Fewer Hangouts For Lobbyists: Senators Propose Closing State Offices To Save On Budget
There may be no better example of how bloated the government is than the number of offices each senator has. First, there’s a senator’s official Washington office in one of three massive buildings on Capitol Hill, especially busy during the 153 days the Senate is scheduled to be in session this year. Add to that a myriad of committee offices. And many senators have hideaways tucked in the Capitol’s corners, where they can hold private meetings with colleagues and constituents or sneak a nap, lunch, or respite. And then there are the 460 state satellite offices.
Back-of-the-envelope math puts the total number of Senate offices at close to 700 for its 100 members. And those 460 state offices are expensive to rent and maintain: $40 million, or nearly one-fifth of the $219 million budgeted to run all Senate offices. That’s why Sen. Ben Nelson, the Nebraska Democrat who chairs the legislative branch panel of the Appropriations Committee is thinking about closing some of those state workrooms as he attempts to impose a 5 percent spending cut to prove the Senate means business in slashing the deficit. “It’s something that needs to be looked at,” Nelson tells Whispers. “There are some economies to be achieved.”
His Republican colleague, Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, agrees. Pruning senator’s budgets “may mean that you don’t have as many offices in your state.”
Terrance Gainer, the Senate sergeant-at-arms, says closing down state offices would also lead to savings in IT expenses and other office goods. “I’d ask them to take a look at that,” says Gainer.“We all ought to feel the pain so as we go to kind of zero-based budgeting or zero-based running a state, how many offices do we need?”
Well, many apparently. While the allotment of offices is supposed to be based on state population, it doesn’t always work that way. Nelson has five state offices in Nebraska, the same as Florida Republican Marco Rubio. Nebraska’s population is 1.7 million; Florida’s, 18.5 million. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California (pop. 36.9 million) has four state offices; Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York (pop. 19.5 million) has nine.
Gainer, a long-time police executive, says it’s time for an adult approach to the Senate budget. “If they are given an allowance,” he says of senators and their state office budgets, “they’ll spend an allowance. So if we reduce the allowance, it will force the tough love.” Still, Nelson’s not looking forward to delivering the news. “It will be awkward for us to suggest changes to [senators from] larger states.”
By: Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers, May 31, 2011
Debt Ceiling Warning: Inaction Would Double Interest Rates, Crash Market
Public efforts by both House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama to convince skeptical new Republican House members to add $2 trillion to the nation’s burdensome $14 trillion debt ceiling are being reinforced by dire warnings from business leaders that failing to OK the increase will lead to inflation, an immediate doubling of interest rates and a killer Wall Street crash.
“If they don’t increase the debt, there will be a huge impact on the economy,” a Wall Street executive told Whispers on background. “Interest rates would spike. S&P and Moody’s would downgrade U.S. debt, raising the price of borrowing, there would be a market sell-off, it would be a disaster.”
While Boehner, who yesterday called for a deal that would OK the debt ceiling increase in return for trillions of dollars in spending cuts, Wall Street lobbyists and banking and business leaders are meeting with several of the new Tea Party-backed House members who pledged to stop raising the ceiling to explain the impact of standing pat.
“A lot of freshmen are new to the issue,” said one of those meeting with the new members, some of whom signed pledges not to raise the debt ceiling no matter what.
Among the specifics the sources say they are telling the new members:
— Inflation could jump, though they aren’t giving any percentage growth.
— Interest rates could double if U.S. debt is downgraded. House loans, for example, that are now below 5 percent, could surge to 9-10 percent, killing any chance of fixing the housing slump or cutting the unemployment rate, now at 9 percent.
— The stock market could suffer a 10 percent drop, far more significant than the 778 point thrashing Wall Street took when the House rejected the government’s $700 billion bank bailout plan in September 2008.
“That market sell-off will look small compared to what we’ll see,” said a Wall Street executive.
So far, the campaign to turn the naysayers around is starting to work, say those involved. Helping is the expectations that the debt ceiling won’t actually be breached until August.
While there have been warnings that the vote must come sooner due to expectations that the cap will be breached this month, officials explained that Treasury can make several moves to postpone that until about August 2.
By: Paul Bedard, U. S. News and World Report, May 10, 2011
Tea Party Puts The Screws To House Republicans Over Debt Ceiling
Tea party activists have taken some lumps lately, but they’re not going down without a fight.
With TV ads, petitions and grassroots lobbying, tea party organizers are gearing up to send an absolutist message to Capitol Hill: Don’t raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances. Tea party activists have already clashed publicly with some of the 87 GOP freshmen they helped elect last year, and they’re warning that Republicans who don’t keep their fiscal promises will pay a political price.
“We will remove as many incumbents as we can that do not do the job they were hired to do,” Darla Dawald, national director of the tea party group Patriot Action Network, said in an e-mail. “We are watching every member of Congress, their votes, position and language.”
A newly formed conservative political action committee has released an ad opposing a debt ceiling increase and disputing the $100 billion in cuts that House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, touted in the recent budget agreement. The ad cites the Congressional Budget Office finding that cuts totaled less than $400 million. But its real target is President Obama and his “massive deficit spending.”
The ad was released by the new Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama PAC, a spinoff of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, the party of the Tea party Express. The latter is about to launch its own national TV ad campaign opposing a debt ceiling increase, said Amy Kremer, who chairs Tea party Express. The PAC raised and spent $7.7 million in the 2010 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Another conservative activist group, Grassfire Nation, is gathering signatures from its 1.8 million members on a petition opposing “any increase in the legal federal debt limit,” to be delivered by hand in the coming weeks to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. A Grassfire Nation poll found that close to 80 percent of its members opposed raising the debt ceiling, even if conditions such as spending cuts or caps were attached.
