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It is almost beyond belief. First, the Dems won’t have a traditional budget because they are afraid of campaigning on one. Then they conspire with Obama for a recess appointment for Donald Berwick because they’re afraid of what will come out in hearings. Now John Fund outlines how they will continue to govern against the will of the country in lame duck sessions.
Democratic House members are so worried about the fall elections they’re leaving Washington on July 30, a full week earlier than normal—and they won’t return until mid-September. Members gulped when National Journal’s Charlie Cook, the Beltway’s leading political handicapper, predicted last month “the House is gone,” meaning a GOP takeover. He thinks Democrats will hold the Senate, but with a significantly reduced majority.
The rush to recess gives Democrats little time to pass any major laws. That’s why there have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an ambitious, lame-duck session to muscle through bills in December they don’t want to defend before November. Retiring or defeated members of Congress would then be able to vote for sweeping legislation without any fear of voter retaliation.
“I’ve got lots of things I want to do” in a lame duck, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W. Va.) told reporters in mid June. North Dakota’s Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, wants a lame-duck session to act on the recommendations of President Obama’s deficit commission, which is due to report on Dec. 1. “It could be a huge deal,” he told Roll Call last month. “We could get the country on a sound long-term fiscal path.” By which he undoubtedly means new taxes in exchange for extending some, but not all, of the Bush-era tax reductions that will expire at the end of the year.
In the House, Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters last month that for bills like “card check”—the measure to curb secret-ballot union elections—”the lame duck would be the last chance, quite honestly, for the foreseeable future.”
Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, chair of the Senate committee overseeing labor issues, told the Bill Press radio show in June that “to those who think [card check] is dead, I say think again.” He told Mr. Press “we’re still trying to maneuver” a way to pass some parts of the bill before the next Congress is sworn in. …
David Broder has the details on the missing budget.
On June 30, the Congressional Budget Office issued its long-term outlook, predicting that deficits would come down for the next few years as the need for counter-recession spending eased and revenue improved. But then, it warned, “unsustainable” red ink would flow again, creating debts not seen since World War II.
The next day the House of Representatives passed a one-year budget resolution rather than the normal blueprint committing the government to a fiscal plan of at least five years.
For all the publicity that goes to earmarks and other spending gimmicks, this was a far worse dereliction of duty. And the cynicism of the maneuver just made it worse. …
John Podhoretz explains the Berwick trick.
… Past presidents have resorted to recess appointments when they believe a nominee’s appointment has been subjected to unjust political and ideological gamesmanship. And the White House said it was resorting to the recess appointment because of Republican recalcitrance.
“Many Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely to score political points,” Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said on the White House blog Tuesday.
That was astoundingly untrue. The only way Republicans, who have 41 votes in the Senate compared to 58 for the Democrats, could have “stalled” the nomination would have been to organize a filibuster, and that would happen only when the nomination came to the Senate floor.
They couldn’t have blocked a favorable vote on Berwick’s nomination from the Senate Finance Committee, which has 13 Democrats and 10 Republicans.
As ABC’s Jake Tapper reported yesterday, “Republicans were not delaying or stalling Berwick’s nomination. Indeed, they were eager for his hearing, hoping to assail Berwick’s past statements about health-care rationing and his praise for the British health-care system.” …
Here’s another certified liberal from WaPo commenting on the kid president’s outrageous policies. Ruth Marcus on the Berwick appointment. And she quotes a Dem!
… As Montana Democrat Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said after Obama’s precipitous action, the confirmation process “serves as a check on executive power and protects… all Americans by ensuring that crucial questions are asked of the nominee — and answered.” Bypassing the process also harms the nominee, undercutting his legitimacy and truncating the time he has to act. Berwick can only serve until Dec., 2011, a short opportunity to make a big difference.
There are legitimate explanations for Berwick’s more incendiary comments on health care. It’s too bad he didn’t get to offer them. A cynic — who, me? — might think that the administration simply preferred not to suffer the political downside of a public airing.
A cynic might wonder, with Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln facing a tough re-election fight, whether Berwick could even get through committee on a party-line vote. A cynic might think that the last thing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wanted before the election was a floor fight about rationing health care.
A cynic might look at the White House explanation — that it was urgent for CMS, without a confirmed administrator since 2006, to have a leader — and ask: Then why did you dither for 15 months before nominating someone? …
The editors of Investor’s Business Daily have more on Berwick.
If Berwick wants to imitate Britain’s model, perhaps he can explain why breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate while in Britain it’s almost double at 46%.
Prostate cancer is fatal to 19% of American men who get it; in Britain it kills 57% of those it strikes.
“Donald Berwick is a one-man death panel,” said David O’Steen, executive director of the National Right to Life Committee. “While Americans may not remember the agency he heads, he will quickly become known as Obama’s rationing czar.”
