What Others Have To Say …

THE LEFT:

… And all of this (House budget cuts) amounts to a savings of less than 1 percent in the federal budget. …

Disparity in income is causing increasingly apparent social problems, unrest and hatred in our nation.

… What people need is more education, particularly at the technical school and community college level.

The Republican response has been to cut money for education across the board, particularly in those schools and programs that are most needed to prepare workers for higher-paying jobs.

Bottom line: Their program is the backasswards of what this country needs. Almost everything the Republicans have done thus far will make our problems worse, not better.

They did defeat term limits, which were always a bad idea.

- Molly Ivins, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

THE MIDDLE:

What’s most striking about these hundred days is not that Gingrich & Co. have dominated the news.

More important is the fact that conservative and Republican arguments now dominate the debate. Democrats fight on the edges to preserve certain programs.

Republicans get their big ideas in play every day: the need to reduce the size of government, to hem in the regulatory apparatus, to let families keep more of their own income.

If your message is that government can work, you’d better make it work. The Democrats’ problem, in 1994 and now, is that they didn’t do that.

Gingrich knows what he is doing in highlighting a “Contract,” which is cast in contrast to the sense that Democrats broke their own promises, and in filling that Contract with declarations that life would be better if government would only recede.

- E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post

THE RIGHT:

The new majority has been denied credit for some of the reforms it has enacted that really are a change from business as usual in the nation’s capital.

Any time someone voluntarily relinquishes power it ought to be news. Upon taking control on Capitol Hill, Republicans voted to live by the laws they enact for everyone else - correcting an outrage that 40 years of Democratic power permitted. They swiftly dismantled one-third of the power structure - committees and committee staff - that they could have taken for their own once achieving a majority. They enacted a lineitem veto despite the fact that doing so gives added power to a president of the opposing party. And more than 80 percent of them voted to limit the terms of members of Congress with many freshman Republicans voting make term limits retroactive as well.

- Mona Charen, Creators Syndicate