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What has happened to David Dewhurst?

Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst has been bitten by the critter that has infested a growing segment of the Republican Party.

He wants Congress to impeach President Obama. Imagine that: A Texas Republican running for re-election to a powerful statewide office has weighed in with the call for a presidential impeachment.

http://www.texasobserver.org/david-dewhurst-calls-obamas-impeachment/

This is not the man whom Texans have elected several times to statewide office. Something has happened to him.

Oh, I forgot. He lost a U.S. Senate race last year after being considered the prohibitive favorite; he got outflanked on his right by Ted Cruz and more than likely vowed never to let that happen again.

Therefore, he’s now calling for the president’s impeachment.

On what grounds? He says Obama has exerted executive authority that go beyond the Constitution. He mentioned something about the Sept. 11, 2011 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that the White House knew from the moment the fire fight began that our officials needed help immediately, but failed to respond.

I used to think of David Dewhurst as a public official with an unparalleled work ethic. No one outworked this guy. He possesses an outstanding command of legislative detail. I thought that trait served him well as the Texas Senate’s presiding officer.

Now the climate has changed. Tea party activists have taken command of the stage. They’re hogging the spotlight. They are out for political blood. Dewhurst, once thought to be an “establishment Republican,” is now sounding as ferocious as his nemeses on the right.

Perhaps the most astounding aspect of his impeachment call is that, as he told The Texas Observer, he was speaking as a “private citizen.”

Listen up, Gov. Dewhurst: You are not a private citizen.

Something has happened to a once-serious public servant. I’m worried about him — and about the state he has been elected to lead.

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Even ‘our SOBs’ may need to get tossed

I’ve been thinking the past few days about my former congressman, the late Jack Brooks, a crusty Democrat who served Southeast Texas for more than four decades before getting beat in that landmark 1994 Republican sweep of Congress.

Jack used to refer to himself as Sweet Old Brooks, which translates into the initials SOB. He was proud of his irascible nature. In fact, Brooks embodied the saying of members of Congress that so-and-so “may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.”

Some polling has come out in recent days that suggests American voters may be more likely than at any time in memory to throw out their congressman or woman in the next election, largely because of the trumped-up drama that took us once more to the brink of defaulting on our financial obligations.

The faux drama ended late Wednesday when the Senate leadership cobbled together a deal to reopen part of the federal government and lift the debt ceiling so we can pay our bills.

The consequences of defaulting are quite chilling to consider. The financial markets would have collapsed, taking millions of Americans’ retirement accounts into the crapper.

Still, with that prospect hanging over Americans’ heads, a number of senators and House members voted against the deal to prevent the default. Who voted no? Among them were Texas’s two GOP senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz and my current Republican member of Congress, Mac Thornberry.

Thornberry said on TV tonight that he voted “no” because the deal didn’t solve any problems; it only postponed for a few months a situation that he thinks will repeat itself when the debt ceiling is set to expire once more.

I guess my question for the dissenters is this: How would you propose to solve all those problems at the last minute?

I’ll concede that the political system is badly broken. However, Thornberry, Cornyn and Cruz all are part of what ails it. They, of course, blame the other party — just as the other party blames them.

So, to fix the problem they proposed letting the government default on its debts, allowing the economy to crash, keeping federal employees furloughed and maintaining maximum dysfunction in our federal government. Reminds me of the old Vietnam War axiom of “destroying the village in order to save it.”

To think that some folks still wonder why Congress’s approval rating is in the sewer.

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Texas voter fraud: Is it a major problem?

Dan Branch wants to become Texas’s next attorney general and, by golly, the Republican state representative from Dallas says he’s going to get really tough on voter fraud.

I must ask, therefore: Is voter fraud a major problem in Texas? I am thinking it’s about as major an issue here as it is virtually everywhere else. Which means it isn’t that big a deal.

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2013/10/branch-vows-to-attack-voter-fraud-in-texas/

Branch vows to monitor groups that seek to “subvert” voter integrity; he would appoint a special counsel who would prosecute those accused of voter fraud; and he vows to defend the Texas voter ID law against “spurious” attempts by the Obama administration to overturn it.

I’m still a bit dubious about the need for a voter ID law in Texas, particularly since those who sing its praises contend that voter fraud has reached epidemic proportions here. I’m still awaiting evidence that voter fraud is rampant.

Roughly 8 million Texans voted in the 2012 presidential election. Has anyone produced evidence that voter fraud has become a major concern anywhere in the state? I haven’t heard of it.

Yes, the state’s political history is full of stories of dead people voting. Duval County in South Texas provides the best-known example of corpses rising from their graves to vote for Lyndon Johnson. That was a very long time ago.

The state’s population has exploded in the decades since that era. The number of people voting in elections has boomed. Have we seen an accompanying explosion in cases of vote fraud? No.

Obviously, I do not condone voter fraud. Yes, the state needs to be vigilant to protect the integrity of the electoral process. I sense, however, that candidates for public office, as the San Antonio Express-News blog linked to this post notes, may be “creating a solution in search of a problem.”

