This article from The Guardian seems to explain the Trump phenomenon fairly well. It’s a shame the Republican Party has not recognized just what it’s done by creating a base of voters who expected Roe v. Wade to be overturned, the Affordable Care Act repealed, gay marriage banned, immigrants thrown out of the country and …
My goodness. Senator Sanders has been getting larger crowds than anyone in the political press expected, but it hasn’t paid much attention. Now, though: 10,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin? It’s no surprise a liberal candidate would get a crowd in Madison, which has a proud tradition of liberalism. But still, 10,000 people 16 months away …
I’m with Kevin Drum, who quotes Ramesh Ponnuru: Senate Democrats will have the power to subject almost all legislation to filibuster (a word that does not appear in Will’s column [whence came the “blizzard” phrase]). Overcoming a filibuster takes 60 votes. So Republicans, who will probably end up with 54 seats, would have to win …
In a Facebook post this morning I wrote the following with a link to a Joan Walsh essay at Salon. Quoting her: “Isn’t it fair to ask whether the constant denigration of government, and the resulting defunding, now makes it harder to handle what everyone agrees are core government functions?” I continued in my own …
No, that’s not my word. That’s the word Paul Glastris and Haley Sweetland Edwards use to title the lead article in the summer issue of Washington Monthly. What they mean is that the moment the Republicans took over the House in 1994 (Gingrich and his crowd), they took a meat ax to Congress’s permanent workforce. …
How can the son of a noted and much-admired liberal like Mario Cuomo become a Blue Dog Democrat who would stand with hedge fund managers and against unions? It’s hard to believe, but that’s clearly what Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has done. In a recent fight about locating and funding charter schools in …
The miserable overpaid political “leaders” of this country have failed the people that employ them once again. This time they have concluded that 1.3 million of their fellow Americans are not deserving of any financial help in staying afloat while they look for work. Specifically, they refused to extend unemployment benefits to those people beyond …
Call it irony, call it aggravation, call it rage. Call it what you like, but notice the obvious conclusion one can draw from the DC Circuit Court’s denial of Presidential recess powers except between sessions of Congress (essentially between December and January of every other year): . . . if the DC panel’s opinion is …
Words cannot express how disgusted I am with Harry Reid, Carl Levin, Pat Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, Max Baucus and Mark Pryor. Because of their fear that someday their party might be in the minority, they watered down proposed filibuster reform to virtually nothing. The changes will surely disappoint reformers who were pushing for more sweeping …
Several newer Democratic Senators have been trying to modify that body’s institutional rules to make the filibuster more difficult to use by the minority. It can be done by simple majority on the first legislative day of a new Congress, and Majority Leader Senator Reid of Nevada has been extending that day by calling the …