“I Won Both Of Them”: If Republicans Dish It Out, They Have To Be Prepared To Get It Back
The substance of a presidential address always matters more than the theatrics. That said, I imagine most observers would agree one specific moment from President Obama’s speech last night was one of the more memorable of any recent State of the Union address.
Towards the end of his remarks, Obama took an almost contemplative turn, telling the audience, “I have no more campaigns to run.” Some Republicans responded with derisive applause, prompting the president to depart from his prepared remarks.
“I know, because I won both of them,” Obama said with a sly smile.
For a few moments, I felt like I was watching a “Key & Peele” sketch and the president briefly became Luther, his “anger translator.”
Not surprisingly, the moment garnered quite a bit of attention.
Facebook’s policy team provided msnbc with data on the most talked-about topics and moments during the Obama’s oratory. The most viral moment of the State of the Union address, according to Facebook? That moment when President Obama said “I have no more campaigns to run,” was interrupted by partisan cheers, and shot back: “I know, because I won both of them.”
TPM’s Sahil Kapur was on Capitol Hill last night, and apparently, congressional Republicans didn’t appreciate the president’s not-so-subtle jab.
“Probably not helpful when you rub the other guy’s nose in the dirt a little bit,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), a close ally of Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), told reporters. […]
Senate Energy Committee Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said Obama’s remarks did not make her feel “warm and fuzzy” about having to work with him for the next two years. […]
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), No. 4 in House GOP leadership, told TPM she was “disappointed” in the president when asked about the swipe.
Their “disappointment” strikes me as wildly misplaced – if Republicans can dish it out, they have to be prepared for the president to give it back. It was GOP lawmakers who decided to interrupt the speech with applause when Obama said he has no more campaigns to run. Can they really blame him for throwing a fastball of his own in their direction?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 21, 2015
“Of All The Ridiculous Arguments”: Republicans Remain Terrified That President Obama Will Close Gitmo
Ever since President Obama took office in 2009, Republicans have done everything in their power to stop him from closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Given his recent successes at repatriating detainees and the looming assistance Pope Francis has offered, they are upping those efforts.
Key Senate Republicans on Tuesday unveiled legislation that would effectively block President Barack Obama from fulfilling his pledge to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before he leaves office in two years.
The legislation from Sens. Kelly Ayotte, John McCain, Richard Burr and Lindsey Graham would prohibit for two years the transfer to the United States of detainees designated medium- or high-risk. It would also ban transfers to Yemen, where dozens of the 127 remaining Guantánamo detainees are from.
Of all the ridiculous arguments they’ve made over the years for keeping the prison open, this one takes the cake.
At a news conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Ayotte argued the administration’s increased clip of transfers was dangerous because it could allow detainees to re-enter the terrorism fight, citing the recent terrorist attacks in Paris.
Given that none of those who have been reported to have been involved in the Paris attack had ever even spent a night at Gitmo, this is nothing but absurd fear-mongering.
Besides, here are the facts about the recidivism of Gitmo detainees who have been released from a report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
According to the report, the percentage of freed detainees “reengaging” during the Bush administration was 19 percent, while another 14.3 percent were “suspected of reengaging.” Since Obama took office, however, just 6.8 percent of detainees are confirmed as reengaging, while just 1.1 percent are suspected of returning to the battlefield.
“Nearly half of the former detainees confirmed of reengaging are either dead or in custody, and more than one-third of the former detainees suspected of re-engaging are either dead or in custody,” the official said.
I have no idea what has Senators Ayotte, McCain, Burr and Graham so terrified. But it looks to me like it mostly has to do with witnessing President Obama succeed on a campaign promise while he protects our national security.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 18, 2015
“Calling In Their Chips”: Americans For Prosperity Announces Legislative Agenda, Mirrors Koch Industries’ Corporate Wishlist
Americans for Prosperity, the grassroots organizing group founded by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, spent $125 million in the midterm elections last year. Now, they’re calling in their chips.
At the National Press Club yesterday, AFP president Tim Phillips and several officers with the group laid out their agenda. The group is calling for legalizing crude oil exports, a repeal of the estate tax, approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, blocking any hike in the gas tax, a tax holiday on corporate profits earned overseas, blocking the EPA’s new rules on carbon emissions from coal-burning power plants, and a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, along with a specific focus on the medical device tax.
The announcement was touted by NPR as a “conservative agenda for Congress.” But it’s also a near-mirror image of Koch Industries’ lobbying agenda. Koch Industries — the petrochemical, manufacturing and commodity speculating conglomerate owned by David and Charles — is not only a financier of political campaigns, but leads one of the most active lobbying teams in Washington, a big part of why the company has been such a financial success.
