The Hill News

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) delivered the following address at the Heritage Foundation earlier today:

Voters who turned out in November are going to be pretty disappointed when they learn the first thing some Democrats want to do is cut off the right of the people they elected to make their voices heard on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

In the November elections, voters showed that they remember the passage of the healthcare law on Christmas Eve, 2009: midnight sessions, voting in the midst of a snow storm, back room deals, little time to read, amend or debate the bill, passage by a straight party line vote.

It was how it was done as much as what was done that angered the American people. Minority voices were silenced. Those who didn’t like it were told, “You can read it after you pass it.” The majority’s attitude was, “We won the election. We’ll write the bill. We don’t need your votes.”

And of course the result was a law that a majority of voters consider to be an historic mistake and the beginning of an immediate effort to repeal and replace it. 

Voters remembered all this in November, but only 6 weeks later Democratic senators seemed to have forgotten it. I say this because on Dec. 18, every returning Democratic senator sent Senator Reid a letter asking him to “take steps to bring [Republican] abuses of our rules to an end.”

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