Subject: Why the GOP Congress will be the most unproductive in 164 years-Thank Mister McGoo McConnell and Private Ryan
THE WEEK
GOP is ineffective because they are just plain lazy, have a very poor work ethic and have become full of too many RINOs like McCain, Graham, Collins, Portman, Flake, Burr, Tillis etc. There is no difference between most of GOPers and DIMM counterparts. They ran on promise of repealing the ACA when in FACT they had no intention of really repealing and replacing due to being scared the replacement version would fail. Basically they ran on this false premise to generate interest and hope and raise campaign funds. Is there anything more worthless than a GOP lead committee that acts like the DIMMs won the election? They do not support the President and will go down in mid-terms due to a lack of leadership in Congress. There are way too many nominations to fill judicial and administrative functions sitting on the senate floor due to Mister McGoo McConnell.
Trump is the only one working up there and it is amazing that he has accomplished what he has with DIMMs obstructionism and GOP incompetence.
The selection of Robert Mueller as a Special Counsel to investigate some undisclosed crime is a witch hunt orchestrated by the far left, DIMMs, and leaker and liar James Comey. Sessions’ recusal has to be the biggest blunder of Trump’s new administration. Who else on DIMM’s side is recusing themselves? Mueller-good luck on that one! There are 17 intelligence agencies who are mandated to investigate counter-intelligence matters and they have been working for approximately 1 year on the Russia probe. Another investigation is overkill and an attempt to extend the witch hunt into the next election cycle. The GOP has to be the Party of Stupid to allow these shenanigans. Where is the leadership outrage? Certainly not anti-Trumpers Speaker Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, Lamar Alexander, Mike Simpson, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, John McCain, Jeff Flake, Peter King, Rob Portman, Lisa Murkowski, Bob Corker, John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell, Thad Cochran, Orrin Hatch, Tillis, Burr etc!
Three reasons Mueller is unqualified to lead such an assignment:
* This is not a criminal probe but rather a counter-intelligence matter. What is the crime?
* Mueller will be probing FBI matters and his friend Comey falls under that umbrella. Sessions recused himself under applicable CFR's that prohibit such a judiciary assignment.
* Mueller has already selected 14 attorneys who contributed heavily to Obama and Hillary to assist him in the Trump witch hunt. One of these was employed by the Clinton Foundation, a RICO operation.
Ҥ 45.2 Disqualification arising from personal or political relationship. (https://www.law.cornell.edu/
(a) Unless authorized under paragraph (b) of this section, no employee shall participate in a criminal investigation or prosecution if he has a personal or political relationship with:
(1) Any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution; or
(2) Any person or organization which he knows has a specific and substantial interest that would be directly affected by the outcome of the investigation or prosecution.
(b) An employee assigned to or otherwise participating in a criminal investigation or prosecution who believes that his participation may be prohibited by paragraph (a) of this section shall report the matter and all attendant facts and circumstances to his supervisor at the level of section chief or the equivalent or higher. If the supervisor determines that a personal or political relationship exists between the employee and a person or organization described in paragraph (a) of this section, he shall relieve the employee from participation unless he determines further, in writing, after full consideration of all the facts and circumstances, that:
(1) The relationship will not have the effect of rendering the employee's service less than fully impartial and professional; and
(2) The employee's participation would not create an appearance of a conflict of interest likely to affect the public perception of the integrity of the investigation or prosecution.
(c) For the purposes of this section:
(1)Political relationship means a close identification with an elected official, a candidate (whether or not successful) for elective, public office, a political party, or a campaign organization, arising from service as a principal adviser thereto or a principal official thereof; and
(2)Personal relationship means a close and substantial connection of the type normally viewed as likely to induce partiality. An employee is presumed to have a personal relationship with his father, mother, brother, sister, child and spouse. Whether relationships (including friendships) of an employee to other persons or organizations are “personal” must be judged on an individual basis with due regard given to the subjective opinion of the employee.
(d) This section pertains to agency management and is not intended to create rights enforceable by private individuals or organizations.”
