TheAgitator.com
Convenient, Isn’t It?
Thursday, February 12th, 2009One item that was left out of the conference committee version of the stimulus bill: the Van Hollen-Platts amendment from the House bill. That amendment would have granted whistleblower protection to federal workers and contractors, including those who report fraud and waste in—you guessed it—how the government spends stimulus money.
Zachary Roth at Talking Points Memo blames Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) for watering down the amendment in conference until it was eventually abandoned altogether. She apparently objected to the protection of whistleblowers who divulge classified information, though that language could easily have been removed.
If that’s true, Collins deserves a lot of blame. But I’m also fairly certain that the Democrats have large majorities in both houses of Congress. If protecting federal whistleblowers who expose waste and abuse is any sort of priority for them, they had more than enough votes to keep the amendment in the bill.
This is the kinda case where you can’t easily judge without knowing what individual senators did. Suppose 48 Democratic senators support the provision–that’s a large majority of their caucus, but not enough votes. And over the past few years, the Democrats have had much worse party discipline than the Republicans–they’ve been unable to get their entire caucus in line on issue after issue.
Of course, procedural bullshit makes such calculations even much more difficult.
I’m sorry – blaming a Republican for this is possibly the most pathetic bullshit I’ve yet seen. The Dems control both houses and the presidency, they and they alone now take the blame for 100% of the stupid shit that’s going on. If they can’t even take responsibility for something like this, God help us.
As far as I’m concerned, the entire stimulus bill debate has been nothing more than theater mixed in with their usual cash-grab infighting. I don’t think there are more than a hand full of people in Congress who have even a vague understanding of rudimentary economics much less grasp the complexities intentionally bred into the system by the government-industry partnership to hide their corruption. Plugging potential leaks is just part of the process. You couldn’t scrape together enough integrity in the entire building to make me want to turn my back on them for an instant.
What is there in this bill that can legally be subjected to classification in the first place? There are federal laws that strictly regulate that sort of thing.
“That amendment would have granted whistleblower protection to federal workers and contractors, including those who report fraud and waste in—you guessed it—how the government spends stimulus money.”
By their actions you will know them.
To me, the worst aspect of this “stimulus bill” isn’t that there’s so little reason to believe it will help the economy, or even all of the corrupt pork it inevitably contains, though those are both direct indictments of both the integrity and economic competence of those who voted for it. The real tragedy is that the government spending all of this money will likely hurt the economy, but the economy will eventually tend to get better on its own, so no one will learn the lesson that government can’t spend us out of a recession. The politicians will claim credit, slapping themselves on the back for a job well done and promising to be ready with more of the same next time. If someone has a cold and some dimwitted (or mischievous) “do-gooder” comes by every day and spits into his food (claiming that it will somehow “stimulate” his immune system), then it sucks that the spitting jackass didn’t help and probably made the patient sicker, but it’s even more of a tragedy if now people think this ridiculous “treatment” is the cure for colds.
BTW, the GOP should spend like $25 million dollars in the primaries the next time Susan Collins has to run, just to get someone who isn’t against what they claim to stand for 70 percent of the time. And, if the new candidate loses to a Democrat nominee in the general election, who cares? If she can’t maintain at least a patina of fiscal responsibility during the first chance the GOP has to try to salvage its badly tarnished reputation on that count, then she’s dead weight anyway. And, I am not just being snide; if the GOP can’t convince voters that it’s learned that it most at least try to resist bigger government, then it is sunk.
(And, this isn’t me endorsing the GOP. It’s just an acknowledgment that, if our recent experience of having the same party in Congress and the White House points to any prediction for the next several years, it’s that the Democrats won’t be a party of fiscal restraint any time soon.)
Freedomfan, I think your first paragraph perfectly characterizes what’s going on and predicts what’s going to happen.
American Dems are easily identifiable: picture ten people facing five opponents. If the side with ten are whining that they’re outnumbered and can’t do anything, then they’re the Democrats.
