From Roll Call: Senate Leadership Elections Set Stage for 2017

Senate party leadership is set for the 115th Congress.

- Click here for the article.

The Senate’s leadership elections went off without a hitch Wednesday, with victorious Republicans keeping their top echelon intact.

Democrats elevated Charles E. Schumer to the role of minority leader for the next Congress, as anticipated, but the most interesting development might be that the Brooklyn lawmaker is going to need a bigger meeting table.

In what appeared to be an effort to respond to the 2016 elections with a more ideologically diverse team, Democrats added Vermont independent Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin as representatives of a more progressive faction and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia representing a more centrist contingent. Sanders will be chairman of outreach, Baldwin will serve as conference secretary and Manchin will be vice chairman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, an advisory board to leadership.

. . . There probably would not have been suspense on the Republican side even if the GOP had lost the majority, but the outcome was even more predictable given the election results.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was re-elected as the chamber’s Republican leader Wednesday during a closed-door organizational meeting.

The Kentucky Republican was nominated by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Sen.-elect Todd Young of Indiana, and received a standing ovation from the caucus.
Young said he highlighted his faith in McConnell’s leadership in his remarks to the caucus. “I trusted Mitch McConnell because I had direct interaction, especially over recent months,” Young said.

The top GOP leaders are all white men. But in the 114th Congress McConnell did appoint four counsels to broaden the discussion at the leadership table, which included two female senators.

Nebraska’s Deb Fischer, who served as one of the counsels, expects those positions to continue in the next Congress. She was also not concerned with the lack of diversity at the top.

“I think it’s important that we put the best person in the job,” Fischer said. “Diversity is good, whether it’s age or prior work experience, life experiences, gender, whatever, that’s always good to have it in the mix. When it comes down to a certain position, I think you always have to look at the qualities of the individuals.”

About the race to replace Boehner

A second option for this week's written assignment for GOVT 2305 is to look at the impact the resignation of John Boehner - who became speaker because he was the leader of the House Republicans. His resignation from Congress was also his resignation from that leadership position. Some background might be in order - the section on parties and committees in Congress covers this as well.

For a look at whose who in party leadership and in what the House Republican Conference is, click here:

- Wikipedia: Party Leaders in the United States house of Representatives.
- House: Leadership.
- Wikipedia: House Republican Conference.
- House: House Republicans.

Here is, roughly, a rank ordering of leaders in the House Majority

1 - The Speaker of the House
2 - The Majority Leader (Kevin McCarthy)
3 - The Majority Whip (Steve Scalise)
4 - Republican Conference Chairman (Cathy McMorris Rodgers)
5 - Republican Policy Committee Chairman. (Luke Messer)
6 - The National Republican Congressional Committee. (Greg Walden)

Now that the top has been - or is about to be - vacated, there will be a struggle to move up. The question will be whether this will be a smooth process where people go up a notch, or whether there will be a power struggle, especially among those members of the more conservative wing of the party who want to increase their influence over policy.

Here are some random readings about what's up as of now - as of tomorrow all this will be dated.

- Politico: Resignation triggers all-out leadership scramble.
- NYT: Candidates in Play for Republican Leadership.
- Politico: Paul Ryan endorses Tom Price over Steve Scalise for House majority leader.
- Huffington Post: Months After White Supremacy Scandal, Steve Scalise May Become House Majority Leader.
- CNN: Majority leader race: Price gets support, McMorris Rodgers declines bid.
- Politico: McMorris Rodgers urges GOP to pull together.
- IndyStar: Tully: GOP ‘Hail Marys’ aren’t enough, Rep. Messer says.
- Roll Call: Leadership Roundup: Scalise Is in; New Talk of a Trey Gowdy Bid.

From Vox: Tea Party Republicans want to fire John Boehner

This has been brewing for a while

- Click here for the article.

John Boehner has been through debt-ceiling fights, a government shutdown, and increasingly bitter challenges to his authority. But never has his job as speaker of the House seemed to be in so much jeopardy as right now.

Top Republicans expect that one of Boehner's adversaries within the Republican conference will try to force a vote on whether to dump him from the speakership this fall, according to Politico. If he survives that, which might require support from some House Democrats, many Republicans think Boehner should or will step down at the end of this Congress.

