And all it takes to stop it is one man! Or woman. Not a black guy, though.

Remember back in high school, when we learned about the orderly progress of a bill through the legislative branch and/or how to express our feelings sexually, and I learned the first one? It seemed so simple back then: a bill began its metamorphosis into law when it got a majority of votes in the House and then the Senate, and it emerged a beautiful butterfly for the President to sign or subject to the hungry barn owl of veto. Even then, the Senate could pass it again with a two-thirds majority. That was the old US Senate. In the new Senate, a two-thirds majority is what you need to pass any bill at all. This system is great, since it frees up the senators to pursue A) negotiating various para-legislative compromises to get the aforementioned sixty votes and B) personal projects. Item (B) is what occupies Senator Herb Kohl (D–WI) lately, which is why he’s decided to block confirmation of nominated DEA chief Michele Leonhart. Yes, that’s a “D” next to his name. He learned it from watching you, Dad.

Never mind that the DEA has been without a leader for more than three years. Having someone to run the Drug Enforcement Agency during our ongoing efforts to contain the heroin trade out of Afghanistan and an escalating narco-war along the Mexican border is of little importance compared to the real issue facing this country: our shameful refusal to let nurses prescribe morphine. That’s Kohl’s thing, see. He wants nurses to be able to phone in prescriptions for Percocet, Vicodin and other high-test palliatives, so that elderly people who get hurt in nursing homes don’t have to wait hours to get pain treatment from a possibly not-on-call doctor.

That seems like a reasonable idea, although one can also imagine some potential problems in multiplying by twenty the number of Americans who can provide other Americans with habit-forming pain medicine. But whatever. The main thing is that until we pass this vitally important piece of legislation—a great step forward in the history of things that Herb Kohl has gotten obsessed with*—the normal workings of government will have to cease. Like a child who has learned that he can reach over and shift the car into reverse as you are driving down the freeway, Herb Kohl would like to go to McDonald’s now.

That a Democrat has opted to use a nomination from his own party’s President as a political bargaining chip is only kind of astonishing. That he would do so during a lame-duck session after an election in which said party lost a bunch of seats and is now struggling to run a complicated legislative agenda through a series of larger, similar obstructions is crazy or sadly predictable, depending on how cynical you have become.

Around here, we’re cynical. Kohl’s move, baffling though it seems from a perspective of party loyalty, is de rigueur for a Senate in which comity has gone the way of the sword cane. Future generations will remember 2008 as the year people realized that anyone can break the Senate, or rather than anyone can threaten to do so without suffering any real consequences. The Republicans realized they could do it to torpedo important stuff like a public option and taxes on millionaires, despite holding one of the smallest minorities in recent memory. But it took a Democrat to pioneer the practice of doing it to his own party for extremely minor legislation, at maybe the most inconvenient time in the last two years.

The irony is sweet. I didn’t think that Senate obstructionism could get any worse than it did last week, when the President said offered Republicans an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in exchange for some unemployment benefits, and Republicans said they’d think about it. That was a low point, but at least the negotiations went across the aisle. Watching one party dictate the Congressional agenda for two years by running the same bluff over and over again with 41 Senate seats was kind of insulting. Seeing a member of the wildly ineffective ruling party turn the same tactic against his President in the final days of that trouncing is the cherry on a hot, dripping, fudge-you sundae. Thank you, Senator Kohl. You have pointed out what a completely useless pack of cowards the Democrats are, one last time before Christmas.

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