Tag Archives: Congress

Status Quo Triumphs Over Future

BY TONY BLANKLEY

 Reprinted from Washington Times and Townhall.com

The debt deal, if it sticks, is a triumph for the bipartisan, status quo-clinging Washington establishment. Here is a prediction: Between now and January 2013, total actual spending cuts will be minimal. That will result from the following: (1) The $900 billion deficit reduction is almost all back-loaded to the years beyond 2012. (2) The select committee created by the budget deal will fail to pass a “second tranche” deficit-cut package of an additional $1.5 trillion. (3) The “trigger” will be pulled that will identify an additional $1.2 trillion. (4) The pulled trigger won’t require any more deficit reductions to go into effect until 2013, when a new Congress and either a new president or a re-elected President Obama will be able to re-decide (or repeal) all these decisions.

Continue reading →

Debt Ceiling Debacle Embarrassing

 

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

A friend who runs a small business told me recently he’s going to make some really tough decisions next week to cut expenses.  Those decisions are going to hurt good people.

I am familiar with people who have started new businesses that are now teetering on the brink of collapse. 

Businesses, big and small, in the housing industry are hurting because of consumer angst about buying or selling.

I know a couple afraid of losing so much of their retirement savings that they won’t be able to slow down when they’d planned.  I talk to young people every week who can’t find jobs and have nowhere to turn.

There are millions like them across America who don’t know where the next paycheck is coming from or how they will support their children or how they will avoid being dependent upon their children in old age.  They are feeling the anxiety of not knowing, the fear of failure, that agony of defeat.  They are real people with real families in real communities, struggling every day because of the uncertainty over the American economy.  They are consumers who won’t spend and manufacturers who won’t produce and bankers who won’t lend because of doubt.

Continue reading →

Sunset Every Law

BY JOHN FEEHERY

Reprinted from the feeherytheory.com

As anybody who ever watched Schoolhouse Rock in the 1970’s knows (“I am just a bill, I am only a bill and I am sitting here on Capitol Hill, but I hope to be a law one day, oh, yes I know that I will, but today I am still just a bill”), it is awfully hard to make a law in this country.

Continue reading →

Nothing Small About Spending Cuts

BY JOHN FEEHERY

Reprinted from the feeherytheory.com

It is easy to be fairly nonchalant about the current budget battle that has consumed the Congress.

Pundits (myself included) have pointed out that the tens of billions of dollars being discussed is chump change, especially if you consider the trillions of dollars that we owe to the Chinese.

Continue reading →

Congress:History is Calling, Please Answer

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

In the spring of 1981 Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman sat for weeks at a long table in room H-228 of the Capitol, his beady eyes peering over stacks of thick, black 3-ring binders containing the detail on most every federal program.

Stockman was holding over budget negotiations with his former colleagues in the House of Representatives. His mission was to cut spending, cut taxes, increase defense, and help his President, Ronald Reagan, usher in a new era of smaller, limited government, entrepreneurial innovation, individual freedom, and global prestige.

Piece of cake.

Few if any at the table, maybe with the exception of Jack Kemp, knew they were making history at the time. But they were, in the same way congressional leaders did for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal and McKinley’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s regimes of political and regulatory reforms.

Continue reading →

Leave the Driving to Boehner

BY JOHN FEEHERY

Reprinted from the feeherytheory.com

House Speaker John Boehner has so far driven Congress in the right direction.  He has negotiated successfully to cut spending and keep the government open.  He allowed for an open process that delivered the largest discretionary spending cuts in the history of the lower body.  He has gotten high marks from just about everybody on how he has risen to the occasion in difficult times.  He has his hands firmly on the steering wheel and he seems to know where he is going.

Continue reading →

Government Shut Down

BY JOHN FEEHERY

Reprinted from thefeeherytheory.com

During the Eddie Murphy years, Saturday Night Live had an iconic skit  that can best be called “Who Shot Buckwheat.” In a spoof of the media  culture that glorifies murderers and assassins, it examined why John  David Stutts shot Buckwheat.
Continue reading →

Obama, Boehner, Context for Tucson

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

In Tucson Wednesday President Obama said what needed to be said and he said it like Lincoln did at Gettysburg: This is an opportunity for us to come together so that those people did not die in vain.

It doesn’t matter what the pundits say or who they claim to be at fault. More than likely, fault lies with the evil demons that dwelled within one man in a whole universe of flying debris and unexplained phenomena.

