Contradictions catching up to Cazayoux Congress career

Rep. Don Cazayoux, he who rode an “I’m a Democrat but don’t really vote like one” mantra to a narrow special election win for his current job, is finding he can’t dance fast enough to obscure the contradictions inherent in that strategy.

As his state legislative record indicated, Cazayoux is a conventional liberal who tries to cast a conservative vote here and there to make his conservative district think he isn’t. In a low-stimulus special election last month, it was enough to win. But as we approach the more-followed regular election season with qualifying for it just a couple of weeks away, attention is being brought to what he says and what he does come a-cropper.

Republican groups and sympathizers are running ads and messages pointing out how the Democrats who run Congress in the House are using procedural votes to defeat Republican attempts to consider commonsensical means by which to increase U.S. energy independence and to bring down high gasoline prices. Cazayoux is voting with Democrats to prevent these measures, which include increasing ability to extract oil from U.S. resources, from coming to votes amended to legislation.

Like always, Cazayoux tries to have it both ways. Despite these votes he claims he really is for things like increased domestic drilling capacity as evidenced by a recent vote, but that is misleading if one doesn’t understand how business gets conducted by the House Democrat majority. Essentially, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gets a vote count on legislation that matters to her. As long as she can get a majority (preferably 218) on a matter, she then allows for enough Democrats to vote against their leadership so that it does not endanger the party’s victory on the issue. Cazayoux had permission to vote that way because she had the votes to spare on S. Con. Res. 70 – barely.

Otherwise, he toes her line like the obedient lapdog to liberalism that he is. He follows the standard party line that “drilling is not a short-term solution,” (which is not entirely accurate) knowing full well that a long-term solution is needed as well but would rather put his eggs in the basket of all sorts of impossible alternative solutions (except, of course, the one alternative that has any realistic chance of providing in the intermediate term, nuclear power). This is the tactic of liberals to create an energy crunch and then blame it not on their own intransigence in matters of supply sacrificed on the altar of misguided environmentalism, but on the free market economy as a backdoor means by which to bring greater government control over the people’s resources.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether it is by choice, because it’s the result of the vote that counts. And the fact is, despite all his words denying it Cazayoux’s actions show he is more interested in voting for a liberal agenda critically out of step with his district, Louisiana, and the country, than he is in doing what’s correct.

Even having been in office less than two months, astute political observers knew he could not hide such votes for long and now opponents are exploiting the internal contradiction. While this fell flat during the special election campaign because it was a vote Cazayoux wouldn’t have to make, the charge that Cazayoux’s first vote if reelected would be to install the ultra-liberal Pelosi as Speaker will ring very true in this fall’s campaign, and Cazayoux is busy verifying that statement with his current voting behavior. It will not amuse a majority in the 6th District. No matter how many symbolic votes Cazayoux casts, as long as he casts his lot with Congressional Democrats, he supports a self-defeating energy policy for America.