Fiscal epiphany for Ritter & Bennet?

Impending mortality tends to focus the mind, and looming elections tend to focus politicians' ears on vox populi. But just as theologians debate the sincerity of "deathbed conversions," voters should be skeptical of lawmakers who find religion as elections near. Although 15 months remain until the 2010 elections, Democrats are learning — just as Republicans discovered after their 2004 victory tour — how quickly the political winds can shift for the party in power.

In less than a year, Governor Bill Ritter has seen his favorable/unfavorable margin flip from plus-13 to minus-8, according to Public Policy Polling. Newly imposed vehicle licensing "fees," championed by Ritter, won't make Coloradans with cars or trucks any more charitable, either.

Ritter's beneficiary, appointed Senator Michael Bennet, hasn't impressed many outside his own party during his eight months in office. Bennet's approval/disapproval rating stands at minus-7 (34%-41%) among all voters, but even worse (minus-11) among unaffiliated voters.

Nationally, the trend is no more comforting for vulnerable Democrats: Rasmussen shows the generic congressional ballot favoring Republicans 43% to 38%, while Gallup says voters are souring on President Obama's health care push with 50% disapproving and 44% approving.

Not coincidentally, both Ritter and Bennet sought to induce a bit of voter amnesia recently with tough talk on taxing and spending.

Ritter told a gathering of municipal leaders that he won't ask for a tax hike in 2010. The AP report didn't mention whether Ritter's proclamation was met with audible laughter or just snickering.

Here's a governor who convinced the legislature and the state supreme court that legislation increasing property tax revenue isn't really a tax increase and therefore doesn't trigger the constitutional requirement for a public vote. As a result, property owners will pay some $200 million more this year than they would have without Ritter's "tax freeze."

In the wake of that ruling, Ritter and the Democrat legislature used a new loophole manufactured by the supreme court to enact an additional $125 million in tax increases — also without a vote of the people.

Just this year Ritter championed two new "fees" so large as to make taxes superfluous. First he enacted his famous vehicle fee to raise an estimated $250 million by increasing the cost of licensing almost every vehicle in the state by $41 to $51 annually. Then he signed a "hospital provider fee" that will, when fully implemented, raise $600 million a year from new charges on patient services.

With fees like that, who needs taxes?

Note that Ritter didn't vow to veto any tax increases sent to him by the legislature; he merely vowed not to ask for them.

Bennet's charade is pathetically weak, too, introducing the so-called Deficit Reduction Act of 2009 in an attempt to build credentials as a "fiscal hawk."

Remember that Bennet cut his senatorial teeth by voting for President Obama's $787 billion stimulus package — the one that stimulated very little and really costs $3.7 trillion, including $1 trillion in interest.

Bennet also helped kill a measure that simply sought to limit new federal debt over the next 10 years to no more than the old federal debt accumulated in the previous 220 years. That's right, the amendment would have allowed for a doubling of the federal debt but no more. Even that medicine was just too strong for Colorado's appointed junior senator.

Bennet's fiscal hawkishness is so feeble that he doesn't even bother to suggest that the federal budget should be balanced — only that overspending should be capped at 3% of GDP, not this year or next year or the year after that but by 2013. By that miserly standard, President Bush succeeded at least half the time.

No, Colorado's big spenders aren't changing their ways — just their words.

Mark Hillman served as Colorado senate majority leader and state treasurer. To read more or comment, go to www.MarkHillman.com.

Let them eat...cake

I'm constantly amazed at the arrogance of our elected officials in Washington.  Service in the government was supposed to be a privilege, and members of Congress were supposed to be the people's representatives. Perhaps there was a time, before big money lobbying and ballooning budget deficits, when that was largely true. But not today.

Today we have a Congress made up of people -- on both sides of the aisle -- who think their position in Washington puts them above everyone else. They have created their own entitlement, with a prerogative that they can do as they wish, when they wish. They no longer work for us. We now work for them. Our tax dollars pay for their perks and their pork. And we are treated as if our opinions don't count. Its enough to make you realize that Reagan was right: Government is the problem.

The evidence of this is everywhere -- from Congress wanting to spend $500 million on new jets for them to fly around the world (on our dime) to them refusing to use the same government-run health care that they are now trying to pass in the House. Last month, Republican Rep Dean Heller (NV) tried to put an amendment on H.R. 3200, the current House Health Reform legislation that would have required Congress to give up their rich health benefits and go on the government plan like everyone else.

