Congressional Quarterly reports on Dennis Kucinich’s new subcommittee chair, the trouble he can cause, and its implications for his longshot Presidential bid.
As he prepares for his second consecutive underdog bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich can use a bully pulpit to draw attention to his activist liberal agenda. His appointment this week to be chairman of a new House domestic oversight subcommittee could help.
The panel headed by Kucinich is under the House Oversight Committee, chaired by California Rep. Henry A. Waxman. The Domestic Subcommittee will oversee domestic policy issues including health care, labor, pensions, energy and the environment, among others.
Kucinich said that as head of the new subcommittee, he will be able to influence Democratic policy making and “re-establish public oversight” over regulatory agencies that he said has been absent since President Bush took office.
“I will be asking questions about the operations of every federal department and expect to be able to bring to public light information that has been hidden for the last six years,” he said in a statement Wednesday.
He has broad leeway to pursue this goal. The subcommittee will have jurisdiction over the Labor, Commerce, Interior and Energy departments, as well as the anti-trust division of the Justice Department, the Federal Communications Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, among other agencies.
It may be a good perch for Kucinich, an unconventional and outspoken figure who was the last challenger to drop from the field in 2004 after Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry emerged as the Democratic Party’s consensus candidate.
Keep an eye on the Department of Interior. That is where Abramoff did most of his damage. Kucinich could get a lot of attention with hearings over Indian casinos and other land-use issues. He’ll never win the nomination, but he might get a lot of attention and do better than expected.
Kucinich has always struck me as the government official who is as cynical about our government as people who are not in our government should be. The more attention he gets, the better.
yeah, his chemtrails fascination takes him into X-Files territory.
Yeah I never got the whole story behind that…was he the one that initially included them in that bill, then later took them out?
i could google it, but it was something like that. If you google ‘chemtrails’ you’ll get a bunch of looney sites with praise for Kucinich.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I got from googling…half the sites are praising him for putting it in, the other half are condemning him for taking it out. But that sounds like the story anyway.
How did I miss this?? I regularly read about Kucinich and also about weirdness.
Damn. In any event, I find this report disturbing. I’m going to have to look into this.
It’ll be a great day in this country and in the world when a Department of Peace isn’t considered “unconventional”.
As a first step I’d be happy with turning our Department of Defense in the Department of…uhh, defense.
Amen, preach on brother!
I can’t remember the site, but the offered quiz was: “Match your issues to the candidate”
I took the test, and the hilarious response at the end was “If your candidate ended up as Kucinich, take the test again”
And we all knew that, didn’t we?
Crudites for thought.
I can and I’m gonna root for Dennis all the way up to the primaries. He’s great, he’s not another Jimmy Carter, he’s a much more seasoned politician, and he not a member of the Trilateral Commission like Carter was before he became president.
Dennis will be excellent in his new position, let’s hope he stays there. Go get ’em Dennis!!
Kucinich for President!
P.S. I’m a Green! 🙂
Kucinich was my favorite in the last election, and he remains my favorite now, unless Al Gore steps in strong.
Conventional wisdom, repeated here by Booman, says that a runty little guy like Kucinich is not “electable.”
I dunno. George W. Bush got elected.
BTW, Dennis wants to establish a Department of Peace.
Why the fuck does anybody smirk about that?! That’s a GREAT idea!
Dennis would make a good president. I support him.
To hell with the doubters and positioners and punditry. We need diversity in this country, and 08 is going to be a free for all. There are what, at leat 15 people up for nomination in the Republicrat Party already. Maybe kucinich is not “electable” but he represents what’s best about governing, and I’m going to pursue that far more enthusiatically than being a whimp that just follows the trends. We’ve got to PUSH PUSH PUSH for good governance, and we’re not going to get it with a whus like Obama or an iron-hard globalist like Clinton.
We’ve got to make a statement about good governance, and Mr. Kucinich is the closest thing we’ve got.
I would love to see him on the backs of the FCC commissioners as well. Fairness doctrine anyone?
He CAN win if just everybody ignore the media spin and pay attention to what he stands for. And now that he is in a high profile position, just watch how the “liberal media” marginalizes him.
Among Kucinich over-sight duties will be the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The drug czar.
Dennis Kucinich is an out-spoken opponent of the drug war policy.
The sub-committee he chairs was the same sub-committee that Rep. Mark Souder used to advance the drug war.
I posted the press release and wrote this about it yesterday. Ending the Drug War in the new U.S. congress