The Wendy Davis filibuster in Texas? The Supreme Court decision on DOMA? The immigration bill passing in the Senate? All of them were achievements by ordinary citizens who got involved and affected elections. These things didn’t just happen. They were the real outcomes of citizens voting, in contests that could have gone the other way just as easily.

The United States is an enormous nation, with an enormously complex political system – one that puts no one in charge, but instead relies on separated institutions sharing powers, federalism, and all sorts of other complications. As a result, it’s very difficult, most of the time, to see obvious links between a specific election and a specific outcome. Yes, every once in a while there’s an obvious consequence: no 2008 Democratic landslide, no Affordable Care Act. But frustration is far more common in the Madisonian system.

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The bipartisan vote was 68-32 on a measure that sits atop President Barack Obama's second-term domestic agenda. But the bill's prospects are highly uncertain in the Republican-controlled House, where party leaders are jockeying for position in advance of expected action next month.

Spectators in galleries that overlook the Senate floor watched expectantly as senators voted one by one from their desks. Some onlookers erupted in chants of "Yes, we can" after Vice President Joe Biden announced the vote result.

After three weeks of debate, there was no doubt about the outcome. Fourteen Republicans joined all 52 Democrats and two independents to support the bill.

In a written statement, Obama coupled praise for the Senate's action with a plea for resolve by supporters as the House works on the issue. "Now is the time when opponents will try their hardest to pull this bipartisan effort apart so they can stop commonsense reform from becoming a reality. We cannot let that happen," said the president, who was traveling in Africa.

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McCain credits her daughter Megan with opening her eyes and "challenging" her to do more to support gay rights -- and that may not be the only case of familial influence going on in the McCain household.

When asked about her husband Sen. John McCain -- who is currently working pretty hard to keep protections for LGBT individuals out of immigration reform -- McCain said a change of heart (and policy persuasion?) may be on the horizon: "I think he's coming around," she said. "My husband and I have differed on many issues over the years … I think down the line we'll see our country changing … on this issue I know he believes what's right."

You can listen to the full podcast here.

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Clearly, the organization is aiming to open the tent to broadly famous individuals; Cindy McCain, who's posed for a "NO H8" photo and spoken publicly about her support of gay rights, may not exactly have done as much as the writer of "Angels in America" on behalf of gays, but the parallel-universe-first lady may be more of a marquee name.

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Actually, it’s not just because a lot of elite reporters appear to worship the guy. Politics, like nature, isn’t all that comfortable with vacuums, and the post-policy Republican Party has plenty of enormous empty spaces when it comes to questions of public policy. John McCain’s knee-jerk invade-everyone responses may be shallow, ill-informed, and often proved wrong…but it’s something, and something almost always beats nothing.

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“The president also will announce that we will be assisting the Syrian rebels by providing them with weapons and other assistance. I applaud the president’s decision.”

Strangely, an administration official then told the Daily Beast's Josh Rogin that the U.S. wouldn't be arming the opposition.

“The president has made a decision to provide the Syrian opposition with military items that can increase their effectiveness on the ground, but at this point it does not include things like guns and bullets,” the official tells The Daily Beast.

Which is it? "Senator McCain heard that from reliable sources,” his spokesman told the Daily Beast. It appears that McCain was correct: The U.S. will be supplying the Syrian opposition with small arms.

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"What a funny joke," I thought. I mean, the bookers probably don't even have phone numbers for Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall! When are those two on TV? It could take ages to look that kind of thing up. And McCain is probably already in the green room, right now, waiting for Sunday morning. (Though hopefully he's not at the NBC green room, as "Meet the Press" is being preempted by tennis this weekend.)

Sen. McCain is on one of the Sunday news talk shows nearly every weekend. (Graham is often on one of the others.) This happens despite McCain not having any important leadership position or even expertise on any particular topic. McCain fancies himself one of America's foremost foreign policy experts, but he is actually just a belligerent hawk. Neither he nor Graham is actually on the Senate Intelligence Committee. They just love cameras and bombs.

The problem isn't just those two: It's the entire rotating stable of camera-seeking elected officials and predictable talking heads, a majority of whom are white and conservative. The guests who aren't partisan are Beltway centrists, more concerned with politics than policy.

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I thought at the time that Rice deserved an apology from Republicans who savaged her, once the truth about the talking points came out, but of course one never came. (Sen. Lindsey Graham countered by saying she "deserved to be subpoenaed" instead.) Now she’s gotten the next best thing: a promotion to National Security Adviser, once Tom Donilon leaves the job in July. The position needs no confirmation by the Senate, so Rice’s GOP critics have nothing to say about her new role.

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"SUNDAY SHOWDOWN!" George Stephanopoulos greets us, to open This Week. It's a political consultant versus another political consultant! Whose talking points will win? "Let's get right to it" with David Plouffe versus Karl Rove, before you even have time to run to the bathroom. Arianna Huffington, Gwen Ifill and the WSJ editorial page's Paul Gigot watch from the other side of the table.

Stephanopoulos shows poll numbers that indicate the public doesn't especially care about any of The Scandals, today's hot lead. Forty-four percent find the IRS targeting scandal the most important, however. And Karl Rove says if you look "inside the numbers," the public is still very unhappy with the economy. And the IRS collects taxes from the economy, so there you go: biggest scandal ever, searingly pertinent to all.

