I'm not sure what to make of this story in my hometown newspaper, the Star-Telegram about Republicans laying the blame for the dismal performance of the 109th Congress at outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's feet. It seems to me that that's a good place to start laying the blame. And blame Denny Hastert over in the House of Representatives, as well.
Late Friday night, House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., said icily in a speech on the House floor that Congress' failure to pass nine of 11 appropriations bills "should be placed squarely at the feet of the departing [Senate] majority leader." The House passed its version of the bills, but the Senate did not.
This Congress has a terrible record of not passing legislation and not listening to the people about the legislation they want (a la immigration). Its record is worse than Truman's "Do Nothing" Congress.
Exemplifying exactly why Republicans got turned out in November, the Senate did manage to pass some legislation:
Frist managed to stick some pork for the folks back home into the final bills passed, however.
A sweeping tax, trade, Medicare and oil bill that passed early Saturday extended a sales-tax deduction for taxpayers in Tennessee, as well as Texas and other states with no income tax.
Tennessee hospitals, meanwhile, got help covering uninsured and underinsured patients. And songwriters collectively got an estimated $3 million tax break, something many constituents in Nashville will appreciate.
An angry Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., a fiscal conservative and Budget Committee chairman, said: "This is being done by the Republican leadership to the Republican membership.
"You just have to ask yourself how we, as a party, got to this point, where we have a leadership which is going to ram down the throats of our party the biggest budgetbuster in the history of the Congress under Republican leadership," Gregg said.
I can tell you how they got to this point: incumbency and re-election campaigning. Everybody wants some pork for their constituents (of course, they don't call it pork when it's for those lil voters at home). But anyone who thinks the spending will be different under Democrats hasn't travelled Highway 119 in Robert "KKK" Byrd's West Virginia. A straight, flat, four-lane highway in the most mountainous state in the country is a testament to the power of incumbency.
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