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But what really worries me about the new rules for corporations and unions is what could happen out of sight of the voting public. I can foresee two ways for such invisible influence to happen, although there may be others I have not thought of as well, I admit.
Because Democrats need to realize that they still have the biggest majority in both houses of Congress that they are likely to see in their lifetimes -- and if they can't get things done with this overwhelming power, then they really should consider just folding up their tents and calling it a day as a political party.
Today we are turning the column over to a State Of The Union speech from the past, to get everyone in the spirit for President Obama's first official State Of The Union speech tomorrow night.
President Barack Obama has the potential of having a pretty good second year in office. Conventional inside-the-Beltway wisdom is that "nothing much gets done in a congressional election year," but this ignores the fact that life itself does not halt for electioneering, but rather keeps right on happening. And there are quite a few positive things either explicitly scheduled for 2010, or at least very likely to happen. This doesn't automatically mean the president is guaranteed to have a great year, but it certainly sets the scene for Obama managing to have a fairly good year.
Welcome back to my annual outright theft of The McLaughlin Group's awards categories for the past year in politics. What's that? We're sorry, but out lawyers insist we instead use the phrase "my annual legally-allowable constitutionally-protected parody" instead. So sorry. For those of you who missed it, Part 1 of this column ran last week, on Christmas.
Welcome once again to our year-end wrapup and awards ceremony. Honesty dictates that I immediately genuflect to The McLaughlin Group, from whom I have stolen all these award categories. We will begin this week with Part 1 of these annual awards, and then next Friday on New Year's Day, we will present Part 2, with reduced volume levels (for those who are nursing hangovers... ahem).
These days, it takes 60 votes to do just about anything in the United States Senate. That is a fact that galls many, especially since it is a fairly recent development. While the filibuster (or, the more polite modern version, cloture) has been around for a long time, it simply has not been used as such a blunt instrument before in the fashion Republicans are now swinging it around. Which has led to calls to either abolish the filibuster, or scale it back in some way. But proponents of such action should really think long and hard before they do. Because, eventually, the shoe's going to be on the other foot for Democrats in the Senate. This is something which usually gets lost in this debate, or brushed off when mentioned. It really shouldn't, though.
[Program Note: This column is a repeat of a past Christmas column, which originally ran on Christmas Eve, 2007. Since today is the Winter Solstice, I thought it was an appropriate subject. While I apologize for offering up nothing but a re-run today, it was unavoidable, as I will spend most of today [...]
OK, sarcasm (and crocodile tears) aside, let's quickly move on to politics. The past week in Washington has seen somewhat of a frenzy of activity. So many things are getting done (or at least getting talked about) that it's almost impossible to keep track of everything. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your point of view, of course.
We do offer a heartfelt apology for the silliness of our opening segment. We make a solemn promise that such silliness will not appear in these hallowed pages ever again... once such silliness disappears from both politics in general, and the media's obsessive lunacy. Once silliness is absent from both of those, we'll never resort to it again, how's that?