Special rules enable the Senate to act despite the filibuster. Sometimes.
Most people believe that, in today's partisan environment, the filibuster prevents the Senate from acting on all but the ...least controversial matters. But this is not exactly correct. In fact, the Senate since the 1970s has created a series of special rules-described by Molly Reynolds as "majoritarian exceptions"-that limit debate on a wide range of measures on the Senate floor.
The details of these exemptions might sound arcane and technical, but in practice they have enabled the Senate to act even when it otherwise seemed paralyzed. Important examples include procedures used to pass the annual congressional budget resolution, enact budget reconciliation bills, review proposals to close military bases, attempt to prevent arms sales, ratify trade agreements, and reconsider regulations promulgated by the executive branch.
Reynolds argues that these procedures represent a key instrument of majority party power in the Senate. They allow the majority-even if it does not have the sixty votes needed to block a filibuster-to produce policies that will improve its future electoral prospects, and thus increase the chances it remains the majority party.
As a case study,Exceptions to the Ruleexamines the Senate's role in the budget reconciliation process, in which particular congressional committees are charged with developing procedurally protected proposals to alter certain federal programs in their jurisdictions. Created as a way of helping Congress work through tricky budget issues, the reconciliation process has become a powerful tool for the majority party to bypass the minority and adopt policy changes in hopes that it will benefit in the next election cycle.
Krehbiel’s Pivotal Politics has served as an influential lens through which to analyze legislative politics in the contemporary Congress since its publication in 1998. In this article, I use ...Krehbiel’s model to explore an increasingly relevant component of legislative policy making: a set of procedures that protect certain bills from the possibility of a filibuster in the US Senate known as the budget reconciliation process. By examining examples of and patterns in the use of these rules since the 1980s, I demonstrate both the strengths and limitations of Pivotal Politics in helping us understand one way major policy change can be achieved in Congress.
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Offering amendments represents an important tool for individual members to engage in behaviors that help them pursue reelection, like position-taking and credit claiming. When the House leadership ...limits the opportunities for rank-and-file members to offer amendments on most measures debated on the floor but leaves spending bills relatively open to amendment, we might expect that individual members will respond by redirecting their amendments to the appropriations process. In this article, I explore whether members use these opportunities to pursue personal goals and to enhance their party's collective reputation.
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During the congressional fight over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), interest groups spent record sums on television issue advertising in targeted efforts to influence members of Congress, but did the ...money make any difference? We use the literatures on outside lobbying and legislative behavior to develop two hypotheses about issue advertising's effects on members' voting decisions. We test the hypotheses using population-weighted, station-level advertising data mapped into congressional districts. We find negligible evidence that issue advertising had a causal effect on either House committee or floor votes on the ACA, even applying forgiving statistical standards. Neither do we find evidence when we ignore the endogeneity bias that should inflate advertising's effects, employ alternative measures and specifications, or limit the analysis to legislators for whom the probability of vote change was highest. The results justify skepticism that the millions of advertising dollars spent on the ACA had a net effect on members' voting decisions. In conclusion, we consider several reasons why our hypotheses are not borne out and suggest several avenues for future research.
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Assessing where the red/blue political line lies in
swing states and how it is shifting
Democratic-leaning urban areas in states that otherwise lean
Republican is an increasingly important phenomenon ...in American
politics, one that will help shape elections and policy for decades
to come. Blue Metros, Red States explores this phenomenon
by analyzing demographic trends, voting patterns, economic data,
and social characteristics of twenty-seven major metropolitan areas
in thirteen swing states-states that will ultimately decide who is
elected president and the party that controls each chamber of
Congress.
The book's key finding is a sharp split between different types
of suburbs in swing states. Close-in suburbs that support denser
mixeduse projects and transit such as light rail mostly vote for
Democrats. More distant suburbs that feature mainly large-lot,
single-family detached houses and lack mass transit often vote for
Republicans. The book locates the red/blue dividing line and
assesses the electoral state of play in every swing state. This
red/blue political line is rapidly shifting, however, as suburbs
urbanize and grow more demographically diverse. Blue Metros, Red
States is especially timely as the 2020 elections draw near.
Interest group spending on issue advertising is growing dramatically, but we know very little about its deployment and purpose in legislative advocacy. This article begins to fill the gap, examining ...where, when, and why interest groups run television issue advertisements. We start from the premise that issue advertising is a form of outside lobbying, but we argue that it can serve two legislative ends. We hypothesize, first, that group strategists will target areas represented by committee allies they want to mobilize more than pivotal members they want to convert. When a roll call is approaching and the vote is likely to be close, however, groups will expand their advertising targets to include floor voters near the chamber pivot. Our statistical tests use data on television issue ads concerning the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill. The analysis provides consistent support for the first hypothesis and mixed support for the second.
