Sens. Obama and Biden might not be your ideal, Jeralyn, but as you've rightly noted, they're certainly better than anything the Republicans have to offer.  While I share your reservations about the legislative excesses of Joe Biden in particular, the election of him and Barack Obama holds real potential for significant progress toward leveling the playing field of law enforcement.

Let's first recognize that even though C-SPAN and local public access channels usually make for some stiflingly boring television, the legislative process most assuredly never functions well when its participants choose to engage in cheap public theatrics, often at the expense of both the issue at hand and common sense.

As someone who worked for years in the legislative field, it is my considered experience that the worst legislation ever passed are those measures fast-tracked for approval without due regard for either the deliberative process or the measure's potential consequences. I'd offer for your consideration California's recent horrific experience with energy deregulation, a true legislative time-bomb that was passed unanimously in 1996 by a then-GOP-controlled state legislature, signed into law by GOP Gov. Pete Wilson after only a few weeks' worth of cursory discussions, and exploded four years later.

Conversely, the most dramatic and memorable single events in American legislative history have been those unplanned or unscripted moments which appear to occur spontaneously:

(1) U.S. Army attorney Joseph Welch's morally unequivocating response to a red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) -- "Have you no decency, Senator?" -- during the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings back in 1954;

(2) White House counsel Alexander Butterfield's stunning 1973 revelation to Sen. Sam Ervin's Watergate Committee that President Nixon bugged his own office with a voice-activated tape recorder.

(3) Congresswoman Barbara Jordan's emotional 1974 appeal to her House Judiciary Committee colleagues to do uphold their oath to the Constitution as they duly considered articles of impeachment against President Nixon.

Lawmaking is not unlike baseball, where fortune generally favors those teams grounded in the game's fundamentals. Home runs can certainly be spectacular and memorable, but games are most often won by the team that hits the most singles and has the best fielding and on-base percentages.  While the San Francisco Giants' home run slugger Barry Bonds was so feared in the 2002 World Series that opposing pitchers preferred to walk him than pitch to him, it was his critical fielding error in Game 6 that helped to open the floodgates for the Anaheim Angels' dramatic rally and eventual triumph.