Posted on 02/21/2002 6:22:01 AM PST by rightwing2
You miss Clinton dont you??
That was Bush/Gore. Who knows what the next election would bring. That election was yesterday. Bush has 89% now.
Bush the Elder had 70% prior to the 1992 election.
But he raised taxes. The worker bee doesn't like that.
People know what taxes are, but not everyone knows what campaign reform is.
Tax affects the voter no matter how much he follows politics, but campaign reform "only affects those politicians in Washington."
Had the bill been called 'The elimination of the 1st ammendment', the masses would hear that.
You'd be suprised how many people don't really care about this issue.
I'm not worried about it. Bush will send the bill back for repairs. He won't sign it as is.
President Bush is exactly right to send mixed signals to the Senate, so the critical squish Senators will not count on him to save their bacon and will not flip and vote Shays-Meehan out.
More and more I think this is a replay of stem cell research. Bush is keeping his power dry and talking to advisors who know exactly what they are doing. In the last two days I've come to the conclusion that Bush is taking exactly the right steps, including the delliberately leaked ambiguity to contribute to defeat of this bill in the Senate.
If that fails, I expect Bush to veto the bill, and ask for time on TV to tell the American people exactly why this bill is an assault on the Constitution and deserved to be vetoed. He will couple that with a demand that Congress go right back to work and pass an honest campaign reform bill that applies NOW, in this election.
The general reaction of most people will be, like on stem cell research,"Now there's a leader I can respect." And Congress, having been painted into a corner, will have to pass a bill that DOES meet Bush's six criteria.
I think that's the end game. If so, everything done, and NOT done, by he White House to date, leads up to putting the football clean and true through the uprights with no time left on the clock. I believe the "Patriots" will win this one, too.
In short, the adults are back in charge. The nay-sayers are like the critics on Afghanistan. Most of the White House action right now is behind the scenes and invisible. Do not assume with this Administration that if you don't see immediate results, nothing is happening.
Don't mess with Texas has a correlary. Don't underestimate Texas.
Congressman Billybob
People do, however, care about the NRA, the RTL committees, and on the other side, NOW and Sierra Club. And when THOSE groups start telling their membership what happened, look out.
This will have much more impact than you imagine.
He repeals the 1934 National Firearms Act and makes machine guns legal and unregulated in civilian hands again.
He repeals the 17th Amendment.
You reinforce my opinion of the fantasy world libertarians live in. Much like John Lennon's "Imagine", noble but not realistic. And I assume you mean the 16th Amendment (the power to tax) not the 17th (election of senators)
He still won't sign it the way it is.
If the next election comes down to a Democrat or Republican, they'll still vote Republican. It's better than a kazillion tax increases and a kazillion new social programs.It's better than total gun control, or abortion of pre-schoolers.
I am not a Libertarian, and I meant the 17th Amendment.
Right now, senators are the worst of all possible "representatives": They are popularly elected, but only infrequently. They are slaves to the will of the people, but they only fear the lash one year out of six. That's what drives their basic legislative pattern: stubborn resistance to any deviation from the status quo, punctuated every six years by a desperate rush to demagogue some hot-button issue. Meanwhile, no one represents the legitimate issues of state governments at the federal level. In order for a governor to work for federal change, he basically has to petition his own voters to vote for federal candidates who will then represent the state's interests—which means, as a practical matter, that there is absolutely no check on theft of power from the state governments to the federal government.
When the Senate became popularly elected, they became just like the Congress. Thusly you see the burgeoning and explosive growth in the power and range of the Federal Leviathon.
The 17th did more damage to America than any other amendment, including the 16th.
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