There are any number of House bills that were duly passed in the last few months that happen to deal with handling the individual mandate.  Including, I believe, one from September 30th, which in retrospect is a deal that Mark Begich, Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, and Jeanne Shaheen (at the very least) kind of wish that the Senate Majority Leader had taken, given that Reid is playing fire with their political careers right now.  At any rate: if the Senate decides to pursue an individual mandate delay anyway, well, the House has done its job; now let Harry Reid do his, and hammer it all out in conference the way it’s supposed to be done.

He can also send the House an apology for the delay, but that observation is made merely so that Reid can never pretend that nobody ever told him what proper, civilized behavior entails. I will allow myself to be content with seeing the Senate Majority Leader take up any one of those bills that he swore to never, ever take up…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Yup, I know that Reid would have to strip out from any particular House shutdown bill a lot of language involving said shutdown that no longer applies.  What, you want to let him not have to play legislative games now? If he can engage in procedural shenanigans to advance his narrow hyper-partisan interests, then Harry Reid can darn well also do that to get himself out of the hole that he and the rest of the Democratic party busily dug for themselves.

PPS: If they’re working on this, they’re not working on, say, an immigration bill.  I note this as somebody who’s a squish on the subject: how many of our regular readers WANT Congress working on an immigration bill right now?