“But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized—at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do—it is important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds,” the President said.

We can’t use this tragedy as an excuse to turn on one another, he said. “Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”

With words like that and those coming from House Speaker John Boehner, who said “the needs of the institution have always risen above partisanship. And what this institution needs right now is strength–holy, uplifting strength”, we can ignore those playing the blame game. We can rededicate ourselves to the kind of governance and the kind of political and social behavior that drew those who died in Tucson to Congresswoman Giffords.

Continue reading →

President, Politics and A New Year

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
There are a number of sites which will recount the month-by-month news for 2010. I’m not going to do that.

There is only one story for 2010 – and it was not Stephen Strasburg needing Tommy John surgery. That was number two.

The only story for this year was the uprising among American voters to produce a 63 seat turnover in the U.S. House plus major changes in the U.S. Senate, in Governors’ mansions, in State Legislatures, county courthouses and city halls from one end of the nation to the other.
Continue reading →

Routing the Regulators

BY TONY BLANKLEY

Reprinted from the Washington Times

In 2011, the two major legislative initiatives of the Tea Party Congress (pray the voters deliver such a Congress) will be to get a grip on the deficit and to begin to reverse the intrusion of the federal government in American lives and business.

Continue reading →

Colbert, Comity and Congress

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

What were they thinking?

The Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration last month turned an official hearing on a serious issue—migrant farm labor—into a 3-ring circus starring comedian Stephen Colbert.  Colbert didn’t even testify, he performed a comedy routine as a character from his television show, mocking farm workers, immigrants and the U.S. Congress. 

The Colbert comedy performance left absolutely no doubt why the American people are disgusted with Congress and some of those who serve there.

Continue reading →

Partisanship Here to Stay

BY GARY ANDRES

Reprinted from weeklystandard.com

Partisan polarization seems like it purchased a lifetime pass in this city.

This won’t sit well with Kumbaya aficionados — those looking for congressional Republicans and Democrats to walk arm-in-arm toward a bipartisan Promised Land.
Continue reading →

Its Time for Media Reform: Part II

By MICHAEL JOHNSON

Apparently, it’s okay for the media to pay their sources, to buy news.  ABC news does it and so do others. 

 More proof of that came on Sunday when CNN’s Reliable Source Anchor Howard Kurtz asked one of his panelists about ABC paying $200,000 to the central figure in a news story for information and material that would make its news broadcasts more appealing and therefore more competitive.Lauren Ashburn of Ashburn Media responded that the high demand for ad revenues among news operations is moving the needle toward that kind of checkbook journalism.  The answer she said was to find ways to generate more ad revenue so the news operations would not be forced to buy and bribe their way to bigger ratings.

By that analysis, it is okay then for members of Congress to exchange campaign contributions for earmarks in legislation, because the pressure to raise so much money for their campaigns leaves them no other choice. No, actually, it is not okay.  It is against the law.  Checkbook journalism should be, too.

  Continue reading →

House and Senate, Venus and Mars

BY JOHN FEEHERY
From CNN
 
When the Founding Fathers decided to create a bicameral legislative branch, they were trying to make things difficult for the federal government to grab power from the people.
What the Founding Fathers may not have foreseen was how much the House and the Senate would grow to dislike and distrust each other. Why is this important now? Democrats in the House may have to take the political risk of voting to pass the health care bill based on assurances from the Senate that the upper chamber will eventually modify the law to change some things House Democrats don’t want.

March Deadline Bad and Bogus

 

BY JOHN PATRICK FEEHERY

Most people looked at the president’s March 18 healthcare deadline and saw a totally unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky, Hail Mary pass from a guy who has set down several totally unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky, Hail Mary pass deadlines in the past. 

Remember when he wanted a healthcare law on his desk last August? Or when he wanted it done before Thanksgiving? Or Christmas?

Continue reading →

Is Government Really Broken?

   

BY TONY BLANKLEY

If you want to see broken government, consider the fall of the constitutional Roman Republic and the rise of Julius Caesar: “Fortune turned against us and brought confusion to all we did. Greed destroyed honor, honesty and every other virtue, and taught men to be arrogant and cruel, to neglect the gods. Ambition made men false. Rome changed: A government which had once surpassed all others in justice and excellence now became cruel and unbearable.” So said the historian Sallust at the time.

Continue reading →