When the 112th Congress kicks off today, the 87 new Republicans of this latest revolution in the House will learn the same lesson all rebels must eventually grasp: Winning control is the easy part. Ruling is much tougher.
Take, for example, their plans to dive right into attacking health care reform, or, as they call it, Obamacare. Their bill will begin by voicing the words of revolution, noting that they seek to “repeal the job-killing health care law and health care-related provisions in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.”
These are angry words. But are they governing words?
More importantly, what the bill doesn’t say, and what needs to be said in this context, is that this is a doomed effort. And the GOP knows it. Incoming Rep. Kevin Yoder, one of our two area freshman Republican members of Congress, noted during the campaign: “I promised I’d vote to repeal health care, so I will. It will pass in the House, but die in the Senate, or at best be vetoed by the president. At that point, we’ll get down to the real work.”
In other words, the point of this bill is for show, not substance. It will simply waste time, and quite a bit of it, on the public tab.
The fact that the underpinnings of the tea party conservative movement decries exactly this sort of politics as theater should not be lost on any voter.
A nation just bouncing back from a serious financial crisis could do without the games.
Especially when the incoming House majority has set a schedule that calls for two weeks on, then a week of vacation, throughout the year. The schedule requires an extremely efficient Congress, because while it only cuts three work days from the average new congressional calendar, it groups the work and vacation days (instead of creating long weekends, for instance), meaning it slices several weeks from the session.
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