“What Republicans Say Versus What Republicans Mean”: A Classic Exercise In Political Disguise And Deceit
Now that the State-of-the-Union cameras are off, House Republicans are eager to discard their frozen smiles and return to their jobs of undermining virtually every goal President Obama set out in his speech on Tuesday night. They made that clear in a letter that the top four House officials sent to the president today, which purports to seek agreement on four points in the speech. It actually does quite the opposite.
The letter is a classic exercise in political disguise and deceit. The real aim of House Republicans is to reduce or remove the influence of the federal government in the marketplace and in the lives of Americans. But that’s not a usable political motto, since most people — except for the most rigid Tea Partiers or libertarians —still expect Washington to work for their benefit. So to preserve the standing of the Republican Party, its leaders have to make it sound as if they share the public’s desire, while concealing their own.
The four leaders — Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the conference chairwoman — wrote that if Mr. Obama truly wants to have “a year of action,” as he said in his speech, he can work with them to enact four bills the House has already passed. They all sound lofty until you actually read them, which is the reason the president has no intention of signing any of them.
Skills training. The president wants more training to match up workers and students to the needs of employers, and called on Vice President Joe Biden to oversee reform of existing training programs. The House training bill, passed last March, would actually eliminate many of the best programs, particularly those that involve labor organizations, and would not replace them. Requirements to direct training to low-income workers– the people who need new skills the most — would be dropped. Instead, the bill would freeze funding for seven years and send much of the remaining federal training money to the states, which cannot be counted on to build reliable programs. The bill’s real intention is to cut spending and weaken labor.
Natural Gas. The president said he would help businesses build factories that use natural gas, which causes less pollution than coal or oil, while strengthening protection of air, water, and federal lands. The Republican letter says nothing about the environment, but does push a bill the House passed in November to automatically allow construction of gas pipelines if the federal government takes too long to issue permits. Almost all pipelines are approved or disapproved within a year, which is apparently too long for the House’s business supporters. The bill’s real intention is to remove federal oversight of the pipeline industry.
Workplace flexibility. The president called for better maternity and paternity leave policies, and an end to restrictions on personal time that he said belonged in a “Mad Men” episode. The Republican response is that businesses should be able to choose whether to give overtime or compensatory time to hourly employees. The House bill, passed in May, would remove the worker protection in place since 1938 that requires extra pay for overtime work. Employees would be able to request comp time, but employers wouldn’t have to give them time off when requested, and wouldn’t have to pay them for comp time that wasn’t used. The bill’s real intention is to give more power to employers and less to workers.
Medical research. Republicans slashed important research in the sequester — the National Institutes of Health has been cut by $4.2 billion since 2011 — and the president urged that the money should be restored. The letter points to a House bill passed last month that would give $126 million to the N.I.H. over ten years for pediatric research. But it would get that money by eliminating public funding for political conventions. The House is free to stop cutting research and put all the money it wants into the N.I.H. The bill’s real intention is to force the political parties to rely on corporations to pay for their conventions, giving businesses far more leverage.
The letter makes no mention of the other popular ideas that Republicans have no intention of approving, including raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment insurance and making preschool universal. The party is on retreat today to come up with disguises for blocking those ideas, too.
By: David Firestone, The New York Times, January 30, 2014
“The Dawning Of Reality”: Chris Christie’s 2016 Access Lane Has Been Closed
Chris Christie was never going to be the president of the United States. That issue was settled long before gridlock set in on the lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge. The New Jersey governor’s record on the critical measures for any state executive bidding for the presidency in 2016—job creation and economic growth—were dismal, and his positions on economic and social issues were far too conservative to attract swing voters in a country that had already rejected John McCain and Mitt Romney.
What remained uncertain was whether a Republican Party that has not nominated a winning candidate with a name other than “Bush” since the 1980s would gamble on Christie. And that issue is now settled, as well.
