From 1947 to 2011, it has been more than six decades since there’s been a Congress without a Kennedy:
It’s remarkable. From Jack through Patches, it’s like watching evolution in reverse. It makes me doubt Darwin’s theory.
Category: Congress
Speaker John Boehner’s Swearing-In: Less Glamorous, More Choked Up and Crying
Austerity is the theme of Republican John A. Boehner’s installation as House speaker this week, placing the start of this new Congress in stark contrast to the more lavish festivities that marked Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s swearing-in four years ago.
On Wednesday, following a bipartisan prayer service at St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Boehner will recite the oath and take the gavel from Pelosi with the attendant pomp and no more – except, perhaps, a few tears.
Then the 61-year-old Ohioan will deliver his maiden speech to the new House, which includes a huge cadre of freshmen lawmakers. Many of them are rambunctious Republicans who sailed into Washington with the tea party winds and are determined to use their new majority to undo much of President Obama’s legislative record.
Don’t expect Hollywood celebrities. Do expect some crying. And lots and lots of Ohio people:
John Boehner would have a sizeable crowd in Washington Wednesday to watch him be sworn in as the 61st Speaker of the House if it were only his blood relatives coming.
Boehner is the second oldest of the 12 children of the late Earl and Mary Ann Boehner of Reading; and 10 of his siblings and their families are going to Washington for the swearing-in.
But hundreds of others are coming as well, by plane, automobile and buses – cousins, family friends, campaign volunteers, Republican Party officials from all over Ohio, and tea party activists who supported the West Chester congressman’s “Pledge to America” campaign that led to the GOP taking over the House in the November election.
“There are a whole lot of us here who want to pay tribute to John’s accomplishments,” said David Kern, a Liberty Township trustee who is chairman of the Butler County Republican Party.
“It’s something we are very proud of – that the speaker of the House comes from Butler County, Ohio,” said Kern, who will fly to Washington Tuesday for the Boehner swearing-in and festivities. “That’s something to celebrate.”
BTW, I’d like to go down to Washington to cover Wednesday’s ceremonies opening the 112th Congress, checking in with some of our favorites like Ann Marie Buerkle and Allen West. So if you want to hit the tip jar for $10 or $20 to help with expenses — gas, parking, bribes for Maryland State Troopers who clock me doing 91 mph in a 65-mph zone — that would be appreciated.
UPDATE: Supporters of North Carolina’s Renee Ellmers will celebrate her swearing-in Wednesday at the Hay-Adams Hotel.
112th Congress: Ready to Rumble!
The Wall Street Journal‘s Patrick O’Connor and Janet Hook preview the upcoming fights:
The Republican majority that takes over the House this week plans an ambitious drive to slash government spending by tens of billions of dollars in the next few months, a strategy that ensures that the capital soon will be consumed by intense debate over how and where to reduce the size of government.
The incoming House majority will start by offering two measures this week that carry more symbolism than substance. One will be a motion to repeal the health bill that President Barack Obama signed last year, and the second will be a measure to trim the cost of running the House itself. The health-care repeal isn’t expected to go anywhere in the Senate, where Democrats retain the majority, and the package of cuts to the House budget will only save about $25 million from a federal budget that exceeds $3 trillion.
After that, however, Republicans in the House say they plan to move on to offer a far more sweeping package of “recissions,” or elimination of spending previously approved, that will aim to bring domestic spending back to where it was before Mr. Obama became president. The skirmish over that proposal for spending cuts, coupled with related fights over government regulation and health care, will set the battle lines for the next two years, as Washington returns to divided government.
Let the partisan bickering begin! Gridlock is our only hope! Glenn Reynolds offers some suggestions:
The first advice comes from Han Solo in the debut “Star Wars” film: “Don’t get cocky.” Republicans won big in the last election, but, if they think that constitutes an excuse to slip back into their old ways, circa 2004 to 2006, then they are doomed — not just as individual politicians, but quite possibly as a party. The public’s patience is quite limited, and is likely to stay so for the foreseeable future. . . .
‘Break into a Prevent Defense for the Second Half and Try to Preserve a Tie’
That’s how Dan Collins at Piece of Work in Progress describes Eric Holder’s strategy for dealing with the incoming Republican majority in the House:
Despite the fact that the New Black Panthers were captured on video with weapons and fascist-style uniforms at the entrance to a polling place, Holder said: “There is no there, there.” Really? Heady stuff from the attorney general.
When asked about the fact that Holder’s Civil Rights Division is hostile to racially equal enforcement of the law from top to bottom, Holder again deploys another cliché, calling it a “made up controversy.” Holder doubled down: “All I have on my side with regard to that is the facts and the law.” . . .
Read the whole thing. A lot of shenanigans that have gone on during the first two years of the Obama administration will be investigated by House committees in the next two years. There’s a lot of that stuff that’s been ignored because when Pelosi’s Democrats were in charge, they refused to do any meaningful oversight of the executive branch.
Expect to hear lots of administration officials (and their apologists in the JournoList community) making lame excuses for various malfeasances and claiming that the GOP is engaged in “witch hunts,” etc. Keep your grains of salt handy.
Late Entry in the ‘Stupidest Things Liberals Said in 2010’ Sweepstakes
Harvard-educated Ezra Klein updates Orwell’s famous maxim: “One has to work at The Washington Post to believe things like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool.”
