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Posts Tagged ‘Jim Demint’
December 17th, 2012 at 11:52 am
The Good News on Tim Scott

With news reports saying that South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley today will appoint U.S. Rep. Tim Scott to fill the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Jim DeMint, it’s worth revisiting a column I wrote on Scott when he was first running for Congress back in 2010. I believe mine was only the second major piece on Scott in a non-S.C. publication (Fred Barnes beat me by a week with an excellent piece). I loved the story he told about how his odyssey toward success was launched at a Chick-fil-A:

Young Mr. Scott did, however, hold down a part-time job taking tickets at a movie theater. The Chick-fil-A was next door. He bought fries there regularly. The restaurant’s proprietor, a guy named John Moniz – a “Christian conservative white Republican, although I didn’t know it at the time,” Mr. Scott said – “just started recognizing me, and one day he came up and sat down next to me and started talking.”

Moniz (now deceased) somehow struck a chord with the young customer. Moniz talked about the virtues of discipline and concentration. They talked often and built a cross-generational friendship.


And Scott is a solid conservative:

To listen to Mr. Scott himself is to hear the clear echoes of former Housing and Urban Development secretary and vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp, whom Mr. Scott revered. “That’s what I want to model as a public official. If it has to be done, let it be done by me with my own sweat equity. … The War on Poverty was four decades, and the same people are living in the same neighborhoods and the same bad houses, in the same poverty. A person who is full of compassion who is a conservative has to say that small business in a neighborhood creates jobs, not government. Government intervention does not lead to a more promising future. Entrepreneurship changes lives for real.” Also: “As a small-business owner, I cannot pay higher taxes and hire more people.”

Mr. Scott, though, seems far more comfortable talking about limiting government than Mr. Kemp was…

Now some might argue that Scott’s single term in Congress makes him a less qualified person for the Senate than some others who might have been chosen. But that ignores his 13 years on the Charleston City Council (four as chairman), his term in the state legislature, and his record of from-the-bootstraps successful business development. This extensive background in entrepreneurship and in more local levels of government is, arguably, exactly what is needed in the Senate. It should make him more dedicated to principles of federalism, and keep him better grounded. And it provided him with great experience in down-home, practical politics. He’s not just a talking head; Tim Scott is someone who produces results.

May 7th, 2012 at 1:59 pm
Jim DeMint Stands on Principle on Export-Import Bank
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By the standard rules of political compromise, Senator Jim DeMint could be forgiven if he decided not to wade into the fight over whether the Export-Import Bank gets reauthorized by Congress. The bank, which subsidizes the business ventures of American corporations overseas, counts Boeing as one of its biggest beneficiaries — and the aerospace giant has a major presence in DeMint’s home state of South Carolina.

As he makes clear in a new op-ed in the Greenville News, however, DeMint doesn’t take stances based on which interests they serve; he takes them based on what principles they represent. From the piece:

When Boeing’s home state labor union ganged up with President Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board to try to sue Boeing for building a new factory in North Charleston, I strongly supported Boeing’s freedom to build factories wherever they pleased.

More recently dust has been kicked over the extension of the Export-Import Bank, a federal program that subsidizes American businesses’ exports. Because Boeing receives Ex-Im subsidies, and because I favor winding down the Ex-Im Bank instead of increasing its budget, some ask if I went from being pro-Boeing to anti-Boeing.

Neither. All I’ve ever been is pro-freedom.

In both cases, my guiding principle is the same: liberty.

Freedom isn’t perfect, but it is fair. And any time government hands out favors, they’ll be unfair to someone.

When Washington picks winners and losers, in the end taxpayers always lose, and Ex-Im is no exception.

Kudos to Senator DeMint for standing on the side of liberty and equality before the law, and for opposing the trends toward rent-seeking and crony capitalism. We could use more like him in Washington.

March 7th, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Dems Can’t Seem to Find Salvation in Nebraska
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Last week, I posted about how the defection-masquerading-as-retirement of Maine’s liberal Republican Senator Olympia Snowe set back the GOP’s hopes for winning back the Senate by putting an open seat in a deep-blue state into play for this fall’s elections. The results of some new polling in another contest halfway across the nation, however, should tamp down some of Democrats’ more enthusiastic expectations for Election Day.

