Tag Archives: US Senate

national news

Wondering if term limits will return to debate stage

With all the hoo-hah in Washington about the battle of ideologies — conservative vs. liberal — I am wondering about the fate of the debate over term limits.

In 1994, Republicans led by U.S. Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, campaigned successfully on the Contract With America platform that included a silly proposition: to limit the terms of members of Congress.

Voters seemed to buy into the notion that we ought to place mandatory limits on the time House members and senators can serve. After all, we limit the president to two elected terms, thanks to the 22nd Amendment. Why not demand the same thing of Congress members?

Well, the idea hasn’t gone anywhere. It requires an amendment to the Constitution. Referring an amendment to the states for their ratification requires a two-thirds vote in both congressional chambers. Term limits proposals haven’t made the grade.

Term limits is primarily a Republican-led initiative. Democrats have dug in against the idea, saying correctly that “we already have term limits. We call them ‘elections.'”

I don’t favor mandatory limits. Indeed, there has been a significant churn of House members and senators already without the mandated limits. The new Congress comprises roughly a membership that includes roughly 25 percent of first-time officeholders. That ain’t bad, man!

Sure, there are deep-rooted incumbents from both parties who make legislating their life’s calling. However, I only can refer back to their constituents: If these lawmakers are doing a poor job, their constituents have it within their power to boot them out; if the constituents are happy with their lawmakers’ performance, they are entitled to keep them on the job.

Of course, we don’t hear much from the nation’s Republican in Chief, the president of the United States, about term limits. He’s too busy “making America great again” and fighting for The Wall. He can’t be bothered with anything as mundane and pedestrian as establishing limits for the amount of time lawmakers can serve.

But where are the GOP fire starters? Have they lost their interest? Or their nerve?

I’m fine with the idea remaining dormant. Just wondering whether it’s died a much-needed death.

national news

McConnell now seeks ‘bipartanship’?

Mitch McConnell’s lack of self-awareness takes my breath away.

The U.S. Senate majority leader has penned an op-ed in the Washington Post that demands that congressional Democrats “work with us” instead of putting “partisan politics ahead of country.”

Interesting, yes? You bet it is!

Let’s review part of the record for just a brief moment.

  • McConnell once declared his intention to make Barack H. Obama a “one-term president.” In fact, he said it would be his No. 1 priority while leading the Senate Republican caucus.
  • He has remained shamefully silent about Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
  • This is my favorite: McConnell said that he would not allow President Obama to nominate anyone to replace the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He made that proclamation mere hours after Justice Scalia died in Texas. Obama nominated Merrick Garland to succeed Scalia, but McConnell would not allow even a hearing to examine Garland’s exemplary judicial credentials. Obama was in the final full year of the presidency and McConnell gambled — successfully, it turned out — on the hope that a Republican would win the 2016 presidential election.

This Senate Republican leader now accuses Democrats of “playing politics” over The Wall and causing the partial shutdown of the federal government.

Astonishing. I need to catch my breath.

national news

Is there a ‘woodshed’ in Rep. Tlaib’s future?

Wouldn’t you know it? A rookie member of the U.S. House of Representatives blurts out a profane declaration, about how House Democrats are going to “impeach the mother***er” and fellow Democrats start expressing their anger at this upstart.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan has made her mark immediately. It’s not a pretty mark. She was seeking to fire up a crowd of progressive activists when she offered the foul-mouthed pledge to impeach Donald J. Trump.

Democrats getting angry

Other Democrats are upset that Tlaib has overturned their efforts to orchestrate an orderly transition to power in the House, now that they are in the majority. They don’t want to rush into what might turn out to be a foolish act if they seek impeachment before knowing all the facts related to the myriad issues at hand.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is expected to file his report soon on his probe into “The Russia Thing.” Loudmouths like Tlaib are getting way ahead of themselves.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who calls impeachment a “last resort” — might need to escort the young freshman lawmaker to the proverbial “woodshed” for a woman-to-woman chat about how things get done in the People’s House. She ought to rethink her hands-off approach to Democratic caucus members’ fiery rhetoric.

It reminds of a time many years ago when a whipper-snapper U.S. senator named Rick Santorum sought to challenge one of the Senate’s elders about legislating.

The late Sen. Mark Hatfield, an Oregon Republican, chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee. He decided to vote against a defense bill to pay for a new nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Corpus Christi. Why the objection? Hatfield was a deeply religious man and he didn’t like the idea of a weapon of war carrying a name that translated from the Latin means “Body of Christ.” Santorum, a newly elected Republican from Pennsylvania, raised a stink about it and sought to have Hatfield removed from his key committee chairmanship.

One of the GOP Senate elders, Bob Dole of Kansas, took Santorum aside and said, in effect, “Young man, don’t even think about challenging Mark Hatfield.”

Santorum backed off.

There ought to be a similar scolding in Rep. Tlaib’s future as well.

national news

Young Dem rookies getting way ahead of themselves

Hold on, you young’ns who just took office in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Yeah, I’m talking to you rookie Democrats who are hollering about impeaching Donald J. Trump. You want to impeach the president already? Before the special counsel, Robert Mueller, releases his findings?

