Who is blocking the solution to shutdown, debt limit?

Senate Democrats block progress on debt limit, shutdown

Reid nixes bipartisan compromise in Senate

The folks over the Huffington Post are all happy because the people they like in the Senate are all over throwing various compromise solutions back in the faces of the Republicans if they offer any.

 

NO SURRENDER! NO RETREAT!

 

I think the American people deserve a little bit better than this, but I understand the sentiment and it is a two-way street. However, having said that, it seems egregious to me that the Majority Leader in the Senate, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, rejected a compromise proposal by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, that had the support of at least six Democrats. Not enough to invoke cloture (should someone decide to filibuster it), but enough to pass the bill if all the Republicans bought into the measure.

So, the narrative remains that it all the Republicans’ fault. I am sorry, but that meme doesn’t fly anymore. This has become a situation where the progressives/liberals are saying “We won the White House. We still control the Senate. It don’t matter what the House says, especially since it is controlled by the opposition. What we want goes, period. End of sentence. End of story. And if you don’t like that you are a hostage-taking, kidnapping, baby-killing, ransom-demanding, terrorist bomber.”

If it were left to me, and I was the only one whose vote mattered, I would start with serious clearing out of the halls of Congress in November 2014 (if not sooner in those states where recall elections are permitted) and I would start with the liberals and progressives, and probably would continue on down to all the elected folks, and then start on the career staff that man all the policy-affecting offices in the congress members’ offices. Now, that is not going to happen, but it is what I would do.

Of course, there is little I could or would do with the blatant partisanship among the various news gathering and news disseminating organizations, other than call them on the fact that they are not fair and balanced, especially the ones in the broadcasting field but also including those in the traditional print media.

Sorry, but label what passes for journalism now as what it is: in the traditional sense of it, we are living again in the heyday of new era of Yellow Journalism.

Wikipedia's defines "Yellow Journalism"

Now, if you don’t know about Yellow Journalism, you need to go back a little more than a century or so, and look at the way the news was covered by the “majors” … not a pretty sight.

The “objective journalism” standard never really has been the norm, but for a brief shining period there in the 1950s and 1960s (and maybe into the 1970s and early 1980s) it was something that mainstream journalists professed as their goal. Not that they even came close, but it was the dream of a lot journalists that trained in that era.

So, I think it is time for us to let go of that illusion and realize that is not the case. Time to realize that everyone has a point of view and to them, it is fair and balanced and everyone else’s is prejudiced.

However, I would like to disabuse those who say that the House has no right to defund programs it doesn’t like. Sorry, but that dog don’t hunt. You may not like it, but the same thing was tried when the Iraq War went south. Remember the people who voted for the war before they voted against it? If you don’t remember that issue, then you need to have your memory checked because it wasn’t that long ago.

And just because some law has passed Congress, and has been upheld by the Supreme Court, does not mean that law is engraved in stone … and unless it is an amendment to the Constitution, it is not necessarily the supreme law of the land. Federal statutes do take precedence over state law, but that does not equal constitutional status.

If it were the case, then little things like the Fugitive Slave Act and the Volstead Act would still be the law of the land. Or Plessey v. Ferguson would still be in effect. Nope, laws can be changed. Courts can change their opinion on what is constitutional and what is not.

Even if it is a law, Congress (especially in the case of the House) has the prerogative to vote against providing any funds to enforce or put any law into effect. Heck, it has been underfunding immigration enforcement for years.

I really would hope, however, that more people would look at the situation unfolding in Washington, D.C., and recognize that despite the repetition of the canard that it all is the fault of the party that controls the House of Representatives, the fault for this mess does indeed lie elsewhere.

To me, the answer is obvious beyond debate.

Nuff said.