On the surface, it's an odd fix for Boehner to find himself in: He came to Congress as a reformer and rose to the speakership as an antidote to the big-government conservative ways of leaders who pushed the No Child Left Behind and Medicare prescription drug programs into law. He's even presided over a permanent extension of most of the Bush tax cuts and significant reductions in federal spending.

But on a deeper level, Boehner has long been the last sentry for the party, using charm, strategic superiority, and his control over House rules to prevent the Tea Party wing from crashing through the gates of the establishment and putting Washington on total legislative lockdown. That has made Boehner the immediate proxy for the war grassroots conservatives are waging against the GOP's Washington insiders, and his enemies are emboldened by Donald Trump's ability to galvanize an anti-establishment fervor that shows no signs of subsiding.

Wikipedia: Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

Leaders for the 114th Congress selected

Lot's of links - but there's lot's to do:

Democrats in the Senate:
- Time for Dems to elect new leaders?
- Democratic Caucus Keeps Reid as Leader, but Airs Frustration.
- Senate Dems unveil new leadership team.
- Tester Named to Chair DSCC
- Dems fault leaders for brushing off losses.
- Warren’s Leadership Job Could Be Liberal Liaison
- McConnell elected Senate GOP leader- Warren joins Dem leadership

- Frustrated Democratic Senators Vent, but Re-Elect Reid to Be Their Leader.
- After Calls for His Ouster, Reid Adds New Leaders to Mend Fences.


Democrats in the House:

Republicans in the Senate:
Wicker Picked to Lead National G.O.P. Senatorial Committee


Republicans in the House:
- Boehner reelected as Speaker.
- Tea Party critics will hold noses, vote for Boehner as Speaker.
- For Returning GOP Leaders, New Governing Challenges.
-10 freshmen who could trouble leadership
-Committee chairmanships are up for grabs

House Republican leadership team shuffled

For 2305's look at how Congress is organized.

In the wake of Eric Cantor's defeat and resignation as House majority leader, the Republican Conference meet yesterday to replace him. As expected the third in command - majority whip Kevin McCarthy - stepped up to be the new majority leader(second in commend of the party) - which created a vacancy in his old position. So there has to be a race for majority whip.

Here's a description of that process from the Washington Post.

- Click here for the article.

It's a great inside look at the process. Click here for another look at it from the National Journal.

Then came the day’s real drama, the election of majority whip. There were three candidates vying to take the spot that McCarthy was vacating and become the House GOP’s official arm-twister and vote-counter.

There was Scalise, the head of the right-wing caucus within the House GOP. Scalise, elected in 2008, sold himself as a voice of the South, and of red-state Republicans more broadly. Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio), the top Republican in the House, after all, was from a swing state, McCarthy from solid-blue California.

On Wednesday night, Scalise had hosted 40 allies at Acadiana, an upscale Louisiana Creole restaurant in the District. Even in a powerful institution like the House, the strength of a candidacy is measured by its free food. And Scalise’s food was solid.

At that gathering, Scalise also handed out red baseball bats. It was meant to be a message of toughness, that Scalise would be harder to say “no” to than the genial McCarthy. This, apparently, would be a whip for whom actual whips were not a strong enough metaphor.

The other major candidate was Rep. Peter Roskam (Ill.), who has been in Congress since 2007 and served as McCarthy’s deputy whip. Roskam’s pitch was that he had already worked closely with the GOP leadership and would be a candidate of stability.

He spent Wednesday afternoon telling that to the House’s older members, who have been there long enough to remember when therewas stability. Roskam knows “how to run the trains on time,” as Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), Roskam’s main campaign strategist, put it to reporters. He offered free food, too: burgers from Good Stuff Eatery, served to supporters in his office.

Scalise won a majority on the first ballot. The story ends up with this ominous note:

But, before Thursday was even over, the House’s two new GOP leaders got a hint of how many other people — outside conservative groups, even other Republicans in Congress — want to lead their troops instead.

At 4 p.m., immediately following the leadership elections, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — who has repeatedly encouraged House conservatives to defy their leaders — sent an e-mail to a large group of conservative House Republicans.

Cruz invited them to meet with him June 24 for an “off-the-record gathering” and “an evening of discussion and fellowship.”
Pizza, Cruz told them, will be served.

