Majority Status Fleeting

In today's CongressDaily AM, Susan Davis has some notes from a speech by Newt Gingrich that included:

"On the one hand, [Senate Majority Leader Frist] has to have a slightly, not dramatically, but slightly greater ability to actually get something decided in the Senate, because the Senate now runs itself largely by exhaustion," he said, adding, "But at the same time the House leadership is making an enormous strategic mistake ... the reason it's a big mistake and not a small mistake is that the great virtue of allowing amendments is that you surface problems early and you begin to notice that the world is different than you think it is."

He argued that the majority in the House needs to lose occasionally on the floor, and that the leaders of Congress shouldn't be afraid to send something up when the President has said that he'd veto it.