Ever since the Senate’s most conservative Democrat (a designation akin to being the MVP of a Pygmy basketball league), Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, announced just after Christmas that he would be retiring with the end of his term this year, the party has been distraught. Nelson’s situation is almost a mirror image of Snowe’s. Considered an ideological apostate, he is little loved by his party’s base. His personal popularity, however, has kept safe a seat that would otherwise fall easily into the opposition’s hands (Nebraska is just as safely Republican as Maine is Democratic).

Democrats thought they had cut the Gordian Knot by recruiting former Senator Bob Kerrey back from his new stomping grounds in New York City (after quite a bit of hemming and hawing) to contend for the open seat, with many analysts believing (quite plausibly, I might add) that Kerrey was the only Democrat with the potential to hold the seat.

According to some new polling from Rasmussen, however, the dream seems to have been premature. The results show Kerrey (who is a known commodity in Cornhusker State politics, having spent four years as Governor and 12 years as a U.S. Senator) trailing the Republican front-runner, Attorney General Jon Bruning, by 22 points. State Treasurer Don Stenberg, who has earned the endorsement of Senator Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund, is up 18 on Kerrey. Thus far, it looks like the Democrats’ hopes that a single transformative figure could lead them to the promised land were quixotic. If only there were an example from recent history that could have warned them of that possibility …

February 13th, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Tea Party Republicans Bringing Real Energy Reform to Capitol Hill
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In my commentary last week — focusing on the economic weaknesses of the Republican presidential candidates — I spent some time looking at Newt Gingrich’s enthusiasm for various energy subsidies, a pathology that he’s shared with much of the bipartisan establishment of the last decade or so. I noted in conclusion:

The Speaker is smart enough to know that the virtues of a free market apply to the energy industry just as much as any other. Fuel markets work best when consumers are making decisions based on price and quality, not when politicians are hand-picking energy sources to please favored constituencies.

This is just as true of conventional fuel sources like coal and oil as it is of boutique alternatives like hydrogen, wind, or solar. And it’s just as true whether it’s Democrats or Republicans giving the handouts. That’s why it’s so refreshing to see a group of Tea Party conservatives on Capitol Hill attempting to strip the crony capitalism from the energy industry. As Timothy P. Carney reports in the Washington Examiner:

Freshmen Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas has proposed the loftily titled “Energy Freedom and Economic Prosperity Act,” while the Senate’s Tea Party heroes, Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Mike Lee (Utah), have introduced the companion bill in the upper chamber.

The bill, which Pompeo hopes to insert into legislation extending the payroll-tax credit, would take a huge bite out of energy subsidies by eliminating tax credits for everything from solar panels and wind turbines to oil drilling and nuclear power generation. At the same time, the measure would cut tax rates.

…”This is the model,” Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist told me Friday. It gets rid of the hodgepodge of distorting credits that steer money away from productive energy investments and toward politically favored activities, and it also lowers everyone’s rates. Neutral, low taxes, conservatives have long argued, are the formula for prosperity and economic growth, not to mention fairness.

On this, Norquist is precisely right. By taking the federal government’s hand off the scales, this bill would allow energy providers to flourish or falter on the merits, rather than according to the size of their lobbying budgets. And by lowering tax rates, it would ensure that providing Americans with the energy they rely on to do everything from heating their homes to driving their cars would be both more profitable for producers and more affordable for consumers.

Pompeo is to be saluted for his courage. Now it falls to the American people to push for this bill’s passage. A wide array of energy industry lobbyists will be hell-bent on killing it. That’s just one more testimony in its favor.

February 7th, 2012 at 5:21 pm
“The New Debate in the Republican Party Needs to be Between Conservatives and Libertarians”
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So says South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint in a wonderful new interview with Reason TV. And on that point he’s precisely right. While the farthest reaches of Ron Paul’s political philosophy (an isolationist foreign policy, drug legalization, etc.) are both ideologically imprudent and political non-starters, the Texas congressman has ignited an important discussion that has the potential to bring the GOP back to its first principles of limited government.

Unlike Paul, however, DeMint is not content to be a legislative voice in the wilderness. His work with the Senate Conservatives Fund has been essential in bringing Tea Party principles to Congress’s upper chamber. Have a look at the video and be thankful that we still have a few more years of service forthcoming from this principled conservative leader.

