Is the US Senate “rigged”?

It may be, at least according to one Democrat whose words of candor were picked up by a hot microphone on the Senate floor, the audio of which was broadcast live by C-Span 2 on Tuesday afternoon.

“Because — because … It’s all rigged,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) said, speaking to a female colleague as fellow Senators voted.

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“I mean, the whole conversation is rigged,” he went on. “The fact that we don’t get to a discussion before the break about what we’re going to do in the lame duck, is just rigged. This stuff’s rigged.”

The Senator appears to have been commenting on how Democrats formulated their lame duck agenda, not the nature of the Senate itself.

“Michael was telling the same truths on the senate floor that he tells folks here in Colorado,” explained Alexandra Obregon, Bennet’s deputy press secretary, in an email exchange with Raw Story.

“For almost two years, he has talked about needing to fix a broken Washington,” she wrote. “We can’t move forward on major issues facing our country because of a broken system that is rigged to prevent progress.”

Bennet was appointed to the US Senate by Colorado Governor Bill Ritter when President Obama selected former Senator Ken Salazar for Secretary of the Interior. Bennet was reelected in November, defeating Republican Ken Buck.

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This video was broadcast by C-Span 2 on Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2010, as snipped by TheDC.com.