Left out in the cold again

Posted on | July 24, 2008 | Comments Off

When I was complaining in last week’s MicroEnterprise Journal about Senator Tom Coburn and his infamous holds on the SBA reauthorization bills, I didn’t realize that there was more to the story than a Senator with a spite against the SBA.

Evidently, Senator Coburn isn’t just putting holds on SBA-related bills. I have since learned that he has placed holds on “roughly 80 bills” — and we wonder why the Senate can’t seem to get anything done.

To address this problem, the wily Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has put about three dozen of those bills together in a huge legislative package called the “Advancing America’s Priorities Act.” He hopes there is enough bipartisan support for the measures contained in the bill to get the 60 votes needed for cloture.

Guess what’s missing from America’s priorities? Yep, that’s right … all those SBA re-auth bills. ::sigh::

But don’t send your hate mail to Harry Reid. It’s not his fault. The bills that made the list did so because the corresponding committees over in the House were willing to pre-conference them, something I hear from Senate staff that the House Small Business Committee was unwilling to do. Or maybe communications broke down and somebody forgot to ask them. Or something.

In any event, however clever this ploy from Senator Reid may be (and we’ll reserve judgment on that until we see whether or not it works), all those stalled small business bills won’t benefit from this maneuver.

Reminds me of something my mom used to say, something like “Can’t win for losin’!”

[tags]politics, SBA reauthorization[/tags]


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