About Steve Chabot

Remember when Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House and she promised to “restore integrity and honesty to Washington, D.C.” and that the Democratic Congress would be “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history?”  Right.  What a joke.  Yes, Republicans have had their share of scoundrels and embarrassments (Mark Foley), but the level of dishonesty, incompetence, cronyism and downright corruption under Pelosi and Reid is unprecedented.  No wonder the people’s faith in this Congress is down to an all time low of 14%.  (And what in the world are those 14% thinking?) 

The latest example is Charlie Rangel, the Chairman of Congress’s powerful Ways and Means Committee.  The House Ethics Committee has just announced that he is being admonished for breaking House rules by taking a number of trips to the Caribbean that were illegally paid for by corporate sponsors.  He also remains under ethics investigation for a variety of other misdeeds, such as failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars of income and assets, and failure to pay taxes.  The tax charge is particularly ironic when one considers Rangel is Chairman of the committee (Ways and Means) which is responsible for the entire U.S. tax code.  It reminds me a little (actually a lot) of President Obama appointing Timothy Geithner to head the Department of the Treasury, which is in charge of the IRS, when Geithner admitted that he hadn’t paid his own taxes! 

When Rangel’s foibles first came to light last year, a resolution was brought before Congress to strip Chairman Rangel of his gavel.  Seems logical – shouldn’t the Chairman of the tax-writing committee have to pay his own taxes, just like every other American is expected to do?  Well, not according to our Congressman, Steve Driehaus.  He voted to allow Rangel to stay on as Chairman.  I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that Charlie Rangel and his PAC had given Driehaus $14,000. 

By the way, Nancy Pelosi, whom Steve Driehaus has voted with a slavish 94% of the time, is sticking by Charlie Rangel, at least for the time being.  And this from the Speaker who was going to give us the most honest and ethical Congress in history. 

America deserves better. 

Well, tomorrow’s the big day.  After failing to convince the American people, and enough in Congress, that what America needs is a government takeover of healthcare, the Obama Administration is inviting Democratic and Republican members of Congress to the White House for a “bi-partisan healthcare summit.” 

In advance of the big pow-wow, President Obama released his own healthcare plan, which, surprise surprise, is a lot like the Democrat bills already considered in the House and the Senate.  A couple of new twists:  the Obama plan imposes even bigger job-killing penalties on businesses (so much for lip-service about creating more jobs in these tough economic times), his plan costs more than the Senate plan but less than the House’s, and he adds another new bureaucracy to impose government price controls on healthcare.  And not surprisingly, despite the fact that the President said he’d be open to Republican ideas, he completely left out Republican ideas, like medical malpractice reform, association health plans, and allowing individuals to purchase healthcare across state lines (to increase competition and keep healthcare costs down).  Let’s face it, the Obama Administration and the Democrat Congress couldn’t care less about keeping healthcare costs to the consumer down, they just want more government control of our healthcare, and of our lives for that matter.

Republicans must be very wary at this so-called summit, which is in reality just a mechanism for the Obama Administration and Pelosi/Reid to use their allies in the mainstream media to browbeat Republicans, and try to convince the public that Republicans are just “the party of NO.”  Well, there’s nothing wrong with saying NO to policies which will hurt the American people, and which the American people have said they are opposed to time after time.  (Massachusetts)

The Democrats in Congress are so desperate for what they consider would be a political win, that they don’t care that the American people would suffer a huge loss.  And they seem determined to even change (break) the rules that Congress has operated under for generations.  All major legislation in the Senate has traditionally required 60 votes for passage.  The Democrats had 60 votes until the people of Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states, were so disgusted with the Democrats’ healthcare plan that they elected a Republican, Scott Brown, to the late Teddy Kennedy’s seat, principally on the promise that he would oppose the Democratic healthcare bill.  There went their 60 votes, so the Democrats are apparently seriously considering a parliamentary trick which would require a mere 51 votes (Reconciliation) even though this is traditionally used only for relatively minor adjustments to budget items, etc.  The government takeover of one sixth of our economy, is clearly far more than a minor adjustment of a budget item, and thus the Democrats are willing to sacrifice the Constitution and the rules of fair play for a political victory.  If they decide to go this route, they may win a pyrrhic victory now, but the American people will make them pay this November.