Democrats also voted down an amendment from Rep. Dean Heller (R-Nv.) that would require all Members of Congress to get insurance through the government-run plan. Apparently Democrat members of Congress do not like the government plan they’re trying to inflict on the rest of us.

In a straight party line vote, Democrats voted against exempting themselves from the government-run plan by a vote of 21-18. “We also had an amendment to require that members of Congress must participate in the government-run plan,” Rep Dave Camp (R-Mich) said. “If it’s such a great idea, it should be a great idea for members of Congress. The majority voted to prevent that from happening. They voted to exempt members of Congress from the government-run plan.”

No surprise, of course, that Democrats rejected this amendment -- when you consider that progressive leadership in the House firmly believes it is superior to the common folk like you and me. They sit on high and decree, spending our money as if it is water and exempting themselves from their decisions. It is truly shameful.

Now there is another attempt at this, HR 615, sponsored by Rep John Flemming of Louisiana who is also a physician. Flemming has put a link on his website that has a petition -- you can go to it and sign here. The fate of Flemming's initiative, however, is already sealed: the scoundrels will never agree to being treated like "regular folk". They're special, remember?

Fortunately, history has its lessons, even if many choose to ignore them. Marie Antoinette also famously once said "let them eat cake". And we know what happened to her. She lost her head (literally) in the public square.

Cake, anyone?

Four-step rehab for DC dolts

Instructions for Congress: (1) STOP what you are doing. STOP destroying the country. Do NOT pass any more legislation. (2) Repeal ALL the legislation you have passed this year. (3) Use a "continuing resolution" from 2008 to cover the 2010 federal budget. I.e., freeze discretionary spending at the 2008 level, minus the 2008 "stimulus".

(4) Go to Hawaii on vacation and have fun. Go exploring. If you're lucky, maybe you'll stumble onto Obama's birth certificate.

Blue Dogs perpetuate Democrat racism

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. - Karl Marx While not in the habit of quoting the father of "scientific socialism," I know a good Marxian quotation when I see one–and boy does it ever apply to the current follies in Washington, D.C. Governing parties in America are always unstable coalitions which, in the Democrats’ case is not surprising, given the racist legacy which is at the core of their being.

There is much talk these days about the Blue Dogs in the Democratic party who have slowed the Obama Administration’s rush toward socialized health care. Although the Democrats have solid majorities in both houses of Congress, and therefore theoretically have the votes to pass any bills they wish, approximately 50 Democrat members of the House of Representative are haggling over the cost, the funding and the coverage of so-called Obama Care.

This has not stopped Democrat spokesmen from denouncing Republicans for all the "lies" they’ve been telling about the estimated trillion dollar program that Obama claims will save the taxpayers money. But if we take a longer historical perspective than the first few months of his administration, we will recall that when the Democrats ruled Congress between New Deal and Great Society days, northern and western liberals shared power with white southern racists.

The only difference is, now the racists are primarily outside the South, and come in both black and white. For years the dream of full equality for former slaves and their descendants was stalled by Democrat apartheid south of the Mason-Dixon line, even with the ascendancy of liberal Democrat politics. As long as northern Democrats did not challenge racism and southern Democrats did not oppose Big Government, the party kept its majority.

Civil rights legislation proposed by the Eisenhower Administration was watered down by a Congress dominated by two Texans, Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. When Johnson became president he saw the advantages to his party from the 90 percent black vote in metropolitan areas outside the South. His embrace of Civil Rights legislation came at the corrupt price of converting the idea of equality of opportunity to, as Johnson put it, "equality as a fact and equality as a result."

As black columnist Star Parker has so often written, liberal Democrats have switched to black racism and bringing blacks onto what she astutely calls "the government plantation" of perpetual dependency and missing out on full citizenship.

Back in 2006, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer devised a clever scheme in which they ran moderate Democrats in traditionally Republican districts. Their object was to gain a House majority, enabling her to become Speaker and Hoyer to become majority leader. All the candidates had to do was to speak and act like Republicans (pro-life, fiscally conservative, etc.) so that Republicans unhappy with their party would feel comfortable voting for a Democrat.

