Yeah. The GOP Congress routinely ignored Bush’s budgets.
Pull the other one.
Well, the first Patriot Act passed with strong bi-partisan support. On its reauthorization, the Bush Administration had to compromise with a coalition of Republican and Democrat Senators who wanted certain civil liberty protections.
Yep, that’s the one. The “cuts” (actually decreases in the growth of entitlements) would have been much larger if the Republicans would have had their way.
It’s more like they didn’t pay any attention to it because it has no place in their budget/appropriations process. The President’s budget has no force on Capitol Hill. He submits it, the buget committees of both houses mark up their own version of the budget resolution, it passes (or recently, does not pass) Congress, and then the appropriation committees start actually dividing up the money. That’s the process, and the President doesn’t have any direct say until he signs/vetoes an appropriations bill.
When did they promise to do that?
I’m not being facetious here. I remember the House leadership’s “Six for '06” that they’re already getting busy on, since they’re planning to get all six through in the first 100 hours that the House is in session.
But I don’t remember the Dem leadership making a campaign promise to run the House in a more bipartisan fashion.
Nonetheless, they are promising now to make the rules more minority-friendly in ways that the GOP wouldn’t entertain over the past dozen years, after the first 100 hours are done with.
I don’t think that’s backpedaling at all. Steny Hoyer, the new House Majority Leader, has laid out a clear rationale for this - that the Dems had been running on their “Six for '06” agenda for six months, there was plenty of opportunity to debate it on the campaign trail (and on the House floor, if the GOP then-majority wished), the Dems won, and they didn’t feel that further debate or amendment was needed on that agenda; that debate had been held last year.
But beyond that first-100-hours agenda, the House Dems have committed themselves to opening up the game. If they change their minds on that, then that will be backpedaling. We’ll find out in a few weeks. (If Congress works 8-hour days, five days a week, 100 hours = 2.5 weeks. And there’s the MLK holiday in there. So the 100 hours will finish up probably no sooner than January 25.) That’ll be soon enough that you’ll still be able to remember how gullible I was if I’m wrong.
They’re plenty fanatic, they’re just not organized enough to do that kind of damage. I think the best we can hope for is that they slow down the republicans and then get so tangled up in internecine squabbling that they don’t have time to screw up the country.
The Democrats can win my short-term favor by, effective as soon as possible, shutting down every single one of the government’s secret/untransparent/overseas detainment facilities, and forcing all detainees to be either convicted of a crime with due process or released immediately. Does anyone know how much power Congress theoretically has with regards to this?
Effectively none.
The conduct of these facilities is a military matter, subject to the whim of the President.
And the previous congress, as a matter of urgency, passed legislation to decriminalise the conduct of paid officials of the US govt there, after the act. Nice huh?
A reversal of this legislation and attempt to climb onto the ladder of civilised nations would certainly be vetoed by the President at the very first rung.
On reflection, I recall starting a related thread a while ago, which posed that question: Which would it be; giving up the rule of law, or the prosecution of serving members of the US military following direct orders. I should have got back to that thread to see how it went. Hey ho. In any case the administration acted true to form and took the former option.
That’s part of the Military Commissions Act, right?
Fanatic in what way ?
What you surely meant to say is that legally, the President’s budget has no force on Capitol Hill. He submits it, the House GOP leadership introduces it as a bill with their full support behind it, the buget committees of both houses mark up their own version of the budget resolution, and so forth.
While it’s true that “the President doesn’t have any direct say until he signs/vetoes an appropriations bill,” there’s this thing called politics which is what goes on up on Capitol Hill, and during the past six years, we’ve had a GOP Congress that, with rare exceptions, has been willing to march in lockstep with the President. Needless to say, that’s greatly magnified the President’s power past that which the Constitution and the laws specifically grant him.
You can ignore that if you wish, but we’re here to fight ignorance.
Ah, the reauthorization. That’s different.
However, the cite I now see you provided doesn’t back up your point. It gives no evidence of compromise, only of the opportunity for such:
I’m not saying that there wasn’t compromise; just that your cite doesn’t support your claim.
