AT HOME AND ABROAD

Send up a cheer. House Speaker John Boehner and his Republican majority have decided to come back to work, or create mischief depending on your point of view. The new Congress has been in session just over a month and the House has been in recess most of that time, including most of the last two weeks for what it calls "constituent work". Translation: go back home and start campaigning for re-election.

In the short episodic occasions the House has been in session, its achievements have been to pass a bill to repeal President Obama's health care reform law and to pass a toothless resolution to cut $60 billion out of this year's budget. It is often said by the legislators and others that Congress does most of its work in committees. In looking over the House schedule there was no indication that there were any committee meetings. In the normal course of the legislative process, the committees hold hearings on bills or on overseeing various activities of the government. The committees then feed approved bills into the legislative pipeline and these bills, or some of them, go to the House floor for debate and passage or rejection. If nothing goes into that pipeline, then nothing comes out. But that seems to be okay with Boehner and his leadership team. In calling for repeal of health care reform, they have no counter proposals of their own so the GOP-chaired committees have nothing to work on. While happy to denounce Obama on jobs and the economy, they have offered no economic recovery proposals of their own.

So what we have had from Boehner, et al, are feeble political efforts to appease the right wing of the party without doing anything of substance on the "people's business" unless you call campaigning back home the people's business. But that's what happens when you provide an abundance of money for lawmakers to travel home to politic. Now Boehner is talking about cuts in the congressional budget, but not nearly as large as cuts to various federal domestic agencies and programs. Also, it will be important to see exactly where the congressional cuts are made -- to the members' various staff, office, and travel accounts or institutions like the General Accountability Office and Library of Congress which fall within Congress' budget.

By way of contrast, while the GOP House was in recess the Democratic Senate stayed in session and there were numerous committee meetings on the schedule, as well as some floor votes. The Senate voted against a GOP effort to repeal health care reform. It voted, with bipartisan support, to repeal a section of the health care law that was recognized to be a particularly burdensome reporting requirement. And it passed a resolution supporting the popular uprising in Egypt. It also took up a bill concerning the Federal Aviation Agency.

So much for the homefront. Now for a look abroad with a domestic slant, which, at least for the present, takes one to Egypt and the Middle East.

A recent posting on this blog was on the possibility of a rerun of the bitter l950s recriminations about "Who lost China?" My point there was that we may get a rerun with the question being "Who Lost Egypt?" To this point the GOP leadership has been supportive of Obama's tightrope effort to identify with the anti-Mubarak protesters, viewing it as an opening for instilling democracy in an historically undemocratic Egypt.

But as the posting noted, the place to look for any beginning of a "Who lost Egypt?" witch hunt would be the right wing talk shows which so often provide the talking points for a wide range of anti-Obama issues. These talking points then become part of the anti-Obama mantra. It may be too soon to tell, but Rush Limbaugh has planted a seed for such a right wing mantra, saying that Obama has supported the Muslim Brotherhood, best known for its goal of establishing Islamic law-based governments in Egypt and the wider Muslim world. The dust has to settle in Egypt itself before we can tell if such a mantra has staying power. If the Brotherhood does play a significant role in a post-Mubarak Egypt, one can expect Limbaugh and kindred spirits to push the point as far as they can -- Obama lost Egypt to radical Islamists. Meanwhile Glenn Beck has been orbiting in his own celestial world about the Egyptian uprising being part of a conspiracy to establish a new Islamic caliphate throughout the Muslim world.

I'll conclude on a strictly "abroad" note. Another previous posting presented the possibility of Turkey becoming the replacement for the U.S. in our assumed role as the country which can foster political and economic stability in the region. It is difficult to imagine that the Egyptian uprising and other anti-government movements in the region will not diminish the U.S. image and political credibility in the region. If that is the case, then whom can we look to as a counterbalance to Iran becoming the dominant power in the region, to the virtual takeover of Lebanon by Hezbollah, and as a new spear carrier for the long-running Israeli-Palestinian confrontation and the U.S. effort supporting the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Beyond what was said in the post, "A Turkish Alternative," space today doesn't permit any further discussion of Muslim Turkey's role in the region. Except to say that, given the current state of the various anti-government movements in the Middle East, the possibility of a growing Turkish role requires a closer look stripped of the suspicions of many that Turkey, as a Muslim country, can't be trusted to instill our "western" morality and values into the Arab world.

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P.S. Couldn't help noticing in the morning paper that two House subcommittees will hold hearings this week on restrictions on federal funding of abortions. Forget any national agenda, go to work on stuff that appeals to the right wing/Tea Party agenda.