Unfortunately, the damage to our country would already be done.  Ronald Reagan once said “there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.”  If Pelosi and Reid and their allies in Congress are successful in imposing their big government healthcare takeover on the American people, it will be very difficult to undo the damage.  That’s why we must stop it before it happens.  And not be suckered in by a so-called “bi-partisan healthcare summit. “ 

I held a news conference this morning at the National Flag Company on Freeman Avenue in Cincinnati, officially announcing that I am a candidate for Ohio’s First Congressional District seat.  National Flag is a family-owned small business, and I chose this location to emphasize the importance of getting this economy moving again, and creating jobs – IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR.  After all, 70% of the new jobs created in the United States over the last several decades have been created by small businesses.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration and the Pelosi/Reid Congress (with Steve Driehaus’s support) decided to ignore small businesses, and instead pass a $787 billion so-called economic stimulus package which only stimulated growth in government, and did virtually nothing to create jobs in the private sector. 

Then they spent the rest of the year trying to pass anti-business, anti-job-creating measures like cap and trade, card-check, and the healthcare debacle.  Each of these bills would have burdened small businesses with higher costs, more regulation, more red tape, and thus made it less likely that they’d be able to hire anybody.

Americans across the country, and here at home, are fed up with perhaps the worst Congress in history.  They’re fed up with government bailouts, government takeovers, and spending in Washington which is so out-of-control that we’re now looking at annual deficits not in the billions, but in the trillions.  They’re fed up with huge bills being voted on with members of Congress not even taking the time to read them.  And they’re fed up with being promised that there will be such transparency, that negotiations on key bills will be on CSPAN, but instead get members of Congress’s votes being bought, behind closed doors.

Unfortunately, Steve Driehaus, who promised he’d be an independent, fiscal conservative has been anything but.  He has essentially done whatever Nancy Pelosi, the most liberal Speaker in American history, tells him to do.  In fact, he has voted with her 94% of the time.  That might be okay if you represent San Francisco (as she does), but Driehaus is clearly out of step with the people of the First Congressional District of Ohio.

Driehaus and Pelosi sort of remind me of an old TV commercial a few years back.  The guy in the commercial would walk around with his cell phone saying “can you hear me, can you hear me now?”  Well, not only do Driehaus and Pelosi not hear us, they’re not even listening.  Although there are many examples, perhaps the worst example was their insistence on passing a very flawed healthcare bill, even though at town hall meetings and Tea Party rallies they were clearly told “we the people oppose this expensive, big government power grab of a plan.”  Pelosi pushed it anyway, and Driehaus voted for it anyway. 

Well, this year a change is coming.  We saw strong evidence of it in New Jersey and Virginia a few months back, in Massachusetts a few weeks back, and in Indiana just a couple days back.  The people are tired of being ignored by their own government.  They’re tired of having policies they oppose rammed down their throats.  They’re tired of having their elected representatives tell them one thing and then do another.  Yes, change is coming.  And I plan to be part of that change. 

A startling revelation was just made by the Congressional Budget Office this week, but has been all but ignored by the mainstream media.  Social Security is going into the red.  For the last 25 years, Social Security has taken in more than it paid out every year.  This is commonly referred to as the Social Security surplus; it keeps the system basically solvent.  Last year however, the surplus virtually disappeared, dropping from $63 billion to only $3 billion, and it’s now projected that this year Social Security will go into the red.  Social Security will begin paying out more than it takes in, and this puts Social Security itself at risk.

How did we get into this potentially disastrous situation?  You guessed it, our leaders in Washington can’t control their profligate spending. 

It began back in the 1960’s, during the LBJ Administration.  President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress were trying to fight the Vietnam War, and pay for a whole slew of new, expensive government programs – the Great Society.  Prior to this, Social Security funds had always been kept separate from the rest of the general funds, thus keeping Social Security safe from politicians in Washington spending it.  The liberals controlling Washington at the time (today we’d call them “progressives”) combined the Social Security Trust Fund with the general fund and started spending Social Security money on anything they wanted to spend it on: the War, anti-poverty social programs, welfare, public housing, you name it.  And it’s been that way ever since.

