Progress Illinois

Talk about lazy journalism. In a front-page article today, the Wall Street Journal laments the lackluster legislative activity of the 110th Congress without providing any proper context:

Barring a burst of legislative activity after Labor Day, this group of 535 men and women will have accomplished a rare feat. In two decades of record keeping, no sitting Congress has passed fewer public laws at this point in the session -- 294 so far -- than this one. [..]

"The Democrats in charge of this Congress have been heavy on fluff and light on substance," says Republican leader Rep. John Boehner of Ohio. "Resolutions are fine but why aren't we also passing legislation to lower gas prices? What about health-care reform and runaway entitlement spending?"

That's a good question, John. But I think your old colleague, former Sen. Trent Lott, spelled out the reason perfectly clearly last April:

“The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail ... and so far it's working for us."

You wouldn't know it reading the Journal article, but the Republicans are deliberately engaging in a "block and blame" strategy whereby they erect legislative firewalls that prevent majority-favored bills from passing and then blame the Democrats for not getting anything done.

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The Illinois Republicans appear to have put on quite a display at the state fair this year.  We already noted the ramblings by 18th District GOP congressional candidate Aaron Schock (above left) about Barack Obama's "level of socialism."  Meanwhile, as has been noted on numerous other sites, Illinois Republican Party Chairman Andy McKenna (above center) also put his foot in his mouth, saying that if Abraham Lincoln "were here today, he would have to tell a story of a house divided that’s even more outrageous than the one that lived in his time," referring to the political climate in Springfield these days. The Rockford Register-Star's Aaron Chambers rightly skewers McKenna's suggestion that the current standoff between Illinois Democrats is somehow "more outrageous" than the fight between the North and South over slavery.

But it doesn't stop there.  Earlier in the week, Rep. John Shimkus (above right) took to the stage on Agriculture Day and railed against the Democratic leadership in Congress for not allowing a vote on offshore drilling prior to the August recess.  Maybe it was all the hay laying around, but Shimkus couldn't resist building a strawman.  Check out his suggestion that his favored energy proposal is "in conflict to those who say, 'Let's do nothing'":

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But who has said we should "do nothing" about the energy crisis?

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This is a bit old, but I want to address it anyway.  Call it a preventative measure.

At a press conference during the Democratic Leadership Council's (DLC) convention in Chicago in late June, Sun-Times columnist and WTTW co-host Carol Marin asked Mayor Richard Daley the following question:

MARIN: Barack Obama, by many estimates, has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. The DLC is a moderate organization. If “change” is the byword of this election -- and just using the Supreme Court ruling on guns as one example -- who changes? Who shifts?  The DLC or Barack Obama?

As far as I know, there is only one "estimate" that has labeled Obama the "most liberal" senator: National Journal's 2007 Vote Ratings.  Indeed, since the rankings were released in late January, Obama's placement has been cited by media figures far and wide.  But as Media Matters for America has repeatedly noted, those referencing the rating rarely mention the subjectivity of the National Journal rating system:

The National Journal based its rankings not on all votes cast by senators in 2007, but on "99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale." In contrast, a study by political science professors Keith Poole and Jeff Lewis, using every non-unanimous vote cast in the Senate in 2007 to determine relative ideology, placed Obama in a tie for the ranking of 10th most liberal senator. [...]

In a June 16 PolitiFact.com article analyzing the Journal ratings, St. Petersburg Times Washington bureau chief and PolitiFact editor Bill Adair reported that National Journal editor Charles Green "says voters shouldn't rely on a single rating to determine a candidate's ideology" and quoted Green as saying, "There's pluses and minuses to each rating system. If you look at a number of them, I think you have a pretty good picture." Additionally, American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Norman J. Ornstein has also criticized the National Journal's rating of Obama as the "most liberal senator" in 2007, calling it "pretty ridiculous."

In short, no reporter should be citing the results of the National Journal study without noting that the methodology has been questioned. 

You can watch Daley field Marin's question over at Jeff Berkowitz's place.

House Republicans believe they've struck liquid (political) gold with their recent oil drilling gambit. Rep. Peter Roskam cut his vacation short to head to D.C. and voice his concern. Rep. Don Manzullo says this could be "America’s greatest hour." Minority Leader John Boehner even thinks Americans are so eager to drill that they "will hang" House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if she doesn't call for an up-and-down vote.

