BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
The election wasn’t over for 48 hours before both sides started laying down their opening bids on dealing with what has become known as the “fiscal cliff.”
At its core, the “fiscal cliff” (and I’m going to stop putting it within quotes from here on) is the result of the Congress and the President (to use another phrase I wish I could excise from the political lexicon) “kicking the can down the road.” Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
Living and working in Your Nation’s Capital I forget, sometimes, that grand issues are fun to debate on CNN or MSNBC, but real people deal with real issues.
At a fundraiser for Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Oh) last night, I heard from a nurse anesthetist that there is a continuing shortage of the basic drug she uses to put people to sleep for surgery. And that when they have the drug it often has a label written in some language other than English, and that the efficacy of the drugs is not constant. Continue reading
BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change (TCBMag.com)
A businessman came up to me the other day to tell me he was an avid reader of my blog. I implored him not to toy with my affections, but he persisted. “No, really, I read your blog every week so that I know what I’m supposed to be pissed about.”
As Goldie Wilson, the future mayor of Hill Valley, exclaimed while sweeping the floors of Lou’s Malt Shop, “I like the sound of that!”
Kind of. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
There is a reason that Kevin Yoder, the Kansas Republican, swam in the Sea of Galilee instead walking on top of it. It is the same reason that Todd Akin is now in extremely hot water. Neither is perfect, unlike the fella who walked on water a couple of thousand years ago.
Both Yoder and Akin were perfectly good members of Congress. Yoder, a freshman member of the Appropriations Committee, has been particularly impressive for his legislative judgment and his mature approach to his work in Congress.
Akin was impressive enough to win a tough, three way primary for the privilege to take on Claire McCaskill, a very vulnerable member of the Democratic majority who has made more than her fair share of ethical mistakes. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
It’s time for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to get their arms around the Republican Members of the House and give – at least some of them – a Leroy Jethro Gibbs slap to the back of the head.
Yesterday was a day that should have featured the Obamas answering questions about the charges of crankiness, stubbornness, and general dysfunction among the White House and Chicago campaign staffs.
We’ll come back to that later.
Instead it was all about Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) who was asked during a TV interview whether he thought abortion was justified in cases of rape. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
When you travel, you get a chance to get reacquainted with the USA today, and on the front page of that newspaper, the headline blared “61 bills, Congress is on pace to make history with the least productive legislative year in the post World-War II era.”
Okay, it’s a long headline. And the headline pretty much sums up the story by my friend Sue Davis. It should come as no surprise that the Congress and the current President found little to agree on. And with the Senate pretty much taking the year off (they haven’t passed a budget in three years, for example), this story doesn’t necessarily fit into the “news” category. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
People are not sure what to call it—excessive partisanship, bad behavior, negativism, gridlock, polarization, stridency, intolerance, ideological extremes.
It is collectively, incivility and it is, arguably, worse now than it has been in American history.
Something must be done about it.
Pundits such as the Washington Post’s George Will and the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone have argued otherwise. Barone, for example, recently bemoaned the bemoaners of what he called ‘hyperpartisanship’ in American politics, suggesting that the problem is not as bad as it may seem and attempts to rectify it in the past have just made matters worse.
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
In 1821, the Supreme Court found in Anderson v. Dunn, that Congress’ power to hold someone in contempt was essential to ensure that Congress was “… not exposed to every indignity and interruption that rudeness, caprice, or even conspiracy, may mediate against it.”
Outside the power of purse, this is one of the most potent weapons the Congress has to assert its power over the Executive Branch.
Bribery of a Senator or a Representative used to be viewed as holding Congress in contempt. I could say something funny here, but I am going to let you draw your own conclusions.
