“Holding A Blank Ransom Note”: GOP Had A Plan On the Debt Ceiling, But Now Have Absolutely No Idea What To Do Next
Last spring, House Republican efforts to hold the debt ceiling hostage quickly became a fiasco – Democrats refused to play along and Congress passed a clean increase. Last October, House GOP efforts to hold the debt ceiling hostage were arguably even worse – the debacle coincided with a humiliating shutdown, and ended with another clean increase.
Despite this recent history, Republican lawmakers once again said they expected some kind of major policy concession or they would once again push the nation towards a default. Say hello to Debacle #3.
House Republican leaders are at a loss on how to move a debt limit increase.
A GOP leadership aide told CQ Roll Call that after an informal canvas of the House Republican Conference through member meetings and phone calls over the past week, leaders concluded that the top two sweeteners could not attract enough Republican support to pass a debt ceiling hike.
Going into this week, House Republicans had narrowed their scope: they would refuse to pay the nation’s bills unless Democrats gave them either (a) the Keystone XL pipeline and its 50 permanent jobs; or (b) the elimination of risk corridors in the Affordable Care Act, which would add $8 billion to the deficit and risk higher premiums on consumers.
In reality, it was highly unlikely the GOP would get either concession – Democrats don’t see the need to pay a ransom if the hostage takers are bluffing – but Republicans seemed certain they’d seek one concession or the other.
That is, until today, when House GOP leaders suddenly realized that rank-and-file House Republicans aren’t on board with either idea. And since these measures apparently don’t have 218 GOP votes, Republicans would need Democratic support to pull off their own hostage crisis, which isn’t going to happen.
So where does this leave the House of Representatives three weeks before Congress needs to act on the debt limit? Lost and directionless.
A leadership aide told Roll Call, “We are mulling other options and trying to figure out the best way forward on this.”
Or put another way, “We had a plan, but now have absolutely no idea what to do next.”
It’s not too tough to predict how this will play out.
That left Republican leaders with no clear alternative to addressing the debt limit, which the Treasury Department has said needs to be raised by the end of February.
Instead, it now appears that a combination of Republicans and Democrats will be needed to get a debt-limit boost through the House.
And that means a clean debt-ceiling increase, which was the inevitable outcome in the first place.
The lingering question isn’t why GOP leaders are struggling in this fight; it’s why GOP leaders agreed to launch this fight knowing in advance they’d lose.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 5, 2014
“Obamacare Is Not A Job Killer”: How Critics Are Misreading A New Government Report
The Congressional Budget Office today released the latest update of its projections for the economy and the budget, including Obamacare. And a fair reading would be that not a ton has changed since last time. CBO now expects the law will lead to 25 million people getting health insurance, while some 31 million people will remain uninsured. It will require a lot of new government spending but, because of offsetting revenue and cuts to other programs, it will actually reduce the deficit.
But CBO revised one finding and, all day long, critics have been seizing on the revision as proof that the law is a boondoggle.
The real story, as usual, is a lot more complicated.
The projection is about how the Affordable Care Act will affect labor output—that is, the number of hours Americans work every year. From the get-go, CBO assumed that Obamacare would slightly reduce labor output, relative to what it might have been without the law in place. Why? The CBO gave a bunch of different reasons.
For one thing, CBO reasoned, the financial assistance Obamacare provides depends on income. The more money you make, the less assistance you get. CBO argued that this would discourage some workers from putting in more hours, since the reward for working harder would be more income but less assistance on health insurance. In addition, CBO noted, historically some people have taken or held on to jobs exclusively to get health insurance. Obamacare makes it possible to get coverage without a job. As a result, CBO predicted, some of these people would stop working—or, at least, work fewer hours.
These weren’t the only ways that Obamacare will affect jobs, according to the CBO. And sometimes Obamacare will lead to people working more hours—for example, by giving people with chronic medical problems more freedom to switch jobs or start their own firms.
Overall, the CBO had said previously, Obamacare’s net effect would be a reduction in total labor compensation of about 0.5 percent. Now, citing new research on the effects of taxes, CBO is predicting that the net effect will eventually be twice as large—a full 1 percent reduction in compensation, or the rough equivalent of what we’d expect if two million fewer people were in full-time jobs.
That sounds like a big deal—and Obamacare critics certainly treated it like one. Here’s the conservative publication Newsmax: “Simply put, the new analysis from the nonpartisan agency suggests the 2010 Affordable Care Act is driving businesses and people to choose government-sponsored benefits rather than work.” Here’s Republican Congressman Tom Price: “This independent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office confirms that Obamacare will destroy economic opportunity and with it financial security for many American families.” And here’s a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee: “There is no way to spin this. Because of #ObamaCare, there will be 2.5 million less jobs in our economy.” (If you want more quotes, Glenn Kessler and Greg Sargent of the Washington Post have nice roundups—and some good analysis of their own.)