This fake Russia-Trump probe and obstruction of justice affair is a waste of time, funds, and exposes the weak leadership or actually lack of leadership in the GOP. Comey was fired because he did not do his job on any of DIMMs scandals. Congressional committees are for oversight, not investigative bodies.
If a Special Counsel investigation on criminal matters is mandated, how about Fast and Furious, the Clinton Foundation RICO operation, Uranium One Scandal, Susan Rice unmasking, FISA violations, IRS targeting of conservative groups, Benghazi probe, Hillary private email server, Iran receipt of cash on pallets etc. There are plenty of DIMM scandals to unravel; but, all we loyal patriots listen to is GOP elected officials passively accepting whatever “Nothing Burger” emerges. In fact, GOP leaders join in the blasting of cabinet members of the Trump administration.
No GOP elected officials are in secure enough positions for the next election cycle unless they promote Trump’s agenda. If I continue to see this lack of GOP leadership and no reversal on the Special Counsel decision, I will work hard along with my fellow conservatives to elect alternate representatives in the primaries who will fight for America and the President.
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Why the GOP Congress will be the most unproductive in 164 years
David Faris
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Mark Wilson/Getty Images
July 18, 2017
Just six months ago, it looked like the Republican Party was about to go on a legislative blitzkrieg, shredding law after law passed by the Obama administration. ObamaCare would be vaporized and replaced with a nickel rattling inside an empty Mountain Dew can. Dodd-Frank was sure to be tossed aside for a transparent giveaway to Wall Street. And Republicans would pass their regressive tax reform, their perplexing border-adjustment tax, and so much more. The GOP hadn't held total power in American politics since 2006, and the party had become much more conservative in the interim. And instead of George W. Bush, a man who recognized at least some theoretical limits on free market fundamentalism, the new Congress would work with a sub-literate tabula rasa named Donald Trump, a man who could probably be persuaded to inject himself with experimental medication if an important-seeming person whispered "do it" in his ear.
But a funny thing happened on the way to libertarian utopia. Indeed, it turns out that the GOP-controlled Congress can't seem to pass any meaningful laws at all. Either they have forgotten how, or the divisions in their own increasingly radicalized caucus are proving too difficult to surmount. Whatever the explanation, thus far these GOP legislators are on track to be the least productive group since at least the Civil War.
Now, okay, technically the Ryan-McConnell 115th Congress is so far actually a bit more active than recent Congresses, if you measure by the 43 laws that President Trump has adorned with his garish signature. Obama was at 40 at this point in 2009. George W. Bush had signed even fewer midway through 2001. But sheer number is not the best way to think about how much is being achieved. As The Washington Post's Philip Bump pointed out, a majority of the bills signed by Trump thus far have been one page long, meaning many are just symbolic or ceremonial.
Some of this very brief legislation has also been passed under the Congressional Review Act, a previously obscure statute that allows Congress to nullify recently enacted federal regulations. The CRA had been used just once before Trump took office, and yet 14 of the 43 bills signed into law by the president have been CRAs. Most of them roll back Obama-era protections against various kinds of transparent evildoing, like preventing coal mining within 100 feet of streams. They're not meaningless, but the Voting Rights Act they are not.
So what's the holdup on important bills getting to Trump's desk? Both Obama and Bush had passed extraordinarily consequential legislation by this point in their first terms. The Bush tax cuts were signed in June 2001, and the massive stimulus that some economists credit with preventing another Great Depression was inked by Obama in February 2009. This Congress has not yet forwarded any legislation to the president that will significantly alter the trajectory of our politics or economics. Feel free to review the whole list yourself here and argue differently, unless you think the "U.S. Wants To Compete For a World Expo Act" (H.R. 534) is going to be the subject of debate by future historians.
One major problem for the GOP's lack of progress is polarization — just not the kind you're thinking of.
