“More Budget Gimmickry”: Republicans Vote To Hide Costs Of Repealing Obamacare In Budget
Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee voted Thursday to shield attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act from objections that it would add to the government’s budget deficit.
The budget resolution for 2016 includes what are known as reconciliation instructions that tell several congressional committees to come up with ways to undo Obamacare. Such reconciliation measures only require 51 votes to pass in the Senate.
But the spending plan also includes language that allows lawmakers to raise what are known as budget points of order against any legislation that would add more than $5 billion to the deficit, and block it. According to the last estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, repealing Obamcare would add $210 billion to the deficit.
That would seem to make it likely that any Obamacare repeal effort would run afoul of a point of order, which takes 60 votes to surmount. So, later in the resolution, it exempts an attempt to repeal Obamacare from those points of order.
“What we have in this budget is a very interesting situation,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who offered an amendment to make the deficit rules apply to Obamacare repeal.
“We have a point of order in the budget for anything that adds to the deficit, but we have a section that specifically excludes the Affordable Care Act from that,” Stabenow said. “So think about it. This budget is conceding the fact that the Affordable Care Act has reduced the deficit, and repealing the law would increase the deficit.”
Stabenow also alluded a related problem the GOP budget ignores: At the same time that it instructs Congress to come up with a repeal, it continues to count all the revenue that the Affordable Care Act is expected to raise — and which the government wouldn’t collect if the law is dismantled.
“You can’t rig the rules on both sides,” Stabenow said. “That’s not fair. I would argue that’s really budget gimmickry. I think it’s important if you are going to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, you have to step up and assume the consequences of that.”
Budget Chairman Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) did not dispute Stabenow’s claim, but seemed to think it was irrelevant, since even if a point of order applies to a repeal measure, it still could be overridden if 60 senators vote to do so. That’s the same filibuster-proof number it takes to pass controversial legislation.
And while using budget reconciliation instructions prevents filibusters — so something can pass with just 51 votes — many parts of the Affordable Care Act could not be legally included in such a measure. And even if they could, it would take a two-thirds majority to override a presidential veto that would be certain to follow.
“I think that probably any repeal is probably going to take at least 60 votes, and probably 67 votes,” Enzi said.
Still, Stabenow countered that her amendment was useful in making clear what was actually happening in the name of “honest budgeting.”
Republicans opposed Stabenow’s amendment on a party-line vote, 12 to 10, and passed the budget by the same tally.
The measure is expected to be on the Senate floor next week.
By: Michael McAuliff, The Blog, The Huffington Post, March 19 , 2015
“Hijacked By The Hardliners”: Threatening To Gum Up The Confirmation Of Loretta Lynch Is Just The Latest GOP Tantrum
On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared he really, really likes having Eric Holder as attorney general. He essentially told CNN that unless Democrats concede to anti-abortion language Republicans snuck into a human trafficking bill, the nomination of Loretta Lynch to succeed Holder would not move forward.
First of all, whether Republicans accept it or not, abortion is a legal, constitutionally-guaranteed medical procedure in this country, for sex trafficking victims or anyone else. And second, this is indicative of the hostage politics we’ve come to expect from a party that refuses to govern. There is no issue, no matter how humane, and no funding need, no matter how dire, that cannot be hijacked by the ideological hardliners in the Republican Party.
We could have had immigration reform a year ago, without the threat of a Department of Homeland Security shutdown, if Speaker of the House John Boehner had told the bigots in his own caucus to take a hike and held a vote on a common-decency bill that would have passed. Republicans did shut down the government and harmed Colorado’s flood recovery efforts thanks to tea party intransigence on the Affordable Care Act. And we came to the brink of ladyparts shutting the whole thing down in 2011 thanks to Republican opposition to Planned Parenthood funding for health care screenings and services.
And no, it’s not “both sides.” I will cheerfully provide a swift wedgie to the next smug pundit who tries to blame Democrats for Republican failure to act like adults. President Barack Obama waited a year and a half for Boehner to move on immigration reform, and Boehner decided to abdicate his leadership to Iowa Rep. Steve King, who has accused undocumented immigrants of being a bunch of drug dealers with “calves the size of cantaloupes.”
Meanwhile, the Denver Post editorial board (or more accurately, publisher Dean Singleton’s ire at former Sen. Mark Udall) continues to rack up bonus points with the most credibility-damaging, fatuous endorsement of 2014, Republican Sen. Cory Gardner. The editorial actually claimed electing Gardner would “usher in a new era of bipartisanship”, that the Senate wouldn’t follow the House’s infantile, truculent lead and it would actually be “more productive.”
How’s that working out for you, Denver Post editorial board? Because Gardner didn’t get the memo.
