“Boehner Rejects Amtrak Question As ‘Stupid'”: U.S. Investment In Infrastructure Has Become A National Embarrassment
It became clear yesterday that congressional Republicans came up with one talking point in response to the deadly Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia: “human error.”
The point, of course, is obvious. If the Amtrak 188 tragedy was the result of a person making a mistake, then there’s no need for federal policymakers to act, there’s no need for Congress to make additional investments in infrastructure, and there’s no need for Republicans to be embarrassed by slashing Amtrak’s budget just hours after the accident.
This morning, as National Journal noted, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) didn’t hold back on this point.
Boehner downright dismissed claims that underfunding for the rail system was responsible for the derailment in Philadelphia that killed at least seven people and injured 200 on Tuesday night.
“Are you really gonna ask such a stupid question?” Boehner said during his Thursday morning press conference when a reporter began to ask about Democratic concerns that Amtrak was underfunded because of Republicans. “They started this yesterday: ‘It’s all about funding. It’s all about funding.’ Well, obviously it is not about funding. The train was going twice the speed limit.”
House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) sounded a similar note on Fox News this morning, dismissing those who want to increase “the size of government programs,” all in response to an accident he said was “human error.”
The congressman added that he hopes “people won’t seize on political opportunities out of tragedies like this” to spend more money.
Let’s set the record straight.
Just on a surface level, even without consideration of the tragedy in Philadelphia, U.S. investment in infrastructure has become a national embarrassment. The United States used to lead the world in infrastructure innovation and development, and the more Republicans decided public investment in “government programs” is necessarily bad, the more other countries have surpassed us.
But specifically on this week’s Amtrak disaster, to dismiss this as nothing more than a tragic case of “human error” is to overlook the relevant details.
According to Boehner, “obviously it is not about funding.” In reality, it’s also obvious that a Positive Train Control system could have prevented the accident.
It’s equally obvious that PTC is not free. If Congress wanted to invest in the system, it could have. Indeed, it can make those investments now. At least for now, however, Boehner and his party don’t see it as a priority.
This might make the Speaker uncomfortable, but it’s anything but “a stupid question.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 14, 2015
“The Left Is So Wrong On Trade”: Playing A 78 rpm Record In The Age Of Digital Downloads
The left’s success in denying President Obama fast-track authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership is ugly to behold. The case put forth by a showboating Sen. Elizabeth Warren — that Obama cannot be trusted to make a deal in the interests of American workers — is almost worse than wrong. It is irrelevant.
The Senate Democrats who turned on Obama are playing a 78 rpm record in the age of digital downloads.
Did you hear their ally, AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, the day after the Senate vote? He denounced TPP for being “patterned after CAFTA and NAFTA.” That’s not so, but never mind.
There’s this skip on the vinyl record that the North American Free Trade Agreement destroyed American manufacturing. To see how wrong that is, simply walk through any Walmart or Target and look for all those “made in Mexico” labels. You won’t find many. But you’ll see “made in China” everywhere.
Many of the jobs that did go to Mexico would have otherwise left for low-wage Asian countries. Even Mexico lost manufacturing work to China.
And what can you say about the close-to-insane obsession with CAFTA? The partners in the 2005 Central American Free Trade Agreement — five mostly impoverished Central American countries plus the Dominican Republic — had a combined economy equal to that of New Haven, Connecticut.
(By the way, less than 10 percent of the AFL-CIO’s membership is now in manufacturing.)
It’s undeniable that American manufacturing workers have suffered terrible job losses. We could never compete with pennies-an-hour wages. Those low-skilled jobs are not coming back. But we have other things to sell in the global marketplace.
In Washington state, for example, exports of everything from apples to airplanes have soared 40 percent over four years, to total nearly $91 billion in 2014, according to The Seattle Times. About 2 in 5 jobs there are now tied to trade.
Small wonder that Sen. Ron Wyden, a liberal Democrat from neighboring Oregon, has strongly supported fast-track authority.
Some liberals oddly complain that American efforts to strengthen intellectual property laws in trade deals protect the profits of U.S. entertainment and tech companies. What’s wrong with that? Should the fruits of America’s creativity (that’s labor, too) be open to plundering and piracy?
One of TPP’s main goals is to help the higher-wage partners compete with China. (The 12 countries taking part include the likes of Japan, Australia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and New Zealand.) In any case, Congress would get to vote the finished product up or down, so it isn’t as if the public wouldn’t get a say.
But then we have Warren stating with a straight face that handing negotiating authority to Obama would “give Republicans the very tool they need to dismantle Dodd-Frank.”
