'Maverick' Chasing Own Tail
Have you heard the McCain ads that blame something called
"Washington" for our ills? This "Washington" is called the Bush
administration and McCain (as he says in an ad) voted with Bush 90
percent of the time.
A McCain ad famously says Democrats will bring us a string of deficits.
What McCain forgets is that George Bush, whom many call the worst
president in history, inherited a huge surplus from Bill Clinton--a
surplus that promised to reduce dramatically the national debt and its
accompanying payment costs--and frittered it away on tax breaks for the
rich and powerful and on a futile and stupid war.
Yes, in the short run, a Democratic administration may be
forced into a period of deficit spending just to repair some of the
Bush damage, but Obama promises to rearrange the ill-thought Bush tax
cuts so that the middle class benefits and the rich and super-rich pay
much more. This rearrangement is what McCain calls increasing taxes.
The other thing we must remember is that when people refer to
a "do-nothing Congress," they are forgetting who wields the power in
the final analysis.
Because of his veto power, a president can engineer virtually
whatever legislation he wants if the a house of Congress is closely
divided. To overcome the veto power of the president, two-thirds of
those present and voting in each house must vote to override a veto.
More importantly, for more than 20 years the Senate has lacked
a "super majority" of 60 to overcome a threat of filibuster any senator
can launch. And the Republican minority, for the past 40 years, but
par- ticularly in the past two years, has not been shy about using that
legis- lation-blocking device.
With the Senate elections this time around, neither party is
likely to reach a super majority last enjoyed in 1978, by the
Democrats. The Democratic party may get closer to that number, but it
has not had any- where near that strength since it gained a one-vote
majority in the Sen- ate in 2006, thanks to now-independent Joe Lieberman who is
not likely to be welcomed, much less vote for a Democratic majority
on Jan. 3.
