By: E. J. Dionne, Jr, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 5, 2012
“Just A Reminder”: Congress, Sometimes You Guys Are An Embarrassment
We’re 15 days out from the expiration of our eighth stopgap — yes, our eighth stopgap — to extend funding for transportation infrastructure. The last long-term transportation bill ended in 2009, and here we are, three years later, with no replacement.
It looked, this week, like perhaps we had finally broken the impasse when 72 senators joined together to pass the Boxer-Inhofe transportation bill. But Hill staffers tell Politico that the House won’t take the Senate bill up before the end of the month. Which means, yes, a ninth transportation stopgap. A ninth bill that doesn’t give states any predictable framework in which to make long-term investments. A ninth failure, in other words.
Congress, sometimes you guys are an embarrassment.
And so long as we’re taking the dim view here at Wonkbook, let’s just be honest about it: Boxer-Inhofe won’t solve our transportation problems, either. It’s much better than nothing, of course. And it’s better than yet another stopgap. But both on the spending and funding sides, it’s inadequate.
On the spending side, it only lasts for two years — the House wants a five-year bill, as does the White House — and, at $109 billion, it’s only about two-thirds the size of the president’s budget request for infrastructure, which was, in turn, smaller than what most infrastructure experts thought was needed.
This is a bad time to do a half-measure on infrastructure. We have literally trillions of dollars in unmet infrastructure needs. We have massive unemployment in the construction sector. Materials are unusually cheap because of a depressed global economy. Borrowing is unusually cheap because we’re one of the few safe havens left in the global financial market. And it’s cheaper to repair an aging bridge today than rebuild a crumbled one 10 years from now. So waiting to do the bulk of our infrastructure passing a half-measure on infrastructure investment later is like waiting till after the big sale ends to buy your groceries. It’s just bad financial planning.
Further, as my colleague Brad Plumer reports, Boxer-Inhofe does nothing to stop the Highway Trust Fund, which is paid for by the federal gas tax, from going broke. There are all sorts of reasons the fund is going broke — more fuel-efficient cars, the gas tax isn’t indexed to inflation, etc — but the bottom line is that the primary mechanism we use to pay for infrastructure in this country is in crisis. President Ronald Reagan, you’ll recall, actually raised the gas tax to fund his infrastructure bill, and Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) offered an amendment to index the gas tax to inflation in this bill. But that amendment was defeated, and so rather than actually fixing the Highway Trust Fund, we’re exhausting it, and patching the rest of the bill with one-time pay-fors and gimmicks. So the central problem in transportation funding — the problem that has arguably led to these nine stopgaps — will be left for another day.
Boxer-Inhofe is a lot better than doing nothing. It’s a lot better than another stopgap. And Sens. Barbara Boxer and James Inhofe deserve credit for actually moving a bipartisan infrastructure bill through the Senate. But it’s a reminder that, these days, even when Congress does get around to doing its job, it doesn’t do it particularly well.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post Wonkbook, March 16, 2012
Congressional Residency Requirements: Home Is “Anywhere I Hang My Hat”
Of all the issues you can raise in a political campaign, the dumbest is whether a member of Congress has moved his/her family to Washington.
O.K., possibly not the absolute dumbest. There was that dust-up over whether now-Senator Rand Paul had, as a college student, kidnapped a female friend and forced her to worship “Aqua Buddha.” Although now that I’m thinking about it, I really did enjoy that one.
Right now in Indiana, Senator Richard Lugar is under fire from a Tea Party opponent who claims that Lugar has not actually lived in the state since he first entered the Senate in 1977.
“This scandal is our chance to replace one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate with a conservative!” said a fund-raising letter for Lugar’s opponent, Richard Mourdock, the state treasurer.
Lugar is actually a pretty conservative guy himself, although he is best known for his work on nuclear disarmament, which does not appear to be a Tea Party priority. The head of the right-wing PAC, Club for Growth, called for Lugar’s defeat the other day in a statement that denounced the senator for, among other things, having supported the bailout of New York City in 1978. I call that nursing a grudge.
Most of the publicity about the race, however, centers on the residency issue. Mourdock recently held a press conference at the house where Lugar has his voting address, and it definitely did seem to be occupied by another family.
