Lawmaker News

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.

It had been 31 years since a bunch of American businessmen had organized a coup against the monarchy that had ruled Hawaii for generations when Daniel Inouye was born. His parents came from Japan, and along with Korean and Chinese workers, the Japanese had come to work on the Sugar plantations. That same year, Congress passed a law banning further immigration from Japan to Hawaii or anywhere else in the United States.

In 1924, on the mainland, Calvin Coolidge was President and Republicans had majorities in both the House and the Senate. It was the era when a President could get away with saying little and doing even less, and Congress basically let the good times roll.

In my latest column, “Les GOP Misérables,” I wrote that the GOP obsession with pursuing losing issues (e.g., cutting Medicare and Social Security) has led to recent defeats and will lead to more. The right might love it when Republicans say Obama "does not need the left,” but on Social Security and Medicare the Democrats and the left win big. Republicans and the right lose big. This is the ace in the hole for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during the fiscal-cliff negotiations:

The chessboard is now being arranged in a way in which House Republicans will vote to cut Medicare and Social Security while their Democratic challengers in the next election will not.

The separation of powers is an essential element of our constitutional structure. It is designed to limit aggregation of power at the federal level at the expense of the people and to foster competition and a balancing mechanism among the three branches of government: the legislative, executive and judiciary.

Here is how it works: When Congress objects to an action (or inaction) by the executive, it can pass a law or withhold or increase an appropriation; the president can veto a bill passed by the Congress; Congress can, with a two-thirds vote, override the president’s veto; the Supreme Court can hold a law passed by Congress and signed by the president unconstitutional; Congress can pass, and the president sign, a new law overriding the court’s decision; and so on and so forth.

Mike Simpson is thinking big.
 
Barack Obama is thinking small.
 
Simpson, an Idaho Republican, recently spearheaded a bipartisan letter in the House urging negotiators to go big when dealing with the financial cliff. Mike is no Johnny-come-lately in his thoughts. He urged the same thing of the so-called supercommittee last year, and his efforts landed him a primary opponent.

Tea Party hero Sen. Jim DeMint, who jolted Washington Thursday with the news he would leave to head the conservative Heritage Foundation, has found his rightful home. The U.S. Senate was just not his cup of tea. For a man who said he would rather have 30 pure conservatives in the Republican minority in the Senate that 60 moderates to give the party a majority, it is clear that — having not found his untainted minority, or an uncompromised majority — that the outside is where he belongs.

I am a lifelong, proud Democrat. But, even though I have a lot of friends who are Republicans, I’m glad I’m not a member of today’s Republican Party. Because today’s Republican Party is just too damned mean.

Just look what they did to Bob Dole yesterday. Over the years, Dole’s one of the Republicans I’ve admired the most and grown close to. He’s an American war hero. He’s a true patriot. He was an outstanding senator from Kansas. He was a very fair and effective majority leader of the Senate. He’s a wonderful, warm, funny human being. But what his fellow Republicans did to him yesterday is shameful.