Childish Democrats cave to President

Like a pack of grade school children, the surrender monkeys among the Congressional Democrats want their Christmas vacation more than they want to stick to their principles according to the Wall Street Journal’s David Rogers;

Eager to go home, Democrats unveiled a year-end spending bill that is a pale imitation of Congress’s springtime budget but still puts their imprint on government priorities ranging from climate change to homeland security and education.

Details of the estimated $516 billion measure were released Sunday night in anticipation of House floor debate as early as Monday. The Senate is all but certain to add additional funding for the Iraq war, and when the package comes back to the House, Democrats are hoping that President Bush will give it his blessing and help send lawmakers home for the holidays.

Now, don’t get me wrong, they did the right thing and I’m glad they folded like K-Mart lawnchairs, they just did it for all the wrong reasons. They keep calling themselves leaders, yet they act like spoiled little kids. Real leadership would’ve stuck to their guns, children would rush to get their work done so they can go home for Christmas.

The Associated Press (by way of Fox News) says the Democrats put their mark on the budget;

Democrats succeeded in reversing cuts to heating subsidies, local law enforcement, Amtrak and housing as well as Bush’s plan to eliminate the $654 million budget for grants to community action agencies that help the poor.

To find the money, lawmakers shifted $6 billion from Bush’s plans for defense, foreign aid and military base construction accounts. And they’ve added $2 billion in future-year appropriations for education that, for practical purposes, adds to Bush’s 2008 budget. Veterans would get $3.7 billion more than Bush requested, but only if he changes his mind and decides the money is needed.

And the reason they made Veterans’ care money so flexible is that they plan on using Veterans’ healthcare as an issue for the campaign. If they had kept the spending rigid, when healthcare falls off (as it usually does, because it’s a bureaucracy and all bureaucracies are intristically failures),they’d be responsible. But, Democrats, who are absent on national security, can wave Veterans’ care like a bloody shirt if they throw the ball into the Administration’s court. Another gutless decision.

The fact remains that it took all year for Democrats to finally cave almost completely. If they’d been the least bit civil about the whole budget thing, instead of focusing all of their energy on opposing the war and nationalizing healthcare, they’d have probably got a budget closer to their liking – but they let the whole process get hijacked by the vocal minority, instead of acting in the interests of the whole country.

However, they thought it was more important to make stupid and vacant political points with their base. Do they really deserve to control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in 2009?

Category: Politics