Powerless ?Power Player?? Wallace Omits GOP?s Plan To Gut Holly Petraeus?s Work For Military Families
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on February 21st, 2011 5:36 am by HL
On today’s Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace heralded Holly Petraeus — Gen. David Petraeus’s wife — as his “Power Player of the Week.” Mrs. Petraeus is the new head of the Office of Servicemembers Affairs “which aims to strengthen and support military families financially as part of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” (CFPB.) Created by the Wall Street reform law last year, CFPB will give Petraeus a vehicle to “enforce the laws” and “write new rules” in order “to ensure that federal and state agencies coordinate their activities to improve consumer protection measures for military families.” Touting Mrs. Petraeus’s ability “to help military families” through the new bureau, Wallace instructed “military famlies and all the rest of us” to use the CFBP to “register complaints” about fraud:
WALLACE: As part of new financial regulation reform, she’s setting up the office of servicemember affairs to protect military consumers…Petraues says on military bases, there are a lot of young people with guaranteed paychecks on their own for the first time.
PETRAUES: So you add those factors together and it makes them kind of easy pickings for somebody who is looking to rip them off.[…]
WALLACE: Now, as part of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she’ll be able to help military families.
PETRAUES: It’ll give me the power to enforce the laws that are on the books, and also to write rules. […] I had a young CB who had heard me speak come up and tell me — i had been talking about a scam, a secret shopper scam — he said “you just saved us $3,000 dollars.” A moment like that makes you feel it’s all worthwhile.
WALLACE: Military families and all the rest of us can visit a new government website at consumerfinance.gov to register complaints against financial companies.
Watch it:
In his praise of this “Power Player,” Wallace breezed by the other powerful players dedicated to gutting Petraeus’s work on behalf of military families — Republicans. Not one House Republican voted to create the CFPB and now, they want to cut funding for the CFPB “nearly in half” in the new budget. Just last week, Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) introduced legislation in the House Financial Services Committee to “hamstring, or defund” CFPB, a goal House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) confirms is a GOP priority. Neugebauer expects the GOP-led House to pass his bill “if and when the proper vehicle arrives.”
The fact that such an effort would undermine help to military families and veterans won’t matter to a party already predisposed to fail in helping the troops. After all, it took considerable outrage from military families for Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to finally relent on her draconian cuts to veterans’ benefits. The GOP plan to gut Petraeus’s efforts to help military families, thus, comes as no surprise. The fact that Wallace failed to mention it, however, does.
FLASHBACK: Abraham Lincoln Wrote Playbook For Wisconsin Dems Who Fled State
Wisconsin Democratic state senators who fled the state to block Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) union busting said today they have “no plans to return to the state until Walker could reach a reasonable negotiation with state employees.” Republican politicians and conservative commentators have lambasted the state senators all week for their supposed “dereliction of duty.” But those in the Party of Lincoln should look to the 16th president before they criticize the Wisconsin Democrats.
Indeed, 170 years before the Wisconsin Democrats fled Madison to deny a quorum, then-state Rep. Abraham Lincoln was fleeing the capitol in Springfield, IL — via a window, no less — to do the same in an attempt to save the State Bank of Illinois:
[Democrats] agreed to allow [the bank] to suspend its obligation to exchange its paper money for specie, but only for the remainder of the legislative session.
That’s when Lincoln determined to keep the legislature in session in order to buy precious time for the bank to find a way to survive, and that’s how he jumped into the national limelight on December 5, 1840. On that date, the Democrats proposed an early adjournment, knowing this would bring a speedy end to the State Bank. The Whigs tried to counter by leaving the capitol building before the vote, but the doors were locked. That’s when Lincoln made his move. He headed for the second story, opened a window and jumped to the ground!
Lincoln’s efforts failed, sadly, and “the bank was killed.” But as the Wall Street Journal pointed out yesterday, “The tactic of quorum avoidance by simply leaving dates back at least to the days when the U.S. Constitution was being debated”:
Legislators tried to stymie passage [of the Constitution] in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts that way, and some in Pennsylvania had to be dragged out of a tavern to vote. The Constitution passed.
There have been at least four occasions of blocking a quorum in Wisconsin’s legislature alone. … And one representative in 1951, Rep. Ruth Doyle, had to be retrieved from the women’s bathroom for a vote on a resolution for the legislature to hear Gen. Douglas MacArthur speak.
Indeed, the tactic has been used in the U.S. Senate on occasion as well. More recently, the tactic garnered national headlines in 2003 when Texas Democrats fled to New Mexico to block a GOP redistricting effort. Eliot Shapleigh, one of the “Texas Eleven” is now advising the Wisconsin Democrats. “Stay close. When one gets picked off, the game’s over,” Shapleigh told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel yesterday.
