Rep. van Hollen Gets Defensive
During Rep. Chris van Hollen’s appearance on Meet the Press, Rep. Chris van Hollen gave some pretty defensive answers about what this congress has accomplished. Here’s what he said:
REP. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN (D-MD): David, let’s just flash back for a moment. The first nine months of the Obama administration, one of the most productive periods in recent legislative history, according to all independent outside observers, we passed an expansive children’s health care, paid for; we provided the opportunity for women to have their day in court on equal pay; we gave the FDA authority to protect our kids from tobacco use; we passed a very important public lands protection bill. We passed a credit card billholders bill of rights. We passed a whole lot of things. Then we came to the healthcare debate. Senator DeMint famously said, “We’re going to use this to break the president. It’s going to be his Waterloo.” Just last week we had seven Republican senators, who had their names on a bill to create a deficit reduction commission, vote against it for purely partisan reasons. There’s been a calculation by the Republican leadership that getting nothing done, to try and prevent the majority from working its will, as it did for the first nine months, is to their political advantage. And there’s no other explanation for that vote we saw.
It’s embarrassing that Rep. van Hollen would list passing credit card holders bill of rights legislation. It’s more embarrassing to hear him say that they passed public lands protection legislation.
These aren’t accomplishments. They’re wasting time while the economy was shrinking and shedding jobs. Each of these bills wasted time in committee hearings, too. What’s the Democrats’ justification for wasting their time on these initiatives instead of working on legislation that would actually create jobs?
It seems to me that bragging that, under the Democrats’ leadership, the American people got such high priority legislation like a credit cardholder’s bill of rights passed is admitting that the Democrats’ agenda was filled with failing to get anything important done that improves the lives of real people.
Frankly, this is proof that Pelosi’s Democrats didn’t pay attention to the American people’s priorities. It’s proof that Pelosi’s Democrats paid more attention to ramming their ideological agenda down America’s throats while people were losing their jobs and their health insurance.
This November, the American people should give congressional Democrats a failing grade in their performance review. They should take Pelosi’s speaker gavel and give it to John Boehner. The American people should then thank the Democrats for not passing more legislation that would do more harm than good.
Technorati Tags: Democrats, Speaker Pelosi, Chris van Hollen, DCCC, Credit Cards, Bill Of Rights, Public Lands, FDA, Election 2010
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
February 24th, 2010 at 9:54 am
I would pretty much agree with your analysis, Gary, except the part where you say we should take away Pelousy’s gavel and give it to Boehner. Why would we want to give it to one of the reasons the Republicans went on their bigger government and spending spree? Isn’t that why we want to get rid of Pelousy/Reid/Bawney/etc?
It just seems to me that, if we retake control of Congress, we might want to have people running things that won’t hand control right back to the social democrats.