We’ve been monitoring the collapse of January’s Senate rules reform agreement over the past couple months, mostly through the lens of presidential nominations. But this week brings us with exciting new examples of its colossal failure.
Here, for instance, is our most recent story about must-pass legislation to avoid a government shutdown. Long story short, some Republicans weren’t allowed votes on their amendments. Then instead of accepting the fact that the bill has supermajority support, they wasted three legislative days out of protest. That’s three days the Senate wasn’t debating the Dem budget Republicans have been salivating over for four years.
But the filibuster reform flop is also partially to blame for the early demise of Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapons ban. Read More
Rand Paul seems to have engineered the unconditional surrender of the Tea Party anti-immigration caucus in the House.
Jeff Bezos and team have recovered from the Atlantic some of the Saturn V rocket engines that powered the Apollo missions back in the day. Take a look.
A quick point of clarification about this piece.
I want to be clear that I don’t think Republicans “won” sequestration, in that I don’t think sequestration is any kind of prize, or somehow a worse penalty for Democrats than for Republicans to suffer. Sequestration sucks for everyone. What Democrats lost was a gamble that Republican leaders would fold quickly as sequestration approached or just after it kicked in. Instead, we’re looking at an unstable, unhappy equilibrium where the consequences of the cuts aren’t severe enough to knock either party off its bottom line. Read More
Back in the 1980s and 90s there was this comical line that once Republicans finally cracked the African-American vote Democrats would be out of business forever. In other words, once Republicans got 100% of the Southern whites and all the blacks, Dems would be toast. To which one might say, yeah, that really would be awful for Dems’ electoral prospects. On the other hand, if you have any feel for American politics, that’s just not going to happen. Democrats actually tried; it didn’t work. Read More
Eric Lach takes a look at the NRA’s international efforts to resist gun control.
TPM Reader JT checks in from the front lines of the sequester:
Many of the stories regarding sequestration have spoken only generally about which services will be affected instead of the more interesting question, to what degree that the public will notice.
In my case, I work as an air traffic controller at an air route traffic control center, a facility which handles the airspace between your departure and destination airports.
No one is to the right of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on immigration reform. But in what may be a sign of the broader conservative softening on the issue, Cuccinelli has removed the hardcore nativist immigration page from his gubernatorial campaign website.
Ex-RNC Chief Michael Steele wonders if GOP minority outreach can really work with GOP minority voter suppression. Watch.
In case you missed it, former Gov. Mark Sanford made it into a runoff for the GOP nomination for the SC-01 congressional seat yesterday. The winner of the runoff will face Stephen Colbert’s sister Elizabeth Colbert Busch, who won the Democratic primary.