June 9th, 2011 at 8:23 am
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) Offers Amendment to Block DOE Gainful Employment Rule
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Yesterday, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina introduced an amendment to block enforcement of the Department of Education’s recently released Gainful Employment rule. CFIF is pleased to see Senator DeMint take action against the rule, which goes too far in regulating private entities, and threatens to eliminate competition in higher education. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have made it clear that they oppose this rule, yet Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) continues to lead a crusade against for-profit institutions. Moreover, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) have threatened to stop DeMint’s amendment in its tracks.

 As an organization that works to preserve free market principles against federal government assault, CFIF applauds Sen. DeMint for speaking out against the overbroad regulations that unfairly target career colleges. We call on all Members of Congress to continue to speak out and join Senator DeMint to prevent the enforcement of this unscrupulous rule.

February 11th, 2011 at 2:02 pm
New Arkansas Senator Says No To Tea Party Caucus

The uniqueness of Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Jim DeMint (R-SC) in joining their chamber’s Tea Party caucus shone forth again when yet another freshman conservative declined to join their ranks.  Tea Party darling Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) refuses to join.  Now, it’s John Boozman’s (R-AR) turn.

Officially, Boozman says he doesn’t want the public to confuse the tri-partisan nature of the Tea Party (Republican, Reagan Democrat, and Independent) with being an arm of the GOP.  But closer scrutiny of Boozman’s rationale to ABC News indicates he’s not ready to balance the budget by cutting agricultural subsidies.

“But it doesn’t sound like ag subsidies will be at the top of your list for things to cut,” Karl said.

“We’re going to have to look at everything but ag subsidies are like everything else. That affects jobs,” the senator said. “Now listen, the one thing about agriculture is we’ve lost our manufacturing, we’ve lost a great deal of jobs overseas, lots of our industry. The last thing in the world we need to do is lose the ability to produce our food.”

Chances are Boozman doesn’t want to tie himself to unqualified budget cutters like Paul, Lee, or DeMint.  Boozman’s calculation may be that it’s far better to fight for certain cuts while arguing to keep tax-supported jobs in his home state.

Senators like Rubio and Boozman argue that caucus membership in the Senate isn’t as important in the upper chamber as it is in the House.  Any member of the Senate can unilaterally slow or kill legislation he doesn’t like.  While that’s true, it’s also a way to sidestep a measure of accountability.  After all, if your major theme is cutting the budget, why not join a group that won’t make exceptions for pet pork projects?

Eventually, Paul, Lee, or DeMint might prove the truth of the single senator theory by killing bills favored by Rubio or Boozman.  If that happens, don’t be surprised to find Rubio and Boozman caught between their rhetoric and their record.

January 15th, 2011 at 6:47 pm
Is Your Senator in the Upper Chamber’s Tea Party Caucus?

Senators Jim DeMint (R-SC), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Rand Paul (R-KY) have all joined the new Senate Tea Party caucus.  No word yet on movement favorite Marco Rubio (R-FL), or other stalwart fiscal conservatives like Tom Coburn (R-OK).

Politico notes that caucuses are more important in the House because of that chamber’s preference for majority rule.  In the Senate, one member can hold up or kill legislation if he’s willing to filibuster (or usually just threaten it).  Even so, it would be nice to see DeMint attract enough members to the Tea Party caucus so that the Senate has at least one institutional block against runaway spending.

December 9th, 2010 at 5:30 pm
As 2012 Race Begins, Keep Your Eyes on Missouri
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Yes, the Show-Me State is virtually always an important bellwether of which way the presidential election is headed. But in 2012, it may say a lot about the future of the senate as well.

Freshman Democrat Claire McCaskill will be standing for reelection in 2012. She’s a canny political operator and a fairweather moderate — both of which are necessary in this most swinging of swing states.

The Missouri GOP looks to have a full bench — Jim Talent, the mainstream Republican who McCaskill defeated in 2006 is said to be mulling a comeback attempt. Yet the most interesting development may be that South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint — the conservative senate leader who is apparently not content to let any grass grow under his feet — is already feeling out an alternative candidate.

