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Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Tick...tick...brrr
At the end of December we heard that Sen. Smilin' Norm Coleman (R-MN) had secured an important promise:
One of the most unreasonable deals in the jumble of unreasonable congressional decisions made last week was stripping an additional $2 billion in low-income heating assistance from budget legislation to win passage in the fractious U.S. Senate. In the horse-trading, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and two other cold-weather-state Republicans, Maine's Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, were promised a vote next month on supplemental Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program money.
Snowe herself said:
Working with my colleagues Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and Norm Coleman (R-MN), I secured a commitment from Senate leadership for a vote at the end of January to supply an additional $2 billion in emergency LIHEAP funding.
There are 6 days left in January, and the poor and elderly are still shivering. Smilin' Norm hasn't had much to say about what appears to be yet another broken promise from his party's congressional leadership.
Venezuela's Citgo has ponied up $100 million to keep Americans warm ... exactly as much as the HHS released on January 5. Citgo had the sense to send its funds to the hardest hit areas of the United States. In the Bush administration, where politics is everything and policy is nothing, the HHS allocated funds largely based on population. Under the HHS formula, California received more funding than Minnesota or Wisconsin. Texas received $5,000 less than Maine.
There's still a little time left for Smilin' Norm to put this right. I hope he does, but I expect that we will soon find that Coleman sold his vote for an empty promise. That doesn't mean Coleman is a bad guy. It does mean he's a bad negotiator, a bad judge of character, and a consistent supporter of bad leadership.
