With a slim majority ….
With the progressives quieting down….
The US House of Representives Democrats have passed a record number of bills…
Of course the US Senate with the 60 vote thing for major legislation has been a bit of tough hill for Democrats to climb legisltion wise…
It may be cold comfort as a stormy midterm election approaches, but House Democrats have achieved a modern milestone in this legislative session that crystallizes a fundamental transformation in how Congress operates.
Working with a razor-thin majority, House Democrats have recorded the highest level of party unity in floor votes that either party has reached in at least 50 years, according to the authoritative statistics kept by Congressional Quarterly and Roll Call. House Democrats have passed legislation on virtually every element of their party’s priority list — from the sweeping Build Back Better investment and social welfare package to bills setting a national floor for voting and abortion rights to major gun control proposals, legalization for big groups of undocumented immigrants and ambitious police reform — with dissenting votes from no more than two of their members and often opposition from only one or none.
The immensity of that record has not received much attention because so many of the House bills have been blocked in the Senate by the Republican filibuster, opposition from Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, or both. But the consensus around this sweeping agenda stands in marked contrast to the Democratic experience under former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, when dozens of House Democrats routinely voted against the party on key measures, from Clinton’s budget to Obama’s Affordable Care Act….
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The increased unity, many observers agree, is a testament not only to the skill of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in wrangling her caucus; it also reflects a succession of tectonic shifts in the electoral and legislative landscape that have transformed the historically unruly House into something much closer to a parliamentary institution that demands exacting levels of loyalty within each party — and produces far fewer possibilities of cooperation between them.
These trends are virtually certain to survive if Republicans, whose own unity has been steadily growing over the past few decades, retake the House in November. No matter which party holds the majority, the House now seems locked into an irreversible path toward more polarization….