What is a majority leader anyway?

This primarily for 2305 - there is no similar position in the Texas Legislature (House or Senate) because the Speaker and Lieutenant Governor are far more powerful in each chamber, which means there is less need for a majority leaders. Parties matter less in the Texas Legislature also.

But in the 2305's section on Parties and Committees in Congress, mention is made of the party leadership structure so this illustrates that point. For now, its best to understand this - the House Majority leader is the second highest position in the majority party in the House of Representatives. It's #2 because the leader of the party is nominated by the party to be Speaker of the House when it convenes after each election. Since the majority party is the majority, they get to select the Speaker.

So what happened earlier this week was that the primary voters in Virginia's 7th District defeated the second most power Republican in the House by not renominating him for the general election. That has never happened before in American history.

Here are a few links for further info about the position of House majority leader, and of leadership in the House in general.

- Wikipedia: Majority Leader.
- Wikipedia: Party leaders of the United States House of Representatives.
- NCSL: Roles and Responsibilities of Selected Leadership Positions.
- US House: majorityleader.gov.
- US House: Majority Leaders of the House (1899 to present).

I want to call special attention to this report from the Congressional Research Service:

- The Role of the House Majority Leader: An Overview.

Here are the opening two paragraphs from the report:

The majority leader in the contemporary House is second-in-command behind
the Speaker of the majority party. Typically, the majority leader functions as the
Speaker’s chief lieutenant or “field commander” for day-to-day management of the
floor. Although the majority leader’s duties are not especially well-defined, they
have evolved to the point where it is possible to spotlight two fundamental and often
interlocking responsibilities that orient the majority leader’s work: institutional and
party.

From an institutional perspective, the majority leader has a number of duties.
Scheduling floor business is a prime responsibility of the majority leader. Although
scheduling the House’s business is a collective activity of the majority party, the
majority leader has a large say in shaping the chamber’s overall agenda and in
determining when, whether, how, or in what order legislation is taken up. In
addition, the majority leader is active in constructing winning coalitions for the
party’s legislative priorities; acting as a public spokesman — defending and
explaining the party’s program and agenda; serving as an emissary to the White
House, especially when the President is of the same party; and facilitating the orderly
conduct of the House’s business.

From Wonkblog: Why Boehner doesn’t just ditch the hard right?

Here's a good insiders look at the difficulty the Speaker is facing managing the Republican Caucus.

Party leaders don't have the tools they once had to build cohesion in their parties. External forces are gaining strength, which tempers the argument that parties are the dominant institution within Congress.

Key bit from the interview in the story I linked to above:

What we're seeing is the collapse of institutional Republican power. It’s not so much about Boehner. It’s things like the end of earmarks. They move away from Tom DeLay and they think they're improving the House, but now they have nothing to offer their members. The outside groups don't always move votes directly but they create an atmosphere of fear among the members. And so many of these members now live in the conservative world of talk radio and tea party conventions and Fox News invitations. And so the conservative strategy of the moment, no matter how unrealistic it might be, catches fire. The members begin to believe they can achieve things in divided government that most objective observers would believe is impossible. Leaders are dealing with these expectations that wouldn't exist in a normal environment.

Ted Cruz wants to be Mel Gibson

That's what The Dish makes of our senator's effort to defund Obamacare despite the reservations of his party leaders.

Is Ted Cruz burning the bridges that might help him win the presidency?

Our junior senator - Ted Cruz - along with Rand Paul and a few others, have begun their careers in the Senate by violating a number of unpoken rules about how newly elected members are supposed to act. Rather than defer to senior members, build up relationships and spend time learning how the institution runs they have made it a habit of acting out on their own, even against senior members of their own party.

They are up front about not caring about how the institution runs but the conflict he is stirring up might make him a less viable presidential candidate should he choose to run. The Dish flags two stories to that make this argument.

One points out, ironically, that Cruz is violating advice made by one of his predecessors from Texas, Lyndon Johnson.

There was a time when a new senator could not have survived such a controversial start. "The making of a good senator is in some ways similar to the making of a good work of art," William White wrote in 1956 in Citadel: The Story of the U.S. Senate. "There are few shortcuts." Lyndon Johnson gave a copy of the book to freshman senators. It advised that a career rested "upon what is slowly developing and enduring ... rather than what is quick and spectacular. Eminence may be reached by a concentration on frenetic and untypical senatorial activity, but it will never be sustained in that way."

