Harry Reid Worries About Olympic Uniforms, Ignores Budgets

Congress: The Senate Majority Leader hasn't proposed a budget in three years, won't bring tax cuts to the floor, yet adds Olympic uniforms to a priority list that includes boxing rules, cowboy poetry and a train to nowhere.

It's been more than three years since the Senate of Majority Leader Harry Reid last passed a budget, and a tsunami of tax increases threatens to swamp the economy in 2013.

So on Thursday Reid decided to take on the critical issue of the U.S. Olympic team's Ralph Lauren-designed uniforms.

It seems the uninspiring uniforms are being made in China. So are a lot of things, which has left us in hock to Beijing up to our proverbial eyeballs. Reid says we should burn the uniforms.

We don't remember Reid saying anything about the bus tours President Obama took in his Canadian-made Ground Force One.

We'd prefer lowering the highest corporate tax burden in the world and curbing union power so more things could be made here in the U.S., but Sen. Reid has his priorities.

Right up there with Olympic uniforms as a Reid priority is the state of officiating in boxing.

Reid recently opined that he thought the fight between Philippine boxing icon Manny Pacquiao and challenger Timothy Bradley was poorly officiated and wrongly decided and hinted such an injustice might be remedied by congressional action. At one time, Reid was an amateur boxer.

Of course, we remember how Reid, in a style of leadership that has become a national embarrassment, took to the Senate floor to lament that Republicans, through a "mean-spirited" budget bill not only wanted to gut funding for National Public Broadcasting but also deprive Nevada and America of a rather unique cultural institution.

"The National Endowment of the Humanities," Reid explained, "is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist."

Wouldn't want the Chinese to get a leg up on cowboy poetry readings. Such programs, Reid added, "create jobs."

Then there is Reid's train to nowhere, a high-speed rail line from Las Vegas to the thriving metropolis of Victorville, Calif.

If the project is to be privately funded as he says, why does it need to be financed in part by a $4.9 billion federal loan? And does he really expect people to drive from Los Angeles to Victorville, then hop a train to Vegas, only to need a car when they get there?

On the issues of budgets, taxes, the economy and an increasingly unsustainable national debt, Harry Reid is AWOL. Last Wednesday, he refused to call a vote on extending the Bush tax cuts, though President Barack Obama days earlier urged passage of a scaled-down version of the tax cuts as soon as possible.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asked for two votes, one on the GOP's plan to extend all the tax cuts, including for income over $250,000, and another on Obama's plan to extend the tax cuts on income just under $250,000.

But Reid, eager to protect his fragile Senate majority, doesn't want to hold any embarrassing election-eve votes or deal with the looming "Taxmageddon" scheduled to hit in January when the Bush tax cuts expire and new Obama taxes kick in.

The malfeasance of Sen. Reid and his Democratic majority is sufficient reason to give the GOP Senate control in November.

Besides ending what might be called, to use a boxing term, Reid's rope-a-dope leadership, it might give him more time to study Olympic fashion and read cowboy poetry.