But CBO didn’t actually say Obamacare would lead to 2 million fewer jobs. It said that Obamacare would lead to the “equivalent” of 2 million fewer jobs. In reality, CBO expects a much larger group of people to reduce their hours by a much smaller amount. Only a relative few will stop working altogether.
More important, CBO says, most of the people working fewer hours will be choosing to do so. And that’s a very different story from the one Obamacare critics are telling. Some of the people cutting back hours will be working parents who decide they can afford to put in a little less time with their co-workers and a little more time with their kids. Some will be early sixty-somethings who will retire before they reach 65, rather than clinging to low-paying jobs just to get health benefits. “This is what we want in a fair society,” says Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist and Obamacare architect. “We don’t want to enslave the old and sick to their jobs out of some sense of meanness. If they are dying to quit/retire, then let them. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Of course, some able-bodied Americans will cut back on hours for reasons that conservatives, in particular, might not like. To put it crudely, they’ll work fewer hours simply simply because they don’t feel like working so hard. But whether or not that’s so problematic, it’s also the inevitable by-product of any program that makes assistance conditional on income. The Earned Income Tax Credit works that way. So do food stamps and Medicaid.
And so, by the way, would the new health care proposal from three Republican senators, which makes subsidies available to people with incomes at 299 percent of the poverty line but not those with incomes at 300 percent. The only question with programs like these is how big the disincentive to work is—and whom, exactly, it affects. The only alternatives are to give help to everybody (which requires much more government spending) or to give help to nobody (which leaves many more people struggling).
Ironically, the CBO report included two other findings that should, if anything, make most people more optimistic about Obamacare’s future. First, the CBO found that the law will reduce the deficit by a little more than initial projections suggested. Second, it found that the now-infamous “risk corridor” program, in which government and insurers share gains and losses, will result in net payments from insurers to the government, rather than the other way. (Jonathan Chait has the details on that drama.)
The change in projected deficits isn’t very large and the risk corridor prediction comes with more uncertainty than usual, so you wouldn’t want to bet a lot of money on either prediction coming true. But both findings call into more serious doubt two of the Republicans’ favorite talking points—that Obamacare will drive up the deficit and that, because of the risk corridor program, it’s a “taxpayer bailout” of insurers. As of today, those claims look even weaker than they did before.
Will Republicans stop making these arguments? Or will they at least acknowledge some uncertainty about them? Nope. And that’s a prediction in which you can feel very confident.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, February 4, 2014
“The Presidency Comes With Executive Power, Deal With It”: Obama’s Just Doing What He’s Empowered To Do
In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama vowed to act on his own if Congress did not do its part. Republicans duly took the bait. “We don’t have a monarchy in this country,” said Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. “The abuse of power by the administration has only become more brazen,” said Senator Ted Cruz.
Obama has unsheathed the sword of executive power, and yet rather than use it to smite his foes, he seems intent on clipping hedges. He says he will raise the minimum wage for a few thousand employees of federal contractors, tinker with the pension system, trim red tape, cajole business leaders to fund pre-kindergarten education, and do something unspecified to help stop gun violence.
Obama begged Congress for help far more often than he vowed to go it alone. Obama’s significant acts of executive power—the Libya intervention, the refusal to defend DOMA before the Supreme Court, non-enforcement of the immigration law against certain groups, climate regulation, NSA surveillance, recess appointments, executive privilege, and so on—lie in the past.
So we have a paradox. In his first term, Obama humbly beseeched Congress for help and sang the virtues of bipartisanship while resorting to unilateral action whenever he needed to. Today, he announces his defiance of Congress yet seems uninterested in using his newly acknowledged executive powers to, for example, shut Guantanamo Bay or raise the debt ceiling on his own.
Be that as it may, it is worth understanding what is at stake in these debates. We all learned in school that the founders feared executive power and so gave policy-making authority to Congress. In fact, the founders feared a too-powerful Congress as well, and they sought to create a strong executive. But the idea that Congress makes law and the president executes it—and any deviation from this pattern is tyranny—is burned into our political culture.
This system of separation of powers was cumbersome from the start. The country did well in its first few decades probably because state governments led the way, and state government structure was far less rigid than federal structure, which finally collapsed with the Civil War. When the communications and transportation revolutions created national markets and new opportunities and threats in foreign relations, it was finally clear that the federal separation-of-powers system could not manage policy at a national level.
