This is how government works in The Age Of The One: House Republicans try to govern responsibly, Senate Democrats obstruct irresponsibly, and Barack Obama does the REAL governing via Executive Decrees, spared the bother of having to even bother vetoing what ever manages to escape Capitol Hill:
A bill to repeal the U.S. oil export ban passed the House of Representatives on Friday, but faces an uncertain future after a veto threat by Barack Obama.
The bill sponsored by Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, passed the House 261 to 159, failing to reach the 290 votes necessary to overturn a presidential veto.
Only twenty-six Democrats voted for the bill despite Republicans’ late effort to attract them by adding a measure to provide funds for the Maritime Security Program. The fleet of privately-owned ships brings supplies to U.S. troops and allies abroad.
And on the Senate side? A companion bill barely squeaked out of the Senate Banking Committee ten days ago, but <sigh> Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn't have the votes to squash the inevitable Democrat filibuster, so unless he's going to "go nuclear" (which he won't) or ram the bill through reconciliation (which he won't), that will be that. Indeed, I don't know why Obama even bothers to issue veto threats as long as his party holds at least forty-one seats in the upper chamber.
Other, I suppose, than his corrupt, fantasist anti-energy enthusiasm:
What are Obama’s reasons for cutting off our nose to spite our face? He’s claiming that he would prefer a bill that “ends billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil companies and instead investing in wind and solar power and energy efficiency.” In other words, it’s more of the same old, same old. Raise taxes and push the money into government subsidies of technologies which are not yet able to stand on their own, assuming they ever will be.
Yeah - who, in the miserable depths of an economic depression, needs an energy boom that could actually produce hundreds of thousand or millions of new, REAL jobs? There are windmills at which to tilt!
This is why John Boehner is retiring, my Tea Party friends. This and Tea Partiers' refusal to understand that GOP leaders can't just wave a magic wand and conjure up a new reality where leftwingnut power doesn't exist and there is no opposition and conservatives can just do whatever they want. Unfortunately, Barack Obama is still at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and the Democrats still hold forty-six Senate seats, which means that even if Mitchie The Kid nuked the filibuster, he couldn't nuke The One's veto. You guys and gals may not want to hear the "We'll just have to wait until 2017" message, but it's the truth that you, and we, cannot avoid.
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