Today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid didn’t just fail to deal with filibuster reform, he totally committed himself to the defense of this disgraceful practice. From his floor speech about his deal with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: Senator McConnell and I both believe our reverance for this institution must always be more important than our [...]

Senate Democrats had an opportunity to get together and make the Senate a working, majority-rule-based chamber. They could have recently used the “Constitutional Option” at the start of this new Congress to rewrite the Senate rules to either eliminate the filibuster outright or at least make staging a filibuster more difficult. Yet, due to a [...]

Quinnipiac is out with a new poll that shows a very slight plurality of the nation thinks that entirely eliminating the filibuster is a bad idea rather than a good one. This is still surprisingly strong support for ending the filibuster among the public, given that the position lacks a single prominent champion advocating for [...]

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t actually need to oppose Democrats’ proposals. He can simply declare that he opposes the Democrats’ plan thereby instantly making the issue a “controversy” for the media. By merely labeling any proposal “controversial” he can often succeed in making it less popular.

Either Sen. Mitch McConnell is a dramatically better negotiator than President Obama or Obama lied about not wanting to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy. McConnell’s superior skills of negotiation appear even more impressive given that he only controls a small minority in the Senate.

If, as Robert Kuttner says, Obama is negotiating a a “grand bargain” with the Republicans that includes cuts to Social Security benefits, the GOP is running a successful trap for him once again. White House strategist apparently believe that this will “give Obama ‘credit’ for getting serious about deficit reduction.’”

President Obama, in an attempt to sell the deal he cut on extending the Bush tax cuts, keeps holding up the one-year payroll tax holiday as his big win. Defenders of the deal, such as Ezra Klein, act like without this deal, there would be no way Obama could have gotten this payroll tax holiday. [...]

It’s like a party for the Corporate Axis of Evil, and Obama’s throwing a kegger.

Today, President Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission failed to secure a sufficient votes from its members, so it didn’t release on official report. The chance that it would have even reached the required 14-vote minimum was remote for a variety of reasons. For example: Selecting Alan Simpson, a cranky old jerk who loves to fight, as [...]

In case it wasn’t clear to everyone after watching two years of politically driven lockstep obstructionism in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, fresh on the heels of Tuesday’s big Republican victory, has again directly stated that his top goal is to make sure Obama loses in 2012. From The Hill: “Over the past week, [...]