Sarah Binder

Kudos to the NYT’s Derek Willis for catching the latest Hastert Rule violation on the floor. A majority of the House Republican conference was rolled when the House voted to suspend the rules and pass Democrat Rush Holt’s (D-NJ) bipartisan bill to expand federal support for preserving American battlefield sites. Requiring a two-thirds vote for […]

I noticed the other day that House lawmakers have cast relatively few recorded roll calls this year—voting just 89 times before leaving town for spring break.  To put those roll calls into perspective, I gathered two decades or so of  House “early voting” data—the total number of votes cast each year between the start of […]

Lined up in my home office are 117 very grumpy Cardinal Peeps.  They lost the Washington Post Peeps Contest.  They did not even make the top 42 set of finalists and semi-finalists selected by the newsroom of the Washington Post.  Is an investigation of voting irregularities in the Washington Post Peeps Contest in order? Indulge […]

It seems the Senate has resolved its impasse over the Continuing Resolution, a disagreement that originally arose last week over which senators would be afforded votes on their proposed amendments. The majority leader overcame last night’s speed bump by sticking to his guns (so to say): Reid began to run out the 30-hour post-cloture clock […]

Political scientists have been nervous about a move by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) to defund the political science program at National Science Foundation.  Yesterday evening’s events on the Senate floor drive home (yet again) how hard it is to get anything done in the Senate.  Coburn could only offer his amendment to the Continuing Resolution […]

The Papal Conclave starts tomorrow, with 115 cardinals flocking to the Sistine Chapel.  Faithful readers of the Monkey Cage are familiar with political science treatments of Papal elections: here, here, here and here.  Now, just in time for balloting in both the Sistine Chapel and the Washington Post Peeps Contest, you might enjoy this Binder-Maltzman […]

Sen. Rand Paul has just completed his nearly thirteen hour filibuster against John Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA.   Breaking off his filibuster (because, he inferred, he had to pee), Rand was heralded for bringing back the “talking filibuster.”  There was much written (and tweeted) about his filibuster, which began with Paul’s dramatic: “I […]

Most Congress watchers quickly noted the remarkable House vote to pass the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA): For the third time this year, the House passed an important bill over the objections of a majority of the majority party.   Another “Hastert Rule violation,” many reporters correctly observed.  (Is it a good sign that House […]

With sequestration’s March 1st start date in sight, Adler and Wilkerson make a good point about why the two parties seem to be treating the imposition of $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts as a fait accomplis.   In short, the pain just isn’t bad enough: As the authors put it, it’s not clear in this […]

On the heels of a prominent monetary policy conference last week, Friday saw a flurry of news stories (for starters, here and here) noting the political fallout that could ensue once the Federal Reserve begins to unwind the unconventional policies it put in place during and after the Great Recession. Because the Fed could incur […]