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Time is getting away from me

This is the latest in an occasional series of blog posts commenting on impending retirement.

I am beginning to understand why retired people often discard their wristwatches.

They become superfluous and virtually without value. I know that cell phones tell time, too. So why wear something on your wrist that gets banged up, right?

My sister and brother-in-law have been retired for some time now and they both tell me how they laugh at well-meaning strangers who say, “Have a nice weekend.” They look at each other and might mutter something to each other like, “Well, OK. Thanks, I guess.”

Yes, time has becoming something that means less and less to wife and me as we move toward retirement.

This is a difficult transition for me, given that I spent 36 years toiling under deadline pressure. Time meant everything to me as a daily journalist. I had projects to complete by a certain time and I had to meet those deadlines … or else face the consequences.

No longer.

There have been moments recently when I cannot remember what day it is. Those moments usually occur on what full-time working folks would call “weekends.” Is it Saturday or Sunday? What do I have to do today? Oh, nothing. That’s a relief.

Our travel plans don’t usually revolve around weekends. Since my working life is now a part-time endeavor and my employers — I’m working three part-time jobs — are all pretty lenient with my requests for time off, my wife and I can schedule our road trips whenever we feel like it.

I’ll admit that this whole new time-management mode is going to take some adjustment. So far, though, we’ve managed to adjust to every change that we’ve encountered as we’ve entered this new phase of our life together.

Retirement, I’ve discovered, requires a high-level of adaptability.

We’re passing that test with flying colors.

What time is it? Oh, never mind.

 

 

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Cruz making more enemies daily

Sen. Ted Cruz cannot possibly understand what he’s doing.

The Texas Republican seems to be doing everything possible, all within his power, to alienate the leadership of his party, not to mention the elders of the U.S. Senate where he has served all of nine months.

As Dana Milbank notes in his Washington Post column, Cruz has done what was thought to be virtually impossible, which is create a massive amount of wreckage in record time.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-in-debt-limit-and-shutdown-defeat-ted-cruz-is-one-sore-loser/2013/10/16/d896d180-36b4-11e3-ae46-e4248e75c8ea_story.html?hpid=z7

McConnell brokered a deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that reopened the government and staved off a default of our national debt obligations. That wasn’t acceptable to Sen. Cruz, who said the Washington “establishment” caved in. To whom he wasn’t entirely clear.

Cruz then stormed in front of a bank of TV cameras at the very time McConnell was making his own statement about the deal. I am quite certain the Senate’s chief Republican is not going to forget what Cruz said and did any time soon. As McConnell was trying to put some kind of positive spin on what he and Reid accomplished, Cruz was turning the spin in precisely the opposite direction.

Team player? All for one and one for all? Neither of those notions has a place in Ted Cruz’s vocabulary.

Cruz said the Senate should have “listened to the American people.” My hunch is that the 81 senators who voted for the McConnell-Reid deal were listening to the people — who were telling them to end this madness, to get the government operating fully and to avoid plunging this nation into default.

It’s Ted Cruz who needs to have his hearing checked.

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Self-awareness has gone AWOL in Senate

The Huffington Post has taken note of a patently hilarious reaction to the deal struck by the Senate to end the government shutdown, which also increases the national debt limit.

It is that the U.S. Senate comprises 100 individuals who have next to zero self-awareness.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/16/senate-budget-crisis_n_4112253.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

There they were, applauding themselves for all the hard they did in getting the deal done. The applause seems to ignore the reality of what brought us to the brink of fiscal calamity — which was the senators’ role, along with the House of Representatives, in creating the problem in the first place.

Indeed, watching Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pat each other — and themselves — on the back for all that work will present late-night comedians plenty of grist for the foreseeable future.

None of this needed to happen. None of the federal employees who were furloughed without pay needed to suffer. The nation did not need to endure this drama. Americans did not need to wonder whether their retirement accounts were going to evaporate because Congress and the White House couldn’t reach a deal sooner.

The deal struck, let us remember, provides only a short-term relief. More drama is just around the corner.

And for this the Senate is congratulating itself?

Give me a break.

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Attention now turns to budget panels

Let us now focus our attention on some members of Congress — from both political parties — who have been given the task of working out a long-term federal budget agreement that prevents charades such as the one that just ended.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/17/politics/shutdown-over-main/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray and Republican Rep. Paul Ryan — who chair the Senate and House budget committees, respectively — are going to begin talking between themselves. They’re both serious politicians (no irony intended, honest) but their task is monumental, given the institutional refusal of both legislative chambers to adopt any kind of strategic approach to these problems.

We came within a few hours this week of defaulting on our nation’s debt obligations. The two-week-long government shutdown sucked an estimated $24 billion from the nation’s economy. It turns out we’ll pay our bills and the government has reopened fully.

President Obama signed the bills into law late Wednesday and said the end of this budget battle removes the “cloud of unease” that had been hovering over the financial world.

I beg to differ, Mr. President.

The unease has just taken a brief respite. It’ll likely return in January and again in February. The money to run the government runs out in January; our borrowing limit expires in February. Many of us out here believe we’ll be right back at it again when those deadlines approach.