Berwick has opined: “We can make a sensible social decision and say, ‘Well, at this point, to have access to a particular additional benefit (new drug or medical intervention) is so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds.” Sounds like denial of care to us.
Berwick’s medical views also fit in well with Obama’s stated goal of transforming America through the redistribution of wealth.
There’s opportunity here for the GOP. Karl Rove outlines.
During the last week, President Barack Obama doubled down on a losing political bet, further cementing the Democratic Party’s reputation as the champion of bigger deficits, higher spending and more government. He did so just as the public is crying out for lower deficits, less spending and less government. …
… To maximize their gains, Republicans must go beyond promising to slash Democratic spending and reverse the Obama agenda (as important as these are). They also need to offer a competing agenda for increasing jobs and prosperity, and outline the concrete steps they will take to get back on the track for economic growth.
Republicans have a receptive audience: Americans overwhelmingly believe prosperity comes from entrepreneurs and free enterprise, not government. Republicans must emphasize that they stand for small and medium-size business—and stand foursquare against crony capitalists who seek advantage by partnering with big government. …
Normally, pieces on world affairs come first in Pickings. But, we got caught up in the Dems hat trick of governing against the will of the people. So let’s look at the Middle East where Rick Richman posts on a slam on Obama’s Israeli policy from a former head of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, thinks that whoever has been responsible for the Obama administration’s Middle East policy should be fired. He runs through the possibilities — Emanuel, Axelrod, Mitchell, Clinton, Jones — but realizes the problem may go higher:
“The more we find out about who makes decisions in the White House on every subject from nuclear weapons to coloring of Easter eggs, it turns out to be the man in the Oval Office himself. He’s the expert. He’s the decider. He invites everyone to state his or her piece or peace, then he tells them what to do — and seemingly without question, they do his bidding.”
Gelb writes that Obama entered office with a “near-zero base of foreign-policy knowledge and no experience in the Middle East,” demanded a pre-negotiation halt to West Bank construction, to which “no Israeli leader, even a dovish one” would ever agree, adopted the “brilliant tactic” of publicly humiliating Israel’s prime minister (not even shaking his hand at the end of the prior meeting), and “only made matters worse” this week by appearing as if he were cowed by domestic politics into treating Netanyahu well. …
Here’s Leslie Gelb’s piece from the Daily Beast. Maybe Obama’s Mid-East advisor is Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Whoever advised President Obama to flay Israel publicly until this week should be fired. Only advisers with no experience in dealing with Israel could have believed that Israeli leaders like Prime Minister Netanyahu would bow to public attacks.
And whoever advised Mr. Obama to kneel rhetorically to Mr. Netanyahu in public on Tuesday should also be fired. The only thing accomplished by this embarrassing tactic was to put Israel in a position to call the shots on Mideast policy for the rest of Obama’s first term.
Were the culprits the non-foreign policy White House intimates – chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and political honcho David Axelrod? Axelrod knows nothing about this, and worse, Emanuel thinks he does because he lived in Israel. Was George Mitchell, the president’s Mideast negotiator, the brains behind the foolishness? Surely, he’s had enough experience working with Israelis to know better. Did General James Jones, the National Security Adviser, remain silent, again? And of course, where was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? Strangely for someone so adept at pleasing Israel’s constituents in America, she spent a lot of time this past year publicly beating up on Israeli leaders. Has she been led astray by the pro-Arab contingent of the State Department?
Or is the guilty party none other than President Obama himself? …
After the third white-wash of climategate, Phil Jones gets reinstated as head of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University. Gerald Warner says, “No mind, the world knows man-made global warming is a fraud.”
“Move along now, please… Nothing to see here…” was the predictable burden of Sir Muir Russell’s investigation into Climategate. Are we surprised? Any other conclusion would have made world headlines as a first for the climate change establishment. This is the third Climategate whitewash job and it would be tempting to see it as just as futile as its predecessors. That, however, would be to underrate its value to the sceptic cause, which is considerable.
This is because Russell’s “Not Guilty” verdict has been seized upon as an excuse to reinstate Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia CRU, this time as Director of Research. That is very good news. It spells out to the world that the climate clique looks after its own; that there is no more a culture of accountability and job forfeiture for controversial conduct in AGW circles than there is in parliamentary ones; that it is business as usual for Phil and his merry men. Or, to put it more bluntly, the brand remains toxic.
Apart from Michael “Hockeystick” Mann, there is no name more calculated to provoke cynical smiles in every inhabited quarter of the globe than that of Phil Jones. The dogs in the street in Ulan Bator know that he and his cronies defied FOI requests and asked for e-mails to be deleted and that people only do that if they have something to hide. …