'The Senate hasn’t been run this way in its history,' McConnell (right) says. | AP Photos Reid, McConnell's icy start to '14

Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are starting off 2014 with a relationship as icy as the polar air that’s engulfing Washington.

Echoing the rhetoric of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — who called Reid a “dictator” on Tuesday — McConnell took a broadside to the majority leader on Tuesday for stifling Republicans from offering amendments to legislation reviving jobless benefits.


The Kentucky senator warned that Senate Democrats’ proposal to extend unemployment insurance for three months cannot be viewed seriously unless Republicans are allowed to get votes on their proposals for job creation and to pay for the legislation.

( PHOTOS: Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid’s friendship)

“We’d be happy to offer amendments just as soon as the guy who’s dictating what the amendments ought to be will let us offer them,” McConnell said. “If you’re not serious about passing it, you prevent amendments and harden the opposition of the minority. Because then that means you’re only interested in a show vote, not an outcome.”

In fact it was McConnell who is not serious, Reid said, particularly after the GOP leader tried to pay for the unemployment insurance legislation by suspending Obamacare’s individual mandate.

“Senator McConnell says that he wants to pay for these extended benefits … by whacking Obamacare. That’s a nonstarter,” Reid said. “We know the Republicans are not going to allow us to close these long overdue tax loopholes. So they come up with all this chicanery like whacking Obamacare.”

( PHOTOS: Harry Reid’s career)

As evidence for the dearth of amendments, McConnell noted that there have been just four Senate votes on Republican amendments in past the six months — which though true, speaks more to the increasingly poisonous atmosphere in the Senate than anything else. There have been few amendment votes at all since the Senate passed its immigration bill in June.

A Democratic leadership aide called McConnell’s diatribe “pretty lame” and attributed much of the slowdown in amendment votes to the government shutdown, Louisiana Sen. David Vitter’s quest for a vote on his Obamacare amendment during consideration of a bipartisan energy bill and Republican objections to amendment votes on a December defense bill.

( PHOTOS: Mitch McConnell’s career)

The breaking point in bipartisan relations was Democrats’ unilateral change to the Senate rules in November, which exempts most presidential nominees from 60-vote thresholds. McConnell warned before that rules change that Reid would go down as the “worst” majority leader ever if he followed through, and McConnell isn’t backing off his criticism of Reid’s place in the Senate annals.

“The Senate hasn’t been run this way in its history,” McConnell said Tuesday. “It’s really not the responsibility of the majority leader to tell the minority whether they can have votes. That’s not his job to dictate to us whether we can have votes or to decide for himself whether our amendments are appropriate to be considered.”

McConnell concluded that the state of a Senate routinely described as dysfunctional by both parties is “almost entirely the responsibility of the majority leader.”