Volume 9, Number 12
December 23, 2007
December 23, 2007
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SUNDAYS - SINCE
1999
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Saturday's Washington Times reported these as accomplishments: "Republicans sustained vetoes of two child health-care bills, an annual spending bill, a troop-withdrawal timetable for Iraq and an expansion of federally funded embryonic-stem-cell research." What I don't understand is how, when in five out of six instances the president's veto is sustained, the spin is universally accepted that the president was victorious and to the Democrats goes the aura of defeat. Rinse, repeat. For starters, whatever the president deemed worthy of his veto would have been the bits of legislation which survived filibusters, secret holds and all the other tactics in the arsenal of a minority. In order to talk up the line that the president got his way, means you fail to consider how clearly Republicans have painted themselves in so doing. If the ridiculous focus on the horse race would let up for just one minute, some insight from recent historical events could creep in. One example is how the dynamic that an executive and legislative of the same party gave earmarks (the subject of Dubbya's disappointment the other day), back in those days, a double bonus. The Republican members would of course be favored but, additionally, the sympathetic executive would make sure the appropriate departments followed through. For this president/co-conspirator to scold anybody on the subject is laugh out loud funny. Dubbya not only pointed a finger of shame at this session's earmarks (though cut 50% by some measures) but promised to sic the comptroller general's scrutiny on as many of them as he can, and just let them die. Not all these earmarks are for disgraceful projects, as their tabloid reputation has it. It's not all barbed wire museums and studies of cow flatulence. Nonetheless, for bypassing the normal authorization, appropriation and accountability aspects of regular order legislation, the pork barrel relies on its disbursement. The goose and the gander, on the same page. But Dubbya evidently is in a pissy, spiteful mood, this holiday season - the soup Nazi of earmarks. (Except for the Ted Stevens ferry to nowhere, of course.) As Mark Shields put it on the Friday Newshour, it's much easier, under our Constitution and the rules of the two bodies, to obstruct than to accomplish. Yet, by and large, the story frame has consistently been this ineffectiveness of the majority. But weren't they extraordinarily effective when they sent six bills to the president which obviously had survived a gauntlet of minority tactics? The president should be as respecting of the rest of the document as he is of Article 1, Section 7 (the veto provision). And we should live so long. This lack of subtlety and discrimination which characterizes the prevailing take on Bush v. Dems is borderline infuriating. A contrarian point of view is about as plain as the difference between fifty-one and sixty-seven. Instead of some divisive dissatisfaction, which the Republicans would perpetuate and ride to victory in 2008 (which may be their invention in the first place), the Democrats have to concentrate on boosting their bare majorities into ones which can surmount a determined minority, regardless of the occupant of the White House. There is no other strategy which can act like an <UNDO> button for this Bush disaster. Democrats in all fifty states need to turn the election night map a nice La Niña Blue. |
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Next week: DOA in IOWA http://users.wildblue.net/msyoudin/paxtpund.html
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