1. The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation oversees most of two cabinet departments and six agencies, over $64 billion in spending, and legislation that affects every aspect of our lives from airports to cable regulation to highway safety. The Committee on Small Business oversees one agency that spends just over a billion dollars. This means the Senators who sit on the good committees have far more power than their colleagues. The effect of this is say a newly elected Senator had previously been  a high ranking Coast Guard officer and would have valuable insights into maritime policy, that Senator would in all likelihood bee assigned to the less powerful Small Business Committee which they knew nothing about.
2. The aforementioned Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation oversees all elements of transportation other than highway building. This is overseen by the Committee on Environment and Public Works. This means creating a single national transportation strategy is all but impossible.
3. The Committee on Environment and Public Works was not created by the Senate in the 1970’s to oversee the EPA, but was previously just the committee on Public Works which claims its environmental jurisdiction by way of, get ready, the pollution of canals. This is not the worst example of using archaic jurisdictions to grab new ones.
4. That honor belongs to the House Committee on Commerce and Energy. This Committee is one of the oldest and was originally assigned to regulate interstate Commerce. It parlayed this into areas such as food and drug safety, clean air, energy, and public health because presumably sick people can cross state lines.  This behemoth committee overseas part of five departments and seven agencies. It takes up so much regulatory room it is one of the few committees in the house worth serving on.
5. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform started out as an innocuous committee to oversee various and sundry government duties. The Post Office, civil service, the census, the District of Columbia, etc. All the little stuff that did not fit anywhere else. Somewhere along the way it received unlimited investigative power. The power is so great that nearly any chair is bound to turn into a mini McCarthy. This also means members are overseeing areas they might not know anything about.
6. This is the best thing about the House Committee system though. Imagine the President (any President either party) ask congress for a comprehensive environmental plan. (liberal or conservative) Here are the committees that various elements of the plan would have to go through. (Just in the House)
   1. Fisheries, Wildlife, and anything to do with public lands. Committee on Natural Resources.
   2.  Clean Air. Committee on Commerce and Energy.
   3. Clean Water. Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. (Yes, the goddamn canals again)
   4. Environmental Research. Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
   5. Agricultural Chemicals and U.S. Forests. Committee on Agriculture

All this assumes the bill does not require spending or create any new taxes, which would bring in more committees. Remember before it gets to these committees it has to clear the Rules Committee.

These are just of few of the problems with the congressional committee system; nearly every committee oversees area it should not or doesn’t oversee areas it should. Some Committees need to be split up, others combined. Illinois Senator Adlai Stevenson III headed a task force to reform the committee structure of the Senate in the 1970’s; nearly all of his recommendations were rejected. People love to talk about the inefficiency of the Federal bureaucracy. Remember bureaucrats just enforce the laws that are passed. Look at the congressional committee system and you begin to understand that a lot of those laws just don’t make sense.

In the House immigration reform doesn’t face a few hurdles so much as a minefield. Firstly, under Republican control the House is in session something like 12 days a year. Secondly, it will be tough to slide an immigration bill between attempts to repeal Obamacare. If the bill does reach the floor it will probably pass (it only needs 17 Republican votes), but it chances of reaching the floor are slim. The first problem is the Judiciary Committee chaired by Bob Goodlatte from Virginia who has a 95% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. Unless Boehner comes up with a creative way around the Judiciary Committee I’m guessing this bill ends up as toilet paper in Bob’s office. The next problem is the so-called Hastert rule wherein a majority of the Republican Caucus has to be in favor of something in order for it to brought to a vote at all. 138 members of the Republican Caucus opposed the Violence against Women Act, 221 members of the caucus voted to defund ACORN three years after it ceased to exist. The chances of a majority of the majority favoring this bill are nonexistent. Boehner has brought bills to floor in violation of the Hastert rule, but paid a price every time. If he does so on an issue the far right is this intense about it could cost him his gavel.

These complaints have intensified in recent months since Mitt Romney’s loss. Bob Dole, Colin Powell, Ken Duberstein, the list goes on of Republicans who loyally served in the Reagan Revolution and have now criticize the party for being too far to the right. They argue that the Tea Party has come out of nowhere in the last four years and ruin the party of Reagan. They see the Tea Party as blindly antigovernment, blindly anti-tax, intolerant toward minority voters the party needs to grow, and unwilling to accept reality of issues like global warming. These Republicans argue that Tea Baggers should look at Reagan Record and point to his moderation. The Tea Party on the other hand sees Reagan as their patron Saint. This may be the only thing that the Tea Party is right about.

Ronald Reagan once said “government is the problem not the solution.” Do you notice he did not name a program that was the problem, no in Reagan land the actual existence of government is the problem.

