CenterLine 1/16: CenterLine: Bruuuuuuuuce, Tea Party denied, and an awesome personality quiz

“'If I started voting how they want me to, versus what I think is right, then they’ve already won,' said Rep. Mike Simpson, Republican of Idaho, who is dealing with one of the best-financed Tea Party challenges of this campaign year." 

“I was talking to one member who is retiring and I said, ‘Do you feel good about it?’ and he said, ‘I really do. It just got to the point where it wasn’t worth it,” said Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth. “It’s pretty stressful. Everybody is aware the system is broken and that becomes stressful. You wonder what can I do to make it work better,” Yarmuth added.

Can Time Guess Your Politics? See how your preferences in dogs, Internet browsers and 10 other items predict your partisan leanings, in a new political personality quiz by Jonathan Haidt and Chris Wilson on Time.com.  

What We're Reading: Getting Congress to Yes: I had lunch yesterday with Jeff Burnam, visiting professor of American Government at Georgetown, who was part of the American Political Science Association's recent task force report on Negotiating Agreements in Politics. The task force examined explores negotiation myopia vs deliberative negotiating — where both sides focus on the positive-sum possibilities (rather than getting bogged down by zero-sum conflicts). The Clean Air Act, for example. 

Today's contest: Take the Time political personality quiz, and post your score on our Facebook page. We'll send one random winner an author-signed copy of "The Centrist Manifesto."

Top Tweets

@RockefellerFdn: A Chief Resilience Officer is... http://ow.ly/sBY1B  #ResilientCities

@TheFix: Want to see what the electoral map will look like in 2060? http://ow.ly/sEzuB 

@ChuckTodd: Great new word alert! MT @cmarinucci Could an emerging crop of "conservatarian" Republicans be CA GOP best hope? http://ow.ly/sEDSk

That's all for today. Thanks, and see you next week.

Christie