Later, some in Washington tried to change this to protect Social Security.  The most serious attempt was legislation called the Social Security Preservation Act.  This bill, if passed, would have required that every penny taken out of a person’s paycheck for Social Security, could only be spent on Social Security, and nothing else.  (I was a strong supporter of passing this legislation, and I co-sponsored the bill a number of times.)  Unfortunately, the big-spenders in Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, prevented the bill from being passed, and thus the spending continued. 

Another attempt to put Social Security on sounder footing was President Bush’s proposal, shortly after he was re-elected in 2004, to allow persons to self invest, in a personal savings account, a portion of their Social Security contribution.  It’s important to point out that these personal savings accounts were voluntary, and thus if a person didn’t feel confident in investing, he or she could continue to have all their contributions go to Social Security.  It was projected that the additional money going into investments would have boosted the stock market and the economy, created more jobs, and most importantly helped to put Social Security on firmer fiscal ground.  (There were some things I liked about the plan, others I did not.) 

You remember the tumultuous town hall meetings many Democratic members of Congress faced this past summer over their healthcare plan; well, Moveon.org and other left-wing organizations had packed town meetings back in 2005, principally to oppose the Bush Social Security plan.  They were successful, and the plan went nowhere. 

The bottom line is, that since Social Security has been thrown into the same pot with the rest of the budget, the more out-of-balance the federal budget is, the more danger there is to Social Security.  Even though Congresses in the past have failed to exercise sufficient fiscal discipline to ensure that we have a balanced budget, and therefore are not spending Social Security funds for other purposes, the present Congress has been without doubt, the most fiscally irresponsible in U.S. history, now having to borrow 45 cents for every dollar it spends.  And what many of us warned would someday happen, that Social Security itself would be endangered by the out-of-control spending in Washington, is now happening.  Our seniors deserve better than they’re getting out of Washington nowadays, and so do future generations of seniors.  It’s time for a change. 

Imagine that your family’s budget was so out of whack that for every dollar you spent, you had to borrow 45 cents.  Well, that’s what’s happening in Washington right now.  Congress and the Obama Administration are so outspending what we have, that for every dollar spent, they’re adding another 45 cents to our national debt.  The 45 cents is borrowed (much of it from our good friends, the Chinese who always have our best interests at heart).  Despite Obama happy talk at the State of the Union Address to do something about the out-of-control spending, Obama’s budget for the next year, which was released just yesterday, is even worse than many feared.  It calls for $3.8 trillion in spending, and since it projects only $2.2 trillion coming in, that means a staggering $1.6 trillion will be added to our children and our grandchildren’s debt burden.  That’s by far the worst year ever. 

President Obama gives lip service to a spending freeze, which of course doesn’t kick in until next year.  And, oh by the way, it amounts to less than one tenth of 1% of the spending, and probably won’t happen anyway.  President Obama also calls for another economic stimulus bill.  (The last one worked so well.)

If you really want a perfect example of the mindset prevailing in Washington nowadays, you need look no further than what the number three Democrat in the House said earlier this week.  James Clyburn, the Democratic Whip, said (with a straight face) that “we must spend our way out of this recession.”  He really said that!  This is the same guy who came to Cincinnati last campaign and raised thousands of dollars for Candidate Steve Driehaus, and has already contributed  $14,000 to Congressman Steve Driehaus this election cycle.  Not surprisingly, Driehaus has been voting with the liberal Democratic leadership (Pelosi, Hoyer, and Clyburn) virtually every time.  No wonder a Washington political news journal Politico called Driehaus a “reliable backer of party leadership.”

One of the more interesting (and ironic) things that President Obama said when he announced his budget this week was that Washington could no longer afford to spend money “as if it were monopoly money.”  (Then he proceeded to offer a budget that spent our money as if it were monopoly money.)  It reminded me a lot of when he said “what I am not doing, what I have no interest in doing , is running GM.”  (Then he proceeded to takeover GM and Chrysler.)  It’s almost as if he forgets that what he says is being recorded, and we might actually go back and compare what he says with what he does.

