Prospects for the United States in the second quarter

Subject

Prospects for the United States in the second quarter.

Significance

Congress met yesterday in a joint session for an address from Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu -- with about a quarter of Democrats boycotting and the White House criticising both the invitation and the content of the address. The address underscores the major trend in US politics in 2015: gridlock and partisanship so pervasive that it has infected one of the major issues of bipartisan agreement, the relationship with Israel. Speaker of the House John Boehner's failure to pass a three-week continuing resolution on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding on February 27 highlights that Washington dysfunction is not simply the product of different policies between the parties, but an inability of the Republican party to use its control of both houses of Congress to pass legislation.