Congress gets poor marks
June 29, 2006 | By Nathaniel Ward
Heritage's experts gave Congress poor marks for their performance so far in 2006.
It’s now halfway through the year, and a good time to see how Congress is faring. In short, they’re not doing well at all. Here’s how Heritage’s experts graded them:
- Spending restraint
House: D+; Senate: D - Budget process reform
House: D; Senate: F - Earmark reform
House: D; Senate: C– - Property rights
House: A+; Senate: D– - Social Security reform
House: F; Senate: D– - Pension reform
House: B–; Senate: D - Energy
House: D; Senate: F - Tax relief
House: B; Senate: C– - Tax reform
House: B; Senate: C– - Medicare
House: F; Senate: F - Medicaid
House: B–; Senate: C - Health care reform
House: F; Senate: D
This is atrocious. The House averaged a C– and the Senate a D. They can certainly do better than this.
- Read an explanation of these grades from Heritage’s experts
- Print this report card
- Send this report to five others
- Get involved and help Heritage educate Congress to improve its grades
Rest assured, Heritage will be working hard with the House and Senate to improve these grades in the 40 or so days they will be in session before the November elections.
The interstates turn 50
Fifty years ago today, President Eisenhower signed the interstate highway system into law, paving the way (pun intended) for the creation of a 42,000-mile national road network. While the interstates are usually looked on as one of the crown jewels of federal programs, Heritage’s Ron Utt puts things in perspective in an exclusive article for MyHeritage.org:
Intended as a temporary program that would dissolve sometime around 1970, the highway construction took a little longer than expected, and the 42,000 miles were not completed until the early 1980s. But though the system was completed, Congress had become addicted to the fuel tax money flowing into the highway trust fund, and today the program is bigger than ever—and far more wasteful than its creators could ever have imagined.
Not only that, building the highways cost 400 percent more than originally anticipated.
Deep-ocean oil exploration
America has been blessed with vast oil and natural gas reserves, Heritage’s Ben Lieberman reports, many of them underwater, miles off America’s shores. These deep-ocean reserves, studies show, could supply several years of energy consumption, but environmental restrictions imposed in the 1990s mean that 85 percent of these areas are off-limits to exploration or drilling.
In fact, Canada already allows offshore drilling, and even Cuba may get into the game—just 45 miles from American shores, using technologies that are less advanced than anything an American company would have access to.
As Lieberman reports in a separate paper, “America stands alone in the world as the only nation that has placed a substantial amount of it domestic oil and natural gas potential off-limits.” He concludes that one bill recently introduced in the House, the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act of 2006, “would allow increases in the supply of domestic oil and gas and thereby improve the prospects for a more affordable energy future.”
Thatcher Center launches website
The Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, established last year at The Heritage Foundation with the help of a generous gift from the Thatcher Foundation, has launched a new website. The Thatcher Center, headed up by Director and Lomas Fellow Nile Gardiner and honored with a mandate to carry on Lady Thatcher’s legacy, focuses its research on four areas:
- The Special Relationship between Britain and America
- U.S. policy toward Europe
- International institutions like the United Nations
- The Anglo-American free enterprise model
Stop by the Thatcher Center website to keep up with all its important work.
The origins of Communist brutality
Communist governments have over the past century killed untold millions of their own citizens. Josef Stalin killed tens of millions in the Soviet Union alone. But why?
Speaking yesterday at The Heritage Foundation, scholar Paul Hollander said that the atrocities perpetrated by Communist governments against their own citizens can best be understood as “violence with a higher purpose.” Communists genuinely held to the misguided “belief that [violent] policies paved the way to some future social-political system.” This immoral notion was founded, in turn, on the belief that “they had some kind of scientific basis for their policies.”
Happy Independence Day
As next Tuesday is Independence Day, there will be only one MyHeritage.org e-mail next week, on Thursday.
In other news
- Tensions are high in the Middle East as Israeli troops continued their offensive into the Gaza strip early Thursday, arresting Palestinian leaders and searching for the Israeli soldier held hostage by terrorists. Though Hamas’ leaders deny a role in the soldier’s kidnapping, their recent praise for that and other acts of terrorism contradicts recent claims that the group is adopting a more peaceful approach towards Israel, whose annihilation is among Hamas’ founding principles. Meanwhile, a Palestinian terrorist group claims to have fired a chemical rocket at Israel , and Israeli warplanes appeared over the residence of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in an apparent warning to that country’s government, which harbors Hamas’ top leader. Early reports also suggest that an Israeli civilian kidnapped earlier this week was murdered by his terrorist captors.
- The Supreme Court ruled today in a 5-3 decision that President Bush overstepped his authority in arranging military war-crimes tribunals for captured terrorists. Chief Justice Roberts recused himself because of earlier involvement in the case. The ruling, though, does not speak to the legality of the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—so the terrorists will remain in custody. Indeed, the camp’s commander told Reuters that the ruling probably doesn’t have “any direct outcome on our detention operation.”
- America and its allies expect Iran to respond to its proposal for negotiations by July 5. It is unknown whether the radical Islamic dictatorship will accept the offer.
- The Senate unanimously confirmed Henry Paulson as the next Secretary of the Treasury on Wednesday. Paulson told a Senate committee earlier this week that America needs to confront the looming entitlement crisis while keeping taxes low and avoiding “creeping regulatory expansion.” Keeping the economy strong “calls for spending discipline and predictable taxation, combined with prudent regulation,” he said.
- New economic numbers reveal that the economy expanded in the first three months of the year at 5.6 percent—faster than previously reported. Liberal proposals to raise taxes and meddle in the economy would most likely undermine this strength.
Coming up at Heritage
To attend these or any other Heritage Foundation events, RSVP at Heritage’s events website. Or you can watch these events live online at Heritage.org. All times are Eastern.
- On Tuesday, July 11 at noon, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) joins Heritage’s Peter Brookes, former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Michael Tanji and terrorism researcher Thomas Joscelyn for “The Captured Iraqi Intelligence Documents: What Do They Reveal and How Should They Be Handled?” a discussion of documents captured from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, many of which have yet to be translated.
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
