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The (Non)
Accomplishments of the Republican Legislatures
Posted 4-2-2005
I am having a dilemma. I cannot figure out which legislative body has
accomplished the least over the last decade -- the Republican-run U.S.
Congress or the Republican-run Pennsylvania legislature. Each assumed their
current rein after winning majorities in the 1994 elections. So, they have
controlled those legislative bodies for ten years and let's see what they
have done.
The Republicans spent the
second half of the 1990s investigating Bill Clinton's sex life as if it was
the most important issue on Earth. They spent millions of dollars, and years
of time, to carry out a political vendetta over what was then, and is now,
certainly an unimportant (and private) issue. They did not try to resolve
the most pressing issues in our society, like the challenge of ensuring each
and every American has affordable health care coverage. This challenge not
only affects those without coverage, but also every employer, large and
small, and every individual, young and old. They couldn't even implement
their tired old, irrelevant proposal for Medical Savings Accounts.
Is the long-term solvency of
social security an important issue? Well, it has been such for years because
the issue isn't really one of privatizing, but one of demographics. It has
been known for years that we face that challenge. Rather than dealing with
it, they investigated Clinton. Even national security was weakened because,
rather than having FBI agents working on important issues, hundreds of
agents had to spend time tracking down women (around the world) who may have
slept with Clinton.
Even as it became apparent
that many Republicans had committed similar acts of infidelity as President
Clinton, the partisan attacks never ceased. We witnessed the politics of
personal destruction first hand, but the greatest travesty is that the
Republicans that run Washington have been unwilling to tackle the tough
issues. Even today, with deficits soaring, health care costs and coverage
never resolved, the real challenges of social security ignored, what have
the Republicans been focused on? They are consumed with steroids in baseball
and the tragedy of the Schiavo case.
None of these reactionaries
must have been watching professional baseball for the last ten years. To
even the casual fan, it became clear that something was happening.
Baseball's home run record had stood since 1961, and suddenly not one, but a
number of bulked-up players, were hitting seventy home runs per year. But
whether they hit seventy or one hundred and seventy, is it the business of
Congress to resolve the challenge, or is it professional baseball's
responsibility? After years of hiding its head in the sand, major league
baseball has addressed the issue. So let them police their own. The
grandstanding over the Schiavo case was equally ridiculous. Delay and Frist
were falling over each other to try to make political gains over this tragic
case. We know Republicans never watch polls, but it was only after it became
clear that a large majority of Americans (including many true conservatives)
thought Congress should butt out, have the zealots backed off.
Has Harrisburg been any
different in the last decade? Let's see. Is property tax relief still an
issue? How about public school funding? And for all the doctors out there
who want relief from malpractice claims, has your Republican-run legislature
solved the challenge?
There have been weak efforts
to find property tax relief. One is the homestead exemption that was passed
several years ago. It was so ineffective that only three out of five hundred
school districts in Pennsylvania implemented it. Of course, county
governments did the work to allow property owners and school districts to
have data available without being completely compensated for our work. And,
the taxing bodies likely to actually be able to give property tax relief,
county governments, have been ignored by the legislature for years.
Even gambling cannot get up
and running here. After years of seeing Pennsylvanians spending their money
in New Jersey, West Virginia, or New York, the legislature almost
reluctantly approved limited legalized gambling. But because of the
partisanship of the legislature and its unwillingness to have Governor Ed
Rendell look good, we are still waiting. The cost of public education
continues to rise and the supposed tax relief from gambling revenue has not
happened.
What is puzzling is how the
public has accepted such a lack of substance from the party in control.
Government cannot solve every problem in society, but it can, at least, make
a serious effort to address them. That is how it used to work. When our
nation had its elderly ending up destitute, Congress created social
security. When there still was a problem in many states with minorities not
being treated as equals, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting
Rights Act. When it was recognized that seniors and the poor could not
afford any kind of health care coverage, Medicare and Medicaid were created
by Congress.
It will be interesting to see
how history judges these Republican-controlled legislative bodies. Their
unwillingness to even attempt to tackle the tough issues of the day is
frustrating. Yet, their willingness to jump into the trendy issues, like
steroids in baseball, demonstrates an eagerness to appear "on top of the
issues of the day" whether those issues are what government should be
dealing with or not. We have a media and culture with a short attention
span, but, at some point, those tough issues that really have an impact on
our lives will have to be resolved. They have the votes in both Washington
and Harrisburg to get things accomplished, let's see when they have the
intestinal fortitude to do so.
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