Thanks to Heritage:

Comments  Print This Post

---

Who are the most conservative and liberal members in Congress? Every year National Journal scores the votes of all members to answer that question.  For 2009:

The 10 Most Liberal Senators

1. Sherrod Brown (tied 1st)
2. Roland Burris (tied 1st)
3. Ben Cardin (tied 1st)
4. Jack Reed (tied 1st)
5. Sheldon Whitehouse (tied 1st)
6. John Kerry
7. Frank Lautenberg
8. Barbara Mikulski
9. Chris Dodd
10. Dick Durbin

The 10 Most Conservative Senators

1. James Inhofe
2. Jim DeMint
3. Jim Bunning
4. Tom Coburn
5. James Risch
6. John Thune
7. John Ensign
8. Mitch McConnell
9. Richard Burr
10. Jeff Sessions

Read more

Comments  Print This Post

---

The grand health care summit was supposed to trap Republicans.  Democrats would show the nation how intransigent and unreasonable those pesky obstructionists on the right were being as they prevented passage of free health care for all.  Instead, Republicans came prepared and ran substantive circles around the Democrats, who were too busy reading phony, heart-string pulling letters from “constituents” to talk about actual details of legislation.  The President seemed irritable and petty, and did little to help his case.

Despite accomplishing nothing, the President is determined to ram his unpopular bill through anyway.  All the talk is about reconciliation, which will avert a need for a 60 vote majority in the Senate, but the real story is in the House.  The Democrats just don’t have the votes right now.

Can that change? Certainly.  If House members realize their toast no matter what they do come November, they may just ram it through as one last thumb in the eye to the American people.  But right now, ObamaCare is looking like it needs to be fit for a coffin.

Does this mean any health care reform is dead?  Only if Democrats want it to mean that.  If they wake up, return hat in hand and have a real summit to discuss bipartisan solutions, some useful things can get done.  Don’t get me wrong, the best solutions are ones that Democrats will never consider, but there are productive things on which both sides can agree.   But that will mean Democrats have to first abandon their bad bill which no one wants.  I’m not holding my breath.

Comments  Print This Post

---

Rumors of a possible Crist defection to run as an independent began a few days ago.  Now, sources indicate it may be a done deal.

Two highly placed and independent sources, speaking strictly on background, tell me that Gov. Charlie Crist is preparing to leave the Republican Party and run as an independent in the race for the U.S. Senate…

Another well-placed source tells me the reason several Crist campaign staffers left recently is because, being committed Republicans, they refused to take part in an independent Senate run by Crist. That’s not confirmed by an independent second source, but it does ring true.

Now, reports from anonymous sources are sometimes wrong, so I have stopped short of reporting a Crist independent run as a verifiable fact, even though I believe my sources are accurate.

Electorally he probably does have a slightly better shot in a three-way race than against Rubio in the primary, where polls show him currently getting creamed and losing more ground everyday.  But he won’t get much Republican support, and likely will pull more Democratic voters.  In other words, Rubio still wins.

My first thought upon hearing that he might do this was similar to that of Erick Erickson at RedState.  The party establishment will try to cover their rear-ends by blaming this on conservatives, instead of putting blame where it belongs: on supporting and promoting the kind of opportunist who so can’t stand to lose a primary that he’d pack it up and leave at the first sign that he might have miscalculated.

Ultimately this confirms what conservatives have been saying about Crist. He is an opportunist snake that only came into office on Jeb Bush’s coattails, but has no real draw of his own.  We don’t want him as our Florida senator under any label, so good riddance.

Comments  Print This Post

---

Paul Krugman is all in a tizzy once again.  This time he’s lamenting the lack of dictatorial powers available to liberal presidents, and thus their inability to ram their agenda down our throats.  He then attempts to criticize the Republicans:

It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis.

Is it just me, or has he just suggested a powerful campaign commercial for…the Republicans?

It turns out that, for the electorate, paralysis is preferable to the radical left-wing policies advocated by the likes of Paul Krugman.

Comments  Print This Post

---

Granted, the GOP still has no power.  But the unprecedented swiftness of the Obama/Pelosi collapse, as evidenced most recently by Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts, makes recapturing the House in 2010 a real possibility.  I wonder whether or not Republicans are ready for that.

