“We’re Going Home For Christmas”: GOP-Led Senate Failing At Its Most Basic Tasks
In light of the recent focus on counter-terrorism and national security, common sense suggests the Senate would want to quickly confirm Adam Szubin to serve as the Treasury Department’s under secretary for terrorism and financial crimes.
As the Huffington Post recently reported, we’re talking about a job that “involves tracking terrorists to prevent them from raising money on the black market and elsewhere.” Szubin is extremely well qualified; he’s worked on blocking terrorist financing in previous administrations; and he enjoys broad, bipartisan support in the Senate.
And yet, the Senate isn’t voting on his nomination. Politico reported overnight that Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has grown impatient with mindless Republican obstructionism and tried to end this farce yesterday.
A frustrated Brown took to the Senate floor Wednesday to force a confirmation vote on Szubin and a host of other nominees stuck in his committee. The panel’s chairman, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, swiftly objected to each of Brown’s attempts.
“That’s a policy decision,” Shelby said Wednesday of the nomination of Szubin, whom Shelby called “eminently qualified” during his confirmation hearing in September. “You know, he’s probably a nice guy in all this. But there is a lot of dissent in our caucus on that.”
Asked whether Szubin could move through his committee soon, Shelby responded: “We’re not going to vote now. We’re going home for Christmas.”
It’s not altogether clear what in the world Shelby was talking about. When he says Szubin is “probably a nice guy in all this,” it’s unclear what “this” refers to. When the senator added there’s “dissent in our caucus on that,” he didn’t say what “that” meant.
But even if we look past the ambiguity, the end result is the same: an uncontroversial, perfectly qualified counter-terrorism nominee is being delayed – without explanation – apparently because Republicans don’t like President Obama.
And while that may seem ridiculous – because it is – it’s important to understand that Szubin is hardly the only one.
The same Politico report explained, “Nineteen potential judges, a half-dozen ambassadors, a terrorism financing specialist and two high-ranking State Department nominees are awaiting confirmation votes on the Senate floor, a backlog that has this GOP-led Senate on track for the lowest number of confirmations in 30 years. The Senate Banking Committee hasn’t moved on a single nominee all year.”
The Banking Committee, by the way, is led by Alabama’s Richard Shelby – the one who’s praised Adam Szubin, but who also refuses to let the Senate confirm Adam Szubin.
The story on judicial nominees is every bit as exasperating. The Huffington Post reported this week on Luis Felipe Restrepo, who, for reasons no one can defend, has “endured nearly every type of Senate delay a judicial nominee could endure.”
The Senate should be voting Monday to confirm Restrepo to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. Senators typically vote on nominees in the order in which they were nominated, and Restrepo is first in line of any district or circuit court nominee. Instead, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) passed him over and teed up a vote on the next person in line, Travis McDonough, a Tennessee district court nominee.
Restrepo has been waiting his turn for a vote since he was nominated in November 2014. His nomination didn’t go anywhere last year, so President Barack Obama renominated him in January. Restrepo waited five months before he even got a hearing in the Judiciary Committee, thanks to his own state’s senator, Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), holding him up.
After his June hearing, Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) delayed the vote for another month, for no real reason. The committee finally voted to move Restrepo forward in July, unanimously, and he’s been waiting in line for a confirmation vote by the full Senate ever since.
The court seat Restrepo is supposed to fill has been vacant for nearly 900 days. No, that’s not a typo, and yes, it’s contributed to a “judicial emergency” on the 3rd Circuit, with a case backlog getting worse.
Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein recently explained, “It’s a Senate engaged in pure partisan harassment of Obama, and indifferent to the smooth functioning of government.”
When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was promoted to his current post, he promised Americans we’d see a new, different kind of chamber. Nearly a year later, I suppose he was correct – because the Senate is now far worse.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 10, 2015
“Why Republicans Are Hell-Bent On Destroying Medicare”: Belief’s That Spring From Ideological Faith, Not Facts
One way you can identify politicians’ sincere convictions is by looking at the things they do even when they know they’re unpopular. There are few better examples than the half-century-long quest by Republicans to destroy Medicare.
