Guys on White Horses

I have to admit, the news from the Hill today was pretty up-beat. Some of the things that the new Democratic majority consider to be the first order of business are not exactly the kind of things that will drastically change the course of the nation, but they are steps in the right direction.

Item one, the Democrats have banned all travel for lawmakers and staffers paid for by lobbyists, and require the ethics committee to pre-approve any travel paid for by outside organizations. Any member of Congress or any staffer that travels on a corporate jet is required to pay the market cost of the flight. All gifts are banned, and the new ethics rules ban the practice of allowing members to change votes, preventing the arm-twisting that happened during the Medicare Bill in 2003, where the voting was extended, and many members of Congress changed votes.

Is this a token gesture at cleaning up Congress? Sure it's a good first start, but I'm pretty sure most Americans would like to see complete reform, getting all of that nasty corporate money out of the election process, but I'm not holding my breath. I would much prefer the new Democratic majority to get out the scrub brush, put on those rubber gloves, move the furniture around, and get down to some serious house cleaning. But like I said, a good start.

And here's some even better news. The fledgling Democratic Majority might even attempt to take on the energy industry.

Among the first items Democrats want to pass are measures that at least some oil and gas companies oppose, such as a measure to repeal certain tax breaks included in a broad energy bill passed in 2005 and a bill to collect royalties on existing drilling leases. Provisions that could cost the industry even more money, such as one imposing a windfall-profit tax, could follow in the Democratic-led Congress, although some of the harsher measures may strain caucus unity.Democrats could try as early as this week, though most likely next week, to force companies that signed leases in 1998 and 1999 to renegotiate those contracts so they pay royalties on oil produced in the Gulf when per-barrel prices pass a set threshold.
What appears to be an Interior Department error meant that the threshold typical of such contracts wasn’t included in the leases signed during those two years. The error has left billions of dollars in royalties uncollected by the federal government.

Democrats would use the additional revenues to pay for a new fund for conservation and development of renewable energy sources.

This is music to my liberal ears.

Of course, we don't live in a perfect world, if we did, Cindy Sheehan would not have had to interrupt the Democratic press conference to remind our newly elected leaders that the Iraq war was not the first thing on the agenda, in a perfect world, an illegal war that took the lives of young soldiers would takeprecedencee over everything else. And what did the Democrats promise about the war? I remember that they promised change, and that there was some mention of troops coming home. And change is what is coming, not in the happy return of our young people, but in what is today called a "surge", a thing that in the 1970's would have been called by it's proper name.

Escalation.

So the knights in shining armor are not looking quite so shiny today, and our job as good citizens becomes even more important as the newly elected majority stands by while our armed forces plan to become more entrenched in an illegal conflict.

Our Democrats are better than those who ruled before them, but they are not able to make those hard decisions that will stop the folly of the Iraq war.

That's up to us.

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