Last election cycle I very vocally expressed my concerns about Jared Polis as a candidate. For some reason he was the darling of many local progressives. My only thought was that they must not have ever worked with Jared or dealt with the ramifications of his poorly thought out policy proposals.
I've essentially ignored him since he took office, which is hard to do since he's a shameless self-promoter who's even profiled in a regular CNN feature on freshman legislators. For the most part he's toed the line, though he did let his glibertarian economic leanings show with a WSJ piece on the auto bailout. He's an annoyance but one that I expect to be relatively short lived, he'll no doubt become bored with Congress within a few terms and find some other vanity project on which to spend his millions.
Polis though has now decided to make quite a bit of noise over a proposed funding mechanism for healthcare reform. Did I mention that the funding mechanism in question is a tax on on the extremely wealthy? Polis is one of the wealthiest members of Congress and he bought his Congressional seat with millions of his own dollars (just as he bought his only other elected position on the State School Board). It takes a lot of nerve to use that extremely safe Democratic seat to throw up a roadblock to a landmark piece of the Democratic agenda, especially since his opposition is so blatantly self-serving.
As David Sirota notes, Polis actually campaigned in favor of a single-payer system and proposed raising payroll taxes to pay for the reform. Now that he holds office though Polis is blocking a funding stream that would impact him and in the meantime undermining much needed reform.
I wish I could say that I was outraged or shocked by Polis' behavior but the sad fact is, I'm not. This is typical Jared Polis and hopefully the progressives who so forcefully supported this Randian candidate will just as forcefully call on Polis to change course and do the right thing on this issue.
No comments:
Post a Comment