Welcome

Welcome to my new blog! The idea is to filter what happens in Congress to my friends and other people who might see this, so they can track the progress of the Obama administration without having to know all of the arcane procedural rules of Congress. When Congress is in session, I will write a post at the end of the day to update what bills have passed, to analyze the bills and who voted for them, and to discuss what political impact they'll have. I will also occasionally provide some useless information on Congressional procedure. I hope you enjoy!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the title of the blog is a parliamentary technique in the House of Representatives to extend the debate on an amendment. When the House is in the Committee of the Whole (I'll explain later), amendments are only debating for five minutes on each side, unless you offer an amendment to the amendment. If you don't actually want to offer a new amendment, but you still want to debate, you can ask to "strike the last word" as a pro forma amendment. This means that you are amending the amendment by eliminating the last word. In reality, the chair assumes that the person offering this "amendment" is really just doing it for more debate time, and won't actually do anything about striking the last word.