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Mitch McConnell: Democrats are ducking Senate rulesBy MANU RAJU | 12/16/09 6:32 PM EST Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) accused Democrats Wednesday of circumventing Senate rules by ending the reading of a 767-page amendment without permission from other members of the body. Earlier Wednesday, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) forced Senate clerks to read an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would have established a single-payer health care system. The reading paralyzed the Senate until the third hour, when Sanders withdrew the amendment. At that point, the Senate carried on with debating the health care bill, which Democrats are...

WSJ/NBC News Poll: Tea Party Tops Democrats and Republicans By Susan Davis The loosely organized group made of up mostly conservative activists and independent voters that’s come to be known as the Tea Party movement currently boasts higher favorability ratings than either the Democratic or Republican Parties, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll coming out later today. More than four in 10, 41%, of respondents said they had a very or somewhat favorable view of the Tea Party movement, while 24% said they had a somewhat or very negative view of the group. The Tea Party movement...

The House is rushing to pass four major bills today -- a Defense Department appropriations bill, a debt-limit extension bill, a continuing resolution to keep the government going, and a new stimulus bill. New versions of all the bills were only introduced last night -- one of them, the stimulus, is an entirely new measure -- which means lawmakers are scurrying to learn what is in the bills before the accelerated schedule of voting. "They introduced a brand-new stimulus bill around 11-ish," says one House GOP source. "And we're voting on it today." There is little doubt that few lawmakers,...

Liberal anger at Sen. Joe Lieberman spread across Capitol Hill on Tuesday, with a House Democrat from Connecticut calling for his recall and Lieberman himself acknowledging the angst he has caused. “No individual should hold health care hostage, including Joe Lieberman, and I’ll say it flat out, I think he ought to be recalled,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) told POLITICO. Connecticut has no recall law for state officials, and the Constitution does not authorize states to recall members of Congress, since each house has the authority to police its own members. DeLauro acknowledged that she didn’t know if it was...

In recent months, a narrative has emerged on the Left regarding the cause of the health care debacle: It's all the fault of the United States Senate, a perverse, bizarre and dysfunctional body, which ought to be phased out or killed.

Liberal Democrats in and out of Congress are expressing mounting frustration with President Obama and what they say are decisions by the president discarding major elements of their agenda. The political left provided Mr. Obama's base of support during last year's election but has been disappointed repeatedly during his first year in office. The Democratic president has agreed to a series of compromises on health care reform, ordered an escalation of the war in Afghanistan and failed to lift the ban on gays serving openly in the military. When Mr. Obama this week gave tacit approval as Senate Democrats dropped...

WASHINGTON -The liberals' longtime dream of a government-run health care system for all died Wednesday in the Senate, but Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont vowed it will return when the realization dawns that private insurance companies "are no longer needed." Sanders, an independent and socialist, said his approach is the only one "which eliminates the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, administrative costs, bureaucracy and profiteering that is engendered by the private insurance companies." His remarks drew handshakes and even a hug or two from Democrats who had filed into the Senate to hear him. Sanders acknowledged the proposal...

For First Time, Voters Split Over Who They Want in Control After 2010 Elections, and Obama's Approval Rating Falls Below 50% Less than a year after Inauguration Day, support for the Democratic Party continues to slump, amid a difficult economy and a wave of public discontent, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The findings underscored how dramatically the political landscape has changed during the Obama administration's first year. In January, despite the recession and financial crisis, voters expressed optimism about the future, the new president enjoyed soaring approval ratings, and congressional leaders promised to swiftly pass his...

Politics: If the Democrats' stitched-together Frankenstein monster of health care reform gets the 60 votes to get through the Senate, it will have been done through an assortment of bribes and brass knuckles. (snip) Sen. Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, has also been critical of the buy-in and public option, but he has an additional issue about whatever comes out of the Senate not involving public funding of abortion in any way. Michael Goldfarb on the Weekly Standard blog quotes a Senate aide as saying the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base on the...

Nelson successfully tacked on an amendment to the sprawling Senate health care reform bill that would prevent cuts to Medicare Advantage plans offered in high cost areas -- particularly Florida but also New York and California.

America Held Hostage- the Obama Files... With a hattip to Rush ( His idea during the Clinton plague upon America ) I am starting a file on “The One,” mostly starting from the election date. Older stuff- links, quotes, quips, and sometimes pointed graphics can be found by scrolling back from these two posts: -Hillary Clinton- archives, comments, and opposition research---Sarah Palin- links, from the beginning--There is some good material in those posts that raises a lot of uncomfortable questions that everyone ought to be asking, and probably will once the “new” wears off, and we are stuck with four...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday withdrew his single-payer healthcare amendment after Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) initiated a procedural maneuver to shipwreck the measure. Coburn earlier in the day forced the Senate clerk to read aloud Sanders’s 767-page amendment to the Senate healthcare bill in an effort to halt the healthcare debate.

Now the fourth Democrat to announce his retirement in four weeks, Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) said this morning in a released statement that he will not run for re-election next year. Gordon, a moderate Democrat from a Republican-leaning district, follows three other Democratic congressmen in similar political situations -- Brian Baird (WA-3), John Tanner (TN-8), and Dennis Moore (KS-3). President Obama won Moore and Baird's districts in 2008, but both were also won by President Bush in 2004. "Turning 60 has led me to re-evaluate what's next," Gordon said in a statement. "I have an 8-year-old daughter and a wonderful...

Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., and 19 other GOP senators today called for a hearing into reports that the Obama administration used the future of Offutt Air Force Base as bargaining chip in the health care debate, according to a press release by Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., has flatly denied that Offutt came up in connection with the health care bill or any other piece of legislation. The White House also has described those reports as "absurd." The group of Republican senators called for a hearing in a letter to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin,...

Rob Wittman was 40 minutes late to his town hall meeting in Montross on Dec. 8, where he received less than the hometown treatment from TEA Party members. Held at Washington and Lee High School, the town hall meeting, sponsored by the Westmoreland County Citizens Association, was the public's opportunity to question Wittman on everything the actions of Congress and federal government. While many questions posed to Wittman, first congressional district representative, dealt with health care and the economy, the show was quickly stolen by TEA Party members. Catherine Crabill, former Republican candidate for the 99th district seat in Virginia's...

From NBC's Mark Murray and Domenico MontanaroJust how angry is the public with the country's two leading political parties? Angry enough that the conservative, libertarian-leaning Tea Party movement is more popular than either the Democratic or the Republican parties, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The Republican Party maintains its net-negative favorable/unfavorable rating in the poll, with 28 percent viewing it positively and 43 percent seeing it in a negative light. For the first time in more than two years, the Democratic Party also now holds a net-negative fav/unfav, at 35-45 percent. By comparison, the NBC/WSJ poll...