legaffairs

Speaking from the exec branch side, the ban on earmarks goes further than that as well. The days pre-earmark-ban, there was a tremendous amount of oversight and transparency on the process. Members' disclosures to the authorizing and appropriations committees for their earmarks made it readily apparent on how things got done, as abhorrent it may have been to the average American. Now though, earmarks still occur, but in a completely opaque manner. Rather than Members and staff lobbying other members and the appropriations committee staff, Members lobby the executive branch directly to fund their projects and there's no record of those actions. Previously, a member who was say the Chairman of a Senate Subcommittee (who really doesn't wield any more power than any other member of the full committee, at least for most of the authorizing committees) would push his earmarks with the appropriations committee who had no issues telling him no and having the support of the party conference. Now though, that Senator will push on the career-government official who can't handle the pressure and will likely cave.

I said it elsewhere, but however unpopular your responses may be with the reddit masses, you are providing the most insightful and honest responses I've seen to one of the AMAs by hill staff. Most of the others that I've seen are really low-level staff with no real clue or someone with a political agenda.

Totally agree, I keep telling people that this really is the best possible scenario for anything getting done over the next 2 years. While the media (and the Democrats) have branded the Republicans as the party of obstructionism (partly true), in reality, Harry Reid in the Senate is the main reason that nothing has been accomplished as he's been preventing anything that passes in the House from being brought to a vote in the Senate and helping Obama keep his hands clean. What people fail to realize is that the only votes occurring in the Senate have been for Presidential nominees and THAT gave the Republicans their midterm talking point of "X candidate has votes with Obama X% of the time." This new Congress forces compromise similar to Clinton's years.

Great answer! As someone also connected to politics in DC (albeit from the exec branch who works with Congress), what brought me to reddit initially in the 2006-7 timeframe was the abundance of articles being linked re:Obama. It was very obvious then that Obama's campaign was using social media (especially the aggregation sites) heavily to push him during the primaries and throughout the 2008 election. It also resurfaced during the 2012 reelection and not just pro-Obama content, but content critical of any/all republican candidates attempting to eliminate them as serious contenders before the nomination. You can see the republicans doing this as well as they've been trying to eat away at HRC for a while now to try and subtract from her status in anticipation.