Teabagger Robert Lowry poses with realistic Ted Cruz blow-up dollEveryone is probably relieved there won't be a Patrick Murphy-Alan West rematch, but next year a handful of New Dems almost as bad as Murphy are going to have to face the Republican ex-congressmember they beat in 2012.Actually, Sean Patrick Maloney has an even worse voting record than Murphy.
Before the end of the year, there's a bipartisan-- in the worst sense of the word-- push to renew tax breaks for special interests, generally special interests that bribe Members of Congress with massive campaign contributions.
If you're a regular DWT reader, you know better. Of course, virtually every Republican in Congress is a full on shill for Wall Street. It's part of their DNA. But it's part of the DNA of a significant chunk of the Democratic congressional caucus as well. When it comes to catering to Wall Street there is virtually no difference whatsoever between Republicans and New Dems. Yesterday, 70 Wall Street-oriented Democrats voted with all but 3 Republicans to pass H.R. 992, an amendment to gut a piece of the Dodd-Frank financial reform consumer protection act.
Bernie Sanders (I-VT)-- like Ken and I, a graduate of James Madison High School-- has been trying to explain that “Yesterday, the Republicans were using the Affordable Care Act as the reason why they had to shut down the government and not pay our bills. Today, it’s ‘reforming’ Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
I've had a lot of feedback-- most of it great-- after Michelangelo Signorile's post last week in HuffPo about how propounding disappointing LGBT freshmen Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ) and Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY) have been. I've been blogging about these two clowns here at DWT all year. No one in New York seems to have noticed that Maloney has the single worst (i.e., most Republican) voting record of any Democratic freshman.
Saturday night House Republicans passed 248-174 a repeal of a medical device tax as part of the CR that threatens to shut down the government. They are demanding a one year delay to the Affordable Care Act and the repeal of the medical device tax.
Barney Frank is no longer a Member of Congress and his influence on the House Democrats' fiscal agenda has been largely supplanted by that of former Wall Street executive Jim Himes (New Dem-CT). As we saw last week, the New Dems have been boasting that a quarter of all House Democrats are now Members of their caucus.
For much of the year we've been talking about the corruption that, to a great extent, defines the New Dems in Congress and pointing specifically to the bad apples among them that managed to get onto the House Financial Services Committee, one of the principal conduits of bribery cash from the Wall Street banksters to Congress.
"We can't have a prosperous economy," explains former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in the video above, "without a large and growing middle class." Over the weekend, his column dealt with the Republican Party's systematic sabotage of the economy. They're opposing policies that grow and sustain the middle class and they're pushing an agenda that pushes more ordinary working families into economic distress and poverty. Reich focuses on the GOP's obstruction of every attempt to improve the jobs situation.
