Ried does have a few accomplishments.... how about your man....nothing since taking the job....but then hell he isn't even liked in his own state... had to buy that election just to stay in office
Has the Tea Party ****** the break-up and disfunction of the republican party
- Thread starter subhub174014
- Start date
I will admit... and most of you know... I'm a Dem..... but I just have no use for McConnell.... he isn't even liked in his own state and had to pull some ******* just keep his seat to begin with... if he was at least liked and supported in his own state... well ok... he has the support of his constituents....but not him.... he is an ass through and through!
He is very typical with what's wrong with Washington to begin with... I'm not a Reid lover and he barely made re-election... but he at least accomplished a FEW things
He is very typical with what's wrong with Washington to begin with... I'm not a Reid lover and he barely made re-election... but he at least accomplished a FEW things
I didn't care for "Boner" but at least I respected him... you knew his position...... Republican....he did try to work for the country... he just hit the tea party ... who wants no part of the give and take... I'm sure he is really crying now... his seat was taken by a tea party member...
Boehner was just...old ..old school.... typical Republican... and believed in what he was saying and doing... you knew and could trust him to work toward a workable means.... his replacement is having a problem already doing that... which is why I started this thread to begin with.... they are imploding....
Actually, the Senate has accomplished quite a bit since Mitch took over and started allowing votes on bills. Here's a excerpt highlighting some:
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/263796-mcconnell-touts-gops-2015-accomplishments
As 2015 wraps up, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is touting the accomplishments of the Senate during the first year of the new Republican majority.
His Saturday remarks came a day after the Senate passed a $1.8 trillion spending and tax package, wrapping up the first session of the 114th Congress.
McConnell ticked off the legislative highlights of the year: a multi-year highway bill; legislation reforming the No baby Left Behind Act; a veterans’ health bill; the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act; a cybersecurity bill; an end to the oil export ban; and fast-track trade authority for President Obama.
that's ... well it is an accomplishment for him... although every year the senate passes that same legislation... so that's nothing
No, they don't pass that every year. In fact under Harry Reid, the Senate didn't pass a budget for several years. They had to keep doing last minute stop-gap bills just to keep the government running. Bringing both sides together to actually agree on a bi-partisan longer term budget was a fine example of Mitch's leadership....something Harry & Obama both are very short on:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fiscal-house-idUSKBN0U11UX20151219
Negotiations on Capitol Hill were mostly free of the acrimony that has blighted similar talks for the past five years and ****** lawmakers to produce a succession of stopgap measures just to keep the government running.
subhub174014 said:
Harry Reid was Senate Majority leader for 8 years, while Mitch McConnell has been Senate Majority leader for a shade under 14 months. Really fair comparison.
and hopefully it ends soon!
Forget Trump: Here's Who's Really Destroying the Republican Party
The Fiscal Times
By David Dayen
The seminal event in the crackup of the Republican Party is not the rise of Donald Trump as their presidential nominee, contrary to popular opinion. It was the overthrow of John Boehner as Speaker of the House. That showed the power of the forty-odd members of the House Freedom Caucus, and their incompatibility with the GOP establishment and the compromises required by divided government (or for that matter, math).
The change in leadership at the top has not bridged this divide. Despite months of happy talk, the Freedom Caucus rejected Paul Ryan’s budget resolution, likely leaving the Republicans with no budget this year, after they made returning to regular order a campaign promise in 2014. The lack of a budget is just a sidelight to the continuing irreconcilable differences between conservative factions. Trump will not be able to fix this either; only a purge of one side of the party or the other would.
The Freedom Caucus essentially wants to control government from a base of 40 members of the House, with only a few allies in the Senate and no president willing to agree to their demands. They want to defund Planned Parenthood, balance the budget through massive spending cuts, dismantle government healthcare programs, and overturn every executive order of the past eight years, regardless of not having the two-thirds support in Congress that would be required currently to override Obama vetoes and make that happen.
Conservatives had to beg Ryan to take the Speaker’s job. His prescient leeriness stemmed from seeing Boehner put in the impossible spot of rounding up votes for routine government functions. And absolutely nothing changed when he received the gavel.
