Is it amnesia, or stupidity?

It’s been reported this week, ad nauseum, that republican senators are considering shutting down the Senate through parliamentary maneuvers (the nuclear option they labeled it when Dems threatened to do the same thing during the BushWhacked Adminisration) if President Obama tries to use budget reconciliation to pass certain parts of his legislative agenda.

Budget reconciliation allows some legislation to be protected from ‘parliamentary maneuvers’ and allow passage with a simple majority… and, being the obstructionists hey are, republicans have a problem with this and some, such as Missouri’s Kit Bond, equate it to “Chicago politics” and are calling foul on the Obama Administration for doing such an “outrageous” thing.

Bond was merely echoing New Hampshire republican Senator Judd Gregg who said that any use of budget reconciliation by President Obama would be seen as an “act of violence” towards Republicans before likening the tactic to “running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River.”

Not to be outdone, Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) decided to join in and called it a “purely partisan exercise” and that it “would be a mess” respectively.

But what they’re failing to mention is that ex-President Bush (GOD I love saying that) also used budget reconciliations.

A lot.

An awful lot.

Case(s) in point: the 2001 Bush Tax Cuts [HR 1836, 3/26/01], the 2003 Bush Tax Cuts [HR 2, 3/23/03], the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 [HR 4297, 5/11/06] and the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 [H. Con Res. 95, 12/21/05] (HT to ThinkProgress for the handy-dandy links).

Furthermore, and this really should come as no surprise, the aforementioned Senators all supported Bush using the budget reconciliations.

Wow… how soon they forget.

As it is, it seems Senate Republicans seem to be suffering from some kind of strange political amnesia… because not only did Bush use this tactic, but so did Presidents Bill Clinton and (GASP), republican folk-hero Ronald Reagan.

And while Senators Bond, Gregg, Kyl and Hatch can’t see the forest from the trees one Republican Senator can…

Sen. John McCain.

Yes, Sen. McCain, the man who, during the presidential campaign, couldn’t even see how bad the US economy was, remembers and was the voice of reason about President Obama using budget reconciliations.

Speaking at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, McCain said; “I fully recognize that Republicans have in the past engaged in using reconciliation to further the party’s agenda. I wish it had not been done then, and I hope it will not be done now that the groundwork has been laid.”

Wow… when Sen. John McCain is the logical one, you know your party is in trouble.

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Let's Give Him Some Time, Shall We?

We’re 65 days into President Obama’s presidency, and there are already grumblings that he’s not moving fast enough to fix the country because the US is still involved in Iraq, has massive unemployment and a recession that might get worse before we get better.

Can we chill for a moment?

America's instant gratification culture is in full tilt… heaven forbid a complex problem requires thought and time in order to both determine a solution and understand whether that solution is good or bad. To some in our society, doing that is just nuts… it’s un-American and they won’t tolerate it god damn it.

Excuse me, but it’s going to take some time to fix the country… hell, it took “President” Bush eight years to screw the nation with its pants on, at least give Obama half of that before you start calling his presidency a failure.

President Obama seemingly agrees with me as witnessed at last night’s presser when Obama, responding to CNN tool Ed Henry’s inane question of why he waited “days” to speak about the AIG fiasco, stoically (and snarkly I might add), said; “It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak.”

Wow… a president that thinks about something before we speak… when was the last time we had one of those?

Ah yes; January 19^th, 2001.

President Obama is trying to bring change to the nation, and it looks as though one way he’s going about that is by making smart and effective decisions, avoiding short term thinking as it rarely leads to good long term solutions (how those big-ass Bush tax breaks working out for ya America?) and, attempting to, craft policies that are designed to address fundamental, complex problems over time.

The fact remains that, after eight disastrous years of republican rule, it's going to be close to impossible (if not totally impossible), to regain the surpluses that President Clinton had when he left office. And rather than offer up their own budget to ‘rally behind’ (primarily because they can’t create one with all the in-fighting in their party), the gop stands idly by, taking potshots from the sidelines while refusing to get into the game.

The nation (well, SCOTUS at first, but then the nation) gave the republicans 8 years to screw up this country, the least the nation could do now is give the Obama Administration 8 months to start fixing it.

That would be the decent thing to do… and hell, after unleashing Bush on the world, isn't it about time that the country started to do the decent thing for a change?

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