On July 21st, President Obama signed the completed bill. The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.
George Packer for The New Yorker: The Empty Chamber
- Just how broken is the Senate?
The Libertarian Power Grid of the 1890s New York City. Before regulation, and after.
I often think the resulting complexity of Libertarian views/systems is in such stark contrast to their marketing the proponent’s messages almost always, to me, are lost or seem illusory.
Of course, everyone in politics over-simplifies. I often view the most informed party as that which has the least deluded constituents.
I'm Nikolaus Bauman 