I’m of two minds about President Obama’s shout out for Senate rules reform in his State of the Union speech. I’m glad he brought attention to the need for reform, but mostly I’m very disappointed with what he chose to call for. From the State of the Union: Some of what’s broken has to do [...]

The correct way to stop problems caused by a perversion of Constitutional intent is not to lay on top of one absurd system another boundary-pushing interpretation of Constitutional power. The correct solution is to fix the root source of what is causing the problems to begin with. Unfortunately, though, that is not how President Obama [...]

Is this the worst Congress in our lifetimes?  The public now gives Congress its worst performance rating in the 20 years in which pollsters have been asking the question. From the Wall Street Journal: This particular Congress ranks as one of the worst – ever. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 42% of [...]

Senate Democrats apparently are trying to scare Republicans into not filibustering every single thing, by threatening to filibuster everything the GOP tries to do if the GOP regains power. From Politico: The White House and Senate Democrats are issuing a blunt warning to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans: You live by the filibuster, [...]

The biggest Congressional news story yesterday was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invoking the rarely used procedure of appealing the ruling of the chair to the full Senate. When this is done, a simple majority of the Senate decides how the Senate rules should be interpreted. A majority of current senators are the people in [...]

The White House has put out a truly disgraceful “myth and facts” post at it’s blog, about the debt ceiling deal, which flatly lies to the American people. From the White House website post: Myth: The joint committee — the so-called “super committee” — makes it easier for Congress to cut the programs we care about. [...]

Having basic functioning government in the United States is becoming harder and harder. Our 223 year old Constitutional system seems ever less able to handle the rise of strong political parties, nor the desecration of the traditional norms in the Senate with its absurd rules on debate. To run the massive apparatus which is the [...]

Any proposal put forward by the Super Congress created by the debt ceiling deal can’t be amended and must receive an up-or-down vote in both chambers of the Congress. This means whatever package this small group of members comes up with can’t be filibustered. If there was every any doubt that the main reason the [...]

Some people are worried about the potential Constitutional crisis if President Obama uses the 14th Amendment to declare the debt ceiling voting unconstitutional. The reality though is that we are already in the midst of a full blown Constitutional crisis that is will likely only get worse in the coming years. Whether or not you [...]

It appears that the bulk of the Gang of Six’s deficit reductions come from simply empowering the relevant Senate committees to decide on cuts at predetermined levels. The Senate committees would then write the pieces of legislation that get fast-tracked through Congress. It would be another move by the Senate to consolidate the actual task of legislation in the upper chamber.