Evan McMorris-Santoro is taking your questions in TPMPrime at 4 p.m. ET.
Photos from the life of the renowned jazz pianist. (Plus other notable deaths of 2012.)
PollTracker editor Kyle Leighton looks at the latest polling on the “fiscal cliff” to see what solutions people favor:
The 30 totally inconsistent, often contradictory, and occasionally incoherent things that Republicans say they must/must not do to rebuild. And it’s only been one month since Election Day.
President Obama made public comments to this effect in front of the Business Roundtable. And various other commentators have reported it. But it’s turning out to be far more important than the jousting over tax rates that President Obama is saying flatly that he will not negotiate under any circumstances over raising the national debt limit. Read More
Big announcement from South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint that he will step down from the Senate to run the Heritage Foundation.
Jim DeMint’s own choice to succeed him in the Senate is Rep. Tim Scott, a conservative African American freshman congressman representing South Carolina’s 1st District, a GOP official in the state tells TPM.
Notwithstanding the fact the GOP is now a whiter party than at any time in its history, no two ways about it: An African-American Senator from the post-Reconstruction South, from South Carolina of all places, would be a new day under the Sun.
Many opponents of GOP debt-ceiling hostage taking have been pointing for more than a year to the idea that the 14th Amendment might give the President authority to continue borrowing money even without a debt-ceiling vote. In other words, the entire concept of debt-ceiling votes are themselves unconstitutional because the President has the borrowing authority himself. I actually think there’s something to the argument. But the White House clearly does not. And that’s probably not even the biggest problem. Read More
It goes without saying on Capitol Hill that Mitch McConnell is one of the most deft parliamentarians in Congress. Even if that makes him akin to a Bond villain in your eyes, you can’t deny the fact that he’s a tactical master of the powers available to party leaders in the Senate.
But every now and again, he’s a bit too cocksure, and he makes an error. This past summer, Harry Reid outmaneuvered him, and he allowed a bill to extend the Bush tax cuts for middle-income earners to pass almost by accident. Today, he tried to embarrass Senate Democrats and the White House by calling for a vote on Barack Obama’s plan to allow the President, instead of Congress, to raise the debt ceiling. Well it turns out Democrats were perfectly willing to support that plan, and he ended up having to filibuster his own gambit.
In so doing he nearly dealt away the GOP’s last significant source of leverage over President Obama. If Senate Democrats can, and are allowed, to effectively raise the debt ceiling on their own, without GOP votes, House Republicans will be isolated next year, threatening to wreck the global economy rather than pass a viable Senate Democratic bill to avert a needless, politically motivated disaster. Read More