Monday, February 23, 2009

Senate Republican sources tell me...

Here's what I hear from my Senate Republican friends in Washington:

The DC Voting Bill will probably come to a vote tomorrow. What that will do is give the District of Columbia a seat in the House of Representatives. Utah, which barely missed out on adding an fourth seat to its House delegation in after the 2000 Census, may get an extra seat until at least 2012.

Most Republican senators oppose the bill, including John McCain, the only senator who voted against the legislation when it was before the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee earlier this month.

Barack Obama will certainly sign the bill, but that doesn't mean Washington will have its representative voting in Congress any time soon. The District of Columbia is not a state, and the constitution seems pretty clear on the matter of sending representatives to Congress.

Then the DC Voting Bill will probably headed to court. As anyone who casually follows politics knows, Washington is overwhelmingly Democratic, which means that it will send a Dem to Capitol Hill forever if supporters of the bill win in the legal arena.

The Senate is also expected to vote on Hilda Solis, the president's choice for Secretary of Labor.

March is budget time for Congress, and based upon what I hear, March will arrive like an overfed lion, and leave in the same manner, courtesy of the Democrats.

Interestingly, just a week after signing that boondoggle of a stimulus bill, Obama is talking about cutting the budget deficit in half by 2013. Republicans, heck, no one as far as I can figure, has any idea how that will occur.

Technorati tags:

1 comment:

Larry LaVanway said...

RE: How Obama will cut the deficit in half by 2013. Basically, he's going to inflate the deficit number before he, "cuts it in half." First, the Bush Administration didn't count the costs of the Iraq War as part of the annual budget. It was a neat little accounting trick where they called it, "supplemental," and thus not counted for annual budget purposes. So Obama is going to lump that sum into his budgets. Second, he is going to lump in the stimulus costs into the budget over a period of 2 or 3 years as well. So basically, he's going to increase the size of the annual deficit, then in the final year pare down that ("cut in half") by phasing out the Iraq War and by simply NOT extending the massive stimulus bill into 2013-2014. He also plans to allow the 2001 Bush tax cuts to expire for people making over $250K per year. Which will have the anti-stimulative psychological effect of increasing taxes on the people who are most likely to be owning small businesses and employing other people.

Anyway, that's in a nutshell how he is going to, "cut the deficit in half by 2013."