Your post exhibits precisely why Americans' concerns regarding defeating Obama have to extend to maintaining control of the house and taking control of the senate. Every single bill you cited is urgent, and yet without a senate that sees them as so (or at least senate leadership that sees them that way -- primary culprit: Harry Reid), they will simply languish off the floor until they 'expire'.
Obama, of the other hand, manages to get a lot done without needing senate or house approval by simply circumventing the need for that approval -- i.e., by issuing Executive Orders, or seeing to it that one of his agencies 'legislates' through regulation (such as, but hardly limited to, the EPA's overstepping its constitutional bounds by issuing all manner of environmental standards -- regarding ambient air quality, hydraulic fracturing, and rates of ethanol that must be blended with gasoline, just to name a few). Multiply these few by the other agencies who are also 'legislating' the types of policy that should be under the purview of congress, and you have a president who simply doesn't always need a sympathetic congress to achieve all of his goals.
I strongly suspect that republicans will tend to play more by the rules (as is their general history when compared with democrats), so their need to have control of the house in order to further their agenda is significantly more necessary than it is to Obama, in practice and in ideology.
Dang! Why is trying to play by the rules always so much more gruelling, frustrating, and downright difficult in modern American politics? Could it be because (1) the rules keep changing (i.e., the Constitution keeps 'morphing', at least in some people's view), and many of our 'leaders' in D.C. believe in two sets of them? |