One particularly wasteful item in the President’s budget that jumped out at me was $237 million to be spent on a prison in Obama’s home state of Illinois, intended to house the dangerous terrorists now being safely kept away from us at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Why we’d even consider bringing them here and housing them on U.S. soil, with all the inherent risks involved (and the added expense) is just nuts.  And as I’ve been saying from the start, it’s just lunacy to risk that the virulent hatred these terrorists carry in their souls be allowed to spread to other inmates in our U.S. prison system. 

In conclusion, Congress is now considering the most irresponsible budget – since the one they passed last year.  It spends too much, raises taxes, and digs us all deeper and deeper into debt.  It’s awful.  Unfortunately, it’s what we’ve come to expect from our current leadership in Washington.  It’s time for a change. 

My fellow Americans, as I stand before you this evening, the state of the union is… well, it’s not very good.  I know many of you bought into all that “hope and change” we were pushing in the campaign more than a year ago now, and I’m going to admit to you right off the bat, that it just hasn’t worked.  Our policies have just made things worse. 

We had such huge Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, that we could do pretty much whatever we wanted.  Rather than working together as I’d promised during the campaign, I gave a green light to Speaker Pelosi in the House and Leader Reid in the Senate to cut the Republicans completely out,  and push our liberal agenda on America full speed ahead.  (Of course our polls tell us we shouldn’t call what we’re doing “liberal” so we now say it’s “progressive”, and I want to thank our friends in the media for so willingly adopting that term, but since I’m being completely honest this evening, I’ll admit that, liberal, progressive, it’s the same thing, and as we learned in one of my favorite states, Massachusetts, just last week, my fellow Americans, you’re just not buying it. )

When I was sworn in as your President a little more than a year ago, you’ve got to admit, we faced some pretty daunting challenges.  I should have focused like a laser beam on the economy, and getting people back to work again.  Instead, I got distracted with side issues like global warming (my advisors say I should call it climate change now), trying to get our enemies around the world to like us better, and every liberal’s dream, taking over everybody’s healthcare and running it out of Washington. 

Then came Massachusetts last week; fine, I heard you.  Although I don’t have to run again for another three years, (and maybe things will be better by then), a lot of my friends in Congress have to face a very angry public in just nine months, and let’s face it, unless we change things dramatically, it could be a bloodbath.

So Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid, here are your marching orders.  First, we’ve got to stop this out-of-control spending.  That $787 billion economic stimulus package we passed a year ago – let’s admit it, it just hasn’t worked.  It was supposed to create jobs, but unemployment has about doubled since we passed it.  I know we’ve tried to spin it that we can count “saved” jobs, and we argued that it would have been even worse if we hadn’t passed it, but even sympathetic press coverage hasn’t convinced the American people that all the spending has worked.  Besides, that damn FOX Network and all those conservative talk shows seem to drown out anything the major networks say in supporting our side.  It’s really frustrating.

Next, we’re dropping the whole healthcare thing, now.  What we really wanted anyway was to out-and-out nationalize healthcare – a single-payer system, the whole nine yards.  We knew from the start that the public would never buy that, so we tried to muddy-up the language with terms like “public option” and “co-ops” and such, but it never really worked.  We tried to spin it that the public didn’t understand what we were trying to do (it was too complicated for them) or that our “messaging” was off, but let’s face it, they got it, and they just didn’t want it.  So Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid, you’re to go back to the drawing board, include Republicans in the process (even they might have a good idea once in a while) and let’s even let the public in on what we’re doing.  We might even want to put it all on CSPAN like I promised in the first place. 

Perhaps my most important responsibility as your President is to keep the American people safe.  Thank God we’ve been lucky during my first year in office; I have to admit, probably in spite of what my Administration has done, not because of it. I deferred to the head of my Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, too much.  Her refusal to call terrorism terrorism, and instead insisting on calling it “man caused disasters”, well that was just wacky.  And then came her claim that “the system worked” when we nearly lost an airliner over Detroit, when it clearly had not. Secretary Napolitano, thanks for your service, you’re fired. 

