By Steve Brawner
© 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.
The U.S. House of Representatives last week played politics with a serious issue. You should not be disappointed if your congressman participated. You should only be disappointed if he brags about it.
And then more importantly, you should ask yourself why it happened.
Let’s note the contrast between powerful congressional leaders leaving office and Arkansas’ congressmen – who haven’t started being in leadership until now – who seek to stay.
Speaker Paul Ryan’s announced retirement Wednesday was the blockbuster, but he’s not the only leader going home. Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Penn., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is retiring. So is Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-South Carolina, a partisan Republican who told VICE News he’s leaving Congress partly because it’s so partisan. Gowdy said he knows exactly how many flights to Washington he has left – 19 as of the interview.
Ryan is the big news. He’s third in line to be president and is one of Congress’ two most powerful officials. But he had to be talked into taking the speakership, and now he’s walking away from it. His stated desire to spend more time with his family is believable given his history, but the job also has worn him down. Plus, he knows there’s a good chance he’d be handing the gavel next January to Nancy Pelosi. Few jobs are more frustrating than being in the minority party in the U.S. House of Representatives. Continue reading
Tucked in the middle of last week’s Arkansas 2nd Congressional District debate was a disagreement between two of the four candidates – about impeaching President Trump.
Asked in the debate sponsored by KATV and Talk Business & Politics about the Russia investigation and Congress’ role as a check and balancer, Gwen Combs said she favors impeachment. Paul Spencer said he “would not even entertain that thought right now without seeing some evidence.”
On this issue, Democrats should follow Spencer’s lead – for the country’s sake, and for their own. Continue reading
What label do you assign yourself politically? Liberal? Conservative? Something else? Some of us consider ourselves to be “deficit hawks.” And for us, these are dark days.
For deficit hawks, reducing the federal budget deficit is a top priority, even amidst all the other priorities that clamor for attention. Some of us believe that if something is worth having, then it’s worth paying for ourselves rather than sticking our grandchildren with the credit card bill.
There obviously aren’t many of us in the nation’s capital. The national debt, which was $5.7 trillion on Sept. 30, 2000, surpassed $21 trillion on March 14. It has almost quadrupled in less than 18 years.
That $21 trillion divided by 327 million Americans equals $64,348 per each of us – as of 6 p.m. Monday afternoon. By the time you read this, all of those numbers will be bigger. Continue reading
It’s obvious that American democracy isn’t working. The question is, how do we fix it?
Consider these two examples.
The national debt has tripled in the past decade and a half to $21 trillion, even though we all know that no entity can spend more money than it collects forever. Not a family, not a business, and no, not the government, either. And we’re headed in the wrong direction. As was announced by the Treasury Department this week, the recent tax cuts and spending increases made February’s budget deficit the worst it has been for that month since 2012.
Meanwhile, Congress can’t create a solution for the 1.8 million young people brought to America illegally as children “through no fault of their own,” as even immigration hardliner Sen. Tom Cotton describes them. That’s happening despite the fact that the compromise solution is fairly obvious: Give the young people a path to legal status while strengthening border security and immigration enforcement.
So what’s next for the world’s oldest democracy? Here are five options. Continue reading