Word: hike
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fact, I don't see too much problem with another price hike. I, for one, would be perfectly happy to spend 40 cents on a stamp - if it means I can count on six days of mail...
...Senate, pro-reform votes get awfully skittish as soon as they're meaningful. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay has vowed to "try anything I can" to defeat the bill, and on this one he's got Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, who's upset about the hike in hard-money limits, in his corner...
...Sounds reasonable, right? It also walked a very fine line. Hard money is the fund-raising category in which Democrats still trail Republicans by a considerable margin. So they were understandably leery of doubling or tripling that margin of defeat. On the other side of the aisle, however, a hike in hard-money limits may have been the minimum price for Republican support - which McCain dearly wanted, especially when that non-severability vote comes around sometime Thursday...
...tripling of the hard-money limits was fought for by Republicans as a long-overdue inflation adjustment, if nothing else. McCain was willing to talk about it - he'd discussed a compromise along those lines with conservative Republican Don Nickles - but the limits hike was something of a dealbreaker for Democrats, who lag far behind the Republicans in raising that sort of cash. Compromise can wait - the amendment went down...
...drive to drive Democrats off the McCain-Feingold reservation with a hike in the hard-money limits will be back as a new amendment, perhaps as early as Tuesday evening. And the vote on "non-severability" - due as early as Wednesday or Thursday - still looms. But backers of McCain-Feingold (and it's interesting to note that buzz-worthy frosh John Edwards, Democrat of North Carolina, has lately been putting himself at the head of this pack) are ending all their press conferences with words like "very optimistic...