Tag Archives: bipartisanship

Help That Is Neither Needed Or Appreciated

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On Friday, Ed Morrissey posted an article at Hot Air about the Senate Democrats’ offer of bipartisanship on the border. They wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune that they would be glad to provide input on any border security bill under consideration by the Republicans. Really?!!? I would love to know what the Democrats’ definition of border security is. The last bill the Democrats proposed for border security allowed for 2500 illegal entries per day in exchange for a gauzy promise to maybe build the wall at some point in the future. Somehow I don’t think they are serious about border security.

The article reports:

The push came in a Jan. 22 letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., which was led by Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., and signed by 12 other Democrats, mostly from politically competitive states.

“We understand that Senate Republicans have discussed using the budget reconciliation process to advance border security budget measures without any Democratic input. While that’s your right, in working together on a bipartisan basis, we can achieve the best outcome for the American people,” the Democrats wrote. “We remain ready to work with you in good faith to craft legislation that can achieve bipartisan support and 60 votes in the Senate.”

…Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., laughed out loud when asked about the letter and whether Republicans might accept their overture.

“That’s a letter we will ignore,” Johnson said in an interview. “We’re not going to wait for them. If they want to secure the border, they could have done that,” he added. “That’s not what they want.”

…Republicans have gotten burned on this issue repeatedly. Democrats spent years playing them as racists for wanting the border secured and illegals deported, but Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office made it clear that Donald Trump and the GOP are the mainstream point of view on illegal immigration, and that voters consider Democrats incompetent or worse on the issue. That’s why several Democrats rejected their leadership to vote for the Laken Riley Act, after having attempted to hijack it last year to push for relaxing asylum rules and enshrining stampede-levels of illegal border crossings as thresholds for “emergency” treatment. 

NBC also notes why Democrats have suddenly found an interest in getting on the right side of immigration enforcement:

Democrats in battleground states and districts are breaking with the bulk of their party on immigration, as they believe that the positions of progressives and leaders of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are out of touch with their voters. The rightward shift comes after Democrats got clobbered on the issue of immigration in the 2024 election, and lost Latino men to Trump.

Asking the Democrats for help with the border would be like asking a fox to help design the hen house.

What A Difference A Few Days Make

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On Friday, The Washington Examiner posted an article about the pre-election plans of Senator Chuck Schumer. Senator Schumer was looking forward to a Democrat White House, Senate and House of Representatives. Thankfully, he was overly optimistic.

The article reports:

Schumer’s top priority in the new Harris administration would have been to eliminate the legislative filibuster that has long protected minority rights in the Senate. That way, even if the Senate were tied between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, those 50 Democrats, with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Tim Walz, could enact far-reaching legislation without any input at all from Republicans. Washington would have true one-party rule, and the minority party would have no say in things whatsoever.

…Schumer believed 2024 would be the year Democrats could finally erase any Republican power in the Senate. Manchin and Sinema were both leaving the Senate, Schumer explained at his talk in Chicago. Manchin’s seat would be won by a Republican, so it still would be unavailable for Democrats. But Sinema’s seat would be won by Democrat Ruben Gallego, Schumer said, and Gallego would go along with the party on the filibuster. That would give Democrats the 50 votes they needed, provided there was a Vice President Walz to break the tie.

Well, things didn’t go exactly as planned.

This is what hjappened last week:

So this week, Schumer went to the well of the Senate and addressed some remarks to his Republican colleagues. “Another closely contested election now comes to an end,” he said. “To my Republican colleagues, I offer a word of caution in good faith: Take care not to misread the will of the people, and do not abandon the need for bipartisanship. After winning an election, the temptation may be to go to the extreme. We’ve seen that happen over the decades, and it has consistently backfired on the party in power. So, instead of going to the extremes, I remind my colleagues that this body is most effective when it’s bipartisan. If we want the next four years in the Senate to be as productive as the last four, the only way that will happen is through bipartisan cooperation.”

The short version of that is: Please don’t do to us what we were going to do to you. Schumer is obviously concerned that Republicans might embrace a scheme to eliminate the filibuster and pass all sorts of consequential legislation with no Democratic input at all. That wouldn’t be bipartisan! Fortunately for Schumer, Republicans have been more principled than Democrats when it comes to the legislative filibuster, and to the filibuster in general. Republicans realize that even though they will have the majority for the next two years, they might be back in the minority at any time after that. So Schumer will not get it good and hard the way he planned to give it to Republicans.

It is amazing how quickly Senator Schumer changed his tune. However, if the Republicans are smart, they will quickly confirm ALL of President Trump’s nominees for Cabinet positions and department heads.

Looking For A Few Patriotic Democrats In The Senate

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Remember the campaign promise by President Biden that he would bring back unity. Well, his definition of unity is when everyone does what he wants them to do. There is no room for any other action or opinion. That is becoming very obvious in the way the infrastructure bill is being handled.

Just the News is reporting today that the bipartisan infrastructure bill that was worked out that did not include the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan will be modified to include the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan and then passed by reconciliation in the Senate. If you are not familiar with the Cloward-Piven strategy, this would be a really good time to look it up.

