josephc

Adding on to that:

Obama had only the house for the first two years. The Senate has the filibuster rule which means control takes 60 seats.

On January 20th, 2009, 57 Senate seats were held by Democrats with two Independents (Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman) caucusing with the Democrats for 59 kinda’ Democrat-ish votes in the Senate. Two more needed for “both houses”.

Also, that included Ted Kennedy and Al Franken. Kennedy had a seizure basically at the start and never returned to vote. Al Franken wasn’t seated until July 7th, 2009 because of repeated recounts.

So really 57 Senate seats. Three or four more for him to have both houses.

Kennedy was replaced by Paul Kirk in September and three other people swapped parties. So Obama had full control of the House and Senate from September 24, 2009 through February 4, 2010.

Four months.

If you’re looking at that and thinking, “isn’t that when they wrote and passed the ACA?” then you’ve got a good eye and a better memory.

Bandcamp for music. Libro.fm for audiobooks.

I used to spend days rotoscoping people in videos. Generative infill for background painting and automatic rotoscoping have saved probably a year of my life at this point. Image generation relies on CLIP, which needs a language model for conditioning.