A lame duck can still roll a log

A recent article in the Financial Times brings up an often overlooked phenomenon which occurs in the time immediately following a major shake-up in the membership of the House and Senate during midterm elections, such as right now. According to Kau and Rubin, Representatives are normally unable to ideologically shirk, or vote against their umbrella party lines, due to the fact that they are swiftly punished by both loyal party voters and also by decrease in funding from their respective representative party. However, during the current 'lame duck' period, when losing incumbents know that they have to vacate office in two months, it becomes extremely difficult to predict Representative voting patterns as the aforementioned Representatives no longer worry about being punished by voters for voting against their best beliefs. In other words, recently-losing Representatives could intentionally vote against their constituent's wishes and best interests and in the end, there would be no major negative consequences, other than perhaps a diminished reputation. Even though a mere six weeks remain for this current Congress, there are apparently quite a few extremely important and extremely controversial bills being brought up to the floor, such as those concerning potentially extending dying Bush-era tax cuts, deciding whether or not to extend unemployment benefits, and even dealing with the ever-so-heated 'don't ask don't tell' policy regarding gays in the US military. Even though the Democratic party has the majority in both houses for the next six weeks, some of the bills they are attempting to pass are particularly ambitious and would require strong cooperation from their Republic counterparts. To complicate issues even further, the vast majority of the incumbents now losing seats are Democrats and thus they are the 'lame ducks' with no real incentive to follow party or constituent ideology voting lines, unless they have future plans to run for House or Senate. Thus, once the constant struggle and inability to pass bills gets to an all-time high, what does one Republic aide suggest, ironically enough in support of Weingast and Marshall's conclusion, will end up being the savior of the situation? Log-rolling. Lame ducks can still roll logs. The aide, Mr. Smith suggested that both President Obama and the Republican brass would "choose a 'log roll' approach", during which the President would make a compromise and vote against his party ideology in exchange for a guarantee that the Republican representatives would do the same, thus guaranteeing that some legislation would pass, whether or not it would appease the voters is another issue. The thing about this article which boggles my mind the most is just how open everyone is regarding the whole issue of log-rolling. When voting for a Representative or even President, I feel like personally part of what I judge politicians on definitely has to do with my ability to trust them or feel that they are honorable or moral; however, this gets extremely hard to do when you see that our nation's leaders are consistently essentially trading votes, one for one.