I would like to make a simple suggestion to vastly improve the quality of reporting in Washington. Whenever a reporter writes “Republicans filibuster” they should instead replace it with the far more accurate phrase, “Senate Democrats allow Republicans to filibuster.” Simply reporting that Senate Republicans “blocked” a bill or a Presidential nominee implies that the [...]

One of the most painful things about following Congress is that it is often hard to tell if a member is being an idiot or engaged in a cynical attempt to hide their true position. You can try to educate the uninformed but you can only hope to relentlessly expose the lies. The latest game [...]

One of the most annoying things about covering Congress is how completely almost everyone in the media has bought into the myth that it takes 60 votes to do anything in the Senate. Even people who should know better, like Paul Krugman, still spread this myth as if it was fact. From Krugman: What about [...]

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 United States government has a general policy against paying ransom for a hostage. This is not because paying ransoms is an ineffective policy. Most hostage takers would be happy to return the hostage for money, so as a short-term solution, it does work. The problem is, long term, paying ransom just encourages many more [...]

Senate Democrats have again failed to pass a large tax-extender and jobs bill because of a unified Republican filibuster. The bill is meant to stop massive layoffs, make sure poor people don’t lose their health care and provide continued unemployment insurance to the many Americans hit hard by the recession. Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) firmly [...]

Democrats seem to have an unsolvable legislative problem on their hands. It does not seem that their current strategy of passing the Senate bill as is and then arranging some fixes through reconciliation will work. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and his anti-abortion gang want changes to the abortion language before voting on the bill, and Senate [...]

During Wednesday’s health care address, President Obama said that the American people deserve a final up-or-down vote on health care reform: So, no matter which approach you favor, I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health care reform. We have debated this issue thoroughly, not just for the [...]

Ezra Klein writes: This reflects the sense that the right compromise on the public option is a compromised public option. That’s true to an extent, but you can define the public option so far downward — a state-based, opt-in, trigger-dependent, nonprofit option, for instance, is seriously under consideration right now — that you’d be better [...]