Tag Archives: House of Representatives

Remodel the Barn, Don’t Destroy It

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  OCT 16, 2023

These days we are being constantly reminded of legendary former House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s ageless admonition that any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a real good carpenter to build one.

Rayburn’s insight is apropos as the nation’s agenda remains blocked by Republicans fighting among themselves over the election of a new Speaker. The former Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, was deposed on October 3 by a strange-bedfellows cabal of eight Republicans and 210 Democrats. The Republicans then nominated Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana and it just took a day for him to accept his inevitable defeat by the full House.

Days later the next GOP nominee for Speaker, Ohio’s firebrand Jim Jordan discovered after two Floor votes that he, too, didn’t have the votes, short 20 and then 22 votes. The next chapter is being written as this is written. What will happen next will probably not be good. Continue reading →

Speaker Ryan Slaying Windmills or Dragons

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  MAY 3

It is mindboggling, isn’t it, this election year? It’s like an untethered hot air balloon caught up in a windstorm.

The atmosphere is a toxic mixture of ignorance and arrogance, fueled by anger, disillusionment, distrust, some big egos and a lot of cash.

Intelligent, civil, informative, unifying, discourse? Forgetaboutit.

Continue reading →

Can The Farm Bill Come Back?

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

One of the reasons Denny Hastert followed the “majority of the majority” rule was pretty simple: He couldn’t trust the Democrats.

The nature of the House of Representatives is to allow the Majority to eventually get its ways. Rules are put in place to protect the minority’s rights, but in the House, unlike in the Senate, the Majority rules.

Sometimes finding out what the majority really stands for is difficult, and through much of the 20th century, constructing a majority coalition transcended party membership. Continue reading →

Appropriations King Hal

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from FeeheryTheory.com

It has been a long time, but the Appropriations Committee has finally got its mojo back. And Hal Rogers, the first term Chairman of the once powerful and feared Committee, is the chief reason why.

The House completed work on all of its appropriations work for the first time in years, and that was chiefly because of the quiet persistence of Chairman Rogers.

The Appropriations committee’s work can be mind numbing. When I worked fo House Minority Leader Bob Michel, I used to have to sit on the House floor when the Subcommittees be grinding through their schedule in the dog days of summer, churning through amendments and fighting over obscure funding projects. Some of the disputes seemed pretty insignificant to a young staffer like me. Continue reading →

Union Wars in Wisconsin

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from mullings.com

The standoff between Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Democrats in the State Senate has been going on for two weeks and may last for weeks or even months longer.

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GOP, Don’t Be Timid, Govern

BY TONY BLANKLEY

Reprinted from the Washington Times

What should congressional Republicans’ policy objectives be for the next two years regarding federal deficits and prosperity? Two very different strategies are being considered by authentic conservatives: 1) Attempt to govern from their majority in the House and try to start the process of reducing the costs of entitlements – most conspicuously, Social Security and Medicare – as a path back to prosperity and good jobs or 2) recognize that the GOP cannot govern without holding the White House and that therefore they should not touch entitlements but merely tinker with discretionary spending and frame the issues for 2012, when they may win the presidency and Senate as well as hold the majority in the House.

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