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The Most Conservative and Most Liberal Members of Congress
Tweet Share on Facebook February 26, 2010 Comment (8)Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
While not exactly on par with FBI's 10 Most Wanted list, the venerable National Journal's list of the top 10 conservatives and liberals in Congress is something all Washington waits to see. For some, the object is to be on one or the other of the two lists--which is compiled based on an analysis of congressional votes--while for others the challenge is to miss the list entirely.
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Why a Republican War of Ideas Is a Good Thing
Tweet Share on Facebook February 26, 2010 Comment (20)Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
In 1994, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, the GOP presented a list of reforms called the Contract with America. A signed pledge committing the party to a series of specific actions, the contract was the leading wedge of an effort to bring the party to power in Congress for the first time in 40 years.
It was successful beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, bringing the GOP to national parity with the Democrats for the first time in the lives of most of the Republicans on the ballot that year.
Today, the GOP is more intellectually fractured, with old guard Republicans, Gingrich-era limited government conservatives, Tea Party activists, libertarians aligned with Texas Rep. Ron Paul, and others engaged in a competition to see which ideas will form the basis for what increasingly looks like a new Republican congressional majority.
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Detroit Mayor’s Surrender Shows the Failure of Liberalism
Tweet Share on Facebook February 25, 2010 Comment (20)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Back before he was president, Ronald Reagan used to joke that the Johnson administration had declared war on poverty and that "poverty won." Indeed, the American landscape is riddled with examples of how the liberal welfare state has continually failed to achieve the improvements in living standards and quality of life its political sponsors promised it would bring.
In certain places, the overreach of the welfare state and the way it has suppressed entrepreneurial initiative has led to the near collapse of governing institutions, the latest example being the long-oppressed city of Detroit, where Mayor Dave Bing has announced a plan to "shrink" the city.
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GOP Holding Unusually Firm on Health Reform Could Flip House
Tweet Share on Facebook February 24, 2010 Comment (90)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Contrary to what many analysts are saying, it is still too early to determine whether or not comprehensive healthcare reform has died on the table. What is clear is that the latest comprehensive package which President Barack Obama’s unveiled Monday has flopped, both as a vehicle that could be the basis for a bipartisan compromise and as a lever to force the GOP to give in to what the Democrats want.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Tuesday that he still hoped that the “all” part of the “all or nothing” strategy the Democrats have pursued since the start of the healthcare debate would prevail but he also, in a break with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House, telegraphed that compromise was possible.
“We may not be able to do all. I hope we can do all, a comprehensive piece of legislation that will provide affordable, accessible, quality healthcare to all Americans,” Hoyer said at his weekly media briefing. “But having said that, if we can’t, then you know me--if you can’t do a whole, doing part is also good. I mean there are a number of things I think we can agree on.”
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Karl Rove: Democrats Are Facing a 1994 Rerun
Tweet Share on Facebook February 19, 2010 Comment (28)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
If there is any one conclusion that can be reached based on the conservatives at the 2010 CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, it is that the political environment in the United States is dramatically different that it was just one year ago.
Back then, riding high atop an almost unprecedented series of electoral victories, President Barack Obama and the Democrats mounted a campaign that was significantly more radical than what they had talked about in either 2006 or 2008. As a result they overreached--losing the backing of the American people they gained thanks to a series of Republican missteps over the last half of the Bush administration.
Then, the nation’s political writers were writing the GOP’s obituary. Now, most political forecasters at least concede the possibility that the 2010 elections could produce Republican majorities in both the U.S. House and Senate.
In politics, if nothing succeeds like success, then nothing fails quite as dramatically as hubris.
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Dick Cheney: ‘Barack Obama is a One-Term President’
Tweet Share on Facebook February 18, 2010 Comment (49)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is not known for pulling his political punches--and he lived up to his reputation Thursday during a surprise appearance Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In brief remarks to CPAC attendees Cheney, already a prominent critic of the current administration’s conduct of the war on terror, was perhaps the toughest he has been to date. “I think Barack Obama is a one-term president,” he told the crowd.
Making a surprise appearance following a speech by his daughter Elizabeth, the head of a new organization called Keep American Safe and considered by some to be a potential U.S. Senate candidate from Virginia, the former vice president took the stage to thunderous applause, prompting him to say “A welcome like that is almost enough to make me want to run for office again” before quickly adding that would “never” happen.
Bullish on the recent string of GOP victories in places like Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Cheney told the crowd that, in his judgment the “sky is the limit” and that 2010 was “going to be a phenomenal year” for the Republican Party.
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GOP Should Bring Anti-Health Reform Democrats to Obama’s Summit
Tweet Share on Facebook February 18, 2010 Comment (13)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
House Republican Leader John Boehner has the opportunity to dominate the upcoming healthcare summit in a way that drives home the point that there is, in fact, a bipartisan aspect to the healthcare legislation currently stalled in Congress.
Lost in the debate over whether the Democrats could assemble a coalition of 60 votes to pass the bill out of the Senate is the fact that the real stumbling blocks to what Obama wants are the members of his own party. Support for the healthcare bill is not bipartisan—but the opposition most assuredly is. That includes not only the 39 Democrats who eventually voted against the bill in the House but the members of the U.S. Senate—like Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Mary Landrieu—whose support had to be bought with pork. And it includes the nearly two score House Democrats who agreed to vote for the bill only after strong language blocking federal dollars from being used to fund abortions was added at virtually the last minute.
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Evan Bayh’s Departure Is Another Glum Sign for Democrats
Tweet Share on Facebook February 16, 2010 Comment (6)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh's announcement he would not seek a third term in the United Sates Senate came as quite a shock to the political establishment.
It shouldn't have.
Bayh has an impeccable political pedigree. The son of a senator, repeatedly elected to statewide office in "Red" Indiana--including two terms as governor--a former head of the same moderate Democratic Leadership Council that propelled Bill Clinton into the White House, the thinking surrounding Bayh was not so much a matter of if he would eventually run for president but when. And now he's leaving the senate--and at the last minute, just hours before the filing deadline closes.
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Obama Misreading Health Reform Gives Republican an Opportunity
Tweet Share on Facebook February 16, 2010 Comment (106)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
For President Barack Obama, the upcoming summit on healthcare is a make-or-break event. Conceived of, no doubt, as a way to embarrass the Republicans into joining his crusade to fundamentally change the way the U.S. healthcare system operates, it may actually set the stage for the bill's total collapse.
Part of this is the result of the White House misreading the tea leaves. A Gallup poll from late January shows the American people are not with Obama and the congressional Democrats on the issue. A majority of them--55 percent--want Obama, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to scrap the bill currently before Congress in favor of a new approach that could, potentially, garner the support of the Republicans. Only 39 percent of those surveyed said Obama, Reid, and Pelosi should continue down the path they have been on for nearly a year.
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‘President’s Day’ is a Ridiculous Insult to George Washington
Tweet Share on Facebook February 11, 2010 Comment (38)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
On Monday America will again observe Presidents' Day, the holiday established to honor all the former chief executives of the United States.
It wasn't always so. In 1968, under the provisions of the so-called "Long Weekend Act," the United States Congress changed the calendar in order to move George Washington's birthday to the most convenient Monday. The three-day weekend the act created, while helpful as a stimulus for shopping, does little to honor the memory of the nation's first, and perhaps greatest, president.
