Tag Archives: US Senate

national news

Reason, sanity prevail

Let us praise the return of some semblance of sanity to the American political process with news out of Nevada that Democrats are going to retain control of the next U.S. Senate.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto will return to Capitol Hill, ensuring that Democrats will occupy at least 50 seats on the upper legislative chamber. The number could rise to 51 if Sen. Raphael Warnock wins the Georgia runoff next month against Republican challenger Herschel Walker; I will root vigorously for that outcome.

What the returns tell me, though, is that American voters across the land are rejecting the Big Lie about alleged vote fraud; they want a return to reasonable debate and discussion; they are giving the heave-ho to notions promoted by those on the far right who condone violence as a form of political discourse.

We are seeing, it seems to me, a return of sanity and reason.

May it continue its regeneration from this day forward.

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national news

Senate control hangs in balance

Election runoffs depend on turnout, or so the saying goes. Which means that the candidate who wins a two-person contest will do so on the basis of getting his or her voters to the polls.

In normal circumstances, voters need to be motivated by factors that might not exist internally. They might exist elsewhere.

So … with that the Georgia U.S. Senate runoff election between Sen. Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker might depend on what is about to happen in Nevada.

The stakes are, shall we say … huge man.

The Senate is tied at 50-50, with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. The midterm election is staggering to its finish. Arizonans just re-elected Sen. Mark Kelly to a six-year Senate term. Kelly becomes the 49th Democrat to be elected. The 50th Democrat well might be Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who is locked in a fight with GOP challenger Adam Laxalt.

If Masto emerges as the 50th Democratic senator, does that render the Georgia runoff moot? Does it lessen the need for Georgia Democrats to ensure their guy, Sen. Warnock, gets enough votes to defeat Herschel Walker? Hardly!

If Warnock defeats Walker — which he damn sure must do — that would give Democrats a 51-49 majority in the next U.S. Senate, scenario few of us saw coming.

I cannot post this blog item without mentioning that Herschel Walker might be the most unfit individual to run for the Senate in the past, oh, 50 years. He was Donald J. Trump’s handpicked nominee, which tells me plenty about Walker’s qualifications to hold this valuable public office — which amount to zero!

Walker is an abortion hypocrite on the basis of two women who say he paid for their abortions. He has next to no relationship with many of his children, yet he campaigns as a staunch anti-abortion family man.

OK, I got that off my chest.

Back to the point, which is that the pending outcome in Nevada does nothing to the importance of the Georgia runoff. Democrats already have made plenty of history by bucking what was supposed to be a political shellacking.

I am going to hope they make more of it next month by re-electing Sen. Warnock to the Senate.

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national news, political news

Now … we wait for the votes

OK, here’s where we stand on the eve of the most consequential midterm election I can remember … and at the age of almost 73, I can remember a lot of ’em.

Depending on who you ask or who is doing the talking, Democrats are either (a) going to get a serious, back-alley thumping at the polls or (b) might pull off the surprise of the century and hold onto the Senate and cut their expected losses in the House of Representatives.

I will not venture a prediction on what will occur. I don’t have a clue. I live out here in the middle of the country. All the political action is either back east or in the Deep South or out west in places like Arizona and Nevada.

My bride and I just returned from the western region of the nation; we spent a few nights listening to the news out of Arizona and Nevada. We heard the extreme negativity coming from both sides of the great divide. I didn’t ask anyone what they thought of the tone and tenor of the campaign being waged.

We’re home now. We are going to vote on Tuesday. No early voting for me … for reasons I have explained already.

What will the result be at the end of it all? Beats me, man. You know what I want to happen: I would prefer the Senate and House remain in Democratic hands, given Republicans’ refusal to offer any solutions other than to obstruct what President Biden wants to accomplish.

If the House flips to GOP control, then I fear a vengeance-filled period for the next two years and likely beyond. The best hope, I suppose, lies in the Senate, where Democrats appear to have a puncher’s chance of holding on to the committee gavels.

Is our democracy at stake? You’re damn right it is!

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State news

What does he favor?

We elect our legislators to, um, legislate. Isn’t that the rule of thumb? Sure it is.

However, when I see U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s name, the junior Republican from Texas usually is telling us what he opposes. The guy cannot affix his name to any constructive legislation, which is why he pulls down that six-figure salary.

Cruz said today that he opposes legislation codifying same-sex marriage. He said it violates Americans’ religious freedom. I’m not sure I get it, but that’s what Cruz said.

Back to my point. Cruz won election to the Senate in 2012. He hasn’t distinguished himself as an author of legislation that benefits American lives. He continues to rail as a gadfly, raising hell and calling Democrats and sons and daughters of Satan.

That’s when he isn’t seeking to get away from doing his job, which is what happened when he sought a vacation in Cancun in February 2021 while Texas were freezing to death in the killer winter freeze.

Ted Cruz just pisses me off.

There. Now I feel better.

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environmental news, national news

Not even close …

This isn’t anything like the way I envisioned legislation would proceed upon the election in 2020 of Joe Biden as president of the United States.

I envisioned a return to the type of collegiality and compromise one could see with a president with decades of legislative experience working with members of Congress to enact laws that would do good things for Americans.

What have we seen? More gridlock. More obstruction from the loyal opposition. More partisan wrangling.

Democrats are cheering the enactment of what they call the Inflation Reduction Act. The Senate vote was 50-50, leaving the tie-breaking vote to come from Vice President Harris.

The bill isn’t perfect, but it includes the nation’s largest investment ever on ways to battle the planet’s changing climate. It seeks to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. It is paid for by taxes being leveled on corporations.