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Obstruction is a fundamental aspect of legislative politics. In the United States Congress, senators exercise procedural prerogatives to defeat a bill with which they disagree on policy grounds. We ...argue that senators also utilize obstructive tactics in order to do more than block legislation with which they disagree. We claim that legislators engage in "weak" (as opposed to strong) obstruction in an effort to accrue political benefits to themselves and their constituents, but only when senators support the underlying policy the bill addresses. We test our theory by measuring the frequency with which senators engage in weak obstruction on bills that passed the Senate between 1973 and 2013. We find that senators are significantly more likely to engage in weakly obstructive behavior when they stand to benefit politically.
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Since its early uses in the early 1980s, the budget reconciliation process has played an important role in how the U.S. Congress legislates. Because the procedures protect certain legislation from a ...filibuster in the Senate, the reconciliation rules both shape, and are shaped by, the upper chamber in significant ways. After providing a brief overview of the process, I discuss first how partisanship in the Senate has affected the use of the reconciliation procedures. Next, I describe two sets of consequences of the contemporary reconciliation process, on negotiation and on policy design. I conclude with some observations about the relationship of reconciliation to the prospects for broader procedural change in the Senate.
We report the case of a 41-year-old previously well male who developed recurrent Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) following sequential COVID-19 vaccination and again after subsequent acute COVID-19 ...infection. While recurrent GBS is reported, monophasic courses predominate the literature with temporal associations to new viral illnesses or vaccinations. Notably with the world-wide viral and vaccine crisis, atypical forms of GBS have been reported particularly in association to COVID-19 vaccination. In this case, our patient had an onset of distal parasthaesias at three weeks following COVID-19 vaccination progressing proximally over the next two weeks. These symptoms eased and he proceeded with his second dose at the planned time interval. Unfortunately, one week following this vaccination he developed a recurrence of symptoms so severe they prompted presentation to an emergency department. At this time, he was diagnosed with GBS due to the clinical picture of distally progressive parasthaesias and hyporeflexia with cerebrospinal fluid albuminocytologic dissociation. He subsequently rapidly responded to a standard course of intravenous immunoglobulin. Following this initial treatment course, he suffered a recrudescence of symptoms following acute COVID-19 infection. These symptoms remained mild and have abated with now only residual intermittent tingling parasthaesias which no longer interferes with his daily function. There is a lack of evidence to support a causal relationship between COVID-19 vaccination and recurrent GBS however, this case raises the question of safety for future vaccination in these patients where initial diagnosis and subsequent relapse had temporal associations with exposure.
The postnatal brain undergoes chromatin and transcriptional changes that underlie functional maturation (e.g., electrophysiological properties, morphology, connectivity, network activity) across the ...lifespan. While these changes are observed across the animal kingdom, changes associated with maturation, including timing, are often neuron-type, brain-region, and species specific.Sensory stimulus coordination of neuronal activity and cross-modal neurotransmission is one mechanism by which the external environment regulates neuronal maturation.Neuronal activity controls the molecular changes underlying neuronal maturation by regulating transcriptional and chromatin factors.Aspects of postnatal neuronal maturation are regulated by cell-intrinsic sensory stimulus-independent genetic timer cascades. These mechanisms are intertwined with cell-extrinsic mechanisms to control maturation.
Embryonic neurodevelopment, particularly neural progenitor differentiation into post-mitotic neurons, has been extensively studied. While the number and composition of post-mitotic neurons remain relatively constant from birth to adulthood, the brain undergoes significant postnatal maturation marked by major property changes frequently disrupted in neural diseases. This review first summarizes recent characterizations of the functional and molecular maturation of the postnatal nervous system. We then review regulatory mechanisms controlling the precise gene expression changes crucial for the intricate sequence of maturation events, highlighting experience-dependent versus cell-intrinsic genetic timer mechanisms. Despite significant advances in understanding of the gene-environmental regulation of postnatal neuronal maturation, many aspects remain unknown. The review concludes with our perspective on exciting future research directions in the next decade.
Embryonic neurodevelopment, particularly neural progenitor differentiation into post-mitotic neurons, has been extensively studied. While the number and composition of post-mitotic neurons remain relatively constant from birth to adulthood, the brain undergoes significant postnatal maturation marked by major property changes frequently disrupted in neural diseases. This review first summarizes recent characterizations of the functional and molecular maturation of the postnatal nervous system. We then review regulatory mechanisms controlling the precise gene expression changes crucial for the intricate sequence of maturation events, highlighting experience-dependent versus cell-intrinsic genetic timer mechanisms. Despite significant advances in understanding of the gene-environmental regulation of postnatal neuronal maturation, many aspects remain unknown. The review concludes with our perspective on exciting future research directions in the next decade.
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