What in heaven's name does Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have against honeybees?
That question haunted my days after I saw the Kentucky Republican on TV fulminating about a provision he found in the proposed government stimulus package. The provision, he said, would provide $150 million for "honeybee insurance."
"This is nonsense," he said, as if he took it personally. You had to think he got stung as a kid or maybe caught a local swarm in the act of recruiting aphids for Al Qaeda.
So I resolved to get to the bottom of this scandalous expenditure.
But first, a little background.
McConnell's Sunday appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" was part of a full-scale GOP assault on the Obama administration's stimulus bill, which was passed last week by the House with zero Republican support. The package is being debated this week in the Senate. The GOP, as I write, is thinking about a filibuster.
Yet the Republicans seem to have trouble coming up with more than irrelevant or trivial arguments. Appearing on ABC on Sunday, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), for instance, owned up to calling the stimulus plan the "worst plan since the 16th Amendment paved the way for the income tax."
Because the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913, this rather dated DeMint's mind-set. In any event, he didn't offer a proposal on how to fund the government, including his paycheck, without an income tax. He just complained that the stimulus plan involved a lot of spending. He would prefer that it all be in tax cuts, apparently on the grounds that the tax cuts enacted under the Bush administration in 2001 bequeathed to us an economy that has performed so well.
On NBC, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), said she wanted the bill to have more spending on infrastructure, but she wanted it to be on military infrastructure, even though much of that winds up as scrap metal in Iraq and Afghanistan, not bridges and schoolhouses in the United States.
She said she would strip from the bill all the "social spending that is not going to create jobs," but when pressed by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), her on-air debating partner, she agreed to preserve some social spending, such as unemployment benefits. The effect of this exchange was to leave Hutchison sounding as though she made up her position as she went along.
