Happy Birthday to James Burton, 74.
Some good stuff:
1. Discharge petition talk bubbled up again recently; Joshua Huder shoots it down. Yup -- as I've said, I think it's a lot less of a problem for the leadership to endure a Hastert violation than it is to allow a discharge petition to work.
2. Seth Masket on the parties and campaign finance reform.
3. Dave Wiltse agrees about skipping Iowa.
4. Matt Yglesias on the health care cost slow down.
5. A big thing that's still underappreciated about the ACA: it's not really one thing, but a whole bunch of marginally related things all bunched together into one bill. Outside of the specific policy issue, that's the real takeaway from a good Ezra Klein post (in which he gets to bash Peggy Noonan, so there's also that).
For non-political scientists, that discharge petition buries the lead: a petition cannot in practice fully evade the House leadership to get a floor vote. If that's the case, then yes, it's doomed. The whole reason lightly informed pundits started bringing it up is because they thought that's precisely what it could do.
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