In addition to education, another area where you can see the President and the Republicans in Congress agreeing is on the issue of trade. One of the first international figures Obama talked to on Election Day was the President of South Korea, and he assured him that the US was working on passing a free [...]

Just to continue about the stupidity of a Heath Shuler run for Minority Leader, consider that even Joe Klein can figure out that Blue Dogs cut their own throat, and putting the kind of people in charge with that same mentality would basically end the Democratic Party as we know it: Normally, I don’t have [...]

You may have seen the statistic going around that 47% of Blue Dogs got returned to Congress last night, while 96% of the Progressive Caucus returned. That isn’t a completely fair statistic. For the most part, those progressives are in safer districts. For the ones in less safe districts, they had big problems last night: [...]

The Progressive Caucus, despite greater numbers than the Blue Dogs, has never had the same impact on the national debate. They tried a co-chair framework this year, with Lynn Woolsey and Raul Grijalva leading the caucus. But Woolsey is just a poor communicator, and the split in the leadership served to weaken its message. Grijalva [...]

One thing the Congress didn’t get around to last night, before adjourning until November 15, was to deal with the expiring Bush tax cuts. The President’s plan calls for extending the tax cuts up to $250,000 of income, while Republicans (and some Democrats) want to approve all the tax cuts, including those at the top [...]

At her weekly press conference, Nancy Pelosi cracked the window a bit on allowing a vote on the Obama tax plan for the middle class before the 2010 midterm elections: The pre-election tax cut debate appeared to be over Thursday night, when it became clear that the Senate didn’t have the 60 votes necessary to [...]

So the House will follow the Senate and punt on the Obama tax plan. I hear cries that Democrats are “gutless,” “cowardly,” “politically stupid,” etc., etc. Um, they just don’t agree that millionaires shouldn’t get $100,000 tax breaks. They want them to. Maybe not the whole caucus, maybe not a majority of the caucus. But [...]

It’s still unclear whether we’ll have any votes on the Bush tax cuts before Congress retreats for the midterms at the end of next week. The Senate leadership put the chances at around 75% that they would hold a vote. Incidentally, here’s what that vote would actually look like: Yet, on this same point, Baucus [...]

I considered the portion of Steny Hoyer’s speech on deficits where he demanded that the military budget be thought of as actually part of the budget was important, because the House Majority Leader was giving voice to an otherwise silent concept in Washington circles. And now, that message is at least resonating and forcing so-called [...]

We haven’t had much discussion of one of the more normal pieces of Congressional business this year – the budget. President Obama sent one up to the Hill back in January. But like everything else, Blue Dogs have choked on the cost. Specifically, they don’t want to ratify a budget that shows a deficit over [...]

The House was scheduled to vote today on the DISCLOSE Act, the series of transparency and campaign finance fixes to the Citizens United decision, but in the end, they found they didn’t have the votes, so Nancy Pelosi postponed it. The DISCLOSE Act became controversial after a narrow exemption to the donor disclosure rules was [...]