Republican reformers (I guess?) point to the fact that Reagan agreed to raise taxes to lower the deficit. Reagan started out with a massive tax cut for the wealthy, and agreed to raise taxes on the middle class repeatedly. The net effect was that middle class taxes skyrocketed and so did the deficit.

Ronald Reagan’s idea of reaching out to minority voters was to tell stories of intercity welfare queens driving Cadillac’s, and to support Ed Meese’s effort to get segregated private schools tax exemptions. It was Reagan who created the mythology that beneficiaries of government programs did not need help, but were just lazy bums. Reagan also opposed a Martin Luther King holiday and putting sanctions on apartheid South Africa.

As far as the environment or any issue involving science goes Reagan once said “Trees cause more pollution the automobiles.” He also once said “facts are stupid things.” It was Reagan who gave the Tea Party its disdain for knowledge, and the attitude that ignorance is not only bliss it is genius.

I put these Republicans against the Tea Party into three camps.

Corporate Republicans who are afraid the Tea Party will make the party of business unelectable. Even worse the Tea Party might even start cutting corporate welfare like farm subsidies in an antigovernment furor.

Then there are the cold warriors who remember valiant Prince Ronnie dashing off to do battle with Ivan. They seem to forget that the U.S. did not defeat the Soviet Bloc; college aged protesters in East Germany, Romania, and the rest of the east bloc did. The same kind of protestors these men denounced during the Vietnam War. They are terrified the Rand Paul’s of the world will deny them the resources to defeat an enemy that does not exist anymore.

Finally there are the Republicans elites who are just plain embarrassed by the Tea Party. It is one thing to go to your Yale class reunion with an actor like Reagan spewing your vitriol, but Louie Gohmert is just embarrassing.

The Republicans who are pointing to Ronald Reagan as a modern day RINO are forgetting two key things. One Reagan was elected on a wave of white backlash coming out of the 60’s and 70’s. Secondly, he was forced to the middle by a Democratic congress. The Tea Party was elected on a wave of backlash against the election of the first black president and Ronald Reagan is their perfect idol.

Now under pressure from the Governor they have agreed to accept the expansion with certain stipulations, which even Snyder thinks are illegal. According to The Hill Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville said “If we take this money, it’s not going to be on their terms. It’s going to be on our terms.” There is nothing like setting the terms upon which you will accept someone else’s money. The stipulation they want is that able bodied adults would have a four year lifetime maximum. Remember the Medicaid expansion requires state to cover people up 133% of the federal poverty line. So the expansion covers people who work. Effectively Republicans want to punish people who work because their employer doesn’t provide health insurance.

Of course Republicans say that we have universal health care anyone can go to the emergency room. Which kind of like arguing we don’t need a border patrol we have nuclear missiles.

Currently states receive matching funds from the federal government. Republicans want to turn Medicaid into block grants where states can spend as much as they want. So Oklahoma, a state that received  $1.36 for each dollar in taxes it paid at last count, could just stop spending its share and just spend the federal money. On top of states no longer having to put in one dime of their own money Republican plans would allow states to divert Medicaid dollars to other antipoverty programs. Meaning Medicaid would just turn into a giant slush fund. Republican plans would also eliminate federal oversight and allow states to set their own eligibility and reimbursement policies. This won’t be a problem though because it’s not as if the southern states have a long history of denying government services to certain groups. If they did you would almost think Republicans want to turn over control to those states so they could do exactly that. The final problem with the Republican Medicaid plan is that it freezes Medicaid grants at the current level so that states would have to cut people of every year. States would have every incentive to target those who cost the most, like poor seniors in nursing homes.

This plan is based on the premise that the money comes from the states therefore the feds have no right to tell them how to spend it. Of course the money only comes from about half the states the other half actually make a net profit on taxes. Guess which states bitch the most about federal control, that is correct the states that do not actually contribute one dime to the union. I have also noticed the same advocates of state control never seem to argue Vermont should be able to spend National Guard or drug task force funding as it sees fit. The cold hard reality is that Medicaid is a voluntary program and if states don’t like the rules they don’t have to take part.

1. The Republicans have voted over 35 times to repeal Obamacare. What is their plan to replace it? I have a feeling they don’t want say because it would make Obamacare look like a wet dream.
2. What is the Republican plan to jump start the economy? Don’t say marginal tax rate cuts. We tried that during the Bush years and if worked we would not need to jump start the economy.
3. Republicans are always saying we need to reduce the deficit by cutting spending. Can they name specific spending cuts that take effect this year, not ten years from now?
4. John McCain has barely been able to conceal his erection at the idea of going to war in Syria. Can the Republicans explain what the benefit of going in is to the U.S., how many troops we will need, what are goals are, and how much it will cost?
5. Can House Republicans explain why exactly someone buying a gun from a licensed dealer needs a background check, but requiring someone buying a gun at a gun show to have the same background check is tyranny?

