Tweedle-Dem and Tweedle-Repub?

In 1984 Charley Reese wrote a column in the Orlando Sentinel about congress that is still being shared around the internet. And with good reason for it is as true today –in some ways, more so!—than it was then.

545 people are responsible for the mess, but they unite in a common con It begins, “Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.” Charley makes the point that we citizens “…don’t propose the federal budget –the president does. We don’t vote on appropriations –congress does. We don’t write the tax code –congress does. If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair. If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red... Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party….”

 Recently I received a fund-raising appeal from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-WV) on behalf of Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) because McConnell says we need to keep the Senate in “conservative” hands. Excuse me, words have meanings and conservative does NOT fit Sen. Kirk. The truly conservative Heritage Action Scorecard rates Kirk down with liberal Democrats at 27% --only Republicans Sen. Collins (R-ME) and Rep. Dold (R-IL) are slightly more liberal at 18% and 22%, respectively. Sen Kirk votes against economic growth issues most of the time as computed by the Club for Growth.

 The point of this Poster is that altho Republicans as a group are far more likely to vote for lower spending (NTU), less waste (CAGW), more economic growth and individual freedom, there are far too many career Repubs for whom attracting campaign contributions for getting reelected is more important.

 The difference between the parties is stark. The Heritage Action Scorecard provides a breakdown by party. The average House Repub scores 75% vs House Dems 6%; In the Senate the Repubs average is 74% while the Dems average is 3%. However, individual Repubs at the lower end of the ratings are very similar to Dems in voting for uncontrolled spending and regulating and for more federal government control over every aspect of our lives. To them, the debt they’re piling onto our children is of no concern. Among conservatives and libertarians in the party they’re known as RINOs –Repubs In Name Only.

 We’ll highlight a few of the worst below. Just over 150 –all Repubs— rate 80% or better; 98 scored 0% --all Dems; the 263 under 40% included 15 Repubs. We’re continuing to use the Heritage Action Scorecard because it covers more votes and breaks them down for us and is an almost exact opposite of liberal/progressive scorecards. A liberal/progressive reading this can be proud of Sen. Nelson (D-FL) at 0% while a conservative/libertarian would know that he is in favor of Big Government and all that implies. It is an accurate, useful tool.

   Among the Repubs with scores reflecting big spending, taxing and wastefulness, in addition to Sen Kirk, and who have been there more than 8 years:

  Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) at 18% is, for all practical purposes, a Dem as she votes with them most of the time. See her Poster of a few years ago: When Perfect Attendance is Costly . We should update her poster but not much has changed except that the $14.7 trillion debt is now closer to $19 trillion! And she did her share of running up that burden on our children –no mention of her having any children. She favors same-sex “marriage” and is avidly pro-abortion.

  Sen. Shelley Capito (R-WV) is in her first term in the Senate replacing Dem Jay Rockefeller but her entire life has been immersed in politics. Her father was Governor Arch Moore; she spent two terms in the W. Virginia legislature and 7 terms in the U.S. House and now as U.S. Senator. In searching her record in the House I discovered the Madison Project which interestingly uses a combination of Heritage Action and Club for Growth scores to arrive at a Madison Performance Index (MPI). MP concludes that Shelley Capito has spent her time in Congress, “… amassing one of the most liberal voting records in Washington.” Since she has voted both socially and economically liberal, MP put her in their Hall of Shame.

  Six-term Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) is at 39%. Before being elected to congress in 2004 he was in the state legislature for 14 years –as with most of our Posters for term limits, he spent little time in the productive private sector. Not surprisingly, he’s not big on economic growth, either –latest Club for Growth rating is 37%.

 Two long term Florida Repubs with liberal voting records – Reps Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart –both at 39% current Heritage Action score qualifies them for mention here as RINOs. They will be the subject of our next in-depth poster so, for now, they’ll just get this mention. Note that the highest rated Dem on the conservative scorecard is Rep Henry Cuellar (D-TX) at 33% --lower than the lowest Repub.

  Bottom line: both Parties have put the country deeply in debt –and continue to do so. When getting reelected is Job #1, professional politicians will vote for what furthers that goal and only secondarily for what is constitutional and/or best for the country. Exceptions are too rare. Only congressional term limits can and will remove the incentives to continue the destructive tax-spend-elect system for tenure.

When Perfect Attendance is Costly

If our $14.7 trillion dollar debt is any indication, the majority of the 535 members of congress are qualified for these posters. Who else would spend so much more than they take in and for what reason?

Well, if you are a professional politician with no real talent or skills in the private sector, then being a politician offers great rewards; as long as you’re willing to do or say almost anything to get elected. And then to disregard your solemn oath of office in doing all that is necessary to get reelected. The career politicians we’ve exposed so far have spent all, or nearly all, of their working lives in politics. With no experience in the real world, they create legislation in areas they have no knowledge of or experience in, resulting in bills they seldom actually read. Then these bills go to a huge bureaucracy to administer by writing thousands of regulations that the working population has to follow--or be fined and maybe even go to jail. They, themselves are routinely unaffected by the laws they pass. Sometimes they even specifically exempt themselves from these laws.

