One of the Democratic Party’s worst pre-November election nightmares began to unfold Thursday as the House ethics committee laid out 13 charges of House rules violations against Representative Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y) and began the process for a public trial on the charges.
Talk about being in two places at once, well Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner appeared to be doing just that Sunday, when he delivered the same message on whether or not to keep the Bush tax cuts in two television networks at almost the same time.
Obviously Geithner does not have the power of ubiquity — that is being in many different places at the same time — so obviously one of the interviews was taped, the other one live.
In any good book, film or story, one must set the stage before the plot begins to unfold.
So goes the story of Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), once chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, as he prepares to stand accused before the House ethics committee this week, after a secret, months-long effort to settle the case fell apart.
No matter who does the poll the results keep brining bad news to Democrats and in particular to president Barack Obama.
The latest in the long list of polls critical to the president came Wednesday. It was conducted and released by Quinnipiac University and shows that Obama’s approval rating has fallen to 44 percent, while those who disapprove of his job now stands at 48 percent.
The story is written as if one party, the Democrats in the Senate, wanted to restart jobless benefits for 2 1/2 million Americans for up to 99 weeks, while the other party, the Republicans were opposed to helping poor people.
In effect, Democrats were able to break a Republican filibuster in the Senate by a 60-40 vote, minutes after the Senate had just sworn in the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd’s replacement.
With less than four months before November mid-term elections, the war of predictions as to who will win control of Congress has begun.
When White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs recently acknowledged that Democrats could lose the House majority this fall, he was only saying what Dallas Republican Pete Session has said all along.
But then again, Sessions chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, the group responsible for grooming House candidates. And on Sunday, Sessions appeared on NBC’s problem Meet the Press to reiterate his prediction.
Sessions said his party would win “slightly over” 40 House seats, which would give them a slim majority in the chamber and, with it, the ability to derail President Barack Obama’s agenda.
An old political adage says that any day a candidate or party stray from their main campaign message is a day lost; a day they will never get back.
This week, Democrats should have been talking about jobs and the economy.
In last minute plea to Congress, President Obama urged reluctant lawmakers Saturday to quickly approve nearly $50 billion in emergency aid to state and local governments, to avoid “massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters” and to support the still-fragile economic recovery.
By David Muhlhausen, Ph.D. , Heritage Foundation.
The year 2010 will surely go down as a bad year for Head Start—a “Great Society” pre-school program intended to provide a boost to disadvantaged children before they enter elementary school.
House Republicans are in the planning stages of creating a 2010 version of the “Contract for America,” which Republicans believe will outline their principles and help them repeat the 1994 mid-year election wins that allowed them to gain control of the House of Representatives.