“The entire state is his home,” retorted Lugar’s campaign manager. I am taking this to be a version of “So what?”
The senator’s ability to vote from a residence he hasn’t actually lived in for decades was, the campaign said, based on the same principle that allows a member of the military to vote from the last place he or she lived before going off to fight for the country. I’m not sure this is a comparison they’d want to press.
The issue of voting addresses is particularly sensitive in Indiana, where the secretary of state, Charlie White, was recently tossed out of office after being convicted of registering to vote at his former wife’s address while he actually lived with his fiancée. White, who once worked as a family law attorney, said his private life was “complicated,” which I’m sure we’re all prepared to believe.
Indiana is clearly a state with a lot of political excitement. Just recently, its State House voted in favor of drug-testing welfare recipients, which would not be all that remarkable except that the members also voted to drug-test themselves. “We had an amendment I thought was even better requiring drug testing for all corporate welfare recipients,” said Representative Ryan Dvorak, a Democrat from South Bend. That one, unfortunately, failed on a party-line vote.
But about the residency issue. These fights have been going on forever. One of the very first political investigations I ever worked on involved whether or not a veteran congressman maintained a voting address that was actually a Burger King outlet in North Haven, Conn.
Rick Santorum’s political career was built on an upset victory against a Democratic House member who, Santorum claimed, had lost touch with his district and moved his family to the Washington suburbs. When Santorum moved his own family to the Washington suburbs, he claimed that promises he made when he was in the House didn’t count for the Senate.
Then he enrolled the kids, who were being home-schooled, in a cyberschool that billed his old school district in Pennsylvania $38,000 a year.
“My dad’s opponents have criticized him for moving us to Washington so we could be with him more,” complained one of Santorum’s kids in an ad in 2006, shortly before he lost by one of the widest margins in the history of re-election campaigns. This was the same race in which Santorum claimed that his Democratic opponent, Robert Casey, was a “thug” who sent operatives to peep through the windows of the house near Pittsburgh where the senator maintained a voting address.
“Your despicable actions have endangered our children’s safety,” Santorum and his wife wrote to Casey. A Philadelphia Daily News columnist noted that the children in question were probably not in peril since they were, you know, in Virginia the whole time.
While serving in Congress is really, truly, not the same as serving in combat, these residency flaps are generally bogus. If we want a Congress that looks at least minimally like the country at large — including women, men with working wives, and parents of young children — we can’t carp if they want to keep their families within commuting distance.
Unless, of course, you are talking about somebody who got elected in the first place by running on the residency issue. Then carp away. Please.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 17, 2012
The Republicans’ Deceptive Payroll Tax Compromise
Republicans finally came to their senses yesterday and realized they were waging a losing battle with their opposition to a payroll tax extension. The two-month extension Congress passed in December was set to expire by the end of this month, and Republicans were adamant that any further extension be paired with equal spending cuts. Democrats balked, instead suggesting a surtax on millionaires that the Republicans would never accept, and another last minute legislative showdown appeared inevitable. Then out of nowhere yesterday afternoon Congressional Republicans announced that they would drop their resistance:
“Because the president and Senate Democratic leaders have not allowed their conferees to support a responsible bipartisan agreement, today House Republicans will introduce a backup plan that would simply extend the payroll tax holiday for the remainder of the year while the conference negotiations continue regarding offsets, unemployment insurance, and the ‘doc fix,’” said GOP leaders in an official statement Monday afternoon.
The last impasse on the tax extension left Republicans limping out of Washington for the Christmas recess. The payroll tax cut—which maintains the current 4.2 percent rate that, for a family earning $50,000 a year, amount to about $80 extra per month than the standard 6.2 percent rate—is a widely popular measure and Republicans faced public scrutiny as their obstinacy risked raising taxes on 160 million people, all in the name of political brinkmanship. By slipping this announcement out far in advance of the deadline on the same day the president released the 2013 budget, Republicans hoped to avoid a repeat of their previous public relations debacle.
Seems like an unabashed win for the Democrats, right? It’s certainly reassuring that the payroll tax extension, a form of stimulus bolstering the still shaky economy, will remain in place through the end of the year. Except unlike the December concession, this change of heart only covers the politically popular payroll tax. Excluded is an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless and the so-called Doc Fix, which stalls a drastic drop in the fees paid to Medicare physicians.
