Kendall Stanley: Running on empty?

As you can imagine, living out here in Arizona means you see the papers full of letters to the editor for and against U.S. Sen. Krysten Sinema, nominally a Democrat and a firm believer in the Senate filibuster. Many Arizonans are not happy with her as they push for voting rights legislation that’s stuck in the Senate because of the filibuster.

Sinema feels that bipartisanship is important and keeping the filibuster means each side has to play nice when the other party is in power because the filibuster gives them an edge.

If, and that is a huge if, both sides believe in bipartisanship which at the moment is in short supply on the GOP side of the ledger.

It goes back a long way.

As Ramesh Ponnuru writes for Bloomberg Opinion, you can trace part of it back to the 2014 election when Mitch McConnell discouraged GOP candidates from running on campaign promises.

“Republicans have been following the plan not to have plans ever since,” Ponnuru writes. “In 2016, Donald Trump ran for president with the wispiest of proposals: Building a wall and somehow making Mexico pay for it was as detailed as he got. In 2018, Republicans had control of both houses of Congress and the White House. They did not say what they would do if the voters kept them in power, beyond confirming judges. Trump released no second-term agenda when he ran for re-election in 2020, the Republicans did not even produce a platform at their national convention that year. McConnell has reportedly told Republican donors he will not get behind a legislative agenda for this year’s elections, either.”

Hard to be criticized when you don’t lay anything out on the table.

Yet still Sinema gives the GOP the benefit of the doubt even though Senate Republicans have shown absolutely no signs of good will, let alone agreement on any plan the Democrats may propose.

Or they will do this ploy: vote against the infrastructure bill and then since it passed, go back to their states and crow about all this wonderful infrastructure aid you’re bringing back home when you have had absolutely nothing to do with said aid headed toward your state.

The Republican Party used to be a party with ideas and Ponnuru said there are some members who have come up with proposals on a wide range of topics, but they are getting nowhere fast.

Rest assured there will be few Republican ideas floating around later this year, not to mention no grand ideas for the 2024 presidential go-around either.

As for Sinema, she’s been censured by the Arizona Democratic Party. Not that it matters in the whole scheme of things for Sinema.

And then there were mink

OK. all you coronavirus aficionados, where’s the virus moved to now?

If you said mink and Michigan whitetail deer, you win the prize!

And why, you may wonder, should we care?

There’s a two-fold answer to that, the first being those animals being a repository for the virus for who knows how long, and the second the ability to absorb the virus, have it mutate and then move back from the animal population to the human one.

Thus we had mink farmers in Europe killing off their mink because of the virus, while here, nada.

There is little money going to surveillance of domestic and wild critters to see where the virus has spread. We don’t exactly know what species might be infected and if the virus is coming back at us with a changed variant.

We might not look at Bambi as a disease vector, but there it is.

Will just leave you with the spread of disease to ponder for a time.

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Kendall Stanley: Running on empty?