Pat Tiberi Accuses Deborah Pryce of Recklessly Threatening 200 Columbus Jobs

The Columbus Dispatch delivered a blanket endorsement back in October for Tiberi, Pryce, and Dave Hobson (OH-15,12, & 7), in this last election, claiming that the incuments' ability to bring home the pork justified any of their problematic enabling of the President. One cooperative endeavor was rightly highlighted in the endorsement:

When the Base Realignment and Closure committee had the Defense Supply Center Columbus and its 6,000 jobs on the chopping block last year, the three members, along with state and local officials, were instrumental in arguing that DSCC not only should be spared, but that the Defense Finance and Accounting Service on DSCC grounds should be expanded.

In the recent continuing appropriations bill, spending was re-structured such that the BRAC recommendations would have to be funded separately. Pat Tiberi voted against the appropriations bill, and he gave one solitary reason for doing so:

U.S. Congressman Pat Tiberi (OH-12) voted to protect 200 new jobs at Defense Supply Center Columbus (DSCC) created during the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Process. The jobs are currently scheduled to be transferred to DSCC in 2007, but are threatened because a Democratic $464 billion dollar spending bill cuts funding for BRAC by more than $3 billion...

...they will restore funding for BRAC in an upcoming emergency supplemental bill, but that’s not good enough. The Ohio delegation worked together to bring these new jobs to Ohio and with one quick vote, all of those jobs are threatened,” said Congressman Tiberi. “BRAC is not an emergency, the BRAC process is complete and its obligation to provide funding for this process and delaying it just doesn’t make sense.”

You can almost hear the pain in his voice as one member of that delegation, Deborah Pryce, a member of the Franklin County Three, abandoned Central Ohio and made a mockery of the Dispatch by callously dismissing, with one quick vote, those jobs they had worked so hard to bring here.

Of course, it's possible that Mr. Tiberi simply thinks Ms. Pryce is stupid and naive, that she has been duped into thinking that he, Pat Tiberi, is overstating the threat. Either way, I wonder what happened. They seemed to get along so well back in those majority days.

bonobo on BSB

As some of you might have seen, Jerid at Buckeye State Blog has invited me to be a front-pager at BSB. I'm honored, and it will mean a lot more eyes on my writing. Blue Bexley will, however, still be my primary outlet. Blue Bexley has always been a place where I wanted to focus on issues directly relevant to the people who share a district or districts with me. It still is. I just happen to have a place to spout off about topics with a broader interest. So just like BSB isn't the place to talk about Woodland Meadows or CSG, Blue Bexley won't be where I discuss the 2008 presidential primary, should I fall to temptation and actually weigh in.

And BTW, in between Bexley and the Buckeye State sits Franklin County. I'm still looking for a few good local bloggers.

Ed Amendment, then Tiberi on ONN this morning

Jim Betts and Bill Phillis discuss GIRFOF on Capitol Square (10am and 8pm), Pa(rro)t Tiberi on On the Hill (10:30am and 8:30pm). Note, if you watch Pat at 10:30 on ONN, you'll potentially miss "Johnny Smoke" Boehner on Meet the Press.

Update: I spent the day out and about with Charlotte, and I planned to catch On the Hill at 8:30 pm. It turns out that the Dispatch listed the wrong times, so I missed it (along with Capitol Square, which I thought I was going to get as a bonus). Obviously, I don't have a DVR, so I won't be able to catch the final broadcast tomorrow afternoon. There'll be an audio podcast at some point, which in some ways is preferable anyway, but I'm still pretty annoyed. You know what would be cool? If the Dispatch would buy ONN, and have one of their reporters host the show. Then they might know what times the program actually aired.

Now can we get an audit?

Gongwer is reporting that the Dems have withdrawn a complaint against Mary Taylor that had been in front of the Ohio elections Commission. Even though the OEC has come under a bunch of fire recently for its seemingly slow and ineffective, but ultimately irrelevant, proceedings... An official finding of deception is something that would be bound to come up in 2010, and wouldn't look good for the current standard-bearer for the GOP. The complaint wasn't dropped for lack of merit:

Days before the Nov. 7, 2006 election in which Ms. Taylor defeated Democrat Barbara Sykes for the auditor's post, a four-member review panel found probable cause of false statements and referred the matter to the full commission.