Don’t get ahead of yourself. In fact, listen to your congressional Democratic elders. They know a whole lot more about the process than you do.Ā House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is shying away from impeachment talk. Yes, she said it’s “possible” that Trump might be indicted, even while he still serves as president. She’s not jumping on the impeach Trump bandwagon now, however.

You see, no matter how y’all are able to cobble together a simple House majority that can impeach the president — for unspecified “high crimes and misdemeanors” — you’ve got this problem in the Senate.Ā Trump would go on trial. A conviction requires a two-thirds vote. That’s 67 out of 100. Spoiler alert: The Republicans still occupy more Senate seats than Democrats. What’s more, impeachment is the most partisan political move that members of Congress can initiate. It isn’t a legal proceeding.

My advice to the House Democratic rookies is to wait for Mueller to finish his work. He’s been digging, scouring, poring over documents, evidence and mountains of other information gleaned from interviews with those close to the president.

It might be that Mueller delivers the goods relating to conspiracy, obstruction of justice, maybe even collusion with the Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Or . . . he might come up empty.

Wait for the man to finish!

national news

‘It would make me look foolish’

A statement attributed to Donald Trump screams loudly to us at a couple of levels.

The president said that accepting a deal to reopen the entire federal government from U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer would “make me look foolish.”

I’ll set aside the snickering that developed at the idea that the president long ago began looking “foolish” by uttering the things he says and doing the things he does.

The idea of negotiating a deal with House and Senate Democrats is not a “foolish” gesture. Brokering such a deal would be the result of compromise, which is an essential element of good, smart and effective governance.

As I heard Speaker Pelosi today when she took the gavel from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, I thought I heard her say she planned to return a Republican-sponsored and endorsed measure to the Senate; she intends to force senators to vote on a measure they already have approved and which the president pledged initially to sign into law.

You know what happened. When the president made that pledge, which included agreeing to sign a bill that didn’t provide money for The Wall, right-wing talkers went nuts. They accused him of betraying the GOP base. Hearing that, Trump back-pedaled. He reversed himself. He stuck a shiv in the back of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Vice President Mike Pence, both of whom said the president would support the spending bill that passed the Senate by a virtually unanimous vote.

Foolish? Does that make Donald Trump look foolish? Yeah. It does.

The bigger issue is whether he’s willing to wheel and deal with Democrats.

Pelosi said she wants senators to re-endorse the measure they already have backed. The pressure now is on them and on the president.

Negotiation is part of legislating. It’s part of governing. It is the essence of how you move the country forward.Ā Refusing to consider a compromise is the prescription for looking “foolish.”

environmental news

Let’s confront the ‘existential threat’: climate change

Newly installed U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi laid a number of key issues on the line today moments after taking the gavel.

One of them is what she described as the most dangerous “existential threat” facing the nation: climate change.

Pelosi pledged to bring climate change back to the front of the nation’s attention, to the top of our national mind.

It has been pushed aside by Republicans who formerly ran the House, by those who continue to run the Senate and by the individual who sits in the Oval Office, Donald Trump, the president of the United States.

Trump has called climate change — formerly known colloquially as “global warming” — a “hoax.” His allies in Congress have bought into the Trump mantra. The president selected a key climate change denier, Scott Pruitt, to run the Environmental Protection Agency; another such denier, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, is now the energy secretary; still another denier, Ryan Zinke, has just left his post as interior secretary.

Pelosi clearly understands what most Americans understand, that Earth’s climate is changing and the change is due largely because of massive amounts of carbon emissions being thrown into the atmosphere. That phenomenon, coupled with deforestation, is warming the planet’s temperature; the polar ice caps are melting; sea levels are rising; communities along our seas, gulfs and oceans are being placed in dire peril — not to mention what it’s doing to wildlife habitat.

Pelosi pledged today to return climate change to the front of the line. I wish her well. Whether this discussion produces legislation and a restoration of regulations aimed at curbing those emissions remain to be seen. The GOP still runs the Senate. The Republican president is still in office.

Whatever it is worth, and I hope it’s worth more than it might seem, Pelosi has the public on her side. Whether that’s enough to, um, turn the tide fills me with a bit of hope that this nation might take a proactive stance against this existential threat.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2017/11/government-endorses-notion-that-humans-cause-climate-change/

national news

Get ready for plenty of congressional push back

I am willing to concede that I would feel differently if we had a president I supported, someone whose policy I endorsed. That’s not the case with Donald J. Trump.

Having made that declaration, I look forward to the president getting some much-needed push back from half of the legislative branch of the federal government.

The U.S. House of Representatives will flip from Republican to Democratic control in a couple of days. Nancy Pelosi will become the next speaker of the House. Democrats will ascend to committee chairmanships. They, not the GOP, will control the legislative flow. Democrats’ voices will be heard more clearly and plainly than Republicans’ voices on Capitol Hill.

What does this mean for the president? It means he will be unable to dictate to the House which bills to introduce. It means he faces the likelihood of subpoenas being issued for his key aides, perhaps Cabinet officials — maybe even a member or two of his immediately family. They’ll be summoned to testify before House committees on a whole array of issues that have bedeviled the Trump administration since it took office nearly two years ago.