That candidate is Sarah Steelman, the former Missouri State Treasurer who was nearly the Republican gubernatorial nominee in 2008. Steelman is smart, articulate, accomplished, attractive and (best of all) an erstwhile economics professor. If you start to hear her name more often, it’s a good leading indicator that 2012 may follow the 2010 trend and bring another class of exceptional Tea Party candidates to the upper chamber.

November 15th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
DeMint Positioning Himself as a Conservative Kingmaker

There may be no politician more adept at turning Tea Party popularity into actionable results than Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC).  Yesterday, the conservative icon took the unusual step of publicly withdrawing his support of his party’s fundraising head, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.  There are good reasons to do so, but by publicizing his displeasure DeMint is serving notice on the rest of the GOP that he is ready to push for a more robust conservative presence throughout the party’s apparatus.

With his Senate Conservatives Fund DeMint went head-to-head and beat several GOP primary candidates supported by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, led by fellow Senator John Cornyn (R-TX).  With freshman senators like Florida’s Marco Rubio, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, and Utah’s Mike Lee owing much to DeMint’s patronage, expect to see the junior senator from South Carolina take on a much bigger role in deciding his party’s next presidential nominee.  If DeMint manages to replace Steele with a RNC Chairman of his choosing, he will be better positioned than any conservative in the party to make a serious run for the nomination.

H/T: Roll Call

November 3rd, 2010 at 11:03 am
Sen. DeMint’s Welcome Letter to Newly Elected Conservatives

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) offers some great advice to newly elected conservative colleagues like Marco Rubio and Rand Paul: stay true to your campaign promises of less government and more freedom.  Here are the highlights:

(1)   Don’t request earmarks – they obligate you to take bad votes

(2)   Hire conservative staff – they help you avoid mistakes

(3)   Beware of committees – in the Senate, all members can legislate from the floor

(4)   Don’t seek titles – every Senator has the privilege to speak and be heard, regardless of seniority

(5)   Don’t let your reelection become more important than your job – breaking campaign promises for the sake of being reelected ensures you won’t be

DeMint’s brief column should go on the wall of every incoming Senate conservative’s office as a reminder of why they are in Washington, D.C.

H/T: Wall Street Journal

October 12th, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Brit Newspaper Releases ‘Top 20’ Tea Party Leaders

According to Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, here are the bottom ten of the Top 20 leaders of the American Tea Party movement:

11.  David Koch, industrial magnate

12.  Rand Paul, GOP U.S. Senate candidate in Kentucky

13.  Jim DeMint, Republican Senator from South Carolina

14.  Judson and Sherry Phillips, founders of Tea Party Nation

15.  Michael Leahy, blogger

16.  Mark Williams, former chairman of the Tea Party Express

17.  Ken Buck, GOP U.S. Senate candidate in Colorado

18.  Mark Skoda

19.  Joe Miller, GOP U.S. Senate candidate in Alaska

20.  Sal Russo, chief strategist, Tea Party Express

The rest of the Top 20 will be released soon.  In the meantime, go here to read more about the figures listed above.

July 19th, 2010 at 9:00 pm
The Republican Version of ‘Deflation’

According to some economists, deflation is the biggest financial risk to the American economy.  In a nutshell, deflation means prices are decreasing, which is usually caused by merchants trying to stimulate declining demand by selling goods cheaper.  If the lower prices don’t sell, people get laid off, factories shut down and there is no joy in Mudville.

It turns out that many Republican Senate candidates are threatening their own version of deflation; part economic, part emotional.  Former presidential speechwriter Marc Thiessen shows that many of the favored GOP Senate challengers are, in fact, big spenders.   Mark Kirk (IL), Mike Castle (DE), Roy Blunt (MO) and John Hoeven (ND) – even one-time Tea Party darling Scott Brown (MA) – are all “vetted” politicians whose records predict senators who will be voting “Yes” when it comes to spending in the national interest.

In an election cycle where Tea Party-backed a candidate like Sharron Angle (R-NV) is being called “wacky” for daring to suggest Social Security should be privatized, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Republican control of the Senate may not have much effect on the chamber’s legislative output.

Nothing would deflate Tea Party aspirations more than a Republican Senate that could get more members to caucus with the likes of pro-stimulus, pro-financial reform Olympia Snowe (R-ME) rather than fiscal conservative stalwart Jim DeMint (R-SC).  If that happens, get ready for a third party bid that severely cripples the Republican brand.

