Here is the House.

“Let’s see where she stands, OK? Yesterday, an amendment leaped over ‘a key hurdle’ in the Senate…The amendment in question mandates that we spend an absurd amount of money on ‘border security’ because we love to spend absurd amounts of money on anything that looks remotely military or remotely like law enforcement, and “border security” looks a lot like both. We will also spend an absurd amount of money on “border security” because that was the only way to bribe enough Republicans to vote in such a way as to allow the amendment to clear the ‘key hurdle.’ So what was the ‘key hurdle.’ Enough senators voted for the amendment to spend an absurd amount of money on ‘border security’ to allow the amendment itself to be voted on in the Senate.”

The indispensable Charles Pierce checks in on immigration reform in the Senate, and underlines anew one of the fundamental truths of our current politics. To wit:

“In 2010, the American people elected what is possibly the worst national legislature in the history of the Republic. They also elected some of the worst state legislatures in the history of the Republic, too, which thereupon enacted redistricting and gerrymandering schemes guaranteeing that subsequent national legislatures elected wouldn’t be much better. In 2010, the country committed itself to decades of gridlock, mediocrity, and a perpetual state of hysterical paralysis in the national government. It would be nice if this were pointed out with somewhat more regularity.”

Update: Some telling stats by way of Dangerous Meta: “The much-criticized 112th Congress — from 2011 to 2012 — was the least productive and least popular Congress on record, according to the available statistics…only 15 legislative items have become law under the current Congress. That’s fewer than the 23 items that became law at this same point in the 112th Congress, which passed a historically low number of bills that were signed into law.”