Tuesday Afternoon Musings

It's primary day in the Northeast, and Delaware Republicans have a choice between winning Vice President Biden's Senate seat or losing it. Mike Castle, the moderate Republican running for the seat is not very conservative, and not my favorite politician. However, even a quality conservative candidate would have trouble winning in Delaware (Christine O'Donnell, Castle's inexperienced challenger, is no Marco Rubio), and these political facts cannot be changed.

Thus, I'm thinking that a Mike Castle win tonight will put more Republicans in the Senate, while a Castle loss would mean more Democrats there. I'm not a petty man, but I love the fact that VP Biden's former Senate seat could switch to Republican if Mike Castle wins.

I already adore the fact that liberal lion Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat belongs to Republican Scott Brown.

Furthermore, I'm really excited to see that President Obama's former Senate seat could soon belong to Republican Mark Kirk.

The real question is, are we a party that can accept moderate Northeastern Republicans? If we are not, we should throw out Scott Brown now, and the GOP should avoid spending campaign money in 12 states because the GOP will rarely win up there.

Jay Cost, over at Weekly Standard:

By and large, genuinely conservative candidates are going to have a difficult time getting elected and staying elected in the Northeast.

With the exception of the once-in-a-while Scott Brown type of candidate (and O'Donnell is clearly no Scott Brown!), the GOP can run moderate Republicans in the Northeast, or it can effectively cede the region to the Democrats, who will elect by default some of the most liberal members in the entire United States Congress. Which is it going to be?

Is this really a tough call for conservatives?

Can we have Northeastern Republicans who aren't as conservative as Utah or South Carolina Republicans? YES!

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Good news from the courts:

A federal judge said Tuesday he is likely to let 20 states proceed with at least a portion of their lawsuit challenging the heart of the Democrats’ health care overhaul.

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Speaking of the health care law:

In a 46-52 vote, lawmakers killed an amendment sponsored by Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) that would have saved businesses and nonprofit groups from having to report an array of small and medium-sized purchases to the Internal Revenue Service.

Why is this random, stupid IRS small business reporting rule mixed in with the Obamacare law? Easy. Because Obamacare is complex by design. Because Obamacare is designed to take more money from small businesses. Because Obamacare could have been ten pages long, but Democrats felt that ten pages was 200 times too short.

Let it never be said that Democrats always have small businesses' best interests in mind, because this rule, which brings new taxes and ludicrous amounts of paperwork along with it, could have been rejected today. However, the Democratic party (save a handful of conservative Democrats) voted against an amendment to remove this obscure, but very significant small business IRS reporting tax provision from the health care bill. Thus, my mother-in-law will be hurting. My good friend will be hurting. Several neighbors of mine will be hurting.

All because most Democrats in the United States voted against an amendment to remove an obscure, but very significant small business IRS reporting tax provision from the health care bill.

For future reference, if you see any serious tax code changes in the next random piece of legislation, let me know. I was wondering if this type of behavior (i.e. changing tax regulations in a random lung cancer awareness month bill) is typical.