Congress can’t resist allure of presidential race
The Senate is spending this week
debating, and summarily rejecting, Democratic-written bills to disclose
the names of people who give more than $10,000 to help elect people such
as, say, Mitt Romney, and to take away tax breaks from companies taken
over by people such as, say, Mitt Romney, who move operations overseas.
Their latest effort, unveiled Wednesday,
would make candidates for federal office, like, say, Mitt Romney,
disclose any of their financial holdings in offshore tax havens, such as
Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. Senate Democrats certainly aren’t alone
in devoting congressional workdays to bills attacking the other party’s
presidential candidate.
House Republicans last week voted to
repeal President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. Next week, they
plan to vote on freezing all of former President George W. Bush’s tax
cuts for another year, including those on the top 2 percent, whom Obama
says should pay more. On Wednesday, the House passed a GOP bill ordering
Obama to specify how many thousands of defense workers will lose their
jobs if the deficit-cutting deal he and Republicans negotiated a year
ago stands.
Congress is just two weeks away from a
five-week August recess, with plenty of critical issues hanging over the
Capitol. But neither party seems able to resist the allure of
presidential politics. As tourists crowd the galleries to escape a
record heat wave, lawmakers in both parties bash their opponents and
push quixotic bills even as they complain about key work not being done.
On Wednesday, Democratic Sens. Dick
Durbin and Carl Levin took the floor to speak out against the use of
offshore tax havens and tout their bill to make candidates for federal
office lay out financial holdings they or their spouses have in any
offshore account. Both senators carried on, seemingly in earnest, never
letting on that the legislation mirrored Obama’s recent attacks against
Romney’s use of offshore bank accounts.
Legislatively, the Senate spent all day
debating whether to debate Democrats’ Bring Jobs Home Act, which would
take away tax breaks for companies that outsource jobs overseas —
another Obama attack line against Romney. It prompted a withering reply
from GOP leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“What are we doing here? Is the Senate a
messaging machine?” he said on the Senate floor. “Or are we doing the
basic work of the government?”
McConnell may object. But his GOP colleagues in the House are hardly plowing through a nonpartisan to-do list.
House Republican leaders actually left
the Capitol on Wednesday, walking a block to Republican National
Committee headquarters, expressly to weigh in on the elections. Speaker
John Boehner told reporters that Obama’s criticism of Romney’s business
career and refusal to disclose more tax returns are a distraction from
the administration’s stewardship of the wobbly economy.
“The American people are asking, ‘Where are the jobs?’” Boehner said. “They’re not asking where the hell the tax returns are.”
Obama’s questions about when, exactly,
Romney left Bain Capital amount to an “attack on the private sector,”
Boehner said, and show that Obama “doesn’t give a damn about
middle-class Americans who are out there looking for work.”
The House’s official business Wednesday also seemed designed to put the president on the spot.
With an overwhelming 414-2 vote,
Republicans pushed to passage a bill requiring Obama to lay out in full
detail how he would implement nearly $1 billion in spending cuts next
year — half of them in Pentagon accounts — agreed to last summer during
the debt ceiling debate. Republicans are trying to use the issue against
Obama, maintaining that any right-thinking commander in chief wouldn’t
undermine the military with deep defense cuts.
Republicans as well as Democrats backed
the legislation that called for $487 billion in defense cuts over 10
years, plus the automatic cuts of about $492 billion in projected
spending if a bipartisan congressional committee failed to come up with
$1.2 trillion in savings. The panel was unsuccessful.