The strategy worked. But when Barack Obama became president and sent costly and intrusive stimulus, cap and trade, and government health care bills up, the relatively less liberal newcomers began to show signs of independence. Currently, they have prevented passage of any sort of health care bill by the time of the August recess, as planned.

Of course, this independence is tenuous. The House leadership controls the committee assignments and is not above abandoning the Blue Dogs when they run in their party’s primaries next year. Thus, it is premature to declare that these worthies will do anything more than delay bad legislation, shave off a few billion dollars here and there, or kill controversial provisions.

Nevertheless, the irony is rich. Whereas in the mid twentieth century white and black liberals needed white racists to keep control of Congress, how black and white racists need Democrats that look like Republicans to maintain and expand their Big Government plantation that keeps minorities down with what former President Bush called "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

Of course, President Obama does not consider himself a racist, for he means to make members of all races dependent on federal largesse and regulation so that no one gets too far ahead of anyone else.

As long as we "spread the wealth around," as he revealingly said to Joe the Plumber last fall, everyone gets to be on the plantation. There may be some overseers around to keep uppity folks under control, but no one said that commandeering the lives, liberties and properties of 300 million people was going to be easy.

Ceding power to Congress: priceless

When I pick up the morning newspaper these days I am often reminded of that old Chinese proverb "may you live in interesting times".  I'm sure that every generation sees their "time" as interesting, and full of change. And so it should be -- with mankind's inexorable march toward the future, change (both good and bad) comes with each tick of the clock. The world moves forward, even if often the "forward" seems more like "backward". Our forward sure seems a lot like backward. Fortunately, it turns out that all this vacuous talk during the campaign about "hope and change" is now catching up to some realities:

-- A majority of the American people don't want a government controlled health care system -- A majority of the American people don't think more government is a good idea -- A majority of the American people have decided that Barack Obama is "more liberal" than they thought he was (big surprise -- not!) -- The economic "crisis" that Obama tried to capitalize on is not as bad as he would like us to think it is -- The failure of Obama to control the agenda -- by ceding power to Congress -- has unleashed the left-wing of the Democrat Party and has led to partisan, left-wing legislation -- That legislation has tanked any chance at bi-partisanship and has turned off the American people

Indeed, the American people are starting to understand that our would-be emperor is wearing no clothes. If you bothered to watch the President's prime time health care news conference this past week you saw a man grappling for answers, talking to "run out the clock" and making very little sense. Makes you long for the simple colloquiums of George W. Bush! Seriously -- the President is so in love with the sound of his own voice and the elegance of his teleprompter that he thinks what he says doesn't matter.

But it does, of course -- and though the left's basic premise is that people aren't smart enough to take care of themselves, the reality is that the American people aren't stupid. They see Congress as a partisan place with parochial interests and where transparency and honesty are in short supply. They thought that Obama would transcend this -- by pledging a "post-partisan" and "newly transparent" government. What they got was just another left-wing politician who has actually moved to strengthen Congress' role -- not weaken it. While this may be admirable for "strict constructionists" who believe that there should be greater balance between Congress and the Executive branch, the reality is that this Congress is run by highly partisan ideologues who aren't interested in consensus. On such huge issues -- like Cap and Trade and health care reform, partisan policy is never good for the country.

By design, of course, there has always been a tension between the executive branch and the Congress, and it is necessary for both branches to be active in balancing each other. But, perhaps one of the reasons why former legislators have rarely become president (and those who have are largely ineffective in the job) is because this balance is easily distorted. When you learn to think like a Senator, with the primary goal of satisfying interest groups, it is hard to put on the CEO hat and understand that your role as president is a unique one. Yes, it is about bargaining, but it is truly (or should be, anyway) about the interests of the nation as a whole and the office of the President. Thus far, Barack Obama's relationship with Congress resembles more like that of a Majority Leader and less like the Chief Executive of the nation.

I'm thankful, of course, that the President has gotten it wrong -- for it shows clearly to the American people that he is a neophyte, without true conviction. I knew that eventually his words would ring hollow, and it would be his actions that would become the focus. We are now at that point, and his actions are clearly not up to the job.

For more along this line of thought: Charles Krauthammer: Why Obamacare is Sinking

Kimberly Strassel: How Obama Stumbled on Health Care WSJ: A Better Health Reform