GOP Leadership Acting Like Spoiled Brats -- Suspend Hearing on Homeless Vets

The Republicans in U.S. Senate are acting like angry
and spoiled brats since they lost the vote to provide healthcare to
Americans and are dismissing the needs of the country by conducting
childish parliamentary tricks to stop the business of the Senate to
harrass the Democrats.

Today (March 24, 2010) I was attending a U.S. Senate
Veterans Committee hearing on homeless vets when at 11am, Committee
chair Senator Akaka abruptly said that the hearing must end immediately
as one member of the "minority" party had invoked a parliamentary
prerogative to suspend the day's hearings.

I was amazed and upset that the important hearing on
homeless veterans could be so easily ended. I stood up in
the hearing and said I was a veteran and that I was outraged that one
disgruntled Senator could halt the hearings of the Senate.

I asked the name of the Senator who had invoked the
parliamentary termination of Senate hearings for the day. Neither
Senator Akaka, nor his staff, knew who had called a halt to the
hearings, only that they had been informed that they should end the
hearing.

I went across the hall in the Senate
Dirksen building to hearing on military medicine to see if it had been
closed down. Senators Jim Webb (Democrat) and Lindsey
Graham (Republican) had decided to ignore the injunction and continue
the hearing with the heads of military medicine for the Army, Navy, and
Air Force. Senator Claire McCaskill, who was to have
chaired the committee meeting on the Afghan National Police good
naturedly called Webb and Graham "rogues" for defying the edict to end
the meetings.

And on the floor of the Senate, McCaskill
said:

"In ten
minutes, I was supposed to convene a hearing on the contracts for police
training in Afghanistan. Now, this is a very important part of our
mission in Afghanistan, is the training of local police departments.
There was a witness who was going to be there from the State Department,
a witness there from the Defense Department. The Inspector Generals
were going to be there.

Just last
week, GAO wiped out a contract that had been let on police training
because of problems in the way the contract was competed, so this
hearing was timely and it's important. We cannot succeed in Afghanistan
if we do not have effective police training, and these contracts are
problematic. The State Department is supposed to be overseeing it. We
have hundreds of millions of dollars that's not being accounted for.

So
what do I find out this morning? The Republican Party is not going to
let us have a hearing? What in the world? Why in the world are we not
being allowed to work this afternoon? Why in the world are we not able
to ask questions at a hearing in a few minutes as to why the police
training is not going well in Afghanistan and how we can do it better?
Our men and women are over there and they are at risk if we don't get
this right.

I don't get
it. I don't get what the purpose of saying no is. I don't get what we
accomplish. We're sent here to work. We're paid by the people of this
country to work. And the idea that I had to call these witnesses and
say, "Go home," because the Republicans won't let us have a hearing.
Somebody has got to explain this to me."

All afternoon hearings were also cancelled by this
parliamentary maneuvering leaving witnesses who had travelled to
Washington from long distances, including senior military officers who
had travelled from Hawaii and Korea for the Armed Services committee
hearing wondering when they would be allowed to testify.

The choice of the Republican Senator to use his power
to cancel all the longstanding Senate hearings scheduled on important
issues for our country is appalling.

Let's hope that the spiteful action today will cause
the Senate to relook its procedural rules and eliminate the ability of
one Senator to halt the proceedings of the entire Senate.