Tag: HELP committee

Colorado US Senator Michael Bennet seems to love his job as much as he hates the senate. That is, he seems to relish the opportunity to make change that matters as much as he reviles the fact that senate rules and procedures and politics work against anyone making any kind of change at all. On Wednesday he said something just like that but more eloquently in a speech on the Senate floor, when Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican, invoked one of the chamber's myriad arcane rules to stall debate on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, legislation Bennet has helped write and that would remake the controversial "No Child Left Behind" act.

At a fundraiser in Iowa Sunday, the new chairman of the Senate health committee, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, declared that a health-reform bill...