Chuck Grassley's Dispiriting Bipartisanship
First, Grassley did not speak like Lindsey Graham or Olympia Snowe. He did not come onto the program determined to present a reasonable face and comfort liberals, conservatives and independents alike. Instead, he railed against "government-run health care" and the "Pelosi health-care bill." He talked about bureaucrats and exploding deficits. He sounded like a House conservative giving a stump speech. Grassley presumably leaves his stemwinders behind when he's with the Gang of Six. But this was not a comforting sign. This was not a unifying performance.
Second, Chuck Todd asked Grassley whether he'd vote for the bill if it was a good piece of policy that he'd crafted but that couldn't attract more than a handful of Republican votes. "Certainly not," replied Grassley. Todd tried again, clarifying that this was legislation Grassley liked, and thought would move the ball forward, but was getting bogged down due to partisanship. Grassley held firm. If a good bill cannot attract Republican support, then it is not a good bill, he argued.
Grassley, in other words, is working backward from the votes. If the Gang of Six reaches a compromise that the Senate Republicans don't support, Grassley will abandon that compromise, regardless of the fact that he's the guy who built it. The Gang of Six, in other words, falls apart if it can't assure a vote of 76. Since it seems virtually impossible that such a vote will manifest, it seems similarly unlikely that Grassley will sign his name to the final bill. And Grassley, remember, was willing to say all this publicly. His version of bipartisanship is strikingly partisan.
Charter schools in Georgia, the majority of which are in metro Atlanta, may be outscoring their public school peers on testing but many are not making the grade when it comes to financial health, according to a new Georgia State University study. Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Professor Cynthia S. Searcy, co-author of the study, said that more than 40 percent of start-up charter schools in Georgia operated with deficits or in the red during the 2006-2007 school year, the latest dates the data was available at the time of the study.
Walter C. Jones reports that a state utility regulator is trying to find out why there are more people interested in selling solar power than there are willing to pay extra to buy it. Stan Wise, one of five members of the state Public Service Commission, wants to know if the Georgia Power Co. is doing enough to market the benefits of its Green Power program. Since the program began in October 2006, only about 4,000 of the company's 2.3 million customers have signed up for energy generated from renewable sources, including solar.
Staff reports that Metro Atlanta saw its smallest annual population growth in nearly two decades in the period between April 2008 and April 2009, according to estimates published Monday by the Atlanta Regional Commission. The region added only 24,700 people in the period, showing the area is really feeling the pain of the housing bust and the recession.
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