July 14th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Senators Move to Stop Obama Administration Lawsuit Against Arizona Immigration Law

Senators Jim DeMint (R-SC) and David Vitter (R-LA) today introduced an amendment that would prohibit the Obama Administration, including the Department of Justice and other federal agencies, from participating in lawsuits seeking to invalidate Arizona’s tough new immigration law.

In announcing the introduction of the amendment, Senator DeMint stated:

States like Arizona shouldn’t be prosecuted for protecting their citizens when the federal government fails to do so.  The federal government is rewarding illegal behavior and encouraging many more to enter our nation illegally when they refuse to enforce our laws. States along the border are facing kidnappings, drug trafficking, human trafficking and gang violence and they have a duty to keep their residents safe. Instead of suing states for doing his job, the President should get serious and stop holding border security hostage to pass amnesty and score points with his liberal base.”

Senator Vitter, who is chairman of the U.S. Senate Border Security Caucus, commented:

The state of Arizona is simply taking responsibility for a problem that the federal government has neglected for years, but Washington’s only response is to oppose these new enforcement efforts and take them to court.  The Obama administration should not use taxpayers’ money to pay for these lawsuits that the American people overwhelmingly oppose.”

According to a statement released by Senator DeMint’s office, the “amendment (#4464) could be voted on next week as part of the debate on the small business bill on the Senate floor.”

June 11th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
What’s Going On in South Carolina?!

While I don’t want any part of the mess surrounding the GOP run-off election for governor, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate is too intriguing to pass up.  Former Army and Air Force member Alvin Greene may be the most tragically comic major party nominee this election cycle.  Consider these opening paragraphs from a Washington Post profile:

Alvin M. Greene never gave a speech during his campaign to become this state’s Democratic nominee for Senate. He didn’t start a Web site or hire consultants or plant lawn signs. There’s only $114 in his campaign bank account, he says, and the only check he ever wrote from it was to cover his filing fee.

Indeed, in a three-hour interview, the unemployed military veteran could not name a single specific thing he’d done to campaign. Yet more than 100,000 South Carolinians voted for him on Tuesday, handing him nearly 60 percent of the vote and a resounding victory over Vic Rawl, a former judge who has served four terms in the state legislature.

Vic Rawl must be hating South Carolina voters today.  So too might Greene’s Republican opponent, conservative stalwart Senator Jim DeMint.  Imagine trying to run against a challenger with – to date – no position on anything other than, “We have to be pro-South Carolina.”

Things are getting awfully strange in the Palmetto State.  Thankfully, its other U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham is about as non-controversial as an immigration friendly, climate change believing Southern Republican can be.

April 20th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Bloated Bureaucracies & a Constipated Congress

One of the measures of successful politicians is how much legislation they author, sponsor, and pass.  Since the activities can be counted, the more a legislator does, the more he can claim to be “doing something” to justify his reelection.

So it must be frustrating for all the Senators who desperately want to “do something” when colleagues in their own party insist on larding unpopular policies into bills that would otherwise sail through the process.  Though the main energy bill claims enough support to pass, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) are blocking it because its centrist supporters refuse to include the Environmental Left’s demands for cap-and-trade.  When asked to present the cap-and-tax language as a stand-alone amendment, Kerry and Boxer balked because they don’t have the 60 votes to attach it.

Who can blame them?  After the large scale corruption of the legislative process to pass ObamaCare, why wouldn’t a Democratic lawmaker think that rules only apply to Republicans?

Happily, adding text to the United States Code isn’t everyone’s definition of a good legislator.  Senators like Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) pride themselves on reducing the word count of the nation’s legal regime.  Less law means less room for bureaucrats to expand their reach.  Let’s hope the Democrats’ insatiable demand for more government continues to be an obstacle to passing any new laws.

December 29th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
TSA to Unionize?

The fracas surrounding Senator Jim DeMint’s (R-SC) hold on Erroll Southers’ nomination to be the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) next chief shows the endurance of two liberal pastimes.  First, the refusal of any of DeMint’s critics to directly address his concerns that Southers will clear the path for TSA workers to unionize.  The second is the enshrinement of unelected bureaucrats as the sine qua non of a workable federal government.

