Nearly Eleven Weeks Of Intolerable Tyranny

As Dave Weigel reminds us, the Dems have had a sixty seat super-majority for all of...four months.

The irony is that if Democrats lose the seat, they will have had a working 60-seat majority for all of four months — much of which was spent with the Senate in recess. They opened the Congress in January with 58 votes, counting the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), not counting Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), whose razor-thin victory was held up by lawsuits from former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.). On April 28, 2009, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) switched to the Democratic Party, bringing the Democrats to 59 votes without Franken. When Franken was finally sworn in on into the Senate on July 7, 2009, the badly ailing Kennedy was unable to vote and break filibusters. Kennedy died on Aug.25, 2009, but it took Massachusetts Democrats — who run every aspect of their state government — a full month to pass legislation seating a replacement, Sen. Paul Kirk (D-Mass.). He took office on Sept. 24, 2009. Only then, and only depending on whether Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) was well, did the Democrats have a supermajority.

But those four months have been the worst and most intolerable tyranny of America's two-hundred-plus-year history, apparently.  Do we have enough pitchforks?

Better yet, can we elect to spend the money allocated on pitchforks towards those Nintendo DS brain exercise games for Americans who seem to have forgotten that our economy was broken by the eight years of Republican policies beforehand?