I imagine Republicans will also find common ground on the latter half—they wouldn’t want to position themselves against your grandma’s doctor during an election year—but the agreement seems designed as a ploy to put an end to the increased unemployment benefits that Republicans have fought against throughout Obama’s presidency. While the payroll tax cut helps keep the economy afloat, the unemployment benefits are the more simulative part of the equation, possibly dropping GDP by 0.3 percent if no extension is passed. But since those benefits aren’t dolled out to as wide a base as the payroll tax, there is less of a public groundswell whenever Republicans hold the extension hostage.
If Democrats buy into the Republicans’ attempts to separate the various measures, it’s unlikely that any offsets would be enough to convince Republicans to support extending unemployment. The party is secretly crossing their fingers, hoping the economy doesn’t improve before Obama is on the ballot this fall. Any form of stimulus that lacks widespread appeal would be a nonstarter.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, February 14, 2012
“We The People,” Not “We The Rich”: The Citizens United Catastrophe
We have seen the world created by the Supreme Court’sCitizens United decision, and it doesn’t work. Oh, yes, it works nicely for the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, especially if they want to shroud their efforts to influence politics behind shell corporations. It just doesn’t happen to work if you think we are a democracy and not a plutocracy.
Two years ago, Citizens United tore down a century’s worth of law aimed at reducing the amount of corruption in our electoral system. It will go down as one of the most naive decisions ever rendered by the court.
The strongest case against judicial activism — against “legislating from the bench,” as former President George W. Bush liked to say — is that judges are not accountable for the new systems they put in place, whether by accident or design.
The Citizens United justices were not required to think through the practical consequences of sweeping aside decades of work by legislators, going back to the passage of the landmark Tillman Act in 1907, who sought to prevent untoward influence-peddling and indirect bribery.
If ever a court majority legislated from the bench (with Bush’s own appointees leading the way), it was the bunch that voted for Citizens United. Did a single justice in the majority even imagine a world of super PACs and phony corporations set up for the sole purpose of disguising a donor’s identity? Did they think that a presidential candidacy might be kept alive largely through the generosity of a Las Vegas gambling magnate with important financial interests in China? Did they consider that the democratizing gains made in the last presidential campaign through the rise of small online contributors might be wiped out by the brute force of millionaires and billionaires determined to have their way?
“The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.” Those were Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words in his majority opinion. How did he know that? Did he consult the electorate? Did he think this would be true just because he said it?
Justice John Paul Stevens’ observation in his dissent reads far better than Kennedy’s in light of subsequent events. “A democracy cannot function effectively,” he wrote, “when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.”
But ascribing an outrageous decision to naivetéis actually the most sympathetic way of looking at what the court did in Citizens United. A more troubling interpretation is that a conservative majority knew exactly what it was doing: that it set out to remake our political system by fiat in order to strengthen the hand of corporations and the wealthy. Seen this way, Citizens United was an attempt by five justices to push future electoral outcomes in a direction that would entrench their approach to governance.
In fact, this decision should be seen as part of a larger initiative by moneyed conservatives to rig the electoral system against their opponents. How else to explain conservative legislation in state after state to obstruct access to the ballot by lower-income voters — particularly members of minority groups — though voter identification laws, shortened voting periods and restrictions on voter registration campaigns?
Conservatives are strengthening the hand of the rich at one end of the system and weakening the voting power of the poor at the other. As veteran journalist Elizabeth Drew noted in an important New York Review of Books article, “little attention is being paid to the fact that our system of electing a president is under siege.”
Those who doubt that Citizens United (combined with a comatose Federal Election Commission) has created a new political world with broader openings for corruption should consult reports last week by Nicholas Confessore and Michael Luo in the New York Times and by T.W. Farnam in The Washington Post. Both accounts show how American politics has become a bazaar for the very wealthy and for increasingly aggressive corporations. We might consider having candidates wear corporate logos. This would be more honest than pretending that tens of millions in cash will have no impact on how we will be governed.
In the short run, Congress should do all it can within the limits of Citizens United to contain the damage it is causing. In the long run, we have to hope that a future Supreme Court will overturn this monstrosity, remembering that the first words of our Constitution are “We the People,” not “We the Rich.”
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