But are Americans really that supportive of the GOP proposals? Guest blogging for Kevin Drum, Gallup managing editor David Moore says that when asked about drilling in isolation, Americans voice great support for the approach. But things get a lot murkier when the poll questions are more subtle and realistic:

A couple of polls addressed the energy issue a bit differently, and they found a more ambivalent public. Pew Research, for example, asked which of two approaches should receive higher priority: "expanding exploration, mining and drilling and the construction of new power plants, OR, more energy conservation and regulation on energy use and prices?" Instead of overwhelming support for more oil drilling, the public was evenly divided between that approach and conservation (47 percent to 45 percent respectively).

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll offered five different approaches to dealing with the energy problems. Almost half (46 percent) opted for energy conservation and more emphasis on wind and solar, while 40 percent chose offshore oil drilling and drilling in protected areas in Alaska, while 10 percent preferred nuclear power.

And the CNN poll actually measured intensity of opinion, by asking if people "strongly" or "mildly" favored, or "strongly" or "mildly" opposed increased offshore oil drilling. The results found 46 percent "strongly" in favor, with 18 percent "strongly" opposed. More than a third, 35 percent, held only "mild" opinions. (In all discussions of the CNN results, however, there was no mention of the "mild" and "strong" opinions. The two groups were combined according to favor and oppose, which is typical of the way poll results are treated.)

Read the whole post here.

There aren't two Americans more fond of the GOP's "Texas Tea Party" than the hosts of WLS' Don Wade & Roma. As the so-called "protest" trudges along, the broadcast duo continues to have House Republicans on their show, thanking the representatives for their purportedly valiant efforts. Today, House Minority Leader John Boehner called in from the Cincinnati airport -- en route to the Capitol after some R&R on the golf course -- making sure to spread some distortions along the way.

For instance, while discussing Republicans' demand that Democrats return from August recess to hold a vote on the GOP's bill to increase offshore oil drilling, Roma and Boehner had this exchange:

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ROMA: In her interview with George Stephanopoulos, Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally ended up with one mantra at the very end of the 10 times he asked her tried and pin her on why she wouldn’t allow a vote. And she said finally, “I want to save the planet.” Is it because the Democratic Party has become beholden to the greenie groups that have funded their presidential runs so heavily?

BOEHNER: Oh yeah. They worship at the altar of radical environmentalism and that’s why they are standing in the way.

Their effort to paint Democrats as the side whose energy positions are controlled by special interests is quite remarkable.

Consider this: since 1990 environmental groups have contributed $17.7 million to candidates at the federal level -- most of which has gone to Democrats. During the same period, the oil and gas industry has doled out $220 million. These contributions have been directed at Republicans by a three-to-one margin.  But according to Roma and Boehner, it's the Democrats who are "beholden."

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There's a lot of absurdity circling around congressional Republicans' ongoing, pro-drilling stunt on Capitol Hill.

Yesterday, I noted that numerous GOP members from Illinois had joined the effort to bring Democrats back from August recess to vote on legislation to expand off-shore drilling. At his new blog Prairie State 2.0, Curt Mercadante responded by accusing the Democratic leadership of squelching "open government":

What the PI post avoids, of course, is the issue of open government and debate. [...]

It’s about the fact that they [the Democrats] tried to shut down debate in the U.S. House of Representatives.

They turned off the microphones, shut off the lights, darkened the House video feed (and, thus, C-SPAN) … all to prevent the GOP debate from being heard.

It’s about open government. It’s about transparency.

When a chamber of Congress adjourns, as the House did on August 1, the microphones, lights, and cameras are turned off. It happened when Republicans were in power. It happens now that Democrats are in power.

This effort to cast the adjournment as some sort of devious, anti-democratic maneuver is a clever election year ploy -- and nothing more.

In fact, folks like Mercadante seem to have forgetten that in the months before Congress departed for their August recess, the Republicans repeatedly attempted to force the House to adjourn, as the Washington Post's Dana Milbank recently noted:

Eighteen times over the past 90 days, the minority tried, unsuccessfully, to force the House to adjourn. Now the House has finally adjourned -- for a five-week recess, no less -- and Republicans are demanding that the chamber be called back into session.

