The most delibertive body on earth is now on the hundred hour sprint

to enact as much law as possible in as few hours as possible. Does that make you think great thoughts about our Representation?

there's no time to deliberate.

I thought not. Don't get me wrong, issues like a minimum wage hike and ethics reform are important. But as the Democrats wrangle and rumble through these one hundred hours, a few hundred innocents are going to be killed in Iraq. Sometimes there are just issues that take precendence over others, and stopping this illegal, immoral war is one of them. Yet the only peep we here from the hill on this is coming from Bush, who now apparently wants to throw more meat into the grinder.

The people of this country handed the Dems their majorities for one reason, to stop the war. I would think that in light of this, their first hundred hours in office could, and should, be spent doing just that.

...debating the war is going to bog everything down, and grind Washington to a halt. It's going to drag on for weeks. Mainly because there's absolutely no consensus sufficient to override the expected veto of any legislation, and there's no one course of action that can get full support from all Democrats, either.

There's going to need to be a lot of work on finding a way out of this mess and building consensus. We don't have enough of a mandate (2/3) to just do it all ourselves. We need cooperation, and that's going to be slow in coming.

We don't want the first Democratic Congress in a decade to look like the do-nothing Republican Congresses of 2003-2006. Let's do some of the other important work that we KNOW has support up front, get it out of the way, THEN do the hard work. Otherwise, these other important agenda items might NEVER get done.

Especially if we come across as do-nothings and get voted out in 2008.

And frankly, we don't need a 2/3 majority. All that the Dems have to do is to present a united front and refuse to fund the war. With majority power, they can keep any funding measure from passing.

What is the number one overarching reason that the Dems were elected last Novemember? Yeah, that's right, to bring the troops home. If they succeed in that, they will be rewarded in '08. If they don't, and especially if they put up a warhawk like Hillary, then they're going to lose, because most liberals and anti-war folks will simply either not vote, or go Green out of disgust. The Dems have a clear mandate from the people, they had better start using it.

I heard on TV.

:scared: