The Specter of a Lame Duck Congress

August 25th, 2010 11:35 AM

I have no idea what is going to happen in the November congressional elections, but it seems the polls -- for what they're worth -- predict a huge Republican win.

It may or may not happen, I just don't know, but if it does and the aisles of Congress are littered with Democrats who will be kicked out in the New Year, will they feel they don't have anything to lose and try to pass the remainder of their socialistic agenda before they're forced to leave.

And if lame duck Democrats try to do this will the Republicans and remaining Democrats who will return have the guts and the honor to block them?

Will they let cap and trade, card check and all the other catastrophic crap they have proposed be passed?

America has not even begun to feel the lash of Obama's whip from the legislation his sycophants have already passed. The cost of health care insurance is already going up in anticipation of the restrictions Obamacare will put on insurance companies.

The federal unemployment numbers continue to hover right around 10% and there's no telling what the actual numbers are. The economy is headed for the pits and you could run out of ink trying to add all the zeros to the national debt.

How much more can this nation take?

We may well find out with a lame duck Congress, a room full of ticked off losers who want to show the country that they'll still have their way although the very programs they would be passing into law are what got them kicked out of office to start with.

But let's just get something straight; just because somebody has an "R" after their name doesn't mean they are the kind of conservatives it will take to undo some of the damage Obama and the Democrats have done.

Remember some of them were bitter disappointments voting for bills they knew their constituents were against and some of them sold out for favors only them and Obama's operatives know about.

I don't claim to know what it will take to bring America out this morass we're in but there are a few common sense factors that are tried and true.

The old Democrat mantra, "tax cuts for the rich" is misleading it's not the rich they're hurting when they raise taxes. The rich people are going to get along just fine. They'll just hang on to their money instead of investing it in businesses to create more jobs.

The card check proposal is nothing short of ridiculous. What business is it of anybody's how somebody casts their vote for union leadership or anything else for that matter?

This just opens someone up for intimidation and ostracizing and subverts the very heart of the Democratic process.

Nobody even knows how the health care fiasco will play out, even those in Congress who sold out the people who voted them in to pass it.

But there's something I can guarantee you; the cost of health care will go up instead of going down as Obama said it would. In fact it's going way up.

If nothing else, the new bureaucracies it will take to administer and enforce it will see to that.

Obama is insincere in really wanting to do something to bring down the cost of health care as no meaningful bill could possible leave out tort reform.

If we're not going to let our troops win the war in Afghanistan, we should just write off that part of the world and bring them home. Why keep dribbling American lives down the drain in a country where most of the people don't want us there to start with.

The only way we'll ever destroy the Taliban is to accept tremendous collateral damage to the civilian population and evidently we're never going to do that so why stay?

A year or so after we pull the troops out of Iraq that country will go right back to what it was except this time the mullahs in Iran will be calling the shots.

The most dangerous and powerful enemy in that part of the world is Iran; they export terrorism and arm our enemies. Until something meaningful is done about them our efforts in that part of the world are meaningless and any victory is temporary.

Playing politics with the energy production in this country is going to play out to be a stupid and horribly costly mistake because one day. Sooner than later, the oil from the Persian Gulf will suddenly stop coming to this country.

We should be drilling in ANWR, and the shale deposits in our western states and bring these sources on line before this catastrophe happens.

I agree that we should be pursuing alternative energy sources for all we're worth, but let's face it... We've been pursuing them for years and are not anywhere near the point that we can depend on them.

Let's go for it, make an all out effort to harness wind and water, create fuel cells, build nuclear plants, discover non-food supply sources of ethanol.

But in the meantime, we're going to need petroleum and we're not going to get it by the feeble and superficial gestures the federal government is making.

You want alternative energy? Make it profitable for the private sector. Get out of their way and it will happen.

A government that sues a state for keeping the law and turns a blind eye to sanctuary cities for breaking it is seriously out of balance and needs to have its priorities adjusted.

Let's hope that will happen in November.