[Vision2020] The Women Versus the Ted

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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May 24, 2013
The Women Versus the Ted By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html>

Let’s discuss how much better Congress would work if most of the members
were women.

The Senate seems to be a tad less polarized since the female population
rose from 17 to 20 this year. It’s also possible that there’s been more
productivity since women got more power. For instance, the Budget Committee
has a new chair, Patty Murray of Washington, and it has produced a budget
for the first time in four years.

It’s conceivable that the committee was inspired by a rule that would have
canceled the senators’ salaries if they didn’t deliver. But I’m hoping for
a larger picture.

“Women tend to listen to what everybody’s needs are, rather than just
saying: ‘I’m the only bright person in the world and you have to listen to
what I say,’ ” suggested Murray in a phone conversation from her home
state, where she was inspecting a spectacular bridge collapse. We will all
stop here to envision the moment in the State of the Union address when
President Obama called for more bridge repair projects and John Boehner
failed to applaud.

The Senate passed its budget two months ago, after 50 hours of debate and
an all-night series of 70 amendment votes. The next step was to send
members to a House-Senate conference committee, but the Republicans held
that up, arguing that before the conference committee could work on an
agreement, the Senate should decide what the agreement would say.

The obstructionists’ great fear — I swear to you this is true — is that if
the House and Senate conferees get together, the Republicans from the House
will be so overwhelmed by the charm and power of the Senate Democrats that
they’ll agree to a grand bargain that includes raising the debt ceiling.

“Let me be clear. I don’t trust the Republicans,” said Senator Ted Cruz, a
Republican.

This has been going on for ages. Recently, a couple of the Republican
senators — John McCain and Susan Collins — demanded that their colleagues
stop stalling and follow the rules. This could be a plus for my argument,
since half of that little rebellion is a woman.

But it also brings up a second possibility, that if the Senate is inching
slightly closer to the middle, it’s because many of the Republicans are
beginning to reject Tea Party extremism due to their hatred of Ted Cruz.

“It has been suggested that those of us who are fighting to defend liberty,
fighting to turn around the out-of-control spending and out-of-control debt
in this country, fighting to defend the Constitution — it has been
suggested that we are wacko birds,” Cruz said proudly. “Well, if that is
the case, I will suggest to my friend from Arizona there may be more wacko
birds in the Senate than is suspected.”

Actually, no student of the Senate has ever suggested a wacko bird
shortage.

Cruz is aligned with other young Tea Party Republicans, including Mike Lee
of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky. They’re all very conservative and very
talkative, but senators target Cruz as the one who just goes on and on and
on and on.

He’s definitely the person responsible for bringing back the maverick
version of John McCain. You will remember McCain the campaign finance
reformer who kept co-sponsoring bills about global warming with Joe
Lieberman. The one John Kerry thought about making his running mate before
Kerry stumbled on the truly exceptional alternative of John Edwards.

The maverick McCain evolved into John McCain, terrible presidential
candidate, and then John McCain, terrified right-wing Senate re-election
candidate. The sullen, superpartisan version was bitter about losing the
presidency to a cocky young whippersnapper like Barack Obama. But now
McCain sees an Obama who has become winningly gray-haired and beleaguered.
While in his place there is Ted Cruz, who is younger and cockier and a
trillion times more irritating.

“When I travel across the state of Texas, men and women stop me all the
time, and say: ‘Enough of the games. Go up there, roll up your sleeves,
work with each other and fix the problem,’ ” Cruz lectured his colleagues
this week, while he was engaged in stopping the budget process dead in its
tracks for the ninth straight time.

So, people, who do you think has been more helpful in edging the Senate
toward a pinch of progress? The women or Ted Cruz? One strives for
collegiality by holding regular bipartisan dinners. One called his
colleagues “squishes” for opposing a gun control filibuster.

I’m sticking with the girls. “Women seem to know how to work in a way that
at least moves the process,” said Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, the
new chair of Appropriations. If you can agree on how to proceed, then maybe
someday you get some progress.

On the other hand, Ted Cruz has memorized the Constitution.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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