Tag Archives: partisan

The Putrid Politics of Immigration

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  JAN 31, 2024

There is no more glaring example of non-functioning government and the suffocating effect of ugly partisan politics than the illegal immigration crisis. It is a national humiliation. Immigration has been a cornerstone of our experiment in individual freedom over two centuries.

“The vast array and diversity of the people our way of life has beckoned here has helped mold the American character. It has also challenged what we stand for, what we strive to be. It is hard to calculate the benefits that flow from the American melting pot. But it is also hard to ignore the intractable problems that have spilled over the edges from unlawful entry. Now it has once again gotten away from us, out of our control.”

Those words are in quotation marks because I wrote them three years ago this April. Matters have only gotten horribly worse since then. The serious solutions proposed over the past two decades, if laid end-to-end would be, well, very long. But the courage to resolve the issues comes up very short. Continue reading →

Politics Is Easy, Governing Is Hard

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

This has to have been the longest, yet least relaxing Independence Day ever.

As you know, the 4th was on a Thursday so here, in Our Nation’s Capital, almost everyone I know pretended they had been sequestered out of having to work on Friday and made it a four day weekend.

While wondering why we choose to end 4th of July fireworks displays with the playing of The 1812 Overture by a Russian composer celebrating a victory over France this happened:

— The U.S. Government announced that the Employer Mandate part of ObamaCare could just wait until January 1, 2015 instead of its scheduled launch on January 1, 2014. It would have taken less time (3 years, 7 months) to defeat Japan in World War II than to implement ObamaCare (3 years, 9 months). And Obama will still miss it. Continue reading →

The Hatfields and McCoys

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

“These guys are like the Hatfields and McCoys. That’s why they can’t get anything done in Congress.”

My cab driver pretty much nailed it on the head. Relations between the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress have taken on all of the characteristics of that famous family feud.

The Hatfield-McCoy feud started out when a McCoy came home from the Civil War as a Union soldier, angering a group of Hatfields, who had formed a pro-Confederacy vigilante group called the “Logan wildcats.” They promptly murdered him. Continue reading →

Abusing Government Institutions: Part III

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

“The word is out. He hasn’t paid taxes for 10 years. Let him prove that he has paid taxes, because he hasn’t.”

Those were the words of the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, Harry Reid, speaking on the Senate Floor, leveling an accusation against Gov. Mitt Romney that he could not prove, for which he offered no evidence, and had every reason to believe was not true.

Reid’s attack on Romney was clearly calculated to goad the Governor into releasing more income tax returns. The tactic is pretty transparent. A person of Romney’s wealth has to have something in his income, or his tax deductions or his charitable contributions to the Mormon Church, or something else that the Democrats could exploit. Reid, who is a wealthy man, of course, has never released his. Continue reading →

The Bipartisanship Myth

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann recently released It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a book dedicated to the principle that bipartisanship is a worthy goal and that its breakdown is all the Republicans’ fault.

It’s hogwash on two fronts.

First, the nature of our politics is adversarial. We have a two-political-party system, where compromise between the parties is supposed to be a rare accomplishment. Otherwise, why have two parties?

In such an adversarial system, it is complete nonsense to blame one party for being too partisan. The Democrats are looking out for their own constituents just as ardently as the Republicans are looking out for theirs.

In fact, Democratic leaders are far more beholden to their extremes than are Republican leaders. Think about it. Barack Obama is far more liberal than Mitt Romney is conservative. John Boehner, while not exactly a centrist, is not by any means a conservative ideologue, while Nancy Pelosi was easily the most liberal Speaker in the history of the House. Continue reading →

Taxpayers Paying for Perpetual Campaigns

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

President Obama is expected to spend a record-breaking $1 billion on his re-election campaign. That’s a lot of money, but there’s more. There are super PACS and interest groups and party organizations, all of which will spend added millions on his re-election.

There’s another pot of money, however, that should be added to the total–the growing amount of tax dollars being used to fund trips and functions that are classified by the White House as “official government business” but are in reality, purely partisan campaign events.

Speaker John Boehner finally spoke up last week, calling the President’s whirlwind taxpayer funded tour of college campuses “pathetic” and “beneath the dignity” of the White House. The President went to colleges in three battleground states, at taxpayers’ expense, presumably to rally support for a problem that was pretty much solved before Air Force One left the ground.

The college town tour was just one of many diversions of taxpayer funds to the campaign. It’s been going on for nine months, and it’s getting worse. Continue reading →

How to Break the Partisan Fever

BY TONY BLANKLEY
Reprinted from TownHall.com

Sunday on “Meet the Press” Colin Powell blamed divisive, poisonous Washington politics on the media and the Tea Party. The essence of Powell’s argument was: “Republicans and Democrats are focusing more and more on their extreme left and extreme right. And we have to come back toward the center in order to compromise. … The media has to help us. The media loves this game, where everybody is on the extreme. It makes for great television. … So what we have to do is sort of take some of the heat out of our political life in terms of the coverage of it, so these folks (Congress) can get to work quietly. … But the Tea Party point of view of no compromise whatsoever is not a point of view that will eventually produce a presidential candidate who will win.”

Of course this is historic. The media have been a circulation-, listener- and viewer-motivated political snapping turtle since the country’s founding (and a liberal snapping turtle since the 1940s). And, of course, the rise of divisive Washington politics predates by decades the emergence of the Tea Party to national attention in 2009. Continue reading →