Right now, the TSA’s supposed top priority is to protect Americans traveling through the nation’s airports and on its airways.  If TSA’s workers are allowed to unionize its primary focus, like all other public employee unions, will become job protection and expanding compensation.  To Senator DeMint that means less flexibility in personnel decisions and higher taxes.  Apparently, Southers hasn’t been candid about whether he supports unionization.  Disregarding the senator’s qualms, pilots unions and trade associations are calling for DeMint to relent.  For those familiar with him, that isn’t likely.

Perhaps what’s more amazing (or disgusting, depending on your current level of holiday cheer) is the implied premise of Southers’ supporters that TSA is “rudderless” without a permanent, Senate-approved leader.  Granted, Congress is on an extended vacation and the president is golfing in Hawaii, but no one can seriously argue that TSA, the Department of Homeland Security, the FAA, or the myriad of other federal departments, agencies, or bureaus touching on domestic safety are insufficiently empowered to decide who gets on an American airplane.  If anything, the admission that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s name was on a terror watch list and had been reported to the American government by his own father indicate that “what we’ve got here is…failure to communicate” among various federal entities.

If it takes a new law to make that possible, so be it.  But fast-tracking a stealth unionization administrator can wait until he and his supporters come up with a better reason than a civil servant’s indispensability.

December 17th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Senators Meet Santa
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Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) is one of the few good guys on Capitol Hill.  He and Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) have taken the lead to stop government-run health care in the Senate.  In fact, they’re using every procedural tool under the sun to defeat the Senate’s disasterous version of “reform.”

According to The Hill newspaper, DeMint is even prepared to go so far as to slow debate and force Christmas Eve votes.  As DeMint noted, “I think it’s our responsibility to stretch this out because every day we do we have time to tell Americans what’s in it.”

For those of you looking for something interesting to watch over the holidays, the Senate will likely be in session on Christmas Eve.

This is the final push against government-run health care.  If you haven’t done so already, call your Senators at 202-224-3121 and tell them to oppose the Senate health care bill.

December 16th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Update: Senate v. Tom Coburn
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The Senate can be a magical place sometimes. Taking advantage of a clever procedural tool, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has forced the upper chamber to read a 767-page amendment out loud.  (One has to feel sorry for the people reading the amendment.)

Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT) introduced his single-payer amendment to the health care bill but Senators DeMint (R-SC) and Coburn put their foot down.  They are now using all available procedural tactics to kill the bill, even if they have to kill the voice of a few Senate staffers in the process (a worthy sacrifice).

Senator Coburn commented, “We’re going to understand what single-payer is all about and read the bill.”

If you’d like to understand more about socialist health care, click here or here.  More of CFIF on health care here.

***Update***

Senator Coburn did battle once again with Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) and the exchange was priceless.  Senator Coburn asked that Senators fully read and understand the bill before they voted.

Senator Baucus, we’ll say, was less than optimistic about the comprehension level of his colleagues. The video (one minute mark) displays our nation’s sad state of affairs.

October 12th, 2009 at 9:33 am
The Country the Nobel Peace Prize Committee Forgot
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It’s name is Honduras.  It’s tiny and impoverished.  It hasn’t had an easy time becoming a democracy.  It’s president was recently thrown out in a “coup.”

Well, that’s what President Obama and a bunch of his South American thug-buddies say.  And Obama’s sticking to his story, come hell or the Honduran Constitution or responsible legal interpretations of it by people who, you know, have actually read it and have determined that the ouster was legal.  Those interpretations have been published.

Well, never mind, the President has his own legal opinion, written at the State Department.  It hasn’t been published.   It’s secret, as if written in the invisible ink that has become a hallmark of this administration’s “transparency.”

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, went to Honduras on a fact-finding mission.  He published his impressions over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. Ambassador to Honduras urged Demint to read the State Department legal analysis.  He tried, before and after his trip.  His request has been refused.  Did we mention that he’s on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee?  Did we mention that President Obama and his South  American thug-buddies have not exactly contributed to the internal peace of Honduras, following the ouster?

Honduras is a tiny country, from which a major U.S. foreign policy blunder is emerging.  Its impact on the world?  Not so much.  It’s impact on the history of U.S. foreign policy regarding South America?  Add it to a long list of sad and sordid tales.  This one is President Obama’s.