{"id":3087,"date":"2004-11-24T13:10:43","date_gmt":"2004-11-24T18:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/3087.html"},"modified":"2004-11-24T13:10:43","modified_gmt":"2004-11-24T18:10:43","slug":"republicans-sure-have-been-busy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/republicans-sure-have-been-busy\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans sure have been busy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Picking up on a point Kevin Drum raised<\/a> 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<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n

Let’s see…<\/p>\n

* House Republicans changed their own ethics rules<\/a> to allow Tom DeLay to be Majority Leader even if he’s under indictment.<\/p>\n

* House Republicans quietly inserted a secret provision into a spending bill so that Appropriations Committee chairmen and their staffs could examine Americans’ tax returns<\/a> whenever they felt like it, for any reason at all, without concern for existing privacy rights.<\/p>\n

* Republicans pushed the government’s debt limit past the $8 trillion mark<\/a>. (Yes, that’s trillion with a “t”)<\/p>\n

* Senate Republicans effectively neutered Arlen Specter<\/a> because he wasn’t right-wing enough for them.<\/p>\n

* Republican leaders indicated they’re prepared to rewrite Senate filibuster rules<\/a>, crushing the rights of the minority party and giving the GOP majority unprecedented raw power<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* Republicans bought Bush a yacht<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* A small group of far-right House Republicans killed legislation<\/a> to implement intelligence reform, as recommended by the 9\/11 Commission.<\/p>\n

* House Republican leaders may have been able to pass the intelligence reform measures anyway<\/a>, but thought it would be embarrassing to rely on Democratic lawmakers for success, so they let it die<\/a> rather than have bi-partisan cooperation.
\n
\n* Abortion opponents rolled over Democrats’ objections<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n

* Senate Republicans gave sweeping new powers<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

* 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<\/a> over the political process, including provisions to make confirming presidential appointees and reinstating executive reorganization authority easier for the White House.<\/p>\n

* Congressional Republicans quietly inserted a provision in an intelligence bill to make conflict-of-interest problems for wealthy government officials harder to detect<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* Senate Republicans boycotted Tom Daschle’s farewell speech<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And that’s just the Republican Congress<\/i>; I’m not even starting on the Republican White House<\/i>.<\/p>\n

It’s going to be a long two years before the 2006 elections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3087\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}