“GOP Lawmakers Hit The Ground Running To The Far-Right”: House Republican Leaders Still Haven’t Mastered The Art Of Vote-Counting
In the weeks immediately following the 2014 midterm elections, there was an enormous amount of talk about the need to avoid “poisoning the well.” The point seemed to be, policymakers should be cautious about picking political fights in order to avoid partisan rancor in the new Congress.
Clearly, those concerns have been thrown out a Capitol Hill window.
House Democrats on Wednesday knocked down a GOP bill that would have delayed a key Wall Street reform known as the Volcker Rule, stunning Republican leaders who had expected it to pass with ease. […]
The bill would have allowed banks to hang onto billions of dollars in risky collateralized loan obligations for two additional years by amending the Volcker Rule, which is part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The rule bans banks from speculating in securities markets with taxpayer funds, requiring them to dump their CLO holdings. A Volcker Rule delay would be a major boon to the nation’s largest banks.
Note, a majority of the House voted for the measure, but because Republican leaders brought the bill up under the suspension calendar, it needed a two-thirds majority to pass. It fell far short.There are a few ways to look at yesterday’s failure. The first, of course, is that House Republican leaders still haven’t mastered the art of vote-counting. The second is that GOP lawmakers clearly remain committed to using their power to do Wall Street’s bidding.
But even putting that aside, let’s not miss the forest for the trees: on only the second day of the new Congress, House Republicans immediately turned their attention to a controversial proposal, backed by financial-industry lobbyists. These guys really aren’t wasting any time.
Indeed, it’s amazing to see just how aggressive the new Republican majority has been since taking its oath of office on Tuesday.
Barring crisis conditions, the start of a new Congress can generally be compared to the start of new school year: folks like to get settled in before tackling a lot of work. On Capitol Hill, some members, especially the freshmen, are still unpacking and learning their way around.
And it’s against this backdrop that House Republicans this week are voting to undermine the Volcker Rule, undermine Social Security, undermine the Affordable Care Act, approve the Keystone pipeline, and impose irresponsible “dynamic scoring” rules – all in the first three days.
It’s one thing when lawmakers furiously try to get stuff done before the end of a Congress – they tend to move quickly when facing an inflexible deadline – but the House GOP majority seems desperate to get this new Congress off to a fast, far-right start, just for the sake of doing so.
What’s more, we’re not even going to touch the newly introduced legislation – including major new abortion restrictions proposed yesterday – which will be considered in the weeks and months to come. I’m just talking about measures on the House floor this opening week.
E.J. Dionne Jr. reminded us this morning, “This will be no ordinary Congress.” Republicans are eager to prove this prediction true.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, January 9, 2014
“This Is Progress?”: The Unbearable Whiteness Of Congress
Cue the confetti: The new Congress sworn in on Tuesday is the most diverse in our nation’s history!
That would truly be a milestone to celebrate—until you see what that record “diversity” actually means. Ready? The breakdown of the 114th Congress is 80 percent white, 80 percent male, and 92 percent Christian.
That’s really diverse if, say, you are comparing our new Congress to the white supremacist group House Majority Whip Steve Scalise once addressed. It’s like Congress is stuck in a time warp: While our calendars read 2015, theirs reads more like 1955.
Look, I don’t care if you are a liberal or a conservative. It’s impossible to make the claim that our Congress accurately reflects the demographics of our nation. And it’s not missing by a little but a lot. If Congress accurately reflected our nation on the basis of race, about 63 percent would be white, not 80 percent. Blacks would hold about 13 percent of the seats and Latinos 17 percent.
But what do we really see? The new Senate has only two black senators. That statistic is even more striking given that earlier this week the first black person ever elected to the Senate, Edward Brooke, was laid to rest. Brooke won his seat in 1966 and served two terms. How far has Congress really evolved on race when in 50 years it has gone from one black senator to two? (Even the arguably more democratic House is only at 10 percent black members.)
Latinos, the fastest growing minority group in America, are even more underrepresented in Congress. They hold 3 percent of the Senate and a little over 7 percent of the House.
And let’s look at religion. Congress is now 92 percent Christian, resembling more to a papal enclave than our religiously diverse nation. The latest Pew Poll found that nearly 20 percent of Americans identify as atheist, agnostic, or not being affiliated with any religion. Yet there’s only one member of Congress, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who openly acknowledges she’s not a member of any religious group.
OK, let’s put race, ethnicity, and religion aside and address the most glaring underrepresentation in Congress of any group: women. This Congress will welcome more women than ever before at 19 percent of the House and 20 percent of the Senate. So what percentage of America is female? It’s 51 percent.
