Page 13 - 1113th News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Democrats, with democrats gaining seven seats. in the senate 55 in the democratic caucus and 45 republicans, with democrats gaining two seats. the 113th congress has 101 women, or about 1 in 5 lawmakers. there is also a greater minority representation than ever before. almost all of it from the democratic side of the aisle. and this is the more progressive congress as well. no doubt about it. let's turn to richard wolffe, msnbc political analyst and vice president and executive editor of msnbc.com. well, meet the new boss. same as the old boss. >> right. >> is the 113th going to be like the 11...

Optimistic about the 113th because even if they do try to do things through regular order, these same underlying dynamics are still governing what's happening in congress right now. >> one of the things that's troubling, the national journal has done a great job in documenting this by taking the ideological temperature of congress for the last 30 years, and they find that every democrat, i'll focus on the senate, every democrat in the senate is more liberal than every republican. every republican more conservative than every democrat and you might think, well, isn't that always the case? it is...

Jenna: and a big i historic hour it is. we're glad you're with us, everybody, i'm jenna lee. jon: and i'm jon scott. "happening now," a new year and a new congress. the vice president, joe biden, set to swear in senators in the old senate chamber before the senate holds its first session of the 113th congress and gets back to the nation's business or some might say avoiding the nation's business. jenna: big question mark there. jon: yeah. we'll see how that goes. there are 12 newly-elected senators, eight democrats, three republicans, unindependent. -- one independent. democrats increasing to ...

Civil rights and seniority went into the republican party. and race began to fall away as the organizing principle in life. so the parties became more ideological separate from one another. democrats agreeing with democrats, republicans agreeing with republicans. as that happened, they began to act as units. we don't have a political system set up very well for parties to act as units. the founders didn't want there to be parties at all. they were very against factions even though they went on to create a number of them. the 112th was a culmination of a lot of trends we've been seeing over the...

To tell you this was not necessarily easy. when all the votes were counted in the first role, it took, of all people, michelle bachman and marcia blackburn, two members of congress who had missed the first roll, who were not present but their names were called, to come down and vote for boehner. that ended up putting him over the top. conservatives sent a real message today. i know to the outside world it doesn't look like much. well, boehner, he still won with the final count 220 votes, but it came painfully close to being the first contested ballot since 1923 for electing a speaker of the ho...