http://www.npr.org/2011/12/31/144459614/this-year-in-congress-much-drama-little-to-show
I love the way House Majority Leader Eric Cantor spins this. Unproductive Congresses are fine, because they don't pass bad legislation? That's a cover-your-butt rationalization, because Republican pols tell us every ten seconds about the massive challenges that face the USA today.
Intransigent House Republicans and even more intransigent Senate Republicans share the blame. Dems can take a small slice of that pie, but Republicans need to take the bigger slice. Senate Republicans are especially guilty by virtue of the way that they have abused the filibuster. The filibuster rule has been loosened up so that you can kill legislation simply with a word- there is no longer any need to stay up all night reading the Federalist Papers to a C-Span camera. And Senate Republicans are now using it to kill EVERYTHING. Republicans decided that they did not like the new Consumer protection position that was created by the previous congress, so they are now filibustering every one of Obama's nominations to occupy that seat. They don't really care who gets nominated, the answer is just going to be NO.
So the Congresses of 2011 and 2012 will go down in history as the least productive in 100 years. It's a safe bet that the 2012 Congress, in a Presidential election year, will be LESS productive than last year's. But that's okay with Republicans, because they view it as a time out to accomplish Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's Job One: limiting B. Obama to one term. So it's not a problem, right?
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Comments: 12
The only thing the tea party has supported is more tax breaks for the super-rich, more tax loopholes so the most profitable corporations can avoid having to pay taxes while they ship jobs and hide profits overseas, and increase the debt.
Time. After. Time.
Which is why the billionaire Koch brothers fund and organize the tea party through their network of lobbying groups run by insider lobbyists on K Street. Ain't that a hoot - the tea party is owned by K Street lobbyists.
When the Republicans were honest (which they actually were at one time) they actually acknowledged the science and even pushed the idea of cap-and-trade as a market-based mechanism for weaning ourselves off our addiction to oil (even GW Bush said this). Newt Gingrich, by the way, was advocating for a market-based approach to dealing with the "profound" reality of man-made climate change. His 2007 book "A Contract with the Earth" argued that protecting the environment and moving toward a renewables based energy future was non-partisan and smart for America.
Then the tea party was mobilized by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel funded organizations to act to deny the science while defunding EPA and other agencies tasked with protecting human health and the environment. Every action the tea party has taken has been to protect the super rich and the most profitable corporations and foist even more of the costs onto the middle class and working poor.
Please provide some action by Obama that shows an attempt to "foist" European-style economic institutions on the U.S. Which of the European economies is socialist? Which has government ownership of the means of production? Lay it out for me. Because so far as I can tell the Common Market is not socialist at all.