I can't believe it... the Tea Party, or at least at least some of it's members, were actually GOOD for something! (And any RW'er who assumes MSN is "liberally biased" can stick their "three ... tools that are crucial to the ... anti-terror law" in their pipes and smoke it.)
Hey, we'll see. It probably won't last. But THIS LIBERAL applauds any "small-government Conservatives" who actually LIVE UP to their libertarian principles and actually vote down government powers that actually interferes with the freedom and privacy of Americans. Because, far from being detrimental to our security, it is only with privacy and individual liberty and freedom that we can BE secure. The FISA Court was little more than a rubber stamp anyway, and probably the most efficient part of the Government. There ws never any reason to go beyond what they did and authorized. If anything, they probably should have used MORE scrutiny over the years! But in any case, bring them back, and scrap the god-damned Patriot act entirely! I've said oit many times, Al-Qaeda has NEVER been a threat to our freedom or our way of life: Only our own Government is, and only our own Government ever will be!
My bet? These guiys will either (1) be branded as RINO's, be blacklisted by the party and get voted out; (2) Be corrupted by politics and slowly morph into BIG GOVERMENT Conservatives - like the ones who wrote, supported, voted for and slandered anyone who opposed the "Patriot" Act in the first place; or (3) THEY WILL CHANGE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY FOR THE BETTER.
And hey... If the oppositon on teh Right is made of PRINCIPLED "small government" types, who will actually STAND UP for our freedom? I can certainly live with that!
All that being said, I'm still convinced that 99% of the tea party and their supporters are no more than a bunch of ingnorant, racist, greedy, immature, same-old-Republican, clowns. But on this day, this Liberal applauds those brave few Tea Partiers who've done more in one vote to defend our freedom than President Obama has doen in 2+ years.
(And I only hope that idiot [Obama] figures that out, because otherwise we WILL be looking at President Fucking Palin in 2012!)
To put that vote in its proper perspective, the House "Tea Party Caucus" has 52 members, and all but 7 of them--over 96%--voted in favor of extending these provisions.
ReplyDeleteHere's what's going to happen next: Those who voted against this--including the 19 non-teabagger Republicans--are going to be taken to the woodshed by the leadership, and will be made to see the error of their ways, probably in only a matter of days. Or Republicans will introduce the bill under the regular procedure, instead of the fascist "fast-track" one they were trying to use to ram them through this time. Either way, the extensions will be passed.
Oh, you're absolutely right, of course. I have no REAL illusions about that, and wouldn't bet a single penny against your prediction. I just LOVE that Speaker Boehner once again showed an inability to do ANYTHING without making himself look incompetant. Of course... it's not like the corporate media will tell what a collosal miscalculation this was on Boehner's part. OTOH, if Pelosi had done something similar? ALL we'd be hearing about is how "out of touch" she is. God forbid anyone admits that Boehner dropped the ball though!
ReplyDelete...Or for that matter that Republicans don't seem to live up their libertarian principles very often. Well, EVER, really. Yet one more angle you won't get from the "Liberal" media. That's why I like to highlight those RARE times when a few a RARE Republicans actually get it right. Kind of strikes a contrast with the other 99.9999% of the time I suppose. LOL
In any case, while I'm sure it will play out exactly as you've described, I'd be really interested to see an in-party rift form instead. It would be interesting to see what the public does with the realization that "96%" of even the Tea Party (let alone the rest of the Republican caucus) have no intentions of living up to the principles they campained on. These seven could really make the rest of the Party look bad (and the Democrats who they're voting with look GOOD) by comparison.
Sadly, I don't see that happening. It would be nice though.
Over the last two nights, Rachel has been making an important point about the new GOP House; how they're not doing a damn thing. They have no real legislative agenda, they schedule short weeks with few bills under consideration, most of them of absolutely no consequence (they did manage to rename some post-office), and they schedule a week's vacation for every two weeks of work.
