290 Bills

This direct from FireDogLake:

"House Has Passed 290 Bills Which Have Stalled In The Senate
By: David Dayen Tuesday February 23, 2010 10:20 am


290. Two hundred and ninety. That’s the number of additional bills which would have passed into law during the Obama era in an alternate universe where America has a unicameral legislature. Student loan reform? Passed. Health care? Done, with a public option. Climate bill? Moving on. Financial reform? Complete, along with a provision to audit the Fed. Etc. Etc. Etc. Not all of these bills are dead-solid perfect policy, but they would be finished and ready for improvements and tweaks during implementation.

It’s gotten to the point where bills that can actually pass the Senate must be so small as to be undetectable under anything less powerful than an electron microscope. Harry Reid’s small-bore “jobs agenda” has an outside chance of gaining momentum, but more likely it’s a political gambit, to prove that Republicans are disinterested in the people’s business, only so we can come back in another year and watch them happily obstruct again. Heck, their representatives for this “bipartisan” health care summit include Tom “I love gridlock” Coburn.

This Congress as currently constructed cannot tackle real problems because obstructionism works in modern American politics. And until that dynamic changes, the minority party has every reason to continue the obstruction.

Democrats have bent over backward to at least try and make it appear as though they are reaching out to Republicans. And, following the script, Republicans have done a good job of obstructing Democrats for the sake of obstructing Democrats.

The problem for Democrats is that their plan resulted in a massive improvement in the Republican electoral situation, rather than improving their own…

Over the last fifteen and a half months, Democrats have lost 4-5% in net partisan self-identification, around 9% in the National House ballot, and around 15% in net party favorability [...] Republicans are paying no political price for their obstruction. Quite to the contrary, they are actually reaping a political reward from it. The Democratic plan of delaying legislation in order to make a big, public show of reaching out to Republicans was a miserable failure.

It has hurt politically and it has hurt in the context of substantive policy. Delaying the health care bill for 75 days so Max Baucus could sit in a kumbaya circle with Chuck Grassley was the biggest mistake of the lost year of 2009, impacting not only health care policy but everything else behind it in the queue. The far better option for Democrats was to use all legislative means at their disposal in the Senate to make up ground on those 290 stalled House bills. They have not done so, and they’re paying a terrible price.