Politics

What lies before us is not the defeat of Speaker Boehner’s so-called Plan B — a dead on arrival proposal on the impending fiscal cliff with no bipartisan support — but instead the culmination of the radicalization of the Republican Party.

What is the evidence?

When CODEPINK, MoveOn and representatives of other organizations marched into Senator Harry Reid’s D.C. office on Tuesday, December 18, they wanted a simple answer to a simple question: Does the Senator support a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity clips, such as the legislation proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein and supported by President Obama and Vice President Biden? It would seem like a no-brainer for the Senate majority leader to fall in line with the leadership of his party in backing a modest bill that would ban the sale of weapons that are only good for mass murder. Unfortunately, Reid’s senior policy advisor Kasey Gillette was unable to give an answer.

Have you noticed the pattern?  A private company cuts corners on risk control; a terrible disaster occurs; and then politicians and the public blame . . . the U.S. regulatory system.

The latest example: a Massachusetts drug compounding pharmacy that contaminated vials of steroids and caused hundreds of cases of fungal meningitis, including dozens of deaths. Even while the Food and Drug Administration was still responding to the serious public health threat, the FDA Commissioner had to answer angry questions from members of Congress. Representative Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) told Commissioner Margaret Hamburg that the meningitis outbreak “was a complete and utter failure on the part of your agency.”

The stumbling path to the fiscal cliff reveals a deep divide between elected officials and the American people.
   
All around the nation, economic shoots of recovery were sprouting at year end: the housing market, jobs and consumer spending. U.S. companies hold $1.74 trillion in cash and other liquid assets, which if invested, could advance a sustained recovery.

Meanwhile, these economic sprouts are fragile, given the headwinds facing the world economy: declining growth in India and China, Japan is teetering on another bout of deflation and the European economy remains in the doldrums. 

This holiday season, as we enjoy time with our families and loved ones, let’s all take a moment to say a prayer for those in Newtown, Connecticut. In difficult times like these, it’s human nature to search for causation and look for someone or something to blame, but we may never be able to explain the senseless tragedy that occurred last Friday. What we can do, however, is let Newtown know that we are a nation united in our mourning for the victims of Friday’s act of violence and that we are sending our thoughts, prayers and well-wishes to their town. Pam and I will continue to remember Newtown as we celebrate Christmas, and we will, like so many around the country, hold our granddaughters Kathryn and Caroline a little tighter this year.

In just the last month, we’ve seen three high-profile congressional exits announced, forcing states to incur additional expenses for special elections and constituents to make do with decreased services throughout the transition.
 
In the cases of Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.), Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.), and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), it is hard to see these members’ actions as anything but selfish. Unless we want to see a greater number walk away — mostly in search of a big payday — congressional leadership and voters should condemn this practice.

When the "Watergate Babies," the largest class of freshman Democrats ever elected to the U.S. House, arrived in late 1974, we wasted no time attacking the seniority system we had campaigned against.
 
We had the votes to throw out three powerful, veteran chairmen, fellow Democrats, whom we felt had stayed too long. We voted in younger and more reform-minded replacements. For the first time, long-standing chairmen, with "till-death-do-us-part" tenure, had to face a vote of "Yes" or "No" to keep their position.
 
Jack Brooks of Texas wasn't one of them. He had just taken over the chairmanship of the House Government Operations Committee. He was a protégé of the former powerful Speaker, Sam Rayburn. We remembered him in that famous sad photo standing behind the blood-stained Jackie Kennedy when his fellow Texan, Lyndon Johnson, was sworn in as president.

In Washington, non-partisan, independent advice is fast becoming as elusive as dark matter.
 
Given his track record of staunch partisanship, Sen. Jim DeMint’s recent decision to move to the Heritage Foundation calls the group’s claim to be a credible think tank into question. But this move is just part of a larger and more troubling trend in Washington: polarized politics unhinged from evidence-based analysis.

Tuesday was supposed to be the night Paul Ryan ended his brief association with Mitt Romney. Speaking at the Kemp Foundation dinner in his first major address since the Romney-Ryan ticket bombed on Election Day, Ryan was going to show that he was not Romney, clueless rich guy and adversary of the welfare state. He achieved that in substance, but it took political shifting of the kind his running mate embodied to do so.

Ryan broke new ground for himself by calling for a stronger safety net. Instead of emphasizing the middle class, as Marco Rubio did in his address there, he focused on the poor. He mentioned the word “poverty” 15 times in his 20-minute address. There may not have been a more appropriate place to do it than at a dinner in Jack Kemp’s honor. But it begs the question, where is Paul Ryan going now?

On Tuesday, Michigan became the nation’s 24th state, and the most unionized state, to enact right-to-work legislation, which prohibits employers and unions from negotiating “union security agreements.” Over twelve thousand protesters who had converged on the state capital in Lansing failed to dissuade Michigan’s Republican governor Rick Snyder from signing the anti-union legislation that will lower wages and worsen labor standards, but will do nothing to help the state’s economy or its workers.