Conservative HQ

By CHQ Staff | 9/13/12

“I think the decisions we make in the lame-duck session are not wise decisions for America,” Representative Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) said in an interview with The Hill.

Were truer words ever spoken about how Congress works?

As The Hill’s Russell Berman noted, “Complaints about lame-duck sessions have been a recurring theme over the years. In the summer of 2010, Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.) introduced legislation to prohibit them entirely.”

But like so many other sensible congressional reforms, that one has languished because it gets in the way of Washington’s insiders working their nefarious activities.

Labrador and fellow conservative Congressman Jeff Landry of Louisiana want the party leadership to skip a lame-duck session entirely, even if it means temporarily going over the so-called fiscal cliff and allowing higher tax rates and deep spending cuts to take effect before the next Congress can come back to address them retroactively.

As freshman Congressman David Schweikert of Arizona put it, “For many of us, we look at what happened two years ago and see the bad policy that came out of that last lame-duck session.”

Of course, the Republican leadership is trying to make the case that if there is no fix enacted before the end of the year, it will create economic havoc -- and that to avoid such a "crisis," a fix must be enacted during a lame duck.

We think this just doesn’t stack-up with what we have seen in the past, where lame-duck sessions involved passing bills no Member of Congress had read and dark-of-the-night deals were cut to benefit special interests.

What’s more, defeated Democrats will have no incentive to cooperate with Republicans to make life easy for a newly elected Romney administration. If, heaven forbid, Obama is re-elected, he will hold a strong hand in any negotiations over taxes and spending by arguing that the people have spoken and deference should be given to his proposals – which are bound to include large tax increases.

Labrador, Landry and other conservatives who opposed all or parts of the Republican leadership deals that created the fiscal cliff are, as usual, making more sense than the GOP leadership.

If Republican leaders truly believe they will have stronger numbers in Congress after the 2012 election, they should quit talking about a lame-duck session that will empower the discredited, and hopefully defeated, Democrats one last time.

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