Okay, fellow Catholic school alums, which side would you put your money on to prevail in this one?: WASHINGTON — Catholic nuns are urging Congress to pass President Barack Obama’s health care plan, in an unusual public break with bishops who say it would subsidize abortion. Some 60 leaders of religious orders representing 59,000 Catholic [...]
The latest from our White House Photo Blog. Anyone else suspect the Democrats might be warming up to that whole Department of Peace idea?
As Michael notes, hypocrisy is a well-established parliamentary procedure: 2010: House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on the idea of passing health care with a self-executing rule: The House Democratic leader, Representative Steny H. Hoyer, also defended the maneuver on Tuesday. “It is consistent with the rules,” Mr. Hoyer said. “It is consistent with former practice.” [...]
There’s a real chicken-and-egg conundrum going on up on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers are clamoring to see the final health care legislation. But their leaders can’t settle on a bill until they know it gets a favorable “score” from the Congressional Budget Office. But the Congressional Budget Office can’t issue its number until it has a [...]
The Associated Press tells us: PHOENIX — John McCain and Sarah Palin are scheduled to campaign together in Arizona next week for the first time since they conceded the presidential election in Phoenix in 2008. Palin and McCain will be at a rally and picnic in Tucson on March 26, followed the next day by [...]
Jay, I’m a bit mystified by this assertion from former Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier in your post: Dreier, though, defended his record saying there’s a big difference between self-executing amendments and self-enacting large pieces of legislation. As I noted earlier, when the Republicans were running the House, Dreier himself was pretty aggressive with self-executing [...]
Nope, you won’t see a public option in the legislation that is expected to come to a vote in the House later this week. But if it passes, we may well see a public option established in some–maybe many–states. As Kate and I have written before, if this bill becomes law, states will be on [...]
As we gear up for an election season, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that, for most people, politics is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Xavier University’s new Institute for Politics and the American Dream is releasing its inaugural survey on the state of the American Dream, [...]
If the House does succeed in passing this health care bill, that’s a big step. But it is just the beginning of the battle for many members. The next thing the Democrats will have to do is convince a very divided and skeptical public that they did the right thing. We were reminded of how [...]
The Slaughter Solution? Another name might be the Dreier Doctrine. Don Wolfensberger, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Congress Project (and former staff director of the House Rules Committee), took a look at this whole business of self-executing rules a few years back. He argues that it’s not at all unusual in these partisan times [...]