Koch Industries transports both crude oil and coal, making the AFP’s work to legalize crude oil exports and to block the EPA from rules that would diminish the coal market in the U.S. particularly important to Koch Industries’ bottom line. As multiple news outlets have reported, Koch also owns a substantial stake of Canadian tar sands, positioning the company to benefit from approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Indeed, on EPA and other issues, Koch Industries’ lobbying office in D.C. has instructed its influence peddlers to work many of the same issues as AFP.
And what makes the AFP agenda almost a self-parody is its focus on the estate tax, which it called the “death tax” during the press event yesterday. In reality, this tax only affects the wealthiest 0.15 percent of Americans because only those who stand to inherit from family members with $5.43 million in wealth are impacted. Couple this with AFP’s focus on a corporate overseas tax holiday, again only an issue that impacts wealthy global companies, and AFP’s purported goal of helping regular Americans loses all credibility.
Charles Koch has made headlines in recent weeks over his claim that he will devote significant energy to criminal justice reform. But curiously, no issues relating to such reforms — even though over-prosecution of petty crimes and abuses such as asset forfeiture clearly fall under the umbrella of economic concerns AFP purports to champion — will be addressed by Charles Koch’s marquee advocacy group, AFP. The issues that are part and parcel of Koch’s bottom line, however, appear to take priority.
By: Lee Fang, Republic Report, January 19, 2015
“While The Rest Of The Country Suffers”: The Republican Congress Has Done Nothing But Help Big Business
On Thursday and Friday this week, House and Senate Republicans are at a joint retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, to listen to an array of speakers on different policy and political issues. This brief respite offers an opportunity to examine what the Republican priorities have been in the first 10 days of the 114th Congress, and it shows one clear winner: Big Business.
House Republicans began 2015 by immediately trying to roll back or delay a number of regulations in the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform law. Just a day into the new Congress, the House voted on a fast-track bill that would have watered down and rolled back a number of important regulations. In fact, the legislation, officially titled the Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burdens Act, was the combination of 11 bills that would, among other things, delay the Volcker Act for years and weaken derivative regulations. The bill was brought up under suspension of the rules and thus required a two-thirds majority to pass. It fell short of that goal, with 276 legislators voting for it and 146 against. It was an unexpected victory for progressives after 44 Democrats changed their votes, after voting for a similar bill in the 113th Congress.
But Republicans were not to be denied. They brought up the bill under the normal rules where a two-thirds majority was not required. On Wednesday, it passed, 271-154. It’s not clear if the Senate would take it up, or if Democrats would have enough votes to filibuster it. But Wall Street received another gift in the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, which expired at the end of 2014 and allows the federal government to backstop commercial insurance companies in the case of a terrorist attack. Even if you think terrorism risk insurance should be the government’s prerogative, it undoubtedly benefits large corporations, insurers, and real estate companies. Wall Street’s real victory, though, was the inclusion of a provision to roll back another, albeit smaller, component of Dodd-Frank. President Barack Obama signed it on Monday.
In other words, Wall Street is a fan of the new Republican Congress. Other industries are, too. Republicans have also focused on energy regulations, most notably approving the Keystone XL pipeline. Last Friday, the House passed a bill to approve the pipeline. The Senate voted to allow debate on the bill and will likely take a final vote on it next week, when it is expected to receive more than the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster. The question is whether Congress has the two-thirds votes necessary to overturn Obama’s veto.
The House also took a whack at Obamacare by passing a bill that would change the definition of a full-time worker from 30 hours to 40 hours for purposes of the employer mandate. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill would increase the deficit by $53.2 billion over the next decade, much of it from employers no longer having to pay a penalty for not offering health insurance for employees who work between 30-40 hours. The Senate is also readying a bill to repeal the medical device tax, which a new report this week estimated would cost 47-1,200 jobs, in total.
It wasn’t hard to predict that the new Republican Senate’s top priority would be helping Big Business. Partially, that’s because enough Democrats have been eager to support these bills and overcome filibusters in the Senate (such as on the Keystone pipeline or medical device tax). Utah Senator Mike Lee explained this in November in The Federalist:
[T]he easiest bipartisan measures to pass are almost always bills that directly benefit Big Business, and thus appeal to the corporatist establishments of both parties. In 2015, this “low-hanging fruit” we’ll hear about will be items like corporate tax reform, Obamacare’s medical device tax, patent reform, and perhaps the Keystone XL pipeline approval.
As it happens, these are all good ideas that I support. But if that’s as far as Republicans go, we will regret it. The GOP’s biggest branding problem is that Americans think we’re the party of Big Business and The Rich. If our “Show-We-Can-Govern” agenda can be fairly attacked as giving Big Business what it wants—while the rest of the country suffers—we will only reinforce that unpopular image.
