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Stormy Monday, 5/5/14
Jeff Rosenzweig: Stormy Monday, 5/5/14
The great John Conyers might not make it onto the primary ballot this year as he seeks a 26th term. Cathy Garrett, Wayne County’s Clerk, said late last week that signatures collected by two Detroit circulators are apparently invalid since the circulators are not registered voters or weren’t at the time they collected signatures, leaving the Congressman short of the required 1,000 signatures. Pursuant to a formal complaint from primary rival Horace Sheffield, a final ruling in the matter will be issued Wednesday, and Conyers could be forced to run this fall as a write-in candidate.
Evidently convinced that the millions of dollars and many thousands of person-hours already blown on brainless, redundant parallel committee hearings on the Benghazi pseudo-scandal were just not an egregious enough exercise in Congressional overreach and grandstanding, John Boehner announced last week that he will soon convene a select committee to conduct the mother of all pseudo-investigations. Hey, it’s an election year, and House Republicans have to be seen to be doing something so that they can avoid actually, you know, doing something. Or something. Watch for committee hopefuls to audition via the airwaves this week, eagerly showcasing their outrage.
Speaking of stale-dated nonsense, the House is expected this week to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress for her supposed role in the agency’s supposedly unfair treatment of conservative groups.
This week, the Senate takes up the Shaheen-Portman energy bill, which would do good things like stepping up conservation practices at federal agencies and providing training in energy-efficient technologies. Since the bill as authored apparently didn’t contain anything terrible, along came North Dakota Senator John Hoeven (a Republican) and Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu (who is almost one) to offer up an amendment which would mandate construction of the infamous Keystone XL Pipeline despite the State Department’s continuing review and a pending lawsuit over the pipeline’s proposed route...
More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/04/stormy-monday-5514/
