Fritz Hollings gave his farewelll speech on the Senate floor last week. Vintage Hollings -- you can hear his voice as you read the words. Most of his thoughts were on either what the Senate experience had meant to him or what is left to be done for the people of South Carolina and the country. But one passage is especially Hollingsesque: funny, sharp, stentorian, and telling.

But the main culprit, the cancer on the body politic, is money: Money, money, money. When I ran 6 years ago, in 1998, I raised $8.5 million. That $8.5 million is $30,000 a week, every week, for 6 years. If you miss Christmas week, you miss New Years week, you are $100,000 in the hole and don't you think we don't know it and we start to work harder at raising money.

As a result, the Senate doesn't work on Mondays and Fridays. We have longer holidays. The policy committee is adjourned and we go over to the campaign building because you can't call for money in the office. So we go over to the building and call for money and obviously we only can give attention to that. We don't have time for each other. We don't have time for constituents, except for the givers. Somebody ought to tell the truth about that.
[...]
But if you want to limit campaigning and if you want to change -- as Abe Lincoln said -- disenthrall ourselves of the dogmas of the quiet past that are inadequate for the stormy present of money grubbing, then we have to think anew and act anew. We need to disenthrall ourselves from this money grubbing and go to work finally for the country instead of the campaign.

That is our situation. I have watched it. I have studied it. I have seen it. They don’t have me going to meetings. They have me going to the telephone and calling and calling, traveling all over the country for money. Money is a cancer on the body politic.

Hat tip Micah Sifry.

Although the opportunities to point out Reasons for Congressional Reform(TM)come fast and furious on a daily basis, from time to time Congress does something that deserves commendation. And so there's a tip of the hat when they do.

The giant spending bill that Congress passed on Saturday eliminated money for developing new nuclear weapons, including one that would be used to destroy underground bunkers. It also deeply cut the Bush administration's request for money for a new factory to make the triggers for nuclear bombs.

One of the projects eliminated was the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, widely known as the bunker buster; the administration had wanted $27.6 million for the program.

A special commendation to Rep David L. Hobson, chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. In an August speech he said he viewed

...the administration's call for research on the new bombs and the earth penetrator, along with a proposal to shorten the lead time required to resume nuclear testing, as "very provocative and overly aggressive policies that undermine our moral authority to argue that other nations should forgo nuclear weapons.''

"We cannot advocate for nuclear nonproliferation around the globe and pursue more useable nuclear weapons options at home,'' Mr. Hobson said at the symposium, which was sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment.

The Senate was friendlier to the Energy Department's budget request but in a closed negotiating session to reconcile the two measures, Mr. Hobson's position prevailed.

Go, Davey, go!!

Oh, it was a fine day on Capitol Hill. And clearly too much to expect that the session would end without providing at least several handfuls more of compelling reasons for Congressional reform.

The Omnibus budget bill got caught up in a complicated little wrinkle, for all the world to see on CSPAN. Seems someone (turns out a House Republican) unbeknownst to certainly the Democrats and, according to Sen Stevens, unbeknownst to the Senate Republicans as well, tried to slip a little passage in the volumnious text.

It would have given the Chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees or their "agents" the power to review any American's tax return with no restrictions whatsoever. Josh Marshall has many of the lovely specifics, but here's the core:

Specifically, none of the privacy law restrictions -- or the criminal and civil penalties tied to them -- would apply when the Chair or anybody he or she designates as his or her "agent" looked at your tax return.
[...]
Sen. Stevens of Alaska, Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, originally blamed the provision on a 'staffer'. But later, according to the AP, Sen. Frist and "congressional aides" said it was inserted at the behest of Rep. Istook [R, Ok., Chair, House Transportation Sub-Committee of Appropriations Committee].
[...]
At the last minute, Senate Democrats caught the language (keep in mind these omnibus bills can be like phone books), protested and the Republicans beat a hasty retreat. Some of it is discussed in this AP article at MSNBC, though they lamely call it a "tax-disclosure gaffe."

The Republicans are acting like it was all an innocent mistake. And it seems clear that there are Republican senators who didn't know anytihng about it and are pissed. But clearly this was no accident, unless provisions have started to write themselves.

The Kossacks had a field day, live blogging the Senate floor appearances of outraged Democrats. The Republicans must be glad they're leaving town for Thanksgiving right about now.

With President Bush off to Santiago's APEC meetings for a rare display of multilateralism -- getting the North Korean talks going again, reinvigorating a Western hemisphere free trade pact -- somebody's got to keep up the side. The Republicans on the Hill have marched into the breach, intent on once again earning their unilateralist stripes.