Special interests have thousands of lobbyists offering big bucks to these elected officials to pass laws favorable to them. They need this money for reelection, and they pile up $millions for that purpose. Our laws end up with too many exceptions for favored industries, and as a result our tax code is extremely complicated; you can be sure that every loophole is bought and paid for by lobbyists.

Lobbyists are uniformly against any term limits on their “honest” politicians. They define “honest” as those who, once bought, stay bought. We need a law requiring members of Congress to wear logos like race car drivers and golfers wear to advertise who gives them money.

Typical of this kind of politician is Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). We mentioned Collins in our poster of Olympia Snowe, also a Senator from Maine. Both are considered “moderates” in the Republican Party and both vote with Democrats so often that many Republicans refer to them as RINOs –Republicans In Name Only. Recently, as taxes, regulation overreach and onerous executive orders have mired the economy in recession, Sen. Collins has taken note and written a mostly reasonable piece in the Wall Street Journal (9/26/2011).

However, in this op-ed she calls for a one-year “time out” on excessive FedGov regulations. What? A time out? Beam me up, Scottie! She writes, “A one-year moratorium on such regulations is a common-sense solution that would help create jobs.” That's preposterous. The common-sense solution is to tear up the regulations permanently. Businesses will not start hiring with only a one-year window of certainty regarding regulations. Uncertainty is one of the major problems, and with a one-year "timeout," uncertainty would not be eliminated. What we need is a permanent solution, not a short-term gimmick. This is just another glaring example of a career pol showing how out of touch with reality she is.

Who is Susan Collins?
Collins was born and raised in Caribou, Maine. Both parents served in elected positions and her uncle was a state Supreme Court justice. She met Sen. Margaret Chase Smith —whose Senate seat she now holds-- in 1971 while participating in the U.S. Senate Youth program in Washington D.C. In 1975 she graduated from St. Lawrence University with a degree in–what else?—government.

She was a legislative assistant to Congressman and later U.S. Senator William Cohen until 1987 when she returned to Maine to join the governor’s cabinet and other political jobs in the State capitol until 1992. President George Bush appointed her to the Small Business Administration for a few months after which she went to Massachusetts to become Deputy State Treasurer for another few months. Back to Maine she won an eight-way primary race in the 1994 gubernatorial election but didn’t get support from conservative Republicans and came in third behind an independent and the Democrat. After a short job at Hussen College she ran for the Senate with Sen. Cohen’s help when he went on to join President Clinton’s cabinet. She won a four-way primary and beat the Democrat 49% to 44%. She’s been a fixture there ever since.

Notice once again the typical route to Congress--no practical experience in the free market, no position in the private sector much less ever having to meet a payroll or create a job. Yet these are the people who tell us how to run our businesses and make decisions that affect every aspect of our lives!

Collins is aggressively pro-abortion. She is a member of Republicans for Choice and was one of only three Republicans to vote against the Partial Birth Abortion Act. A major LGBT organization, the Human Rights Campaign, endorsed her campaigns. Collins voted in favor of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. Both Collins and Snowe voted to acquit Clinton in his impeachment trial admitting he broke the law by committing perjury, but they didn’t think that was serious enough to remove him from office. She voted against restrictions on travel to Cuba, harsher punishments for drug users, and amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriages. She was the recipient of the Gay and Lesbian Leadership Award (10/5/2011); curiously, her co-recipient was Rep. Ellison (D-MN), a Muslim.

A protectionist, she regularly votes against free-trade, including the Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). In 1999 she and Snowe were two of the four Republicans (with Jeffords and Specter) to vote for an amendment to the Trade and Development Act of 2000 which would have conditioned trade benefits for Caribbean countries on "compliance with internationally recognized labor rights." This vote for what is in effect world governance put her to the left of many Democratic senators including Edwards, Dodd and Biden. Just last week she was the only Republican to vote against the trade agreement with Columbia that is expected to create thousands of jobs in the US.

She wrote in that WSJ article, “…the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new rule on fossil-fuel emissions from boilers that—by the EPA's own admission—would cost the private sector billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. The owner of a small business in Maine told me the proposed rule would require him to scrap a new, $300,000 wood waste boiler he recently installed.” She’s just finding this out after sponsoring such bills herself like the Cantwell-Collins bill (S. 2877), also called the Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal (CLEAR) Act, that creates a program to regulate fossil fuels. How many thousands of regulations in those bills?

She voted for the confirmation of two U.S. Supreme Court nominees, Alito and Roberts but she also voted for President Obama's nominees, Sotomayor and Kagan.

Collins was one of just three Republican lawmakers to vote for the so-called stimulus, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and in mid-December 2009, Collins was again one of just three Republican senators to back a $1.1 trillion appropriations bill for the fiscal year beginning in 2010. You can see how the $14.7 trillion deficits happen.

In January 2009 Collins voted in favor of the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act. But she voted against ObamaCare in December 2009 and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

Currently, she is the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Feel safer now?

