Posts Tagged ‘Jim DeMint’
DeMint resigning from Senate to lead right-wing think tank
Thursday, 06 December 2012 10:59
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Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) will resign his post in January to head up a right-wing think tank, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The two-term Senator and proponent of term limits was re-elected in 2010 amid an anti-incumbent frenzy that he helped create, much to the chagrin of his fellow Republicans. DeMint previously announced that he was already planning to leave Congress after his second term was up. (Read more…)

Instead, the Journal notes that he’ll leave the Senate to lead The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank known for promoting misinformation about climate science and supporting tax cuts for the rich and debasing social safety net programs like unemployment insurance and Medicare.

The Heritage Foundation was also a decades-long promoter of the individual mandate to buy health insurance, but they backed away from it once President Barack Obama and fellow Democrats came to support the idea. The mandate is now the law of the land.

The Journal added that The Heritage Foundation’s current president, 71-year-old Ed Feulner, will take a new job as the think tank’s “chancellor,” a new role created just for him.

DeMint’s move means South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) will appoint his replacement in the coming months. That successor will face a special election in 2014.

 
Sen. DeMint blasts ‘secular’ government, urges Creationism in schools
Wednesday, 27 June 2012 16:24
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At a Freedom Congress conference earlier this month, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint (SC) railed against the “increasingly secular” culture of the United States, which was being fostered by the government.

“Washington reflects people,” he said at Heritage International Ministries. “It reflects our culture. (Read more…) If reflects the fact that we’ve become increasingly secular as a culture.”

“Part of that is the government pushing faith aspects out of our society, cus now in our culture if you say something is wrong, if you want to raise your family and teach your children right and wrong, you’re likely to be persecuted in some way by the government for saying something is wrong.

“The stigma is now on you, instead of those who are doing things that are wrong,” he continued. “So the government has been a participant in secularizing our country. And perhaps the worst of that, the thing we’ve conceded as a people we need to fix, is turning the education of our children over to the government.”

Later in his speech, DeMint said children should be able to go to schools that teach creationism. He claimed that scientific discoveries, such as the human genome project, provided evidence supporting creationism. DeMint also said God had put Christians in charge of “this vineyard we call America.”

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube by RightWingWatch on June 27, below:

 
Tea party senator wants JPMorgan CEO to ‘guide’ Congress on banking regulation
Wednesday, 13 June 2012 12:22
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Tea party favorite Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) on Wednesday asked JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who recently announced that his company had lost at least $2 billion in the derivative market, to “guide” Congress in creating friendly banking regulations.

During a U.S. (Read more…) Senate Banking Committee hearing, DeMint told Dimon that lawmakers had no right to judge JPMorgan for their massive losses.

“We can hardly sit in judgement of your losing $2 billion,” the junior senator from South Carolina explained. “We lose twice that every day here in Washington and plan to continue to do that every day. It’s comforting to know that even with a $2 billion loss in a trade last year, your company still, I think, had a $19 billion profit. During that same period, we lost over a trillion dollars.”

“As you can tell, there’s a temptation here. Every time something goes amiss, we want to add a regulation, and we’ve surrounded the banking industry with so many regulations and we still seem to have problems here and there,” DeMint added. “I think we do need to recognize that you are a very big bank, the biggest in the world. You’ve got very big profits. Periodically you’re going to have big losses and we need to look at that as part of doing business.”

The senator continued by asking Dimon “for some ideas of what you think we need to do … to allow the industry to operate better.”

“I believe in strong regulation, not always more,” the CEO replied. “I would prefer a simple, clean, strong regulatory system with real intelligent design. And that’s not what we did. We created a really complex, hard to figure out who’s responsible, no one could adjudicate between all the various regulatory agencies.”

“Obviously as we’ve seen, the laws and regulations are not necessarily improving things,” DeMint agreed. “Some of the things you’ve done voluntarily — and other banks — like capital requirements. I think a best practice — if we could do anything to encourage the industry to develop a lot of its own voluntary rules, that would guide us a lot better.”

“So I guess if I could just leave you with any one thing, if you could come back this time next year and talk about how the industry has put together large-scale, best-practice committees, that would help us keep banking as a private enterprise rather than as a government institution.”

Dimon announced in May that his firm had lost $2 billion gambling on derivatives, but only days later, experts said the losses had surged to at least $3 billion.

Watch this video from CNN, broadcast June 13, 2012.