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Eric Cantor on House Republicans: We're not lazy!
by Jed Lewison Thu Oct 27, 2011
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (center) is working hard—on all the wrong things
If this pushback is any indication of what's going on inside House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's mind, then he doesn't have a clue about why public approval of Congress has fallen to an all-time low of 9% since Republicans took control of the House:
In a 1-page “Dear Colleague” letter, Cantor pointed to several numbers that he said indicated a more deliberative and productive House due to the new schedule. For example, through Oct. 14 of this year, the House has taken 800 roll call votes so far, compared to 565 votes by the same time in 2010.“I believe this year’s calendar, because of its new design, helped improve the legislative culture of the House,” Cantor wrote in the letter released Thursday.
In his letter, Cantor also noted a “boom of activity” in House committees, with 1,276 hearings and 194 mark-ups held so far in 2011. Like this year, votes in the House in 2012 will be held later in the day between 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. – largely to allow committees sufficient time to do their work in the mornings.
Cantor seems to think that the public is pissed off because they don't think Congress is keeping itself busy. But that's not the problem—nobody keeps themselves up at night worrying how many hours per day members of Congress are on the job. What they care about is whether Congress is actually getting something done. And by that measure, Congress has been an absolute failure, and the blame falls squarely on Republicans.
Nobody doubts that Paul Ryan worked very hard to pass his budget plan that called for the end of Medicare as we know it. Nobody doubts that tea partiers spent countless hours plotting the debt ceiling debacle. Nobody questions whether John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have burned the midnight oil to figure out how to block President Obama's jobs agenda.
The problem isn't how hard House Republicans are working. It's that they are working for the wrong things. They've got their priorities upside down. And the only way to solve the problem is to throw them out next November.
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