Washington is now focused on the political dance between President Obama and key Senate Republicans over immigration reform. The overwhelming assumption is that immigration will happen, certainly in this Congress and likely this calendar year. The question is just how the politics gets massaged. But what if none of this is right and immigration reform cannot happen unless and until Democrats retake control of the House. Read More
Until around the time Todd Akin blew up his Senate race, the conventional wisdom in campaign world was that if Romney won, he’d carry the House and the Senate as well. That supposition underlay the GOP’s entire substantive agenda from tax reform to entitlement cuts to repealing key provisions of Obamacare. You can’t circumvent the filibuster without controlling the budget process and you can’t control the budget process without controlling both chambers of Congress.
It turns out that CW was wrong. If Romney had won, he’d have had to contend with a Democratically controlled Senate. That means no tax rate cuts for the rich, no Medicare privatization, no Medicaid cuts, etc. etc. Read More
A woman who helped to stop the Tucson shooting that injured Gabby Giffords came away from John McCain’s town hall in Phoenix yesterday disappointed. She talked to TPM’s David Taintor.
They don’t have a final deal yet, but business and labor issued a joint set of principles today on immigration reform. Benjy Sarlin on why that’s a big deal.
What’s wrong with people? Crowd cheers after McCain tells mother of Aurora massacre victim that she needs to hear “some straight talk.” Watch.
With Labor and Business apparently coalescing around a set of compromise principles on immigration reform (a very big deal as Benjy Sarlin explains), the sole big political obstacle that could complicate things for Democrats looks less likely to occur. And now comes news that Obama’s popularity is soaring with Latino voters in the wake of his immigration push.
As I said this morning, Washington and the country’s elite political class (and I mean that not as a pejorative but merely in a descriptive way) has convinced itself that the Tea Party and the base of the GOP no longer exists. They’re wrong.
On the brink of being gutted by the Supreme Court, we look at how the Voting Rights Act changed America.
DC press so bored by sequester stand-off, now reduced to writing articles about how overwhelming public support may backfire on the President.
As I’ve noted in a series of posts, after speaking to numerous people who’ve been associated with Ted Cruz over the last quarter century, I’ve been struck by how unanimous the opinion of him as been at basically every step. But I did get this note from one close observer which, while not terribly different from the others, points to how powerful a political force Cruz could still be.
From TPM Reader XX …
You’re probably getting a lot of feedback about Cruz about now. He wasn’t a shrinking violet in college.
I knew Cruz through the college debate circuit. He was a top-flight debater.
Arrogant? Sure. I always chalked it up to deep confidence, but being in the law for as long as he has would probably coagulate that into arrogance.
While you weren’t looking, we put together a handy guide to the confusing debate over sequestration.
The short version is that partisan whining about how the sequester came into existence is a huge distraction from the more important, though badly misrepresented, fight over how to replace it. And both threads point away from the basic question of what the sequester is, how it works, and why it ought to be avoided.
Enjoy.