For months, Ryan has attempted to broker a deal on a budget resolution, which sets topline numbers for the appropriations committees to use to fund government operations. A bipartisan deal at the end of last year set those numbers in stone, at $1.07 trillion for the next fiscal year. But the Freedom Caucus wants to cut that by $30 billion, back to the level mandated by sequestration, the automatic spending cuts implemented in 2011.
Ryan and his colleagues tried to offer the Freedom Caucus incentives to come aboard. He promised $100 billion in future cuts over the next 10 years, if they’d just sign onto the topline $1.07 trillion number. He offered votes on cuts to the Children’s Health Insurance Program and taking away tax credits for undocumented immigrants with U.S. citizens as children. And he threatened to cancel the appropriations process without a budget resolution, meaning no opportunity for the kinds of ideological policy riders the Freedom Caucus cherishes as a way to get their priorities into law.
Nevertheless, the caucus formally announced its opposition, unable to stomach the nominal $30 billion spending increase (all of which was offset by cuts elsewhere). Members dismissed the additional votes as meaningless, because the Senate was unlikely to take them up.
Consider that Ryan is the architect of perhaps the most sweeping conservative budget in history, one that would balance the budget in a decade, mostly by pulling the safety net out from low-income Americans. In the past, he has proposed ending Medicare as we know it, cutting Social Security benefits and simultaneously cutting taxes on the wealthy, necessitating even more budget trims. And now this guy is a big-spending liberal!
Because Democrats don’t typically agree to budget resolutions from the other side, losing a 40-member bloc is enough to ensure that the Republican budget won’t have enough votes. That means it’s likely the government will be funded with a continuing resolution at current levels for the near future. And Democrats will have to supply most of the votes for it.
Democrats, indeed, have largely been in charge of budgeting for the past year because of this dysfunction. Freedom Caucus members have tried to claim that they are listening to the public will as expressed by Trump’s primary successes — “the establishment has been rejected in every one of our states,” Rep. Raul Labrador said recently — but this has been going on since before Trump ever announced his candidacy.
Indeed, this implacability is more reminiscent of how Ted Cruz has operated in the Senate, with his demands to shut down the government over Obamacare in 2013. Cruz actually sees that event as his defining moment, even though it accomplished nothing. And his acolytes in the House are following this script. We’re seeing the Cruz-ification of the Republican Party, not the Trump-ification.
It’s worth noting that senators despise Cruz for what they consider doomed, self-serving gambits. But the institutional structure of the modern GOP values such tactics over conciliation. That’s a recipe for disaster, and heralds this split within the party more than anything else.
The kicker to all this came this Tuesday, in deposed Speaker John Boehner’s backyard. His replacement in that congressional seat will be Warren Davidson, a businessman who was actively supported by the Freedom Caucus. It’s part of a strategy of theirs to win open-seat races in conservative districts across the country, slowly building their membership. “We’re doing everything we can to win,” said Freedom Caucus chair Jim Jordan. And they did.
It’s hard to see how this will stop. If Paul Ryan cannot mediate this intra-party dispute, who can? If they can’t agree on something as simple as a topline budget number, what can they agree on? And if Freedom Caucus-aligned candidates have a leg up in head-to-head races, what stops a much more deeply conservative Republican Party from growing, and a backlash — even a fissure — from its establishment wing?
Trump’s cult of personality may come and go. But the Freedom Caucus phenomenon seems much more consequential. And it’s hard to figure out how Republicans will manage the fallout.
The Fiscal Times
By David Dayen
The seminal event in the crackup of the Republican Party is not the rise of Donald Trump as their presidential nominee, contrary to popular opinion. It was the overthrow of John Boehner as Speaker of the House. That showed the power of the forty-odd members of the House Freedom Caucus, and their incompatibility with the GOP establishment and the compromises required by divided government (or for that matter, math).
The change in leadership at the top has not bridged this divide. Despite months of happy talk, the Freedom Caucus rejected Paul Ryan’s budget resolution, likely leaving the Republicans with no budget this year, after they made returning to regular order a campaign promise in 2014. The lack of a budget is just a sidelight to the continuing irreconcilable differences between conservative factions. Trump will not be able to fix this either; only a purge of one side of the party or the other would.