ReplyDeleteSomething Rachel is underplaying--to bring it back to what you wrote--is the extent to which the Republican majority is doing what little work they're doing via those fascist "fast-track" procedures. Back in 1995, when Republicans took over both houses of congress (by much slimmer margins that Democrats had after 2008), they systematically destroyed any opportunity for meaningful participation by Democrats in the legislative process. Bills debated under “open rules” became as rare as honest politicians. Bills were routinely sent to the floor without going through any sort of committee process, and it didn’t do a whole lot of good to put a bill through the proper committee process anyway, because, after it was voted out, the Republicans on the rules committee would re-write it in the middle of the night, then push the rewrite through (often also in the middle of the night) without even bothering to tell anyone what they’d doing. Conference committees are supposed to be bipartisan, but became the province of a handful of Republicans, who would literally lock Democrats out of the room. When Democratic members requested the use of committee rooms for hearings, they found themselves assigned closets. Under Clinton, Republican committees wasted millions on fruitless, ginned-up “investigations” of the administration, and even went through an impeachment proceeding; when Bush came to power, congressional oversight came to a halt--not a single significant hearing for as long as they controlled congress. Even staunch Republicans like Bob Barr began objecting to the way his own party was running things, after the “compromise” USA PATRIOT bill worked out between the parties in committee was thrown out in the middle of the night by Republicans on the Rules committee, who reinstituted the rejected original, unamended Bush language. These sorts of things had no precedent in any previous Democratic-controlled congress.
In the last six years Republicans controlled congress and behaved this way, they didn’t have an Obama--a can't-we-all-just-get-along president who bent over backwards to accommodate the other party in his policy proposals. They had a reactionary slug who recognized no limits on his own power, and expected congress to act as his rubber stamp, which is exactly what they did.
Democrats did give Republicans a taste of their own medicine in the last two years, but honestly, it was only a little taste. Republicans ranted and raved about abuse of the process for the entirety of their time in the minority, but now that they're running the House again, they’re taking up right where they left off.
One of their first legislative efforts was health-care repeal, a bill for which they held no hearings, submitted to no committee vote (or even consideration), and didn’t allow it to be amended. Called on their hypocrisy, they said their victory in November meant the public had litigated the matter. Somehow, this reasoning didn’t apply to the much larger Democratic majority that had won in 2008, but don’t expect anyone in the press to point that out to them very loudly.
Now, they've put up the renewal of provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, and, again, it was sent up without going through any relevant committee, without allowing for any amendments, without allowing for even a debate. The only matter on which they're allowing for debate this week is on a resolution reminding oversight committees that it's their duty to conduct oversight. After six years of no oversight of the Bush administration, I suppose they have to remind themselves of this.
The press won't tell this story.
No, you're absolutely right, they won't.
ReplyDeleteMaddow might want to introduce her audience to the term: IOKYAR. If we could get THAT into the public consiousness and lexicon? It could be as powerfull an idea and propaganda piece as the "liberal media" myth is.
And, of course the Repug's have no legslative agneda. Becuase they weren't even really running on an anti-Obama agenda, in ACTUALITY. They were running an anit-Obama-that-exists-only-in-their-minds agenda. They want to REPEAL this "solcialst gov't take over" of health care? Good fucking luck, becuase THERE WASN'T ONE. They want to STOP federal money paying for abortions? Shit, that should be easy, seeing as how IT AIN'T HAPPENING! And now they're in power and they talk about how their biggest focus - with "laser-like intensity" - is JOBS. And what have they done? Proposed spending cuts, leaving out defense (and even entitlements, which is new, for THEM anyway) and vowed to "repeal health care." (Basically avoided doing ANYTHING job-related like syphillis.)
And what, pray tell, does the RIGHT hope to GAIN from denying big-insurance the billion dollar payday that "HRC" (or "Obamacare") promised them anyway? Seems to me that the party of big-business shouldn't be going out of its way to piss off one of the biggest, fastest growing business sectors in the country! (I've always known John Boehner was a fuck-up, and not even the stupid-yet-lucky kind like Bush was. I mean, he's a REAL FUCK UP. And repealing health care might win his party some brownie points with the public, provided that ALL the touch is the mandate, and little to nothing else, but that would turn big-uinsurance against them BIG TIME. Not that I want the dems being MORE in big-insurance's pockets, but at this point, I say LET John Boehner fuck up as much as he can for the Right.
He'll be gift that keeps on giving.