You can live in this town for years and still occasionally find yourself gobsmacked by what counts as “normal” by Washington standards. Take the ongoing debate over whether it’s fair for us to expect our elected representatives to read the laws they pass and expect us to follow.
Recently, Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., scoffed at the idea that they should read the health care legislation working its way through Congress. (Hey, it’s only a matter of life and death.)
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When tens of thousands of Americans marched on Washington last month to protest President Barack Obama’s ongoing power grab, many liberals dismissed them as a horde of partisan, crypto-racist cranks.
But a new study from a prominent Democratic polling firm shows that the Tea Partiers are neither racist nor particularly partisan. What’s more, they genuinely support smaller government — and they’re not going away anytime soon.
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Asked recently when the Senate might vote on cap-and-trade legislation, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., demurred, muttering about “a busy, busy time the rest of this year.” And yet last week, the Obama administration quietly moved forward with a plan to regulate power plants and other large stationary sources of greenhouse gases.
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‘No more czars!” is the new tea party rallying cry, as conservatives across the country fear that President Barack Obama has unleashed a legion of unaccountable bureaucratic overlords on the body politic.
Having helped oust Van Jones, Obama’s “Green Jobs” czar, Fox News’ Sean Hannity swears that he won’t rest until he’s gotten “rid of every other one.” But if he succeeds, will the country be appreciably freer, or the government noticeably smaller?
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In a new book, Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times Book Review editor, proclaims the death of conservatism. Movement leaders’ devotion to “radical” anti-government ideology, Tanenhaus argues, has left them “trapped in the irrelevant causes of another day, deaf to the actual conversation unfolding across the land.”
Judging by the massive crowd that descended on the district Saturday for the 9/12 March on Washington, you would have to be deaf not to recognize that small-government conservatism remains a vital part of the national conversation.
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URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/people/gene-healy?page=6&quicktabs_6=1