Over the past few years, journalists have given significant attention to the data maintained by political scientists at the University of California Los Angeles, which tracks the ideological makeup of individual members of Congress over time. The most important finding they've uncovered is that over the past 30 years, congressional Republicans have become substantially more ideologically extreme, while congressional Democrats have moved marginally to the left but are not much different as a group than they were in 1980, a process known as "asymmetric polarization." For most of the post-war period, there were Democrats who were more conservative than the most liberal Republican, and vice versa. The last time this happened in the Senate was in the 108th Congress, when soon-to-be-ex-Democrat Zell Miller sat to the right of several liberal Republicans, including Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and future party-switching Republicans Lincoln Chafee and Arlen Specter.
The slow decline of this ideological overlap has led inexorably to gridlock and dysfunction when one party controls the presidency and the other leads at least one chamber of Congress. There is is simply less to talk about. It's not like disagreeing about whether to get a Border Collie or a Boston Terrier; it's like if you want a dog and only a dog and nothing but a dog and your partner despises animals of all kinds.
But you would think that this sorting would make for more coherent ideological blocs more capable of making policy when one party controls Congress and the presidency, as Republicans do now. That was surely what Republican voters expected when they woke up triumphant on Nov. 9 last year. But the divide within the Republican Party is proving to be as problematic as polarization between the parties. The ideological distance between the Senate's most liberal member (Maine's Susan Collins) and the most hard-right senator (Utah's Mike Lee) is the same as the chasm between a middle-of-the-pack Democrat like Maryland's Ben Cardin and a conservative like Iowa's Joni Ernst.
If you want to understand how much harder it is going to be for Republicans to get anything done than it was for the Democrats in 2009-2011, your best bet is to look at this intra-Republican distance. When Democrats were toiling away on what was to become the Affordable Care Act, the total distance between the most left-wing elected Democratic senator (Bernie Sanders) and the most right-wing (Nebraska's Ben Nelson) was barely half the size of the canyon between Susan Collins and Mike Lee. Think about that for a second.
And it's not like Collins is alone. She's part of a cluster of three GOP senators, along with Lisa Murkowski and Shelly Moore Capito, who are much more liberal than the rest of the caucus. (By the way, it is not a coincidence that the GOP's three most reasonable senators are women). Moreover, Mike Lee is part of a bloc of five far-right radicals — along with Jeff Flake, Rand Paul, Ben Sasse, and Ted Cruz — who are all substantially more conservative than anyone in the Senate during Barack Obama's first two years in office. In a sane political system, there is a zero percent chance that Mike Lee and Susan Collins would be members of the same political party.
To make matters worse, Republicans control only 52 seats in the Senate and as of yet seem unwilling to nuke the legislative filibuster (something they could do at any time by changing the rules of the Senate). Republicans no longer have conservative Democrats to lean on to get to 60 votes when their own most liberal members are beyond reach, because GOP behavior during the Obama years taught Democrats the electoral value of party unity. That means that even some very conservative pieces of legislation that have already passed the House, including the Financial CHOICE Act (H.R. 10), which guts Dodd-Frank, stand very little chance of becoming law. House leaders, including Speaker Ryan, either aren't particularly interested in crafting bills that could actually get through the Senate or they have given up trying to forge the necessary compromises.
Or they are delusional.
The result, regardless, is that this Congress is going to be historically unproductive. How can I be so sure of this? One measure of what Congress is likely to do the rest of the year is to look at bills that have already passed the House but are awaiting action in the Senate. There are 238 of them. Amazingly, GovTrack gives only 13 a better than 50 percent chance of actually arriving on President Trump's desk in their current form. If that holds up, Trump will have signed just 56 laws by the beginning of the 2018 congressional session. If this tortoise-like pace continues, he will preside over the least productive Congress since Millard Fillmore signed just 74 bills sent to him by the brink-of-war 32nd Congress between 1851 and 1853.
Maybe that will change. But if it doesn't, the Republican Party's problems are far bigger than Trump — and will probably get worse before they get better.
Terry Payne
450 Silo View
Marble, NC 28905
“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
-Winston Churchill-
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