As Matt notes, David Mayhew -- argbuably the country's most important Congress scholar -- has shown that while divded government affects the type of legislation passed, it has had suprisingly little effect on the quantity of legislation passed. (You can see a quick summary of...
congress
To state the obvious, this non-action is awful both on the merits (making the permanent extension of Bush's upper-class tax cuts more likely) and as politics (name me the district.
Given the glaring factual howlers (which, needless to say. err on the Pain Caucus side the paper's editors have long favored), none of the claims in this WaPo story can.
Shorter Jeffrey Rosen: I am beginning to have serious questions about the existence of Santa Claus.While I can't resist making fun of Rosen's belated recognition of the obvious, he does go on to raise a serious issue. about the potential for interbranch conflict. Rosen argues...
Bart Stupak is happy to blow up health care reform, denying countless people medical care and hence unnecessary illness and death, if access to abortion can't be made more inequitable..
Although there will be an inevitable rush among Beltway journalists to turn this into a "Democrats are dropping like flies!" narrative (see a classic example here), I endorse all of.
Another example of the "but the New Deal and Great Society were bipartisan" argument. To add another point, as I understand it the political justification for seeking Republican support is that it would mean Democrats wouldn't "own" health care reform (this would seem to be...
A useful reminder that of what the era of congressional bipartisanship actually consisted of:The Senator in question was James Eastland of Mississippi and he was a good deal crazier and.
I agree that Kyl and Grassley openly admitting the obvious fact that Republicans will not vote for any Democratic health care proposal seems like a dumb political tactic, which could.
Yglesias:Nominally at least that means that health reform is now in a legislative dead zone—there aren’t the votes in the House for a bill without a public option and there aren’t the votes in the Senate for a bill with them. If it comes right...
I think this is definitely correct. I didn't understand why Obama was appointing viable Senate candidates at the time, and it looks even worse in retrospect. (Although the subsequent analysis.
To follow-up on what Matt says here, it's especially dismaying to see Murray and Cantwell vote for the decrease in the estate tax. It's not as if they have to.