07/23/2010
Charles Krauthammer, about whom VDARE.com has reservations, has used his privileged position at The Washington Post to write a valuable column: Beware the lame duck Friday July 23, 2010. In it he collegially credits fellow Neocon Irwin Stelzer (about whom we also have reservations) for raising the alarm about the dangers of the upcoming Lame Duck session — right at the end of his column The President’s Truce with Business WeeklyStandard.com July 17 2010.Stelzer wrote
The president plans to renew his attack on the private sector immediately after the November congressional elections. The defeated congressmen return to Washington for a lame-duck session that runs until the newly elected congress is seated early in January of next year. That gives the president two months to push through bills that his defeated colleagues, perhaps hoping he will find jobs for them in the ever-expanding bureaucracy, can support with impunity: They would have nothing more to lose.
Krauthammer more colorfully amplifies
Leading Democrats are already considering this as a way to achieve even more liberal measures that many of their members dare not even talk about, let alone enact, on the eve of an election in which they face a widespread popular backlash to the already enacted elements of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda.…a lame-duck session, freezing in place the lopsided Democratic majorities of November 2008, would be populated by dozens of Democratic members who had lost reelection (in addition to those retiring). They could then vote for anything — including measures they today shun as the midterms approach and their seats are threatened — because they would have nothing to lose. They would be unemployed. And playing along with Obama might even brighten the prospects for, say, an ambassadorship to a sunny Caribbean isle.
Krauthammer suggests Card check, Cap and trade, and major tax hikes as possibilities and points out — correctly — that the managers of this Congress have proved themselves utterly unscrupulous:
pushing through a health-care reform the public didn’t want by means of "reconciliation" maneuvers and without a single Republican vote in either chamber — something unprecedented in American history for a reform of such scope and magnitude.
As a good Neocon, Krauthammer does not mention that the Hate Crimes legislation was similarly crow-barred through last summer, and that a leading candidate for this treatment is Amnesty — as Peter Brimelow recently reported:
Two coup possibilities currently rumored in Washington:(1) Executive Branch parole;
(2) attaching amnesty to the budget reconciliation bill during the lame duck session, when Republicans could tell their betrayed constituents that voting against it would also cut off financial support for American troops in the field.
But Krauthammer is correct about the dangers and VDARE.com applauds his suggestion:
How then to prevent a runaway lame-duck Congress? Bring the issue up now — applying the check-and-balance of the people’s will before it disappears the morning after Election Day. Every current member should be publicly asked: In the event you lose in November — a remote and deeply deplorable eventuality, but still not inconceivable — do you pledge to adhere to the will of the electorate and, in any lame-duck session of Congress, refuse to approve anything but the most routine legislation required to keep the government functioning?
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