Even internally in the House, women are not getting their fair shake. While 19 percent of the House is female, just one woman will get to chair one of its 20 committees.
There are various reasons—some rather complex, some rather base—why our Congress doesn’t come close to reflecting the demographics of our nation. One that affects all the groups is that Congress moves slowly, and I don’t mean just on passing legislation. Historically the reelection rate for members of Congress is in the area of 95 percent. The benefits of incumbency are quite potent, especially in the all-important area of raising campaign funds. This is likely the single biggest reason why you don’t see Congress evolve demographically more quickly. (Term limits could be a prescription to speed change along.)
Minority communities also have had to deal with the issue of “racial gerrymandering,” where congressional districts are designed either to dilute the strength of a minority community, known as “cracking,” or over-concentrate them, known as “packing.” While “packing” will lead to the guarantee of a few seats in Congress, it also can reduce the opportunities for minority candidates, says Arturo Vargas, executive director of the Latino group NALEO. Finding the “sweet spot” between packing and cracking, he says, is central to creating more districts that provide minorities the opportunity to be elected to Congress.
And then comes the issue of women in Congress. The United States now ranks 98th in the world for the percentage of women serving in its national legislature, behind Indonesia and Kenya.
Why are so few women serving in our Congress? Studies have offered us a few reasons, some contradictory. One found that women have less interest in seeking elected office, with 48 percent of the men surveyed having considered a career in politics but only 35 percent of women. Partly this was due to women receiving less encouragement to go into politics and having lower self-confidence about running for Congress.
But in the case of black women, another study found no lack of interest. Rather, black women are not recruited to run because party bigwigs view them as being less electable and less likely to raise the campaign dollars needed to mount an effective campaign than white women or men.
With all that said, representation of each of these respective communities has increased in the new Congress. But as Vargas noted, “Progress never comes fast enough.”
So what would happen if our Congress accurately, or at least more closely, reflected our nation’s demographics? Would our Congress be less dysfunctional? That feels like the old Catskills joke that ends with the punch line “It can’t get any worse!”
But people in the underrepresented groups might see Congress as truly being representative of who they are and their views, as opposed to seeing it as an institution still dominated by the old guard. That could (possibly) lead to a Congress that’s more responsive. And that’s good for all of us, regardless of our race, religion, ethnicity, or gender.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, January 9, 2015
“The ‘No Child’ Rewrite Threatens Your Kids’ Future”: Congress Is Attempting To Pass The Buck On Federal Funding For Education
In the weeks ahead, Congress will consider rewriting the No Child Left Behind Act and, if some leaders on Capitol Hill get their wish, it will feature dramatically reduced federal oversight of education.
These Congressional leaders point to states’ rights when they argue that the federal government should send $50 billion to 50 states and more than 10,000 school districts each year but ask for little or nothing in the way of results.
Despite America’s long and sordid history of extreme inequity in schooling and in spite of dramatic continuing disparities in educational quality, states’ rights advocates assert the federal government isn’t needed to monitor or assure educational quality and equity.
Whether because of racism, politics, ignorance, or indifference, the brutal facts are that states and school districts have too often neglected their educational responsibilities. The losers have always been children in poverty, children of color, and children with disabilities.
Think back to Topeka, Kan., in the 1950s, where seven-year old Linda Brown was denied the opportunity to attend a nearby public school because she was black. The Supreme Court eventually stepped in and ended legal segregation in the landmark 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education.
Three years later in Little Rock, Ark., despite the Supreme Court’s decision that segregation violated the Constitution, nine young Black students were denied access to a public high school by segregationist Governor Orval Faubus. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to force Faubus to admit the students to Central High School.
The same thing happened over and over again, in state after state, in the ensuing years, including in Mississippi where my mother Marian Wright Edelman, on behalf of courageous black plaintiffs, sued several segregated local school districts. States and local school districts violated Brown, lawsuits or non-violent protests (which often provoked violent reprisals) eventually led to desegregation orders, and then great vigilance was required to ensure those orders were enforced.
On a parallel track, in the 1960s, federal officials recognized that states and local school districts were systematically spending less to educate poor kids compared to wealthier kids. So in 1965, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to provide federal funds to help make up the difference.
In the 1970s, my mother and many others, including parents of children with disabilities, protested because states and districts weren’t meeting children’s special needs. A seminal 1974 Children’s Defense Fund report called “Children Out of School” chronicled the extent of the problem. The federal government responded by passing a law requiring states and districts to educate children with special needs and providing additional resources (though the feds have never come close to funding the cost of their mandate, which is a huge and largely undiscussed problem).
