“Crumbling Walls”: Boehner’s Anti-Unemployment Insurance Excuse Is Falling Apart
Nearly three months after federal unemployment benefits expired for over a million Americans nationwide, House Speaker John Boehner’s excuse for refusing to take up a bill to renew the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program is falling apart.
When Senate Democrats and five Republicans struck a deal that would reauthorize the EUC program for five months and retroactively pay the benefits that expired on December 28, Speaker Boehner immediately dismissed the bill.
Citing a letter from the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) – the state agencies that distribute the unemployment checks – Boehner argued that extending unemployment benefits would be too “difficult” and “unworkable,” due to the complications involved in ensuring that beneficiaries were actually looking for work during the proceeding three months.
Abandoning the House’s continuous claims that an extension would hinder job creation and dissuade long-term unemployed Americans from seeking employment, the Speaker argued that “the Senate bill would be costly, difficult to administer, and difficult to determine an individual’s eligibility.”
The bottom line, according to Boehner: ”This could increase the likelihood of fraud and abuse.”
NASWA president Mark Henry, however, is now clarifying that the organization does not endorse a particular position on whether or not the bill should proceed. As Politico reports, Henry says that some in Washington had “conflated” the concerns mentioned in NASWA’s letter.
“The letter that I wrote did not label the legislation ‘unworkable’; that was Speaker Boehner’s word,” Henry said, distancing himself from the Speaker’s stance.
Also, as The New York Times points out, state agencies managed to overcome that same “difficulty” back in 2010, when benefits were renewed after a lapse.
Even others in the GOP are not buying Boehner’s excuse, which seeks to appease House Republicans, who, for the most part, oppose an extension of the EUC program.
According to Politico, Senator Rob Portman, a powerful Republican also from Ohio, shot back at Boehner, saying he understands the “concern” over implementation, “but it’s been done before.”
“We’re eager to hear [the House’s] ideas as to how it could be implemented more effectively,” he added.
Portman was not alone in speaking out against the House’s opposition to the program’s renewal.
“There’s a lot of things that the Speaker doesn’t like that we do over here,” says Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. “What we have out there is a fair proposal.”
Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) also spoke out, describing the deal as a “good compromise that takes care of people who are running out of their checks and does it in a way that is paid for appropriately.”
By: Elissa Gomez, The National Memo, March 26, 2014
“John Boehner’s Hypocritical Griping About The Obamacare Deadline Delay”: Conservatives’ Real Beef, That People Want To Sign Up
The Obama Administration has made another adjustment to the Affordable Care Act and the critics are making another fuss.
The adjustment, first reported (I think) by Amy Lotven for Inside Health Policy, is an extension of the open enrollment period for buying private insurance through the new Obamacare marketplaces. Officially, most people have until March 31 to sign up for a plan. (The exception are people who lose a job or have some other, similar life-altering experience. They can sign up throughout the year.) But on Wednesday, the administration announced that it will be offering some extra time to consumers who don’t finish their applications in time. They’ll be able to use the websites, just like they can now, only they’ll have to check a box attesting to the fact that they started the application process before April 1.
Exactly how many extra days will these folks get? And what’s to prevent somebody from lying—effectively taking advantage of the grace period to get insurance after the official deadline? On a predictably painful and frustrating conference call Wednesday, officials from the Department of Health and Human Services wouldn’t answer these questions directly. Obamacare critics, meanwhile, were quick to express their displeasure.”What the hell is this? A joke?” House Speaker John Boehner said at a press conference. “Another deadline made meaningless. If he hasn’t put enough loopholes in the law already, the administration is now resorting to an honor system to enforce it.”
Boehner appears to be right about the lack of enforcement. Nothing can stop people from gaming this new system. And establishing some kind of fixed date might be a good idea, as Philip Klein points out at the Washington Examiner, although in practice the insurers will basically do that on their own. (If they don’t get applications by the middle of the month, they won’t start coverage on May 1.) But even insurers are shrugging at this and it’s not clear why Boehner or anybody else should react differently.
There’s genuine reason to think that people who waited until the last minute to sign up really might have problems completing the process in time. Traffic to the online marketplaces has been increasing rapidly, with levels now rivaling the surge that took place in late December. On Tuesday, 1.2 million people visited healthcare.gov, according to officials. At some point, the congestion could trigger a built-in queuing system—making it difficult for last-minute applicants to finish enrollment by midnight on March 31. As administration officials pointed out, you don’t stop people from voting because they were standing in line when the polls closed. Or, to borrow a phrase I saw on twitter, you don’t kick somebody out of a restaurant because their dish wasn’t ready before closing time.
