Baumgartner is Hard at Work

So he says.

I’ve reprinted below an email I received on May 7th from the office of U.S. Representative Michael Baumgartner (R-CD5, eastern Washington). If your only window on the goings on in Congress were Rep. Baumgartner’s email you would be sadly misinformed. Most politicians are pretty good at “tooting their own horn”, but, on the basis of this newsletter, Mr. Baumgartner should be offering tutorials.

In the emailed newsletter, he launches right into it, asserting that:

The Republicans in Congress hit the ground running – cutting taxes, stopping illegal immigration, blocking fentanyl, and making strong reductions in government spending. The old establishment and far left activists have tried to block us at every turn, but we have not stopped or slowed down.

From Baumgartner’s email one might assume that Congress, with his help, had formulated and passed significant and important bills. The truth, and the tally, fall rather short of that. (Of course, perhaps that’s a good thing considering what has passed.)

Six bills, five laws

Since Donald Trump took office (speaking as of the 100 day mark in late April) Congress, meaning both the House and the Senate, passed exactly six bills, five of which were signed into law by the President. (see Time Magazine’s detailed coverage) Three of those six bills were very simple bills that trashed the prior administration’s work. They were passed only because they bypassed a potential Senate filibuster by using the “Congressional Review Act (CRA)”, a time bomb set in place in the Gingrich era (mid-1990s). These three CRA laws were used to nullify a great many of the regulations put in place over the last “60 legislative days” of the Biden administration. I’m sure it took a great deal of effort and research on Rep. Baumgartner’s part to trash regulations put together over years of hearings and deliberations. [sarcasm alert]

A fourth bill signed into law by the President was the stopgap funding bill that passed with the help of the votes of a few Democratic Senators who didn’t want to risk being blamed by voters for the result of voting against it. Since that was seen as a must-do piece of legislation to avoid a painful government shutdown, it is hard to offer much credit to the Republicans who voted for it.

The fifth bill was the controversial Laken Riley Act that passed with some limited bipartisan support. It requires the Department of Homeland Security (through Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE]) to hold in custody illegal immigrants “admitting to, charged with, or convicted of a variety of crimes.” The law was fired up by the case of (and named after) Laken Riley, a nursing student in Georgia, who was murdered in early 2024 by an illegal immigrant who had previously been cited for theft. The Act, according to the GovTrack summary [bold is mine]:

…would detain people unlawfully in the United States if they are arrested for shoplifting or or other more serious crimes, likely followed by deportation. The individual would not need to be either charged or found guilty.

The legitimate worry is that this Act puts any immigrant whose immigration status is somehow murky at the mercy of any and every law enforcement officer who might see fit to arrest the immigrant for suspected, actual, or even made-up infractions as minor as shoplifting. The bill was widely opposed by groups concerned with civil rights, but the carefully constructed and widely trumpeted optics of bill (the Laken Riley story) carried the day. (Admittedly, in our current media environment, communicating that legitimate concern broadly to the public would have been a challenge.)

Baumgarter’s contribution? Only his vote on a bill first filed in the previous Congress before he even had a seat there.

Finally, Ted Cruz’s “Take it Down Act” passed both chambers of Congress April 28. The President has yet to sign it, but is expected to, since it was supported by his wife. The Act “requires ‘covered platforms’ to remove nonconsensual intimate visual depictions, and for other purposes.” A bit of a no-brainer, the bill seeks to clamp down on internet posting of revenge porn. It passed the House 409-2. (Perhaps notably, the two dissenters were Republicans ;-) So much for hard work on the part of Mr. Baumgartner.

These six bills reek of Congressional paralysis, not “hit[ting] the ground running” as Baumgartner puts it. Instead, they speak of Congressional abdication of its Constitutional duties as a co-equal branch of the federal government.

Meanwhile, as of May 1, Mr. Trump has issued 143 decrees, aka Executive Orders, many of which, like his decree ending birthright citizenship, are blatantly and provocatively unconstitutional. Verbal or voting objections to the Trumpian decrees by Congressional Republicans? Not a peep. Baumgartner, like almost all Republican congresspeople, has almost totally abdicated the role of Congress as a co-equal branch of government to a budding dictator wrapped in the deceptive packaging of the “unitary executive theory”. Among their maneuvers was clever avoidance of having to take a vote on re-asserting Congress’s constitutional role in discussing and setting tariffs.

Baumgartner DID, of course, in his position on the House Judiciary Committee, join other Republicans in spurning a raft of Democrats’ amendments to the Committee’s budget efforts, including an amendment offered by Pramila Jayapal that “sought to make clear Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cannot detain or deport U.S. citizens under any circumstances.” Like so many spineless Republicans, Baumgartner wouldn’t want to bring attention to himself as a Trump-dissenter, even if, by doing so, he would be supporting the U.S. Constitution against a wannabe dictator.

Jerry LeClaire, Indivisible - The High Ground