From the business pages of the FT, that mouthpiece for the Socialist Internatonale, comes this tid-bit:

The US Congress is threatening to cut off funding for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development unless the OECD ends efforts to promote fair international tax competition.

The measure, which could deprive the Paris-based think-tank [i.e., the policy club of wealthy countries, where the US has significant influence, ed.] of its largest funding source, is part of a huge spending bill that Congress is trying to pass by this weekend.
[...]
The OECD wrangle has been fuelled by anti-tax groups that say the organisation is wrongly attempting to penalise countries that lower their taxes to attract investment. Senator Judd Gregg, incoming chairman of the Senate budget committee, has added language to the spending bill that would halt OECD funding unless the organisation stops pressing tax-haven countries in the Caribbean and elsewhere to share information on companies that may be attempting to evade taxes.

You say whaaaat....?! Used to be that when Congresmen or Senators would get up to this sort of nonsense, someone from the White House congressional liaison office and Treasury would do a full-court press. The idea was to avoid just the sort of situation we have here -- a half-baked but extreme over-reaction that would be extremely damaging to US external relations, coming to the surface at the eleventh hour, mixed in with an urgent omnibus bill, and with enough publicity that the Senator has to save face.

When ol' Jesse departed the Senate and the Foreign Relations Committee, there was an audible sign of relief across every department and agency in Washington that does business with an international organization. But now that "unilateralism" has become a badge of courage, seems like everyone wants in the act.

That's left it to the OECD to try to explain things to the nation's represenatives:

Donald Johnston, the OECD secretary-general, was in Washington this week lobbying Congress to drop the provision. Nicholas Bray, a spokesman for Mr Johnston, said many in Congress misunderstood the OECD initiative, which is not aimed at “tax harmonisation” but at “levelling the playing field in terms of foreign competition on tax policy”.

Inquiring minds want to know. Is the proposed change in House Republican Conference rules , which would protect Tom DeLay's leadership position if he's indicted, a pre-emptive or a preventive strike?

House Republicans were contemplating changing their rules in order to allow members indicted by state prosecutors to remain in a leadership post, a move designed to benefit Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) in case he is charged by a Texas grand jury that has indicted three of his political associates, GOP leaders said today.

The rules change, which some leaders said is likely to be adopted Wednesday, comes as House Republicans return to Washington indebted to DeLay for the enhanced majority they won in this month's elections. DeLay led an aggressive redistricting effort in Texas last year that resulted in five Democratic House members retiring or losing reelection. It also triggered the grand jury inquiry into fundraising efforts related to the state legislature's redistricting actions.

So let me see if I understand. If you cheat, and it works, and your party makes out like, uh, proverbial bandits, then the party in gratitude protects you -- or in other words, crime pays?!? Do you hear the sound of Jon Stewart's voice in here somewhere?

Karl Rove's summary this morning of Bush II's coming attractions:

President Bush will renew a quest in his second term for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage as essential to a "hopeful and decent" society, his top political aide said on Sunday.

   more »

I'm planning on writing a fair bit in the near future about where Democrats can go from here. As I wrote yesterday, I think we do great on issues and ideas, but have some work to do on thematic packaging. So as a first step, I'd like to propose a provisional Mission Statement for the Party. In the days to come, I'll apply that Mission Statement to various issues and ideas that come up in elections.

This is a big job and I'm looking for some help. But I'm ready to start the ball rolling with the following proposed MISSION STATEMENT:

The Democratic Party will provide an enlightened government that will help Americans be free, safe, healthy, and prosperous.

   more »

This comment captures perfectly my increasingly partisan sentiments after reading the Boston Globe's devastating coverage of the rules of conducting the peoples' business in the DeLay House ("Back room dealing a Capitol trend,"Energy bill a special-interests triumph, and "Medicare bill a study in D.C. spoils system".

Captain Obvious on Tacitus, commenting on Cheney's incomprehensible fiction that he'd never met Edwards before the debate:

Gore got savaged for much less... here's to hoping that karma truly is a bitch.

---

UPDATE [9-6-04 10:40AM] by nadezhda

Well here's a bit of instant karma!

In response to Edwards' attack on Haliburton connections, Cheney referred viewers to a website that lays out the Haliburton story. The site is factcheck.org, which is part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at U of Penn. But Cheney misspoke and referred instead to factcheck.COM.

Aww, go ahead. Make your day. Click on it. (Courtesy Bat Guano, via Political Animal.)

Just wondering.