Ted Cruz didn’t read that book, and even if he did, he’s decided to write his own. Though his colleagues have suggested he tone down his hard charging approach, he continues to engage with verve on multiple fronts.

There are at least a couple reasons why. First, the Senate occasionally provides a quick step to the White House, and the quicker the better. Both JFK and Obama made the jump during their first terms, so if Cruz's goal is the White House and not a long Senate career, he better make the jump soon. Older candidates - John McCain, Robert Dole and John Kerry for example - have not been as competitive.

Second, his real constituency is the Tea Party, and he prefers to do their bidding. They provide his support, so he doesn't rick much in the short term. from taking the establishment on. This includes picking fights with the older members of the institution. But this strategy might be more successful - electorally - if all he is interested in is being a long serving member of the Senate. If he wishes to make the jump to the White House, he needs to broaden his appeal:

. . . there are still dangers lurking for Cruz and others in the purity caucus. Though Barack Obama moved through the Senate quickly, he used it as a platform for bipartisan platform building. That’s what you need to do to win a national election in a diverse country. Cruz is pursuing the opposite strategy. It may win him cheers at home, but that puts him on track toward becoming this generation's Phil Gramm, the Texas senator whose effort to build a conservative platform from within the Senate made him unappealing as a national candidate.

His refusal to create relationships might limit his future goals:

I spoke to Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma this week about a wide variety of topics. He is as principled a conservative as you can find in the Senate, and he is more eloquent than Cruz about the venality of career politicians. But Coburn can also talk about the power of human relationships in politics in a way that seems antithetical to the brand of politics pursued by Cruz. "Relationships are how deals get done," said Coburn, who in this case was talking about President Obama. He's been friendly with Obama since 2005, the year they both arrived in the Senate. This is a constant source of confusion for Coburn’s constituents. "The No. 1 question I get at home is: Why are you friends with Barack Obama?" Coburn's answer, as Obama wrote in his essay about him for Time, is, “How better to influence somebody than to love them?” It's hard to imagine Ted Cruz talking that way.

John Sides makes the same point, and adds a nuance:

Cruz’s problem is that he may want to be president of the United States, reports the National Review’s Robert Costa.  And to be the Republican nominee, he’ll need the support of his Republican colleagues.  The 2012 election once again showed—and despite some skepticism—that it is very hard to win the nomination unless you’re preferred by a substantial chunk, if not the vast majority of, your party’s leaders (as was Romney).  Which is to say, it pays to be nice to your colleagues. 

Here's the nuance. If he really wants to win his party's nomination, much less the presidency itself, he has to tone down his ideology:

. . . many in the party are wary of nominating a strongly ideological candidate—a “severe” conservative, if you will—because they’re afraid that this candidate will lose in the general. And rightly so! See Table 2 of this article (pdf) by John Zaller.

In 2012, as Lynn Vavreck and I show in The Gamble (pdf), only about half of Romney’s supporters were closest to him ideologically. The other half were closer to Gingrich or Santorum—that is, to one of the more conservative candidates. But this other half also tended to believe that Romney was the only candidate who could beat Obama in November. Their vote was about electability, not experience. Of course, Romney didn’t win, but Zaller’s finding suggests that a more conservative candidate would have done worse, other things equal.

Cruz’s path to the presidency—if he decides to run—must consist precisely of convincing “the middle” of the party that he’s electable despite the fact that he may be the most conservative member of the Senate (pdf). To do that, he’ll need the support of his fellow party leaders to send that signal.

From the Fiscal Times: Even Reagan Couldn’t Pass GOP Purity Test, Says Dole

The Fiscal Times argues that while Congressional Republicans are hoping their multiple investigations of Obama will help solidify the party, their purity test might make it difficult for their coalition to expand enough to win elections?

Some Republican leaders believe they can capitalize on Obama’s woes in the coming months to rebuild their party after a disappointing performance in last November’s election – with an eye toward taking back control of the Senate in 2014.

But the national party has shifted so far to the right in recent years that even President Ronald Reagan would have trouble today finding a home in the GOP, former Republican senator Bob Dole said Sunday.

