Salazar: Senate Repubs Fail Moral Test

Five Democratic senators gathered this morning to hold a roundtable discussion on faith. The general tone was to be expected: compassion, reverence for religion and a desire to rise above petty politics dominated the wide-ranging exchange.

Of course, this is the United States Senate we're talking about, so no event would be complete without a stick or two in the other party's eye. And Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), who began his remarks saying that he studied for the priesthood in high school, didn't disappoint. "To be frank about it," he said, "I think the Republicans, frankly, in many ways, have not - do not meet the moral test" when it comes to voting in the Senate. "And we see that in programs like children's health insurance," he went on. "This president, who is a man of faith, would go ahead and veto a program that was intended to provide health insurance to 9 million children."

ALSO: A second stick was thrust by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who put the blame for the financial mess squarely at the feet of the GOP. "I think we've not seen in our history before one-party control for a period of time where you can really see what the consequences were of what they say they believe in, what their philosophy is," she said. "Well, we had that from 2001 until 18 months ago. We had a situation where we not only had deregulation policy but we had a president put in place people on the Securities and Exchange Commission, people on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, people on the FDIC, who didn't believe in using the authority they had to be able to monitor what was happening, and we see what has happened as a result of that."