Even in the Minority, Harry Reid Is Trying to Run the Senate

[Geee]

National Review:

Now he’s plying his old tactics on the human-trafficking bill.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) is not talking like a man who was humbled to be on the wrong side of a landslide in the most recent midterms.

“I support this legislation, but we’re not going to have an abortion provision in the bill,” Reid told reporters last week, demanding that Republicans strip the Hyde Amendment language — a provision barring taxpayer funding of abortions that has been uncontroversial for decades — from a human-trafficking bill that passed unanimously out of the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year. Once they do that, “then we’re happy to debate all the amendments they want . . . including Vitter’s stupid amendment,” Reid said, in reference to a rider proposed by Senator David Vitter (R., La.) that would end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.

 

The fight over the human-trafficking bill demonstrates how much power Reid wields in the Senate, despite the loss of his majority in November. When the minority leader was still at home, recovering from injuries suffered in a bad fall, Republicans voted on 41 amendments to the Keystone XL pipeline bill. When he returned to work, he united his troops around a strategy of filibustering to prevent votes on bills they don’t like. As a tactic, this worked so well in the fight over funding the Department of Homeland Security that they’re trying it again with the once-obscure, bipartisan human-trafficking bill.