By Nicole Goeser & John R. Lott Jr.
Thursday, July 28, 2016
Democrats have been using their convention speeches this
week to make Hillary Clinton look like a can-do politician. On Tuesday, Bill
Clinton flatly declared, “She’s a natural leader, she’s a good organizer, and
she’s the best darn change-maker I ever met in my entire life.”
We heard speech after speech about how Hillary cares
about the children, about her innovative ability to solve problems. But there
is a reason the speeches lack specific examples.
Hillary wasn’t much of a change-maker in the U.S. Senate.
Sure, being president is different from being a senator, but both jobs require
making deals. Both offices require drawing up proposals and winning the support
of others. Given all of the insight she must have gained as first lady, one
might have expected her to be better at pushing legislation. She intimately
knew all of the players, had Bill by her side, and had access to the tremendous
wealth of the Clinton Foundation.
Yet, Hillary’s Senate career is
defined by safe, noncontroversial bills, most of which were essentially pure
fluff and yet she couldn’t get them passed.
In her eight years in the Senate, just one of Hillary’s bills got enacted into
law. This bill designated the U.S. courthouse at 40 Centre Street in New York
City as the “Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse.”
Hillary had eleven other bills that were passed by the
Senate, but none made it through the House. Four of those bills were to rename
U.S. Postal Service offices. Then there was another courthouse renaming, a
commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Military Order of the Purple
Heart, and another commemoration for the 225th Anniversary of the American
Revolution.
Talk about safe, inconsequential bills. Who would oppose
a bill honoring wounded veterans? Amazingly, she couldn’t even get her
feel-good, Purple Heart bill passed. At the end of the day, her legislation
didn’t really do much to help everyday Americans.
The five remaining bills had only slightly more
substance. Two asked the secretary of agriculture to map out a possible
wilderness reserve in Puerto Rico. Another sought to authorize $500,000 to
“improve and coordinate the dissemination of [elderly] care information and
resources to family caregivers.” Another would have allowed the secretary of
veterans affairs to provide advice on prosthetics, orthotics, and
rehabilitation to victims of landmines. A fifth bill proposed to extend
unemployment insurance in 2001, but there was nothing unique about that bill.
It appears as though it was actually a gift to her so that she could claim an
accomplishment.
There were no bills
aiming to help take care of children. So much for the image that everyone
has been trying so hard to construct this week.
The Puerto Rico bills didn’t even mandate the creation of
a wilderness reserve. Apparently, Hillary wanted something that she could tell
her Puerto Rican constituents about.
Some of Clinton’s inability to pass legislation might
have been due to Republican control of the House, but Democrats controlled both
the House and Senate for one full session of Congress while she was in office.
Republicans may have wanted to prevent Clinton from passing legislation; for
the same reasons, Democrats would have probably moved bills so she could
demonstrate her legislative prowess. Yet even when the Democrats controlled
both houses, Clinton wasn’t able to get legislation enacted.
Of course, Hillary’s isn’t alone with this type of
record. Her vice-presidential running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, also has no
legislative accomplishments.
There only seems to be one explanation for all of this.
Hillary already knew that the Democrats would eventually nominate her to be
president. Her strategy was thus to do nothing that could possibly be used
against her. The only amazing thing is that she couldn’t even get these pieces
of fluff passed.
Did she simply not care or was it an inability to
accomplish even that task? Only Hillary might know the answer to that question.
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