Happy New Year! Yours truly spent the holiday season playing golf (poorly), relaxing, and gearing up for the NFL playoffs (Go Packers!). Naturally the time off was all the more merrier given the Senate’s approval of New START.
In the aftermath of the successful Dec. 22 vote, there have been a plethora of “how’d it get done”-, “what does it mean”-, and “where do we go from here”-type postmortems. Additional thoughts can be found here, here, and here.
NoH will have more to say about all of this in the coming days and weeks. Suffice it to say for now that the outcome was in doubt until very late in the 4th quarter, and that the victory says a lot about the new terms of the nuclear security debate and the opportunities for and obstacles to moving forward. Simply put, it was an enormous achievement given the current political climate in Washington.
In the meantime, friend of NoH Rob Leonard, Government Affairs Representative at the Ploughshares Fund, makes some particularly astute observations about the ratification effort over at the Connect US Fund blog. The substance is of course all well and good but RL gets mad props for coining the phrase “collegial grit” to describe how Senators Kerry and Lugar and the administration dealt with the Republican caucus on New START.
Rob’s wordsmithing gives me the opportunity to highlight another classic instance of collegial grit – minus the “collegial” part that is. Those of you who have even been through deposition training at a law firm may be familiar with this. Either way, enjoy!
