Don Wolfensberger
| May 7, 2013, 1:35 p.m.
When you hear cries for a “return to the regular order” from both parties in both chambers, you know there is either a bipartisan consensus about the causes of disorder and its cure or a selective invocation of the term by different folks with differing agendas. Alas, it is the latter — a political Rorschach test in which each group perceives the ink blot according to its peculiar “ink-linations.”
Don Wolfensberger
| April 16, 2013, 6:14 p.m.
A silent spring descended on House and Senate chambers March 25 when Congress left town for its two-week break. During five recesses last year, banging gavels reverberated in both nearly empty chambers as designated presiding officers convened and adjourned pro forma sessions in a matter of seconds. The hapless victims: House and Senate floor staff.
Don Wolfensberger
| March 19, 2013, 6:14 p.m.
GOP Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois was asked by a reporter in 1964, when he was minority leader, what he thought of a proposed change in filibuster rules. “Well,” he replied in his distinctive basso profundo, “Ha, ha, ha; and, I might add, ho, ho, ho.”
Don Wolfensberger
| March 5, 2013, 5:46 p.m.
A rubber band is a continuous elastic cord designed to hold things together. If stretched too far, it either breaks or slips in a stinging snapback. In either case, the bundle falls apart. Congress and the White House have been playing rubber-band politics with budget issues for the past two years, hoping to hold things together with new gimmicks that only cause further stretching of the band.
Don Wolfensberger
| Feb. 12, 2013, 5:45 p.m.
House Republicans deserve muted applause for backing away from another fiscal cliff over the debt limit. They get only half a clap for now because: (a) the fix is only temporary — a three-month suspension of the debt limit, and (b) the fix swaps the fiscal cliff for another geo-metaphoric hazard — the marital rift.
Don Wolfensberger
| Jan. 22, 2013, 7:24 p.m.
Back in the 1960s, a group of House Republicans was guided by the axiom “Procedure is substance; process is policy.” The Young Turks recognized that those who make the rules control the policy outcomes.
Don Wolfensberger
| Jan. 2, 2013, 7:39 p.m.
I used to hold an open house at the Wilson Center on the first day of a new Congress so staff and fellows could drop by and observe on a big screen the pomp and pageantry of the world’s greatest democratic legislature organizing itself. In addition to providing coffee and doughnuts, I put together helpful handouts and provided a running commentary on what was transpiring in the House chamber.
Don Wolfensberger
| Dec. 11, 2012, 7:30 p.m.
Early in his second term as vice president, John Adams lamented to his wife, Abigail, that he held “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
Don Wolfensberger
| Nov. 27, 2012, 10:59 p.m.
A group of former Senators and House members, senior staff and congressional scholars have called on Congress to change its ways.
Don Wolfensberger
| Nov. 27, 2012, 5:55 p.m.
A group of former Senators and House members, senior staff and congressional scholars have called on Congress to change its ways.
