SEPTEMBER 2010
A Publication of the Public Policy Committee At the WNDC Upcoming Events in DC Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius speaks at WNDC
Sibelius pointed out the new programs that the Recovery Act addressed, especially beefing up health research, with a $10 billion increase to the National Institutes of Health. There will be an emphasis on speeding up trials for new and promising drugs and therapies. President Obama, Sibelius said, has asked all Cabinet heads to “leverage our Departments.” HHS is following up that directive, working, for example, with the Department of Education’s early childhood programs and with the EPA on environmental health sciences. Sibelius was questioned on how the Administration was planning to sell health care reform to a skeptical public. “One day at a time” was her answer. The public will start to see the specific benefits the Act mandates this month, which should change opinions. “The opposition is not intimidated by a lack of facts.” (Back to the Table of Contents) UPCOMING EVENTS IN DC The WNDC has issued a statement that the present operation of Senate Rule 22, requiring a super majority of 60 votes to cut off debate on legislation, has been misused by the Republican minority. The routine use of the supermajority is clearly in violation of the intent of the Constitution, which envisaged the use of supermajorities only in a few special cases such as ratifying treaties, impeachment, expulsion of members, constitutional amendments and overriding Presidential vetoes. The WNDC supports actions that would correct this situation. American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein recently proposed one possible action: The Senate could replace the majority’s responsibility to end debate with the minority’s responsibility to keep it going. Ornstein suggested that the first four weeks of debate would be under the old rules in which the majority has to find the 60 votes for cloture. However, after that period had elapsed, the debate would stop unless the minority could find 40 votes to continue it. For a thoroughly alarming report on the “100 Vote Senate” see The American Progress analysis. Small Government: Potemkin Village Fire Hydrants, or “You get what you pay for” “For the second time in about three weeks, a fire has devastated building in an area of town where although hydrants were within reach of the scene, they were not equipped to suppress a blaze.” That is because, as it turns out, the fire hydrants look like traditional hydrants but these, under federal regulations, don’t meet the requirements for fighting fires. They exist only to allow a privately owned residential potable water system to be flushed out. The hydrants are owned by the Connecticut Water Authority (SCWA), which, despite what the name implies, is a private entity. In the wake of these and other blazes in the area, the only remedy suggested by the SCWA was to label hydrants so the public would henceforth know that the hydrants could not be used for fighting fires. The SCWA general manager told a public meeting that if using hydrants was a “preferred method” for fighting fires, it would cost millions to upgrade the system which would have to be done through a “publicly funded project.” How about Pricing Good Economic News into the Market? “For retiring baby boomers looking to retire mortgages are twice the value of their property, pensions were based on 10% returns in the stock market, but instead the market lost money. States and municipalities are all bust. We thought we’d inherit something, the parents are going to live forever … in the nursing home. Forget double dip. We may still be in a recession…. The Fed may have staved off Depression, but deficit spending hasn’t worked to reignite the economy. “The market swoons when it fixates on negatives. Then at the darkest moment we start to remember what is right in the world. What isn’t priced into the market? Perhaps bottoming real estate prices and unemployment rates, or that a resilient economy continues to recover. Down the road, recounting what is right in the world, we may marvel at what should have been so obvious.” Contempt for the Poor Nevada Senatorial candidate and Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle should be an early target for attention here. She has called the unemployed “spoiled.” Nevada Representative Dean Heller has said that extending unemployment insurance was “creating hobos.” Kentucky’s Rand Paul thinks the jobless should “quit bellyaching” and “get back to work.” And then we have former Senator and Deficit Commission Co-Chair Alan Simpson, who thinks people on Social Security are milking a U.S. cow “with 310 million tits.” Simpson has referred repeatedly to Social Security recipients as “lesser people.” Just as we must rebuild barriers to explicit racism that had seemed to have crumbled, we must make talking down the poor unacceptable in public debate. It may be an inadvertent resonance but “lesser people” sounds very much like a definition of “subhuman.”
Congress is a branch of our federal government. Candidates with these antigovernment passions are like spy thriller “moles.” They are sent to infiltrate government, not to steal secrets, but to destroy it from within. Maybe they should be labeled as “infiltrators.”
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