There was a Mickey Kaus / Dave Weigel twitter exchange on the likelihood of an amnesty gambit lame-duck session: Mickey thinks it’s likely, Weigel not so much. Personally, I think that it’s not, for one specific reason: there are a lot of Democratic Senators who will be sweating 2012 as it is, because they aren’t precisely in a position where any remaining, lingering popularity of the President’s will necessarily rub off on them (hi, Senator Webb!). You think that conservative activists can hold a grudge for two years?
Yeah: fortunately or unfortunately, so do those Senators.
But I could be wrong.
Here’s the bottom line: Republicans will still hold 41 votes in the lame duck session which means nothing will move, so why bother?
I’m confident that we could hold all 41 because the simplest response for every the New England senators is that the business should wait until the new Congress.