The problem was that Congress was an enormously clumsy institution. Its numerous members fiercely advanced their deeply parochial interests. Policies of great importance for one section of the country, or one group of people, could not be embodied in legislation unless logrolling could be arranged, which was slow, difficult, and vulnerable to corruption. As a public, deliberative body, Congress could not react swiftly to changing events, nor act secretly when secrecy was called for.
No one held a constitutional convention to replace the eighteenth-century constitution with a twentieth-century one. Instead, political elites acting through the party system adjusted the government structure on their own. Congress created gigantic regulatory agencies and tasked the president to lead them. Congress also acquiesced as presidents asserted authority over foreign policy. The Supreme Court initially balked at the legislative delegations but eventually was bullied into submission; it hardly ever objected to the president’s dominance over foreign affairs.
This was not a smooth process. The rise of executive power sometimes hurt important interests and always rubbed against the republican sensibilities that Americans inherited from the founders. From time to time, Congress reaped political benefits from thwarting the president. But today Congress reacts rather than leads. It investigates allegations of corruption in the executive branch. It holds hearings to torment executive officials. It certainly doesn’t give the executive the budget he always wants, or pass every new law that he believes that he needs. But existing laws and customs almost always give the president the power he needs to govern. And when they don’t, Congress will sooner or later give him the power he wants. Witness the Dodd-Frank Act and the Affordable Care Act—two massive expansions of executive power.
In monarchies, the official position was that the king made policy but everyone understood that his ministers did. In our system, the official story is that Congress makes policy and the president implements it—such is the inertia of history. But the reality is that the president both makes policy and implements it, subject to vague parameters set down by Congress and to its carping from the sidelines. Presidents can defy the official story and assert the reality if they want. That is what the George W. Bush administration did, to its eventual sorrow. In hindsight, the broad assertions of executive power by Bush administration lawyers in signing statements, executive orders, and secret memos were naïve. They described, with only some exaggeration, the actual workings of the government, but their account conflicted with the official narrative and thus played into the hands of critics, who could invoke tyranny, dictatorship, and that old standby, the “imperial presidency.”
Democratic presidents have been shrewder. Bill Clinton and Obama have been just as muscular in their use of executive power as Ronald Reagan and Bush, but they resisted the temptation to brandish the orb and scepter. Whereas Republican presidents cite their constitutional powers as often as they can, Democratic presidents avoid doing so except as a last resort, preferring instead to rely on statutes, torturing them when necessary to extract the needed interpretation. Thus did Obama’s lawyers claim that the military intervention in Libya did not violate the War Powers Act because the U.S. bombing campaign did not amount to “hostilities” (the word in the statute). A more honest legal theory—one that does not require such a strained interpretation of a word—is that the War Powers Act infringes on the president’s military powers, but a theory like that would have provoked howls of protest.
In most cases, lawyers do not need to resort to such measures because Congress has already granted authority. The president’s power to raise the minimum wage comes from the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, which, in typically broad language, permits the president to set contract terms with federal contractors so as to promote “efficiency.” Far from being a bold assertion of executive power, this is the type of humdrum presidential action that takes place every day.
Congress gave the president the power to determine contract terms because Congress did not want to—practically speaking could not—negotiate those terms itself every time the U.S. government entered a contract. This principle explains why Congress gives the executive branch enormous discretion to determine health, education, environmental, and financial policy. Congress directed the financial regulators to implement the Volcker Rule, but it would be entirely up to those regulators to make the rule meaningful or toothless. Nor can Congress block Obama’s decision to effectively implement the Dream Act—which was not passed by Congress—by not enforcing immigration laws against those who would have benefited from the act.
Meanwhile, the founders’ anxieties about executive tyranny have proven erroneous. The president is kept in check by elections, the party system, the press, popular opinion, courts, a political culture that is deeply suspicious of his motives, term limits, and the sheer vastness of the bureaucracy which he can only barely control. He does not always do the right thing, of course, but presidents generally govern from the middle of the political spectrum.
Obama’s assertion of unilateral executive authority is just routine stuff. He follows in the footsteps of his predecessors on a path set out by Congress. And well should he. If you want a functioning government—one that protects citizens from criminals, terrorists, the climatic effects of greenhouse gas emissions, poor health, financial manias, and the like—then you want a government led by the president.
By: Eric Posner, The New Republic, February 3, 2014
“In The Dark By Choice”: Christie Still Unsure About Traffic Study
As Rachel reported on the show last night, there were quite a few developments late yesterday in New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) bridge scandal, including the governor himself answering questions on the controversy for the first time in weeks.
Indeed, one of the more striking moments last night came when Christie, appearing on a local radio show, stuck to a position that’s literally hard to believe.
