Word: bills
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...that changed when Bill Clinton took office. With the GOP no longer controlling the White House, a new breed of aggressive Republicans - men like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott - hit on a strategy for discrediting Clinton: discredit government. Rhetorically, they derided Washington as ineffective and conflict-ridden, and through their actions they guaranteed it. Their greatest weapon was the filibuster, which forced Democrats to muster 60 votes to get legislation through the Senate. Historically, filibustering had been rare. From the birth of the Republic until the Civil War, the Senate witnessed about one filibuster per decade. As late...
...McConnell led a filibuster of a deficit-reduction commission that he himself had demanded. The Obama White House spent months trying to lure the Finance Committee's ranking Republican, Chuck Grassley, into supporting a deal on health care reform and gave his staff a major role in crafting the bill. But GOP officials back home began threatening to run a primary challenger against the Iowa Senator. By late summer, Grassley wasn't just inching away from reform; he was implying that Obamacare would euthanize Grandma...
...disgust with government not just to cripple health care reform but also to derail other Obama initiatives. In a memo to clients on how to defeat new regulation of Wall Street, Republican pollster Frank Luntz urged them to attack "lobbyist loopholes" - items that were put into the financial-reform bill, as in the health care bill, largely to attract enough Democratic votes to break the GOP filibuster. Needing 60 votes has made the debate over every bill on Obama's agenda longer and uglier, which is exactly how the Republicans want...
Last month, when the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed Americans' views on health care reform, it found that most people still back the individual components of Obama's effort. But enthusiasm for the bill itself - the contents of which remain hazy in the public mind - has faded, just as in 1993. And according to a new poll by CNN/ORC, public approval of Congress stands at its lowest level since - you guessed it - the Gingrich era. Once again, the Republicans have told Americans that they can't trust government with their health care, and once again, their own actions have helped convince...
Setting aside fear to enter into negotiations does not mean entering a period of harmonious and easy-to-achieve bipartisan partnership. Under President Reagan, we never had a majority in the House, so every bill had to include a lot of Democrats. The negotiating was difficult, and the debates were tough, but in the end we got a lot done...