“Reagan couldn’t have made it,” Dole said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” adding that he, too, would probably be deemed too moderate and unacceptable by today’s Tea-Party conservative standards. “Certainly, Nixon couldn’t have made it, ’cause he had ideas,” said Dole, a decorated World War II veteran who overcame serious wounds to go on to a highly successful career in politics.

A central criticism is whether the party will be able to lure the Hispanic vote by embracing immigration reform. The party leadership is in favor of it - mostly - but the rank and file is not, jeopardizing the party's chance to gain traction with the fastest growing segment of the population.

Not a new observation.

Getting past the Hastert Rule

I've been sitting on a post that tries to thoroughly look at the Hastert Rule - also called the majority of the majority rule - which ensures that any bill that is not supported by the majority party in the US House will not make it to the floor of the House for a vote, despite the fact that a majority of the entire body might support it.

The rule has been relaxed recently - both the fiscal cliff deal and the Hurricane Sandy relief bill passed despite being opposed by a majority of Republicans - but it is still on the books. Critics argue that this rule prevents majorities in the House from passing legislation and contributes to gridlock.

Here is a suggestion for how to go beyond the rule and allow members of the House to pull a bill out of committee and send it to the floor despite the objections of the leadership. Its called a discharge petition.

- Wanted: 20 House Republicans to save Congress.

- Can the “discharge rule” save Congress?
- Oh 113th Congress Hastert Rule, we hardly knew ye!

Angling to take out Boehner? Have they strengthened Democrats in the House?

I'm surprised these two didn't make a move. The guy on the left is #3 - Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy. The guy on the right is #2 - Majority Leader Eric Cantor. They've positioned themselves to the right of Boehner and seem poised to ride the conservative wing of the Republican Party upwards, but will this make the party weaker?

It's an ironic problem when a party is in the majority. It tends to splinter.

The Democratic Caucus on the other hand - at least according to this report - might be unusually unified. If Republicans split on a bill important to the leadership, they will need a few Democrats to pass it. But if Democrats can stay unified, they can prevent that from happening and extract concessions for their votes:

“The minority in the House has very few ways of getting things on the agenda,” Don Wolfensberger, director of the Congress Project at the Wilson Center, a former top staffer for the House Rules Committee and a CQ Roll Call contributing writer, said recently.

But Pelosi is beginning to maximize her leverage by keeping her troops unified, making Republicans find the votes for a majority in their own conference.

“There are few people as strategic as Nancy Pelosi. She has expressed to her colleagues and to others that if Democrats are going to be asked to support something, the number of Democrats who will be able to support something depends on the something they are being asked to support,” said Rep. Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

“If you need Democrats, you need to tell us what’s in the deal, and if there is an appetite in the caucus, then the caucus will provide the votes. If there is no appetite in the caucus, then you can’t count on us for the votes. Nobody knows how to get to 218 more than Nancy Pelosi, and so she’s been applying herself to see how you get to 218 to get this solved in a way that is fair,”

Boehner v Cantor

The Hill reports that the two top leaders of the Republican Party in the House voted on either side of the fiscal bill. Its expected that this will set up a fight over leadership of the party in the 113th Session, including who will be elected Speaker later this week.

During the vote, the filling House chamber was subdued. All eyes were on the tally board high above the press gallery in the House, where Republican lawmakers saw a significant division appear in red and green lights among their leadership team.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) wasted little time in casting a yes vote for the bipartisan measure. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Chief Deputy Whip Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) waited until the last minute to vote no.

Even though the Speaker doesn’t traditionally cast a vote, Boehner walked onto the floor less than one minute after the vote opened, leaned over a colleague to place his card in an electronic machine and voted “aye.”

Boehner would be joined by 84 other GOP lawmakers in voting for the bill. Many Republicans did not support the legislation, but opted to vote for the bill as a means to stave off the potential calamity of the fiscal cliff's across-the-board tax hikes.

McCarthy and Roskam, who were present on the floor throughout the 15-minute vote, refrained from casting “no” votes until the measure had hit the 218 marker, signaling passage.

They waited until Cantor appeared on the floor, with zero minutes remaining on the vote clock, to cast his own “no” vote — putting him at odds with the Speaker.

