Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 24, 2010
The breathless pace that President Obama set after taking office last January jolted lawmakers from the soporific haze of the final George W. Bush years, revving up dormant committees and lighting up phone lines with a frenzy of dealmaking.
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Then the bullet train screeched to a halt. Republican Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts special election on Tuesday cost the Democrats' their filibuster-proof Senate majority. Obama's biggest priorities -- overhauling health care, expanding college aid, reducing climate change -- are now in limbo, facing dim prospects as Republicans show little interest in cooperating, and Democrats brace for a 2010 midterm election year potentially as volatile as 1994, when the GOP captured the Senate and the House two years after Bill Clinton was elected president.
The agenda, Obama acknowledged Friday, had run into a "buzz saw" of opposition. "It's just an ugly process," he told an audience at an Ohio community college. "You're running headlong into special interests, and armies of lobbyists, and partisan politics that's aimed at exploiting fears instead of getting things done. And the longer it takes, the uglier it looks. . . . I can promise you there will be more fights ahead."
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Courting the GOP
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But Republican votes never materialized -- at least not in meaningful form that the White House had in mind. The first hint of GOP obstruction had emerged in January, when Obama made an early trip to Capitol Hill to urge support for his stimulus bill.
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But even as he spoke, House GOP leaders were urging their rank-and-file to vote against the rescue package. Obama had just departed when House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) issued a statement calling the plan a "wasteful and unfocused package."
The bill received zero Republican votes in the House. ......
Brown's victory in Massachusetts crushed those hopes. ...
[i.e. the 60th senator controls whether anything gets passed ... Democarcy at its finest! ed.]
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