In 2001, with great fanfare, Congress updated the 1965 ESEA law to require every state and district to assess children’s educational progress regularly and publish results by race, income, disability, and whether English is a second language. The hope was that greater transparency about performance would drive results.
The new ESEA, or No Child Left Behind law, exposed grossly unequal educational outcomes and motivated a range of efforts across the country to address the low performance of low-income children and children of color. That said, the law was deeply flawed. States were encouraged and allowed to lower standards to make it appear they were improving. The tests on which the federal government based its ratings were “dumb”—they assessed students’ knowledge of information not their ability to think, solve problems, or write, and they only measured students within the confines of their grade level. And there was a ridiculous assumption that states would somehow get all of their students to proficiency—that’s right, 100%—by 2014.
In the past five years, the federal government has offered incentives and resources for states to lift academic standards, fix schools that have struggled for decades, offer more choices to parents, and strengthen teaching through more accurate educator evaluations. These incentives and lobbying by state-based education advocates led most states to raise standards, embrace choice, and develop fairer, more rigorous systems for evaluating teachers. (This is happening well in most places, but there’s still a long way to go.)
Now, we all know that federal interventions don’t always work as intended. What sounds good in concept often stumbles in practice, which is why it’s important to revisit laws regularly (that hasn’t happened with No Child Left Behind because of the stalemate in Washington).
That said, it’s patently false and downright irresponsible to suggest states and districts will do the right thing without meaningful oversight from the federal government. The evidence is everywhere that absent real accountability many states won’t ensure that districts protect children at risk.
Today, for example, because education is often funded by local property taxes, states typically spend much less money educating children in the bottom fifth of the economic ladder than the top fifth. In Illinois, for example, a student in the low property value Berwyn North school district just west of Chicago receives $8,588 in combined state and local education funding whereas a student twenty miles further west in suburban Lisle Community Unit School District 202 receives $17,169 in state and local funding.
In addition to getting the short end of the stick on funding in most states, low-income children and children of color are disciplined more severely, have less access to rigorous high school classes, and are more likely to be taught by ineffective teachers. [We only know about these disparities, by the way, because the federal government makes states measure them and publish the results.]
Not surprisingly, fewer than 10 percent of low-income children earn a four-year college degree, compared to about 80 percent of upper-income students.
This is why arguments for little to no federal oversight of education are so disturbing.
There’s also talk by states’ rights advocates of no longer requiring annual testing by states, which would deny parents and educators valuable information about whether students are on track, reduce the ability to measure and improve teacher quality, and make it harder for administrators to know how schools are doing and when they need to intervene. Ironically, this is being proposed just as “smarter” assessments come online that will more accurately measure student learning, including their ability to think critically, solve problems, and write.
If Congress takes the states’ rights, anti-accountability, anti-assessment tack that is being discussed, the outcome will be as predictable as it is tragic. Many states and districts will take the easier path than trying to educate ALL children, disadvantaged students will lose out, and millions of young people who could have become hard-working taxpayers will end up jobless, in prison, or worse.
So when you hear politicians talking about reducing the federal role and restoring states’ rights, what they’re really saying is that they’re passing the buck. They’re saying they don’t want to take responsibility for ensuring ALL children receive a quality public education.
President Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk that read: “The Buck Stops Here.” When it comes to educating our children, Congress should heed that message, not ignore it.
By: Jonah Edelman, The Daily Beast, January 3, 2014
“People Make Mistakes About Sex And Stuff Happens”: Will Dirty Pol Vito Fossella Replace Dirty Pol Michael Grimm?
Anthony Weiner sexted with scores of women, only getting caught when a photo of his crotch went viral, and still ran for mayor two years later. Eliot Spitzer spent more than $15,000 on high-price prostitutes, and after resigning his governorship in disgrace, ran for New York City comptroller five years later. Rep. Charlie Rangel was censured by the House of Representatives and was urged by the president of the United States to step aside, and he still ran and won re-election—three more times.
And now to this list of New York pols who refuse to go away, it may be possible to add another name: Vito Fossella.
The former Staten Island congressman was one of New York City’s most prominent Republicans, regularly winning re-election by double digits. He was often talked about as a future New York mayor.