Even before The New York Times reported on Friday that former Port Authority of New York and New Jersey official David Wildstein, an old friend of the governor who gained his position with Christie’s blessing, has written a letter explaining that it was on “the Christie administration’s order” that access lanes to the bridge were closed—thus gridlocking Fort Lee, a city where the Democratic mayor had refused to endorse the Republican governor’s re-election bid—Republicans across the country were looking elsewhere.
After his re-election last fall, Christie led the Republican pack in national polls and polls from battleground states.
That’s over.
A Washington Post/ABC News survey released this week determined that Christie “appears to have suffered politically from the bridge-traffic scandal engulfing his administration.”
That’s polite newspeak for: Christie’s numbers among those most likely to support him have tanked.
In the Post poll, only 43 percent of Republicans viewed the governor favorably—not that much better than his favorable rating among Americans in general: 35 percent.
The survey found that Christie had sunk to a weak third-place position in the nomination race, with support from just 13 percent of Republican-leaning voters. The candidates who have benefitted most from the governor’s collapse—nationally known Republicans with big names and well-established histories—were soaring. Congressman Paul Ryan, the party’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, who is looking a little more like a 2016 contender these days, was at 20 percent. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush was at 18 percent.
Worse yet for Christie, his 13 percent support level was barely better than that found for Texas Senator Ted Cruz (12 percent), Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (11 percent.) and Florida Senator Marco Rubio (10 percent).
There was a line of analysis that suggested Christie—who after a marathon press conference three weeks ago, in which he tried and failed to explain himself, has pretty much avoided the media—might ride the storm out and get back into contention.
But reality has to be dawning on even the most ardent Christie enthusiasts, now that Wildstein’s lawyer has released the letter claiming that “evidence exists as well tying Mr. Christie to having knowledge of the lane closures, during the period when the lanes were closed, contrary to what the governor stated publicly in a two-hour press conference.”
It is far too early to say where the inquiries and investigations of the bridge scandal—and all the other scandals that have arisen in its wake—will ultimately end up. It is far too early to speak in conclusive terms about what Christie knew, or when he knew it. But it should be clear by now that the sorting out of this governor’s troubles is going to take a very long time. Christie will be fighting in that time not to restore his presidential prospects but to regain the confidence of voters in his home state. Indeed, before this is done, he could well be fighting to retain the governorship through the end of his current term.
That’s not how a candidate secures the Republican nomination for president.
And that is why the time really has come to accept that Chris Christie’s brief period as a presidential prospect is absolutely finished.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 31, 2014
“There’s Something About Darrell”: Issa Praises Waxman For Ideas Issa Opposed
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), one of the most effective federal legislators in a generation, announced he will retire at the end of this term. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a frequent sparring partner of Waxman, issued a nice statement honoring his fellow Californian’s “long and distinguished career.”
“While I didn’t always agree with Chairman Waxman on matters of both policy and oversight tactics, his tenure helming the Committee set important precedents and innovated new investigative tools such as the use of subpoenas for closed-door depositions.
“A number issues [Waxman] doggedly began to follow during his two years as Chairman such as the use of the White House Office of Political Affairs to advance partisan political agendas with taxpayer funds, the over-classification and pseudo-classification of information to hide embarrassing government blunders, and the problematic use of non-official e-mail accounts for official government business remain on the Committee’s agenda today.”
It is, to be sure, a nice gesture when a member from one party extends best wishes to a member from the other party.
But there’s something about Issa’s praise for Waxman’s investigations that seems odd.
In his press release, note that Issa expressed admiration for some specific efforts launched by Waxman during his two-year tenure as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, including the “use of the White House Office of Political Affairs to advance partisan political agendas with taxpayer funds” and “the problematic use of non-official e-mail accounts for official government business.”
Issa’s not wrong about the merit of Waxman’s efforts during the final two years of the Bush/Cheney presidency, but I was following the Oversight Committee pretty closely at the time and I recall a Republican member of the panel expressing outrage that Waxman would dare launch these investigations.
I believe the member’s name was Darrell Issa.