The GOP are not fiscal conservatives anymore. Barry Goldwater was the last one who really thought that way as far as I am concerned. The neocons destroyed that party and it’s never going to be the same ever again.
Actually, you need 60 votes in the Senate to be able to push any legislation that you want. Since the Dems only have 58 right now (59 if Franken is seated), they do not have a big enough majority to push a partisan agenda without two Republicans joining their ranks. You need a 3/5ths supermajority (60 votes) to invoke cloture and end a filibuster (as threatened by the Republicans).
That’s what happened with the Stimulus bill. Three Republicans joined the 58 Democrats to give them the 61 votes (one more than they needed, actually) in order to get the bill to the Senate floor for a vote. If they made two of these Republicans mad enough, they would revert back to 59 votes and not be able to vote on the bill.
I guess they had to remove that language in order to get the votes needed to pass the bill. So, the blame doesn’t fall entirely on the Democrats (just mostly).
I have no love for either party, but if it was at the urging of a Republican that the provision was ultimately abandoned, then it really doesn’t matter how many democrats and republicans there are.
Personally, I think they’re all cut from the same cloth and “doing the right thing” is not on the to-do list of any of them.
I’m confused now… did Cynical in CA just quote the Bible? Seems pretty close to Matthew 7:16 to me. Next up: politicians who admit they can’t actually solve anything with legislation, and SWAT teams who cry Mea Culpa for botched raids, and pay back the raid victim out of their own pocketbooks.
“But I’m also fairly certain that the Democrats have large majorities in both houses of Congress. If protecting federal whistleblowers who expose waste and abuse is any sort of priority for them, they had more than enough votes to keep the amendment in the bill.”
What part of “Collins is a Republican, without whose vote the measure couldn’t pass” do you not understand? None of it, I suspect. You know perfectly well what the numbers in the senate are, and you know perfectly well that Collins is able to make some demands in exchange for her vote.
The only purpose served by this display of willful faux-ignorance is to allow you to blame the Dems for this outrage.
I don’t know why Collins has chosen to spend her chits on this. It seems like a win-win to me. Democrats get expanded whistleblower protection, and you know how we’re always whining about the little guy getting screwed by the system, boo hoo. Republicans win too–they’re looking at a long stretch of enemy control of the government. Any whistles that get blown will most likely embarrass the party in control, rather than the minority.
So often when someone says “I don’t understand why politician X did Y” they understand it perfectly well and it’s just a rhetorical device. But here, I’m genuinely baffled. I’d really like to know what Collins is thinking here, because when smart seem to be doing obviously stupid things, that means the observer is missing some important information.
>>>>>>>I’d really like to know what Collins is thinking here, because when smart seem to be doing obviously stupid things, that means the observer is missing some important information.<<<<<<
Or the orginal assumption of ’smart’ was false.
Wouldn’t the Whistleblower Protection Act already cover federal employees? What would this amendment have accomplished? The only change I can see would have been adding the protection to contractors, which seems wise, but whistleblower protection only protects federal employees against adverse personnel actions as a result of the revealing fraud, waste, abuse or mismanagement of funds. It would be interesting to see how this protection would apply to employees in the private sector if it was attached to the stimulus bill.
#12 | nathan
“I’m confused now… did Cynical in CA just quote the Bible? Seems pretty close to Matthew 7:16 to me.”
Just because I don’t believe in religion doesn’t mean I can’t sift literature for relevant material. There’s plenty of wisdom in the Bible, and one can appreciate it even if it was written by cruel, primitive men.
I thought you might be interested in reading a letter from Halliburton whistleblower Bunny Greenhouse urging all Americans to continue the fight for greater oversight and accountability. You can read Bunny’s letter and help her protect taxpayer dollars by visiting
http://capwiz.com/whistleblowers/issues/alert/?alertid=12666936
Halliburton whistleblower Bunny Greenhouse wrote a new letter in response to Congress cutting whistleblower protections for federal employees from the final version of the stimulus bill. You can read the letter at http://capwiz.com/whistleblowers/issues/alert/?alertid=12666936
sign the new petition at http://www.whistleblowers.org.