by hilzoy
Via Kevin Drum, a truly depressing story in the well-known leftist Wall Street Journal:
“Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month.
Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. And the departing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.), has been demanding that the Democrat-crafted 2008 budget absorb most of the $13 billion in costs incurred from a decision now to protect physician reimbursements under Medicare, the federal health-care program for the elderly and disabled.
The unstated goal is to disrupt the Democratic agenda and make it harder for the new majority to meet its promise to reinstitute “pay-as-you-go” budget rules, under which new costs or tax cuts must be offset to protect the deficit from growing. (…)
But with Mr. Hastert dismantling his office, House Republicans appear to be operating in a post-election leadership vacuum. The White House is watching with alarm, as are many Senate Republicans, who have a greater stake than the House in maintaining relations with Democrats.
“There are individuals who want to blow up the tracks, and there are more of those individuals in the House,” said one Senate leadership aide.
The collapse of the appropriations process will be felt soon in the Justice and Commerce departments, food-safety agencies and veterans’ health care. “It’s not just a mess. It’s a mountainous mess,” complained Wisconsin Rep. David Obey, the next House Appropriations Committee chairman. (…)
With Congress turning off the lights this week, there seems no chance of saving the appropriations process. Instead, most of the government will remain on a stopgap bill through Feb. 15, and in kicking this can down the road, the Republican leadership has no idea where it will stop rolling. (…)
The stopgap resolution, which the House expects to take up today, allows no growth above 2006 spending, and as a rule, any spending cuts from 2006 levels voted by the House this past summer prevail. On balance, annual funding is about $6 billion less than the president’s budget request — without always reflecting his priorities.
In the course of the House floor debate, for example, general administration funds for the Justice Department were cut to $35.4 million, less than half the 2006 funding level and a nearly 70% cut from the president’s request. House members were gambling then that at least some of the money could be restored in final talks with the Senate, but since the appropriations process has collapsed, those talks never took place, and the Justice Department must live with the results.
Mr. Portman will have greater discretion to apportion funds to deal with the crisis. But the gaps are too big in some cases to easily work around. Food-safety inspections face a $17 million shortfall by Feb 15. Veterans medical care will be funded at an annual rate $3.1 billion less than most of Congress agrees is needed, and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R., Texas) is demanding changes in the stopgap bill to recognize this shortfall.”
That’s what I love about the House Republicans: their commitment to core American values like personal responsibility. Heaven knows they aren’t the sorts of people who would leave veterans’ medical care underfunded in the middle of a war, or slash the Justice Department’s funding in half as a bargaining ploy and then forget to put it back. Not them. Oh no.
Still, at least they do believe in hard work:
“Forget the minimum wage. Or outsourcing jobs overseas. The labor issue most on the minds of members of Congress yesterday was their own: They will have to work five days a week starting in January.
The horror.
Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, the Maryland Democrat who will become House majority leader and is writing the schedule for the next Congress, said members should expect longer hours than the brief week they have grown accustomed to. (…)
“Keeping us up here eats away at families,” said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who typically flies home on Thursdays and returns to Washington on Tuesdays. “Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families — that’s what this says.””
I can’t wait to bring that up the next time some Congressional Republican claims that employers don’t need to pay overtime, or that working parents don’t need sick leave. “They’re already working a five day week, fully 250% of what a family can endure!!“, I will exclaim. Unfortunately, the House Republicans probably don’t care any more for consistency than they do for responsibility, diligence, or giving us taxpayers our money’s worth.
Can we have our grownup politicians back now, please?
It seems to me there’s one fairly simple answer. Draw up a list of the biggest subsidies, giveaways and tax lists to Republican interest groups and make sure weveryone knows those will be the first places hit if the budget needs balancing – and then do it.
Can we have our grownup politicians back now, please?
I would settle for reasonably responsible teenagers.
Like Kevin Drum, I’m eagerly waiting for those pro-family GOP Representatives to mandate a three-day work week for the rest of us.
Also, hilzoy: stop telling the Republicans to not not pass bills. Way to be the Party of No; don’t you have any positive ideas?
