Lawmaker News

There are probably more kinds of stupid, but two especially come to mind: stupid of the head, like Chuck Hagel’s visions of Israel, and stupid of the heart, like Mark Sanford's. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said recently that the Republican Party is in danger of becoming the “stupid party.” (Possibly sinfully, irretrievably stupid: See Bill O’Reilly’s upcoming book, Killing Jesus.) 

Sanford’s sin is not of the head, but another place. Press today say that Sanford will be running for office again in spite of his recent “peccadilloes” — not the word I would have chosen. He feels reformed enough to reenter politics. He should be allowed back into the world. Because before there was a Tea Party and before Texas Gov. Rick Perry chanted “states’ rights, states’ rights, states’ rights” at the Alamo, there was one man standing alone in opposition: South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

Don’t blame Ted Cruz, he’s only doing what he said he would do if elected.

The wave of national media attention surrounding the freshman senator late last week followed a traditional groupthink pattern.  First it was a Reuters national wire story early in the week, then the Politico story late Thursday, The New York Times story Friday, alongside columns by Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post and Frank Bruni in the Times, and a segment on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Friday.

The hearings to consider the nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) began with two great statesmen endorsing Hagel and ended with a freshman Republican senator embarrassing his state and the Armed Services Committee with a performance that illustrates why Republicans have lost three of the last four national elections and why Texas Democrats have good odds of a historic revival.

I was not planning on writing any more pundit blogs this week, but I do have a brief comment about Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) outburst at the Benghazi hearing with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Paul suggesting he would have fired Clinton is like the Little League coach suggesting he would have fired Babe Ruth. I expect Hillary Clinton to run for and win the presidency, and I very much hope Paul runs against her. If he does, Hillary Rodham Clinton will pulverize Rand Paul into outer space.

It is good that our nation is engaging in a necessary discussion on the importance of curbing gun violence. It is critical to realize that there is no single solution and all sides will need to give. If we can't reach an agreement on an issue as fundamental as this, we may have reached a point in our nation where we will never agree on anything. That would indeed be tragic.

This debate provides a wonderful opportunity to understand the art of compromise. We must first realize what is important to both sides. The gun lobbyists are concerned about the Second Amendment and fear an overreaching and more powerful government that could more easily become a dictatorship if the populace is disarmed. The other side is most concerned about unbalanced or angry people having possession of dangerous weapons.

“You’ve got to make concessions; you’ve got to compromise,” said Wolf Blitzer in that solicitous MSM salon of salons named like muscle-bound Mike of “Jersey Shore,” “The Situation Room.” He was lecturing the brand-new senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, on the same day Cruz was sworn in to the Senate. Telling him how to act. Welcoming him into the big leagues. “If you’re just going to come into Washington and say, ‘Do it my way or the highway,’ you’re not going to get anywhere.”

Don't miss the excellent story by Bob Cusack and Molly K. Hooper in The Hill about the latest intrigues involving House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

One wonders if the House members’ dining room might need to hire a food taster to protect certain Republicans from other Republicans. Suffice it to say that whatever the deep background story, I worked for House leaders under three Speakers, and if any Democrat had acted toward then-Speaker Tip O'Neill the way Cantor "helped" Boehner, he would have found his House office space moved to Wasilla, Alaska. If any Democrat had "helped" then-Speaker Jim Wright the way Cantor "helped" Boehner, the Longworth House Office Building would have secured a new elevator operator, even if the new elevator operator was a former majority leader. I will confess that on one occasion Wright offered this option to yours truly, unless yours truly "got on the program" ASAP (as he said it, his pen was menacingly pointed an inch from my eye!).

After a fierce response to House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) decision to delay consideration of relief legislation for victims of Hurricane Sandy, the House went ahead and voted Friday on the bill to raise the borrowing authority of the National Flood Insurance Program so it could continue paying the 140,000 claims it has received but has yet to complete. What the vote showed, despite its easy passage 354-67, was just how emergencies are not only no longer bipartisan, but how they are dividing conservatives.

The Senate vote last night was a touchstone event, a benchmark, if you will, to mark the progress of history. It is, in that regard, much like the Senate vote to approve George W. Bush’s trillion-dollar vengeance assault on Iraq to bag Saddam — and in retrospect it is hard to see any other purpose for that adventure. But the Senate vote to approve the invasion in October 2002, told us who was brave when it was time to be brave and those lions of the Senate, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden, who approved, then disapproved, were not. It has been zero-sum, no-fault politics ever since; we continue to vote them in and advance them to greater leadership — even after astonishing incompetence and systemic state failures in the Middle East — because we are familiar with them, because they have been around so long, because we have become a blindly partisanized nation, because we don't really care. But we are at a sea change and two to watch at the quiet turning of the tides today are Rand Paul and Mike Lee, senators from Kentucky and Utah, who voted against the fateful "fiscal cliff" agenda last night. The century might start this year with them.

There was an agonizing irony to the frenzy on Capitol Hill yesterday as the late Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda and GOP leaders scurried about trying unsuccessfully to scrounge up the votes to pass a bill to avoid the fiscal cliff. Inouye, a pillar of patience and practicality, represents a time gone by — when Congress wouldn't think of coming so close to an avoidable economic disaster because members feared losing their jobs in primary challenges. Sure, some Republicans did not, and refused to budge on their tax-lowering principles to vote for a tax increase for those making more than $1 million per year simply because they were opposed, but many members conceded their vote could not pass muster in safe GOP districts with the purists in the grass roots who would surely come after them.