Ron Johnson is still an ass

It is just the latest step by Johnson, who is up for reelection in a state narrowly won by Biden, to burnish his Trump credentials, whether that’s by repeating unfounded theories about the Jan. 6 attack or becoming the face of GOP opposition to the coronavirus bill that is broadly popular even among Republicans.

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Johnson’s move delays the vote-for-all, a process where senators will be able to force amendment votes, and the subsequent final passage of the bill.

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Johnson is taking a two-pronged approach to his hardball tactics: First, he’s forcing the Senate clerks to read the entire piece of legislation, a delaying tactic that irritated Democrats and even some Republicans. Then, he wants Republicans to sign up for shifts so they could potentially force hundreds of amendment votes.

Johnson’s delaying tactics won’t sink the bill, and some colleagues have been puzzled over what his endgame is.

  The Hill

There's no endgame. He's just an ass.

"It doesn’t punish anybody except members of the staff … and pretty much all 100 senators,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D).

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Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, defended Johnson’s ability to force the reading, but noted that Republicans are also eager to get to the debate so they can showcase their opposition to the Democratic bill.

“I think our goal would be to have to be able to use 20 hours so our members can get up and talk. While they’re reading the bill you don’t get a chance to do that,” Thune said.

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Johnson says he is forcing the reading to give the American people more time to get acquainted with the 628-page bill that was formally unveiled on Thursday afternoon, and to let Republicans craft amendments.

Apparently the Republicans already have their amendments crafted and want to get them out there. As for the American people, does he really think any but the most hardcore policy wonks are going to listen to ten hours of it being read? Or even ten minutes? No. All he's done is further cement his reputation as an ass and caused some poor schmucks to read dry as dust legal verbiage for 10 fucking hours.  The Senators themselves aren't going to sit there for it.  Johnson won't even do that.

Is he trying to take Ted Cruz' place as the most hated person in the Senate?

It’s hardly the first time Johnson has found himself in the middle of controversy in recent weeks, as he at times appears to be positioning himself as the most pro-Trump member of the Senate.

In February, Johnson said the Jan. 6 mob attack [Johnson's] decision to become the leading critic of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill also puts him on the record against $1,400 stimulus checks to millions of households and providing a $400 increase in unemployment benefits to the jobless.

Such provisions have made the legislation broadly popular, even with Republicans.

P.S. Mike Lee is still an ass, too.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

At this moment, on this issue, time can be measured in human lives. On average, nearly 2,000 people a day are dying from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. That’s a death about once every 44 seconds. It’s an improvement over the end of January, when people were dying at a rate faster than two a minute. But it’s still a far faster rate than the country had seen for much of the pandemic.

CBS’s Frank Thorp reported that the reading of the bill (by a non-speed reader) began at about 3:22 p.m. By 4:01 p.m., the reader had gotten to only page 40, a rate of 37 pages an hour. The bill is 628 pages long so, if the text of the bill were consistently dense throughout, it would have taken about 17 hours to read it in its entirety. Reading would end at about 8 a.m. on Friday.

As it turned out, the readers picked up the pace. The reading of the bill completed after 10 hours, 44 minutes. Given the current rate at which people are dying of covid-19, that means that about 880 Americans likely succumbed to the disease during that period.

  WaPo