The beauty and the weakness of our constitutional system is that the legislative and executive branches don’t always get along. Sometimes, the Congress wants to find out exactly what the President’s people have been up to, and sometimes the President doesn’t feel like sharing. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
“While I’ve gone to great lengths to keep this website a forum for ideas, and not a personal forum, I should say something about the various stories regarding my political future in Virginia, the state that has been my primary home since late December 2010.The short of it is this: I don’t know and am nowhere near deciding. If I were to run, it would be as a Republican. And I am in the process of changing my voter registration from Alabama to Virginia, a development which likely does represent a closing of one chapter and perhaps the opening of another….If you have read this blog, and taken the time to look for a theme in the thousands of words (or free opposition research) contained in it, you see the imperfect musings of a voter who describes growth as a deeper problem than exaggerated inequality; who wants to radically reform the way we educate our children; who despises identity politics and the practice of speaking for groups and not one national interest; who knows that our current course on entitlements will eventually break our solvency and cause us to break promises to our most vulnerable—that is, if we don’t start the hard work of fixing it….On the specifics, I have regularly criticized an agenda that would punish businesses and job creators with more taxes just as they are trying to thrive again. I have taken issue with an administration that has lapsed into a bloc by bloc appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured: frankly, the symbolism of Barack Obama winning has not given us the substance of a united country.”
This is an excerpt from the blog of Artur Davis, a former Member of Congress from Alabama. When he served in the House, Davis was unique in that he was a proud member of the Black Caucus and the Blue Dogs. He was also the only Democrat to vote against Obamacare. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
Freedom of speech and press keep the blood flowing through public discourse. But sometimes they are not all they’re cracked up to be.
A good example is Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post May 2, in which he excoriated House Republicans for not getting anything done. “It’s another recess week for our lazy leaders,” he wrote. “They are planning to be on vacation—er, doing “constituent work”—17 of the year’s remaining 34 weeks, and even when they are in town (Washington) the typical workweek is three days.”
Milbank is way off base on several counts and on balance, contributes more to the ignorance of his readers than their enlightenment, which you would think would be one of the key tests of whether a responsible news outlet prints or broadcasts anything broadly categorized as news or news commentary. In other words does what is printed or broadcast contribute to the public good; that is more the education than the entertainment of the people the media are trying to help govern themselves? Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
The Obama Presidency is a wonder to watch. Barack Obama is making changes, which taken together—the sum of their parts—are transforming government and politics in disturbing ways it will take years and maybe decades to reverse.
His presidency is the triangulation of three distinct characteristics of politics and government.
First, the Obama Presidency is an Imperial Presidency, accumulating and concentrating power in the Executive like few Presidents have done before.
Second, it is a campaign Presidency, intensely focused on winning a second term, at the expense of public policy and cooperation with Congress.
Finally, it is an Administration, a collection of Cabinet departments and federal agencies which he is using to move the government and the country in a starkly different direction than in any time certainly since Reagan, and maybe Roosevelt.
The Imperial Presidency, historically, is a label applied to administrations that have taken unilateral military actions or engaged in aggressive foreign policies: James K. Polk’s intervention in Mexico; Theodore Roosevelt’s internationalism; and in more modern times, Lyndon Johnson’s expansion of our role in Vietnam or Ronald Reagan’s aid to Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Continue reading
BY STEVE BELL
All you really need to know about the state of Washington, D.C., are three facts:
A–a majority of Republicans in the Senate defeated a bill to extend the payroll tax holiday that was introduced by their own Senate Minority Leader last week;
B–President Obama has decided that the only real legislative item he wants passed is that very payroll tax holiday–not deficit reduction, not extension of unemployment benefits, not ending the expansion of the Alternative Minimum Tax into the middle class, not preventing a 27 per cent overnight reduction in payments to Medicare providers;
C–Congressional Democrats and Republicans, as well as the White House, still have not approved the basic appropriations bills necessary to keep the government operating.
To extend what should be extended will cost about $200 billion plus. The President doesn’t want to run the risk as a big taxer, so he is watching as Congress wrangles, something that has been thematic about this President–talk and watch.
Congress fears both extending the items that a weak economy needs and not extending them. This confusion puts the rotten cherry on top of the melted ice cream sundae that has been this session of Congress.
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
The death of the super committee on deficit reduction was so painful to watch.
It didn’t even get a decent funeral. But then it didn’t deserve one. Its life was ill begotten and misspent.
The eulogies were a mix of ‘I told you so’s’ by people and press who told us nothing, and politicians and interest groups pointing the finger of blame at each other—back and forth between conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, Senators and House members, Congress and the President (how does the Supreme Court always escape blame?), tea partiers and occupiers and on and on.