He was one of the 47 Republicans to “pull a Dennis Rodman” and decide to communicate directly with a foreign government in order to undercut Obama. Given the backlash, Rodman’s North Korea visit may have been more effective and less comical, but this remains yet another example of Republican ineptitude. As conservative Michael Gerson put it, “This was a foreign policy maneuver, in the middle of a high-stakes negotiation, with all the gravity and deliberation of a blog posting. In timing, tone and substance, it raises questions about the Republican majority’s capacity to govern.”
Gerson’s right, and it’s only going to get better from here. According to Talking Points Memo , there are five more policy “cliffs” awaiting Congress, including the debt ceiling, funding for the Child Health Insurance Program and the end of overall funding for the federal government on Sept. 30. Obama has so far managed to outmaneuver these fools, but at some point voters need to stop rewarding failure by electing a party that is utterly incompetent at the basic functions of government.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, March 16, 2015
“A Virtual War On The Poor And Middle Class”: Give House Republicans Credit For Producing A Budget This Cruel
Everyone condemns politicians for being too quick to pander, too concerned with doing the popular thing, too willing to hide what they really believe in order to curry favor with an unmerciful electorate. So when a group of politicians throws caution to the wind and tells us what they really think despite the political risk, they deserve our praise. So it is with the House Republicans, who have just released their new budget.
That isn’t to say the budget is free of gimmickry or outlandish projections (we’ll get to that in a moment). But let’s look at some of the rather notable things it would do:
Turn Medicare into a voucher program. This is accompanied by a lot of rhetoric about how the magic of the market will hold down costs (just as it has with private insurance — oh, wait) and free seniors from the tyranny of their government insurance plan. Let’s see how that will go over.
Roll back the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid and lay the groundwork for further cuts. All those millions of low-income Americans who got coverage through the expansion are suffering terribly, because “Medicaid’s promises are empty, its goals are unmet, and its dollars are wasted.” House Republicans would liberate them from this oppression by taking away their health insurance. The rest of the program would be block-granted so that states could have “flexibility,” which in practice means the flexibility to dump even more patients from their coverage.
Repeal the rest of the ACA. The subsidies that have allowed millions of people to afford insurance? Gone. Protection against denials for preexisting conditions? Not anymore. If you were expecting this to be accompanied by a few comically vague words about “patient-centered reforms” with which the ACA would be replaced while 16 million people are wondering what to do about the coverage they lost, then you’ve been paying attention.
Cut regulations on Wall Street. They’ve been having a real hard time over there, and they could use a helping hand.
Cut environmental regulations. Let’s face it, if the environment is ever going to learn to take care of itself, it needs a little tough love.
Cut Pell grants, which they describe as “targeting Pell Grants to students who need the most assistance.”
Block-grant food stamps, or turn them into a “State Flexibility Fund.” There’s that word again.
Most of these ideas are presented without any actual dollar figures attached to them, but there is “a magic asterisk” in a table located in an appendix, as Max Ehrenfreund points out. This is more than a trillion dollars of savings they claim they’ll get from “Other Mandatory” spending. Ehrenfreund explains:
Other than health care and Social Security, mandatory spending includes a range of programs such as food stamps, disability payments for veterans, the earned income tax credit, and Pell grants for college students. The budget document did not specify which would be cut. Even presuming very large cuts to these programs, though, it was still unclear how lawmakers expected to come up with $1.1 trillion, said Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
By comparison, the Republican majority in the House voted in favor of reducing the budget for food stamps in 2013. The controversial measure passed only narrowly, with every Democrat and a few Republicans opposed. Many worried the cut was too severe, but it totaled $40 billion, just a sliver of the savings claimed in this week’s proposal.
At this stage, it isn’t so terrible for their proposals to lack specificity; this part of the budget process is meant to sketch a broad outline, while later legislation will set all the particulars. But let’s give the House Republicans credit. They aren’t shying away from talking about voucherizing Medicare (as their Senate colleagues did), and the rest of the document lays out a virtual war on the poor and middle class. They may toss the word “opportunity” in here and there, but the document is a bracing statement of Republican ideology.
Which is as it should be. Sure, the White House is going to criticize it, because the Democrats’ priorities are very different. Now we can have a debate. Should we turn Medicare into a voucher program? Should we toss millions of people off Medicaid and take away the subsidies that allow millions more to afford insurance? Should we cut food stamps and education grants? What are the alternatives? Those are the questions that debate should address, and then the two sides will have to arrive at a budget that incorporates the answers.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, March 18, 2015
“Look Over There!”: The Plot Thins On The Clinton Email ‘Scandal’
So over the weekend, the Times, which had already walked back some of the wilder implications of its Hillary Clinton-email reporting, did so just a little bit more. It did it under a provocative (though basically defensible) headline that tried to make it sound like the plot was thickening, but in fact this plot is thinning faster than Tony Blair’s hair (seriously, have a look). What began life two weeks ago as another “Clintons play by their own rules” mega-scandal is now pretty clearly devolving into a “what do you expect, it’s the government” saga that is about as dog-bites-man as it gets.