As for people gaming the system to buy themselves extra time, sure, it’s going to happen. But it’s unlikely to happen that frequently, certainly not enough to upset the actuarial balance of insurance plans. And it’s not like this is unprecedented. As Igor Volskly explained in an item for ThinkProgress, the Bush Administration did pretty much the same thing with Medicare Part D:
In May of 2006, just days before the end of open enrollment, President Bush took administrative action to waive “penalty fees for very low-income seniors and people with disabilities who sign up late” and allowed “the same impoverished beneficiaries to sign up for Medicare drug coverage until Dec. 31.” …
Like Obamacare, the launch of President George W. Bush’s prescription benefit plan was hampered by technical glitches, setbacks, and mass confusion. As the May 15 deadline for enrollment loomed, a bipartisan group of lawmakers advocacy organizations, and a surprising number of newspaper editorials, urged the administration to extend the enrollment period and protect seniors from the penalties associated with late enrollment.
Of course, the real issue here for conservatives isn’t this one delay. It’s all of the delays, plus all of the exceptions and waivers. And it’s totally reasonable to ask hard questions about these, particularly when it comes to the limits of presidential authority and the precedent it sets for the future. (I’m still waiting to hear from more lawyers on the constitutional issues.) But, for what it’s worth, the Affordable Care Act really did give HHS a huge amount of leeway over how to implement the law—and it did so for a very good reason. Given the inherent complexity of health care, there’s no way Congress could have figured out all of the details. It made sense to delegate that authority—to put in place new systems, but leave the nitty-gritty of regulations and transitions to the administration.
For each one of these extensions or delays, the ultimate question is whether they change the law’s ability to realize its basic goals—which, in this case, means encouraging people to buy new private health plans while maintaining a stable insurance market. Giving people a little extra time to enroll wouldn’t seem to impede this kind of progress. If anything, it would seem to enhance it. And maybe that’s what really bothers some of the law’s fiercer critics.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, March 26, 2014
“No Vote Head-Faking”: How John Boehner Is Playing Washington
There were no fireworks when John Boehner stood before Republican members at their retreat in rural Maryland and unveiled the House GOP’s “principles” for immigration reform. Even as the speaker outlined policies intolerable to hawkish conservatives, such as providing citizenship to undocumented children, there was, amazingly, no ugly dissent inside the Hyatt conference center.
There’s a simple reason why: Most members realized that Boehner was presenting broad ideas to be discussed, not specific proposals to be voted on.
“I thought the principles were vague enough that most people could agree with them,” Rep. Raul Labrador said after the retreat.
That was the idea.
At the beginning of the year, interviews with dozens of lawmakers and aides revealed a strategic dichotomy forming within the House GOP. Many conservatives craved a “bold” voting schedule in 2014 that would draw sharp policy contrasts on a host of issues. Republican leaders, on the other hand, saw such aggression as counterproductive in an election year and preferred to play it safe by pounding the issues of Obamacare, government oversight, the economy, and opportunity for middle-class Americans.
What has emerged is something of a safe middle ground. Boehner said Thursday that Republicans “will not shy away from” advancing major legislation this year. But the pace of that advance will be slow. Indeed, as GOP leadership carefully navigates an election year that appears promising for the party, Boehner is allowing conservative policy solutions to emerge from the conference—but they are meant to elicit positive headlines and score political points, not to expedite votes.
Take immigration. In the abstract, plenty of Republicans support legal status for undocumented immigrants (albeit only after several triggers, such as border security and employment verification, are in place.) Still, they say 2014 isn’t ripe for such an overhaul, citing election-year politics and a belief that President Obama is unwilling to enforce immigration laws. Boehner, knowing the reticence of his members yet understanding the necessity of appearing proactive on immigration, felt he had to act.
So the speaker released a nebulous outline of principles. Republicans rolled their eyes, sensing that significant legislative action was unlikely, but the media went crazy, splashing front-page headlines heralding the House GOP’s embrace of legalization for the undocumented. And one week later, after lawmakers lodged obligatory concerns and reporters wrote glowing reviews, Boehner dutifully acknowledged that immigration reform probably won’t happen this year.
“This is an important issue in our country,” Boehner said on Feb. 6. “It’s been kicked around forever, and it needs to be dealt with.”
The speaker was discussing immigration, but he could have been referencing any number of policies his GOP members want to bring to a vote—tax reform, health care, privacy, and welfare reform among them. Republicans want action, but it’s becoming clear that most of these will share immigration’s fate: Principles will be shared and a discussion will be had, but a vote will not.
