I Reject the Premise- There is Nothing for McConnell to Fix

This is a joke, right?

The Senate’s incoming majority leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), has pledged to return the Senate to “regular order.”  As  McConnell put it the day after the elections, “First thing I need to do is get the Senate back to normal.” What would a “normal” Senate look like, and can McConnell make it happen?

McConnell is not the first leader to bemoan the state of the Senate.  Like Democratic and Republican leaders before him (for starters, Democrats Harry Reid, Tom Daschle and George Mitchell and Republicans Bill Frist, Trent Lott and Bob Dole), McConnell now advocates a Senate that strikes a balance between debate and action, as opposed to a chamber perpetually tied in knots by the parties’ parliamentary warfare. As McConnell arguedon the Senate floor last January, after admitting just a smidgen of culpability for the Senate’s sorry state of affairs, “It just can’t be the case that senators — on either side — are content with the theatrics and the messaging wars that go on here day after day.”

Time out, what?!? Since President Obama took office in 2009, the Senate has seen the minority party lead a record number of filibusters, a minority party lead by McConnell. If the Senate was failing to pass bills, it's because of McConnell, not the amendment process or anything else that McConnell is whining about. Furthermore, the big ticket item, immigration reform, passed the Senate and died in the House of Representatives, which does need a return to "normalcy." McConnell blocked gun-control legislation, anything to balance out income inequality, and equality for women.

The problem the Senate has had, for at least the past four years, is the existence of the U.S. House. The House has continued to send bills with no chance of becoming law to the Senate, and then it refuses to take up bills that can become law in the House. Couple that with McConnell's full-out obstruction over the last six years, and not a lot of laws have passed. The Senate hasn't somehow not worked though because of process- it's been because of people like McConnell. He who broke it isn't going to fix it.