Nathan Stubbs

Vitter gets busy

by Nathan Stubbs

Two days into their new session, many members of Congress are yet to file any bills. Not David Vitter. He filed 34 on the first day. That’s how David Vitter rolls. The Times-Picayune reports today that Vitter’s filing frenzy is of a predictably hardline conservative agenda: abortion, public prayer, stem cell research, home schooling, drugs, the death penalty, illegal immigration and protecting the American flag. You name it, he’s got it covered. Modest as always, Vitter says it’s just business as usual.

“It’s pretty much my normal procedure, “ he tells the T-P. “Between the election and the end of the year is a pretty quiet time in most offices. We’re not particularly quiet. We’re pretty organized, and we want to get to work on these things from the get-go.”

And don’t be mistaken. Should you be thinking that these polemical issues are taking up all Vitter’s time, he clarifies that he is still working nonstop on bringing home funding for levees and I-49. “No one should take the list of bills I put in the hopper the first day as some sort of conscious list of my top priorities, “ he says. “These are certainly things I care about, but a lot of things would rank even higher than some of them but don’t take the form of a discrete bill. There are the huge priorities that I work on all the time.”

So it’s just a typical day at the office. And has nothing to do with being a politically-calculated move to continue to try and bring himself back into the in the good graces of his Christian conservative base after that whole prostitution scandal.