CHRISTIE: [A]s I said at the time of January 9th when I did my press conference, I still don’t know whether there was a traffic study that morphed into –
HOST: You still don’t know at this point whether there was a traffic study?
CHRISTIE: Well, what I’m saying, Eric, did this start as a traffic study that morphed into some political shenanigans, or did it start as political shenanigans that became a traffic study?
The host’s incredulity was understandable, since the notion that there was some kind of legitimate traffic study was discredited quite a while ago. Christie hopes to maintain his credibility as multiple scandals surrounding his administration continue to unfold, but the more he suggests the traffic-study fig leaf was real, the more suspect his defense appears.
It’s worth emphasizing that in the same interview the governor “unequivocally” denied having anything to do with the Fort Lee scheme before it was executed by his team last September.
It was, of course, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Ann Kelly, who said it was “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” and it was Kelly who also raised some eyebrows late yesterday afternoon.
Kelly, whom Christie fired last month, has refused to comply with the subpoena issued by the state legislature’s investigatory committee.
In a letter issued [Monday] by the lawyer for Kelly, who last month was fired as Gov. Chris Christie’s deputy chief of staff after emails emerged showing she had apparently orchestrated the lane closures, Kelly cited both her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and Fourth Amendment privacy rights.
Michael Critchley, Kelly’s lawyer – widely known as an aggressive and highly skilled trial lawyer – wrote in the letter that, “Here, the information demanded from Ms. Kelly … directly overlaps with a parallel federal grand jury investigation being conducted by the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey.
Kelly is not the only former member of Team Christie to take the Fifth in response to investigators’ request for information – Bill Stepien, Christie’s former campaign manager, and David Wildstein, Christie’s former aide at the Port Authority, both did the same thing in January.
And speaking of subpoenas, Christie also acknowledged last night that his office has received a federal subpoena from the U.S. Attorney’s office as part of its investigation into the bridge scandal. This is separate from the subpoenas issued by the state legislature’s investigatory committee. The governor said his office will comply with the federal subpoena.
Finally, Christie said during the radio interview last night that he’s “curious” about “what happened here” and remains “really anxious to find out.” It’s unclear, however, why he didn’t ask Bridget Ann Kelly why the scheme was hatched before her dismissal.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 4, 2014
“The Mad Men Problem At Home”: Closing The Wage Gap Begins With Remedying The Housework Gap First
When President Obama addressed the gender-based wage gap during his State of the Union address last week, women cheered and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro even gave out high fives. Obama called on Washington and businesses to help women succeed at work and “do away with workplace policies that belong in a Mad Men episode.” However, the President forgot to name a key constituency in his call to help women succeed: husbands.
All the workplace policies in the world aren’t going to get women to parity unless we do away with our Mad Men-era policies at home, too. Despite the fact women are the sole or primary source of income in a record 40% of U.S. households, they still do the majority of housework and childcare. According to the Pew Research Center, during an average week[OK? The study, if I’m looking at the right one, seems to have measured weeks rather than days.], women spend more time cleaning, doing laundry, and preparing food then men do. Men, on the other hand, spend more time watching television than women do. And even in households where the woman is the sole breadwinner, the labor division is far from equal. Men who stay home average 18 hours of housework per week, while their working partners average 14. Stay-at-home mothers, though, average 26 hours of housework. Their working partners average just a third of that time. America has a housework gap, and it’s fueling the gender gap at work.
Research indicates there is a direct and negative correlation between housework and the wage gap. One theory, from research in The Journal of Human Resources, suggests this could be employers’ negative reactions to women who appear dedicated to household activities. It could also be that many employers believe mothers are less committed to their jobs than other employees, as Shelley J. Correll, a sociology professor at Stanford University, posits. As a result, employers are reluctant to hire them and offer them high salaries. The “mommy penalty” is real. The wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is greater than that between women and men, according to the advocacy group MomsRising.
It appears that in 2014, we have high expectations of what a woman can accomplish at work, but we still have 1950s expectations about her role at home. But it’s time to rethink and renegotiate who does what where. Men who have opted out of housework should lean in at home so their wives can lean in at work. And they should advocate for, and take advantage of, family-friendly policies such as paid sick days, paternity leave, and flex benefits in order to create a more equitable arrangement at home.
If we truly believe that, as Obama said, “when women succeed, America succeeds,” then we need to stop ignoring the housework gap. Laundry and dirty dishes may not be standard agenda items for our legislators and business leaders, but they should be. After all, a woman can’t have it all if she’s too busy doing it all.
By: Liz O’Donnell, Time, February 4, 2014
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