SO FAR, THE NEW REPUBLICAN CONGRESS HAS NO CLUE ABOUT HOW TO GOVERN

 

The GOP proves again that they should never be given the keys for driving the US government.

As it was with so many of us that write political opinions, many of us were concerned when we learned that starting in January 2015, the Republicans would be running both houses of Congress.  Here they already had the activist US Supreme Court on their side, and the House, and now they would have the US Senate.  Sounds kinda scary, doesn’t it?

But, so far, the reality is that even though they have never been very good at governing, currently they are not showing that they learned very much while they were out there waiting in the wings.

Yep, just as the concern of extreme ISIL terrorists has been increasing in the US, the GOP-controlled House and Senate are unable to agree on a bill to fund America’s Department of Homeland Security.

Just when we should be seeing signs that the GOP does really have the American public’s security and well-being as a top priority, what were the House Republicans doing last week?  Well, instead of working on a Homeland Security bill that might actually pass, the House was voting for the 56th time to repeal the Affordable Care Act, knowing full well that this attempt, like the previous 55, had no earthly chance of success.

In the Senate, even though the House Speaker knew the bill he sent to the Senate would be dead-on-arrival because it had amendments to reverse the President’s executive actions for undocumented immigrants to stay in the US, the new Senate Majority leader still brought it up three times for a vote, in trying to get it passed.

Yep, it was obvious from the beginning that the Majority Leader McConnell did not have the 60 votes needed to get the bill through the Senate.   But he nevertheless dutifully brought the bill up three times, seeing it rejected each time by the Democrats, who quite reasonably demanded a clean funding bill with no extraneous bells or whistles.

On top of it all, both Republican leaders knew that even if by some miracle the legislation would have made it through, there was no way President Obama would ever sign it into law.

Even the Senior Republican Senator from Arizona, John McCain, became so flustered he declared, “Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Voting for the same bill over and over again?”

The Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson said it best when he wrote, “Boehner and McConnell appear to be trying to teach House Republicans a lesson in basic arithmetic. The class, however, is busy throwing spitballs…..Bang. Bang. Crash. That was the sound of the Republican majority in Congress shooting itself in both feet, then tripping over them.”

If the Republicans are trying to show us that they know how to govern and that they are working positively for the average American worker, they are doing it in a way that sure is hard to understand….?

Copyright G.Ater  2015