Picking up on a point Kevin Drum raised the other day, it’s hard not to notice that it’s only been a few weeks since the election, but Republicans have been awfully busy. As the LA Times’ Janet Hook noted yesterday, “Republicans may have picked up only a handful of seats in Congress on election day, but they have been acting ever since as if they’d been carried by a conservative landslide.”
Let’s see…
* House Republicans changed their own ethics rules to allow Tom DeLay to be Majority Leader even if he’s under indictment.
* House Republicans quietly inserted a secret provision into a spending bill so that Appropriations Committee chairmen and their staffs could examine Americans’ tax returns whenever they felt like it, for any reason at all, without concern for existing privacy rights.
* Republicans pushed the government’s debt limit past the $8 trillion mark. (Yes, that’s trillion with a “t”)
* Senate Republicans effectively neutered Arlen Specter because he wasn’t right-wing enough for them.
* Republican leaders indicated they’re prepared to rewrite Senate filibuster rules, crushing the rights of the minority party and giving the GOP majority unprecedented raw power.
* Republicans bought Bush a yacht.
* A small group of far-right House Republicans killed legislation to implement intelligence reform, as recommended by the 9/11 Commission.
* House Republican leaders may have been able to pass the intelligence reform measures anyway, but thought it would be embarrassing to rely on Democratic lawmakers for success, so they let it die rather than have bi-partisan cooperation.
* Abortion opponents rolled over Democrats’ objections and added a provision to a giant spending bill that would make it easier for health-care providers to refuse to perform abortions or provide abortion-related services. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California called it “an extraordinary sneak attack.”
* Senate Republicans gave sweeping new powers to Majority Leader Bill Frist, including the authority to assign members to the Senate’s plum committees, challenging the tradition that seniority dictated committee posts. Even some Republicans called it a power grab. “There is only one reason for that change and it is to punish people,” Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) told reporters.
* Republicans on the House Government Reform Committee, which had already given up on any pretense of administration oversight, unveiled a plan to give Bush even more power over the political process, including provisions to make confirming presidential appointees and reinstating executive reorganization authority easier for the White House.
* Congressional Republicans quietly inserted a provision in an intelligence bill to make conflict-of-interest problems for wealthy government officials harder to detect.
* Senate Republicans boycotted Tom Daschle’s farewell speech.
And that’s just the Republican Congress; I’m not even starting on the Republican White House.
It’s going to be a long two years before the 2006 elections.