“It’s no secret that the tea party movement’s unhappy,” said Kremer. “You’re seeing people on a local level really upset with their congressmen and women.” Reps. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., Tom Price, R-Ga., and David Schweikert, R-Ariz., are among the House Republicans who have fielded flak from conservative bloggers, demonstrators, or town hall hecklers upset that Congress isn’t acting faster to bring down the deficit.
“There’s a frustration that we can’t move faster,” said Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, referring to the tea party movement. “But also an understanding that their job is to say: Let’s do more, let’s do more, let’s do more.”
The debt ceiling vote will be a key test of both the tea party and of the GOP on the threshold of the 2012 election. Technically, the federal government will run out of money in mid-May, but Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has signaled that accounting adjustments may give Congress until early August to actually vote.
It’s an open question how successful the tea party will be, both in the debt ceiling fight and on the campaign trail next year. Of the GOP freshmen, who’ve played a pivotal role in the unfolding budget drama, one bloc would raise the debt ceiling on the condition of substantive budget reforms or spending cuts, sources say. Another bloc opposes a debt ceiling increase flat out. And about a third are undecided.
Tea party activists are up against expert and administration warnings that failing to raise the debt limit could send the economy and the stock market into a tailspin. The tea party’s star, moreover, may be fading.
A Capitol Hill protest in March to demand more budget cuts proved underwhelming. The movement’s national leaders, most notably former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., have drifted to the fringes of the GOP White House nominating contest. A couple of tea party PACs unveiled to much fanfare last year–Ensuring Liberty and Liberty First–have fizzled. And GOP leaders have signaled that certain tea party goals–repealing the health care law, partially privatizing Medicare–may or may not be on the table in ongoing debt limit negotiations.
It “absolutely is not true” that the movement is losing steam, countered Kremer. “You’re not seeing the great big rallies that you did before, because people are engaged on a local level doing things.”
Virginia tea party activist Jamie Radtke, who’s launched a Senate campaign for the seat now held by Democratic Sen. Jim Webb, concurred that the movement is shifting from a national to a local focus: “There is a strong desire in the tea party movement to keep the tea party local.”
Radtke predicted that activists will take the fight over the debt limit to the mat. “The GOP is on probation, because under President Bush they spent a lot of money, and added $3 trillion to the national debt,” she said, adding: “You will see that the tea party will have no problem whatsoever challenging the very freshmen they put in.”
Such warnings still make some on Capitol Hill very nervous. But as Republicans struggle between idealism and pragmatism, the GOP–and the tea party–might soon face a moment of truth.
By: Elizabeth Newlin Carney, Contributing Editor, National Journal Daily, May 9, 2011
Gut Punch To Seniors: Republicans Are Done Pretending
“Should Congress have cut Medicare half a trillion dollars to pay for ObamaCare?” asked a 2010 ad for Republican newcomer Renee Ellmers in North Carolina’s 2nd congressional district.
That theme — “Obama’s coming for your Medicare!” — helped Ellmers and GOP candidates across the nation consolidate the senior vote, winning that crucial voting bloc by a 59-38 margin. In 2008, Democrats won seniors by 49-48. The dramatic shift was a massive component of the GOP wave.
It was a dishonest attack, of course. The Democratic healthcare law cut $126 billion from Medicare Advantage over 10 years, not half a trillion. And Medicare Advantage, which allowed seniors to get healthcare via private insurers, was an inefficient and wasteful experiment to see whether private companies could deliver health services more efficiently than the government. It failed. In fact, Medicare Advantage cost 11 percent more to run than standard Medicare for identical services.
Yet “fiscally responsible” Republicans successfully demagogued the issue all the way to a majority, winning precious senior support with promises to “protect Medicare.” Those promises are now officially history. Republicans are now rewarding seniors for their vote by punching them in the gut.
GOP Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) has fired the first shot in a new war to destroy the benefit structure that seniors paid for throughout their working lives. Under his plan, seniors will no longer enroll in Medicare, but rather receive vouchers to try and secure care through private insurers. Ryan’s plan delays implementation for 10 years to ward off the wrath of current seniors, but the end result is the same — the elimination of a program Republicans pretended to protect.
After all, if the plan is so great for seniors, why wait until 2021 to implement it?
Ryan’s plan would cap the growth of vouchers to a hair over the rate of inflation. However, the cost of medical services has far outpaced inflation. So what happens when the vouchers aren’t enough to cover the cost of expensive life-saving medical procedures? If Republicans won’t bargain with drug companies or limit reimbursements to doctors (and they won’t), the only thing left would be real-world death panels.
In other words, seniors would die, needlessly and prematurely.
It is no coincidence that Republicans are using this moment to try and discredit the AARP, which will undoubtedly push back against this irresponsible plan. The House Ways and Means Committee has launched an investigation into the organization’s finances, arguing that its support for last year’s healthcare reform measure should invalidate its tax-exempt status. “Republicans are desperate to try to break the trust that America’s seniors have in AARP,” said Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) during the committee hearings. “They need to do so before they announce their budget that will devastate Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”
If Republicans were serious about containing healthcare costs, they would take a fresh look at a public option, allowing Americans to choose government-run insurance that would compete against private insurers. But Republicans don’t really care about providing quality care at reasonable prices — they care about enriching their insurance lobbyist friends.
Seniors allowed themselves to be taken in by the GOP in 2010. But their choice now is obvious. Republicans are done pretending.
By: Markos Moulitsas, The Hill, April 5, 2011
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