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Blue-Dog "Fix" Makes Health Reform "Cure" Worse Than Disease
By John Nichols
More and more House Democrats are pledging to oppose compromises on health care reform now being entertained by at least some aides to President Obama and Democrat leaders in the House and Senate.
"We have compromised and we can compromise no more," an angry Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-California, declared at news conference that felt more like a rally outside the Capitol.
Woolsey and her Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair, Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva, have now attracted 60 signers for a letter condemning compromises that make the cure worse than the disease.
(131) CommentsJuly 30, 2009
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Squeeze Insurance Profiteers, Not Medicare
By John Nichols
At a critical moment in the tense health care debate -- when the U.S. House and Senate are scrambling to forge compromise reform plans that might be passed before the Congress embarks upon its traditional August recess -- President Obama is retooling his health-care reform message.
Instead of the bold rhetoric of last year's campaign, or even of last month's press conferences, the president is now pitching reform as more of a consumer-protection gambit.
"No one is talking about some government takeover of health care," Obama explained to the crowd at his latest town hall meeting in North Carolina on Wednesday.
(112) CommentsJuly 29, 2009
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For Sotomayor, Against the Confirmation Process
By John Nichols
Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold joined fellow Democrats and one Republican (South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham) on the winning side of last week's 13-6 vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee to approve the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
But the chair the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution wishes he knew a little more about the thinking of the woman who is now all but certain to be confirmed before the Senate breaks next week for the traditional August recess.
"I cannot say that I learned everything about Judge Sonia Sotomayor that I would have liked to learn," he said in an endorsement of President Barack Obama's first high court nominee by the Judiciary Committee's most determined defender of the Constitution. "But what I did learn about her makes me believe that that she will serve with distinction on the Court, and that I should vote in favor of her confirmation."
(50) CommentsJuly 28, 2009
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Hope for Health Reform? Push Single-Payer Now
By John Nichols
It is unsettling to listen as President Obama and House Speaker Pelosi talk up a health-care reform "plan" that has yet to take shape in any realistic form.
The vagueness on the part of the president and the speaker is, of course, intentional.
Obama and Pelosi are still pushing the notion that they can get some version of their public-private stew cooked up before the year is done -- although not, according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, before the president and the Congress take the extended summer vacations that will kill whatever sense of official urgency might have existed.
(202) CommentsJuly 26, 2009
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Congressman Eric Cantor, R-Unethical
By John Nichols
Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor has taken a lead in Republican attacks on expanding role of the federal government.
But there are some expansions of government that do not bother the conservative stalwart.
For instance, Cantor does not appear to have any problem with the government funding his political projects.
(30) CommentsJuly 24, 2009
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Obama Recognizes He Must Lead on Health Care
By John Nichols
Barack Obama's most ardent critics would have us believe that his bumbling of the healthcare reform push -- and, yes, he has bumbled it -- will doom his presidency.
The critics would, of course, be wrong.
That does not mean, however, that their claims and charges should be dismissed by the White House -- or that they are being dismissed.
(199) CommentsJuly 22, 2009
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Key GOP Senator Lindsey Graham Backs Sotomayor
By John Nichols
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham on Wednesday became the first Republican senator from a Deep South state to say he would vote to confirm Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
Judge Sotomayor is all but assured of approval by the Senate Judiciary Committee and confirmation by the full Senate, after a hearing that revealed her conservative critics had come up with little in the way of substantive objections to her record as a jurist.
The question with regard to President Obama's first nomination for the high court has always come down to a simple test: How many Republicans will oppose the first Latina nominee, and only the third female nominee, to serve on the Supreme Court simply because she is not a rigidly right-wing judicial activist in the mold of Chief Justice John Roberts?
(42) CommentsJuly 22, 2009
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Senate Rejects F-22 Boondoggle
By John Nichols
After years of rubberstamping even the most ridiculously expensive and unnecessary allocations to enrich defense contractors -- and in so doing extend the reach of the military-industrial complex about which former President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned -- the US Senate on Tuesday actually rejected a useless military spending scheme.
As part of the broader debate over the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, the Senate voted by a 58-40 margin in favor of Michigan Democrat Carl Levin's proposal to strike $1.75 billion in funding for more F-22 fighter jets.
Designed in response to the fantasy that the US Air Force would be fighting high-tech dogfights with Soviet fighter jets, the F-22 has never been flown in combat or deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
(79) CommentsJuly 21, 2009
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Cheney, High-Level Wrongdoing Must Be Focus of Inquiries
By John Nichols
Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, the chief critic of executive excess and wrongdoing in the Senate during recent Republican and Democratic administrations, wants Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a prosecutor to investigate the CIA's harsh interrogation program.
But Feingold wants Holder to do it right.
The chair of the Constitution subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee is concerned that the appointment of a prosecutor by Holder -- which now seems increasingly likely -- come with a charge by the attorney general "to focus on holding accountable the architects of the CIA's interrogation program."
(252) CommentsJuly 15, 2009
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Walter Cronkite: Definitional Journalist Saw Big Media's Flaws
By John Nichols
Walter Cronkite was the the most serious of serious journalists.
The former CBS anchorman cared not just about the next story but about the future of reporting in a country where was known for the better part of a half century as "the most trusted name in news."
So it should come as little surprise that what worried Cronkite in the last years of his life was the collapse of journalistic quality and responsibility that came with the increasing dominance of newsgathering by a handful of media corporations.
(116) CommentsJuly 17, 2009
John Nichols
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