On MSNBC, Klein was asked about plans of the 112th Congress to read the Constitution aloud:
“Yes, it’s a gimmick. I mean, you could say two things about it. One is that it has no binding power on anything. And then, two, the issue of the Constitution is not that people don’t read the text and think they’re following it. The issue of the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person, and differs depending on what they want to get done. So I wouldn’t expect too much coming out of this.”
Ezra has attempted a walk-back, but not before inspiring a devastating Iowahawk parody.
My apologies for being the last blogger on top of this particular dogpile, but somebody in the blogosphere must be assigned to keep up with Natalie Portman’s lesbian scenes and I drew the short straw.
Thank God: The 111th Congress Is Over
The House on Wednesday evening passed a motion to adjourn the 111th Congress “Sine Die”, bringing to a close Democrats four-year reign in the lower chamber. . . .
Democrats touted the busy lame duck as a fitting end to what they are touting as one of the most productive Congresses in recent history.
“This was, by far, the most productive Congress in American history,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said on the Senate floor Wednesday evening. “And the lame-duck session we’re finishing was the most productive of its kind. Why? Because we heard the message the American people sent us last month: They don’t want us to sit around and waste their time. They want us to work together and work for them.”
Yeah. “Working together” = “Ramming through the Democrats’ agenda with the cooperation of RINOs.”
That’s really popular, Harry.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And I’d like to add a shout-out to my colleague Smitty who as regular readers know (a) was recently deployed by Uncle Sam to a landlocked country ending with “-stan,” and (b) despised the 111th Congress with every fiber of his being. You may want to send Smitty an e-mail to wish him a Merry Christmas and thank him for his service.
Allen West Asks, ‘Hey, How Come Congress Is Getting So Many Days Off?’
After taking a look at the congressional calender for 2011, the newly elected Congressman from Florida’s 22nd District sent a letter to Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Page 1 and Page 2 in PDF format) and issued this press release:
Congressman-Elect Allen West has questions surrounding the Congressional calendar released last week and has written a letter to House Majority Leader-Elect Eric Cantor to reflect those concerns.
“As we know, Congress needs to work to create jobs, reduce the deficit, strengthen our economy, limit the size of government and contend with a plethora of national security issues,” West said. “How are we to do that when, among other things, we start off being in session only ten days the entire month of January?”
Congressman-Elect West is concerned with the fact that Congress is only in session 123 days, only one-third of the entire year. He points out that Congress will not even meet the mark of 90 days in session until September of 2011, just a matter of days before the end of the Fiscal Year.
“I am sure we both agree that the issues before us today require the members of Congress to go beyond what has been the accepted practice in the past to meet the challenges of the future,” West writes to Cantor.
West is also concerned with the “retreats” in the month following the swearing in – some of them taxpayer funded- for members of Congress. Congressman-Elect West has already decided he will not attend at least two of the retreats.
“We have to show the American people we are going to be different than years past,” West said. “We are there for one reason and one reason only, to work for the constituents of the districts we are so privileged to represent. I hope that if it becomes clear that we are not meeting the promise we made to the American people, leadership will modify the schedule in order for us to accomplish the important task we have before us.”
News coverage from CNN, National Journal and The Hill.
Death of Omnibus Boosts GOP
Defeating Harry Reid’s pet pork package gets Republicans off on the right foot going into the 112th Congress:
Senate Republicans sought to build momentum on Friday after successfully forcing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to beg off a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill.
Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wrote a valedictory e-mail to GOP supporters cheering the death of the omnibus bill.
“You did it. Facing pressure from you, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Thursday night he was withdrawing the Democrats’ last-minute, 2,200-page-long, $1.1 trillion spending bill,” Cornyn wrote, crediting Republican wins in Senate races this fall for the victory.
Reid pulled the spending bill from the Senate floor after Republicans signaled they would not support the legislation . . .
The defeat last night of the OmniPorkulus bill, as the Boss Emeritus calls it, gives us a chance to revisit the long-held — and long-true — belief that both parties are equally addicted to pork-barrel spending.
Ed links to a column by Byron York that argues Republicans really did get the message of the Tea Party movement and the midterm elections.
Meanwhile, the passage of the tax “compromise” leaves liberal Ezra Klein perplexed:
The tax deal passed last night, and without changes. Liberals don’t really like it. Conservatives don’t really like it. Even people who supported the deal — myself included — don’t really like it. It’s tempting to say that this broad spectrum of gnawing dissatisfaction just shows that the bill was a true compromise, with everyone getting a little and giving up a bit. And maybe it was. But it was a compromise that said something bad about our political system, not something good: It said we’re operating without a clear theory of what’s gone wrong in the economy, or how to fix it.
Who is this “we,” Kemosabe? “What’s gone wrong in the economy” is the collapse of a speculative bubble, followed by a misguided attempt to re-inflate the bubble through Keynesian interventionism. As I tried to tell all you genius experts two years ago: “It Won’t Work.”
As for “how to fix it,” the answer is equally simple: Stop!
Stop the endless deficit spending, stop the endless extension of unemployment benefits, stop trying to “fix” the housing market with further interventions, stop trying to “fix” deflation by having the Fed buy Treasury debt, stop the government takeover of the health-care industry — stop just about everything that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama have been doing since January 2009.
Once you’ve stopped doing the wrong things, that will be about half of the solution. The other half of the solution — actually doing the right thing — will probably have to wait until January 2013, when the next president is sworn in and we rid ourselves of Barack Obama, who now looks much less like the messiah Ezra Klein once worshipped and a lot more like the Second Coming of Jimmy Carter.
UPDATE: Ed Driscoll notes that ObamaCare is the next big target in GOP sights.