Morning Bell: The Senate’s Secret Santa Agenda

Conn Carroll / December 03, 2010

Today the Labor Department released its monthly jobs report, which showed that the U.S. economy added an anemic 39,000 jobs this month and that the nation’s unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent. That marks the 19th month in a row that the unemployment has been over 9 percent, a post–World War II record.

So how is this lame duck Congress, a Congress that was thoroughly rejected at the polls just last month, greeting this news? By raising taxes on the American people by $700 billion. Is this what the American people want? Not at all. According to Gallup, only 31 percent of Americans believe the best approach for dealing with the economy is raising taxes. The vast majority of Americans (62 percent) believe that the best way to fix the economy is either through deficit reduction (39 percent) or lower taxes (23 percent). But neither of those items is on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D–NV) agenda.

So what legislative gifts is Reid planning on giving the American people this Christmas? No one knows for sure, but Reid’s wish list is long.

New START. Just this week we learned not only that Russia has moved tactical nuclear weapons closer to our NATO European allies but also that the State Department has been negotiating with Russia on missile defense “cooperation.” This after claiming for months that New START in no way limited our missile defense options. But before the ink was even dry on the treaty, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov insisted that “linkage to missile defense is clearly spelled out in the accord and is legally binding.” The Heritage Foundation has identified at least five sections of the treaty that limit missile defense. If the Administration has nothing to hide on this issue, then it should have no problem releasing the treaty negotiation records to confirm what U.S. negotiators were saying about missile defense. (more…)