-Reid leadership team” (!!??!?!?!?!?!)

But what about this?

The Utah Republican [Lee] laid out the argument in a press release after party leaders set the sequencing of votes:
“The first Obamacare vote on Sunday will have a 60 vote threshold, and Democrats will likely block it,” Lee continued. “But thanks to the sequencing of the votes we just locked in, Republicans will have the opportunity resurrect that Obamacare amendment later on in the process, and put it back before the Senate in a manner that only requires a simple-majority vote.”

After cloture is reached on the Export-Import Bank amendment, senators will still be allowed to offer germane amendments to the highway bill, each of which would only require a simple-majority to pass. If the Chair rules that the Obamacare amendment is non-germane, Senate Rule 22 also allows any senator to appeal that ruling to the full Senate. At that point, a simple-majority of Senators would have the power to add the Obamacare repeal amendment to the highway bill.

I’m sure we can rely on the McConnell-Reid leadership team to do the left thing and ensure that the 2014 election remains immaterial.

Category: Republicans
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