Vitter vs Landrieu In The U.S. Senate

You can search this blog high and low and you're not going to find too many favorable references to Louisiana DLC Senator Mary Landrieu. She has a miserable overall voting record, one of the half dozen Democrats voting most frequently with the Republicans on substantive issues, a clear reflection of the unconscionable flood of corporate money that has made her campaigns one of the Senate's most corrupt cesspools, on a par with Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Richard Burr (R-NC), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Arlen Specter (R/D-PA) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR). I remember she once gave a great barn-burning progressive speech about something and I spent an hour just now searching for it on DWT and couldn't find it. Apart from that, I doubt we've ever had a nice word to say about her.

However, her Louisiana Senate colleague is so much worse in every conceivable way that comparisons often go begging. This week the comparison was not only undeniable, but Landrieu made it herself. Vitter was twittering away the week, as he so often does, bragging about one crudely partisan or racist ploy after another sure to please his fans at the kook-end of the far right spectrum-- real crazy stuff about czars, fighting health care reform, and extolling the virtues of fellow fake-secessionist Joe Wilson.

In the past two days Vitter managed to get the Senate to consider two of his racially-tinged amendments to HR 3288, an appropriations bill for transportation and Housing and Urban Development-- one of which actually passed. The one that passed-- on Wednesday-- had 73 yes votes and basically re-affirms the continuing existence of the community service requirements under section 12(c) of the United States Housing Act of 1937. As Landrieu points out in the video below, there's nothing wrong with public service. What the 25 nay votes didn't like is that Vitter's amendment is aimed squarely at poor people, often minorities, and never says a thing about the wealthy people who get government subsidies that dwarf decades of subsidies for poor people. Why not ask, CEOs of failed banks to do some public service as a price of their subsidies? It was startling to see Landrieu join progressives she rarely votes with like Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Sheldon Whitehouse, Frank Lautenberg, Al Franken and Dan Akaka instead of sticking with the usual aisle crossers she's always in cahoots with-- like Blanche Lincoln, Joe Liberman, Evan Bayh, Max Baucus, the Nelsons, and Specter. But watch her discuss the issue; she was damn good.

I am a big supporter of community service. I try to do it when I can. I support community service and I support calling all of our citizens to community service. What I don't support is making poor people and mostly minorities do community service, while other people sit on the sideline and never are required to do it, even though the largesse they receive from our government is much greater than a resident of public housing could ever hope to get even if they lived there for 50 years.

If you lived in public housing for 50 years, you could not possibly benefit as much from the General Treasury as if you would if you were the executive of AIG to whom we gave a gazillion dollars. Did we ask them to do 8 hours of community service? We didn't even ask him to pay the money back. Somebody has to wake up in this Chamber.

I am not fussing at my colleagues because I know people have a different view about this. But if we want to require law students to do 8 hours of community service for the loans they get, fine. But don't just pick on the poor because they can't fight back, and they don't have any lobbyists up here for them.

Yesterday's amendment, for the same bill, failed miserably, 62-34. Vitter claims he was seeking to "prohibit the use of funds for households that include convicted drug dealing or domestic violence offenders or members of violent gangs that occupy rebuilt public housing in New Orleans." Landrieu makes the point about how odd it was that he was just targeting poor working families (always his favorite target) and only in New Orleans, not in any other cities in Louisiana or in the rest of the country. It was a crackpot bill and not even the worst crackpot Democrats like Nelson, Bayh and Lincoln, could get behind Vitter on this crazy scheme. In fact half a dozen Republicans found it too bigoted to swallow and voted against him. Landrieu again:

[T]he real reason to vote against the amendment is because it is mean-spirited and counterproductive. What this amendment basically says is that you can be evicted from public housing if anyone in your family commits a crime or gets in trouble with the law.

I understand family members. I am one of nine siblings. I am married and now have two children. I have many brothers and sisters and 38 cousins in our extended family and two wonderful parents. The Presiding Officer has met many members of my family. I like to try to take responsibility for everyone in my family. But parents, no matter how hard they try, sometimes somebody in your family does something that is wrong. Should the entire family become homeless? That is what the Vitter amendment will do. It is such poor policy. It is so mean-spirited. It is so counterproductive. It will mean an increase in homelessness for a city that has already seen our homeless population quadruple.

More than that, the nature of this amendment is so punitive. It penalizes grandmothers or great aunts or moms and dads, or siblings who are trying to do the best they can with very little. Children sometimes do very bad things. Sometimes you will have a family of five children. Four are wonderful and straight-A students. Then you have one child who gets in trouble with drugs or becomes an alcoholic, and causes trouble for the family. Senator Vitter has put in an amendment which he will ask this body to support that would do this: when one member of the family gets in trouble with the law, the whole family gets thrown out on the street.

If this amendment passes, I would like for him to have to go to the sister in fourth grade, because, let's say, the teenage son who is 17 is the one who is causing the problems. I don't want people to think I just pick on boys, but I think people understand we have lots of trouble with this age group of all genders. I would like maybe for my colleague to be the one who has to knock on the front door and tell the mother and the fourth grade little girl, who got an A on her test, performed in the band and has straight A's, that she can pack her bags and spend the night on the street. If I could modify this amendment to make him have to do that, I would. This is not compassionate conservatism. This is mean, and it is nonsense. It needs to be voted down.

To repeat the number, for my colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans, it is amendment No. 2359, only for New Orleans and only for people in public housing. I hope Members will vote no.

She may only do it once every six years, but Mary Landrieu earned her right to call herself a Democrat this week. David Diapers Vitter earns the right to call himself a teabagging idiot and racist every single day: