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Rep. Adam Putnam's Scary Halloween Speech

By Bluey Posted in Archived | Congressional Democrats — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

After months of adjusting to life in the minority, congressional Republicans have begun to show some life. They've thwarted the Democratic majority on one issue after another throughout the summer and early fall, and in recent weeks, the GOP appears emboldened by recent debates over children's health care and intelligence gathering and a showdown over federal spending.

Even President Bush seems to be engaged unlike ever before -- appearing yesterday at the White House with House GOP leaders to lecture Congress for its failures. It's quite evident that spirits are brighter on Capitol Hill these days for Republicans, and there's no better example of that than Rep. Adam Putnam's speech to the caucus today.

The speech is getting so much buzz that I've decided to reprint it in its entirety on the jump.

Continued below...

The new Democrat majority’s high-water mark was January 4, 2007 – the day they were sworn in. Today, on Halloween, it is a very different Democrat majority: beleaguered, divided and demoralized. Republicans have stuck to our principles and effectively driven home the truth about the new majority, and the American people are noticing.

They are noticing because you are not letting them ignore it; you’re in the paper that arrives on the front step at sunrise, you’re on the car radio during the commute to work, you’re creating conversation pieces for family supper.

And Democrats? Yesterday’s Drudge Report said it all: “HOUSE IN A MESS.”

Let’s review how we got here:

SCHIP: At the start of this month, Democrats gave themselves a two-week window within which to allow the DCCC and their liberal allies to run attack ads on Republicans while they planned a veto override vote they knew they would not win. That’s not governance, that’s opportunism.

• The debate over the veto override was overshadowed by Rep. Pete Stark’s shameful comments about our troops.

• Then last week, using the 40th closed rule so far this year, Democrats tried to rush through another SCHIP bill while some Members were back home seeing to their constituents during the wildfires. And now we know why: to run another week of political attack ads against our colleagues.

• Even Members who supported the SCHIP bill slammed Democrats for making it all about politics, not policy. The result? According to a recent Gallup Poll, 52% of the American people say that SCHIP should focus on families earning less than 200% of the poverty level, and 55% are concerned Congress will shift 2 million kids out of the private care they already have and onto the public dole.

FISA: Democrats hastily pulled their fatally flawed extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after their “bin Laden loophole” was exposed: a requirement in the Democrat bill that intelligence officers consult government lawyers before wiretapping Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda or other terror groups. The ensuing legislative “train wreck” among Democrats caused leaders to stop debate on the bill and postpone consideration. The Washington Post called the whole episode an “embarrassment” for Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Turkey: As if failures on SCHIP and FISA were not enough, the Speaker saw many in her own party run away from her on the Turkey-Armenia issue. Her hand-picked choice for majority leader, John Murtha, led the effort against her. Bloomberg News called the episode “biggest political misstep of her speakership,” a misadventure into foreign policy that is still reverberating.

• At the end of that week, even the media were calling it “Speaker Pelosi’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week.”

Mother of All Tax Hikes: Last Thursday, Rep. Charlie Rangel proposed the largest individual tax increase in American history, the Mother of All Tax Hikes that has come under constant fire. At a press conference held later that day, Speaker Pelosi said she “certainly support[s]” Chairman Rangel’s plan. But yesterday, we learned that she was so embarrassed by her support for the Rangel plan that she had the transcript whitewashed to fool the public. But the public isn’t fooled. When Democrats say they want to raise your taxes, believe them.

Failure to Govern: On Friday, the Democrat Congress hit another milestone. It has been 20 years since Congress has failed to send even a single appropriations bill to the President’s desk. A month has passed since the start of the new fiscal year, and key priorities remain unfinished – including $4.4 billion in new veterans spending that remains in a drawer. Why? Because Democrats are using this bill, which serves our veterans and military families, as the oxen to pull wasteful spending elsewhere across the President’s desk.

• What’s more, 25 million American middle-class taxpayers are still unprotected from the AMT. When Republicans were in the majority, we always acted to protect taxpayers by June. Now, on Halloween, Democrats risk a $2,000 tax hike on the middle-class and a three month delay in issuing tax refunds to Americans who need to make ends meet.

Keystone Cops at Judiciary Out Whistleblowers: Yesterday, we learned that 150 Department of Justice whistleblowers had their identities revealed by the carelessness of the House Democrat staff. These whistleblowers contacted the committee under a promise of confidentiality, and by making their identities public, the consequences for their lives and careers could be severe. They even added Vice President Cheney’s public email address to the list, reportedly as an inside joke. If this lack of investigative integrity is what Democrats call “oversight,” then it looks more like the Keystone Cops than a congressional committee.

Murtha Inc. Needs to File Chapter 11: After a series of investigations into the swirling controversies around Rep. John Murtha by Roll Call, the Wall Street Journal yesterday reported on its front page about Murtha, Inc. – the system he has constructed where an earmark creates a program that obtains other earmarks for other programs, all of which have a close connection to Murtha, his former staff or his campaign. Murtha Inc. has procured millions in wasteful earmarks, and, according to the Journal, “many weren't sought by the military or federal agencies they were intended to benefit. Some were inefficient or mismanaged … One Murtha-backed firm, ProLogic Inc., is under federal investigation…” We need real transparency in earmarks in order to force Murtha, Inc. into bankruptcy. We need to get that discharge petition signed and get a vote on real earmark reform on the floor of the House.

Where does this leave the new Democrat majority?

• A recent Zogby poll found, for the second month in a row, the Democrat-led Congress’ approval rating is a paltry 11 percent. Sixty-six percent of Americans think the country’s on the wrong track, up four points from the last poll.

• A California poll shows that for the first time, more Californians (40 percent) disapprove of Speaker Pelosi’s job performance than approve (35 percent).

Lastly, The New Republic, the house organ of elite liberalism in America, slammed Congressional Democrats in its latest issue. It wrote: “Forget ‘liberal’: Given a few more weeks like the ones congressional Democrats just endured, and the dreaded L-word they'll be struggling to shake is ‘losers.’ Children's health care, government spying, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire, the toxic ramblings of Representative Pete Stark--you name the issue, Dems managed to get their clocks cleaned in the p.r. battle... Not to kick a party when it's down, but what in God's name is wrong with congressional Dems?”

And for all this, the majority has it rewarded itself with a shorter workweek in 2008.

All of this is a function of wrong Democrat priorities, their failure to make efforts at bipartisanship, and their refusal to keep the promises they made.

This is not the time, however, to rest on our laurels. If anti-incumbency is to be the order of the day in the months ahead, there is no guarantee that it will only fall on one party’s shoulders, especially now when we have as divided a government as we have had since 1995. Just because the majority is doing so poorly does not mean we won’t be counted among them – when they ask do you disapprove of the job Congress is doing, they don’t specify, Democrat Congress or Republican Congress.

It’s up to us to make the distinction. For Democrats, it seems only one thing matters: November 2008. We know they aren’t serious about making tough choices, we know they want to run out the clock and set themselves up to become a rubber stamp for a liberal Democrat president.

We know that’s no way to keep a majority. We need to keep our focus beyond the Beltway and prove that we are ready to be responsive to the needs of working families and deliver solutions that empower them to deal with the challenges they face.