Heath Shuler Was One Of The Blue Dogs To Hang On So He Thinks He Should Run The Democratic Caucus Now

The crap Rahm left behind when he scurried off to Chicago

Although over half the Blue Dogs were wiped off the face of the political map on Tuesday-- a silver lining to an otherwise grim day-- almost half the Blue Dogs are still in office... and as eager as ever to serve their corporate masters and pull the Democratic Party further and further away from the principles and values that have made the party the party of ordinary working families.

One of the worst of the Blue Dogs not swept away Tuesday-- an inveterate homophobe, immigrant-basher, anti-Choice C Street fanatic and all around reactionary shill is failed football player Heath Shuler, Rahm Emanuel's "greatest hit." Shuler was one of the 40 Democrats in the last session who voted more frequently with the GOP than with the Democrats when it came to the contentious, substantive issues that the House took up. His Progressive Punch score was an atrocious 36.13 and only 3 Democrats with lower scores, Jason Altmire (Blue Dog-PA- 34.96), Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC- 33.61) and Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK- 26.50), survived the national repudiation of Blue Dogism on Tuesday.

But even with so many of his right-wing colleagues gone, Shuler is still clamoring for a leadership post within the now far less conservative Democratic House caucus. In fact, yesterday, he threatened to run against Nancy Pelosi if she decides to remain as party leader. He also vowed to recruit conservative candidates like himself to run in 2012 in the seats where conservative candidates like himself were defeated earlier this week. He, like many of the corporate crooks he pals around with in Congress, has demonized Pelosi and tried to paint her as a "polarizing figure" because she insisted on standing up for ordinary working families while Shuler and his cronies worked behind the scenes for the Wall Street bankers and Big Business. As we saw Wednesday, almost every single Democrat who ran as an anti-Pelosi candidate was defeated.

Some in Washington feel Shuler, who is incredibly ambitious for someone with so little to offer intellectually and who only managed to hang onto his own seat by 54%, is just trying to make Steny Hoyer, always the Blue Dogs' and corporate America's cat's paw inside the party, seem less unacceptable to the caucus. At the same time, another extremely right-wing Blue Dog (and Hoyer buddy), Utah reactionary Jim Matheson, who barely survived the general election (51%) after being seriously primaried earlier in the year, is stamping his feet and demanding Pelosi resign. Matheson, who feeds at the same corporate trough as the Republicans, is widely considered one of the more corrupt, self-serving Democrats in Congress and, like Shuler, he never could understand why Pelosi was always pushing all that ethics stuff on the caucus. You might want to make your way over to Daily Kos today and sign the petition telling Nancy Pelosi you want her to stay on as Democratic House Leader.



Another Boehner Boy Blue Dog Snarls Impotently In Pelosi's Direction

After Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL), Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS) and Gene Taylor (Blue Dog-MS) were flushed down the toilet Tuesday, one piece of crap that the voters missed was Oklahoma's anti-family reactionary, Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK). Today, as expected, Boren, who famously voted against Obama when he ran for president, said he wouldn't vote for Pelosi to be House Democratic Leader. “I cannot in good conscience support Nancy Pelosi as Leader,” Boren said. “I intend to support a more conservative Democrat alternative.” Pelosi, widely considered one of the greatest Speakers in contemporary American history, would never appeal to a dedicated servant of the corporate special interests like Boren.

Nancy Pelosi may be moving out of her spacious office in the Capitol, but the woman who broke the marble ceiling to become the first female speaker of the House has already moved into the ranks of the most effective legislators in history.

"While right now she is overshadowed by this thumping, she's going to rank quite high in the pantheon of modern speakers" of the last 100 years, said Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Only Texas Democrat Sam Rayburn, the longest-serving speaker in history whose parliamentary maneuvers cleared the way for passage of civil rights and social legislation in the 1960s, ranks higher.

...[H]istorians and nonpartisan political observers who take the long view say Pelosi stands out among the 52 lawmakers who have held the job set forth in Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution. And not just because all the others were men.

"The last Congress in particular has been remarkable in its productivity-- in both the number of bills enacted and their scope-- and Pelosi shares much of the credit," said Matthew Green, a political scientist at Catholic University of America and author of "The Speaker of the House: A Study of Leadership."

Many speakers shepherded through big bills: Democrat Tip O'Neill guided major energy legislation though in 1978, and Republican Dennis Hastert twisted arms to create a new Medicare prescription drug benefit. But few, Green said, have passed more legislation than Pelosi.

Other speakers have taken a back seat on major legislation on their watch, Green added. John McCormack presided in the 1960s when Congress enacted Lyndon Johnson's historic Great Society program, but it was the president who wrote and lobbied for most of the bills, not the elderly speaker. In contrast, Obama took a mostly hands-off approach to health care reform, leaving it to Pelosi and others in Congress to work out the details.