Tax reform is the latest example. Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, made a splash last week by introducing a long-awaited overhaul of the tax code. Many conservatives have eagerly anticipated Camp’s proposal for three years, and are now agitating for a vote. “If this is a really powerful document that can rally a bunch of support in the party, then what’s to stop us from having a vote in the House?” Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina said of Camp’s tax plan.
Boehner’s response when asked about Camp’s plan on Wednesday: “Blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Leadership sees the details of this proposal, such as eliminating popular deductions, as politically perilous. But they also know how enthusiastic some members are about tax reform. So rather than rankle conservatives by suffocating the plan altogether, or irritate the business community by bringing a risky proposal to the House floor, Boehner’s team is content to have Camp to unveil his plan—allowing for a broad messaging campaign but not a specific vote.
This head-faking has provided GOP leadership with a blueprint for 2014. Now, with immigration and tax reform essentially taken off the table, and fewer than 75 legislative days left before midterm elections, Boehner’s team will have to grapple with but a few more potentially troublesome policy pushes.
Privacy legislation, if it’s a libertarian-backed bill with teeth, is unlikely to reach the floor.
Same goes for welfare reform. A group of conservatives, led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, have worked with the Heritage Foundation on a proposal to roll back welfare spending to pre-recession levels and add work requirements to the food-stamp program. But a vote on this plan is unlikely. Tinkering with the social safety net is always hazardous, and, as with other bold proposals, leadership won’t risk an election-year backlash by voting on something that stands no chance of clearing the Senate.
The one major issue that Boehner’s strategy won’t apply to is Obamacare. Conservatives have demanded action—and were promised votes—on an alternative to the Affordable Care Act. Majority Leader Eric Cantor earned applause in Cambridge when he guaranteed an Obamacare replacement plan, and is beginning to meet with colleagues to piece something together. Cantor is widely expected to deliver.
Still, as National Journal reported in January, the House Republican health care plan is likely to be a medley of poll-tested proposals slapped together— not one of the comprehensive alternative plans that conservatives have been boosting.
For conservatives who demanded an aggressive, wide-ranging legislative agenda in 2014, winding up with one vote on a watered-down health care bill might not suffice. “Instead of talking, we could actually act—and we could have a real impact,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, a frequent critic of leadership. “It’s easy to blame Harry Reid and the president for everything, but we’re missing a lot of opportunities. Standing back and waiting is not going to win elections.”
Still, after initially decrying a play-it-safe strategy, other conservatives now sound comfortable with the approach. “When you put a bill out there,” said Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana, “it has a lot of details that can detract from the overall concept.”
By: Tim Alberta, The National Journal, March 2, 2014
“When The Pot Calls The Kettle Lazy”: Thanks To Boehner’s ‘Leadership’, Capitol Hill Has Set New Benchmarks For Ineptitude
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) hosted a lively press conference with Capitol Hill reporters yesterday – the “boner” joke won’t be forgotten anytime soon – but there was something in his opening statement that was so audacious, I’m surprised it was largely ignored.
“You know, back in 2012 the president chose politics over governing. He took the year off, got little done, and this year I’m beginning to see the same pattern of behavior. We’ve seen more and more that the president has no interest in doing the big things that he got elected to do.”
Boehner added that President Obama intends to “pack it in for the year” and “just wait for the election.”
There’s hypocritical rhetoric. There’s breathtaking hypocritical rhetoric. Then there’s rhetoric so hypocritical that it ruptures the space-time continuum.
Reasonable people can debate the merits of competing proposals or policy strategies, but for Speaker Boehner to suggest President Obama is uninterested in governing, lacks ambition, and intends to do nothing for the rest of the 2014 is so head-spinning that it’s genuinely alarming Boehner was able to say the words out loud without laughing hysterically.
Let’s briefly review reality in case it still matters. John Boehner claimed the Speaker’s gavel three years ago, and since that time, he’s racked up zero major legislative accomplishments. While Obama has at times been desperate to get something, anything, done with this Congress, Boehner has tried and failed to lead House Republicans towards anything resembling governing.
The result has been the least productive Congress since clerks started keeping track several generations ago. Thanks to Boehner’s “leadership,” Capitol Hill is establishing new benchmarks for ineptitude, giving the “do-nothing Congress” phrase an updated definition to reflect levels of ineffectiveness few thought possible before 2011.