Huh? Obama swatted down the remark as wild, hypothetical speculation, noting he engaged in a “massive” fight with Wall Street to get the reforms passed. “And then I sign a provision that would unravel it?” he told political writer Matt Bai.
“This is not a partisan issue,” Warren insisted. Yes, in a twisted way, the hard left’s fixation over big corporations has joined the right’s determination to undermine Obama at every pass.
Trade agreements have a thousand moving parts. The U.S. can’t negotiate with the other countries if various domestic interests are pouncing on the details. That’s why every president has been given fast-track authority over the past 80 years or so.
Except Obama.
It sure is hard to be an intelligent leader in this country.
By: Froma Harrop, Loeb Award Finalist for Economic Commentary in 2004 and 2011, Scripps Howard Award Finalist for Commentary in 2010; The National Memo, May 14, 2015
“Not Exactly The Same As Others”: Procedural Dissolution Resolution Included For The First Time In TPA
Yesterday the Senate failed to pass a procedural vote on granting the president Trade Promotion Authority (TPA or so-called “fast-track“). As Ed Kilgore noted, this is probably not the end of the line for TPA. It will likely be brought up again very soon.
As I read commentary about the debate on this legislation, I often see an assumption that this TPA bill is exactly the same as others that have been approved in the past. Statements like this one from Senator Elizabeth Warren are regularly repeated.
The president has committed only to letting the public see this deal after Congress votes to authorize fast track. At that point it will be impossible for us to amend the agreement or to block any part of it without tanking the whole TPP. The TPP is basically done.
Here’s Steve Benen saying basically the same thing.
At issue is something called “trade-promotion authority” – also known as “fast-track” – which is intended to streamline the process. As we discussed a month ago, the proposal would empower President Obama to move forward on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiating its specific provisions. If successful, the White House would then present a finished TPP to Congress for an up-or-down vote – with no amendments.
Lawmakers would effectively have a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity.
And finally, here’s Caitlin MacNeal:
“Fast track” authority would limit Congress to a simple up or down vote on the TPP without amending the deal.
That’s pretty much how TPA is being described across the board. Those statements would be accurate if we were talking about trade promotion authority that has been approved in the past. But for the first time, the current TPA bill (you can download it from that link) contains the ability for Congress to pass a “procedural disapproval resolution” after a particular trade agreement is presented to them. Such a resolution can be presented for several reasons, but the most likely would be that it fails to adhere to the “trade negotiation objectives” outlined in the bill (IOW, a pretty open door). If such a resolution were to pass, it negates trade promotion authority and consideration of the agreement would then be open to amendments and a filibuster.
All of this is available to Congress AFTER a negotiated trade deal has been finalized and made available to the public. In other words, lawmakers would have three options:
1. Approve the trade deal
2. Reject the trade deal
3. Pass a procedural disapproval resolution and open up debate on amendments
Such a resolution would require 60 votes in the Senate to pass. But given that the opponents of TPA required 60 votes to approve it, the fact that dissolving it also requires 60 votes makes sense.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 13, 2015
“They’ll Kiss And Make Up”: Prophecies Of A Divorce Between The GOP And The Christian Right Are Very Premature
So here’s TNR’s Elizabeth Stoker Breunig with another of her provocative, eerily confident, and ultimately questionable meditations on the intersection of religion and politics. The headline she or her editors chose seems more or less appropriate to what she seems to be saying: “The Deterioration of the Christian Right Is Imminent.” Last time I wrote about one of her articles she seemed to be saying “the culture wars are over.” So it’s clear she sees a trend.
To parse her argument very succinctly (if you want the scenic tour of Bruenig’s piece, check out my colleague Martin Longman’s take at Ten Miles Square, which arrives at a similar destination by a different route), Bruenig views the rising conservative attacks on Mike Huckabee for economic policy heresy as a sign the Corporate Wing of the GOP has lost patience with the Christian Right, and is willing to do without it, substituting instead a watery commitment to Christian evangelical rhetoric they can get from any number of less troublesome presidential candidates. Bruenig hopes that in turn that the scales will fall from the eyes of true conservative Christians, who will finally realize they’ve sold their birthright for a mess of pottage and turn elsewhere–where I’m not sure–for vindication of their values.
I wish I could agree with this analysis, but it depends crucially on the belief that support for capitalism is extrinsic to conservative evangelical Christianity, and has been undertaken as part of some sort of bargain–corrupt, perhaps, but still a bargain–between the agents of God and of Mammon. If the bargain is broken by the merchants of greed, then presumably their half-willing Christian allies may bail. But from everything I’ve read and seen, the spirit of capitalism and many of its associated impulses have deeply sunk into the American Christian, and especially conservative evangelical, world view. And that’s not at all surprising, since the people we are largely talking about have in the mean time traveled from farm to small town to city to suburb, and are living lives fully integrated with the market economy and mentality. They’re as likely to object to Huckabee’s heresies on trade and entitlement as to support them.
