Congress

I found it surprising how much sway minority parties have in Congress. As explained in Hetherington and Keefe, the role of these minority parties is to "mobilize congressional majorities and shape public policy." When I first heard about the Democratic takeover of the House in 2006, I was excited to hear what changes they'd enact after 12 years of Republican rule. When I failed to see any real action, I wondered why. Was it because the House couldn't come up with groundbreaking new legislature? Was there no media coverage of their decisions? Or did President Bush have something to do with it?

Now, while I don't understand the whole process completely, I think that the fact that Democrats didn't have that wide of a majority over the Republicans made a huge difference. The Republicans were still able to filibuster or in other ways block the House from passing Democratic-backed bills. And even though Democrats hold the majority, not every Democrat will vote with his party 100% of the time. The vote of the moderates can make or break a bill.

As explained in the class video, when a bill is presented to five people on varying places in the political spectrum, it will usually appeal to 2 of those people and not appeal to the other 2 on the opposite side. The majority vote, then, goes to the person square in the middle. The moderate. If he agrees with parts of the bill, it will pass. If he mostly disagrees with it, it will fail. It seems that moderates play a vital role as tiebreaker for the House. The Richert article, "Moderates Come Front and Center,"describes a specific scenario in which the moderates decided the fate of a certain bill. "In 1994, Clinton bet much of his political capital on being able to sell his health care initiative to a solidly Democratic Congress, completely misunderstanding how many moderates in his own party hated his ideas and were willing to join with virtually everyone on the Republican side to bury his ambitions." Certainly, the minorities play a huge role in determining the effectiveness of legislature negotiations.

As for the bailout bill that flew through the Senate but failed in the House, I found a number of explanations for the result. First of all, congressmen seemed reluctant to vote for a bill so unpopular with their districts. During a reelection year, congressmen generally will not vote for a bill that will doom their campaigns in the future. And since the term limit for congressmen is two years versus Senators' six, the Senators had less to lose by passing the bill.
There was also the question of partisanship related to this bill. Right after the bill failed, Minority Leader John Boehner blamed Nancy Pelosi's speech, right before the voting began, for the failing of the bill. He stated, "I do believe we would have gotten there had the Speaker not made this partisan speech on the floor of the house." Whether or not that speech actually made that big of a difference is unknown, but it was amusing to hear Rep. Barney Frank's opinion of Boehner's comment. "We don't believe they had the votes and I think they are covering up the embarrassment of not having the votes. But think about this: somebody hurt my feelings so I will punish the country. I mean that's hardly plausible. And there were twelve Republicans who were ready to stand up for the economic interest of America but not if anybody insulted them. I'll make an offer: Give me those twelve people's names and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them and tell them what wonderful people they are, and maybe they'll now think about the country."