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 [...]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is the first congressional leader to pick his three members for Catfood Commission II. From Politico: In the first of what will be a closely watched selection process for a powerful new deficit panel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he will appoint Democratic Sens. Patty Murray (Wash.), Max Baucus [...]

Quinnipiac released their Florida poll numbers on the President and the debt ceiling bill, and it does not bode well for his 2012 chances in the swing state. His approval among Independents went from 42% last Wednesday through Sunday to 33% from Monday through Tuesday, while disapproval shot up 52% to 61%. When asked to describe how they feel about the deal, more Independents said they were “angry” (23%) than either Republicans or Democrats.

In order to contextualize the bind that this puts Obama in, it’s worth recounting what I’ve been told about how the deal went down.

With Speaker John Boehner’s plans in the House in disarray, it looks like the only legislative vehicle that still has a chance of passing before August 2nd is some form of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plan. The most likely path for the Reid plan passing Congress is by getting most of its support form [...]

Yesterday, after hours of last minute whipping, Speaker John Boehner was forced to pull his debt ceiling vote from the House floor because he couldn’t get enough ultra-conservative members of his caucus to vote for it. This failure on Boehner’s part makes little sense to me. President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid both [...]

The debt ceiling package put forward by Speaker John Boehner would increase the nations borrowing limit by $1 trillion, which would cover borrowing for about another six months. On the other hand Senate Majority leader Harry Reid’s plan would raise the debt ceiling by $2.7 trillion, which means it would about a year and a [...]

One of the biggest battles over raising the debt ceiling at this moment seems to be whether any debt ceiling increase will last until after November 2012 or will it require another vote on the debt limit before the election. Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) plan would require the debt ceiling to be raised again in [...]

Although the debt ceiling fight isn’t over yet, it is now clear it won’t be the excuse President Obama wanted to justify quickly jamming through an austerity grand bargain. As much as Obama desperately tried to use this artificial crisis to justify cutting Social Security and Medicare in a secret deal, that opportunity slipped through [...]

It’s telling that a key selling point being used by Eric Cantor to get his caucus behind John Boehner’s debt ceiling bill, is that such a move would call President Obama bluff on his threat to veto any short term increases. From Politico: “The debt limit vote sucks,” he said, according to an attendee of [...]

With less than two weeks until President Obama’s August 2nd deadline for raising the debt ceiling, there seems to be no coalescence around a single solution. If anything, the scope of ideas being discussed seems to grow wider not narrower. There is the $4 trillion grand bargain offered by President Obama. This deal was rejected [...]