No, Barack Obama Isn't a Lame Duck (Yet) [View all]

Last edited Wed Feb 12, 2014, 01:22 PM - Edit history (1)

This OP is posted in the Barack Obama Group

PHILIP BUMP

Wall Street Journal columnist Neil King ponders a question that seems to have begun on or around January 21, 2013: Is President Obama a lame duck? The answer, as with all questions involving gauzy terms, is: depends on what you consider a lame duck.

King doesn't really offer an answer to the question he poses, calling the current situation in D.C. "lame duckish." "An eerie calm has fallen over the nation’s capital," he writes, "and it feels like a premature case of the lame duck." In part, he suggests, it's because no one expects anything to get done, and even Obama's insistence that he'll act unilaterally seems like so much wing-flapping.

It seems more than a little premature to declare Obama a lame duck. It seems that way, anyway.

Prior to the 20th Amendment, ratified in 1933, lame duck sessions were inevitable and lengthy. Congresses generally didn't convene until the December a year after their election, and the old Congress — including people who'd already lost their elections — would serve in the interim. As University of Notre Dame professor John Copeland Nagle explained to NPR in 2010, those lame duck politicians would pass legislation without having to worry about the consequences.

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http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/02/no-barack-obama-isnt-lame-duck-yet/357993/