Once upon a time, when students learned civics in high school, we were taught that one of the inspired decisions of our Founding Fathers was the creation of a bicameral Congress with different yet complementary roles. The House was closer to the people, its members serving two-year terms. It was the "cup," containing the passions and …
Tag: Harry Reid
Congress: a profile in cowardice
Will it take a Baltimore Orioles/Washington Nationals World Series to bring members of Congress back to Washington soon? If so, it only highlights Congress' cowardly unwillingness to exercise its Constitutional responsibility and vote on the ISIS war. This least productive, shortest session of Congress ended with no debate on President Obama's new response to the terrorist threat roiling …
Are Harry Reid’s questionable tactics working?
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's most recent foray into presidential politics - claiming someone had told him that Mitt Romney had paid no taxes for ten years but refusing to corroborate the accuser's name or the charge has the stench of McCarthyism. During the Cold War, the late Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy held hearings to rout out Communists …
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Obama’s energy speech: time to walk the walk
President Obama this week laid out a plan to cut dependence on foreign oil by 2025. Forty years ago, Richard Nixon also promised to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. At the time about 34 percent of our oil was imported. A decade later it was 45 percent, and Jimmy Carter was making the same …
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Shattered dreams: No Dream Act for now
When I was eight years old, I knew my family, my neighbors and some of my elementary school classmates. I knew we lived in Boston, scarcely understood Massachusetts and had no sense of nations or nation-states. If my parents had decided to move, we would have moved, no questions asked. As told in the New …
Thinking big about energy with T. Boone Pickens
T. Boone Pickens has made nearly $1.5 billion as an oil man, financier, corporate raider, takeover artist, and hedge fund chairman. He’s been working since he was 12 years old, when he started delivering newspapers, and, at age 82, is a larger-than-life character who has spent, he says, $70 million of his own money to …
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Scott Brown is at once appealing, appalling and even a cause for optimism
Scott Brown drew a huge crowd to a New England Council breakfast this week. His speech was a reminder of the regular-guy appeal that won him the seat last January and the power he is currently relishing as the 41st vote in the U.S. Senate, a guy who can stop a filibuster or put a …
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Winners and Losers from Health Reform Summit — (posted late due to 2-day Comcast outage)
Seven hours of discussion at Thursday’s health summit did produce some winners and losers on both sides of the table. The Republicans were winners because they were able to present themselves as having ideas, rather than just being naysayers. They had a wider audience for their versions of tort reform, expanding health savings accounts (nothing …
Marjorie Arons-Barron 