Legislature to Howie: No Time for Tea Party

We don't have a state budget yet (expect pizza deliveries to the Capitol 'round midnight tonight). but in the face of the total destruction of our cconstitutional republic, our state senators have ignored dozens—dozens!—of rallying protestors and a big wooden horse and rejected an opportunity to take our country back from socialists.

Actually, they just told Gordon Howie to shut up. Yesterday a big majority of our state Senate agreed with me that the Legislature has much more important things to do than to suspend its rules to reconsider Howie's grandstanding, nullificationist legislation that it already killed and killed hard in February.

The vote against reconsidering Howie's health care nullification bill wasn't even close: 14–20, and he needed a two-thirds vote (24) to suspend the rules. David Montgomery suggests that the passage of federal health care legislation won Howie three more votes than the February 11–23 defeat. But let's not give the bill too much credit: there is a difference between voting to let Howie through a few more rhetorical crumbs to his Tea Bag followers and actually voting for costly and unconstitutional legislation.

The nay votes included Senate Majority Leader Dave Knudson and fellow Republican Senators Tom Hansen and Jean Hunhoff. Senator Howie will surely whine than his own party leadership is out to get him. Paranoia, persecution complex, and paucity of practical policy: that's the fuel that keeps Tea Bags like Howie running.