Reply #9: They might as well be working for us.

[sofa king]

The House generates the outrage and the anti-Republican sentiment. The Senate waits a few weeks for the news cycle to completely forget about it and move on to the next outrage, and then quietly kills it.

I will, however, hand it to the NYT for finally pointing out in the seventeenth paragraph that this bill has no chance of actually being signed into law. That's some real ace legislative reporting for the mainstream media.

Edit: I should add another important factoid to this observation, which is that the Democrats in the Senate are playing some real nasty hardball behind the scenes. Not one Republican-generated bill (that I know of) has passed the Senate in this session. They keep this up, and every Democratic candidate will be able to point out next summer that the incumbent Republicans achieved absolutely nothing for their home districts. Not one damned thing.