And I’m reversing a few other calls I made.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind September 11th, we’re going to try him in a military tribunal, rather than in a civilian court in New York.  I am not going to give that terrorist, there I said it, a soapbox to trash this great country of ours and recruit even more terrorists, there I said it again.  And forget about closing Guantanamo Bay.  If we bring those dangerous radical Jihadists to U.S. prisons, their hatred for America will inevitably spread to some of the other inmates they come into contact with, and further endanger Americans.  I’m just not going to take that risk. 

And finally, let me speak directly to my fellow Democratic colleagues serving in the House and in the Senate.  I know Massachusetts scared a lot of you, and you’re thinking, “I could be next.”  Let me pick one of you out as an example, the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Driehaus.  You’ve done exactly what Speaker Pelosi told you to do.  Your very first vote was to make Nancy the Speaker of the House.  You voted for the budget we concocted even though it was out of balance by $1.4 trillion, the worst in history.  You voted for the stimulus package that, let’s face it, has only stimulated more government and done nothing to create jobs in the private sector.  You voted for our Cap and Trade scheme, even though we knew it would be a job-killer, and hurt people in your own district and state.  You co-sponsored the card check bill, which was nothing but a payoff for the unions’ support of you and me in the last election.  And you voted for our healthcare takeover, even though your own constituents made it pretty clear in your town halls that they were against it.  And I understand that those pesky tea party folks are pretty active in your area. 

Well Steve, since you’ve been what Politico called “a reliable backer of party leadership”, in other words, you’ve done what you were told, your party leadership will be there for you.  My advisors tell me that according to an independent poll done last week, you’re losing to your Republican opponent by 17 points – 56% to 39%.  Well, don’t worry about it.  You just keep doing what Nancy and I tell you to do.

So in conclusion, my fellow Americans, I heard you loud and clear; I’m going to do better.  And, oh by the way, it’s all George Bush’s fault.

In a poll done last week by SurveyUSA, a top polling firm, which was authorized and paid for by FireDogLake, a liberal blog, the results were Chabot 56% Driehaus 39%.  Not surprisingly, most Republicans support us (86%) and most Democrats support Driehaus (79%), but most encouraging was that Independents overwhelmingly support us 69% to only 27% for Driehaus. 

So does this mean we win?  Of course not.  There’s a lot of hard work yet to be done and we need everybody’s help, especially volunteers.  We also need to continue to fundraise so we can get our message out, especially since we know that the left-wing groups will spend a huge amount of money trying to distort my record and point of view on just about everything.

And a poll is only a snapshot of a particular point in time.  The election is still 10 months away.  And that’s a long time in politics.  But it sure is encouraging.  And I’d rather be in our shoes than in Driehaus’s.  He’s got to try to defend his liberal track record on a whole range of issues, from the so-called economic stimulus package, to Cap and Trade, to the healthcare debacle, to card check (unionization by intimidation) just to name a few.  People know that I am a true fiscal conservative who’s always voted for restraint in government spending, opposed government takeovers, always voted to cut taxes, etc.

And the reasons Independents are flocking to us over Driehaus is they know I always put the people I represented over the party leadership.  Driehaus on the other hand was described in Politico, a newspaper that covers Capitol Hill, as a “reliable backer of party leadership.”  That says it all. 

In Massachusetts last night we saw another reliable backer of party leadership, Democrat Martha Coakley, in the bluest of blue states, fall to an independent-minded Republican candidate, Scott Brown.  The last time a Republican held that particular Senate seat was 1953 (coincidently the year I was born).  The Washington Democrat spin is that she was just a bad candidate (and she probably was).  But I think it’s much bigger than that.  It was a dramatic rejection of the mindset which runs Washington nowadays.  It was a rejection of the out-of-control spending, the corrupt practice of buying votes for a very flawed healthcare plan, the broken promise of letting the public see what’s going on on C-SPAN, and the arrogance and contempt for the public shown by Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid. 

The public is fed up.  They are demanding, and they deserve, far better leadership in Washington than they are receiving now.  And Cincinnati will be part of that change this year, just like Massachusetts was last night.