As we move towards the 2016 presidential election, it’s something we’re hearing about yet again. Conservatives know the Democrats will attack them for it mercilessly, and they know those attacks are probably going to work — yet Republicans keeps trying. Which is why it’s clear that they just can’t stand this program.
When Medicare was being debated in the early 1960s, one of its most prominent opponents was a certain future president, who recorded a spoken word album called Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine. In it, he said that if the bill were to pass, “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” He failed in that crusade, and ever since, conservatives have watched in pain as the program became more entrenched and more popular.
That popularity didn’t happen by accident. Medicare is popular because it gives seniors something they crave: security. Every American over 65 knows that they can get Medicare, it will be accepted by almost every health care provider, their premiums will be modest, and it won’t be taken away. On the policy level, the program is expensive, but that’s because providing health care for the elderly is expensive. It’s not because the program is inefficient; in fact, Medicare does an excellent job of keeping costs down. Its expenses for overhead (basically everything except health care) are extremely low, somewhere between 1 percent and 5 percent of what it takes in, compared to private insurance costs that can run from 10 percent to 20 percent and, in some cases, even higher. (See here for a good explanation of these figures.)
That’s not to say there’s nothing about the program that could be improved, because there certainly is. The Affordable Care Act tried to institute some Medicare reforms, including moving away from the fee-for-service model (which encourages doctors and hospitals to do as many procedures as possible) and toward a model that creates incentives for keeping patients healthy. It’s still too early to say how great an impact those changes will have. But Medicare is still in most ways the most successful part of the American health insurance system. And if you care about empirical truth, it’s impossible to argue that it’s a failure because it involves too much government.
But Republicans do argue that, and it’s a belief that springs from ideological faith, not facts. In Wednesday’s debate, Rand Paul was asked whether Reagan was right about Medicare, and he responded, “The question always is, what works better, the private marketplace or government? And what distributes goods better? It always seems to be the private marketplace does a better job. Is there an area for a safety net? Can you have Medicare or Social Security? Yes. But you ought to acknowledge the government doesn’t do a very good job at it.” Paul’s ambivalence is obvious — he grudgingly acknowledges that you can have a “safety net,” including Medicare, even as he says it’s terrible. But if that’s so, why not get rid of it entirely?
The presidential candidates who have said anything specific about Medicare all want to move in the direction of privatization, which isn’t too surprising. After all, they believe that it’s impossible for government to do anything better than the private sector, and if you can take a government program and privatize it, that’s what you should do. That’s also what new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan believes: For years he’s been touting a plan to privatize Medicare by essentially turning it into a voucher program. Instead of being an insurer for seniors as it is now, the government would give you a voucher that you could spend to buy yourself private insurance. And if the voucher didn’t cover the cost of the insurance you could find? Tough luck.
When you ask Paul Ryan about this, the first thing he’ll say is that he wants a slow transition to privatizing Medicare, one that won’t affect today’s seniors at all, so they don’t need to worry. In Wednesday’s debate, Marco Rubio made the same argument. “Everyone up here tonight that’s talking about reforms, I think and I know for myself I speak to this, we’re all talking about reforms for future generations,” he said. “Nothing has to change for current beneficiaries. My mother is on Medicare and Social Security. I’m against anything that’s bad for my mother.”
In other words: Medicare is a disaster, but we would never change it for the people who are on it and love it so much. They don’t have to fear the horror of being subject to our plan for Medicare’s future. Which is going to be great.
That contradiction is the essence of the Republicans’ Medicare problem. It’s one of the most successful and beloved social programs America has ever created, and to mess with it is to court political disaster, particularly among seniors who vote at such high rates. And its success is particularly galling, standing as it does as a living rebuke to their fervent belief that there can never be any area in which government might outperform the private sector.
But grant Republicans this: A less ideologically committed group might say, “We don’t like this program, but it’s too politically dangerous to try to undo it. So we’ll just learn to live with it.”
Republicans won’t give up. They want to undermine Medicare, to privatize it, to try in whatever way they can come up with to hasten the day when it disappears. And no matter how often they fail, they keep trying.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, October 30, 2015
“Screwing Up A One-Car Funeral”: House Republicans Three-Headed Monster Of A legislative Vehicle For Its Views On Iran
One of the few things we all thought we could count on when Congress returned from its August recess was a quick vote in the House on a resolution of disapproval for the Iran Nuclear Deal. After all, (1) it’s an issue on which all congressional Republicans seem to agree, (2) there’s a mandated timetable for dealing with the resolution that everybody agreed on months ago, and (3) it’s all kinda Kabuki Theater right now because Democrats have the votes to filibuster the resolution in the Senate.
