I talked about the debt limit deal in the past tense in my initial thoughts, but I should have put it in the present tense. Because there’s no real guarantee that this thing gets through the House. I think Senate passage is far more likely – there will be some falloff on the left and [...]

Before the DADT repeal vote on Saturday, the Senate will take up the DREAM Act. Both votes came up as a House amendment to a Senate amendment to a bill, so they only require one cloture vote, a motion to concur. If they invoke cloture with 60 votes, they would only need a simple majority [...]

Scott Brown announced his support for repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell today, consistent with the position of the broader military. “I pledged to keep an open mind about the present policy on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Having reviewed the Pentagon report, having spoken to active and retired military service members, and having discussed the matter [...]

The Senate introduced a new version of the DREAM Act yesterday, which included a number of concessions designed to attract more Republican votes. The latest version, filed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) late Tuesday night, would bar illegal immigrants from receiving in-state college tuition; drops the age [...]

While Mike Allen’s anonymous win-the-day sources tell him that the Obama Administration would welcome a deal in the cat food commission around Social Security to “establish credibility with the markets” (with 10-year bond yields at a rock-bottom 2.56%, I’d say the credibility has been established), others in the Democratic coalition are slowly drawing a line [...]

Sen. Jim Webb appears to have decided against voting in the Senate Armed Services Committee for an amendment that would begin a process toward repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy because he believes it’s not really what the Pentagon and the White House want: “Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen have [...]

Economics of Contempt, a blog written by a structured finance lawyer in New York, claimed that the Merkley-Levin amendment banning proprietary trading is “a joke” because it relies on too-specific readings of complex securities arrangements and doesn’t give regulators the ability to follow the law’s intent. I saw the value in this argument to an [...]

Carl Levin is giving his word – he will try to put a repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy in the defense authorization bill, perhaps as soon as this month. However, he will need the 15 votes on the Senate Armed Services Committee necessary to make it stick. Once repeal is in [...]

Perhaps the lowest-hanging fruit on the Congressional calendar with respect to gay rights is re-authorizing the Employee Non-Discrimination Act to include the LGBT community, banning job discrimination for gays, lesbians and transgendered Americans. The bill carrying ENDA in the House has 198 co-sponsors. And Steny Hoyer tells Congressional Quarterly that his chamber expects to move [...]

I haven’t written much about Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney’s excellent piece on the power struggle inside the Democratic Party. It highlighted an important issue that virtually no other media outlet bothers to cover in full. There’s a cottage industry these days, and really has been since the emergence of Barry Goldwater in the early [...]

Since I’ve been looking at votes all week, I thought I should at least take a look at the vote on the rule for the health care bill, which passed 224-206 (there’s one vote missing in there and I can’t find it UPDATE: From the comments, the missing vote was Pelosi’s). The rule allows the [...]