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Why 2015 will look a lot like the early 1990s
Why 2015 will look a lot like the early 1990s
12/22/14
In his 1991 book Parliament of Whores, conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke famously wrote, "Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it." In 2015, with a new Senate majority and a larger majority in the House, the GOP will get another chance to make O'Rourke look good.
...But in the end, the grand old party faithful tacked hard enough to the right to keep its incumbents in office and bring in challengers that, while undeniably ultraconservative, didn't self-destruct in the campaign as they have in the last couple of election cycles.
So at the start of 2015, Ohio's John Boehner will still be Speaker of the House, and veteran Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell will ascend from Minority to Majority Leader.
It will be interesting to see what McConnell's Republican majority does with the Senate rules, which come up for a vote at the start of each new session. How much of the fraught and frustrating filibuster will remain for the minority Democrats to use? Still, no matter what the rules, the president still has to sign every bill the Senate votes on, and that president is still, for another two years, Democrat Barack Obama.
Obama's mantra since taking office in 2009 has been to find common ground with the Republican Congress. That might not seem like what he's doing to some in the GOP, who are crying foul at Obama's executive actions on immigration and the environment, and his executive overtures toward Cuba. But some of those Republicans probably owe their presence in Congress to the administration's strategic blunder of waiting until after the elections to make moves that could have motivated Democratic votes....
http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2014/12/22/year-in-politics2014.html
12/22/14
In his 1991 book Parliament of Whores, conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke famously wrote, "Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it." In 2015, with a new Senate majority and a larger majority in the House, the GOP will get another chance to make O'Rourke look good.
...But in the end, the grand old party faithful tacked hard enough to the right to keep its incumbents in office and bring in challengers that, while undeniably ultraconservative, didn't self-destruct in the campaign as they have in the last couple of election cycles.
So at the start of 2015, Ohio's John Boehner will still be Speaker of the House, and veteran Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell will ascend from Minority to Majority Leader.
It will be interesting to see what McConnell's Republican majority does with the Senate rules, which come up for a vote at the start of each new session. How much of the fraught and frustrating filibuster will remain for the minority Democrats to use? Still, no matter what the rules, the president still has to sign every bill the Senate votes on, and that president is still, for another two years, Democrat Barack Obama.
Obama's mantra since taking office in 2009 has been to find common ground with the Republican Congress. That might not seem like what he's doing to some in the GOP, who are crying foul at Obama's executive actions on immigration and the environment, and his executive overtures toward Cuba. But some of those Republicans probably owe their presence in Congress to the administration's strategic blunder of waiting until after the elections to make moves that could have motivated Democratic votes....
http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2014/12/22/year-in-politics2014.html
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