Janet Hook reports (ironically, in the Wall Street Journal) that the reason no one is legislating anything big in Congress anymore is because the Republican Party won’t allow it. Their desire to repeal legislation, not create it, has been voiced even by the Speaker of the House. Never mind that they aren’t repealing anything, either.
Even if you won’t read this information on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, it’s comforting to see it stated so plainly in the news pages. Even when the Republicans try to legislate, it doesn’t go well. Jonathan Cohn has a laugh at the result of their health care bill, which the Congressional Budget Office scored to hilarious effect. CBO estimated that their reforms would kick a million people off their insurance, leave half of them with no coverage whatsoever, and add $73 billion to the deficit. Try running on that clusterfuck.
Meanwhile, Ways & Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp is basically being told to take a hike by his colleagues even before he can unveil his grand plan to reform our tax system. The Obama administration partly preempted Camp by sending his partner in crime, Max Baucus, to China to serve as our ambassador. Despite that, Camp wants to press on but Mitch McConnell just told him to drop dead.
Pretty soon, no one outside the leadership will be left in Congress who remembers how to actually mark up a bill in a way that it can actually pass.
OY!!!
This Congress, and the last one, make Truman’s “Do Nothing Congress” seem like busy-beavers who could have built the Hoover Dam!
Outside of trying to repeal the PPACA, limit the rights of minorities and women to vote, and to further try to restrict civil and choice rights, nothing else gets done.
This is “The Know-Nothing KKKonservative KKKongress.”
If they won’t work, fire them. Last chance in November. Tell the Democrats.
Which makes it even more mind boggling that we are even talking about the high possibility that Republicans might well improve their position in Congress this November.
These are truly bizarre times we are living in.
Obama is the President, and therefore the Democrats are in control of everything in the government. If Obama isn’t getting everything he wants, he must be incompetent and we should punish him.
Sadly, it’s not just conservatives who think this.
The President has tremendous power. He can shift road projects, other public works, military bases and, through embedded Schedule C’s, determine who gets contracts. Very few contracts (by dollar value) are competitive bid. This President has even asserted the unilateral right to be judge, jury, and executioner over every human being on the planet, citizen or non-citizen, on US soil or not. I am, of course, referring to the drone program and Obama’s public statements on it. You may think it far fetched to think that Obama could declare Mitch McConnel an enemy combatant based on secret determination and send a drone to blow his house apart, but he has asserted the power. If not him, some future President will do so.
As I was saying…
When times are bad the tendency is to vote against the incumbents. The incumbents in the purple districts are Democrats and the states with Senate races are Southern and Western.
So what is this David Camp plan that has no chance?
It’s in the Max Baucus link.
Thank you.
That plan might actually cut my taxes depending on where the cut point between ten and twenty five percent was placed. I’m just over the line at 25, so most of my income is taxed at 15%.
Just taking a break from doing my taxes. I’ve noted how being over 65 has gone from having an extra exemption ($3600 for everyone) to an extra $6000 on the stand deduction only to $1200 extra on the standard deduction only. I expect it to disappear entirely and it will be a Democrat that does it, just as Democrats are thirsting for chained-CPI and increased premiums for Medicare.
Often fantasize about how much better off we’d be if most legislation enacted over the past thirty years were repealed. The biggies such as the Patriot Act and Gramm-Leach-Bliley along with all not to high profile stuff (and boneheaded executive decisions) that helped create so many problems, including problems that the PPACA attempts to fix at a highly inflated price.
While the last two Do-Nothing Repub Congresses have taken gridlock and paralysis to unparalleled heights (while spectacularly frustrating the last Dem Congress as well), all the Repub Congresses of the “conservative” era were basically useless and unproductive. It’s part of “conservative” ideology.
First, “conservatives” actually hate legislatures as being far too democratic and potentially responsive, and thus vastly prefer the Powerful Male Dictator model, placing all confidence in a (Repub) prez. Fuhrer Cheney is the ideal.
Second, as noted, the biggest desires of a “conservative” legislator are repealing existing social welfare legislation and corporate regulation. That’s “legislating”. Even their “greatest” bills, such as Gramm Leach which Marie references, were aimed at rolling back (effective) Big Gub’mint legislation, or declaring that an agency was not permitted to regulate something that needed regulation, such as the futures markets. That sure worked out well…like so many “conservative” brainstorms.
Finally, it seems to me that “conservatives” simply see no actual problems in the Great Old US of A, the (self-identified) Greatest Country on Earth. Certainly every problem lib’ruls see is mocked as non-existent, such as global warming, inequality of opportunity and wealth, environmental degradation, health care, etc, etc. Federal debt is the only problem in America, and of course “conservatives” can’t see the actual cause of the rising debt—tax cutting, endless Asian wars and worthless autopilot “defense” spending—but instead blame the debt on providing health care or (self funded!) social security.
So you gets what you pays for, American idiots—a Repub Congress is a paralyzed Do Nothing Congress BY DESIGN. It’s a feature, not a bug. Boner’s Boneheads and Mitch’s Morons are proud of their sloth and utter inaction. But if the American electorate hasn’t figured this bloody obvious fact out by now, it never will.
And of course the legions of teaturd and “conservative” voters are quite satisfied with gridlock, although they would prefer a rather hotter War on Women, with more actual female casualties. Can’t have everything, though!
As you point out by omission, “do nothing” GOP legislators is incorrect. They have done a lot over the past thirty years. Spent gobs of money on the stuff they like and refusing to tax and pay for it. From Reagan’s massive increase in military hardware spending to GWB’s four trillion dollar adventure to destroy Iraq. Dare we mention the failure of Clinton wrt to the peace dividend with the collapse of the USSR and support for the drunk and corrupt Yeltsin that gave away Russian state assets to a new group of oligarchs (and the DC consensus howling as the Putin gang rolled back some of that and are probably stealing less). (Under western style neo-liberalism, the life expectancy in Russia plummeted to third world level and did so very quickly.)