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Do those things go together? The political scientist John Sides thinks it’s going to be a problem:

[T]o be the Republican nominee, he’ll need the support of his Republican colleagues. The 2012 election once again showed—and despite some skepticism—that it is very hard to win the nomination unless you’re preferred by a substantial chunk, if not the vast majority of, your party’s leaders (as was Romney). Which is to say, it pays to be nice to your colleagues. It’s no guarantee, of course: junior Senator Hillary Clinton kept her head down and played nice, and lost the nomination. John McCain often irritated his fellow Republicans, but still mustered enough support within the party to win the nomination.

But political scientist Dave Hopkins isn’t so sure: “Don't think this is the problem for Cruz that John does. McCain bugged Sen colleagues/leaders too; still won '08 nom.”

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Original post: Prospects for peace talks over the Syrian civil war looked grim Tuesday, as the U.S. and E.U. butted heads with Russia over sending arms to opposing sides in the bloody conflict. The U.S. has praised Europe's decision to ease an arms embargo against Syrian rebels, although major European forces Britain and France have not gone so far as to arm Syrian rebels. As the Guardian noted:

British officials said the lifting of the embargo had a political purpose, increasing pressure on President Bashar al-Assad and his supporters, Russia and Iran, to make concessions at Geneva, and most importantly to agree not to play a role in a transitional Syrian government. If that fails, the officials said western arms supplies would strengthen moderate elements in the opposition who are currently outgunned and outfinanced by jihadist groups.

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But with the easing of scandal fever on the Potomac, Republicans are back to fighting one another, and the week-long Senate clash between freshman Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. John McCain over the budget is exposing the yawning gulf within the party once again.

Now that the GOP-dominated House and Democratic-led Senate have passed very different budgets, McCain has tried to argue for the formation of a conference committee that would try to reconcile the two. That might be a thankless, impossible task nowadays, but it’s nonetheless the way Congress has always worked. Democrats agree with McCain, and so do most Republicans.

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Cruz was responding to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who harshly criticized conservative  Republicans who are holding up the Senate's ability to pass a budget. "What are we on my side of the aisle doing? We don't want a budget unless we put requirements on the conferees that are absolutely out of line and unprecedented?" McCain said on the Senate floor on Tuesday.

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post explains:

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“I don’t want to jump to judgment here because many of us did call on the administration to investigate leaks; I am struck by what appears to be a very broad net and not a very targeted look,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters on Tuesday, Buzzfeed reports. “I think the best thing to do would be to have the attorney general come over and testify before the Judiciary Committee.”

“I can only speak for myself, but it strikes me this Justice Department inquiry will go forward and we’ll look forward to seeing what comes of it,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

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“Remember when she said, ‘well who cares how this happened,’ in a rather emotional way?” McCain asked guest host Martha Raddatz. “A lot of people care.” It’s too bad Raddatz didn’t tell the senator that no, she didn’t remember that – because Clinton never said it.

Remarkably, I’ve seen no one follow up on McCain’s misstatement today either. (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong.) Instead, reporters are breathlessly parsing each new GOP charge on Benghazi (while also decrying the very real abuse of the IRS overscrutinizing the tax-exempt status of conservative groups.) The National Journal’s Ron Fournier tweeted “Welcome to the 90s,” with no apparent irony or self-awareness about the role of the media in ginning up that decade of phony scandals that paralyzed our last popular second-term Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

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From a pure political perspective, supporting inclusion of same-sex couples in the immigration reform bill should be a slam dunk for both Democrats and Republicans. Scuttling the package over this provision would alienate the growing Latino constituency by blocking a pathway to citizenship -- and denying rights to LGBT Americans would be ignoring the direction of the country on civil rights.

And yet, according to a flurry of news stories from the past couple of weeks, the die is apparently cast on the matter: Allowing some 30,000 same-sex couples the same access to green cards that opposite-sex couples enjoy will halt the bill for 11 million immigrants. Even before the provision has been debated or a vote count begun, Republicans are holding firm to a position that’s literally killing their party. Meanwhile, Democrats run scared, to the detriment of the overall bill.

In plain English: The Republicans need this bill because their party doesn’t have a future if they can’t appeal to Latino voters. On the flip side, Democrats shouldn’t be sacrificing any progressive priorities before the horse-trading even begins because the more they start with, the more they will be able to keep in the end.

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That's been McCain's line for years on big strategic questions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: defer to the military's advice and don't swerve. The military happened to agree with him then on the need to keep troops in those countries, but when it comes to Syria, where the Pentagon is at odds with McCain's gung-ho interventionism, McCain is suddenly uninterested in heeding the military's advice.

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Yet, right now, President Obama is preventing you from learning any of this, by keeping the report classified.

Before the end of the Bush administration, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. — then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee — started investigating the torture program. When Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., took over as chairwoman of the committee in 2009, she intensified the investigation and negotiated with the CIA to get access to its files. After almost four more years of work and reviewing 6 million pages of documents, the committee voted out the report in December on a mostly party line vote.

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While there's already been downside for those who voted against the bill, today we learn that red state Democrats who voted in favor of the bill have been rewarded in the polls. In North Carolina, 52 percent of voters said they're more likely to reelect Sens. Kay Hagan of North Carolina because of her vote, while just 26 percent said the opposite. Meanwhile, in Louisiana, 45 percent said Sen. Mary Landrieu's vote boosted their likelihood of voting for the Democrat, compared to just 25 percent who said it makes them less likely to vote for her. She also saw her net approval rating tick up by six percentage points.

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