“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to be very good at her job. This is her fourth term as speaker, and she can point to landmark legislation in each one. If these two bills pass, on top of the pandemic-relief legislation from earlier this year, this will probably be her most successful Congress yet. And that’s with basically no margin of error: Democrats right now can only afford to lose three votes in the House, and none at all in the Senate, as long as all the Republicans vote the other way.”

“Standard reports of Democratic disarray turned out to be off the mark. Only 10 moderate liberals made any trouble at this stage of the process. One reason why is that there just aren’t that many policy differences within the House Democratic caucus. Another reason is that pundits keep expecting the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party to ruin things for everyone else, and it keeps not happening. That’s mainly because the most liberal Democrats, who are in fact ideological outliers, appear to be generally pragmatic, not radical, in their approach to politics. That is, they’re willing to bargain for the best deal rather than insisting on getting their way no matter what the consequences (see a good Greg Sargent item for more details). By contrast, House Freedom Caucus Republicans and many others in both chambers are radicals without necessarily being policy outliers, at least within their party” – Bloomberg.