Michele started her career in politics by organizing the New Heights charter school in Minnesota where she was removed for violating state law by having Christian curriculum. Michele argued that state funded school should be allowed to have a Christian curriculum if the parents wish. It was the parents at New Heights who removed her.

Michele than ran for State Senate because she opposed a state education program to train high school students with job skills. She described the program to help kids compete in the market as “socialism.” As a state senator her signature bill was a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage which failed to make the ballot twice and was rejected by 56% of voters in 2012. The duly elected representatives of the people of Minnesota just legalized gay marriage.

In 2006 Michele made her way to congress; where she did not have signature legislation, but just made wild accusations. She demanded an inquiry be held into which democratic members of congress held “un-American views.” She accused a top aide of Hillary Clinton’s of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is funny because when I think of second wave feminism I think of the Muslim Brotherhood. She claimed the HPV vaccine caused retardation, and that the AmeriCorps volunteer program ran reeducation camps. She proposed a law to ban foreign currency from being recognized in the U.S.; which to be fair is one of her less crazy ideas since it is already illegal. She introduced repeals of Dodd-Frank and Obamacare more times than human mathematics is capable of calculating.

Michele was so much more than a conspiracy believing, uniformed, and some out right dangerous lunatic. She was also corrupt. She took a federal home loan from a program she called repeatedly for the abolition of. She allegedly stole an email list from a Christian home schooling group. Her husband runs a pray the gay away clinic and despite not being a licensed mental health professional, the clinic has received over $100,000 in government funds, because Michele supports smaller government that much. Her presidential campaign was an exercise in either gross incompetence or outright criminality. (I am guessing both)The campaign made payment off the books, bribed a state senator, and illegally transferred funds between PACs. (Okay, allegedly she has not been found guilty) She is under investigation by congress, the FBI, the Iowa State Senate, and I swear to god, the Urbandale Iowa police (pop 39,000). If the Urbandale PD are the ones that nail her I am going to laugh my ass off. On top of all this she did not bother to pay some of her top staffers; their testimony should be interesting. She got in all this trouble to finish sixth in the Iowa Caucuses and drop out. If the campaign had lasted much longer Scotland Yard might be investigating.

I say good riddance to Michele Bachmann hopefully her brand of PTA mom banning books from the school library will go with her.

The Myth of the 1992 Election

The basis of the DLC saved the party theory is that Bill Clinton’s reached out to white working class men and southerners and that is the reason he won in 1992. The narrative is after sad ass Mike Dukakis’s run in 1988; Bill Clinton revived the party with new ideas and they won an overwhelming victory and set the party on the road to eternal victory. The reality is that Clinton got 2.7% of the vote less than Dukakis. In 1992 Bill Clinton won because Perot was on the ballot. Let us look at some state numbers. We’ll look at Clinton’s 92 margin of victory, the Perot vote, and how Al Gore did in the state in2000 the next presidential election where Perot was not on the ballot.

1992 Election

State                     Clinton Victory Margin                   Perot Vote                          Bush 2000 margin

Kentucky             3.21%                                                    13.65%                                  15.1%

Louisiana             4.61%                                                    11.81%                                  7.7%

Georgia                                .59%                                                      13.34%                                  11.7%

Montana             2.51%                                                    26.12%                                  25%

Look at Clinton’s margin of victory, and then look at Perot’s vote. Perot voters accounted for much more than the margin. If you look at Bush’s 2000 margin it becomes obvious where Perot voters went, and who they probably would have went for in 1992. We see this trend in state after state. Without Perot on the ballot in 1992 Clinton would have lost. Dukakis in 1988 receive a higher percentage of the vote in every income group than Clinton did in 1992. As far as Clinton appealing to white men and southerners in 1992 he lost the south and he lost whites and married men in both elections. As far as the DLC reviving the party as a whole in 1994, two years after the DLC saved the party; the Democrats lost both houses of congress for the first time in 40 years.

The Base of the DLC

In the article Ball cites southern Democrats like Clinton, Sam Nunn, and Chuck Robb as leaders of the movement. Southern Democrats combined with some moderates from other regions form the DLC to push the party to the center. Where is the comparative group is in today’s Republican Party? The Republicans party no longer exists in New England, and the number of moderate Republicans in the Senate can be counted on one finger. Even in regions which should have moderates gerrymandering has left the party with nothing, but dedicated right wingers. The party even has a dearth of moderates at the gubernatorial level. A perfect example is the 2010 New York primary. New York Republicans know they live in a Democratic state, but after the Spitzer scandal they had a decent chance of victory. The party leaders put forward the right of center former congressman, Rick Lazio. What did Republican primary do? They nominated Carl Paladino, a right wing kook who lost by almost 30 percent.