So the 3rd and 4th in rank joined #2 in opposition to #1.

If I'm Boehner, I'm watching my back.

Should we miss pork barrel politics?

A Slate writer does. Earmarks and pork barrel deals helped problems get solved. While they became symbols of corruption (both real and imagined) recently, they provided opportunities for congressional leaders to bargain in order to gain support for legislation, McConnell-Biden Plan now being debated in the House.

Earmarks have been banned in the past few years, along the same time that Congress has become dysfunctional and public approval ratings have plummeted. Are these related?

It turns out that a Congress full of highly principled men and women, fired-up by genuine idealism about America’s future, is a place where nothing gets done.

That’s not to say we should pine for a return to bribery and graft, but watching the prolonged fiscal cliff deadlock (and other Obama-era legislative battles) it was hard not to miss a little old-fashioned earmarking and pork.

Consider John Boehner’s embarrassing failure to line up sufficient House Republican support for his own Plan B legislation on the fiscal cliff. Coalition fragmentation has always been a problem for American legislative leaders, but defections normally arise from the center. Legislators holding at-risk seats sometimes feel they can’t do what the leadership wants, and wise leaders don’t expect vulnerable members to vote for everything. DeLay had a term for it: “catch and release”—only making the absolutely bare minimum of members with moderate seats take tough votes, and making sure no member who might be vulnerable in his next election needed to vote for too many leadership initiatives. But a member whose seat isn’t at risk has traditionally needed to vote with the leadership lest leaders retaliate by curtailing pet projects. Take away these pet projects, and a vital tool of legislative discipline goes missing.
You can't have everything.

Anyone who watched Lincoln saw political operates effectively buying votes by offering members who had been voted out of office patronage jobs. This raises an interesting dilemma, does our demand for hyper clean politics make governing difficult?

Who leads the Republican Party?

This is a question we asked of both parties when we covered the subject, but when your party looses an election - especially the second in a row - the question is especially important.

Here's one man's attempt to answer the question.

Texas Senator John Cornyn set to move up to #2 in Senate Republican leadership team

Politico and The Hill report that Texas Senator John Cornyn is set to become the Republican Party Whip in the Senate - which means he is second in command of the party, just behind the party leader - the minority leader - which will continue to be Mitch McConnell.

Without a race for the whip’s job, the Senate Republican leadership hierarchy will stay the same. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will keep his job and Senate Republican Policy Committee Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Senate GOP Conference Vice Chairman Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) are expected to win easy reelection to their posts.
Politico points out that Cornyn is up for re-election in 2014, that is certain to affect his behavior during the 113th Congress in order to prevent a primary challenger within his party. Expect him to tilt to the right - but this will be worth monitoring.

The Washington Monthly finds the appointment curious since Cornyn has been in charge of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and was tasked with leading his party's efforts in taking over the Senate from Democrats - but it he was unable to despite having several factors which should have made this easy. They ask if this was social promotion.

Study finds that the current crop of congressional Republicans are the most conservative in a century

There is empirical proof that the Republican Party has veered far to the right.

Keith Poole of the University of Georgia, with his collaborator Howard Rosenthal of New York University, has spent decades charting the ideological shifts and polarization of the political parties in Congress from the 18th century until now to get the view of how the political landscape has changed from 30,000 feet up. What they have found is that the Republican Party is the most conservative it has been a century.

Moderates have left Congress - or been replaced more accurately.

. . . this loss of moderates and further rightward movement by congressional Republicans would have been a challenge to navigate for even the biggest conservative hero of modern times, President Ronald Reagan. Poole said:

"Ronald Reagan was so successful because he made all these deals with these huge blocks of moderate legislators. That's why he had overwhelming majorities for the 81 tax cut, the 82 tax increase, where they had to go back and adjust the tax bill in 82 and the Social Security fix in 83. Then in 86 you had Simpson Mazzoli, which included amnesty and tax simplification. All that stuff passed with very large majorities. You cannot imagine anything like that happening now. Which is why the country is really in the tank.
"There's a lot of blame to go around. It doesn't look like there's any resolution of this anytime soon."

That said, Poole says the data are hard to deny; the polarization is largely due to how far and relatively quickly Republicans have shifted to the right end of the ideological spectrum.

