Priorities

December 18th, 2008

It’ll be nice to have a president who values the people of the nation at least as much as he values its institutions. Over the past eight years, Bush has given far higher priority to energy companies, financial institutions, drug companies, media corporations, so forth and so on. Whenever there was a conflict of interest between the American people and these organizations, Bush always acted against the interests of the people.

In the last days of his administration, Bush is spending most of his time enacting all manner of new edicts which essentially do all the things he couldn’t even bring himself to do before, a massive free-for-all, a giveaway to the fat cats and a serious reaming for the American people. Among the slew of new scandalous decisions: allowing more farm manure runoff, more mining waste runoff, more pollution near national parks, uranium mining in the Grand Canyon, allowing concealed weapons in national parks, allowing religion to be used to deny women abortions, transporting toxic materials through populated areas, allowing truckers to drive longer hours without sleep, giving more freedom to fisheries to damage the environment, and more corporate activity that could kill off endangered species.

Fortunately, there is talk of Congress employing a loophole which could–hopefully–easily repeal all of Bush’s changes in the last two months of his presidency. If not, then this last-minute fire sale to corporate interests, this lame-duck assault on the safety and rights of the American people could prove to be a major distraction for the Obama administration.

At the very least, we won’t have a president who is actively out to harm the American people. As Keith Olbermann noted, it’s almost as if Bush decided, upon his election, to do the most damage to the country possible. Or as Aaron Sorkin put it about a fictional Republican, he’s someone who says he loves America but clearly can’t stand Americans.

  1. Leszek Cyfer
    December 18th, 2008 at 17:51 | #1

    The loophole you’ve mentioned is the Congressional Review Act, pushed through by Republicans in 1996 to prevent Bill Clinton from doing sth like Bush is doing now – what is needed is a majority vote of both houses to undo any, some, or all of these rules within six months of Bush’s departure from office, and with democratic majority it is almost sure.

    What it boils down to is that Congress and Obama can repeal any new rule in the next congressional session for up to 60 days. And no filibuster – the debate is limited to 10 hours.

    It seems the Republicans unexpectedly shot themselves in the back 😛

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