Sarah Binder

Three cheers to Wonkblog for starting the day with a little Senate parliamentary puzzle.  Dylan Matthews gets us going by noting Majority Leader Harry Reid’s procedural move this past Thursday.  After seeing that the cloture vote would fail to cut off debate on the motion to confirm Chuck Hagel to head the Defense Department, Reid […]

I’m late to the conversation about whether Republican efforts to insist on sixty votes for cloture on Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Secretary of Defense constitute a filibuster.  Bernstein’s earlier piece (“This is what a filibuster looks like“) and Fallows’ recent contribution provide good, nuanced accounts of why Republican tactics amount to a filibuster, even if […]

Today could have been the day when Senate Democrats went nuclear – reining in minority party abuse of the filibuster with a simple majority vote.  That would have been my Super Bowl.  Instead, the Senate is poised to adopt a bipartisan set of modest (many say, meager) changes to the Senate’s cloture rule.   More like […]

Ezra Klein offers a provocative argument: Perhaps the House discharge rule could save Congress.  He argues: “…[T]here is an alternative to the Hastert rule that doesn’t require Boehner’s assent. Under the rules of a “discharge petition,” an absolute majority of the House can bring a bill to the floor whether or not the speaker of […]

Is the Hastert Rule dead?  Speaker Denny Hastert coined his eponymous rule in 2003 when he declared that the “job of the Speaker is not to expedite legislation that runs counter to the wishes of the majority of the majority.” (Hastert’s speech came at a conference honoring the 100th anniversary of the Cannon House Office […]

Some people watch football; I watch Congress.  The fiscal cliff drama was my Superbowl and Rose Bowl wrapped into one.    First, two septuagenarians negotiated a tax deal overnight, which was then approved in a bipartisan Senate vote at 2 AM. Then, we were treated to a House GOP rant and rave against a deal […]

As the clock runs out on the dysfunctional 112th Congress, few have been impressed by its paltry record and balky performance.  But pardon my glee: December has been a great month for students of Congress.  First, the House leadership was handed a blistering defeat on its “Plan B” to resolve the fiscal cliff.  Next, while […]

Is the House Republican Conference the ACME Corporation of our time—selling crazy products that fail at the worst possible moment?  This week’s product was Plan B—a short-lived back up plan hatched by House Speaker John Boehner to give Republicans (and Boehner) political cover should negotiations with the president over the fiscal cliff deadlock.  The plan […]

That’s Charlie Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, who has been credited as a key force behind today’s somewhat surprising move by the Federal Open Market Committee.  (H/t to Ezra Klein’s twitter feed for the Evans meme.)  Evans has been pushing his colleagues on the FOMC to adopt a specific threshold of […]

I suppose the competition isn’t very stiff.  (Even the rare film on Congress tends to focus on the Senate—Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Advise and Consent, The Candidate.)  Still, Seth Masket’s excellent piece about Lincoln (in which he argues that Lincoln “is probably the best film on the American presidency ever made”) motivates me to […]