{"id":7611,"date":"2006-06-06T15:36:20","date_gmt":"2006-06-06T19:36:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7611"},"modified":"2006-06-06T15:36:20","modified_gmt":"2006-06-06T19:36:20","slug":"a-do-nothing-congress-by-design-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-do-nothing-congress-by-design-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"A &#8216;Do-Nothing&#8217; Congress &#8212; by design (redux)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About a month ago, the Boston Globe <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/nation\/washington\/articles\/2006\/05\/10\/gop_narrowing_its_congressional_agenda\/\">reported<\/a> that Republican leaders in Congress were considering a legislative agenda in which they would literally give up on passing major policy initiatives and instead focus on divisive bills that they didn&#8217;t expect to pass.<\/p>\n<p>According to (subscription-only) Roll Call, the Senate GOP is officially <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rollcall.com\/issues\/51_132\/roadmap\/13658-1.html\">on board with the plan<\/a> and, despite a 10-seat lead over Senate Democrats, they won&#8217;t try and pass any more substantive bills, at least for several months.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>With only a few months left on the legislative calendar, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has decided to abandon any efforts at bipartisanship in favor of using his chamber to hold a series of highly partisan, mostly symbolic votes on conservative causes, including amendments banning gay marriage and flag burning, and fully repealing the estate tax.<\/p>\n<p>Although Frist has peppered the Senate schedule with a handful of substantive issues &#8212; including likely votes this week on a new U.S. trade representative, a Native Hawaiian-rights bill and a new mine-safety czar &#8212; the chamber will put off work on major legislation such as the fiscal 2007 Defense authorization bill in order for Frist to pursue items of special interest to his party&#8217;s conservative base.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So, during a war, the Senate Republican leadership would rather spend three days debating an anti-gay constitutional amendment &#8212; that they know isn&#8217;t going to pass &#8212; than finish negotiations on a Defense authorization bill. In fact, the entire legislative process has now effectively come to a halt so Frist &#038; Co., who&#8217;ve blown off the far-right base for months, can go through the motions on some hopeless legislation.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s been painfully obvious for a while now, but it&#8217;s almost comical how unserious congressional Republicans are about matters of state. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About a month ago, the Boston Globe reported that Republican leaders in Congress were considering a legislative agenda in which they would literally give up on passing major policy initiatives and instead focus on divisive bills that they didn&#8217;t expect to pass. According to (subscription-only) Roll Call, the Senate GOP is officially on board with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7611","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7611\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}