Ben Terris spends Thursday following around senators as they vote on an immigration bill that everyone says is doomed.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, for example, spent part of his day in a Senate office building rotunda, a tall blond woman from the Tea Party News Network towering over him with her arm around his shoulder.
“Sorry that took so long, I could just talk to you all day,” the interviewer told Sessions with a laugh. The Alabaman has become the face of the GOP objection to the Senate bill, telling almost anybody who will ask what he thinks is wrong with it (well, almost anybody. After talking to TPNN, he refused an interview with Telemundo, the Spanish language channel).
That’s an awesome anecdote, but it’s not quite true: Sessions did go on to talk to Telemundo.
Molly Redden asks what the Senate’s passage means for John Cornyn.
The ur-factor of his three decades in politics is his willingness to zig and zag within conservative culture, amassing more institutional power with every zig, and always retaining his placid public image. But now it seems the tea party may have taken him one evolutionary step too far. In making a show of his fringiness, Cornyn may have lost his ability to horse trade over the things that matter to the Chamber of Commerce man who lies underneath all of the Senator’s various incarnations.
Amy Walter names the House Republicans most and least likely to back an immigration bill that looks like the Senate’s.
A gun control bill (restricting access to those adjudicated mentally ill) fails in Delaware, which has a healthy Democratic state Senate majority. (The state legalized gay marriage a couple of months ago.)
Luke Mullins delves deep inside the FreedomWorks battle, which has left Dick Armey in a talky retirement and the D.C. organization awfully distracted.
Kevin Drum shares my confusion about how WaPo describes the players on tax reform.
