Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Bipartisan claim by Naifeh puppet is bunch of bunk

The claim yesterday by the puppet of outgoing House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh that he will be promoting a bipartisan approach to government is the biggest lie since the FBI started questioning former state Sen. John Ford after Operation Tennessee Waltz.

Naifeh never was about being bipartisan when he was speaker. He would use subcommittees to perennially kill legislation, such as charter schools until we built enough momentum to get it out and into law. Naifeh made sure meaningful ethics reform proposed by fellow Democrat Rep. Frank Buck was always killed.

The reasoning of operating the Senate in a bipartisan way as former Senate President John Wilder was only in place to keep the dinosaur in power for more than three decades. It was never about better government. And Wilder was an outspoken critic of Operation Tennessee Waltz, which showed that power-sharing with the GOP was actually about power preservation.

Tennessee Democrats just keep coming up with tricks to frustrate the people at the ballot box. They've even employed their shenanigans against their own as in the case of former Sen. Rosalind Kurita. Any Democrat here who complains about Bush and Florida in 2000 is a hypocrite.

While I now support Choice because of my continuing experiences with leukemia and the close relationship I developed with my doctor, the people should not be denied a vote on the matter -- opening the door to a 48-hour waiting period for abortions and hospitalization for all late trimester abortions for the health of the mother.

Those are necessary safeguards. And the people should not be blocked from voting on the question of whether the state constitution provides more protection for abortions than the interpretation by the U.S. Supreme Court of the U.S. Constitution.

Yet abortion actually is just one of several issues on the GOP agenda. Some I don't like ... such as more anti-immigrant measures. But no party should meet any one columnist's approval. Most worrisome is the denial of the will of the people. That endangers our republic.

So does the bipartisan bunk being pushed by the no-name, new Speaker of the House.

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