But all of that came to an end in 2008, when the 43-year-old Fossella got a little too sloshed at a White House reception honoring the New York Giants Super Bowl victory and was arrested for driving under the influence in northern Virginia. The scandal could have been the kind that amounts to a mere hiccup in the baroque New York political scene, but it became a bit more serious when it was revealed that Fossella, a married father of three, had been cruising around the D.C. suburbs because he was off to see his mistress, with whom he had fathered a child—a fact that was revealed when Fossella called the woman to pick him up from his overnight stay in jail.
But now that Rep. Michael Grimm is joining the crowded club of New York politicians who have resigned in disgrace, is Fossella ready to join the nearly equally crowded club of lawmakers who have mounted ill-fated comeback attempts?
“Vito’s name has come around a couple of times. He is very beloved in the Staten Island community,” said Leticia Remauro, a former Staten Island GOP chairwoman and a political consultant. “He served the community well, but he clearly has to make a decision based on why he left.”
John Catsimatidis, a supermarket magnate who lost a bid for the Republican nomination in the 2013 mayor’s race, won Staten Island, a victory many attribute to the introductions Fossella made on the island. Before Grimm announced he was stepping down, Catsimatidis used his Sunday morning AM radio show to urge the congressman to give up the seat and suggested that he support Fossella.
“Vito is the most experienced. If he wants it, it is his for the taking,” Catsimatidis told The Daily Beast by phone from the Bahamas. As for Fossella’s baggage, Catsimatidis, a major donor to Republican causes, said: “Who doesn’t have baggage? People make mistakes about sex and stuff happens.”
Catsimatidis appeared to step back a bit from his comments over the weekend, however, saying he would commission a poll to find out who was the most viable Republican—Fossella, district attorney Dan Donovan, or Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis.
Donovan, who has come under withering criticism for his inability to win an indictment against a New York City police officer in the strangulation death of Eric Garner, a black Staten Island man selling loose cigarettes, announced Tuesday morning that he was “seriously considering the race.” Although Donovan remains a popular figure on Staten Island even after the Garner grand jury decision, many island political analysts said they doubted he had many ambitions beyond the DA’s office.
Guy Molinari, a former Staten Island borough president, pushed back against that view. “It is his dream [to go to Congress] and he is going to be running,” Molinari said. “He is entitled to it. The reading I have right now is that all of the elected officials, with the exception of Malliotakis, are lining up behind Donovan.”
When Fossella was first elected to Congress in 1997 at age 32, Molinari was described as his political godfather. In the intervening years, the two had a falling out, and the tribal divisions of Staten Island’s Republican Party split between a Molinari camp and one loyal to Fossella. Molinari was an enthusiastic backer of Grimm, but when Fossella loyalists in Staten Island’s GOP leadership endorsed Fossella in 2008 even though he said he would not run in light of his scandal, Molinari attacked his protégé in unusually personal terms.
“It’s going to be ugly, it’s going to be nasty, but he has to know that would come out in the course of a campaign. Everything he has done will be brought to light by me in this campaign,” Molinari said at the time, pledging a primary battle. “I have a difficult time believing that Fossella would put his own personal ambitions above his family. His family has been through enough, and I couldn’t believe that he would be willing to put them through all of that once again.”
Fossella declined to run again, but in the years since he has mused aloud about challenging Grimm. Now that Grimm is gone, the question is whether Fossella was merely tweaking Molinari or was serious about seeking a return to Congress.
“I think he had a genuine interest in that seat,” said one Fossella ally, who said the former congressman was unlikely to challenge Donovan if the district attorney decided to run. “It’s a great gig to be the DA, and I think Danny likes doing it. The likelihood as I see it is that Donovan stays where he is.”
Fossella did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but in a television interview Tuesday night, he gave a tepid denial, saying he was “not really” interested in running again and that “my hope is that the people of Staten Island and Brooklyn go to the polls and just choose the best person for all of us.”
These days the former congressman appears to have reconciled with his Staten Island family and has rebuilt his life working as a lobbyist for a firm owned by former U.S. Senator Al D’Amato. He appears frequently on television as a political commentator. If he were to run, he would have to overcome deep skepticism from Washington Republicans, who are not likely to want to replace one scandal-scarred Staten Island Republican with another scandal-scarred Staten Island Republican. The district, which also includes parts of Brooklyn, is by far the most Republican in New York City—Bill de Blasio failed to carry it even as he romped to victory in the 2013 mayor’s race—and should be a relatively easy Republican win in a special election, which conservative base voters are more likely to turn out for. But if Democrats lose this year, they think they can win the seat in 2016 riding Hillary Clinton’s coattails—something Republicans also sound keenly aware of, even if they have their own motives for discouraging a Fossella campaign.
