SENATOR BOOKER, DIDN'T YOU KNOW THAT ONLY REPUBLICANS ARE ALLOWED TO BREAK PRECEDENT?

So this is happening:

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker is set to testify against Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions Wednesday in an unprecedented move during his attorney general confirmation.

This would be the first time in Senate history that a sitting senator will testify against another sitting senator for a Cabinet post during a confirmation.

And the right is flipping out. Gateway Pundit:



RedState:

The Left Has Lost Its Mind: Cory Booker To Testify Against Sessions

National Review, in concern-troll mode, says Booker is "throwing himself onto the tracks of an oncoming train of an all-but-certain confirmation."

I'm sure what Booker is doing won't change a single Republican vote -- the GOP is the Borg -- and I'm sure that, as many critics charge, he's doing this with an eye to a possible 2020 presidential run. But this unprecedented!!! act really seems to have gotten up right-wingers' noses -- it's as if they're saying, Hey, breaking with precedent in an uncompromisingly ideological way is our signature move! How dare you steal it! Republicans can jack up the number of filibusters, or threaten the repeated use of the rarely invoked Congressional Review Act to roll back President Obama's executive orders and make it impossible for a future Democratic president to reissue those orders, or blow the dust off an 1876 rule that allows them to set at $1 the salaries of federal workers who deviate from conservatively correct thinking, and Democrats are supposed to accept that that's just politics not being beanbag. But now it's Republicans who seem to be sniveling and whining. (See also Paul Ryan threatening fines for Democrats who livestream on the House floor.)

Or maybe Republicans just think any dissent is a violation of the New Republican Order. The GOP base has long believed that in order for the conservative utopia to be achieved, it's not enough to defeat the opposition, it must be obliterated.



Trump is going to get all his Cabinet picks. Republicans are going to get all, or nearly all, of their legislative agenda. But in conservatives' memory of the last Golden Age, Ronald Reagan and his team exercised total control not only of the legislative agenda but of the news cycle, and pesky liberals never got a word in edgewise. Trump, the TV personality, ought to be able to accomplish at least as much, in cooperation with congressional Republican. If he can't, the base is going to feel betrayed, and insist once again that this wouldn't happen if true conservatives were in charge.

So good job, Senator Booker, for upsetting them. Democrats, keep this up.