Jonathan's shmooze with Nancy drew suggestions that she should have cut off Iraq funding, countered by a suggestion that she didn't have 218 votes to swing it.

It's counterfactual - grotesquely so, one might say - but I can't resist:

Suppose Nancy had said, No FY07 Iraq supplemental. Could a coalition of Blue Dogs and GOP have forced her hand?

The discharge petition would have been available: if 218 reps had signed up, they could have got a funding bill to the floor (strictly speaking, they'd have been discharging the rule related to the funding bill which, we assume, Pelosi has had deep-sixed in committee).

What if the rule discharged had been a closed rule - the doer done! - that would mean that Pelosi and her henchmen couldn't introduce any sneaky poison pills or the like into it.

If the bill had passed, I'm thinking, it would (politically speaking) have been over Pelosi's dead body: how could she possibly have carried on as Speaker if thus thwarted? (Step forward Speaker Steny!)

Point is, if the Dem House leadership had had the cojones to tell Bush no more Iraq funding, it would probably have been up to holding the party together against a funding bill rebellion.

Since said leadership is - not exactly caponized, but certainly careful - neither course of action was ever on the cards.

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Last week, I mentioned an article (by one Jim Pope) that I'd spotted (but not then read) on the strange mid-30s phenomenon of the sit-down strike.

Now, I've read it!

It's perhaps most useful in the just the facts detail of who sat down when and where.

But it makes some pretty sweeping claims for the effect such strikes had on all branches of the Federal government, not to mention state and local government (graf 92ff).

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Last Wednesday, I flagged an excellent book by William Forbath tracing the growth of US labor from the days of the Knights of Labor up to Norris-LaGuardia on the cusp of the New Deal.

Now, let me do the same for Christopher Tomlins' The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960.

Obviously, the first part of the book covers the same period as the Forbath, though majoring on different elements, such as the intellectual underpinnings of early US unionism - Marx is even mentioned.

But it then takes the story on (mentioning only cursorily the Black-Connery Thirty Hours Bill, strangely - my piece thereon) to the evolution of the Wagner Act and beyond.

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No book (that I've read) does it quite as well as James Patterson's Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933-39 .

It has everything going for it: reasonably short (at 350 pages of decent-sized print) and well-written, an undoubtedly critical period and topic, just the right mixture between narrative and analysis.

And - a particular interest for MyDDers, perhaps! - covering the effects of the last realignment election in US politics. (And - yay! - a realignment in favor of Dems and liberals.)

What's not to like?

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Folks here have talked a bit before about the rise of the liberals as a force in the Dem party - Matt started it, I seem to remember.

A critical period was that beginning with the remarkable liberal success in the 1958 Congressional elections. The strengthened liberal forces butted up against the existing power structure of autonomous, mostly Southern, committee chairman, supported by a still functioning conservative coalition. The liberals were generally rebuffed.

But, once further buttressed by a JFK victorious on a radical platform, how could they not succeed?

The answer was (on the whole) rather easily.

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