Our Frist Love

Before we share in this morning's City Paper's nostalgic love in the wake of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's departure from DC, keep in mind that Frist is the main reason why the Congress did not finish any budget work after the November 7 elections. The only time that Frist scheduled for spending bills this year were for Defense Appropriations and Office of Homeland Security. My retrospective on Frist's last months in office would include the fact that he got paid to carve his name in his desk while accomplishing little else for his country.

Frist Makes CREW List

Tennessee Senator Bill Frist has received the dubious distinction of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington's list of Most Corrupt Members of Congress. He shares that distinction with only two other Senators. Frist is looking like he's willing to go down with the President's cruel-and-inhuman-interrogation ship, as prominent Republicans are jumping overboard. So, making CREW's list does not help him. Perhaps Frist needs to take a moment to locate his moral compass, assuming he ever had one.


09/22/2006, 10:55 a.m. Update: Looks like I gave the proverbial deck-clearing rats too much credit. They are willing to compromise their own principles or to stage an argument with the White House so that they can look independent in order to distract attention from the billions of dollars per month that we are taking out of American communities and dumping into Iraq. Looks like the Dems were played, Bush still gets to torture even though it rarely produces any useful information, and Frist avoids a fight that would have brought down his reputation even lower than it already is.

The Frist Maneuver: Blame CNN for the Senate's Low Public Regard

Republican Tennessee Senator Bill Frist told CNN that the shrinking regard that the public has for the Republican congressional majority going into the November elections is CNN's fault. Perhaps Senator Frist should pay more attention to polls that show the low priority that Americans place on his pet projects like flag burning, gay marriages, and the estate tax. According to a Pew Research Center study just out, education, the economy, health care, social security and Iraq are the top five priorities for Americans. Blaming CNN is ludicrous when you refuse to allot the necessary time and energy to issues about which Americans are most concerned.

It's a New Raw Deal: The Federales Are No Federalists

For all of their talk about "New Federalism" and "letting the states decide" policy matters, the Republican powers-that-be in the U.S. House and Senate have done more to remove the prerogative of states to determine their own policy than any Congress in recent past. A minority report from the Committee on Government Reform is just out identifying several areas that the U.S. Congress has preempted state laws and regulations to advance a conservative cultural agenda from the top and to strengthen conservative executive power over local, democratic initiatives.

Since 2001, the House and the Senate voted 57 times to overrule state authority. The multiple preemptive provisions in those bills amount to 73 total against state authority. President Bush has signed 27 of these bills into law, amounting to 39 distinct preemptive provisions against states. In most cases, these bills focused on areas where the Republican leadership's policy preferences differed from the polices adopted by state government or the decisions of state courts:

The preemptive bills passed by the House and the Senate nullify a wide array of state laws and regulations and significantly erode the authority of state courts. Some of the bills federalize traditional state authorities, such as state land-use decisions and issuance of state drivers' licenses. Others prevent the states from protecting their citizens from emerging threats, such as computer spyware or the growing problem of unsolicited email.

Some of the preemptive bills are narrow in scope but represent an unprecedented intrusion into purely state and local matters, such as the law that stripped Florida state courts of jurisdiction over the end-of-life decisions of the [Terry] Schiavo family. Other bills would overturn a huge swath of existing state laws and regulations, such as the House-passed bill that would block state regulation of food safety. Some of the bills advance the interests of large Republican campaign contributors, such as the law that preempts state regulation of information-sharing among affiliates of large financial institutions. Others impose social values held by a minority of Americans on communities across the nation.

Tennessee Senator Bill Frist figures prominently in the report, especially on attempts to override states not passed by the Congresss.

It would seem that the "let-the-states-decide" mantra in the Republican Party is actually a trojan horse designed to hide the many ways that they are actually taking power from the states and concentrating it at the federal level. New Federalism Federales are paradoxically undermining our republic.

HT: PLAN blog

Frist Is Under Their Thumb

U.S. Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) did a solid for the big pharmaceutical lobby on the sly recently. It seems that Senator Frist put a secret amendment into a defense bill protecting vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits claiming recklessness or negligence. However, the amendment was composed by vaccine manufacturers themselves. With Frist sneaking this one past the goalie and with a new $1 billion federal contract in their pocket, it should be a very fat year for these vaccine corporations (by the way, the contract does not even bind the corporations to produce vaccines for the government or to provide them to consumers at a reasonable price; it's merely a carrot). Maybe the Senator is bucking for another free ride for the Frist family on a corporate jet to next year's Super Bowl.

Religious Diversion

I am a Baptist boy from way back. But it's been all I can do lately to endure: Senator Bill Frist's tacit endorsement of an evangelical group that considers any votes against any Bush policies as action against "people of faith"; the overt political overtones parochial vainglory in yesterday's "National Day of Prayer"; and now, a Baptist pastor who "disfellowshipped" (a.k.a., kicked out) church members who did not vote for Bush in the last election, because they did not vote for Bush in the last election.

Land o' Goshen and sakes alive. Should I stay a Baptist, or should I go?

Note to Jim Wallis if he be reading this: you cannot get to Nashville soon enough. You've got to remind me of the value of faith, because the meaning of it gets cheaper and cheaper the more prevailing political winds prevail. See you at the Belcourt.

And somebody please take that NC church's tax-exempt status away from them.

05/07/2005, 7:00 p.m. Update -- The pastor who tries to force people to vote his presidential preferences seems to have gone into hiding in order to avoid facing the inevitable scrutiny that had to result from his behavior.

Why doesn't he just rename his congregation, "The First Baptist Church of George W. Bush"? There's already a "Church of John Coltrane." It might work.