Word: chambers
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...anything, running the majority has become more difficult in recent decades, as the once decorous Senate has grown to resemble the rowdy and partisan House. No longer do personal relationships and mossy traditions insulate the Senate chamber from the vitriol that has come to pass as political debate in this country. And as everyone who has held the job in recent years can tell you, much of that is aimed at the Majority Leader. "It really is better to throw grenades," says Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker, "than to have to catch them." So if you are looking...
...Whoever gets the job will also be trying to do it as both parties head into what is the most wide-open presidential election in over half a century. It seems like half the Senate chamber is either running for President or thinking about it. All of those Senators will be grandstanding to the primary voters in their own party, and ingratiating themselves with the interest groups they think they need. That's hardly conducive to statesmanship or compromise...
...internal housekeeping that determines how committee memberships will be allotted between the two parties, as well as who will get to serve as chairman and ranking members of each of the panels. These resolutions traditionally stand until the next Congress, even if the makeup of the chamber shifts to put the other party in the majority, which is why precedent would seem to dictate that the Chamber would stay in Democratic hands, even if Johnson is replaced by a Republican...
...votes (including the two independent Senators, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont) to 49 for the Republicans. But Democrats now fear the real possibility that Republicans will filibuster that resolution. They could insist - just as the Democrats did after the 2000 election that left the chamber evenly split, with Vice President Dick Cheney as the tie-breaker - on an "out clause" that stipulates that control of the chamber goes to them if they somehow manage to achieve a majority during the course of the session. As both sides remember, that clause came in handy for the Democrats...
...Republicans filibuster the organizing resolution and the question drags on into January or even beyond, it presents another truly extraordinary possibility: a chamber with a new Democratic leader, but the existing set of Republican committee chairmen. That is because, until an organizing resolution is passed, incoming Majority Leader Harry Reid would have no control over the committees...