Here’s what I mean.  My question isn’t whether or not they’re ready to win, but whether they are ready to govern with principle.  My worry is that Obama’s surprisingly fast collapse, due to his unprecedented overreaching, has not given the party bureaucracy the time necessary to properly internalize the reasons for their defeat.  Obviously, I hope that concern proves to be unfounded, and that Republicans are able to recruit principled, small government conservatives to run, and win, in the next election.

Comments  Print This Post

---

The left has for some time self-servingly wrung its hands about the state of the GOP as a supposed “regional” party. The basis for this claim was the defeat of northeastern liberals like Lincoln Chafee and the defection of others like Arlen Specter.  This meme was always short on intelligent thought, and now Scott Brown has exploded it.

As if the election of Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey weren’t enough, Scott Brown has surged to the position of favorite in the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat.  Deep Blue Massachusetts may just elect a Republican to end the Democrats’ filibuster proof hold on the Senate.  How could a “regional” party like the GOP do this?

According to the learned wisdom of the liberal analysts, the party was just too fanatically conservative for the northeast.  Yet it was liberals who kept losing there.  The reality is that it is those very northeastern liberals who diluted the Republican brand by collaborating with Democrats to expand the size and scope of government.

Scott Brown may not be the strongest conservative,  nor a standard bearer of the Tea Party movement, but he didn’t make a race of it in MA by running as a Rockefeller Republican, either.  Instead, he ran as a fiscal conservative.  That’s the key to winning in the northeast and everywhere else for Republicans.  Don’t listen to the self-serving advice of the left.  Some regional compromises are okay, but sticking to core principles is what will reinvigorate the Republican party, in New England as well as the country as a whole.

Comments  Print This Post

---

The unprecedented reach of the radical Obama-Pelosi agenda will have consequences for Democrats in 2010.  What kind of consequences?  Perhaps there are some clues.

We all know what rats do when they’re stuck on a sinking ship – they dive off.  Democrats have already seen 4 House retirements in the last few weeks.  Now you can add a defection to the list:

POLITICO has learned that Rep. Parker Griffith, a freshman Democrat from Alabama, will announce today that he’s switching parties to become a Republican.

…Griffith’s party switch comes on the eve of a pivotal congressional health care vote and will send a jolt through a Democratic House Caucus that has already been unnerved by the recent retirements of a handful of members who, like Griffith, hail from districts that offer prime pickup opportunities for the GOP in 2010.

The switch represents a coup for House Republican leadership, which had been courting Griffith since he publicly criticized Democratic leadership in the wake of raucous town halls over the summer.

Griffith, who captured the seat in a close 2008 open seat contest, will become the first Republican to hold the historically Democratic, Huntsville-based district. A radiation oncologist who founded a cancer treatment center, Griffith plans to blast the Democratic health care bill as a prime reason for his decision to switch parties—and is expected to cite his medical background as his authority on the subject.

Looks like there might be some hope for a change, after all.

Comments  Print This Post

---

Matt Yglesias is upset and considers America to be “ungovernable” because Obama can’t just wave his hand and have his agenda pass without opposition:

We’re suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority’s governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking. Or you can have a system in which a defeated minority rejects the majority’s governing agenda out of hand, seeks opening for attack, and hopes that failure on the part of the majority will bring them to power. But right now we have both simultaneously. It’s a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure. It’s insane, and it needs to be changed.

No, it doesn’t.  What we have is a system that protects itself from the whims of fanciful, but ill-considered change.

The guardian has also taken up the cause of whining about America’s “broken” system, which just refuses to allow the immediate and thoughtless adoption of a sweeping, radical agenda.

This is not Latin America, where any colorful demagogue can rise to power and immediately reshape an entire nation in his imagine.  Where Matt Yglesias and the hard-left see a bug, those more concerned about the nature of American democracy than the ability to ram through radical legislation see a feature.

The Senate is the only body in the government which protects minority rights from the trampling of the majority. It was designed specifically for that purpose, and although the nature of how it does so has changed, it continues to serve that purpose today.  We should not undo our governing model on the basis of the dictatorial impulses of Matt Yglesias.

Comments  Print This Post

---

Since Congressional Democrats refuse to do it, Republicans have scheduled a reading of H.R. 3962 from 2:00 to 6:00 PM EST this afternoon.  You can catch it live here.

Comments  Print This Post

---

Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.