Collins has an unbroken voting record in the Senate, never missing a single vote since becoming a senator in 1997. Too bad.

We really need term limits www.termlimits.org

Tyranny of Seniority --those most out of touch are most firmly in control

Update: On 2/2/2012 on the vote to limit the terms of congress it is telling that the senators who voted against term limits have been in the Senate for an average of 13.6 years compared to just 6.4 years for those who support them. The longer people are in Congress, the more power they get, and the more they lose touch with the voters who elected them. Of course, both Collins and Snowe voted AGAINST the reform.

See how your Senator voted: http://senateconservatives.com/site/votes/112/2/11?c=5R4F2B4F9B3A137 hint: All Democrats but Joe Manchin of WV and 24 RINOs voted AGAINST the reform even though they know full well that a super-majority of their constituents are in favor of term limits.

What happened to the New England rugged individualists of olde in Maine? Their present congressional delegation --Snowe, Collins, Pingree, Michaud-- goes along with the welfare state regardless that their oaths of office specify that they "shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this constitution." Judging by their voting records they have not read the US Constitution as they vote for more freebies for some at the expense of others with FedGov as the middleman. (I realize that this is not uncommon in the congress –especially true among the Poster Children.)

Where in the Constitution of the United States is the federal government granted the authority to create a public option or otherwise be involved in health care? The Constitution grants no such power. James Madison, one of the authors of our Constitution, wrote, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence the money of their constituents.” Benevolence is their rationale for these power grabs.

Snowe and Collins are nominal Republicans (RINOs) each in their 3rd 6-year terms. Non-partisan National Taxpayers Union rates both at the low end of all other Repubs for their profligate spending. We’re naming Olympia Snowe our Poster Child at this time because she is going over with the left-wing radicals of the Obama regime to help them take over the entire health care system in the country. What tells her that we should emulate the socialized medical systems of Canada, the UK and other less free countries? Don’t people who can afford to, come here from those countries for their serious medical care? When ObamaCare turns out to be the disaster many expect it will be, history will look grimly upon liberal Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe.

If it was really about medical care, no one would vote for a government system; they would work on the problems in the system. As one blogger asks, “Why not just provide a voucher or grant for private coverage for the 5-10 million legal citizens who are uninsured and who actually cannot afford their own plans instead of this monstrous power grab and grotesque new bureaucracy?” Of course, it is not about medicine, it is about power. And professional politicians are part of the power-elite so they ignore the limited government restrictions of the Constitution and go along to get along and participate in the power structure. Without term limitations professional politicians predominate in congress. And their priorities are for their own continued participation in the power structure. Reelection is all that matters. That takes big bucks. So, they back the bills and programs that generate the most money from the lobbyists.

As with our other Poster Children, Olympia has been at the government trough for most of her life. After earning a degree in political science from the University of Maine she married Peter Snowe, a member of the Maine legislature. She entered politics by winning a seat on the Board of Voter Registration and working for Congressman and later Senator William Cohen. At age 26, her husband was killed in an auto accident and she ran for his seat in the legislature and won there and then won a State Senate seat and then she got elected to the US Congress for two terms. She then married the governor of Maine who had been in congress with her. When George McGovern retired she succeeded him in the Senate and has been there ever since. 35 years in government jobs --no real world experience at all, yet she determines how we live under and pay for all the FedGov programs that restrict our liberties and indebt our children as far as the eye can see. She was a full member of the Senate Finance Committee.

Remember when Snowe and Collins went to the defense of Bill Clinton during his impeachment? They didn’t think his perjury and the underlying acts were all that bad for a president of the United States. Sen. Snowe backs legalized abortion and “gay rights.”

Only Repubs Olympia Snowe, Lincoln Chaffee and John McCain voted against the Bush pro-growth tax cuts. Snowe is an avid protectionist voting against virtually all free trade agreements. Even Charlie Rangel said, “It's absolutely ridiculous to believe that we can create jobs without trade.” Does she know that? Does she care?

She is a co-chair of the International Climate Change Task Force. A favorite of the “environmental” lobbyists, Snowe is emphatically in favor of a cap-and-trade system to address climate change what she calls “one of the greatest challenges of this century.” “If we successfully implement a cap-and-trade system that will reduce long-term risk and provide market certainty, the economy undoubtedly will respond with ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and job expansion, while simultaneously addressing climate change,” How so? She has no clue but her vote for massive tax hikes on energy along with her vote for health care nationalization could cost the American economy growth for generations. The Club for Growth rates her votes at 12% --way down in the anti-growth category.

Would citizen legislators likely go along with these unconstitutional, costly hits to the economy and to our freedoms? Maybe, but not likely. At least we could expect that with new blood coming into the institution regularly they would not consistently be for ever greater spending, taxing and growing the size and scope of FedGov which is where they live. Rather, they’d likely be for the growth of the economy that they will live in for the prosperity that it brings. They’d be closer to the people. The recent Town Halls have demonstrated dramatically how far removed these pro-pols are from we, the people.