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“Senate Voted on ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Bill 3 Minutes After Receiving It”

This is the august, deliberative chamber, recall.  Not like that unruly People’s House, with all its 2-year temporary riff-raff and populist TEA Party dregs.

CNS:

The U.S. Senate voted 89-8 to approve legislation to avoid the fiscal cliff despite having only 3 minutes to read the 154-page bill and budget score.

Multiple Senate sources have confirmed to CNSNews.com that senators received the bill at approximately 1:36 AM on Jan. 1, 2013 – a mere three minutes before they voted to approve it at 1:39 AM.

The bill is 154-pages and includes several provisions that are unrelated to the fiscal cliff, including repealing a section of ObamaCare, extending the wind-energy tax credit, and a rum tax subsidy deal for Puerto Rican rum makers.

The bill avoids the fiscal cliff by making permanent the Bush tax cuts for everyone making $450,000 per year or less and putting off the automatic spending cuts (sequestration) from last year’s debt ceiling deal until March.

Well, I guess once McConnell and Biden reached a deal — and the President gave it his blessings, congratulating Republicans for seeing the wisdom of raising taxes on small business owner and job producers during a recession and at a time of high unemployment, all so he could show his base how he’s willing to tax the rich not for revenue, necessarily, but for “fairness” — what was left to say?

Besides. The Georgetown bars were likely still open, provided they hurried.

10 Replies to ““Senate Voted on ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Bill 3 Minutes After Receiving It””

  1. geoffb says:

    They are obviously geniuses because they fully understood when they voted the meaning and effects of things like this which is about 1/2 of a page, or .003 of the whole.

    Section 7 of the TMA, Abstinence Education, and QI Programs Extension Act of 2007 (Public Law 110–90; 121 Stat. 986) is amended— (1) in the heading, by striking ‘‘LIMITATION’’ and all that follows through ‘‘ADJUSTMENT’’ and inserting ‘‘DOCUMENTATION AND CODING ADJUSTMENTS’’; and (2) in subsection (b)— (A) in paragraph (1)— (i) in the matter before subparagraph (A)— (I) by striking ‘‘or 2009’’ and inserting ‘‘, 2009, or 2010’’; and (II) by inserting ‘‘or otherwise applied for such year’’ after ‘‘applied under subsection (a)’’; and (ii) in subparagraph (B)— (I) by inserting ‘‘(i)’’ after ‘‘(B)’’; (II) by striking ‘‘ or decrease’’; 7 (III) by striking the period at the end and inserting ‘‘; and’’; and (IV) by adding at the end the following: ‘‘(ii) make an additional adjustment to the standardized amounts under such section 1886(d) based upon the Secretary’s estimates for discharges occurring only during fiscal years 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 to fully offset $11,000,000,000 (which represents the amount of the increase in aggregate payments from fiscal years 2008 through 2013 for which an adjustment was not previously applied).’’; and …

    It continues on and on and on.

  2. Drumwaster says:

    If they don’t pass a law every three minutes, people might wonder what they were actually doing…

  3. McGehee says:

    No, Drumwaster. I don’t think anybody wonders.

  4. Bob Belvedere says:

    CONGRESS: ‘We exist only to serve Baal, er, Caesar!’

  5. cranky-d says:

    And Boehner is, after all, and honorable man.

  6. sdferr says:

    And Boehner is, after all, and honorable man.”

    Maybe (yes, I’m laughing), but even so, it isn’t clear that he’s in the game for the sake of honor in any meaningful sense of the term honor. On the other hand, that could be written up to his own confusion what honor means anyhow. In which case, we can send him to Montequieu (or Homer) for a quick brush-up on the subject.

  7. cranky-d says:

    Mark Antony, pick up the white courtesy phone.

  8. McGehee says:

    Congressional Republicans have gotten confuzzled by the term “loyal opposition,” forgetting that it was coined in England where the Crown is a member of no political party.

    Like our Constitution.

  9. geoffb says:

    If anything best exemplifies spaghetti code it is the politically correct legal system. It is riddled with unworkable provisions, unaffordable mandates, conflicting penalties and special interest loopholes. It’s nightmare code. The legal system can be thought of as a Congressionally written source program which, when fed into government, is somehow supposed to compile into executable code.

    It probably doesn’t compile at all. The only way anything works at all is through the ingenuity of old hands on the job, who by the application of unofficial rules, winks and nods and shortcuts manage to get things from 9 to 5. In other words the entire thing is a mass of exception handlers. Nothing can be just routine except rejection. Everything that actually happens must be just a little bit special.
    […]
    “Coding by exception: Adding new code to handle each special case as it is recognized”. Coding by exception is really a recognition that you’ve put the wall in completely the wrong place and that unless one opens an increasing number of doors in it then nothing will work. It’s an admission that things are so screwed up that without fancy footwork you’ll wind up arresting yourself.

    A world in which it’s bad for a prosperous plumber not to pay his “fair share” but OK for Al to sell to Al for $100 million; where a newspaper can do what it denounces or where a journalist can commit a crime on TV may not yet be a world where there are legal exceptions, but it’s getting there.

    This is probably how politically correct systems function, if at all. They create multiple categories of exceptions to everything. There are exemptions handed out by race, religion, ethnic origin, fame and political affiliation.

    Exceptions, in our legal system, are required by design because they are where the real power and money flow from. They are coveted features by those who write the code.

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