Word: lessing
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Anyway, we would find him/her somewhere in the haze of college revelry, and it would be love at first sight. That was how our night was going to pan out, no more, no less. Harvard, please forgive...
...Republican Party shifted rightward, its Northern liberals became Democrats. Whereas many members of Congress had once been cross-pressured - forced to balance the demands of a more liberal party and a more conservative region, or vice versa - now party, region and ideology were increasingly aligned. Washington politics became less a game of Rubik's Cube and more a game of shirts vs. skins...
...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 as the 1960s, Senators filibustered less than 10% of major legislation. But in the '70s, the filibuster rule changed: Senators no longer needed to camp out on the Senate floor all night, reading from Grandma's recipe book. Merely declaring their intention to filibuster derailed any bill that lacked 60 votes...
...also brought much of Clinton's agenda to a halt, and they made Washington look pathetic. In one case, GOP Senators successfully filibustered changes to a 122-year-old mining act, thus forcing the government to sell roughly $10 billion worth of gold rights to a Canadian company for less than $10,000. In another, Republicans filibustered legislation that would have applied employment laws to members of Congress - a reform they had loudly demanded...
...October, the process had dragged on for the better part of a year, and the public mood had grown bitter. According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the percentage of Americans who said Obama had done a "very good" job of "achieving his goals" was less than half the level of January 2009, and significantly fewer people believed he was successfully "changing business as usual in Washington." (See the top 10 political defections...