Why has Congress gotten so much done over the lame duck session? Well, first, because Republicans decided to stop blocking everything and start cooperating (not all or even most Republicans, of course, but more than zero, which is enough in most cases — especially in the Senate, where many a threatened filibuster could have been ended if just the handful of moderate Republicans in that body had voted for cloture.
Okay, but why did Republicans decide to stop blocking everything and start cooperating? Another easy answer: Their opposition was always more about the midterm elections, not principle. And the midterm elections are over.
I did not come up with this analysis — Ezra Klein did. And it makes a lot of sense:
The question is why the Republicans didn’t just drag their feet and let things expire and then come back to everything in 2011, when they’ll have more allies in the Senate and control of the House? As [Lindsey] Graham said, “with a new group of Republicans coming in, we could get a better deal on almost everything.”
The answer, I think, is that there are plenty of Senate Republicans who aren’t too comfortable with the class of conservatives who got elected in 2010. These legislators knew they had to stick with McConnell before the election, as you can’t win back the majority by handing the president lots of legislative accomplishments. But now that the election was over, the bills that had piled up were, in many cases, good bills, and if they didn’t pass now, it wasn’t clear that they’d be able to pass later.
The incumbent — and the outgoing — Republicans know that the fact that Republicans will have more power in 2011 doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll use that power to pass sensible legislation. So those of them who wanted to pass sensible legislation decided to get it all done now, even if that meant handing Reid and Obama a slew of apparent victories in the lame-duck session.
*Inspired by Kevin Drum.
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