Watch: GOP Senate Leader Shockingly Filibusters A Bill — His Own

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Republican U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, today offered a bill, and a short time later, when Senate Majority Leader, Democrat Harry Reid brought the bill to the floor for a vote, McConnell — possibly in the first time ever in  history — objected to the vote, and filibustered his own bill.

Embarrassingly, McConnell couldn’t even get one of his GOP lackeys to do his dirty work.

Senator Dick Durbin, as you can see in this video, said he believes this is the first time ever a Senator has filibustered his own bill — a statement of how vile the GOP has become.

Reid responded the best way possible.

“What we have here is a case of Republicans here in the Senate once again not taking ‘yes’ for an answer,” Senator Reid announced. “This morning the Republican leader asked consent to have a vote on this proposal, just now I told everyone we were willing to have that vote — up or down vote. Now the Republican leader objects to his own idea. So I guess we have a filibuster of his own bill, so I object.”

Not that it even matter, but the bill was a rather important one: raising the debt ceiling.

“Democrats piled on,” the Huffington Post reports:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters that McConnell thought he’d thrown Democrats for a loop. “It was a little too clever by half,” Schumer said, adding that it “would have been a great moment.”

“Sen. McConnell’s usually astute political radar was a bit off today,” Schumer said.

“This may be a moment in Senate history when a senator made a proposal and, when given an opportunity for a vote on that proposal, filibustered his own proposal,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “I think we have reached a new spot in the history of the Senate we’ve never seen before.”

“I don’t know how the Republicans can say they’re not abusing the filibuster after what we saw on the floor today,” Durbin told reporters. “It’s somewhat comic, but sad as well, that we’ve reached the point where Sen. McConnell will not even accept a majority vote on his own measure.”

“What just transpired deserves a word,” Senator Durbin remarked, as The Raw Story reports. “Sen. McConnell came to the floor this morning and offered a change in law that would help us avoid the kind of obstruction and the kind of show downs we’ve had in the past over the debt ceiling.”

Durbin explained “to those who don’t follow the Senate” that by calling for the legislation to be passed by a 60-vote majority, McConnell had filibustered the bill. He said this was probably the first time in history that a senator had filibuster his own proposal.

Bottom line: the Republicans continue to be the Party of No, the party of pure obstructionism — and pure fanaticism.