Boot the Blue Dogs — IN 2008, Barack Obama's presidential campaign seemed to rewrite all the rules in electoral politics and herald a new progressive era in America. Democrats assembled a huge Congressional majority and, in the euphoria that followed the historic election, were poised to enact sweeping change. . . .
Editorial notes: the NY Times writer blames the 2005 drive lead by Howard Dean and Rahm Emmunel to elect as many Democrats as possible. As a result, many came into the party as pro-life, pro-gun and anto-tax and spend. The Blue Dog registry contains 57 names of supposedly conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats in the House.
The article above has this to say about these consevative member: Democrats would be in better shape, and would accomplish more, with a smaller and more ideologically cohesive caucus. In other words, get rid of the Blue Dogs. After all, they share in the blame of what has happened to the Democrat Party !!
Nonsense.
At no time was there enough Blue Dog counter strength to resist passage of the billion dollar Stimulus, the $462 billion Omibus bill (did you forget about this one??), cap and trade (few know that the House passed such a bill ), ObamaCare (22% of the nations economy moved under the control of the Feds), the forced bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler, the 70 billion dollar gift to the auto-makers unions and the 1500 page Financil Reform bill. All of this and much much more was passed in the House by a very united (forced to be such by Pelosi) Democrat House majority. So why this ridiculous criticism? The Marxist Dems are prepared to "clean house." It is not clear how that will add to their influence. While these House Marxists are a majority in the congress, this bunch of Marxist misfits are vastly out-numbered in the larger population. So much for the House of Representatives.
In the Senate, things slowed down a bit. We won't go into detail except to discuss the reason for the Democrat debacle in the Senate [or so they say] : the " . . . incessant misuse of the filibuster . . ."
What a major big time load is this whiny excuse. Most do not know what a filibuster is.
In the Senate, a bill is submitted out of a committee for discussion "on the floor" of the Senate. Before this step in the legislative process, few in the Senate have seen the bill or even know of its existence. When it goes to the floor for discussion, the entire Senate, all 100 Senators [two from each state] get to talk about the bill for as long as necessary. It takes 60 votes to end this discussion but only 50 plus 1 to pass the bill after discussion has officially ended via the 60 vote process.
Obama made this statement with regard to the filibuster:
Today President Obama told Senate Democrats that they had faced “enormous procedural obstacles that are unprecedented. You had to cast more votes to break filibusters last year than in the entire 1950s and 1960s combined. That’s 20 years of obstruction jammed into just one.”
Understand that there is no filibuster in effect if a vote to end debate has not been called. What Obama said is factually untrue. How many filibuster breaking votes were taken in 2009? How about "zero" ?? As in none, nothing, zilche, nadda. And why were there no votes taken to end filibuster? Because, if such a vote is taken and the vote fails, the bill is effectively dead until compromises can be effected and another debate ending vote is taken. In the Senate, where all this takes place, Reid would not call for a vote unless he knew it would be successful. As a result, he refused to bring a number of bills up for cloture (the vote to end debate). Again, understand that Obama said that more filibusters were broken in the Senate than in all of the 1950's and 1960's --- 10 different congressional seasons !! Obama just made up this number. It is flat out untrue. The fact is that no filibuster was broken, and none who were enacted.
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