Media Wrong to Blame Snowe's Departure on GOP - Democrats Control the Senate

Since Senator Olympia Snowe's (R-Maine) surprising announcement that she won't be seeking reelection in November, the media have been doing a victory lap blaming her decision on the lack of moderate Republicans in Congress.

Yet an op-ed she published in Friday's Washington Post suggests her dissatisfaction with government stemmed from the behavior of Democrats that have controlled the Senate since 2007 (emphasis added throughout):

Yet more than 200 years later, the greatest deliberative body in human history is not living up to its billing. The Senate of today routinely jettisons regular order, as evidenced by the body’s failure to pass a budget for more than 1,000 days; serially legislates by political brinkmanship, as demonstrated by the debt-ceiling debacle of August that should have been addressed the previous January; and habitually eschews full debate and an open amendment process in favor of competing, up-or-down, take-it-or-leave-it proposals. We witnessed this again in December with votes on two separate proposals for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

Let's understand that the failure of the Senate to pass a budget in over 1,000 days is exclusively due to Democrats having not proposed one.

As for the debt-ceiling debacle, this should have been resolved in 2010 as Snowe wrote, but Senate Democrats didn't want to discuss it in an election year.

The Senator continued:

As Ronald Brownstein recently observed in National Journal, Congress is becoming more like a parliamentary system — where everyone simply votes with their party and those in charge employ every possible tactic to block the other side.

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Well, who's been "in charge" since 2007? That would be Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and his obstructionist Democrats who since the Republicans took over the House in January 2011 have prevented numerous bills passed there from even being debated.

It is of course not surprising that media who have been blaming all the problems in the nation on House Republicans would conclude Snowe's retirement was caused by an excessively conservative GOP.

But what they've badly missed in their victory lap is that Snowe didn't throw in the towel when Republicans controlled the Senate.

She's doing after five years of Democrats ruling the roost and not giving a damn about what anyone on her side of the aisle thinks.

I guess the media mantra has switched from Blame America First to Blame Conservatives First.