And yet the Speaker wants to complain that Obama “got little done” after Republicans took control of the House majority.
As for the president having “no interest” in doing “big things,” this is the exact opposite of our version of reality. Obama it appears is preoccupied with doing big things – the Speaker should have listened a little closer to the State of the Union address being delivered a few feet in front of him – while Boehner has said it’s time for Americans to start expecting less. Indeed, House Republicans leaders have been quite explicit on this point, saying the GOP does not like and does not want big policy breakthroughs.
Finally, the very idea that the president intends to coast through the rest of 2014 without doing any actual work buries the needle on the Irony-o-meter because it’s House Republicans who’ve already announced, more than once, that they intend to coast through the rest of 2014 without doing any actual work.
We’ve become all too familiar with the GOP’s reliance on the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” game, but this is ridiculous.
I have no idea whether Boehner actually believes what he said yesterday. But whether the rest of us should believe his comments is clear.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 28, 2014
“John Boehner’s Sunshine Band”: A Cartoon Festival Of Illusions That Would Embarrass Disney’s Brilliant Fantasists
From now on, it’s the Zip-a-dee-doo-dah House.
The political world stopped for a moment when Speaker John Boehner broke into the jaunty old Disney tune — “My, oh my, what a wonderful day” — after a news conference in which he threw in the towel on the debt ceiling fight. He found himself trapped between the immovable object of Democrats determined that they’d never again let Republicans take the nation’s credit hostage and the irresistible force of a dysfunctional, crisis-addicted GOP majority of which he is the putative leader. Boehner decided to skip away in song.
Feb. 11, 2014, was , in fact, a wonderful day. It marked the end of a dismal experiment that saw the right wing of the conservative movement do all it could to make the United States look like a country incapable of governing itself rationally. We were so caught up in our own nasty politics that we forgot that we’re supposed to be a model for how democracy should work. There will be other episodes of foolishness, but the debt-ceiling bomb finally has been defused.
Moreover, there were lessons here that should be applied from now on. The first is that refusing to negotiate over matters that should not be subject to negotiation is the sensible thing to do. President Obama learned this the hard way after the debilitating budget battle of 2011.
It’s true that both parties have played political games around the debt ceiling. But until our recent tea party turn, politicians kept these symbolic skirmishes within safe limits. The 28 House Republicans who faced reality by voting to move on for another year sent a signal that they want to return to those prudent habits.
But this means that 199 Republicans voted to go over the cliff. Or, to be more precise, many pretended they were willing to take that leap to appease big conservative funders and organizations, knowing that a minority of their GOP colleagues and the Democrats would bail them out. These profiles in convenience included Reps. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the Budget Committee, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who chairs the House Republican Conference.
This tells us something important: The House Republican majority now governs largely through gestures and is driven almost entirely by internal party fractiousness and narrow political imperatives. When Boehner tried to tie the debt ceiling vote to a popular proposal to restore modest cuts to military pensions, Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) complained that he could not vote to raise the debt limit but also didn’t want to vote against the pension restoration.
It’s a perfect parable: Cotton, an Army veteran who is trying to unseat Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat, this fall, felt a need to placate pro-spending and anti-spending interest groups at the same time and didn’t want Boehner to call his bluff. No wonder the speaker gave up on mollifying his caucus and, bless him, offered his ironic melody about all the sunshine coming his way.
Something else happened on Tuesday: Fully 193 of the 195 Democrats voting were prepared to shoulder the burden of hiking the debt ceiling. This vote, like many before it, proved that there is a moderate governing majority in the House. It could work its will again and again if only Boehner were willing to put bills on the floor and give practical-minded Republicans a chance join with Democrats to enact them.
This proposition deserves a test on immigration reform. Supporters should be thinking about a discharge petition to force Boehner’s hand — or maybe even to allow him to do what he’s said privately he’d like to do. If a majority of House members signed it, there could be a successful vote for the immigration bill the Senate already passed.
The largest lesson is to those who make a living bemoaning Washington gridlock and demanding a return to old-fashioned, bipartisan, good-faith negotiations.
That would be very nice if we were dealing with the GOP of yesteryear. We’re not. The debt-ceiling vote confirms what has long been obvious: Getting to yes on anything begins with an acknowledgment of how many members of Boehner’s caucus are ready to blow up our governing process and how many others feign a desire to do so to avoid political pain from their right.
The Zip-a-dee-doo-dah House has become a cartoon festival of illusions that would embarrass Disney’s brilliant fantasists. Exposing the fantasies is the first step toward sunshine.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 12, 2014
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