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Harry Reid and John McCain apparently just cut a deal which will avoid the "nuclear" or "constitutional" option of changing the Senate's rule that allows filibustering presidential (non-judicial) appointees. Yesterday I wrote about the meeting which produced this deal, so I thought it was worth writing a followup article now that a deal has been reached.
An extraordinary meeting is taking place today, which all 100 senators have been invited to attend. This should really not be an extraordinary thing -- you'd think that all senators meeting together would just be an actual floor session in the Senate -- but it is because it is actually a political meeting, with the doors closed. The senators aren't meeting to pass legislation, they're meeting to have a political showdown of sorts (hence the closed doors). Normally, each party's caucus meets separately behind closed doors to hash out party strategy, but what's extraordinary about today's confab is that both parties are meeting at once.
OK, we've got somewhat of a backlog to take care of here, due to summertime laziness striking early this year. So we're just going to plow through the swirling storm of craziness as fast as possible. Insert your own "Sharknado" joke, if you feel so inclined.
Earlier this year, after the new Congress was seated, there was a rhetorical push from Republicans lauding the sanctity of "regular order" for Congress to follow. The term was used constantly, although few outside the Beltway knew what they were talking about.
The recent developments in Egypt have caused an interesting reaction from American political commenters, because real-world events have an annoying way of not fitting neatly into our prepackaged political pigeonholes. The basic questions (such as: "Is the overthrow of Morsi a good thing or a bad thing?") have complex answers, because while many argue that Morsi was bad for Egypt, the way he was removed from office is certainly nothing to celebrate. The United States government can't use the word "coup" because that would mean we'd have to cut off aid, but outside the world of diplomatic fictions, that's exactly what happened: a military coup d'état. As coups go it was a fairly restrained one, but celebrating a populist/military overthrow of a democratically-elected leader is an unusual stance for Americans to take, for obvious reasons. Even if we do like the new guy better than the old guy.
Maybe it's just envy. I'll fully admit it, up front. After all, who wouldn't want a job where you get one-third of the time you're supposed to be working as free vacation days? Nice work, if you can find it. So maybe there's a tinge of envy which propels me, on a semi-annual basis, to essentially air the same complaint. But the regularity of these rants is also due to the fact that not much changes in Washington, ever, and one of the reasons that Congress just doesn't work these days is that Congress just doesn't work all that much.
Today, exactly 150 years ago, the Battle of Gettysburg began. Seen by most military historians as the turning point of the Civil War, the victory of North over South was indeed a profound moment in time. But I'm going to leave that sort of thing to the military historians who are much more informed about the battle itself, the meaningfulness of the victory, and all the rest of the arrows-on-a-map analysis. There should be plenty of such commentary this week to commemorate the battle, a three-day affair that left roughly 50,000 Americans dead. Instead, today I'm going to go off on a rather large tangent into the history of the American political world, so be warned.
Well, we've been away for two weeks, and those two weeks were just chock-full of political news, so we've got a lot to cover. The reason for the interruption in columns was, of course, our attending Netroots Nation, the yearly conclave of bloggers, Progressives, and all and sundry who like hanging out with them. Which brings us to this week's unusual title -- today's Friday Talking Points, for the first time ever, are going to be professionally-produced and focus-group-tested. More on this later.
However, for a whole lot of gay couples, life will have gotten one whale of a lot better. Today's Supreme Court rulings are a giant leap forward along the path to fully equal rights. The federal government will now recognize marriages which their states recognize, and the barriers to equal treatment under federal law have disintegrated for good. That is indeed something to celebrate. Which is why I'm going to stop using the term "gay marriage" ever again in my writing. There is no "same-sex" and "opposite-sex" marriage anymore. There is just marriage, period. From now on, the phrase I'll be using is "marriage equality," because we're all now equal under federal law -- as we should be under state law, as well.
Arizona is a truly beautiful state. It has many spectacular sights, of which the Grand Canyon is the most awe-inspiring. But Arizona is also a state of forbidding landscapes -- much of the state is desert or near-desert, where the heat of the midday sun is a force of nature to be heavily respected, if not downright feared. But what has put Arizona into the news recently is its "forbidding" political landscape. Specifically, on immigration.