Jon Popham
October 1, 2008 | 10:34 am EST
Rep. Henry Waxman (left) and Rep. John Dingell (right)
The battle for Chair of the House Energy Committee is getting heated between Democrats John Dingell of Michigan and Henry Waxman of California. Dingell, the current Chair of the committee, referred to his challenger Waxman recently in a Detroit radio interview as “anti-manufacturing left-wing Democrat” with a “serious lack of understanding of people in the auto industry and manufacturing generally.” Waxman is not phased however, claiming to have the votes within the Democratic caucus to take the gavel of the powerful committee away from his Michigan colleague in the incoming Congress.
Why do we care you ask? The reasons are pretty straighforward:
1. Committee Chairmanships are the true power centers in our Federal legislative process. The Chair of a Committee chooses what legislation he or she will allow to come before the committee, thereby framing the entire discussion of what the fully assembled House of Representatives or Senate will eventually vote on. If the Chair wants to push a new law through, they can. If they wish to bury it, it will disappear, lost in the swamp of parliamentary procedures that litters the land around the U.S. Capitol.
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It’s nearly impossible to leave your home these days without overhearing people’s opinions on the credit crisis and bailout package. Yesterday, while running errands, I had the misfortune of tuning in for a few minutes to a conservative Baltimore radio commentator, hilariously trying to pin the credit crunch on Democratic policies and their obstruction to regulation (!), while railing against the bailout and vaunting the House Republicans who voted against it (no word was mentioned about the Democrats who actually doomed the measure). Later while standing in line at a National Wholesale Liquidators in Northeast Baltimore - about as good a place as you can find to overhear regular people’s concerns - I listened to a checkout line full of shoppers irate over the bailout package that would go to “all those millionaires up there in New York“.
It is indeed an infuriating thought that billions of dollars of Federal, taxpayer money will go to the same Wall Street firms who greedily demanded deregulation from the politicians they patronize in Washington, then, once they got it, eagerly wrapped it around their own necks and hung themselves. So why do it? What is the possible justification for this? The answer comes down to one simple concept: Credit.
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Don’t believe the hype from the politicians, the bailout is all about politics. Congressional politics, Senatorial politics and most importantly Presidential politics. Two huge aspects of politics that often go unspoken are taking credit and assigning blame. Indeed many of the key policy positions of political parties in the United States and democracies around the world arose from their ability to either take credit or assign blame for actions on issues related to those positions. This bailout is no different, and the way it’s played by both political parties and their respective candidates has the potential to redraw the political map as we know it in this country for a generation to come, if not more, should one side take a bold action.
The current bailout plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has elicited a deep measure of skepticism in the electorate for a number of very poignant reasons. True conservatives absolutely detest spending taxpayer money to bailout anything, with many considering the current plan “financial socialism” as Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning termed it. Liberals aren’t so much turned off by the socialism than by the fact that it’s intended to go to the people in this country who need it the absolute least: Wall Street investment firms. Finally people from across the political spectrum can all think of much, much better things to do with their hard earned $700 Billion than to go and gamble it on a financial industry that has already had a number of bailouts and is still falling apart.
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One of the tamer results...
While writing a post on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s firm position on offshore drilling I ran across something downright disgusting. Following my usual method, I did a Google Images search using the sole term “Pelosi” to find a photo for the post. The results were, without mincing words, about sexist as hell, featuring a high ranking official in the United States in a seemingly endless parade of demeaning photoshopped poses and unflattering snapshots. I was under the mistaken impression it would be easy to find a simple, dignified photograph of the Speaker of the House of the United States to plug into a blog entry, however I was unpleasantly surprised by the sheer vitriol and subject matter in so many of the search results I found. What made matters worse was that the majority of the sexist photoshopped images were found on right leaning websites. Sites which since the introduction of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee have surprisingly found their inner feminist, and are suddenly authorities on sexism themselves. I guess it takes one to know one.
As a male in this society it is easy - too easy - to forget that sexism is still a very real part of life for women in both personal and professional settings. This photo survey however on the most widely used search tool in the world provided a grim reminder of the backwards, immature, piggish attitudes too many people exhibit toward a highly successful woman in a position of power - and particularly one championing policies running counter to the conservative movement. So here’s a tour of what’s out there - and trust me when I say it will be offensive…
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Now that the Democrats in the House have changed their minds in the face of what Nancy Pelosi called “the political climate,” they’ve passed a bill that allows drilling 50 miles offshore, which will now make its way to the Senate.
It was only a few weeks ago that “Ms. Pelosi was adamant that she would not clear the way for a House vote on new coastal exploration,” however increased Republican pressure and the whole expensive gas thing has made many Democrats, Pelosi included, attempt to reach a compromise. As Pelosi said, if we don’t have something in the bill, it’s drilling three miles offshore. The issue of offshore drilling is, says The New York Times, “an issue that has been a Democratic environmental touchstone since the 1980s.”
The bill passed the House 236-189, and allows drilling if states adjacent to the water approve of it. Now it comes to the Senate, which, according to the Associated Press, “has no intention of going as far as the House in expanding offshore oil and gas drilling beyond the western Gulf of Mexico.” The Senate may open drilling in the Southern Atlantic (Virginia, Georgia, the like), but seem disinclined to go to the Pacific or Alaska.
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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is sticking to her guns, firmly rejecting the notion the House solely vote on whether or not to drill offshore. The California Democrat will instead introduce comprehensive energy legislation which includes limiting tax breaks for oil companies and funding alternative, renewable energy with the royalties from new drilling in approved areas. The Republican backed measures for a simple yes or no vote on offshore drilling, sidestepping or ignoring all other energy concerns in the United States for the GOP’s corporate oil sponsors, were described as “a hoax on the American people,” by the Speaker.
The Baltimore-bred, San Francisco Congresswoman went on to tell KQED television’s “This Week in Northern California“:
You want to drill? We want the royalties for the American people, and we want that to pay for renewable energy resources. We want to connect all that together.
As Wendy mentioned, last weekend was Netroots Nation, where lots of awesome bloggers and folks got together to talk about exciting things in the realm of making the world better. Not only was Al Gore there, but my fellow TakePart blogger Katie Halper (she’s on a break this summer) was there too!
And in case you miss your daily TakePart dose of Katie, check out the video below, it’s sure to make you smile!
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We Can Solve It, the climate change advocacy group (they’re against it, FYI) that brought us the Al Sharpton/Pat Robertson commerical, are back at it with a new spot pairing Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich. While this Ungar/Madison idea may sound like the makings for strange bedfellows, I can assure you it’s even more awkward than it sounds. Check out the video, after the jump.
