From the diaries by Erick . . . Eric Holder testifies before Congress today on his department’s outrageous Operation Fast and Furious scandal. Eager to provide political cover for Obama’s embattled Attorney General, House Democrats yesterday released a report attempting to exonerate Holder and his political appointees for failing to do their jobs. Of course, their report says Holder’s innocent. The facts say he’s guilty. I say he must resign. This cynical ploy is just the latest effort by Democrats to cover up the truth. Slowly but surely, their web of misstatements, falsehoods, and shifting blame is coming unraveled, revealing a reckless and incompetent administration. First, a recap: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) lost track of more than 2,000 weapons in a 2010 trafficking sting operation gone bad. Most ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels. Many ended up at crime scenes. Some were used in murders, kidnappings, and other violent crimes. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. border agent. It’s a disaster and tragedy that could have been prevented, and the Justice Department refuses to take responsibility. First came the denials. ATF chief Kenneth Melson claimed he didn’t know about Fast and Furious until January 2011. But DOJ officials said otherwise in a letter sent to Congress. Melson was briefed in December 2009, before the operation began, and received periodic updates afterward. Attorney General Eric Holder also feigned ignorance when questioned. First he said he hadn’t heard of Fast and Furious until Spring 2011. Then documents showed he received briefings in 2010. When called out, Holder admitted his testimony was “inaccurate” and “imprecise.” Holder frantically backpedalled again when it was discovered that DOJ officials sent a letter with false information to Sen. Chuck Grassley. When asked if they were lying, Holder dodged: “It all has to do with your state of mind.” Democrats will do anything to avoid blame. The DOJ withheld information. The White House accused congressmen of “playing politics.” Officials “screamed” and “cussed at” CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson. The administration sealed the court documents connected to the murder of the border patrol agent. If Holder and Obama’s appointees are innocent, why won’t they hand over relevant documents? Why won’t they answer forthrightly in congressional inquiries? Why won’t they talk politely to investigative reporters instead of screaming and cursing? Why do they seal court documents from public view? It begs a bigger question: What more are they hiding? Amid all this, Obama still insisted in October that he has “complete confidence in Attorney General Holder and how he handles his office.” That’s the biggest problem. Obama has “complete confidence” in a scandal-ridden department. Perhaps it “all has to do with your state of mind.” Americans, meanwhile, have lost their confidence in this administration, and I, along with many other Republicans, have repeatedly called for Holder’s resignation. It’s time he heed those calls. In his State of the Union address, President Obama said, “I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis.” A new agency run by Eric Holder? I wouldn’t get my hopes up on that one.
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The Fast and Furious Cover Up
Yesterday, Mitt Romney caused a stir when he made the following remarks about the poor during an interview with CNN : “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.” Following this comment, CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien prodded Romney to clarify his remarks. “We will hear from the Democrat party, the plight of the poor…. You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus…. The middle income Americans, they’re the folks that are really struggling right now and they need someone that can help get this economy going for them.” The media, Democrats, and many Republicans are painting him as out-of-touch, while expressing their concern that he is apathetic to the plight of the poor. However, they are missing the point. The real outrage is not that he doesn’t want to do more for the poor; it’s that he thinks they are taken care of with the welfare state. Worse, he believes that the welfare state is, more or less, functioning properly. Fear not, ‘any minor glitches would be repaired by Mr. Fix It. It is precisely this sentiment that makes Romney disqualified for the Republican nomination. Romney doesn’t believe that the welfare system is fundamentally flawed; that the welfare state is the consummate enemy of the poor; that unlimited welfare is what perpetuates and exacerbates poverty. He thinks it is working relatively fine, albeit in need of some minor tweaks here and there. As Senator DeMint noted , this could have been a teachable moment – a moment for Romney to shine. He could have gone on offense by explaining how it is these very welfare programs that have failed to deracinate poverty, even though they have been in place for decades. He could have shown how the only thing that is stimulated by these programs is the dependency of the program itself. $30 billion spent on food stamps gives rise to $60 billion, which now gives rise to $80 billion. He could have defended the inherent compassion of conservative free-market policies in weaning people off these programs and creating upward mobility. As conservatives, we care deeply about the poor. Then again, we care for everyone equally. We don’t recognize a class system – one that Romney has propagated incessantly throughout the campaign. It is that conviction that burns in the heart of every conservative who desires to fundamentally overhaul the welfare state and the cycle of dependency and poverty. We care immensely about the millions of poor who are condemned to a life of failure because they are trapped in the public education system perpetuated by teachers’ unions and the Democrats. We cry out for those who cannot afford healthcare because the liberals have destroyed the free market. We empathize with those who can no longer afford food, gas, and utilities because liberals have artificially inflated the prices with government interventions. We sympathize with those who can’t find jobs that fit their skill set because liberal environmentalists have eliminated their jobs. As conservatives, we are not happy to merely be efficient stewards of Medicaid, LIHEAP, Food Stamps, Unemployment, and TANF to deal with the aforementioned problems. We seek to solve those problems by offering an equal opportunity for everyone to earn a living with dignity; not by offering capricious politicians the opportunity to grow dependency, and by extension, their own power. Only one who is insouciant towards the plight of the poor – whether Republican or Democrat – can feel content with the core structure of the current welfare/entitlement state. Such a person is satisfied with trite incremental tinkering of the system. Mitt Romney personifies that caricature. That is why his solution to poverty it to manage the welfare state…and raise the minimum wage requirement . Is this the man we want as our spokesperson during an election over the economy? Cross-posted from The Madison Project
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The Real Problem With Romney’s Comments