The problem is, “much larger” cuts that would have still been orders of magnitude too small to make a real difference with respect to the deficit, is still so-what in terms of the deficit. Although those cuts, insignificant as they were with respect to the deficit, were quite significant with respect to the programs being cut. (For instance, one government survey I’m familiar with cut its third-quarter sample in half in order to save, as Dr. Evil would say, One. Million. Dollars. Put a thousand of those cuts together, and you’ve saved a whole billion. This process was going on across the entire government, to create savings that would reduce the deficit by a barely discernable tick in the numbers. Yeah, I’ll call it a sham. Damned straight.)
Besides, it’s the sort of compromise-at-knifepoint that the GOP has specialized in over the past few years, along the lines of “I’ll compromise and just take your wallet, I’ll let you keep your shirt.” The primo example of this was the 2003 tax cut, where they initially proposed a $700 billion tax cut, but ‘compromised’ on a $350B job. Same thing with the “Deficit ‘Reduction’ Act.” Yeah, it’s a ‘compromise,’ but not in the sense of ‘you get something you want, and I get something I want’; it’s a ‘compromise’ in the sense of ‘I won’t take everything of yours I set out to take; I’ll leave you with some of it.’
We’ll soon see how good they are at compromises of the sort where both sides have real power in the negotiations. But there’s no recent track record here.
Not quite. The House leadership does not introduce it with their full support behind it. Have you ever looked at the President’s budget? It’s not in bill form. It’s an outline of how he’d like to see spending divvied up. For most agencies, it’s usually par for the course, a small increase in spending with nothing changed. For others, he suggests a radical overhaul of their structure and mission.
The House and Senate budget committees then begin work on a budget resolution that is much less detailed and simply outlines spending for the appropriations committees to follow (or, sometimes they add provisions cutting mandatory spending or cutting taxes, which are then dealt with during th reconciliation process).
I’m fully aware that the President lobbies for his spending priorities. So what? Having actually worked on Capitol Hill on appropriations, I can tell you that Congress does not “march in lock step” on every single thing the President wants. Sure, he gets a lot of what he wants, but Congress also fails to do quite a few things he desires, too.
If that’s the case, then don’t spread ignorance about the budget process.
Maybe we’ve been living in different realities for the past six years. I’ve been living in one where the GOP, with rare exceptions (Dubai ports, Harriet Miers), did pretty much what the President wanted.
Oh, good: you can reduce my ignorance by naming a particular year’s budget and telling me just how much it gave the President what he wanted, and how much was different.
Not to worry, folks. We don’t have to think, we’ve got Fox News to do it for us. As their graphic states, the Democrats have “100 Hours to Turn America Into San Francisco.” And Nancy Pelosi is identified in their graphic as the “San Francisco Speaker.”
For those of you not into right wing code words, San Francisco is FoxTalk for GAY. So the Dems want to make us all gay, or so Fox wants you to think.
Just as they de-Baathified Iraq, the Republicans eventually will have to de-bathhousify Congress.
Well, I hear they wanted “San Francisco Twat,” like a pun on “San Francisco Treat,” but they thought that was pushing the bounds of good taste. I’m sure they used to identify Gingrich as “Georgia Speaker,” or at least “Georgia Peach”…
It also refers to drugs and general Godlessness. Jeane Kirkpatrick popularized the term “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984 GOP Convention keynote address. Along with “They always blame America first”, still a crowdpleaser.
The answer to talk about the “blame America first” crowd is, who else should we blame?
Because we’re Americans, and we’re debating what America has done, or should do. If America does right, then well and good. If America does wrong, then it’s America’s fault.
After that we can get specific and point out who made the bad decisions that caused America to do wrong. (Hint: the GOP. ;))
I’ll grant that at one time that was part of the inference. But now, especially with Bush’s personal history, the GOP isn’t bashing drug users like they used to. In today’s GOP, SF is shorthand for “we’ve got trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with G and that stands for GAY!”
I haven’t heard Blame America First lately, though it does make me nostalgic. It really means to be objective enough to recognize when your country is wrong. Bit by bit, the notion that the US made a colossal blunder in Iraq is becoming mainstream.