A distracted GOP
The House Republicans, in one amazing quote
By Jonathan Bernstein, WashPost, Updated: March 28, 2013
Ladies and Gentlemen, your House Republicans:
Couldn’t write a bill because he was distracted by Fast and Furious and Benghazi? Why not just say that his computer was down or that a dog ate his homework? At least those cliched excuses don’t imply what is really going on here: Republican politicians who believed that the job of a member of Congress is to be outraged, and once they’ve done that, they can pretty much go home.
Which, as I was getting at yesterday, is the whole story of the Boehner-era House Republicans. Their big bill from the last Congress was to be repeal-and-replace, yet they never even held hearings to develop a bill to replace the Affordable Care Act. They do pass (nonbinding and unusually vague) budget resolutions, but there’s never any legislation to implement those resolutions. Last week was the third time in three years that House Republicans voted to replace Medicare with a new scheme, but they don’t even pretend that there will ever be an actual bill to carry out that plan. Now, it’s comprehensive tax reform that is supposedly their agenda. We’ll see … or, as I’m predicting, we won’t see.
(More here.)
Ladies and Gentlemen, your House Republicans:
Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) was assigned to write legislation that would cut $380 million in loan guarantees to clean-energy companies. But nothing happened with that idea, because Kelly never wrote a bill. He got distracted.That’s from a nice article by David A. Fahrenthold about the fizzling of budget-cutting efforts by Barack Obama and by House Republicans. The Obama portion is interesting, but when it gets to the House Republicans, it rapidly becomes farce. Basically, the Republicans came up with a nice gimmick but had no interest at all in legislative follow-through.
“It was a priority, and it remains an issue of interest. But Mike’s efforts shifted when he chose to focus more on holding the administration accountable with regards to [Operation] Fast and Furious. And then when the Benghazi tragedy occurred, that took the cake,” said Kelly’s spokesman, Tom Qualtere.
Couldn’t write a bill because he was distracted by Fast and Furious and Benghazi? Why not just say that his computer was down or that a dog ate his homework? At least those cliched excuses don’t imply what is really going on here: Republican politicians who believed that the job of a member of Congress is to be outraged, and once they’ve done that, they can pretty much go home.
Which, as I was getting at yesterday, is the whole story of the Boehner-era House Republicans. Their big bill from the last Congress was to be repeal-and-replace, yet they never even held hearings to develop a bill to replace the Affordable Care Act. They do pass (nonbinding and unusually vague) budget resolutions, but there’s never any legislation to implement those resolutions. Last week was the third time in three years that House Republicans voted to replace Medicare with a new scheme, but they don’t even pretend that there will ever be an actual bill to carry out that plan. Now, it’s comprehensive tax reform that is supposedly their agenda. We’ll see … or, as I’m predicting, we won’t see.
(More here.)
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