The Grand Obstructionist Party fought all of it. Tooth and nail. Hammer and tong.

President Biden’s predecessor took office without a lick of government experience … and it showed. He couldn’t negotiate his way out of a phone booth. Biden took office in January 2021 making what I thought at the time was a reasonable pledge to restore a sense of commonality between Democrats and Republicans.

Silly me. It hasn’t worked. GOP members of both congressional chambers continue to dig in, even to the point of denying that Joe Biden even is the “legitimate president of the United States.” Yes, they have swallowed The Big Lie and are obstructing the president at every turn.

But … Democrats won this latest battle. I am glad and grateful at least to see one side of the great divide working on my behalf.

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national news

Pure nonsense!

1 Comment

All righty, this seems to make a point better than I could ever make it about whether Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Georgia, is a certifiable dumbass.

I want to challenge anyone out there to parse this piece of verbal dooky and report back to me.

What in the hell is this idiot saying?

Let’s remember that this former football star who has earned the “full and complete endorsement” of Donald J. Trump wants to join a legislative chamber that once proclaimed itself to be the world’s “greatest deliberative body.”

This guy deserves to enter the Senate chamber? Not … a … chance!

I might be inclined to pay real American money to watch this guy debate the man he wants to defeat, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.

Meantime, someone please tell me what Walker said.

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national news

Headed to Land of Oz?

Pennsylvania’s Republican Party voters appear to be punching their tickets for a trip to the Land of Oz. God help them!

Mehmet Oz is leading — albeit barely — over Dave McCormick in the GOP primary balloting for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Pat Toomey, who is retiring.

I won’t spend a lot of time on this nonsense, given Oz’s lack of credentials or credibility. He got the endorsement from Donald J. Trump for reasons that have nothing to do with public policy. Trump likes celebrities, and Oz fits that description.

I consider Oz, once a practicing physician, to be a quack. Trump thinks he’s the greatest.

I am going to pull hard for Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who won the Democratic primary easily, to defeat the GOP winner. Whether it’s Oz or McCormick, it matters little. They’re both repugnant.

If it’s Oz, then Fetterman can start with the fact that Oz doesn’t even live in the state he wants to represent in the Senate. He’ll figure out the rest of it.

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national news

RBG spoke wisely

God bless the memory of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The nation is beating itself senseless over a leaked draft opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court that proposes to do the very thing that Justice Ginsburg feared.

The opinion suggests the court should toss aside Roe v. Wade, the ruling that legalized abortion in January 1973. Doing so, I fear, would turn women into “less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”

The fight has commenced. The U.S. Senate will vote next Wednesday on legislation that provides federal protection for those seeking an abortion. It isn’t likely to pass, given the Republicans’ strategy to filibuster the bill. Since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to end a filibuster, such a move is virtually doomed in a 50-50 Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, though, wants to put his GOP colleagues on the record in opposing granting women the right to control their own bodies. Go for it, Mr. Leader.

Justice Ginsburg would be proud

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national news

Hatch’s death saddens me

A strange sense of sadness overtook me this evening as I learned of the death of the longest-serving Republican U.S. senator, Orrin Hatch of Utah.

Why am I so sad? I think it is because Hatch, who left the Senate in 2018, embodied a gentler time in American politics. Did I agree with his policy views? Hah! Not even close! Hardly ever!

However, this conservative lawmaker — whose name appears on hundreds of pieces of legislation that became law — exemplified the ability to work with Democrats. He knew how to find common ground, where to look for it and how to craft it into meaningful legislation.

He said this in his farewell address to the Senate: “The last several years I have seen the abandonment of regular order … Gridlock is the new norm. And like the humidity here, partisanship permeates everything we do, … All the evidence points to an unsettling truth: The Senate, as an institution, is in crisis, or at least may be in crisis.”

Yep, it’s in crisis, all right. It is in crisis because the Senate has turned into a pit of vipers, along with the House, with members of both chambers expressing outright fear of working with members of the other party.

That is nothing close to the “regular order” that Hatch and other senators cherished.

He was a principled conservative, but he was a gentleman, too.

Thus, the sadness at his death.

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national news

Herschel Walker: dumbass

Gosh, I hate speaking badly about a guy I used to admire when all he did was pack a football and run with it for thousands of yards during his career.

However, that ex-gridiron star, former Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker of Georgia, is now running for the U.S. Senate and all I can say about him is that he might be the biggest dumbass running for high office in this election cycle.

Walker is running as a Republican. He wants to succeed Sen. Rafael Warnock, one of two Democrats elected to the Senate in 2020 from Georgia.

I have heard some of the nonsense that comes from Walker’s pie hole. One utterance, caught my attention. He recently said while disparaging evolutionary science that “If man came from monkeys, why do we still have monkeys?”

Isn’t that just a real knee-slapper? Actually, that isn’t even an original quip. I heard the late comic George Carlin say it many years ago. So, Walker not only is a dumbass, but he’s a dumbass who cannot offer many original thoughts.

Sen. Warnock has done a creditable job in the Senate. He has become a leading voice of the Senate’s progressive caucus. He also has plenty of what one could call “cred” among African Americans, given that he is African American. What’s more, when he is not writing federal law, he preaches at Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the Holy Word to his parishioners.

It occurs to me that this contest could offer voters in one state a chance to stop the dumbing-down of Congress by returning a man with considerable intellect — Sen. Warnock — and rejecting a man with next to zero understanding of how government works … and who cannot even produce an original quip.

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