The president supports repealing the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA] and enacting the Employee Non-Discrimination Act [ENDA], but he knows that neither will happen in the next two years unless attitudes change dramatically within the Republican caucus. As for his own attitude, he hints again that he might be coming around to supporting gay marriage, but for now he is sticking with the civil unions argument.
It looks like the administration is going to stick with the Environmental Protection Agency as its primary enforcer on climate change issues, and they aren’t backing down to the incoming House chairmen who will be launching ridiculous investigations about everything except how to deal with rising temperatures.
The Republicans caved on the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. Those goddamn punks exploited our firefighters and police officers for all they were worth and then didn’t want to help them deal with the health consequences of their heroism.
The President got 71 Senators to give him his START Treaty. Never have the Republicans been more shameless. They literally threatened to kill a treaty because they didn’t like that gays got some acknowledgement of their basic human rights. Some of them went ahead and voted against it because they were mad about procedural issues.
Obama ate the Republicans’ lunch but he didn’t get everything:
The largest disappointment, he said, was the Dream Act failure. He said he gets frequent letters from kids whose parents brought them here from other countries as small children and are treated as illegal immigrants when they grow up.
“It is heartbreaking,” Mr. Obama said. “That can’t be who we are. To have kids, our kids, classmates of our children, who are suddenly under this shadow of fear, through no fault of their own.”
For now, it is who we are. But we’re doing okay. It’s been a great two years. I am going to miss Speaker Pelosi though. One day they’ll be an office building named after her. She was that good.
