Enough! Stop ‘Minority Tyranny’ in the Senate and Nuke the Filibuster

By now, more than a year after Barack Obama took office as the 44th president of the United States — and the first African-American to assume the office — it is becoming more and more apparent that the Republican opposition in Congress, and particularly in the Senate, is not acting in the role of the "loyal opposition" that one would expect in a democracy.

Instead, the GOP is engaging in an unprecedented attempt to grind to a complete halt the president’s ability to govern. Not to mention the ability of the majority party in Congress to pass legislation.

This is nothing less than an outright "tyranny of the minority" that is a clearly unconstitutional abuse of power. The evidence of this abuse of power is becoming more and more apparent with each passing month. And it must be stopped.

REPUBLICANS ABANDON THEIR OWN IDEAS AFTER OBAMA ADOPTS THEM

In a scathing expose, MSNBC’s Rachael Maddow noted that the Republicans in Congress have repeatedly done an about-face on one policy idea after another that they themselves proposed, turning around and opposing those same ideas once President Obama adopted them — even going so far as to do a 180-degree turn on policies implemented by the previous Bush administration that Obama continued.

It was the Republicans who first proposed a blue-ribbon commission to come up with ways to deal with the ballooning budget deficit, Maddow notes. But once the president endorsed the idea, the GOP turned around and came out against it.

The Republicans, who are supposedly deeply concerned about the ballooning budget deficit, voted against a major deficit-fighting tool backed by Obama: Enshrining into law the so-called "pay-as-you-go" budgeting rules that were first implemented under President Bill Clinton in 1995 under prodding from the then-GOP-controlled Congress.

Obama on Friday signed the "pay-as-you-go" measure into law — part of a larger bill raising the national debt ceiling to $14.294 trillion, without which the federal government would have been forced to shut down. Yet almost every Republican in both the House and the Senate voted against it.

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