Ezra Klein at The Washington Post reports:
“The filibuster has been abused,” Sen. Harry Reid said at a reporter’s briefing this afternoon. “But next Congress, we are going to take a look at it. And we’re going to make some changes in it.”
Reid didn’t say precisely what More…
Sen. Jim Bunning’s (R-Ky.) blockade on extending temporarily unemployment benefits put the Tea Party movement in an unfamiliar position. Instead of nudging the Republican Party to take a stand, activists watched a politician pick an anti-government fight they didn’t even know existed.
“We’ve just been so consumed with the health More…
I think Matthew Yglesias and Jonathan Chait pretty effectively pummeled this silly Mike Potemra post about the filibuster, but they missed something. Potemra:
Three years from now, Palin is president, with J. D. Hayworth as Senate majority leader, and Michele Bachmann as Speaker of the House. (Of
The Obama administration is reportedly looking more closely at recess appointments for some nominees who’ve been mowed down by filibusters, with Sen. Richard Shelby’s (R-Ala.) holds and the self-parodying filibuster of National Labor Relations Board nominee Craig Becker — it only took 33 votes to block him on a snowy More…
In the Senate, a nominee for a crucial security agency right after an attempted terror attack can be blocked by a single legislator from the minority party because he has a problem not with the nominee but with organized labor. Sensing the possibility to deal a political setback to More…
In the final stretch of the Massachusetts special election for Senate, Republican candidate Scott Brown has focused on “restoring balance” to Washington. He’ll be the “41st vote” to filibuster legislation; the Democrats’ hold on 60 votes has let liberals run the country into the ground. “That’s not what the founders More…
The GOP’s candidate in the Massachusetts special election raised more than one million dollars — double the goal — in a 24-hour “moneybomb” on the Ron Paul model. The event itself, and its presentation, bespoke the confidence of a campaign that the slapdash organization of Democratic candidate Martha Coakley More…
Few public figures are as quick to embrace their unflattering monikers as Sen. Tom “Dr. No” Coburn (R-Okla.).
“We’re accused of being ‘The Party of No,’” Coburn said on the chamber floor this afternoon. “I want to tell my colleagues and the American public that ‘no’ is a More…
Tom Hill’s massive sign–a white sheet taped onto a fishing pole–said it all. On one side, in thin black letters, Hill had written “STAND FIRM WITH JOE,” a call for solidarity with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). When Hill–who lives in Connecticut–had written that, he thought Lieberman was going to block More…
Another notable passage from Sen. Richard Durbin’s (D-Ill.) interview on MSNBC this morning finds the majority whip conceding that the Democrats have few alternatives but to bow to the sensitivities of Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who this week single-handedly blew up a Democratic More…
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