Members of Congress like to say that governing is not a game, but they are increasingly playing round after round of gotcha.
As a watershed election looms next year and little of real significance is happening on the legislative front, lawmakers are consumed with trying to trap one another with hot-button votes that don’t have much to do with real legislative business.
Whether such show votes really matter when it comes to actual voters is another issue entirely. It is hard to find a case in which an incumbent senator or representative was knocked off solely because of an ill-considered decision in a postmidnight vote-a-rama in the Senate or on a particularly devious motion to recommit in the House.