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The Hill is reporting that GOP Rep. Judy Biggert was among the new arrivals in Washington, DC today, as House Republicans continued their effort to bring Congress back into session so that their offshore drilling bill can receive a vote. As we noted yesterday, Republican Congressmen Peter Roskam, Mark Kirk, and Don Manzullo have also been participating in this bit of political theater.

This morning, Biggert and several of her colleagues joined former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at a press conference to announce a new GOP-sponsored poll purportedly showing that the public supports their actions. From The Hill:

Pollster David Winston of the Winston Group told House Republicans at a morning briefing that 68 percent of Americans want a drilling vote before the end of the 110th Congress. He also said the GOP is winning generic ballots by 12 percent on energy policies when the Republican and Democratic plans are compared, a source in the room said.

I'd be interested to see the wording of that question.

But while we're on the subject of energy-related polling, here are some recent findings that fly in the face of the GOP assumption that the public supports their pro-drilling mantra. In a July poll by Belden Russonello & Stewart, 76 percent of respondents said that "investing in new energy technology including renewable fuels and more efficient automobiles" was a more important government priority than "expanding exploration and drilling for more oil":

As Huffington Post's Sam Stein also mentioned today, 63 percent of the Belden poll respondents said that opening up public lands to oil and gas drilling was "more likely to enrich oil companies than to lower gas prices for American consumers."

On Sunday, Rep. Peter Roskam and his family decided to forgo their scheduled family vacation and instead headed east to Washington, DC, where a group of House Republicans were gathering to protest what they have termed the "Pelosi shutdown" -- the decision by Democrats to adjourn for August recess without first voting on offshore drilling legislation.

Yesterday, Roskam called into WLS' Don Wade & Roma to discuss his impromptu trip. After lauding him for his effort -- even thanking him for "helping America's families" by moving the energy debate forward -- the radio hosts assisted Roskam in obscuring some crucial facts about the drilling proposal. For instance, listen to this exchange:

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ROSKAM: Our desire is to move a holistic energy policy forward. There is an understanding that were not simply going to drill our way out of this, but you’ve got to pursue those sources of energy in the short-run.

But if we can't "drill our way out of this" energy crisis, as Roskam acknowledges, why should we devote resources to expanded offshore drilling? Why not instead focus most of our energies -- and taxpayer dollars -- on developing sustainable, alternative sources of energy?

Curiously absent from the 11-minute discussion on WLS was any mention of timeframes -- with one exception. During the above clip, Roskam appeared to suggest that increased drilling will help lower gas prices "in the short-run."

But a recent report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted we wouldn’t see “a significant impact” on gas prices until 2030. No economist from any ideological position disputes this point. So unless Roskam equates "20-plus years" with "short term," he's being highly misleading.

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After enduring at least seven years of expensive education, the average law school graduate now carries a debt load between $50,000 and $90,000, meaning a well-paying job is virtually a necessity upon graduation. In steps the corporate sector, which attracts these economically insecure graduates with highly lucrative jobs. Meanwhile, the public sector just can't compete -- entry-level Wall Street lawyers can earn over $100,000 more than their public-interest counterparts. With this migration of young legal talent towards corporate firms, the public loses out.

But help may be on the way. Buried in a bill Congress passed last week reauthorizing the federal law overseeing higher education was a debt forgiveness proposal sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin.

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In the Washington Post this morning, Dana Milbank highlights the GOP's ridiculous display on the U.S. House floor in recent days:

House Republicans can't seem to make up their minds.

Eighteen times over the past 90 days, the minority tried, unsuccessfully, to force the House to adjourn. Now the House has finally adjourned -- for a five-week recess, no less -- and Republicans are demanding that the chamber be called back into session.

On Friday and again yesterday, they opened the doors to the darkened House chamber and invited tourists wearing shorts and sandals to sit in the members' chairs. The microphones, lights and cameras were off. The speaker's chair was empty. But, hour after hour, the Republican lawmakers stood in the well and cursed the darkness.

So what were the Republican members cursing about? They complained that Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to bring their pro-drilling energy legislation up for a vote before the August recess. The Republican ensemble included several congressmen from Illinois. For instance, 18th District Rep. Don Manzullo said on Friday: "Tell your congressman -- we don’t want you back home. We want you in Washington. This could be America’s greatest hour. Insist that we come back to vote.” Apparently, the opportunity to vote on legislation that would have no short-term affect on gas prices while padding the pockets of the oil industry qualifies as "America's greatest hour" in Manzullo's book.

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