On the former, Bush’s Office of Political Affairs, as led by Karl Rove, engaged in alleged misconduct over and over again. Investigators later reported that Bush’s political office, in one of the era’s lesser-appreciated scandals, engaged in “a systematic misuse of federal resources.”
When Waxman began looking into this in 2007, Issa not only opposed congressional subpoenas intended to get to the bottom of the story, the Republican also rejected the very idea that there was anything untoward about a White House political office using taxpayer money for partisan purposes since Congress does the same thing. “It’s a little bit of hubris that one body can’t do something without the other body pretending that we don’t do what we do,” he said at the time.
And yet, now Issa is praising Waxman for launching the investigation Issa opposed.
As for using non-official e-mail accounts for official government business, when Waxman began looking into this in 2008, Issa could barely contain his disgust, accusing the committee of becoming a “Peeping Tom.”
“Mr. Chairman,” Issa said at the time to Waxman, “I think what you are doing is going to prove in retrospect to be shameful.”
So much for that idea.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 31, 2014
“The Fundamental Dynamic Hasn’t Changed”: No, We Aren’t Getting Closer To Immigration Reform
Yesterday, congressional Republicans released a set of principles on immigration reform which are supposed to guide the writing of an actual plan. This has led some optimistic people to say that perhaps some kind of compromise between the two parties might be worked out, and reform could actually pass. I’m sorry to say that they’re going to be disappointed.
I might be proved wrong in the end. But I doubt it, because the fundamental incentives and the dynamics of the issue haven’t changed. You still have a national party that would like very much to pass reform, and individual members of that party in the House of Representatives who have nothing to gain, and much to lose, by signing on to any reform that would be acceptable to Democrats and thus have a chance of passing the Senate and being signed by the President. So it isn’t going to happen.
Now it’s true that in the wake of the government shutdown and the various debt ceiling crises, House conservatives have slightly less power to force the rest of the GOP to bend to their will. But only slightly. One thing hasn’t changed: the average House Republican still comes from a safe district where the only real threat to his job is a primary challenge from the right. He knows that his primary voters are people who watch Fox News and listen to conservative talk radio, where they hear things like Laura Ingraham telling them that jingoistic Mexicans are trying to take over America, which is why “your language [that’d be English] is gone,” while Rush Limbaugh rails at the Republican immigration principles as the wolf of “amnesty” in sheep’s clothing. Today’s Drudge Report featured a graphic of John Boehner in a sombrero, and it wasn’t a compliment. As one Southern Republican member of Congress told Buzzfeed, “If you go to town halls people say things like, ‘These people have different cultural customs than we do.’ And that’s code for race.”
Even in the slightly less bombastic reaches of the conservative media, forces are pushing against doing anything on immigration. “Bringing immigration to the floor insures [sic] a circular GOP firing squad, instead of a nicely lined-up one shooting together and in unison at Obamacare and other horrors of big government liberalism,” advises the Weekly Standard. “Since there really is no need to act this year on immigration, don’t. Don’t even try.” The National Review offers the same counsel, for the same reason. “The correct course is easy and eminently achievable: Do nothing…the last thing the party needs is a brutal intramural fight when it has been dealt a winning hand on Obamacare.”
And here’s the thing: they’re right. The best outcome for the Republican party as a whole is the passage of reform with their cooperation, which might at least begin the process of healing all the damage they’ve done to their image with Hispanic voters. But the worst outcome is a lengthy, angry debate about immigration in which there are lots of ugly comments made by their more conservative members, and which ends in reform failing, which would of course be blamed on the GOP’s antipathy toward Hispanics. And that is by far the most likely outcome.
