Quote:
Originally Posted by notlongnow
I think the thing that is missing from your post is that the President and his party are the ones who put the political pressure on the other party by continually bombarding us in the press with how bad the Rebs are if they DON'T do what they want.
I think that that you are right that both side are not doing all they can do to fix this but I think that the Rebs do a lot of the things they do to survive the attacks from the left, including the pres., when they go against the left and the left leaning press.
That make the president a major player in how the deficit grows, not just the House of Rep.
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When one party has a clear and strong majority in a house of Congress, like the Republicans do in the House of Representatives, they have little to worry about with regard to "attacks from the left". They can pass pretty much whatever legislation they desire. The rules of the House are different from the rules in the Senate. With the Republicans in control, they control both all the committees as well as the agenda for putting legislation up for a vote.
If the GOP has had a problem, it's that the party is so fractured that they can't legislate with anything close to a clear agenda. The centrist Republicans can't get along with the Tea Partiers and they refuse to compromise with one another. Furthermore, anything the House does pass has to clear the hurdle of a Democratically-controlled Senate with their arcane rules and the right of any single Senator to block anything as well as their right to filibuster. The House would either have to pass legislation that had a reasonable chance of also passing in the Senate, or at least be close enough to arrive at something acceptable coming out of a conference committee. The problem is that both houses are so ideologically out at the edges that they can never seem to agree on anything...other than continually passing "continuing resoultions" to continue to spend more and more money.
The problem is with the Congress, not the President!