The article reports:

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal told Just the News that there will be a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill passed in the Democratic-led House that includes President Biden’s entire American Families Plan.

The article concludes:

Neal was asked if he thinks the entire American Families Plan will be weaved into a reconciliation bill if it’s left out of the bipartisan infrastructure framework congressional negotiators have reached with the White House.

“Yeah, it seems to be as though, based on some of the early comments the president had that it looks to me, not knowing all the details yet, that there’s going to have to be a reconciliation bill,” Neal said on Thursday. 

The $1.2 trillion bipartisan framework does not include the new spending programs that would be created if Biden’s American Families Plan is enacted. 

Essentially, the bi-partisan agreement that was worked out is going to be scrapped in favor of what the Democrats wanted in the first place. Hopefully there might be a Democrat in the Senate that would vote against this, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Bipartisanship Doesn’t Really Mean The Same Thing To Everyone

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The Epoch Times posted an article today about a bipartisan deal on infrastructure spending reached between the White House and a group of Senators. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it. Well, not so fast.

The article reports:

Biden appeared alongside a group of lawmakers, including Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), and others.

“To answer the direct question, we have a deal,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “We have made serious compromises on both ends.”

The announcement came after senators worked for weeks to craft a package that would garner enough support from both Republicans and Democrats. According to a fact sheet released by the White House on June 24, the bill would be worth about $1.2 trillion and would make investments in “clean transportation infrastructure,” as well as “clean power infrastructure” and the “remediation of legacy pollution.”

According to drafts of the agreement, lawmakers sought $579 billion of spending above expected federal levels that totals $974 billion over a five-year span and $1.2 trillion if it continues over the course of eight years.

But despite the bipartisan agreement announcement, it isn’t yet clear if certain Democrats or Republicans would support it.

So far, it sounds pretty bipartisan, but wait…

The article concludes:

Hours after the announcement, Biden told reporters that he wouldn’t sign the measure unless the American Families Plan was also passed by Congress.

“Less than two hours after publicly endorsing our colleagues’ bipartisan agreement on infrastructure, the President took the extraordinary step of threatening to veto it. That’s not the way to show you’re serious about getting a bipartisan outcome,” said Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on the floor of the Senate.

But Portman, one of the Republicans who support the bipartisan agreement, said on June 24 that it’s important that Democrats and Republicans were “able to come together on a core infrastructure package.”

Manchin also praised the deal, saying it’s a “tremendous opportunity for us to show the rest of the world that we can still get big things done in a bipartisan way.”

That’s not bipartisan–either the infrastructure bill as a product of bipartisan negotiations gets signed on its own merits or you have broken the implied promise of the bipartisan negotiations. It is quite possible that the negotiations on the infrastructure bill were strictly for show so that the Republicans can be blamed when President Biden refuses to sign it. Those in Washington have forgotten who they are supposed to represent. Congress and the Presidency have become one big political power game. It is time to unelect anyone currently in office who is not properly representing the interests of the voters.

About That Unity Thing

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Yesterday Bloomberg posted a very interesting article about bipartisanship. Despite President Biden’s claim that he seeks unity, there seems to be very little unity in Washington these days. I should mention that bipartisanship is not a requirement. The Democrats control the White House and the House of Representatives and essentially the Senate. There is no requirement that they work with Republicans. However, the article points out that the Republicans are not solely responsible for the lack of bipartisanship.

The article notes:

During the Obama years, Democrats cited incidents like this one to cast Republicans in a bad light. Obama and several other Democrats also complained bitterly that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell had announced at the start of his first term that his top priority was preventing a second one. Democrats said they tried again and again to meet Republicans halfway on health care, too, and were rebuffed.

With President Joe Biden in the White House, Democrats are saying that the Republicans’ behavior then justifies ignoring them now: There’s no point wasting time trying to negotiate with them.

The incidents didn’t actually happen, though, or at least didn’t happen the way Obama related them. Before he met with House Republicans in January 2009, House Democrats had already introduced a stimulus bill without any of their input, and Republicans had already made public statements of opposition. In his meeting with the Republicans, Obama reportedly said he was open to changing the bill; the Republicans then voted against the unchanged bill; and Boehner issued a statement saying he would still like to work with Obama on the issue.

McConnell’s remark, meanwhile, was made well into Obama’s term, right before the midterm elections of 2010. He said in the same breath that he would work with Obama if he moderated the way the previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, had: “I don’t want the president to fail; I want him to change.”

Part of the problem right not is that we really don’t know who is making the decisions in the White House.

The article concludes:

Republicans and Democrats worked together to pass a large Covid-relief bill last spring, and did it again just a few weeks ago. The second one was passed after Biden had won the election and the Electoral College had met. Republicans knew that any positive effect it had would buoy Biden politically, and did it anyway.

There’s no moral or constitutional obligation for Democrats to bargain with the Republicans. Obama came into office with large Democratic majorities in Congress, and had the votes he needed to pass the stimulus and his health-care bill without Republicans.

Maybe they will have the votes they need in Congress this time, too. It would be nice, though, if they would stop pretending that they have no other choice.

If you are going to talk about unity, it would be nice if you did something to promote it.