Half Changed World

Wheeeeeeee!  It’s really looking like the Dems have taken both the House and the Senate.  Given that Virginia uses overwhelmingly electronic voting machines, it’s hard to imagine the circumstances under which a recount would find another 7,000 votes for Allen.  It’s not like Florida, where you can argue about chads and voter intent.  I think Webb has pulled it off.

There’s an odd little debate that’s floating around the blogosphere about how progressive the new Democratic representatives and Senators are.  This is both a question of who should get credit for the victory (e.g Emanuel vs. The Netroots) and a question about the upcoming legislative agenda.

In particular, I think it’s a question about how much Pelosi should use her power as Majority Leader to promote her vision of the Democratic party and keep more conservative members from making common cause with the few moderate Republicans who are left.  Over the past couple of years, she’s really pushed Democrats to maintain party discipline — to vote strict party lines, so the Republicans couldn’t claim that they were acting in a bipartisan manner.  And that’s made sense, since the Republican leadership has been using their power over the rules to prevent any amendments from being voted on that they didn’t like, even when those amendments could have won the support of a majority of Representatives.  But now that the Democrats are in power, it will be interesting to see whether she tries to maintain that sort of strict discipline.

On the Senate side, because of the possibility of a fillibuster, most legislation requires 60 votes.  In recent years, the Democrats have gotten very leary of providing the needed votes to move any legislation forward, because even if the Senate-passed bill was reasonable, they knew that they’d get screwed in conference committee.  So it will be interesting to see how things play out.

Finally, everyone should pay attention to what Congress does over the next six weeks, as they return for a lame duck session.  The continuing resolution that provides funding for most of the government only runs through November 17, so they have to come back and finish up the budget process.  This gives the Republicans one last chance to try to ram through some of their priorities before they lose control.  It could get ugly very fast.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 9:00 pm and is filed under US Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.