The media and academia have been obsessed with having two center parties since the 1950’s. The Democrats have moved to the center, and now they want to coax the Republicans to the center. The cold hard reality is that there is no base within the party for moderates to act.

In 1998 House Republicans voted to impeach Bill Clinton. The Senate vote a few months later to acquit him. This whole farce was planned in the aftermath of Clinton’s 1996 reelection when, according to Rolling Stone, Tim LaHaye and other conservative activists had a meeting in Montreal where they decided to remove Clinton from office using the impeachment process. With the rise of Benghazi, the IRS scandal, and the AP story; and the fact Republicans can’t go 35 seconds without mentioning impeachment, let us assume the Obama impeachment meeting has already happened.

The response of the left to the attempt to impeach Clinton was to rally to his side. Move On was established to defend the President, and many liberals were Clinton’s most strident defenders. When the Republicans impeach President Obama, he will find himself very much alone. Liberals won’t support the impeachment, but there are good reasons they won’t rally to his defense either. Here are the most important distinctions between the Clinton and Obama years as far as liberals are concerned.

1. The longest and most deeply held of liberal beliefs is that the U.S. needs a single payer healthcare system. Bill Clinton attempted to do something close to this with Hillarycare, but failed to get it through congress. When negotiating for Obamacare started the President made it clear that he did not support single payer, and gave up the public option he ran on almost immediately.  In the end what passed, despite what Republicans say, was Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich’s plan from the 90’s, and it passed without a single Republican vote.
2.  Bill Clinton was not a liberal by any imagination except the crazy right. That having been said Clinton never attacked liberals, the same cannot be said for Obama. Obama during the healthcare, keystone pipeline, and budget debates attacked liberals for being unrealistic. Even James Carville, the paragon of Clinton centrism, said that Obama likes “upsetting” liberals. Liberals would have to be stupid to rally to the side of someone who has shown nothing, but disdain for them.
3. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 he was elected over the opposition of liberals in the primaries. So when he won liberals had low expectations. Obama was nominated over Hillary Clinton largely because liberal voters flocked to him because of his opposition to the Iraq war.  Liberals had a huge amount of hope in the Obama administration; those hopes have been repeatedly dashed.
4. The shift in the American electorate will not be of help to Obama either.  When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 the Democrats had held the presidency 4 of the previous 24 years, and had lost three elections in a row. They left rose to Clinton’s defense partly out of a sense of party survival. The Democrats are now looking at controlling the White House 16 out of 24 years, and the prospects for the future are good. Defending Obama will not be seen as key to party survival.

As I said liberals will not support the impeachment of the President, but they will not be the ardent defenders they were of Clinton. I will put one caveat on this; if the Republicans impeachment attempt becomes too overtly racial, liberals will have no choice, but to rush to the Presidents defense. Now that I think about it the Republicans won’t be able to stop themselves. So all of this is basically a mute topic.

The Republican Party has been squealing about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi since before the election. They have made wild accusations against Hillary Clinton and the President all based on the premise they were somehow complicit in the deaths of 4 Americans.

. The Republicans version of event sis that Obama allowed our consulate in Benghazi to fall to terrorists when steps could have been taken to stop it. The best way to gauge these claims is to compare Benghazi to another embassy attack. Benghazi is in Libya a country where we have little in the way of military assets, and the consulate was attacked by around 150 gunmen. In January of 1968 19 Vietcong sappers attacked the U.S. embassy in Saigon, which was a fortress by the way, and force their way into the compound. The U.S. Army, which had half a million men in Vietnam, ordered the 716^th MP battalion to regain control of the embassy. It took the battalion almost seven hours to clear the compound of 19 VC. Remember that when Republicans claimed a handful of Special Forces could have save the facility in Benghazi.

The other claim is that an F-16 could have defended the embassy from attack. The F-16 is not exactly designed to be a crowd control device. Imagine trying to hit a person flying over the at Mach speeds. The risk of losing the plane to ground fire would have been unacceptable, and you just can’t go strafing crowds in friendly countries. Let’s not forget that the reaction to the attack in Libya was hundreds of Pro-U.S. demonstrations.

The death of four Americans was tragic, but the idea that the Obama administration somehow allowed it to happen is just ludicrous. This is part of a Republican plan to harass the administration with investigations; just like they did Bill Clinton.  Republicans in the House need to create a pretext to impeach the President because they are afraid of primary challenges if they don’t.