These things must be done delicately.
Posted: December 3rd, 2006, 3:43 pm
I don’t know anybody important. Maybe it is different among college professors, artists and poets. But the people I know are not going to respond positively to anyone who calls Bush a war criminal and starts clamoring for impeachment. With a one vote majority in the senate there is no way in hell Bush could be impeached anyway.
Cut and Paste from here:
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1106/110606nj1.htm
"Given public disenchantment with the Bush administration," says Brookings Institution congressional expert Sarah Binder, "I would suspect that the public might be comfortable with an investigations focus."
Perhaps, but these things must be done delicately.
RE: 80th congress and Truman.
"Even though they did so much, there were a lot of partisan clashes, and oversight-type investigations that went too far," congressional expert Norman Ornstein says. "The lesson here is that except in the most extraordinary circumstances, Congress cannot stage a confrontation with the president and win."
...
RE: Clinton
It also foreshadowed Republicans' tendency to overplay their hand, which led to the 1995 and 1996 budget showdowns that helped Clinton win re-election, and to the impeachment proceedings that helped Democrats chip away at the Republican House majority in 1998. Within weeks of that election, Gingrich was forced to resign, even as congressional excess reached its pinnacle with the Clinton impeachment.
...
Ideologues might prefer a mandate, or an agenda, if not a "contract" with America from a Democratic-controlled House in 2007. There are a couple of important reasons, however, why it would behoove Speaker-in-waiting Pelosi and her Democratic Senate counterpart Harry Reid to move cautiously in enacting it.
The first is that swing voters tend to look askance at victors' pronouncements that a single election constitutes a "revolution." Moreover, aside from the Democrats' liberal base, most people do not necessarily equate congressional legislative activity with a good thing.
"My fear is that the Democrats will wake up on November 8 and think they did it," says Les Francis, a moderate who arrived in 1975 from California as chief of staff to freshman Democratic Rep. Norman Mineta and who ended up working as congressional liaison in Jimmy Carter's White House. He is speaking only half in jest. "This year is shaping up as a repudiation of Republicans, not an endorsement of some Democratic platform," he explained. "And that's not a bad thing."
A balance-altering Democratic class in January 2007 would certainly be smaller, and because it would hail from swing districts, it might constitute a natural brake on liberal excess. This could be the best thing that a Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have going for her, some veteran Democrats say.
But lawmakers can alienate voters from the opposition direction, too. As Clinton and Truman proved, congressional excess is in the eye of the beholder. And one way that presidents can make this claim stick is to accuse the opposition party controlling Congress of effecting legislative gridlock for partisan purposes -- of overreaching by thwarting the president, or, as Truman said, by doing "nothing."
Cut and Paste from here:
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1106/110606nj1.htm
"Given public disenchantment with the Bush administration," says Brookings Institution congressional expert Sarah Binder, "I would suspect that the public might be comfortable with an investigations focus."
Perhaps, but these things must be done delicately.
RE: 80th congress and Truman.
"Even though they did so much, there were a lot of partisan clashes, and oversight-type investigations that went too far," congressional expert Norman Ornstein says. "The lesson here is that except in the most extraordinary circumstances, Congress cannot stage a confrontation with the president and win."
...
RE: Clinton
It also foreshadowed Republicans' tendency to overplay their hand, which led to the 1995 and 1996 budget showdowns that helped Clinton win re-election, and to the impeachment proceedings that helped Democrats chip away at the Republican House majority in 1998. Within weeks of that election, Gingrich was forced to resign, even as congressional excess reached its pinnacle with the Clinton impeachment.
...
Ideologues might prefer a mandate, or an agenda, if not a "contract" with America from a Democratic-controlled House in 2007. There are a couple of important reasons, however, why it would behoove Speaker-in-waiting Pelosi and her Democratic Senate counterpart Harry Reid to move cautiously in enacting it.
The first is that swing voters tend to look askance at victors' pronouncements that a single election constitutes a "revolution." Moreover, aside from the Democrats' liberal base, most people do not necessarily equate congressional legislative activity with a good thing.
"My fear is that the Democrats will wake up on November 8 and think they did it," says Les Francis, a moderate who arrived in 1975 from California as chief of staff to freshman Democratic Rep. Norman Mineta and who ended up working as congressional liaison in Jimmy Carter's White House. He is speaking only half in jest. "This year is shaping up as a repudiation of Republicans, not an endorsement of some Democratic platform," he explained. "And that's not a bad thing."
A balance-altering Democratic class in January 2007 would certainly be smaller, and because it would hail from swing districts, it might constitute a natural brake on liberal excess. This could be the best thing that a Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have going for her, some veteran Democrats say.
But lawmakers can alienate voters from the opposition direction, too. As Clinton and Truman proved, congressional excess is in the eye of the beholder. And one way that presidents can make this claim stick is to accuse the opposition party controlling Congress of effecting legislative gridlock for partisan purposes -- of overreaching by thwarting the president, or, as Truman said, by doing "nothing."