7thriv

In the post-election "lame duck" session of Congress, Obama and the Democrats will focus on jobs, jobs, jobs. ... Oh, wait, no. They'll focus on passing a big amnesty for illegal immigrants, in order to reward their Latino "base"--which was only 8 percent of the national vote but supposedly cares with something approaching monomania about amnesty (despite evidence that Hispanic American opinion is shifting against illegal immigrantion). ... When did the Democrats' African-American base--11 percent of the vote--get that kind of service? ...

This is really how liberals and liberalism have been able to persist. I mean, they just lost an election by historic margins. There are people in the Capitol Building today, planning on voting on this thing, who will not be in office in five weeks. But, it's full speed ahead. I can understand that there might be Republican Senators who are sympathetic to the idea of the DREAM Act, but I'm not sure how they can justify letting a bill like this pass under these circumstances.

UPDATE: Sandy Levinson is no conservative (far from it), but he's been banging the the drum on weaknesses in our constitutional order for quite some time. Lame-duck sessions - along with their executive brother the three-month presidential transition - have long been a target of his ire for being unnecessarily long and leading to too much mischief.

Just this week, we have the DREAM Act.

We have the president suddenly waking up and demanding the the Senate pass the START Treaty, despite its being pending quietly for months.

We have Jay Rockefeller calling for the FCC to "ban" Fox News (without mentioning that his wife is a big wig at PBS).

And so on. It's like the election never happened.

UPDATE: the Senate is also scheduled to vote on some kind of crazy "food safety" bill (sponsored by urban farmer, Dick Durbin):

S510 puts all U.S. food production under the control of the Department of Homeland Security. And the Department of Defense. We lose not only private-citizen control of our food supply, but sovereignty as well. The bill sets in motion standardization of the food animal supply chain, focusing on eliminating biodiversity in food animal genetic stocks. It further mandates that the federal government control and empower hormonal, genetic, and antibiotic additions to our food supply while postponing most definitions of what will constitute "food crimes" under the bill's sweeping and generalized powers.

They're calling it the food version of Obamacare.