In today's Political Diary:
* Bill Thomas's Big Plans
* From L.A. to N.Y., Labor Defends Its Slush Funds
* University of Washington Afflicted by Plague of Cretinism
* Tainting the GOP Brand (Quote of the Day I)
* Baby's Got a Gun (Quote of the Day II)
* There Will Always Be a Haiti
Undoubted Thomas
We're hearing that Rep. Bill Thomas of California, who now holds the lofty position of Ways and Means Committee chairman, will make a run for Budget Committee chairman next year. Rep. Thomas, the economic czar of the House, is one of the craftiest of all Republicans and a man who has an encyclopedic knowledge of budget and tax issues. But he also has earned a reputation for heavy-handedness. Ways and Means Committee members grouse that his management style is "dictatorial" and "iron-fisted."
A Thomas power play for the Budget Committee chairmanship is guaranteed to ruffle feathers. Conservatives favor one of the younger, more reform-minded members of the Republican caucus to run the committee. Two names being pushed by Republican Study Committee members are Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Jeb Henserling of Texas. The two are cosponsors of the Family Protection Budget Act that would repeal the 1974 Budget Act, restoring the line-item veto and putting spending restraint back in the budget process.
Reformers in the House are beginning to complain of the musical chairs being played by committee chairmen, who slip from one chairmanship gavel to another every six years. The six-year term limit that Republicans established when they took over Congress is 1995 was intended to keep bringing new blood into the chairman slots. But a system of privileged rotation has been established instead.
Mr. Thomas's great accomplishment as head of the tax writing committee was passage of the capital gains and dividend tax cuts. He saved both from extinction. Lately, he has kept all of Washington's tax community on edge with his announcement that he will unveil a grand opus tax reform plan sometime in the weeks ahead. Mr. Thomas is said to be fashioning a grandiose plan that would fix the tax system, the health care system, and the retirement system in one fell swoop. Most political analysts believe that Mr. Thomas has run out of time to enact such a sweeping plan since he has to vacate the Ways and Means chairmanship at the end of the year. That's why he's said to be eyeing the Budget committee chairmanship slot.
Mr. Thomas also is said to have desires to gain a leadership position once Denny Hastert steps down as speaker in 2008, rescrambling all the leadership slots. The consensus is that Rep. Thomas has steamrollered over too many adversaries in the GOP caucus to win such a race. He has a personality as soft as sandpaper. One of his House colleagues and a Thomas supporter tells me: "Bill's greatest asset is that he's the smartest guy we have on economic policy. His greatest liability is that he knows it."
-- Stephen Moore
United States of Big Labor
Remember that three-day mass transit strike that paralyzed New York City over the Christmas holidays? Apparently the drama isn't over. Since then, transit workers have narrowly rejected the contract their leadership accepted to end the strike. The union is now hoping to start new talks in a desperate effort to avoid binding arbitration that would probably result in a less generous contract being imposed on them.
But an even more important fight for the union leadership now concerns the threatened loss of its ability to automatically collect dues from members. Unions that violate New York state law barring public-employee unions from striking face losing the right to require these automatic paycheck deductions. "Dues checkoff is absolutely indispensable," labor law professor David Gregory told the New York Times. "If dues are suspended, frozen or sequestered, that's a radical move. It would fundamentally cripple the union." He noted that dues account for 87% of the union's $23 million in annual revenue.
A very similar issue explains why California public-employee unions spent over $120 million last year to defeat Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's set of voter initiatives to reform California politics. A centerpiece of the governor's effort was a proposal to require the unions to seek written permission from their members before spending a portion of their dues on politics. "At the heart of the union's ability to extract concessions from government employers is their unlimited ability to spend union dues money on political retribution against elected officials," notes former teacher union official Myron Lieberman. "That issue is at the heart of most failures to improve the performance of government."
New York's transit union was once before denied the right to automatically collect dues money from its members after a bitter 1980 transit strike. But the courts restored its privileges after it presented evidence that it would be bankrupt without the cash infusions that automatic payroll deductions brought in. Given the chaos and costs last December's strike caused New York, here's hoping the courts view any such appeal for sympathy this time with a more jaundiced eye.
-- John Fund
'Pappy' Shot Down by Campus Ignoramuses
It's well known that college students today aren't as educated in our nation's history as they should be, but it's still hard to grasp the mind-bending political correctness just displayed by the University of Washington's student senate at its campus in Seattle.