And that leads to the other problem with Bruenig’s case: I don’t know that Huckabee’s (or for that matter, Rick Santorum’s) economic “populism” has any particular religious foundation. He’s trying to exploit a very simple contradiction between the economic views of Republican politicians and of their voters: the GOP “base” is heavily concentrated among older and non-college-educated white folks. Few of them care for “entitlement reform,” if it comes at their perceived expense, and a decent number have never supported “free trade,” either. Huckabee is clearly trying to break out of his conservative-evangelical political ghetto into a broader neighborhood of potential allies against the GOP Establishment people who rejected him back in 2008. Whether or not it works, the Christian Right has no inherent dog in this fight, and as Bruenig acknowledges, there are plenty of other candidates who are willing to check all the boxes on the Christian Right’s agenda.
Yes, as Bruenig notes, some businesses are breaking with the Christian Right on the scope of “religious liberty” laws, as are some Republican politicians. But let’s not forget that the victorious plaintiff in the most important recent Supreme Court case in this area, which expanded the ambit of “religious liberty” significantly, was the self-consciously Christian business Hobby Lobby. The Christian business Chick-Fil-A has been an enormous symbol in the culture wars. The pulpit-pounding leader of the wildly popular (on the Right) Duck Dynasty clan, Phil Robertson, called himself a “Bible-believing, gun-toting capitalist” to screaming applause this year at that libertarian-dominated event, CPAC. Huck himself is hardly William Jennings Bryan.
As Martin Longman says in the title of his post: “The Christian Right Ain’t Populist.” Nor is it uniquely represented by Mike Huckabee. Nor has it lost faith in the GOP. Nor is the GOP showing it the door.
Other than that, Breunig’s essay is, as all her articles are, quite stimulating. In this particular case, she kind of reminds me of an adult child whose parents have divorced, with one marrying someone the child regards as a despicable scoundrel. Any sign this second marriage could be on the rocks will quite rightly stir up the child’s hopes. But nine times out of ten, they’ll kiss and make up.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 14, 2015
“Pamela Geller Is No Rosa Parks”: Trying To Cash In On The Moral Authority Of The Movement While Scrapping Its Moral Foundations
After armed gunmen attacked a Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, last week, event organizer Pamela Geller went on Fox News to explain the moral righteousness of her cause. Responding to critics like Donald Trump, who accused her of “taunting” Muslims, she asked, “What would he have said about Rosa Parks? Rosa Parks should never have gone to the front of the bus. She’s taunting people.”
Nor was Geller alone in seeing the civil rights parallel. John Nolte, writing for Breitbart, contended, “Anyone who knows anything about history understands that tactically and morally, Geller’s provocative Muhammad Cartoon Contest was no different than Dr. Martin Luther King’s landmark march from Selma to Montgomery.”
They’re both wrong, in a particularly pernicious way. By drawing a parallel between Geller’s anti-Islamic events and the civil rights movement’s anti-Jim Crow protests, they are trying to cash in on the moral authority of the movement while scrapping its moral foundations.
There is a surface-level similarity between the two movements, one Geller and Nolte hope no one probes too deeply. Civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s knew that if they violated the laws and norms of the Jim Crow South, white Southerners would react with spectacular violence. Putting that violence on display was the point. Jim Crow laws gave Southern racial violence the veneer of a civilized legal code. The protests showed the rest of the world the ever-present threat of violence upon which that legal code was built.
Geller, too, meant to provoke violence with her Muhammad cartoon event. The question is, to what end? We already know that violent extremists are violent and extreme. If we want to see how extremists respond to people who draw Muhammad, we only need look at recent events in Paris and Copenhagen. The point for Geller and her cohort is to demonstrate that the West is at war with Islam – and ultimately to devote more resources to that war.
In other words, Geller hopes to use the violence she provokes to justify violence in return. And that’s where the civil rights analogy utterly fails. The radical potential of the early civil rights movement grew out of its moral commitment to nonviolence. And not just nonviolent action – King called upon activists to be nonviolent in word and thought as well. The reason the movement has such moral authority in America is because it was built on this deeply held belief in the transformative power of love-based politics and resistance.
Geller’s movement has none of that. She and those in her camp seek not a world with more peace but one with more war. Given that, it is especially repugnant that they call upon the names of Parks and King, trading on their courage and sacrifice while undermining the values of love and peacefulness that makes their work worth emulating.
By: Nicole Hemmer, Historian of Modern American Politics and Media; U. S. News and World Report, May 12, 2015
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