On January 30, 1996, Ron Wyden edged out Gordon Smith by just over 18,000 votes to win a special election to fill the seat vacated Bob Packwood in the United States Senate. One week later on Ronald Reagan’s 85th birthday (February 6), according to Wikipedia, the Oregon Democrat took office. At the time, Republicans held a majority in the Senate.
It has now been twice that time since Scott Brown won a more decisive victory in the Bay State. And the man appointed as interim Senator is still voting, while the man elected by a considerable majority has yet to be sworn in. (Wyden had only won with a plurality.)
Seems Democrats are delaying Brown’s swearing in to do favors for the special elections who support their party. According to Mark Hemingway, on Monday,
Senate Democrats rushed through a party-line cloture vote on Obama’s nominee for Solicitor General, Patricia Smith. Smith got 60 Democratic votes even though a Republican senator produced damning evidence that she lied in Senate testimony regarding her role in a controversial program that unfairly benefited labor unions while she was New York State Labor Commissioner.
Today, the Senate is again trying to perform as many favors for Big Labor as it can before newly elected Republican Senator Scott Brown is seated and Democrats lose their supermajority. Senate Democrats are now trying to rush through the nomination of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Becker would be the first union-employed lawyer to be confirmed by the Senate to the NLRB and is very cozy with and has received many paychecks from big politically active unions like the SEIU and AFL-CIO.
If Senate Democrats need to wait to seat Scott Brown, then they should wait on holding any votes until the man elected by the people of Massachusetts takes his seat in the Senate.
The Democratic talking point is “B-b-but look how long it took to seat Al Franken” (ignoring, of course, the fact that there was an extremely tight race, that Coleman had the most votes going into the recount, that the recount procedure itself was highly controversial, etc.).