Thursday, November 10, 2016

Clamoring for attention, an ignored Walker suggests Cong. rigging

Poor, increasingly irrelevant Scott Walker.

Remember a few years ago when he and Paul Ryan and Reince Preibus were the The GOP Big Three, The Young Wisconsin GOP Guns who'd each carved out a sphere of influence:

There was GOP Party boss Reince Priebus, House of Representatives committee chair/2012 GOP Veep candidate Paul Ryan, and Walker, the Wisconsin Governor and noted union-slayer whom some conservatives were already pitching as Presidential timber.

And where are they now?

Priebus may have parlayed his party chairmanship into a big appointment - - maybe even White House Chief of Staff - - by President-elect Donald Trump.

Ryan is now Speaker of the House, third in the Presidential line of secession and in charge of much of the GOP's agenda, particularly spending bills, and his infamous reward-the-rich-budget plan which now has a real chance of passing.

And Walker?

Third in line of significance among The Young Wisconsin GOP Guns, a failure on the presidential stage with no path to the White House in the new Trump-Pence era, reduced to tweeting the other day from his kitchen apropos of nothing about having made about 19,000 ham and cheese sandwich daily brown bag lunches all by himself...

...and suggesting that the US Senate, of which he is not a member eliminate the Senate filibuster rule so that Trump's judicial nominations and bills he will spoon-feed to the Congress can all pass the Senate with a simple majority and without the opportunity of extended delay which filibusters present.

A couple of things about this:

* This matter of Senatorial procedures is not a matter of Walker expertise, but clearly he wants Trump to know it was a Scott Walker proposal. Kind of the policy equivalent of showing off his sandwich-making prowess, as if to say 'Look what I did!'

*  Senate Republicans used the filibuster to their advantage when blocking so many of President Barack Obama's initiatives. But taking a long view, GOP Senators have avoided past proposals to end the rule for momentary or short-term gain because they know they will need it in their back pocket when Democrats eventually retake the Senate.

Put it this way: there's more to running the US Senate that putting a couple of slices of ham and cheese on two slices of wheat bread, then bagging it.

*  Changing the rules to fit the players is a just another way of rigging the system, as Trump would have said.

*  And, finally, remember then-developer Cathy Stepp's infamous blog screed against Democrats whom she said had played around with rule-making for partisan purposes during the Doyle administration - - a laughable claim in hindsight now that Republicans in the Legislature at Walker's behest have eased, ended or change rules across the board which govern groundwater withdrawals, environmental inspections and pollution enforcement, election procedures, campaign donation limits, local controls, collective bargaining and even rule-making itself at the expense of Legislature prerogatives - - all giving Walker and now-DNR Secretary Stepp in particular far more executive authority over many, many governmental actions at the expense of the public interest.

For the record, here's the heart of Stepp's ultra-partisan, anti-DNR screed which now makes a devastating mockery of her special-interest management at the DNR and also calls attention to all of Walker's and the Legislature's self-serving rule-bending:
...agencies try to use this [emergency rule-making] process as an end-around the legislative process...
Just another example of the democrats game plan: Change the Rules to Fit the Players.
Shout it with me, now: HYPOCRISY, THY NAME IS DEMOCRAT.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Having been run over by a Trump truck, expect Walker to run against Tammy Baldwin.

Anonymous said...

I am so tired of seeing people proclaim Scott Walker is becoming irrelevant and so is GOP. They are in the catbird's seat, control Wisconsin and now America - linely for the rest of my life!

They did this by hook and crook, but they did it none-the-less. I fo not know why some otherwise well-informed people tell me this. The outlook is bleak and putting our heads on the sand makes prospects for change worse. I am tired of reading blog posts that boast GOP is going to become irrelevant (the worse offender of this is Daily Kos!)

You don't exactly post that nonsense, but mocking Scott Walker is one this. Misinterpreting his future when Koch interests dominate the nation while Walker is one of their top stooges, is just not helpful and is entirely inaccurate.