...is that the Dems socialist pro-nanny state agenda is stalling. At least, that is what the Washington Post is saying....In the heady opening weeks of the 110th Congress, the Democrats' domestic agenda appeared to be flying through the Capitol: Homeland security upgrades, a higher minimum wage and student loan interest rate cuts all passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
But now that initial progress has foundered as Washington policymakers have been consumed with the debate over the Iraq war. Not a single priority on the Democrats' agenda has been enacted, and some in the party are growing nervous that the "do nothing" tag they slapped on Republicans last year could come back to haunt them.
"We cannot be a one-trick pony," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), who helped engineer his party's takeover of Congress as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "People voted for change, but Iraq, the economy and Washington, D.C., [corruption] all tied for first place. We need to do them all."
The "Six for '06" policy agenda on which Democrats campaigned last year was supposed to consist of low-hanging fruit, plucked and put in the basket to allow Congress to move on to tougher targets. House Democrats took just 10 days to pass a minimum-wage increase, a bill to implement most of the homeland security recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, a measure allowing federal funding for stem cell research, another to cut student-loan rates, a bill allowing the federal government to negotiate drug prices under Medicare, and a rollback of tax breaks for oil and gas companies to finance alternative-energy research.
The Senate struck out on its own, with a broad overhaul of the rules on lobbying Congress.
Not one of those bills has been signed into law.
I think Jon Kyl (R-AZ) from the Senate gets it right:
Democrats are just "trying to score political points on the war. . . . Part of their party can't conceive of anything else to talk about but the war."
See, Dems, doesn't it suck when the only thing that got you elected was saying no? That has a habit of biting you on the posterior, or in your cases, the jackass. You have shown you can gripe, Dems, but you have not shown you can govern...
