Posted on 05/29/2002 8:44:38 AM PDT by Zack Nguyen
Why should Republicans bother to vote GOP next November 5? Inexplicably, President Bush and congressional Republicans are giving their party base myriad reasons to go fishing on Election Day.
Republicans and Democrats have proven to be pigs in a bipartisan pen on pork-barrel spending. While some Republicans still treat taxpayers' dollars with reverence, too many more stand gleefully at the trough, snout-by-snout, with their Democratic colleagues.
This Congress is set to hike federal spending by 15 percent over just two years, more than quadruple the inflation rate. Most of this does nothing to fight terrorism.
On May 13, Bush signed a $191 billion farm bill that boosts agriculture subsidies by 80 percent. Congress even included $100 million to provide rural consumers "high-speed, high-quality broadband service." The Heritage Foundation estimates that this 10-year bill will cost the average U.S. household $180 in new taxes annually.
Bush's education department budget grows from $35.75 billion in 2001 (when he arrived) to a projected $57 billion in 2005. That is a four-year, 59.5 percent increase in federal school outlays. Bush's Leave No Child Behind initiative promotes testing and higher standards, but does little to advance school choice.
Bush signed the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law. It treats the disease of legal bribery with a prescribed overdose. As if there were no First Amendment, it will restrict political activists from purchasing ads critical of political incumbents within 60 days of elections.
Bush dropped an anvil on free-marketeers this spring when he imposed 30 percent tariffs on imported steel and a 27 percent tax on Canadian softwood lumber. This has created throbbing headaches among world leaders who have grown weary of Bush's self-mocking free-trade rhetoric.
Bush has applauded a Senate bill by liberal Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico and arch-liberal Democrat Paul Wellstone of Minnesota that would force company health plans to insure mental illness and physical ailments equally. Costs will soar as employers underwrite medical care for anxiety atop angina.
Enough.
A popular conservative president should steer Congress starboard. A May 14 - 15 Fox News poll of 900 adults found Bush's job approval at 77 percent (+/- 3 percent). Alas, like his father (who achieved 90 percent favorability after the Persian Gulf War), G. W. Bush guards his political capital like an heirloom rather than invest it for even greater gains.
When Democrats smeared appellate-court nominee Charles Pickering as a racist, Bush, for instance, should have held a press conference with Pickering and his prominent black supporters from Mississippi. As Charles Evers, the brother of slain civil-rights activist Medgar Evers, said: Pickering "was standing up for blacks in Mississippi when no other white man would." Bush avoided such bold action. A thousand cuts later, Pickering's nomination fatally hemorrhaged in the Senate Judiciary Committee last March.
Bush could have enhanced the prospects for petroleum exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He could have invited local Eskimos to the Rose Garden and let them explain how oil development would lift them from poverty. Better yet, Bush could have taken the White House press corps to ANWR to unmask its potential oil acreage as a barren mosquito farm. Bush avoided the ANWR fray, thus clinching that proposal's Senate demise.
Beyond speaking softly in his bully pulpit, Bush never has touched his veto pen. Had he threatened to reject some of this absurd legislation, fence-sitting GOP congressmen would have yielded and defeated (or at least improved) these bills. Absent Bush's leadership, they climbed atop the gilded bandwagon rather than fall on their laissez-faire swords. Republicans should worry that their demoralized stalwarts will do what they did in the last midterm election: Stay home.
The proportion of self-described conservatives at the polls fell from 37 percent in 1994 to 31 percent in 1998, Voter News Service reports. Frustrated with a "Republican Revolution" turned free-spending self-parody, the party faithful sat on their hands just enough to cost Republicans five House seats.
If they don't reverse this parade of white flags, Washington Republicans similarly may shrink or lose their House majority and dash their plans to capture the Senate — not because they advanced their free-market principles but because they betrayed them and thus surrendered their claim to power.
Borrowing on the analogy then, a popular conservative president must also watch out for many minefields as he tries steering anyone anywhere these days.
Because if there's one thing Liberals do with perfection each & every time?
That'd be to *help* conservatives to destroy themselves.
...& conservatives blow up quite nicely whenever they move too quickly, y'know.
Bush is not Reagan. Accept it. Move on.
Free the Daschle Fifty
House Majority Leader Dick Armey today called upon Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to vote on 50 bills that have passed the House and are stalled in the Senate.
"The American people want action," said Armey. "They don't want political posturing. The Democrat-led Senate has a responsibility to vote on legislation. In fact, it's their job."
The following is a list of bills that have passed the House and are stalled in the Senate:
The republican controlled house gave us the Gestapo Law;
The republican controlled congress gave a $5 Billion grant to airlines and said nothing when they still laid off thousands of employees
The republican controlled congress gave us 48,000+ more employees on public payroll (Airport Security Law)
The republican congress is buying into providing food stamps for legal immigrants.
The republican congress is buying into bush's feelers proposing amnesty for illegals
The republican congress passed the dem's education bill into law when we all know that the feds should not be involved in education.
The republican controlled congress gave us a 190 BILLION farm welfare bill, a bill that will give scottie pippen $100,000 per year. FYI, pippen makes $19,000,000 a year!!!
An overview is a wonderful thing if we bother to do one.
Isn't "war" a great diversion. Keep warning us of possible terrorists attacks on a daily basis ( a warning du jour)and keep the citizens on edge so we do not see what is happening on the home front.
Finally, a republican congress gave us years more of the lowlife clintons in the impeachment farce.
Please tell me where there is a difference a republicrat and a democrat!
I am registered as a "declined to state" and at this time, I do not intend to vote for any republicrat or democrat.
That's just a downright dumb statement by the author. This President has been quite busy raising funds for GOP candidates.
Thanks aain!
Maybe it's better to have them stalled.......
The enemy is liberalism! We have to fight it, to rid it out of this country. The enemy wants the US to be a socialist/communist nation.
Look, friend. If the GOP doesn't change back to what it was becoming under Reagan, there is no reason for me to help them into office. Incidentally, voting the current GOP team back in office WILL give you 'democrats' running the show in the fall. In fact, the democrats are running the show right now and W is the Maitre d'.
Perhaps the GOPs should remember what happened to the Canada's 'conservatives' when they became indistinguishable from their political 'adversaries'. Or UK's conservatives.
Oh, how do we change the GOP back to what it was becoming under Reagan? By voting the current impostors OUT.
If they do not, should I care that they are "stuck"?
Myself, I would like to see the GOP take back the Senate. If nothing else, it would stifle the excuses for why the GOP is not doing anything about making govt smaller, defending gun rights (more than lip service that is), etc. It would be "put up or shut up" time.
It appears to me, that OUR enemies are those 536 people in washington who continue to take what we've earned and give to others who have not earned it.
Yeah, and when you're wrong, you're dead wrong.
"We" control the house. "We" control the White House. We control the vertical. We control the horiz....Ooops. I got off track there. ;-) "We" are only one vote from controlling the Senate. In this environment, why can't we at least stop some of the spending and some of the Dem agenda? It's because of a lack of principle. The "R's" are as addicted to the power and money and the trappings as the "D's". And as the author pointed out, Bush has never vetoed A N Y T H I N G.
I'm not praising x42, but he did sign 7 or the 10 items in the Contract with America. He has signed more 'conservative' legislation than Bush. And Bush has undone very little of the bad things that clinton did and he still has many clinton appointees in place. WHY???
I don't fish, but November 5th I just might be found at the range. I think that no matter who wins, the practice will do me good.
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