But sometimes with these birds even the simplest things come unglued. Suddenly today a “revolt of House conservatives”–by no means the first or last–occurred, and now pending a meeting of House GOPers that’s currently underway, the Party of Responsible Government looks likely to produce some sort of three-headed monster of a legislative vehicle for its views on Iran, per Politico‘s Jake Sherman:
They are moving toward voting on a measure asserting Obama did not submit all elements of the agreement with Iran, a concept first raised by Reps. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), a former member of GOP leadership. Second, Republicans are working on a bill to try to prevent Obama from lifting sanctions against Iran. Third, the House would vote on a resolution to approve of the Iran pact. The original plan was to vote on a disapproval resolution.
This first gambit is based on the growing right-wing furor over “side agreements” between the Iranians and international nuclear monitors, plus alleged other “secret” deals, which conservatives claim cancels the procedural timetable for any votes and also makes the administration vulnerable to lawsuits. Boil it all down, and it’s an effort to add the Iran Nuclear Deal to the long list of things on which the Tyrant Obama supposedly broke the law and violated the Constitution.
In other words, House GOPers are talking to themselves, and to the almighty base.
The third gambit supposedly makes the treasonous nature of Democrats more obvious by requiring them to vote for the deal, not just against a resolution of disapproval.
Trouble with that one, and with the whole package, is that it’s not being coordinated with the Senate, where it’s totally not welcome (guess Ted Cruz is too busy in Kentucky trying to get into photos with Kim Davis to serve as the liaison between House and Senate wingnuts). So what should have been the easiest of maneuvers in a very crowded and complicated schedule has become a fiasco (Greg Sargent calls it “snatching defeat from the jaws of defeat.”), and congressional GOPers have become the people who could screw up a one-car funeral. Just amazing.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, September 9, 2015
“Greed Is Always In Fashion On Wall Street”: Republicans Or Social Security? On 80th Anniversary, Still An Easy Choice
Ten years ago, as Americans celebrated the 70th anniversary of Social Security, the presidency of George W. Bush was already disintegrating over his attempt to ruin that amazingly successful program. The people’s rejection of the Bush proposal to privatize the system was so powerful that Republicans in Congress scurried away – and his political reputation never recovered.
Since then, the United States has endured a market crash and a crushing recession that proved how much this country needs its premier social insurance plan. Those events demonstrated that ceding control of Social Security and its revenues to Wall Street, in accordance with the Bush scheme, would have been a national disaster. And yet the Republican candidates for president seem utterly unable to learn that simple economic lesson.
To paraphrase the old French adage, the more things change, the more conservatism remains the same. On this 80th birthday of Social Security, the increasingly right-wing Republicans continue to blather the same old nostrums, as if they missed everything that has happened since 2005 – and as if they still want revenge against Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the humiliations he inflicted on their ideological ancestors.
Since August 14, 1935, Republicans and their financial backers have sought to undo the progress that Social Security represents for workers, the elderly, the disabled, and their families. Today’s Republican presidential wannabes all claim to be offering something new, but whenever they talk about Social Security, they sound as if they’re stuck in 2005 – or 1935.
From Rand Paul to John Kasich, from Marco Rubio to Rick Perry, from Lindsey Graham to Ted Cruz, from Bobby Jindal to Jeb Bush and George Pataki, they all agree that Social Security should be privatized. And with the possible exception of Mike Huckabee, all agree on undermining the only program that keeps millions of older Americans from ending their lives in poverty rather than dignity. Chris Christie, robber of public employee pensions, would swiftly raise the retirement age to 69, threatening grave hardship for blue-collar, lower-income Americans. Carly Fiorina would inflict similar suffering on workers who weren’t fortunate enough to snag an undeserved $40 million “golden parachute,” like she did.
Behind Republican warnings about the solvency of Social Security – and their enduring desire to privatize – are major financial interests that would like to seize the system’s revenue streams for their own profit.