The Freedom Caucus essentially wants to control government from a base of 40 members of the House, with only a few allies in the Senate and no president willing to agree to their demands. They want to defund Planned Parenthood, balance the budget through massive spending cuts, dismantle government healthcare programs, and overturn every executive order of the past eight years, regardless of not having the two-thirds support in Congress that would be required currently to override Obama vetoes and make that happen.
Conservatives had to beg Ryan to take the Speaker’s job. His prescient leeriness stemmed from seeing Boehner put in the impossible spot of rounding up votes for routine government functions. And absolutely nothing changed when he received the gavel.
For months, Ryan has attempted to broker a deal on a budget resolution, which sets topline numbers for the appropriations committees to use to fund government operations. A bipartisan deal at the end of last year set those numbers in stone, at $1.07 trillion for the next fiscal year. But the Freedom Caucus wants to cut that by $30 billion, back to the level mandated by sequestration, the automatic spending cuts implemented in 2011.
Ryan and his colleagues tried to offer the Freedom Caucus incentives to come aboard. He promised $100 billion in future cuts over the next 10 years, if they’d just sign onto the topline $1.07 trillion number. He offered votes on cuts to the Children’s Health Insurance Program and taking away tax credits for undocumented immigrants with U.S. citizens as children. And he threatened to cancel the appropriations process without a budget resolution, meaning no opportunity for the kinds of ideological policy riders the Freedom Caucus cherishes as a way to get their priorities into law.
Nevertheless, the caucus formally announced its opposition, unable to stomach the nominal $30 billion spending increase (all of which was offset by cuts elsewhere). Members dismissed the additional votes as meaningless, because the Senate was unlikely to take them up.
Consider that Ryan is the architect of perhaps the most sweeping conservative budget in history, one that would balance the budget in a decade, mostly by pulling the safety net out from low-income Americans. In the past, he has proposed ending Medicare as we know it, cutting Social Security benefits and simultaneously cutting taxes on the wealthy, necessitating even more budget trims. And now this guy is a big-spending liberal!
Because Democrats don’t typically agree to budget resolutions from the other side, losing a 40-member bloc is enough to ensure that the Republican budget won’t have enough votes. That means it’s likely the government will be funded with a continuing resolution at current levels for the near future. And Democrats will have to supply most of the votes for it.
Democrats, indeed, have largely been in charge of budgeting for the past year because of this dysfunction. Freedom Caucus members have tried to claim that they are listening to the public will as expressed by Trump’s primary successes — “the establishment has been rejected in every one of our states,” Rep. Raul Labrador said recently — but this has been going on since before Trump ever announced his candidacy.
Indeed, this implacability is more reminiscent of how Ted Cruz has operated in the Senate, with his demands to shut down the government over Obamacare in 2013. Cruz actually sees that event as his defining moment, even though it accomplished nothing. And his acolytes in the House are following this script. We’re seeing the Cruz-ification of the Republican Party, not the Trump-ification.
It’s worth noting that senators despise Cruz for what they consider doomed, self-serving gambits. But the institutional structure of the modern GOP values such tactics over conciliation. That’s a recipe for disaster, and heralds this split within the party more than anything else.
The kicker to all this came this Tuesday, in deposed Speaker John Boehner’s backyard. His replacement in that congressional seat will be Warren Davidson, a businessman who was actively supported by the Freedom Caucus. It’s part of a strategy of theirs to win open-seat races in conservative districts across the country, slowly building their membership. “We’re doing everything we can to win,” said Freedom Caucus chair Jim Jordan. And they did.
It’s hard to see how this will stop. If Paul Ryan cannot mediate this intra-party dispute, who can? If they can’t agree on something as simple as a topline budget number, what can they agree on? And if Freedom Caucus-aligned candidates have a leg up in head-to-head races, what stops a much more deeply conservative Republican Party from growing, and a backlash — even a fissure — from its establishment wing?
Trump’s cult of personality may come and go. But the Freedom Caucus phenomenon seems much more consequential. And it’s hard to figure out how Republicans will manage the fallout.
Similar threads
