Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell and the Malfunction Minuet

By Dana Milbank,
WashPost
Published: December 14

It has become commonplace to say that Washington is broken, but rarely does one get to see all the broken parts perform live and in concert as they did on the Senate floor Wednesday morning.

There and then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell, executed a veritable Dance of Dysfunction, a bravura Promenade of Pathology. Facing yet another deadline for a government shutdown, this one just over 36 hours away, the two leaders decided that the most constructive course of action would be to stand 10 feet apart in the Senate well and trade televised insults for 20 minutes without looking at each other.

“Americans can’t understand the Republicans’ obstructionism,” Reid announced. “Republican leaders have spent weeks drumming up support for Tea Party legislation they knew was dead on arrival in the Senate.”

“Our friends across the aisle have no plan and, some might suggest, no desire to pass a payroll tax cut extension,” McConnell retorted. “Instead, we’ve wasted week after week after week, one senseless show vote after another.”

(More here.)