Attorney Donald McTigue said Thursday that counsel for Ms. Taylor subsequently asked Mr. Redfern to seek dismissal of the case, and that the chairman agreed to do so. The commission unanimously accepted the request to withdraw the complaint.

So why was it withdrawn by the Dems if it was true and had some potential utility in future elections as a legitimate point against Taylor? I don't really know how these things work. It could have been a courteous letting of bygones to be bygones. Or, perhaps, Taylor might have something the Dems want in exchange. I can think of something. Brunner has been calling for an official audit of the SoS office as it was run by Ken Blackwell. Ms. Taylor has been less than enthusiastic. In the spirit of a new Hannibal Lecter movie coming out, let me be the first to hiss:

 

Quid pro quo, Mary. Quid pro quo.

 

When will my representative stop whining?

Sometimes I have to step back and ask myself, do I really want to keep expressing the deep irritation the people who are supposed to be representing me keep causing? At some point, the constant irritation will start to look like a personality defect on my part rather than a natural reaction to the irritating antics of guys like Pat Tiberi. So it's kind of ironic that I'm watching Pat fall into that exact sort of cranky narcissism when it comes to Democrats. He started launching broad partisan condemnations of the majority even before this session convened, then he complained because they didn't allow amendments on the bills that were part of the legislative plan his party had insisted didn't exist. Now, he's complaining about the schedule. As his buddy John Boehner allowed back in December:

Setting a calendar that satisfies 435 members is impossible, said the current majority leader, Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who will become minority leader in January. "Between the travel issues, the members' work schedules, the family and district issues, it was a Rubik's cube," he said.

One solution, used by Boehner, was to give the House a 2.5-day work week, resulting in Congress being in session for the fewest total days since the Great Depression. Another solution is to create a 5-day work week. This is what Steny Hoyer has now done (well actually, it's a 3-full + two-half day schedule), and Pat doesn't like that solution at all:

Here we go again. Another campaign promise – broken. In the days surrounding Election Day, Democrats declared the return of five-day work weeks, implying that Congressmen didn’t work unless they were in Washington, D.C. voting.

See, the mean Democrats are going to make him stay in Washington and do work there. Oh no, wait, if you keep reading, he's not mad about that, he's mad because things like Martin Luther King Day have stopped him from putting in a five day work week. Oops, no, he didn't want to skip the two day Republican retreat to get more time in on the floor, he's just upset that the Democrats said they would make him work, and then, one week when they got their work sufficiently done, Hoyer didn't make them stay anyway. Of course, he didn't want Hoyer to make them stay, because the Dems would have just made him vote on more bills that he considers hardly worth his time. He wouldn't mind staying if the Dems would just let him pick out some legislation to debate. Except that he would, because there's nothing that can be done in five days by Democrats that couldn't be done in 2.5 days by Republicans anyway.

He then goes on to accuse Hoyer of keeping him in D.C. just to play politics.

Perhaps Mr. Tiberi is brilliant. We could talk about him voting against a minimum wage act that not only mirrors an incredibly popular ballot initiative here in Ohio, but would stop the supposed flow of minimum wage jobs from Ohio into neighboring states that conservatives like Ken Blackwell predicted would follow the implementation of minimum wage-hike here. We could ask him if, given that no loss-of-life is too much to reconsider our plans in Iraq, if there's a maximum dollar amount the U.S. should be willing to pour into the war before we start to worry about the much more important effects on growth. We could ask him if he believes cord-blood cells are an adequate substitute for the pluripotent embryonic stem cells he voted against using in federally funded research. We could ask him if he's among the 13% of Congressional Republicans who understand that global temperatures are rising due at least in part to human activity. We could try and get him to stop whimpering about entitlement reform and give us a detailed proposal for how he would modify Social Security.

We could actually engage him on a series of issues where his positions range from short-sighted to out-of-step to just plain wrong. Instead, folks like me get suckered into calling him out for his incessant incoherent petty moans about the mean old majority party, and how he doesn't like the way they do things. He's bratty like a fox.