Trey of Diamonds
Well-Known Member
A Congress with no room for Olympia Snowe and other centrists?
Selected quotes
Selected quotes
Sniping and partisan acrimony inside Congress are evidently as bad as they seem from the outside, and Sen. Olympia Snowe would be first to second that.
But in the end, she cited partisanship, gridlock, and an inability to get things accomplished as not worth another six years of her career.
An atmosphere of polarization and my way or the highway ideologies has become pervasive in campaigns and in our governing institutions, Snowe said in a statement on Tuesday.
Lawmakers willing to reach across the aisle are a vanishing species within the Republican Party and are on the endangered list on the Democratic side of the aisle, as well.
Too many competent legislators have retired from Congress for the same reason as Senator Snowe. Theyre sick and tired of being trapped in a rotten system, said Mark McKinnon, a cofounder of No Labels, a public-interest group promoting bipartisan solutions, in a statement.
In 2010 and 2011, Congress could find no political center that is, not one Republican voted more liberally than any Democrat, and not one Democrat voted more conservatively than any Republican, according to a survey released this month by the National Journal, which has ranked voting records of Senate and House members for 30 years.