Lee’s worries were prescient. The 114th Congress has only just begun, of course, so Republicans have plenty of time to put forward an agenda focused on the middle class. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could support other moderate Republicans in crafting a compromise to increase the minimum wage. The GOP could make an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit a priority. Lee and Florida Senator Marco Rubio have proposed a number of other policies that are focused on the middle class.
But right now, there are few signs that Republicans are going to do anything like that.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, January 15, 2015
“Foot-Dragging Tedium Can Become Dangerous”: Senate Republicans Are Already Frustrated With John Boehner’s Crazy Caucus
There’s an any-port-in-a-storm quality to Speaker John Boehner’s piloting of the House, and nothing illustrates that better than Republican squabbling over whether and how to fund the Department of Homeland Security.
Why is the Department of Homeland Security about to run out of money? Because back in December, conservatives wanted to use a government funding deadline to pick a big fight with President Obama over his deportation relief policies, and rather than risk a shutdown, or wrest the till back from the hardliners, GOP leaders decided to give them whatever they could cobble together. What they came up with was a harebrained scheme to fund all government operations except for Homeland Security through the end of the fiscal year. Meanwhile, they extended DHS funding through February only, and promised to fight Obama’s deferred action programs in the context of a narrower threat to shut down the department that enforces immigration policy.
The problems with this strategy were obvious from the outset. As I observed at the time, denying DHS an appropriation wouldn’t freeze Obama’s deportation programs, because the agency implementing them is self-financing. In fact, denying DHS an appropriation wouldn’t accomplish very much at all; as a national security hub, most of its functions are considered essential, and thus exempt from the kinds of closure protocols that apply to national parks and Social Security administrative offices.
The upshot is that Republicans are threatening to infuriate DHS employees and their allies, weaken DHS functionality, and, in a losing p.r. campaign, surrender the mantle of national security back to Democrats—all unless Obama agrees to rescind his own executive actions. As muggings go, this isn’t much different than screaming, “Your money or my life!” No less an immigration hardliner than Representative Steve King understands that the plan has always amounted to capitulation.
But having promised a brawl, Boehner must now go through the motions, which look more and more contrived as prominent Republicans—particularly in the Senate—step in to admit that they will fund DHS, come what may.
This week, John Cornyn, the number two Senate Republican, told CNN “we’re not going to take any chances with the homeland.” Cornyn is showing his cards here, but he’s also putting the House’s strategy up for ridicule. Because House Republicans must proceed as promised, Cornyn et al must now pledge not to incur the mostly-imagined risk that his House counterparts are supposedly inviting. When Republicans let appropriations lapse in 2013, and DHS was just one of the many agencies ensnared in the shutdown, domestic security wasn’t the core political concern. By centering the fight around DHS alone, though, conservatives have left themselves no choice but to swallow Democratic demagoguery—their strategy is premised on the notion that Obama will relent when the threat to national security becomes too great. There are no national park closures to obscure the fact that the fight is over something called the Department of Homeland Security, and you gain no leverage by threatening to withhold funds from DHS, if you admit that withholding funds from DHS doesn’t really accomplish much.
Senate Republicans have other political concerns as well.
Dean Heller, a Republican senator from Nevada, worries that forcing a fight with Obama over immigration policy, in the context of an appropriation, invites the risk that certain members lapse into referring to affected immigrants “in a way that is offensive.” Mark Kirk of Illinois—a vulnerable incumbent—believes any “government shutdown scenario” would be “a self-inflicted political wound for Republicans.”
Where Senate Republicans would like to avoid deadline-driven fights altogether, Boehner promises to drag them into those fights at the behest of conservatives, even when he knows he can’t win. His inability to admit the obvious, while Republican senators feel unencumbered, reflects the dramatically different pressures a House speaker and a Senate majority leader face. The strategic rift thus isn’t limited to DHS, but will emerge any time Senate Republicans see political dividends in a compromise that House hardliners won’t accept.
To avoid an embarrassing, damaging lapse in highway funding, for instance, senate Republicans, including Orrin Hatch, who helms the tax writing committee, are warming to the idea of replenishing the highway trust fund by increasing the gas tax. Collapsing gas prices have made the prospect of a higher gas tax less punitive, and lent an obvious idea bipartisan support.
Naturally, Boehner can’t accept this.
At least not yet. The logic of a higher gas tax might become more appealing to him as the funding deadline nears, just as we assume the logic of extending DHS funding cleanly will overwhelm him before too long. As a template for addressing pressing national business, taking symbolic stands like these is more tedious than dangerous. But foot-dragging tedium can become dangerous when the pressing business is increasing the debt limit or responding to unanticipated crises.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, January 14, 2015
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