Mark Watson

Johnny Hart and Brant Parker, creators of the marvelous Wizard of Id and B. C. cartoon strips, penned an Id cartoon decades ago about the real Golden Rule, which portrayed subjects of the vertically challenged and uncharitable king discussing the golden rule—“He who has the gold, makes the rule.”

He who has the gold, makes the rules.

If Hart and Parker were still with us, they would have seen their golden rule modified to include a new political golden rule unveiled in the Senate on Wednesday.

A little background: On Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) introduced a tediously long amendment to the current health care legislation being debated in the Senate.

As is the custom in the Senate, the legislator who introduces an amendment seeks to have a unanimous consent to dispense with reading the legislation, partly to save time, but also to get the clock for debate underway. Typically motions to dispense with reading are routinely granted by fellow senators with a mere voice approval.

But not today. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) invoked a little-known Senate procedural rule and required that the entire text of Sanders’ proposed amendment to the misidentified health care bill be read.

Requiring Senate clerks to read every word of Sanders’ 767-page amendment would take eight to 10 hours to complete. Under Senate rules, once the reading of an amendment has begun, it must be completely read. No amendments, discussions or withdrawals of such proposed legislation are allowed.

Until now.

Three hours into the reading process, Sanders was allowed to withdraw his amendment by the Democratic majority and the reading was halted.

Shortly after the reading ended, Coburn and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) were featured on the Sean Hannity radio show. Coburn and DeMint told Hannity that Senate rules were violated when Sanders was allowed to withdraw his amendment.

Coburn read from the Senate procedural rules on Hannity’s show and told the host that the rules specifically forbid withdrawing an amendment while it is being read. Coburn and DeMint vowed to continue requiring readings of future amendments.

Republican senators have threatened to use such parliamentary procedure to slow down debate on the health care legislation pending in the upper chamber. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire) wrote a memo last month reminding fellow Republican senators they could use a full reading tactic. “We, the minority party, must use the tools we have under Senate rules to insist on a full, complete and fully informed debate on the health care legislation — as well as all legislation — coming before the Senate,” Gregg wrote in that memo.

Coburn suggested that he expects the health insurance bill to be voted on in the Senate on Christmas Eve.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and his Democratic colleagues, with a near-filibuster-proof control of the Senate, now possess the political gold. Ignoring procedural prohibitions on Wednesday shows that Reid and other Democratic leaders are unafraid to use their political golden rule to make new rules whenever it suits them.

That would mean Republicans may be as powerless in stopping Reid as the peasants were in stopping the king in the Wizard of Id.

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