It has gone viral:  When a 22-pound house cat scratched a Portland couple’s 7 month-old child, the “man of the house” kicked it in the rear.

At that point, the animal went “full kitty,” chasing the family into the bedroom and trapping it there.

As the 911 operator intoned “9-1-1, what is your emergency?”, in the background, you could hear the chilling abject sound of pure terror:  “Meow.”

In the U.S. Senate, Democrat Leader Harry Reid has just crammed a bevy of GOP-opposed nominees down the Republicans’ throats using his illegal rules.  Reid is probably going to bury the budget in order to deny Republicans a chance for votes on “reserve fund” amendments.  He spits on House-passed bills, and has made it clear that he will spend most of the time between now and October 1 forcing votes on Democratic political agenda items intended to reelect his minions.  And he almost daily takes to the Senate floor to hurl slime at law-abiding Americans exercising their political rights, while he counts on billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and George Soros to buy the Senate back for him.

And how have Republicans responded to this?

They have just passed the first of four “era of good feelings” bills intended to show that “the two parties can work together.”

Ted Kennedy wouldn’t have put up with Reid’s behavior.  (Nor would John Dingell have put up with an Elijah-Cummings-type rank questioning the motives of a committee chairman.)

And there are a number of ways a single Republican can bring Reid’s tinpot dictatorship to an end — the most obvious being to start bringing the entire GOP agenda onto the Senate calendar and to begin threatening to move to proceed to it.

ObamaCare will be a great motivator in the November elections. But if the American  people think the GOP is too cowardly to do anything about it — whoever is in control of the Senate — it loses some of its salience.  The same can be said if Reid and Pelosi successfully spend the next eight months successfully changing the subject.

So here’s a message for the Senate GOP:  Come out of the bedroom and confront the “kitty.”  It won’t take much courage.  But it will take some.  Hopefully, it won’t take more than you have.