That’s what I love about the House Republicans
*tweet*
gratuitous generalization. you really should’ve listed, by name, each Republican House member that offended you, with a detailed list of his/her specific offenses. otherwise, this whole post is deeply offensive to me and everyone else who demands that you write like a lawyer.
Thanks for writing about this.
Contemptible government-hating punks come to Washington in 1994 and now leave unchanged, with the exception, natch, of the silk lining their pockets. To call them children is to molest the concept of childhood.
I’m so glad you included the Kingston quote. This guy is a frequent contributor to Bizarro World, otherwise known as the Anbar Province of American politics.
So, what is he admitting by claiming that “Marriages suffer”? Has he been whoring around without using protection? Is his wife lonely? Does she need some tender-loving earmarks? Can’t she trust him to bring home the bacon? Has he been flirting too much with Phyllis Schafly, Michelle Malkin, and Jack Abramoff? Why are these folks’ families so fragile? Don’t their vows and committments mean anything to them? For “better or worse” didn’t include screwing up the domestic and foreign policies of the greatest Nation on Earth?
Self-righteous, whining, incompetent, war-loving, adulterous, unAmerican, corrupt, terror-loving aliens, the lot of them.
Investigate them, harass them, draft their kids and grandkids and parachute them into Iraq. Let them keep their precious guns for the effort. Cut their funding as soon as they reach the Green Zone. In fact, designate wherever they live in the States as a Green Zone. If they try and come back to Washington, Iraqify the roads to the airports, bus stations, and train depots.
Send me a line-item veto pen. The pavement leading to their driveways, which I helped pay for, will be jackhammered out. If they camp in a National Park campground, I’ll privatize it in the middle of the night and kick their sorry butts back down the trail and off my land. The pages may put their pants back on and stay till morning as a sop to victims’ rights. Pollute the water coming out their taps and collect the carbon dioxide coming out their lungs and sell it back to them to balance the budget.
Give them each an autographed hard-bound copy of “Atlas Shrugged”, a very heavy desk and an office on what’s left of the polar ice caps. Mandate a seven-day workweek. Then rev up those power plants and Hummers because I think I can get into some extreme global warming. Maybe Rand’s wooden characters will float.
Put a sculpture of the lot of them in a glass case in the Smithsonian, then defund that entire wing of the place and donate the sculpture to France, where it will stand in a harbor somewhere, their collective Gingrich middle finger raised toward the U.S. Government and an inscription that reads:
“Send us your spoiled, your rotten, your conniving, your splenetic, your dyspeptic, your preposterous, your craven, your creatively destroyed.”
O.K. I’m done for the day.
P.S. Any and all resemblance to rank and file Republicans here, or in my neighborhood, or in my family, is wholly unintended and accidental. Kingston is Kingston only. Gingrich is Gingrich only. The “lot of them” includes only elected officials and political appointees, not to mention most Texans, with the exception of Bob McManus. The rest might be very nice people but why take a chance and resurrect political correctness at this late date? The name DaveC. has not been used in this rant, for good reason. Well, a pretty good reason. Actually, only a barely acceptable reason having to do with an abandoned Valiant and a cold zipper. Who cannot be charmed by that? 😉
This guy is a frequent contributor to Bizarro World, otherwise known as the Anbar Province of American politics.
That. Is. Awesome.
Oh, and John Thullen is shrill.
A reader writing in to TPM has an even more pointed response to Kingston’s sniveling: “How about the thousands of military marriages that have ended because of husbands and wives being deployed for a year multiple times?”
John: even by your normal, amazingly high standards, this is wonderful:
“Maybe Rand’s wooden characters will float.”
I will be giggling for weeks.
Bush gets to play in this game with the Democrats starting in January. Perhaps the goal is to utterly demoralize and depress the new congress and the base. He will veto everything not to his liking. We have see this month that his party will do anything, anything and Bush will not be the responsible one.
So will Democrats completely cave? Or shut down and declare war? I don’t know.