[Posted by Karl] As usual, you are positively encouraged to engage in sockpuppetry in this thread. The usual rules apply. Please, be sure to switch back to your regular handle when commenting on other threads. I have made that mistake myself. And remember: the worst sin you can commit on this thread is not being funny. — In the segment on space policy during last night’s CNN debate , Wolf Blitzer observed that a lot of people have lost their jobs in Florida as a result of the decline of America’s space program. It was left to the viewer to draw the inference that Newt Gingrich’s renewed emphasis on ideas like a permanent moonbase was perhaps not merely one of his recurring flights of futuristic fancy, but also an unsubtle pander to a bloc of voters in a key primary. Left entirely unmentioned was the fact that space programs are among they very few Americans support cutting and the inferences that might be drawn about a politician who will pander away even low-hanging fruit. –Karl
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Sockpuppet Friday (Moon Unit edition)
We have a legislative process, often referred to as “regular order,” for good reason. The committee, floor, and conference committee stages of the process are designed to maximize transparency and allow all members of Congress to offer their input on the impending bill. In recent months, there has been a disturbing trend among House leaders to jettison the floor process in the House in favor of a shortcut straight to conference committee with the Senate. They claim that this is needed in order to finish all the “must-pass” legislation on time. In reality, they are undermining their own majority in the House, while abdicating gratuitous power to the Senate. You would think that Republicans would be eager to leverage the power of the House – the one body they control – as much as possible. Instead, they have shown that their desire to forge deals supersedes transparency, as well as the leverage of their own conference. Under regular order, after a bill has been fully vetted and voted on by the members of the committee with jurisdiction, it is then sent to the floor so that all members can vote on amendments to the bill. The other body follows the same procedure, either concurrently or sequentially. At that point, the two legislative bodies reconcile their differences by instructing conferees to a conference committee or by ping-ponging the bill back and forth until one body acquiesces. However, under ‘House GOP order,’ they have agreed to send bills to conference committee even though the bills were never considered on the House floor. In some cases, the bills never even got out of committee. In other instances, they took obsolete bills that passed the House and totally transformed them without coming back to the conference for a floor vote. First it was Harry Reid’s minibus bills. After House Republicans worked assiduously to formulate a commonsense budget for FY 2012, House leaders went straight to conference on Senate appropriations bills – bills that eschewed all our budget figures and policy riders – that were never considered on the House floor. This allowed the statists in both parties to negotiate bad legislation behind closed doors. Once the conference committee reported its final product, each body was forced to vote up-or-down – without any opportunity to offer amendments. The same thing occurred with the $1 trillion omnibus. Those spending bills, which affect every facet of government, never went through regular order in the House. Even though one bill had already passed the House, Harry Reid tacked on new appropriations bills, funding massive components of government. These additional rider bills never passed the House, yet leadership in both parties felt that by using the name of the passed bill as the title, they would give the impression of using regular order. While they may be correct in the technical definition of regular order, they are clearly employing a stratagem that negates the transparency of the legislative process. Moreover, here is what Republicans promised on page 33 of the Pledge to America : “We will end the practice of packaging unpopular bills with “must-pass” legislation to circumvent the will of the American people. Instead, we will advance major legislation one issue at a time.” Another example is the payroll tax cut package. When Republicans caved on the two-month payroll tax cut package last December, the long-term bills were dead. They should have begun the new session by passing a new bill that would allow all members of the conference to ensure that unemployment insurance is reformed and that, at the very least, the entitlement spending in the bill is fully offset in a meaningful way. Instead, they chose to send it off to a conference committee. House Republicans will now be placed in an awkward position when they are forced to vote up-or-down on an agreement that will undoubtedly be offensive to most conservatives. Harry Reid is already talking about larding up the conference report with a proposal to extend over 80 temporary tax credits and deductions (the annual “tax extenders”) that expired last year. While some of those extenders are pro-growth, others are handouts to green energy . Is it really a good idea to force Republicans to vote up-or-down on a single bill that contains a tax cut on the one hand, and entitlement spending and green handouts on the other? These are all consequential and far reaching bills that require more attention from the full House than a simple up-or-down vote on a conference report. They should only go to conference based on a current bill passed by both houses, not based upon some tentative agreement between a few members, or an antiquated bill that has been abandoned prior to conference. The reality is that this pernicious precedent was already set with the idea of the Supercommittee, which was hatched from the inane debt ceiling deal. The idea that a small group of Congress could be given complete authority over every aspect of budget and taxation is an anathema to the traditions of our legislative process. Why would Republicans want to negate the leverage that is inherent in control over the most consequential body of Congress? They have control over all budget and taxation bills; let them use it to comply with their pledge for greater transparency. Are they worried that there is not enough time to pass all these wonderful bills through an open amendment process on the floor? Then stay in session longer. It’s not like they have other jobs. A tight schedule is not an excuse to short-circuit the legislative process, especially for the purpose of passing bad legislation. Cross-posted from The Madison Project
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Let the Full House Decide Major Legislation
What could possibly go wrong? (Roll Call) — House Democrats will decamp Wednesday from Washington to the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay Golf Resort, Spa & Marina in Cambridge, Md., to hone their jobs and economy message going into the 2012 election. According to the retreat agenda, Democrats will focus on the theme “Reignite the American Dream”
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MSNBC’s IQ-Deprived Ed Schultz, Jesse Jackson To Help Dems Work On Their Messaging At House Democratic Retreat…
