This editorial will appear in Sunday’s print edition.

It was probably inevitable that a Washington Post report on congressional earmarks would turn up something on U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Belfair.

As a veteran member of Congress who has risen to leadership roles, he’s as well-positioned as anyone to bring home the bacon – more politely known as earmarks – to his district and state. For most folks, that’s fine – a perk that goes along with having a congressman with lots of seniority. Read more »

This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

Supercommittee? More like Sad Sack committee.

Today was the deadline for the 12 members of Congress charged with charting a path toward national solvency. By Thanksgiving, they were supposed to have produced a package of measures to reduce the U.S. government’s debt – which just exceeded $15 trillion – by $1.2 trillion.

The total reduction they came up with: $0.

All their fumblings and failures played out against a truly alarming background: the crumbling of Europe’s economy under the weight of unsupportable debt and many years of unsustainable spending by southern European countries. That crisis threatens to kill America’s weak, flickering recovery and drag us right back into recession.

You would think that the cataclysmic unfolding of Europe’s folly – that’s our future, folks! – would persuade Republicans, Democrats, anybody, to throw out the old partisan talking points and reach a serious deficit-cutting agreement. Instead we get partisan gridlock in Congress, which led to the creation of the supercommittee, which promptly settled into its own partisan gridlock.

Republican and Democratic leaders are frantically blaming each other for the collapse, hoping the voters will punish the other party in the 2012 elections. That tells you where their hearts are.

Within the supercommittee, there actually were moves toward compromise. On the Republican side, Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania abandoned the GOP’s no-taxes-or-the-lady-dies posture and suggested $300 billion in revenue measures. Some Democrats were willing to pare back Medicare, Social Security and other entitlements.

In the end, though, the supercommittee – like Congress – didn’t have enough statesmen or stateswomen willing to put the nation’s interests above their party’s – or their own careers, for that matter.
Read more »

This editorial will appear in Monday’s print edition.

Ten years after it was enacted, the No Child Left Behind Act needs overhauling. On that there is little disagreement.

But on how to do it? A lot of disagreement.

A polarized Congress hasn’t done anything to address the flaws in the education legislation that was a centerpiece of President George W. Bush’s presidency. The Obama administration’s unilateral decision to grant states waivers from the law should prod Congress to make substantive changes in NCLB.

The waivers – which are allowed under NCLB – would let states bypass 10 provisions of the act, including the requirement that all children show proficiency in reading and math by 2014. In return, states would have to impose their own standards to prepare students for college and careers and adopt more stringent performance-based evaluation standards for teachers and principals.

NCLB has served an important purpose by focusing money and attention on the worst-performing schools and the children who had few alternatives to attending them. Read more »

This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

Redraw the political map purely for the benefit of Pierce County, and you’d get a bizarre gerrymander in which four or five congressional districts somehow fan out from the Tacoma Dome.

The more members of Congress looking out for Pierce County’s interests, the better.

That, alas, can’t happen. The four-member redistricting commission now overhauling the state’s political boundaries must pay lip service to geography and is supposed to keep communities as intact to the extent possible. We trust the final plan will also keep a key relationship intact – the one between Tacoma and U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks.

The unspoken – but overriding – priority of nearly any redistricting effort is to protect incumbents and maximize partisan advantage. Washington’s commission is designed for political parity: Two of its members are appointed by Republicans, two by Democrats. Collectively, they’re tasked with drawing lines both parties can live with.

This is an exceedingly complex job, akin to solving an algebraic equation with way too many variables. There are all kinds of reasons to stretch the lines of a particular district one way or another. In fact, the addition of a new congressional district – Washington’s 10th – is forcing a wholesale readjustment of boundaries for both Congress and the Legislature.
Read more »

This editorial will appear in Thursday’s print edition.

Warren Buffett considers it a crying shame that he only paid $6.9 million in income tax last year.

In an opinion piece Monday in The New York Times, the billionaire notes that he paid only 17.4 percent of his taxable income – while the tax burden of people who worked in his office averaged 36 percent.

The tax breaks he and his fellow rich Americans enjoy should end, Buffett says, as part of the “shared sacrifice” all of us will have to make if we are to pull the national economy out of its debt crisis. While the poor and middle class fight in Afghanistan, and average Americans struggle to make ends meet, it’s not right that the mega-rich continue to enjoy tax rates that have declined over the past 20 years, he wrote.

Some high-ranking Republicans have criticized Buffett for saying the rich are being “coddled” by Congress and should pay higher taxes. And online commenters make the point that no law is needed for Buffett to pony up more in taxes; he can just write a check for what he thinks is a fairer amount.
Read more »

This editorial will appear in Wednesday’s print edition.

Every time House Speaker John Boehner walked into a room to talk debt limits with Barack Obama, he was followed by an invisible crowd with cocked hats and manic smiles.

The tea pot brigade.

“Just between us,” Boehner could say, “I know it makes sense to include some new revenue in the deal. But I’ve got these crazy members who wouldn’t want the richest man in American to kick in an extra dime toward a balanced budget.

“You don’t know what it’s like caucusing with these nuts. There’s no dealing with them. Hell, some of them would squeeze me out of leadership in a heartbeat if they could, and then who would you be dealing with?

“Some of them really would let America go into default rather than raise taxes. And there’s even crazier guys back in their home districts talking about running against them if they cut me any slack.

“I’d love to play ball with you, Mr. President, but that’s the world I have to live in.” Read more »

This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

Tuesday’s rout of congressional Democrats sent some strong messages, especially to President Obama. But the triumphant Republicans should be cautious about claiming a sweeping partisan mandate.

For Obama, the politically catastrophic loss of more than 60 Democrats in House seats was a whack on the head with a two-by-four. There is no way to pretty up those returns: On the whole, Americans are thoroughly fed up with the Democrats’ stewardship of the White House and both House and Senate.

Americans didn’t reflexively vote against all incumbents. They kept Republican incumbents and picked off Democrats, including senior lawmakers in what seemed like safe seats. The elections saw a surge in self-identified conservatives, who have always outnumbered liberals in this country and now appear to have widened that advantage.

Many fiscal conservatives and suspicious populists were alarmed by the federal government’s bailout loans to major banks, General Motors and Chrysler; by the huge and expensive stimulus bill of 2009, and by this year’s health care reform package.

The price tag – many hundreds of billions of dollars – made these bills easy targets.
Read more »

This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

This is one of those “throw the bums out” years. But the South Sound’s three U.S. representatives aren’t bums, and it would be dumb to throw them out.

In fact, the region could lose much of its influence in Congress if Norm Dicks of the 6th Congressional District, Dave Reichert of the 8th and Adam Smith of the 9th lost their jobs.

In terms of raw clout, Dicks is the mightiest of the three – one of the mightiest in the country, for that matter. His 34 years in the House and parliamentary skills have landed him in positions of enormous power in the House Appropriations Committee: chairman of the defense subcommittee and vice-chair of the interior subcommittee.

As such, he has helped secure Washington’s share of the federal budget, steering countless appropriations toward the state and the 6th District, which covers the Olympic Peninsula, University Place and parts of Tacoma and Lakewood. Federal funding of the cleanup of Puget Sound, for example, has multiplied many times over on his watch. Dicks is also one of Congress’ leading authorities on defense and military policy, which makes him an ideal advocate for Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor.
Read more »