New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg has withdrawn his offer to serve as Commerce Secretary and the third Republican member of President Obama’s cabinet, citing irreconcilable philosophical differences:
“I’m a fiscal conservative, as everybody knows, a fairly strong one,” Mr. Gregg told reporters at a news conference in the Capitol. “And it just became clear to me that it would be very difficult, day in and day out, to serve in this cabinet or any cabinet.”
“It has become apparent during this process,” Mr. Gregg said, “that this will not work for me, as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the census, there are irresolvable conflicts for me.”
“We are functioning,” he added, “from a different set of views on many critical items of policy.”
What’s this about the census? As Byron York points out, the census – which is ordinarily in the Commerce Department’s portfolio – is politically sensitive: Census results drive the allocation of federal resources and congressional re-districting. Power, in other words.
Why would White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emmanuel want to take charge of the census? Perhaps because he feared that having Republican politician atop the standing apolitical bureaucracy at Commerce could jigger the results in politically congenial ways. That’s what the hyper-partisan Rahm would probably do, after all.
It takes a thief to smell a thief.
I think Rahm had it planned from the start – he wanted someone with an R after their name at Commerce to give him cover for a blatant power grab with the census. They realize they are in a very unique position to cement Democrat control over this country for decades, and I feel this is just the beginning.
As you already know, Lex and friends, having a Republican heading the Commerce dept. is a double plus. In the first place, the party in power could then take the major responsibility of the Commerce Dept., the national census, away from it and give it to more favorable-to-Democrat hands. As Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News, the “mainest” thing that Commerce does is to conduct the census every ten years, and the resulting figures could be skewed to give Democrats more votes in future elections.
But taking a Republican Senator away from the Senate could also mean that a Democrat could be appointed in his place, thus tilting the numbers still further toward a filibuster-proof Democratic voting bloc. If the troubled Minesota Senate election battle ends up with Democrat Al Franken getting the disputed Senate seat instead of Rubublican Coleman, there’s another safe Democratic seat in the Senate. This is important to the Democrat party, since Democratic leader Ted Kennedy is ill and on a short clock to survive. He will certainly not be on hand to swell the Democratic ranks on day to day voting.
Harry Reid and the Democratic party want a Senate which is filibuster proof, and it looks more and more as if they’re going to get one.
Marianne
Yes, it would have had the multiple beneficial effects of (1) castrating a conservative Republican, and (2) ensuring that magic number of 60 in the Senate. I concur that all politically important powers of Commerce would have been stripped from that agency if Gregg had taken it. Hillary is a shining example of just what was in store for him.
Scott Ott has a suggestion:
http://www.scrappleface.com/?p=3235
Funny, we’re not hearing the liberals crying about how the Prez is “illegally and conspiratorially concentrating power in the Executive Branch” as they coincidentally did for the past eight years.
I’m shocked.
Cap’n,
Of course the Obama/Emanuel Cabal want to control the census. Once completed, every Democrat Party Governor or Democrat controlled State Assemble will ensure no Republican-majority district ever appears on on Statewide political maps again.
These people are unscrupulous, demonstrably corrupt, avaricious, slime with pretensions of godhood. Then there’s Obama and Emanuel who oozed out from under some rock.
I find the consistent reelection of some of the Democrats to be amazing. Harry Ried and Nancy Pelosi even LOOK evil, and just looking at Chris Dodd and Barney Frank tells you that these are not honest, honorable people.
Truly, I do sometimes wonder, if the last, best hope for humanity is coming to an end.
With the 2000 census the left did want an enumeration, they insisted on “sampling” techniques to allow for “under counting” in the urban areas they contend has been happening for years. The Courts, IIRC, held that the census was constitutionally an enumeration, meaning simply, a count, not an exercise in statistics. How you could arrive at anything close to accurate with some kind of sampling technique is beyond me. Most likely, that was the point. It would be easily manipulated.