The Times headline, on A1 Saturday, proclaimed: “Emails Clinton Said Were Kept Could Be Lost.” The article, co-bylined by the reporter who broke the original story and another, reported that the State Department did not start automatically archiving the state.gov email traffic of deputies until February of this year. This bit of information came from department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who discussed this at her daily briefing the day before (i.e. last Friday).
Now. Remember what Clinton had said at her UN press conference last week—that even though she used a personal address, everything she wrote to her deputies’ state.gov addresses was archived: “The vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department.”
She’s right that they were captured, but that doesn’t mean they were archived, according to what Psaki said Friday. So the Times put those two factoids together and produced its Saturday piece, the most dramatic possible reading of events, which opened by informing readers that contrary to what Clinton had said, not everyone at State was required to archive their email correspondence, so maybe some of those emails she told us had been preserved had quite possibly not.
It’s a defensible news story. But here’s the thing. If you read farther down into the article—and certainly, if you read the transcript of Psaki’s Friday briefing—the picture that is very clearly beginning to emerge here is one of a lumbering department (is there any other kind when it comes to matters like this?) taking a long time (shocking!) to get itself into compliance with regulations and laws. Toward the end of the Times article, it quotes experts saying the kinds of throw-up-your-hands things that people say when they think a situation is unfortunate but not genuinely a scandal (“it really is chaos across the government in terms of what agencies do, what individuals do, and people understand that they can decide what they save and what they don’t”).
As for the State briefing, here’s what happened. Psaki fielded a question that went: “You had said that you would check—yesterday, you said a couple of times that you’re now automatically archiving…the emails of certain principals.” Psaki said yes, that process started in February of this year (there’s your news). Somebody else asked, naturally enough, why not until February of this year:
Psaki: “Out of an effort to continue to update our process. Our goal, actually, is to apply an archiving system that meets these same requirements to all employee mailboxes by the end of 2016. So it’s only natural that you’d start with the Secretary, which we did in 2013; that you would progress with other senior Department officials, and we’ll continue to make—take steps forward.”
Then somebody asked, again naturally enough, why not sooner. “I’m sure,” she said, “if we had the technical capability to, we would have, and it’s just a process that takes some time.” And then later: “This has been a process that’s been ongoing, and obviously, it’s not only time-consuming and requires a lot of effort on the part of employees to do it in other ways, but they have long been planning to do this. It’s just something that it took some time to put in place.”
You get the idea. Anybody shocked to hear those words? A government agency got a directive, and it’s taking a long time to implement it!
Now, you can blame Hillary Clinton for all this if you want to. She was the boss, and in some sense the buck stops at the boss’s desk. But don’t you think the secretary kinda has bigger things on her mind than this? “Hey, Steinberg, forget Middle East peace and Russia and just go find out where we are on compliance with that 2009 National Archives and Records Administration directive!”
In other words—a lot of what has happened here would probably have happened no matter who was secretary of state. If the secretary had been John Kerry then or Dick Holbrooke or whomever—why, even if it had been Clinton scold Maureen Dowd!—the department would almost surely have operated exactly as it did in terms of regulatory compliance. So, if some of these records weren’t preserved, it wasn’t a Clinton thing. It was a State Department thing.
Now obviously, the issue of whether we can trust that Clinton and her staff made an honest effort of determining which of her emails were public and which were private remains. That’s a fair question, although it’s one we’ll probably never know the answer to (just as we’ll never know it with Jeb Bush). As I wrote previously, Clinton needs to learn some lessons from this episode, and one is that suspicions will linger about her.
She ought to be cognizant of this. Not long after she becomes a candidate, for example, she ought to say that this episode has taught her about the importance of transparency and propose that if she is president, her administration will set up a system by which some kind of independent third parties will go through high-level officials’ emails to determine what is and isn’t public. This would constitute direct acknowledgement that she gets why that looks funny to people, and it would not only put the whole thing to bed, she’d get actual points.
But in the meantime, here’s what we’ve learned. On March 2, when the story broke, this was dynamite—a scandal that might prevent Clinton from even getting in the race. Then it emerged that the original Times report overstated things a little. Then it emerged that all kinds of other former secretaries of state and cabinet officials do more or less what Clinton did (some quite a bit less). Then it emerged that Jeb Bush took seven years to release all his emails and chose which ones to put out just like Clinton did. Then it emerged that other Republican candidates also have transparency issues at least the equal of Clinton’s. And finally, it emerged last Friday that the State Department performs certain administration functions rather slowly.
And remember, the only reason we’re going through all this anyway is that the Republicans, who’ve investigated Benghazi six ways to Sunday and come up with nothing on her, are now taking rocks they’ve already turned over and turning them back over. The whole Gowdy committee is nothing but a capital-P Political sting operation. It’s clearer than ever now that this is a committee to investigate Clinton that has one job and one job only: find something, anything, that might keep her out of the White House.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 16, 2015
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