Super Lame-Duck

so, this is now the final word on the lame-duck session, and it turns out that i was right. the tax-cut deal paved the way for everything else that passed in the last two weeks, and it was a LOT of stuff: DADT repeal, the START treaty, the food safety bill, the healthcare bill for the 9/11 first responders, etc.

it was a historic session! following on the heels of the historic 111th Congress, actually. it's true, with everything they passed in the last 2 years, a headline on Bloomberg News the other day was "No Congress since the 1960's has had as much impact on the public as the 111th"

and they never would have been able to push all this stuff through if not for that tax-cut compromise Obama made. of course, a big disappointment was the Dream Act, and the lack of any action on immigration reform. if the Dems had held Congress in the elections, i guarantee that it would have passed in the next year. but with the Republicans coming in, that's obviously gonna halt any action on that front, until they can win back a majority, sadly. or until enough republicans can decide it's actually in THEIR best interest as well to do something about immigration, considering how latinos are the fastest growing minority in the country and will undoubtedly be making more and more of an electoral impact in the future. i expect Obama to push for it strongly and publicly, in order to show the latino community exactly who it is that's blocking action on this, and that MAY make a difference, but we'll see.

overall though, i'm pretty happy with the record of accomplishment since '08. it was a lot of stuff! in fact, the 4 main priorities that i personally wanted to see done went 3 for 4. health care reform, wall street reform, and repealing DADT (the other was immigration). it's pretty amazing that those three relatively giant things got done in the first TWO YEARS. the biggest thing that will have an impact on public opinion is the pace of economic recovery, of course. at least until we will actually start seeing the benefits of those other overhauls (the healthcare exchanges open in 2013 and it will take time to set up the WS reforms as well). and the economy was always going to take time. you could argue that the administration should have fought for openly visible courses of action on it, something to similar to the gov't programs that FDR set up in the 30's, like the WPA and CCC. but the investments in the gigantic stimulus package that was passed in '09 did prevent another Great Depression from even happening. and things were THAT bad at the time he took office. the jobs that were lost btw the time he was elected and the time he was inaugurated were huge. and actually, i would also argue that the reason he couldn't set up programs like that was because he DIDN'T have FDR like majorities in Congress. yes he had the full House, but the Senate, where everything goes to die, saw virtually all of his legislation filibustered by the entire Republican caucus, preventing him from the getting the very best stimulative measures possible. i mean, even with the stimulus, just 3 Republicans voted for it- even in the face of the catastrophe the country was facing. and the reason behind that was a bet made by the Republicans that the economy wouldn't be better by 2010, and they could benefit from that in the midterms (which they did). boy, that's really putting your country first, isn't it? anyway, at the time FDR was elected, he had 80 seats in the Senate, not 59, so he really could do whatever he wanted. as a result of that, he GAINED seats in 1934.

so, ultimately, the economy takes time. and the fact is we ARE in a recovery, it's just painful and slow, because the crisis was so bad. but we aren't losing jobs anymore, we're just struggling to get back upwards. and that required more than the 18 months btw the inauguration and the midterms.