I refer, of course, to “The Russia Thing.”

The House’s first order of business will be to push the Trump administration and their Senate colleagues — who still are run by the GOP — to find a way out of this ridiculous stalemate, the one that has shut down part of the government. Too many families, roughly 800,000 or so of them, have been deprived of income during the Christmas holiday. Just as importantly, too many families have been denied access to key government services to which they entitled.

Donald Trump entered the political world after living in an environment where he called the shots. He didn’t have that luxury even when he and his fellow Republicans controlled the entire federal government.

He really won’t have it now that Democrats take control of the House of Representatives.

The president is entering a new — and for him, uncharted — world when the next Congress takes its oath office.

So are the rest of us. Thank goodness.

national news

Wishing the POTUS . . . luck in the new year

The new year is at hand. 2019 promises to be a doozy. Where it all goes remains anyone’s guess.

Of course I refer to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the president of the United States. Mueller reportedly is getting ready to wrap it up and will present his findings to Congress and, hopefully, to the public.

No one knows what’s in the guts of his report. I do have this sense that it is going to present commentators, bloggers, pundits, editorial writers, columnists and just plain folks on all sides plenty of grist.

Whether it clears Trump of any misdeeds regarding his campaign and the Russians who interfered with our election or whether it implicates the president directly of wrong doing, the fecal matters is going to hit the fan.

Democrats are going to take the gavel in the U.S. House of Representatives later this week. Republicans will retain control of the U.S. Senate. Donald Trump will keep his fingers tightly on his Twitter buttons.

Most eyes will focus on how the Democrats respond to regaining control of one legislative chamber. Will they unleash the hounds on Trump? Will they churn out more subpoenas than we can count? Will they launch impeachment proceedings the moment Mueller’s report goes public? Will they even wait for Mueller’s report?

I would not want to be Donald Trump at this moment, not that I ever wanted to be Trump ever at any time!

The new year is going to present him with untold and unprecedented challenges. A guy who spent his entire adult life seeking to be master of his own destiny now finds himself at the mercy of others. Congress will be calling a lot of the shots now, once Robert Mueller finishes his examination and hands over his findings.

My feelings about the president are well-known to readers of this blog. I won’t waste my energy wishing him well.

I am left merely to wish him “luck” as he enters the new year along with the rest of us. It looks as though we’re headed for a rockin’ and rollin’ ride.

 

national news, political news

Why, indeed, is she ‘the thing’?

I have to agree with lame-duck Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, who wonders about the meteoric rise to super-political stardom of a young member of Congress — who hasn’t even taken office yet!

The object of McCaskill’s curiosity is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old self-described socialist from New York. McCaskill told CNN, “I’m a little confused why she’s the thing.” Ocasio-Cortez took umbrage at being called “the thing.” Well, she ought to settle down and get ready to take on some major challenges while representing the 14th Congressional District of New York.

McCaskill also referred to Ocasio-Cortez as some sort of “shiny object.” And yes . . . the rookie congresswoman took offense at that, too.

McCaskill, who lost her bid for re-election this past month, was speaking metaphorically. The Missouri lawmaker has been known for having a bit of a tart tongue during her years in the Senate. I am quite sure she didn’t intend to denigrate Ocasio-Cortez when describing her.

As for her “confusion” over the representative-elect’s rapid rise, I have to say I harbor some inherent suspicion of politicians who have this way of hogging the spotlight. They become media favorites — and then feed off of that favoritism for the sake of grabbing headlines and elevating their profiles. I can think of several such pols: Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas comes to mind; the guy who almost beat him this year, Democrat Beto O’Rourke does, too.

I fear that Rep.-elect Ocasio-Cortez is going to assume a dubious distinction as she takes her seat a few days from now among the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. She will become the punch line in a gag that talks about the “most dangerous place in Washington is the space between a TV camera and . . . ”

Well, you get the idea.

I hope Ocasio-CortezĀ  does a good job representing her constituents. I only would caution the young woman to think of them first as she learns to navigate her way around Capitol Hill.

national news

Not going to ‘feel the Bern,’ Sen. Sanders

I am baffled as to why U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders even is in the conversation about whether he should run for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

I want to make two quick points: He ran for the 2016 party nomination and lost it to Hillary Rodham Clinton. His platform this time around seems to mirror the mantra he recited in 2016 — which is that too few people control too much wealth. This self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” wants to redistribute the wealth to more of us. I guess I’m too much of a capitalist to buy into that notion.

My second point? Sanders isn’t even a Democrat. He ran for the U.S. Senate from Vermont as an independent. He doesn’t belong to a political party, although he does caucus with the Senate Democrats. He votes with them almost without fail. Still, he isn’t a Democrat.

So why is this guy talking about running again for the Democratic Party presidential nomination?

Moreover, why aren’t the media calling him out more vigorously on the phony association he has with a political party to which he doesn’t even belong?

Don’t run, Bernie. Leave the political stage to other politicians who have more to say than you do.