House Republican leader Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, of all people, has dropped a live bomb of an idea into the White House’s new online suggestion box: a mandatory 72-hour review period before Congress votes on any major spending bill.
The virtual box, designed more for the average citizen to be able to offer ideas on making government more transparent, went into a digital frenzy, Politico reported.
When Newsmax checked on Friday, the Boehner idea-grenade had amassed 677 votes from site browsers for “Looks Promising” — outstripping a proposal encouraging local governments to adopt the White House’s open-government policies, calls for an end to the “imperial presidency,” demands for the prosecution of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and a nifty plan to legalize and tax marijuana.
Boehner's post maintains that a mandatory review period would “prevent taxpayer-funded outrages” such as “the empty ‘Airport for No One’ in the congressional district of Democratic Rep. John Murtha” and “huge bonuses for AIG executives.”
Boehner’s fixation on the issue of Democratic spending certainly precedes its colorful manifestation in the online suggestion box.
Just this past week, Boehner issued a scathing statement about the administration’s “100-day” report on the Democrats’ trillion-dollar stimulus spending bill:
“The trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ has fallen short of the Administration’s claims, and middle-class families and small businesses are paying dearly,” he wrote. “It hasn’t created the jobs American families hoped for, brought the transparency to government the president promised, or moved money into communities as quickly as the administration pledged.
“On every score, it has not lived up to the expectations set out for it, all while leaving our children and grandchildren to foot the bill.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” he concluded. “Republicans had a better solution: a stimulus bill that would have created twice as many jobs as the Administration’s spending bill at half the price. Unfortunately, Washington Democrats took a ‘go-it-alone approach,’ barreling ahead with their inefficient and wasteful ‘stimulus’ spending plan that has failed to produce the results the Administration promised.”
In a tribute to the power of the Internet, Boehner’s suggestion has received much more attention than any run-of-the-mill House news release.
Meanwhile, noted Politico, Boehner’s modest victory in an online poll keeps Boehner alive and well in the policy wars – as Boehner discovers yet another way to tout spending cuts and notions for trimming federal spending.
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