A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

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...

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...

Fiscal Cliff Deal Late last night (or rather, early this morning) the Senate passed a White House-negotiated deal to avert and postpone, respectively, key parts of the fiscal cliff. The 89-8 vote (opposed by Democrats Michael Bennet of Colorado, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, and Tom Harkin of Iowa, and by Republicans Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Richard C. Shelby of Alabama (with absences from Mark Kirk of Illinois, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who's on his way out to head the Heritage Foundation) sends the legislation to the House where Speaker John Boehner has been huddling with his leadership team about how and when to bring the bill to the House floor. There's been some discussion that the House might amend and send it back to the Senate, but my money is on the House grudgingly taking up the Senate package as-is (perhaps with some kind of procedural mechanism that help...