Of the two budget panel chairs, Ryan has the more difficult task, given the role the tea party wing of the GOP — of which he is a member — played in prolonging the ridiculous drama that unfolded. The House Republican caucus will continue to fight to eradicate the Affordable Care Act, which only just now has been implemented. They don’t like it and predict all kinds of catastrophe will befall the nation if it is allowed to live on.

Ryan is considered to be a serious and thoughtful young man. I’m withholding my final judgment on him. I’m not sure he’ll be able to resist the enormous pressure he’ll feel from the extreme right wing of his party, although I retain some faith he’ll be able to work constructively with Democrats on his committee and with the likes of Chairwoman Murray in the Senate.

Here’s a bit of advice from out here in the Heartland. Work until you get a deal. You have no need to take extended recesses between now and Christmas. You have much to do and the public — into whose faces you spit when you closed much of the federal government — pay you folks a pretty fair wage to solve these problems.

Finally, Democrats and Republicans can learn from the memories of two presidents — Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. Both men knew how to work the system. They perfected the art of principled compromise.

Now … let’s get busy.

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Debt deal is no ‘victory’ for anyone

President Obama has called the debt deal brokered by the U.S. Senate that reopens the federal government and saves the nation from defaulting on its debts as some kind of victory.

It isn’t.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/328985-obama-hails-debt-deals-passage-as-lifting-cloud-of-unease

It delays the next fight, which is going to occur early in 2014 when the federal government will come up against the next debt ceiling deadline and when the government runs out of money to keep many “non-essential” agencies running.

Sens. Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid struck a deal early Wednesday. The Senate approved it; then the House of Representatives followed suit.

The whole scene produced a disgraceful display of brinkmanship, showmanship, posturing, demagoguery and cheap politicization. In my view, the bad guys continue to be the tea party wing of the House Republican caucus, which fought almost to the very end to defund the Affordable Care Act and pursued that tactic as a method of getting their way.

What now? Well, members of Congress are supposed to begin meeting to hammer out a “permanent” budget solution. Good luck with that. Count me as one American who has no faith — zero, none — that Congress will negotiate any kind of long-term agreement that will prevent this kind of nonsense from recurring in the near future.

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Phone technology getting rather fun

I’m about to make an admission that might startle some members of my family and even a few friends.

It concerns some telephone technology to which my wife and I were recently introduced. It’s that technology that enables one to receive and make phone calls while driving a motor vehicle, and without having to fumble with a telephone.

My admission is that I’ve used it and have found that it’s easy and actually kind of fun.

We purchased a hybrid car, a Toyota Prius, recently. It has a lot of bells and whistles. It’s a pretty high-tech car. One of the bells — or maybe it’s a whistle — is this program that enables one to connect a cell phone with the car. You call my cell phone and the car radio speaker starts bleating a sound that tells me a call is coming in. I press a button on the steering wheel and start talking to whomever is calling.

I know this is old news to many of you. It’s new to my wife and me.

I’ve made a couple of calls from the car to people I’ve put on “speed dial” on the radio. I hit another button on the steering wheel, hit the speed dial button and it calls the number automatically.

Yes, this too is old news to those who’ve known about this technology all along.

But it is rather cool.

So I’m able to use the phone in the car while not getting busted by Amarillo police officers for talking and driving at the same time.

I’m really not afraid of technology. It’s all just something that requires some adjustment. I’m finding, though, that I am a fairly adaptable creature.

Texting, though, is an entirely different matter.

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Bring Senate debt plan to vote, Mr. Speaker

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner has been hiding something called the Hastert Rule, named after former Speaker Dennis Hastert, one of Boehner’s predecessors.

The Hastert Rule means that nothing goes to a vote if it doesn’t first have the support of most members of the party that runs the House of Representatives.

The time is at hand for Boehner to throw the Hastert Rule in the trash bin. The U.S. Senate very well could present the House with a plan to extend the nation’s debt ceiling and reopen the part of the government that’s been shut down for two weeks.

Both of these things likely would be short-term repairs. They would, however, stave off the first default on our obligations in American history. If that occurs at midnight, world financial markets could collapse, the U.S. credit rating would plummet and a new recession could occur, causing significant pain and misery for millions of Americans.

Boehner has been shackled to the will of about 30 or so members of his Republican caucus who want to attach certain conditions on the debt ceiling increase and reopening the government. It’s time he showed some guts.

It’s a fairly open secret that most members of the entire House want this debacle to end. The speaker, I hasten to add, is the man in charge of the entire legislative chamber. His “constituents,” such as they are, do not comprise merely the Republican majority. Depending on who’s doing the counting, Democrats are virtually united in their support of Senate efforts to end this madness. Add their numbers to the substantial number of Republicans who also want it to end, and I’m pretty sure you come up with far more than 218 House members, which is the minimum number of votes needed to approve a deal.

So, what’s it going to be, Mr. Speaker? Are you going to allow this catastrophe to occur or are you going to exercise the enormous power you have by virtue of your high office to get something done?

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