 The Mean-ing Of The SeasonAs we get ready to start our annual holiday break Tuesday afternoon, like many media organizations, we've been trying to look back at the past year.
It's been a record year for Congress, though not in a good way. As Steve Benen pointed out clearly on Friday, the 113th Congress in the first half of its session, passed the least number of bills since the end of World War II. As Benen also noted, the meager few bills they passed weren't good.
In cae you'd forgotten Congress - specifically, the Republicans in Congress, led by their extremist tea party faction - also shut down the federal government this year, while almost blowing up the world's economy by not raising the debt ceiling. Republican action not only didn't achieve their initial stated goal, to stop the implementation of Obamacare, but it also ended up costing the government - meaning taxpayers - $24 billion while hurting the economy.
Meanwhile, bills that Congress has routinely passed during other highly partisan sessions, like the Farm & Food bill, never got approved by both chambers before Senators and Congresspersons high-tailed it out of DC. The long-term unemployment extension bill also never got passed. That means instead of the bare minimum of assistance, millions of unemployed Americans are getting a lump of BS and and a brush-off from Congress at Christmas that smacks of Ebenezer Scrooge.
As Timothy Egan wrote in the New York Times over the weekend, this misguided treatment of America's poor, mostly by Republicans, has - just like their pointless shutdown, and empty debt ceiling threats - proven only their arrogance, ignorance, hypocrisy, and smallness of spirit.
In short, instead of working together to make America and the world a better place...
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