Henry Waxman had an interesting thing to say in “The Hill”
“Can you imagine the reaction if each member of Congress had a campaign person paid for with taxpayer dollars?”
Apparently he’s considering legislation to ban federal funding of purely political staff.
On the other hand:
“The notion of taking politics out of governing is silly,” said Rich Galen, a GOP strategist, in reference to Waxman. “I understand what he’s getting at, but Rove would have had the influence he had no matter what his title was and what his duties were.”
Thoughts? Is it ok for taxpayers to fund a (necessarily) partisan and purely political staff position? Of course it’s a given that staffers (as well as office holders) may be partisan, but is it ok if the only purpose of the job is to be political and partisan?
Rove had no restraint.
So not only do I think it’s okay, I think it’s a fantastic idea… so long as it also means the end of big money.
This is dumb. Every Congressman/woman is a politician 100% of the time. Their staff are politicians 100% of the time. Policy is politics.
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p>All this proposal would do is create another bunch of useless paperwork and another bunch of bureaucrats to scutinize the useless paperwork, pretending to discern some difference between political and non-political.
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p>This strikes me as the electoral college proposal does: post-hoc rationalization of how Democrats managed to get themselves so thoroughly pantsed by Bush and Rove for 7 straight years. It wasn’t our fault; everything was unfair! See how we fixed it?
I tend to agree with you on the merits of this proposal. But National Popular Vote is (or at least should be) an utterly bipartisan, true “good government” move. Let the guy or gal with the most votes across the country be president. How can you seriously argue with that?
Like you said, how can you seriously argue with that? I mean, if someone is President and the people want him/her to stay President, why not? Why have this artificial rule prohibiting a President from be re-elected over and over and over. Just as American and the NPV… right?
Politics is the process policy makers use to make policy that determines who gets what, where, when and how. A standard definition that applies to private policy makers in the workplace(who gets the new computers first) and in families (who gets to use the car on Saturday night.)
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p>Sometimes policy makers in the public and private sectors consider all relevant information before they decide, sometimes they don’t.
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p>At least parents have the ultimate luxury of being able to get away with saying “because I said so that’s why.” For awhile anyway. I could get away with it until they were five and they started the “yeahbuts” to try to make my arbitrary and authoritarian decisions more transparent.
Policy is what politicians use to decide who gets what, when and how. In other words, policy is what politicians use to see that people who vote for them get goodies. In other words, policy is politics.
Only if taxpayers fund political operatives for all would-be challengers to the president. This is another case of incumbency protection — paying for political staff for the president, but not any governor, senator, etc., who may want to go after him.
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p>Of course all public policymakers are politicians…but there are strict and arcane rules about separating the two roles, unless you’re already the most visible politician of them all.