In theory, John Boehner could bring to the floor a bill like the one the Senate passed last June, with increases in border enforcement and a long and difficult process for undocumented immigrants to eventually find their way to citizenship. But he’s already promised never to do so. Too many House Republicans—and not just the most ardent Tea Partiers—won’t accept a bill that includes any path to citizenship.Somebody obviously told Republicans that they are no longer allowed to use the phrase “path to citizenship,” but must now use the phrase “special path to citizenship” when saying they oppose it. It’s ridiculous, because of course any path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants is going to be special—it will be particular to them, and different from the path that a documented immigrant will take, in that it will be much more difficult and take a lot longer. But saying they oppose a “special” path to citizenship is a handy excuse for opposing any path to citizenship. (This may remind you of how conservatives used to say they opposed “special rights” for gay people, which meant things like the right not to get fired or kicked out of your home for being gay.) The statement Republicans put out yesterday is a bit vague, but it seems to imply some kind of second-class citizenship for undocumented immigrants, wherein after jumping through a whole bunch of hoops, they’d be given some kind of legal status, but they couldn’t become citizens.
And for lots of House Republicans, even that’s too much. So I’m pretty sure that before too long, Boehner and the rest of the House leadership are going to realize that there’s just no point in moving forward. If anyone asks, they’ll say they put out a proposal, but it couldn’t go anywhere because of dastardly Democrats who wanted to give every undocumented immigrant amnesty. But mostly they’ll just try to find something else to talk about.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 31, 2014
“Breaking The Cycle Of School Shootings”: Too Many Shootings, Too Many Moments Of Silence
When the detective arrived at my home, he had a folder in his hand. “We just have some paperwork to take care of first,” he said. After I signed his forms, he gave me a box with the clothes my mother was wearing when she was murdered. It had been almost a year, but I needed to touch them, to know how many times she was shot, to see where she had been hurt.
My mom, Dawn Hochsprung, was the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Recently, I told a woman that my mother had passed away just over a year ago. I was trying to be polite, but I instantly felt disgusted with myself for using the term “passed away.” My mother was shot to death through no fault of her own. That is not “passing away.” She was killed, gunned down in what I would normally have called her haven — her school.
There have been at least 39 school shootings since the massacre in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012. Already this year there have been 10 school shootings, including one Thursday at Eastern Florida State College . Sadly, Americans seem to be getting used to seeing our nation’s youth, parents and educators gather outside schools, waiting to hear if their loved ones are safe.
This past December, the holiday season felt wrong. There was an empty place at our table, and traditions didn’t seem to matter anymore. My daughter was not yet 6 months old when my mother was killed. I tuck her into bed each night with a stuffed doll that was the first and only Christmas gift she’ll ever get from her grandmother. The doll is a nightly reminder that my daughter will never know my mother.
During my mother’s wake, my 10-year-old son burst into tears and asked me why, of all the schools in America, this had to happen at Grandma’s school. I didn’t know how to tell him the truth: that this could happen anywhere, that such shootings might continue to happen.
Immediately after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, discussion of safer gun laws consumed the nation. At the time, I thought it was too soon — 26 innocent people had just been slaughtered at the school, and we were mourning.
I realize now that I was wrong: It wasn’t too soon — it was already too late.
It was too late for my family and for all the families of Sandy Hook. It was too late for the families of the victims of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, Tucson, Aurora and Oak Creek .
Early last year it felt like the tragedy in Newtown was an eye-opener to the problem of gun violence in our country. But since Newtown, more than 12,000 Americans have been killed by gun violence. Last April, a majority of senators voted for a bipartisan bill to expand background checks and keep guns out of the wrong hands — but a minority caved to the gun lobby and was able to block passage.
I thought Congress’s failure to pass gun-safety legislation would shatter my hopes. But it did the opposite: I and others who make up the 90 percent of Americans who support comprehensive background checks aren’t going away. We’re here to share our stories and fight for our future.
As the daughter of a shooting victim, I hope no one else ever has to suffer through my experience. As a mother, I am horrified by the thought that this senseless violence could happen again anywhere, at any moment. There have been too many shootings and too many moments of silence. There is a national movement of Americans, from mayors to moms, raising our voices. We demand action — closing the private-sale loophole — from our leaders, and we will win the fight against gun violence.
By: Christina Lafferty Hassinger, Opinions, The Washington Post, January 30, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 