‘There are individuals who want to blow up the tracks’

December 6, 2006

I know we’ve talked at length about ignoble exit of the 109th Congress, and the do-nothing Congress’ do-nothing lame-duck session, but it’s worth remembering it’s a problem with some layers.

What offends me is not just that Congress hasn’t done its job, and not just that they’re complaining about feeling “tired,” and not just that congressional Republicans are already whining about having to work a little harder next year, it’s that GOP lawmakers are intentionally screwing things up for next year.

Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month.

Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. And the departing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.), has been demanding that the Democrat-crafted 2008 budget absorb most of the $13 billion in costs incurred from a decision now to protect physician reimbursements under Medicare, the federal health-care program for the elderly and disabled.

The unstated goal is to disrupt the Democratic agenda and make it harder for the new majority to meet its promise to reinstitute “pay-as-you-go” budget rules, under which new costs or tax cuts must be offset to protect the deficit from growing.

It’s like they’re pouring a little salt in the soil after burning the place down.

If this were merely a consequence of the GOP’s inability to govern, it’d be a frustrating shame. But instead, this is an intentional, spiteful strategy.

“There are individuals who want to blow up the tracks, and there are more of those individuals in the House,” said one Senate leadership aide.

Keep in mind, that’s a quote from a Senate Republican leadership aide, admitting the problems on the Hill.

“It’s a demonstration of the irresponsibility of Republicans that they would leave this country with this mess,” said soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). “But we won, we will deal with it.” Added Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va), “What a sad mess.”

Except in this case, it’s a mess the GOP created on purpose.

We’re off to a great post-election bi-partisan start, aren’t we?

“But we won, we will deal with it.” – Nancy Pelosi

Do we need to say anything else. They are being childish but we are being adult (grandparently, even 😉 ).

  • The old joke goes: Republicans seek office on the premise that government can do nothing right, and once elected do everything they can to prove it.

    It seems this holds true for getting unelected too.

  • The Dems should start with withholding any pay due to any Republican lawmakers. When they start screaming about it, press the MSM with the meme, “they did not due their work, they shoud not get paid.”
    Next, they should propose garnishing any pensions due to said Repubs, just to offset the debts that they incurred.
    What fun fantasy is!!!

  • Remember when out going Clinton staff removed all the W’s from the keyboards. It was childish, but extremely funny and probably a little annoying to some.

    This isn’t childish behavior, children don’t understand the consequences of their actions. This is one thing only, REPUBLICAN behavior.

  • Am I the only one who thinks the Republicans are hurting themselves with this? The Dems get to gut all the Republican earmarks out of the current budget bills, stick in their own and if it comes out a few dollars less, they can claim victory. The budget bills allows the Dems to effect the government RIGHT NOW instead of Oct 2007. No matter how much the Dems screw up, it will be easy to do a better job than the last Congress.

  • Remember when out going Clinton staff removed all the W’s from the keyboards.
    Comment by ScottW

    And even this is quite likely a Bushite lie. The only government agency that reported that was the White House, not the GAO.

    But would Ari Fleischer lie?

  • The removal of W’s from keyboards is probably an urban myth, spread gleefully by those who wanted to pretend that adult supervision was returning to the Executive Branch and needed to distract us all from the fact that there were no adults in charge on the Hill.

  • I sure hope that Nancy Pelosi takes note of the tenor of these assholes. She will make nice with ’em at her own risk.

  • First, that story about Clinton’s staff removing the Ws from the keyboards is apocryphal.

    Second, I agree with Lance. None of this is surprising given the record of these clowns. They lost because they screwed everything up. Now it’s up to us to clean up the mess. We wanted the leadership, and now we’ve got to exercise it. Stunts like BuzzMon suggests will only hasten the day when the clowns are back in charge.

    The grown-ups are in charge now.

  • “…it’s a mess the GOP created on purpose.”

    That cannot be said enough. These people have engaged in a twenty-five year long conspiracy to hamstring, dismantle, and vandalize the government of the United States of America. The deficit, Katrina, the quagmire in Iraq — none of these are unintended consequences. What we keep referring to as “failure” are in fact successes on the part of the GOP.

    That’s why Bush says we’re winning in Iraq. He’s not divorced from reality. He’s acknowledging in his way what reality really is. We’re sucking billions of dollars out of the Treasury, and the social programs that the GOP despises but will not publicly attack, and diverting a nice chunk of it into the pockets of administration supporters. For him, that’s win, win, win.

