Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid demanded an apology from Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy Tuesday for daring to say he runs the Senate like a “plantation,” but when Hillary Clinton made nearly identical remarks about the House in 2006, Reid dismissed her comments.
Reid “runs the Senate like a plantation,” Rep. Cassidy said, according to a story posted Tuesday by Energy & Environment Daily. “So instead of the world’s greatest deliberative body, it is his personal, sort of, ‘It goes if I say it does, if not it stops.'”
Hillary Clinton made an almost identical complaint in 2006, when Republicans controlled the House and Senate, and George W. Bush was president. “When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run,” she said in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech, “it has been run like a plantation — and you know what I’m talking about. It has been run so that nobody with a contrary point of view has had a chance to present legislation to make an argument to be heard.”
Asked about Clinton’s comments, Reid, who was the Senate minority leader at the time, dismissed her comments. “I didn’t listen to the speech, but no one can question her civil- and human-rights credentials,” he said according to the New York Post. “They’re the best.”
But asked by reporters Tuesday about Rep. Cassidy’s remarks, Reid demanded an apology: “With all the things going on in America today, that’s fairly insensitive. That’s really insensitive. Very insensitive,” Reid told reporters. “And if there were ever a statement that deserved an apology, this is it big time.
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