Episode #97: What Happens in Vegas…

The latest episode of guns and death occurred last week in Oregon.  While there was a sad "sameness" to the tragedy, President Obama sounded different: angrier, more defiant, hoping to lead the country to push for stronger gun laws. Hillary Clinton weighed in on her proposals as well. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post offers a status report of what Congress is or is not likely to do. The five Democratic presidential candidates take center stage for their first debate next Tuesday in Las Vegas. Jill Lawrence, a contributing editor at U.S. News &; World Report, tells us what's at stake and what she's looking forward to hearing. And our "this week in political history" feature goes back 22 years to the announcement by House Minority Leader Bob Michel that he will retire when his term was up. After decades in Congress, Michel decided to call it quits in 1994, the first time the GOP won a majority of seats in the House since 1954. Ray LaHood, Michel's former chief of staff who succeeded his boss in Congress, talks about what has happened to comity and congeniality in Congress since Michel left. Photo via flickr user Phil Roeder and Barbara Kinney for Hillary for America This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License