They keep spouting this crap and the media keeps giving them a platform from which to get attention. I refuse to watch them any more. I refuse to listen to them. They only perpetually lie and distort.

Only when their ratings go down will people whose ratings are important to them not feature them as often. Why should I help boost the ratings of David Gregory and others like him by listening to Boehner?

I am also starting to do this more on MSNBC, which is slowly but surely giving more air time to the GOP. It is the Comcast influence, I believe.

Sam

I watched the Dem bill to avoid sequestration, pass by a 51 vote majority, but fail on 60 vote requirement. It had nice features like 30% minimum on the millionaires and elimination of oil subsidies.

the Congress have this Hastert Rule for the House and they don't have a similar majority Rule for the Senate?

I think that- unless Boehner wants to seriously damage the party- he's going to have to be willing to move legislation without the majority of Republicans. They have fewer Republicans in the House this session and I think that they have realized they can't just blindly obstruct anymore (though they can and probably still will slow things down a lot). But I don't agree with the rule in any event and the Senate shouldn't have one either IMHO. That's not really how things were set up to run in Congress.

The House and Senate both set their own rules. Traditionally, the House has always had a majority rule - 50 + % wins. The Senate long ago had the possibility of filibuster where even ONE Senator could stop the Senate from doing things. The cloture rule that allowed for a vote ending discussion was to prevent a small group of Senators from immobilizing the Senate (as they did on Civil Rights legislation.) The 60 votes meant that it would take 41 Senators to block something. The idea was that just 50% led to each side, when they had the majority, not going with legislation that could get say 70% of the members rather than just 50%.

The Hastert "rule" is no law or a real House rule. It was an axiom (for lack of a better word) presented by Representative Hastert that said that he thought they should only pass things that were supported by the majority of their caucus. This ignored the fact that when the parties are near equal, it could rule out something favored by as much as 74% of the House. (ie all Democrats and slightly under half the Republicans.) As can be seen this year, NOTHING that would have a "majority of the majority" could pass a Democratically controlled Senate and be signed by a Democratic President. Insisting on the Hastert rule (named after a hack politician) is functionally equivalent to a temper tantrum - and the Republicans violated it 3 times because they were paying a political price for their petulance.

It'd still have to go back to the House to be voted on and it wouldn't pass that since the Democrats aren't in the majority.

......says it right there in the constitution, Article 1, Section 7........

Article I, Section 7 states that all revenue bills shall originate in the House of Representatives but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on any other bills. The reason for this is that at the time the Constitution was written, it was felt that Senators would be more wealthy than Representatives and might be willing to spend more government money than the Representatives would. Also, the House with its greater numbers was seen as being the better guage of the wishes of the people for spending measures.

Revenue bills were only to originate in the House because members of the House of Representatives are the only federal officials elected directly by the people. Senators, up until the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, were chosen by the state legislatures. And the president was chosen by the Electoral College. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 it was felt that, in order for the new federal government to have sufficient legitimacy to gain popular support, it was imperative that at least part of the government would always have a popular mandate. Hence the three words at the beginning of the Constitution are "We the People." This meant that the new government would derive its authority directly from the people and not from state governments.


So, Mr. Boner, do your fuckin job.....pass a bill!




source:http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_must_all_revenue_bills_originate_in_the_house_of_representatives

Even if the bill starts off in the Senate. The Senate can pass anything it likes. It can pass a funding bill.

The House can take it and alter it and see if the Senate passes it. Or the House can just give the text of the Senate bill a new number, pass it, and bounce it back to the Senate that liked it once before. The formal requirement is met, whether the House starts off with the bill, reworks Senate bill, or just renumbers a Senate bill, but the House already knows the opinion of the Senate with the renumbering scenario.

That's better than the way it worked last session of Congress on a work-around for the sequester. The House passed a bill and the Senate just sat on it. What didn't the Senate like? Nothing real specific. The Senate rejected the ideas of the House, unwilling to discuss them; and the Senate demanded that the House do precisely what it had said it was unwilling to do or discuss.

The symmetry is nearly perfect. The sequester has a large chunk of cuts that (D) would have liked but which they knew (R) would sweat bullets over. It has a large chunk of cuts that (R) would have liked but which they knew (D) would sweat bullets over. The mix of "draconian" cuts is the best that compromise could achieve 18 months ago--"here, rather than work out a solution, how about I let you hit me as hard as you can while I hit you as hard as I can. That way, we both lose."

but I won't do mine!"

An orange crying drunk.

Mr. President, opposition research and smear campaigns have gotten really expensive and the Koch Brothers are sick of funding losing campaigns. So we need your guys to write the campaign ads we're going to use against them.

I didn't follow it all that closely, but that's my understanding of it.