A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

When I left the Hill last year, I wrote down my favorite -isms for my staff. I stumbled upon them again today and decided they're still surprisingly relevant to life in advocacy. The House’s most important motto: “Nunquam quicquam nunc si potest donec XXIV Decembris.”  (Never do anything now if it can wait until December 24.) Procrastination is the right strategy 95% of the time (and a total disaster the other 5%). That said, no work ever goes to waste. So if you wrote a speech for an event that was just canceled or questions for a hearing she wasn’t able to attend, remember that press releases and op-eds and speeches and hearing questions get re-used as constituent letters and talking points and vote recs. And vice versa. Anything is possible on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives if you have the votes. Congress is a representative body. You can’t hate Congress without hating the American people. And I really hate the American people. Competence is always p...

I’ve been asked what I think is going to happen in the House now that Kevin McCarthy has pulled out of the running for speaker. The answer is... complicated. But first… If you haven’t been following the tumult in the U.S. House of Representatives with a bowl of popcorn and an ear-to-ear schadenfreude grin… well, let’s just say you don’t live in our home. Here’s the thirty-second recap:  In late September current House Speaker John Boehner was facing a likely coup attempt and an imminent government shutdown unless he caved to the demands of ~40 whackjobs to "defund" Planned Parenthood. As a devout Catholic, he had also just fulfilled his lifelong dream of bringing the pope to speak to a joint session of Congress. So, with little warning even to his closest allies, he announced that he would bring a “clean” short-tern funding bill (i.e. one free of partisan non-starters such as the defund language) up for a vote to prevent a government shutdown. Then he would step...

I don't know what Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi are going to do. They've surprised me time and again—for better and worse. But John Boehner? I'm the Michael Jordan and Yo-Yo Ma and Bill Gates of Boehner predictions. If there was a Nobel Prize for Boehner prediction, I'd win it. If there were championship rings for Boehner prediction, I'd have ten. So it's interesting to see Dan Pfeiffer commenting publicly on what I told my boss for years: I’ve always believed that the fundamental, driving strategic ethos of the Republican House leadership has been, What do we do to get through the next caucus or conference without getting yelled at? We should never assume they have a long game. We used to spend a lot of time thinking that maybe Boehner is saying this to get himself some more room. And it’s like, no, that’s not actually the case. Usually he’s just saying it because he just said it or it’s the easiest thing to solve his immediate prob...

Knowing that I will soon be leaving Congress, I made this flowchart today to help my colleagues predict in my absence whether or not Speaker Boehner has the votes necessary to pass any given bill. The flowchart was right during Boehner's "Plan B" tax proposal in 2012, right again during the battle over the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization, right again during the 2013 shutdown, right during the farm bill debate, right during the transportation spending bill, right during... Well, you get the idea. UPDATE: The flowchart also correctly predicted the outcome of the DHS funding showdown in spring 2015 over the president's immigration executive orders. If House Republicans could have controlled themselves and just gone after the 2014 EO (DAPA) related to the parents of legal residents, they could probably have peeled off a number of mushy Democrats. But they couldn't resist the siren call of full crazy and passed a funding bill that also invalidated t...