By Alexander Bolton - 01/30/15

The first month of the new Senate Republican majority didn’t turn out exactly how Mitch McConnell wanted. But it came pretty close.

The Senate closed its first month under Republican rule on Friday by passing legislation approving the Keystone XL pipeline — moving a step closer to sending the controversial bill to President Obama’s desk.
It’s the most significant accomplishment McConnell's had so far as majority leader, but is far from the only one.
The Senate under McConnell has already held twice as many roll call votes on amendments as the chamber held in all of 2014.

By Monday, it will have approved three bills: the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, Keystone and a veterans’ suicide prevention bill.

The GOP leader is even earning some praise from Democrats.

“But for one terrible Thursday night, he’s done a good job,” Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told reporters before the final vote on Keystone.

McConnell claimed a measure of victory on Thursday.

“This is a happy day on several counts. We just finished having our 38th roll call vote on an amendment in the Senate which is more than twice as many as we had in all of 2014,” he said after the vote on the Keystone bill, which he touted as “an extraordinarily important jobs bill for our country.”

McConnell vowed to change the way the Senate conducts its business if he became majority leader. He's followed through with his word.

The Senate is working longer hours and taking more votes.

It worked until after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, after midnight the Thursday before and after 10 p.m. the prior Tuesday.

To be sure, there have been complaints about McConnell.

A constant critic is Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) spokesman Adam Jentleson.

“The first month of the Republican Senate is littered with Sen. McConnell’s broken pledges … McConnell has already bypassed committees, shut down debate on the Senate floor and failed to hold a single Friday vote,” he tweeted this week, referring to Democratic amendments the Republicans voted to table.

Reid’s spokesman also needled McConnell over the time it took to move Keystone through the chamber, noting that 27 House-passed bills are already sitting on the leader’s desk.

McConnell tried to speed the process along by holding a vote on Monday to end debate but Democrats blocked it, arguing that they had not received enough time to offer amendments.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) complained that while McConnell allowed votes on Democratic amendments, he kept the threshold for approval at 60 votes, ensuring their failure.

“Virtually everything in this process of a multiplicity of votes, they’ve all fallen apart with an exception of two,” she said. “The lesson is you’ve got to find a way to get to agreement on numbers of votes and do it in a way that doesn’t develop the kind of hardness between the two parties.

“Everything goes to 60 votes so again the supermajority is the only [thing] that moves the body,” she added.

for more see:
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/23123...early-victories

[bold emphasis mine]