The issue before the Senate this month was a proposed memorial to World War II combat pilot Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, a 1933 engineering graduate of the university, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service commanding the famed "Black Sheep" squadron in the Pacific. The student senate rejected the memorial because "a Marine" is not "an example of the sort of person UW wants to produce."
Digging themselves in deeper, the student opponents of the memorial indicated: "We don't need to honor any more rich white males." Other opponents compared Boyington's actions during World War II with murder.
"I am absolutely bewildered that the Student Senate voted down the resolution," Brent Ludeman, the president of the UW College Republicans, told me. He noted that despite the deficiencies of the UW History Department, the complete ignorance of Boyington's history and reputation by the student body was hard to fathom. After all, "Black Sheep Squadron," a 1970s television show portraying Colonel Boyington's heroism as a pilot and Japanese prisoner of war, still airs frequently on the History Channel. Apparently, though, it's an unusual UW student who'd be willing to learn any U.S. history even if it's spoonfed to him by TV.
As for the sin of honoring a rich white male, Mr. Ludeman points out that Boyington (who died in 1988) was neither rich nor white. He happened to be a Sioux Indian, who wound up raising his three children as a single parent. "Colonel Boyington is luckily not around to see how ignorant students at his alma mater can be today," says Kirby Wilbur, a morning talk show host at Seattle's KVI Radio. Perhaps the trustees and alumni of the school will now help educate them.
-- John Fund
Quote of the Day I
"Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said Republicans cannot betray their core belief of keeping taxes low. Referring to the Coca-Cola Corporation, Norquist said the brand name would be destroyed if people found a rat head in their Coca-Cola. 'Republicans who vote for tax increases are rat heads in the Coke bottle,' Norquist warned" -- reported by CNSNews.com
Quote of the Day II
"[The Cheney shooting] was hardly an affair of state. And it was hardly going to be kept secret. Arrogance? The media laying these charges are the same media that just last week unilaterally decided that the public's right to know did not extend to seeing cartoons that had aroused half the world, burned a small part of it and deeply affected the American national interest. Having arrogated to themselves the judgment of what a free people should be allowed to see regarding an issue that is literally burning, they then go ballistic over a few hours' delay in revealing an accident with only the most trivial connection to the nation's interest or purpose. Cheney got a judgment call wrong, for reasons that are entirely comprehensible. The disproportionate, at times hysterical, response to that error is far less comprehensible" -- Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer.
Maximum Maxine
What do you say about a country that has had 32 coups in 200 years, that has had only one democratically elected leader serve out his full term, a country whose average citizens survives on less than $1 a day and whose worst slums are virtual war zones? If you are an American politician, you might want to keep your distance. But the Democratic Party has never shown a hesitance about adopting Haiti as their own.
Rep. Maxine Waters, the ultraliberal California Democrat, finds the U.S. to blame for the latest turn in Haiti's troubled history, this week's disputed election. In a statement released Wednesday, she ranted: "The obvious attempts to steal the elections in Haiti are blatant and shameful. It is absolutely outrageous that the President Aristide-haters, the anti-Lavalas elites, and the United States Government would so openly and blatantly steal these elections."
Never mind that it was the people of Haiti who forced the corrupt President Aristide into exile two years ago. Never mind the legitimate confusion this week as to whether Aristide associate Rene Preval had won the necessary 50%-plus-one votes to avoid a run-off election. In any case, Ms. Waters can sleep easy. Haitian officials have now declared Mr. Preval the winner, having chosen to disregard the discovery by poll observers of bags of tampered ballots sitting in a garbage dump. There's even reason for modest optimism. Mr. Preval's previous service as president was highlighted by economic reforms, including privatizations, that resulted in the country's lowest unemployment level since the fall of "Baby Doc" Duvalier. The one concern is Mr. Preval's vagueness on whether he'd welcome the return of the dangerous and demagogic Mr. Aristide.
But don't kid yourself, as Ms. Waters does, that the U.S. can dictate these outcomes. She's a throwback, even in the hardcore Democratic left, to a time when campus Marxists delighted in imagining the world's downtrodden peoples serving only as passive victims of U.S. designs. Most of her ilk have now figured out that the world is a complicated place and the U.S. ability to influence events is sorely limited, even though it would often like to. |
