From a New York Times editorial, 6/9/06:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/opinion/09fri2.html?ex=1307505600&en=f8ca96773963ef15&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
What Passes for Good News
Any day in which the House or Senate refrains from doing something
destructive is about as good as it gets in Washington lately.
Yesterday, the Senate cleared that low bar when it rejected efforts to
repeal the estate tax.
The nation is at war and the budget is so wildly out of balance that
the government cannot pay its bills without borrowing money from
foreign investors.
The idea that this is a good moment to repeal a tax on people who
inherit multimillion-dollar estates is mind-boggling.
But Congress, pushed by the lobbying efforts of a handful of
super-rich families, was on the brink of doing just that.
The country was saved from that fate when the Senate fell three votes
short of the 60 needed to prevent a filibuster by Democrats who were
rightly horrified by the whole idea.
The senators who deserve the most credit for saving the day, however,
were George Voinovich of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island,
Republicans who broke with their party to help block consideration of
the repeal.
Mr. Voinovich said, rightly, that the idea of eliminating the tax
under current conditions was "incredibly irresponsible and
intellectually dishonest."
Majority Leader Bill Frist, on the other hand, was the chief culprit.
Mr. Frist appears convinced that the best way he can demonstrate his
potential as a presidential candidate is to march the chamber through
votes on all the most divisive and useless legislation moldering on
the agenda -- banning gay marriages, writing a prohibition of the
nonexistent flag-burning problem into the Constitution, and
eliminating a tax that applies only to the richest 1 percent of the
population.
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Slick Willie Frist's sure got some purty strange priorities.
Harry
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