Nobody apologized for the failure.
The combatants remain defiant. They were still harping at each other the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Some seem to be under the influence of an elixir that has them hallucinating about the next election. They believe if they put off governing for another year, the American people will reward them by electing more politicians of their ilk. They could then, beginning in 2013, impose their political will on the country without any of this nettlesome bickering standing in their way today. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
Some years ago, a politician in West Virginia hired a very savvy political professional to write strategic plan for him to run for Congress. The professional burned the midnight oil and produced a comprehensive, 60-page roadmap to Capitol Hill.
She presented it and waited while the prospective candidate began reading: “OBJECTIVE: TO WIN ELECTION TO THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS.”
The candidate lookup up from manuscript and said he had a problem with the first line. He really had no interest in serving in Congress, he wanted to set himself up to run for governor and thought running for Congress would be a good stepping stone.
I was reminded of that story September 7,when President Barack Obama appeared before joint session of Congress and demanded–seventeen times, no less—that the legislators pass his latest job-creation program. Why?
President Obama’s speech was a hoax. His objective that night was not congressional approval of his jobs agenda. He was really setting the stage for his re-election in 2012. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
The Popular Press is swooning over what they consider to be the new-found potency in President Barack Obama’s demands that the Congress pass his Jobs Bill.
For reasons which I cannot understand, the President decided to make his case for his bill by leading with who was going to pay for it, notwithstanding we have no idea how the first job will be created by the jillions of dollars of new taxes he is proposing.
You want people who make millions of dollars a year to pay more in taxes? Ok. I don’t have an answer to that.
But somehow, in the translation, anyone with a family income north of about $250,000 (husband and wife each making a little over $10 k per month) becomes the equal of Warren Buffett’s income and needs to be penalized for the family’s success. Continue reading
BY TONY BLANKLEY
Reprinted from The Washington Times
Since the end of World War II, in both the United States and Western Europe, the best way to win a national election has been to be the incumbent political party. But that 3-generation-old predisposition in Western democracies may be coming to an end.
We may well be entering a political epoch in which the best way to win a national election in the West is not to be the party in power.
For the past 65 years, the world economic order has been vastly favorable to the West’s middle-class citizens and voters with their incomes going up steadily or at least flattening at a predictable and comfortable material level. Moreover, the middle-class fears of economic hardship was virtually eliminated by the existence of the welfare safety net. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
The weeks and months following the September 11, 2001 attacks were extraordinary, filled with anger, revenge, heartbreak, sadness, patriotism, national unity and spiritualism. We were America again, all for one and one for all. That was the good that rose from the ashes of tragedy. Survey researchers said we had changed forever.
It wasn’t just the high degree of patriotism, but the spirit of civility and common cause that permeated both political thinking and behavior. President Bush threw his arm around a retired firefighter when he visited the twin towers site, reflecting how strongly Americans felt about working together and uniting against a common enemy. There were pledges and promises to keep that spirit alive, to work together and treat each other better. It was even evident in Congress.
BY TONY BLANKLEY
Reprinted from the Washington Times
President Obama’s post-Labor Day “jobs” speech will be his last chance to launch an economic policy with any chance of manifesting its effect – both economic and political – before the November 2012 elections. He has three options. In order of descending likelihood, they are: a timid hodgepodge of previous proposals, a bold left-of-center initiative or a turn to a free-market “nuclear option.” Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
My daughter was in Canada recently and went into a gift shop to buy a souvenir. She handed the clerk U.S. dollars and the clerk called the manager over to get the most recent exchange rate. “We don’t take American money anymore,” the manager said. “Things are so unpredictable down there, we never know what the dollar is worth.”
Early in August, 5,000 Federal Aviation workers were thrown out of work without pay, along with thousands of construction workers because Congress couldn’t get its act together and reauthorize the agency. Workers were left without income to pay mortgages, car payments and buy groceries. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
Do you ever get into a discussion and get so bogged down in specifics, you forget what the central argument was about in the first place?
It happens around the dinner table, but unfortunately it is occurring more often in our public dialogue on critical policy issues, making debate less civil and solutions more difficult to reach.