Tag Archives: progress

The Traffic Cop

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Unlike the House, where the Speaker is expected to expedite the will of the majority, the person charged with running the Senate is not expected to exert his will.

Instead, he or she is more like a glorified traffic cop, making certain that all of the highways of the upper chamber are cleared of obstructions and moving smoothly.

It’s a tough job because the Senate is necessarily full of obstructions and rarely moves smoothly.The Senate majority leader, unlike the Speaker, is not named in the Constitution. Nor is the majority leader the top Senator in the line of succession to the White House. That title goes to the president pro tempore — usually the longest serving senator. Continue reading →

Summitry

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Heads of state – presidents, prime ministers, dictators, whatever – cannot know all the details of what is going on in their country much less in the other person’s country. That’s why before a modern “summit” between or among heads of state, battalions of high- mid- and low-level staffers go through every conceivable subject and produce forests of briefing papers to prepare the principal.

According to the late William Safire writing in the New York Times, the word “summit” to describe a meeting of heads of state was coined by (no surprise) Winston Churchill in 1950 when he called for a “parley on the summit” of a few heads of state to chart the post-war world rather than, as Churchill put it, “‘hordes of experts and officials drawn up in a vast cumbrous array.'” Continue reading →