...
Every Republican I know thinks Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are the best things they have going for them," Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury official in the first Bush's presidency, writes in Washington Monthly.
Reid would likely lead the Democratic majority in the Senate, if there is one. What's so terrible about the social conservative from Nevada is beyond me. Pelosi, no doubt, is the bigger hope for a liberal voodoo doll.
Republican partisans should consider another possibility -- that Pelosi and Reid don't govern as the lefty radicals of their dreams but as pragmatic progressives. They would battle for embryonic stem cell research, a higher minimum wage and an energy policy not hostage to oil interests -- all popular causes frustrated by the Republican leadership.
With Democrats utterly out of power, Republican partisans have had the liberty to air their fantasies about what those crazy people might do. They imagine out loud that Pelosi, who represents a heavily gay district, would never punish a homosexual congressman caught hitting on a congressional page. They conjure up scenes of House Democrats initiating wildly disruptive impeachment proceedings against President Bush.
But every now and then, reality raises its inconvenient head. Pelosi has already called on the House Ethics Committee to investigate Mark Foley's "egregious" conduct. And when asked whether a Democratic-controlled House would try to impeach the president, she answers an emphatic no. "We don't have time for that," she says.
Poetic license lets partisans make up stuff about what the opposition might do in the future. That license needs revoking, however, when their flights of fancy contradict things that have already happened. Many Republicans are especially inventive in rewriting the fiscal history of the Clinton era.
Joe Scarborough, MSNBC talk-show host and former GOP congressman from Florida, contends in a Washington Monthly essay that "conservative Republicans and the Clinton White House somehow managed to balance the budget ..." He adds that Clinton's "worst (fiscal) instincts were tempered by a Republican Congress."
Whoa. The hard budget-balancing work took place in 1993, before there was a Republican Congress. That's when Clinton pushed through a tax hike on the richest 1.2 percent of taxpayers. It passed a Democratic-controlled House with zero votes from the Republican side.
...
Perhaps, just perhaps, it was Clinton who forced fiscal discipline on the Republican Congress and not the other way around. Clinton established the "conservative" principle that spending had to be paid for with taxes. Permission to splurge with abandon, borrow the money and leave the bills to one's grandchildren came from a Republican president and his enabling Republican Congress.
Given the reality of galloping deficits (the lower deficit figure for 2006 is a temporary reprieve from a horrid long-term projection), Pelosi's remark that she might want to roll back Bush tax cuts for people making $250,000 to $300,000 or more a year is neither surprising nor unwelcome. And in another budget issue, she vows to "drain the swamp" of Washington corruption by ending the marriage between Republican powerbrokers and "K Street" lobbyists holding bags of money.
That doesn't sound scary. It sounds like a nice change.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/10/speaker_pelosi_why_not.html
Every Republican I know thinks Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are the best things they have going for them," Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury official in the first Bush's presidency, writes in Washington Monthly.
Reid would likely lead the Democratic majority in the Senate, if there is one. What's so terrible about the social conservative from Nevada is beyond me. Pelosi, no doubt, is the bigger hope for a liberal voodoo doll.
Republican partisans should consider another possibility -- that Pelosi and Reid don't govern as the lefty radicals of their dreams but as pragmatic progressives. They would battle for embryonic stem cell research, a higher minimum wage and an energy policy not hostage to oil interests -- all popular causes frustrated by the Republican leadership.
With Democrats utterly out of power, Republican partisans have had the liberty to air their fantasies about what those crazy people might do. They imagine out loud that Pelosi, who represents a heavily gay district, would never punish a homosexual congressman caught hitting on a congressional page. They conjure up scenes of House Democrats initiating wildly disruptive impeachment proceedings against President Bush.
But every now and then, reality raises its inconvenient head. Pelosi has already called on the House Ethics Committee to investigate Mark Foley's "egregious" conduct. And when asked whether a Democratic-controlled House would try to impeach the president, she answers an emphatic no. "We don't have time for that," she says.
Poetic license lets partisans make up stuff about what the opposition might do in the future. That license needs revoking, however, when their flights of fancy contradict things that have already happened. Many Republicans are especially inventive in rewriting the fiscal history of the Clinton era.
Joe Scarborough, MSNBC talk-show host and former GOP congressman from Florida, contends in a Washington Monthly essay that "conservative Republicans and the Clinton White House somehow managed to balance the budget ..." He adds that Clinton's "worst (fiscal) instincts were tempered by a Republican Congress."
Whoa. The hard budget-balancing work took place in 1993, before there was a Republican Congress. That's when Clinton pushed through a tax hike on the richest 1.2 percent of taxpayers. It passed a Democratic-controlled House with zero votes from the Republican side.
...
Perhaps, just perhaps, it was Clinton who forced fiscal discipline on the Republican Congress and not the other way around. Clinton established the "conservative" principle that spending had to be paid for with taxes. Permission to splurge with abandon, borrow the money and leave the bills to one's grandchildren came from a Republican president and his enabling Republican Congress.
Given the reality of galloping deficits (the lower deficit figure for 2006 is a temporary reprieve from a horrid long-term projection), Pelosi's remark that she might want to roll back Bush tax cuts for people making $250,000 to $300,000 or more a year is neither surprising nor unwelcome. And in another budget issue, she vows to "drain the swamp" of Washington corruption by ending the marriage between Republican powerbrokers and "K Street" lobbyists holding bags of money.
That doesn't sound scary. It sounds like a nice change.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/10/speaker_pelosi_why_not.html