And he blames poor leadership for the current inability to solve problems:

And he faults leaders of both parties for allowing the nation to get into a fiscal morass in which government spending on health care is unsustainable:

"It is true that the Republicans have moved further to the right than the Democrats have moved to the left. That's absolutely true.
"On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much impetus on the part of the leadership of either political party to really do something serious about our budget crisis. I doubt very seriously we'll see much improvement.
"People forget how utterly irresponsible our political leadership has been for the last 30 years. ... The current political class of the U.S. just isn't in the same league as Truman and Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. You just don't have that kind of leadership now, just when we need it.

This isn't meant as a knock on Obama, Poole said. But he's not very optimistic about what an Obama second term would bring:

"The likely outcome of the election is that it's a very close victory by President Obama, the Republicans hold the House and may come within an eyelash of taking the Senate. I could see a 50-50 Senate. So good luck. After $2 billion gets spent on federal elections at all levels, how bitter will the atmosphere will be in January 2013? We're really up the creek."

Rank and file Democrats in the Senate grumbling over Majority Leader Reid's leadership

For our discussionof how party leaders attempt to manage their party's rank and file, in this case the Senate.

From the Hill:

Some Democrats are grumbling over how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has run the floor this year.

The frustration is felt mostly among junior lawmakers, who want more of a role in decision-making and have yet to resign themselves to the traditional pace of the Senate, where seniority rules and lawmakers often have to wait years to have significant influence.

Resentment stems from Reid's decision to work with Republicans over recent legislation without consulting them:

But while Reid’s decisive action could help him check off accomplishments and pressure House Republicans, some Democrats feel like he’s sometimes running ahead without them.

“There’s a brewing frustration about how the last few things were managed,” said a Senate Democratic aide, who added that some senators have felt shut out of leadership decisions. “There’s a discontent with the rank and file that people have not been read into the process.”
The feeling is that bills are rushed to floor without giving traditional Democratic supporters time to weign in on content.

Is the House Republican leadership divided?

For 2302 here is the first in a series of posts regarding the current House and Senate and the personalities and organizations within them.

The two top Republicans in the House - Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor - are apparently not the best of friends. Politico writes of tension between the staff's of both men:

The top aides to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Speaker John Boehner are now seeking a truce after a bitter year of behind-the-scenes fighting that pitted the top House Republicans against one another.

Tensions had gotten so bad between the two offices that senior aides decided, for the good of the party and their own bosses, that the rivalry has to be toned down.

The interoffice tensions were so prominent that elected Republican lawmakers were chafing at the public and private tribulations of the ongoing Boehner-Cantor drama — one GOP lawmaker stood up and complained about it in a recent closed-door meeting of House Republicans — and the two operations came to the realization that the constant sparring between their camps could hurt both lawmakers politically.

Disputes have centered on how and whether to compromise with Democrats on the payroll tax extension, the debt ceiling and proposals to cut the budget.

The dispute may test of the viability of the Republican majority and could impact the ability of the party to be effective this year and to hold onto their majority after the 2012 election.

A couple stories on splits within the Republican Party

Both of these are from Frum Forum:

- Boehner Can't Control his Caucus:

At some point, Speaker John Boehner was going to have to show the most conservative members of his caucus that he would get work done in the House without them.

Yesterday revealed that day has not yet come. The ramifications of the failure to pass the Continuing Resolution (CR) for FY12 in the House will be far-reaching. It’s true that Democrats took advantage of the Tea Party defections from the GOP leadership and aided in killing the CR. But this was the second embarrassment on a critical vote for the House Republican leadership this year.

Rep. Eric Cantor had predicted that the votes were there to pass the CR. “All is well.” It wasn’t.

. . . A quick survey of very experienced former senior members of House and Senate staff showed unanimity this morning– none of them could recall such a public humiliation for any Speaker of the House in the past four decades.

- Who Controls the GOP?

John Boehner’s continuing inability to manage his right flank in Congress points to the larger frustration of a generation of Republican leadership. They struggle to grasp what drives the Tea Party, evangelicals, and the candidacy of Rick Perry. To begin to understand where these people came from and how they acquired so much influence relative to their numbers, perhaps we should look more closely at ‘The Stockman Effect.’

read on . . .