YOU KNOW, THIS LAME-DUCK SESSION WORKED OUT PRETTY WELL: Food-safety bill victim of omnibus defeat, incompetence.

When Harry Reid pulled the plug on the omnibus spending bill Thursday night, he also ended his best hope of fixing a monumental blunder committed earlier in the lame-duck session. Senate Democrats bragged that they had passed a far-reaching food-safety bill opposed by conservatives for its overreach and regulatory expansion, until their counterparts in the House pronounced it dead on arrival for its unconstitutional creation of new tax policy. Reid had hoped to sneak the House version into the omnibus in order to wipe the egg off of his face, but that plan ended up under the omnibus.

You’d think the Senate Majority Leader would pay closer attention to constitutional requirements, but . . . oh, who am I kidding? Anyway, it was a lousy bill, and it’s dead because of his ineptitude and overreaching. T.S. Eliot said that there’s no greater treason than to do the right thing for the wrong reason — but when you’re talking about Congress, you take what you can get.