  • We’re sucking billions of dollars out of the Treasury, and the social programs that the GOP despises but will not publicly attack, and diverting a nice chunk of it into the pockets of administration supporters. For him, that’s win, win, win. —–Comment by Roddy McCorley

    I think you just nailed it. That has always been their agenda. Something about shrinking government and then drowning the rest. We can’t have a functioning government without the funds to run it, so they have diverted all the funds they can get their hands on, and tried to raid the Social Security trust fund too. I hope we deal with the left over budget by cutting all of the earmarks in sight, and restore homeland security funds to the cities that need it, and forget the petting zoos.

  • Pelosi is offering Hastert nice digs because he’s NOT in the leadership anymore. Now Republican’t representatives who might not have visited him in the basement will come hang out in his space, and when they eventually get into fights with BONER, they will all collalese together to undo him.

    Evil, that’s what I say. If I were BONER I’d insist Hastert not take the space. But he’s probably not even aware of the subtle threat to his power.

    Go Nancy!

  • How ironic…

    Written in 2001 – “Clinton’s tawdry behavior made it seem that this last week a mature adult was taking over the presidency from a clever, but narcissistic adolescent. As people remember what it is like to have a President whose character one can respect, they will wonder why they were ever satisfied with less.”

  • They also paid $78 each for new keyboards. I know, you’re shocked.

    Rather than go to Frye’s and pick them up for $9.99? Typical Republican “governance.” Right up there with the $600 Hair Farce coffeepots.

  • If the Republicans are now a regional southern party, they sure took good notes from Gen. Sherman’s Civil War playbook. This incredible display of immaturity, spite and dishonorable behavior, I fear, will probably pale in comparison to the scorched earth that will be left in the wake of W’s departure from D.C.

  • Does this mean the Republicans belong to the Party of Personal Responsibility as well as Collective Malfeasance?

  • Clearly, the GOP has gone totally suicidal. They still don’t have a clue to their own actions. Dems now have not only the chance to conduct investigations and oversight, but now they can document everything.

    EVERYTHING.

    Starting with Day One, Minute One, Dems can produce a finitely-detailed list of everything the ReThug has done—and what’s even better, the ReThug is helping them do it.

    Gut the pork while trussing the pig for the luau—and the pig does it’s own gutting and trussing. It’s a “win-win-win-win” situation for Dems.

    That’s called a “Grand Slam….”

  • Seems like with a minimal effort, Dems could preface successes and forward progress with some explanation of why they’re proud of having achieved that success in the face of needlessly negative starting points and what part RepubCo played in creating that behind the 8 ball reality.

    The horror story of RepubCo’s malicious, impotent criminality was a key aspect of why Dems got handed the keys to the congressional barge. Their infantile cutting off of the nations nose by continuing to thwart good gov’t in order to spite the Dems face is not invisible to the general public who put in Dems hoping for better.

    Steny Hoyer’s statement that Congress would be starting a five day work week made the front page of my local paper and the folks who I work with five days a week can certainly relate to that approach better then the retired CEO with a pension approach to working that RepubCo pursued.

    It’s about working hard and really trying and letting the public know what the hell is going on. Every day. The harder Dems work to lead and work to accomplish, the stupider Repubs will look with their petty, destructive foot stamping tantrums.

    RepubCo is made up of wimps like the losers who want to leave their gov’t posts because they don’t want to be scrutinized for having carried ShrubCo’s water. They don’t deserve to be feared and never did.

  • And that is why I cannot for the life of me understand why the hell Nancy Pelosi is doing this:
    http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Pelosi_offers_nice_Capitol_Hill_digs_1205.html

    Comment by lib4

    LOL. Hell yes, I agree with Lance. It’s too early to say for sure that Pelosi’s generosity is a plot worthy of Sun Tzu like Lance suggests, rather than a garden-variety screw-up and the restarting of a long trend of Democrats being the Stupid Party… but then, it’s too early to say for sure that it’s not.

    There must be some witty, pithy quote somewhere about having good choice in enemies. Democrats already understand this at least a little bit, obviously, the way they ran against Bush. At the moment, Hastert seems like a chump who happened to be in charge, and if Pelosi feels safer with him in a leadership position among Republicans rather than whichever slick, well-disciplined faux-centrist manages to rise to the top of their circular firing squad (the mixed metaphors, they burn!!! Um, sorry), she just might be right.

  • I don’t think Nancy Pelosi is stupid or naive. She understands that it is better to have a friend than an enemy and now Hastert is a friend who she just gave a favor to. There may be a time when Pelosi needs a favor from Hastert. She is one smart woman, and she knows what she is doing.

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