“Under the circumstances, with the problems he has had, and in this atmosphere with the issues that are out there,” said Molinari, “I just don’t think Fossella runs.”
By: David Freedlander, The Daily Beast, December 31, 2014
“There’s A New Twist This Time”: To GOP Congress, As Usual, It’s Welfare On The Chopping Block
Congress loves to be Scroogey when it comes to helping the poor at Christmastime. Last year, it let an unemployment extension for the long-term jobless expire during the holidays. That was right after food-stamps were cut. This year, a bare-bones welfare program will continue into the New Year without being updated. For some, it’s a mixed blessing: This Congress would likely cut the program even more rather than fix its problems.
In late 2010, Tea Party Republicans first stormed into the House of Representatives with their budget-cutting agenda, one of the first items they nominated for the chopping block was a component of the program once known as welfare.
The program was a $25 billion emergency fund that passed in the stimulus act and encouraged employers to hire low-income workers by subsidizing their salaries through welfare-to-work funds. Throughout 2009 and 2010, it had created 250,000 jobs in 37 states, including conservative states like Mississippi, and was widely popular because it helped bolster employment during the economic downturn.
Despite the program’s popularity, Congress let it die in September 2010. So it was ironic a couple of months later when the Tea Partiers were railing against it—it had already expired.
And that’s how fights over virtually all aspects of the program once known as welfare go. Welfare recipients have had to meet work requirements to receive their checks ever since President Bill Clinton signed the welfare reform law in 1996, and those paychecks are meager: in most states, the average family will receive between $200 and $400, clocking in between 20 and 30 hours of work activities and applying for as many as 20 jobs a week. Yet stereotypes of the program as a large handout to moochers who don’t have jobs remain, and the program is always among the first that the public and conservatives would sacrifice to budget cuts.
And so as the year ends, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, as what we call welfare is officially known, is not being reauthorized again this year. The bill expired way back in 2010. Congress keeps funding it through continuing resolutions, but TANF’s existence has been year-to-year, and supporters of the social safety net have always preferred full reauthorization.
But there’s a new twist: Now, many progressives and policymakers who care about the poor are ironically happy that TANF isn’t being reauthorized again this year. The reason? These folks fear that reauthorizing the bill will hand Republicans who control the house—and as of January, the Senate—the opportunity they’ve been waiting for—to gut it.
The program already operates at a minimum level. In 1997, the first year after the law was passed, state governments spent 70 percent of the funds provided through the program on cash assistance for families. Now they only spend about a quarter of their money by directly helping families, and they send the rest of the money on other welfare-related programs or use it to close holes in their own budgets. Critics noted this led to the program’s lackluster response to the economic crisis. In 2011, only 27 percent of families living in poverty were receiving welfare assistance.
Among the fears are that House Republicans will try to eviscerate funding—which in 2013 totaled about $16.5 billion for the welfare program. The House budget chair, the Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, wants to turn all safety-net programs into a giant block grant to the states—he says it would maintain the programs’ current levels of funding but most experts believe funding would ultimately dwindle and serve fewer families.
Republicans showed their gleeful willingness to go after safety-net programs when they tried to slash food stamps by more than half. And when President Barack Obama attempted to provide waivers to states so that they could be more flexible in how they administered welfare-to-work and do less paperwork for the federal government, Republicans accused him of gutting the work requirements. So not only are Republicans likely to cut funding, but they would also resist any changes that might actually make the program run better.
This is why progressives are just as happy to see TANF not be reauthorized. However, there’s a downside to that. Only eight states have raised the amount of money that families get to keep pace with inflation, which is why so many families in so many states get so little money. Reauthorizing the bill could force states to readjust the formulas they use to determine benefits so that families get more.
The stimulus program that helped low-income Americans find employment during the recession—the one the Republicans were so proud to claim credit for cutting—could be reauthorized as well. While the economy has been inching toward recovery, the long-term unemployed and low-income Americans are still struggling to find good jobs that pay well, and increased welfare funds designed to employ them could bolster the economy again.
There are other programs, including those designed to help states serve their clients better, that have expired or gotten lost in the shuffle. Many advocates want those changed, adjusted, or bolstered, and the only way to do that is to open up the bill and reauthorize it.
Instead, conservatives still view the fact that Americans need help from the government as a disaster, and are more likely to cut benefits than to think about helping them. It was a Republican Congress working with a Democratic president that succeeded in passing the welfare reform bill the first time. But this time around, advocates are too worried Republicans will do something unprecedented, like they did with food stamps—which is try to tear the program completely apart.
By: Monica Potts, The Daily Beast, December 26, 2014
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