This Lame Duck Will Destroy Us All!

I have a piece up today on the latest battle in what, lacking a better name, I will call the Process Wars—these surprising skirmishes we keep having over the once-uncontroversial way that Congress works. The latest attack comes from Republicans who demand that Democrats promise not to 1) call a lame duck session after the election or 2) pass anything substantial if they do call it.

This just isn't going to happen. On Tuesday, in an attempt to debunk the lame-duck panic , Politico 's Jonathan Martin discovered, in plain sight, "a host of moderate Democrats who will be on the ballot in 2012 and aren't going to have any more appetite to take a difficult vote." Another factor that hurts the Democrats—one that didn't hurt Gingrich in 1998—is the Senate's method of installing new members. The winners of elections in Illinois, Delaware, Colorado, New York, and West Virginia will be replacing appointed senators, and their terms will begin right away. We won't have Roland Burris to kick around anymore, but Democrats might have to deal with a Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who'd be as likely to support card check as he'd be to emigrate to Luxembourg.

Republicans realize this. Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., who runs the ahead-of-the-curve Republican Study Committee, will keep pushing to forestall a lame-duck session. Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, is promising to get a vote on Price's plan. But the office of Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who'd have the most to lose in a lame-duck session—the House has basically passed everything Democrats want already—confirms that a lame-duck session is on the calendar and likely to be bland. Republican aides I talked to admitted that the lame-duck session's agenda was likely to be noncontroversial and would probably handle whatever routine business that the blundering 111 ^th Congress couldn't finish in September.

Seriously, we're having a fight about this. A general slack in the trust people have in government is at play here—it's not hard to convince people that Congress is being gamed. And that's manifesting in the way liberals have come to view the slowness of the Senate, and the way conservatives have come to view just about everything in both houses.