[Vision2020] The Girls of Summer

Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Sat Aug 3 05:59:09 PDT 2013


  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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August 2, 2013
The Girls of Summer By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html>

Congress, like France, does not believe anybody should have to work during
August. However, to be fair, the French feel compelled to do some stuff
during the other 11 months.

We do not have nearly enough time to discuss all the exciting things that
happened in the final week before summer vacation. The House, for instance,
voted for the 40th time to repeal the Affordable Care Act. I will summarize
the debate:

“Obamacare is bad. ... ” (Majority Leader Eric Cantor)

“Forty is a number that is fraught with meaning in the Bible. ...” (Nancy
Pelosi)

Meanwhile, the Senate considered a bill to appropriate money for
transportation, housing and urban development. This sounds a little dull,
but I want you to consider that its nickname is THUD.

In normal times, back when Congress got things done and disco was extremely
popular, the transportation bill was easy to pass. Everybody likes roads
and bridges. This year, THUD was a labor of love in the Senate
Appropriations Committee, where Barbara Mikulski is chairwoman, Patty
Murray is the leader of the transportation subcommittee and Susan Collins
is the top-ranking Republican. I am not going to point out that they are
all women. Just that they worked well together and were considerate of
everyone’s feelings.

After long and effortful negotiations, they came up with a bipartisan deal
that made most people reasonably happy. In another show of good will,
Murray — who handled the bill on the floor — agreed to let the senators
keep debating until their tongues fell out and permitted the introduction
of more than 80 proposed amendments. “Including,” she said in a phone
interview, “one totally off-message and off-subject on Egypt.”

Ah, yes. That would have been the work of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky,
the libertarian White House wannabe. Paul proposed withdrawing foreign aid
to Egypt and using it for bridge repair. The Middle East is not something
you’re supposed to fiddle around with during a transportation debate, but,
as Murray said, she was going the extra mile. The amendment was defeated 86
to 13.

Murray and Collins were confident that they had the 60 votes necessary to
get their bill through the Senate. “Everyone has falling-apart roads and
crumbling bridges,” said Collins. Most of the Republicans on the
Appropriations Committee had voted for it. And then there was all that
debate and the 80-plus amendment proposals, and everything was going swell.

Enter the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. “For reasons I don’t
fully understand, Senator McConnell decided he needed to draw a line in the
sand,” said Collins.

There are many theories, one of which involves McConnell’s re-election
campaign in Kentucky. It is not going great. He’s being primaried by a Tea
Party candidate, and there are polls suggesting his constituents don’t find
him all that likable. Lately, McConnell has been struggling to look like a
rebellious right-winger rather than a future lobbyist. He even voted for
the Egypt amendment.

“I’ve never seen him work harder to kill a bill,” said Collins. “And this
is my 17th year here.”

Suddenly, everybody realized the bill was doomed, and the senators were
flitting around, buzzing. “Sit down and shut up!” said the majority leader,
Harry Reid. As only he could.

An angry Susan Collins, who would be the only Republican to vote for the
bill, took the floor and expressed her frustration. Murray followed, while
Mikulski watched indignantly. In the Senate president’s chair, Tammy
Baldwin of Wisconsin was presiding. Everybody was a woman! Except Mitch
McConnell, who, having already twisted all the necessary limbs, just made a
vague speech about how the bill would be viewed by Americans as a betrayal
of the Budget Control Act of 2011.

Under McConnell’s argument, which he made with approximately the same
amount of passion one would use to lace a shoe, the nation would spend
August in an uproar about the Senate’s failure to live up to the spirit of
a crazy deal that was cobbled together two years ago to keep the nation
from crashing through the debt ceiling. No one would have the heart to
barbecue.

Actually, the commitment Congress is supposed to be following is its own
budget plan. The Senate and House each have one. The House version is very
austere, and this week the members got a chance to start putting it in
action with — yes! — a transportation bill. Once they got a look how their
principled stand against spending translated into real life, they recoiled
in horror and their leaders yanked it off the agenda.

In a normal world, the House and Senate would get together in a conference
committee to work out a joint budget deal. This year, the Senate
Republicans keep vetoing that. So, on Thursday, just before the senators
left for the airport, Murray asked her leadership to once again request a
conference.

“They’re going to object,” she predicted. “And it’ll be a guy who’ll be
saying no, by the way.”

She was right.

“I’m going to go home and eat chocolate,” Murray decided.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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