A Senate About Nothing

As the dedicated journalist that I am, equipped with the finest research tools and unnamed sources around, sometimes I get all of my information from the CNN news crawl -- those tantalizing morsels that creep across the screen, allowing us to turn the sound off.

Here's one that caught my attention yesterday: "Senate is debating five budgets that won't pass."

News crawls are like tweets. They relieve us of complexity. And in this case, none is needed.

The Senate debating something that won't happen is sort of what the rest of Washington has become, an exercise in futility -- like trying to find a missing sock or watching for the pot to boil having forgotten to add water.

The deal with the Senate is that in an election year all they really want to do is argue, call each other names and repeat talking points their lobbyists wrote for them.

But to stage these smackdowns they have to pretend that pending legislation is on the table. So, all day yesterday they used phony budget bills that even some of the sponsors don't intend to pass.

Give up the charade, senators. Just schedule arguing time -- about nothing. Spare your staff the chore of writing up the bills and journalists the pointless task of reporting what's in them.

Just wallow around the floor blaspheming and belching at one another. Leave the rest of us out of it.

If you ever do pass a budget, which hasn't happened for three years, I'll be looking for it on the news crawl.

Craig blogs daily at craigcrawford.com