Greed is always in fashion on Wall Street. But working Americans see no reason to hand Social Security over to the banks, when its administrative costs amount to well under 1 percent of its revenues. They know that the financial geniuses who almost sank the world economy eight years ago would charge far more than 1 percent, while imposing enormous risks on everyone but themselves.
So thanks, but — most emphatically — no thanks. As we mark this anniversary, most surveys show negligible support for privatizing Social Security or reducing its benefits; indeed, there is growing public support for proposals to expand and improve the system.
Yet polls also show many young Americans worrying that the system may not be sufficiently robust to pay full benefits by the time they reach retirement age. The latest report of the Social Security trustees, issued last month, suggested that the system’s trust fund could be exhausted by 2034.
Even then, the system’s revenues are projected to pay at least 75 percent of the benefits owed. But that wouldn’t be good enough when benefits are already too low – and there are several simple ways to fix Social Security’s finances so that nobody need worry. Long before the trust fund runs out of money, Congress can follow the example Ronald Reagan set in 1983 by raising the payroll tax rate — or mandate more progressive policy changes, such as lifting the cap on earnings subject to the tax, and broadening the tax base.
Declaring the nation’s “ironclad commitment” to Social Security, Reagan – who had once opposed the system as a symptom of creeping socialism – also expanded its base by bringing government employees into the system. Comprehensive immigration reform, which the Republicans oppose in nativist lockstep, would also create a stronger future foundation for all retirees and disabled workers.
So whenever these would-be presidents start barking about the need to pare, prune, or privatize this country’s most effective government program, remember this: Saving Social Security for future generations — even with higher payroll taxes — is far more popular than any of them ever will be.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Featured Post, Editor’s Blog, August 14, 2015
“Privatization Of Medicare”: Jeb Bush Now Says He Wouldn’t ‘Phase Out’ Medicare. What He Would Do Is Just As Wrong
It had to happen sooner or later: a Republican presidential candidate says something suggesting he’d destroy Medicare, the Democrats jump all over him, and he backtracks, saying that’s not what he meant and in fact he only wants to strengthen it. This time it’s Jeb Bush, who said the other day that though we can keep Medicare around for the people who are currently on it, “we need to figure out a way to phase out this program for others and move to a new system that allows them to have something – because they’re not going to have anything.”
This is an old argument from Republicans, one they also use to justify attacks on Social Security: the program is doomed anyway, so we should go ahead and privatize it. The argument is completely wrong with regard to Social Security, and the truth about Medicare is that the program’s future is looking brighter and brighter — in no small part because of the Affordable Care Act. The argument Bush is making is ten years out of date.
Bush did try to walk back his statement a bit, saying the “phase out” part was taken out of context and he’s only talking about how we “reform our entitlement system.” Here’s his follow-up, which doesn’t change the essence of what he was arguing:
“It’s an actuarially unsound health care system,” said Bush, who said something must be done before the system burdens future generations with $50 billion of debt. “Social Security is an underfunded retirement system; people have put money into it, for sure.
“The people that are receiving these benefits, I don’t think that we should touch that; but your children and grandchildren are not going to get the benefit of this that they believe they’re going to get, or that you think they’re going to get, because the amount of money put in compared to the amount of money the system costs is wrong.”
Bush hasn’t yet released his plan to phase out/reform Medicare, but given these comments it seems likely he’ll embrace something like what Paul Ryan has been advocating for years. It involves changing Medicare from a guaranteed single-payer government insurance plan into a voucher plan, in which the government gives senior citizens a set amount of money with which they can go out and get private health insurance. It saves money by limiting the value of that voucher, so if it’s less than what coverage actually costs, well, tough luck. In that way, it eliminates the central promise of Medicare, which is that every American senior citizen will have health coverage.
We’ll await Jeb’s particulars, but I promise you that most of the GOP candidates will embrace some version of this plan, because that’s what the Republican consensus on Medicare is these days. And it’s always justified with the argument Jeb gives: because of skyrocketing costs the program is doomed, so privatization is the only way to make sure it’s there for your kids. But don’t worry, current seniors, we won’t touch your Medicare! Which is one of the ironies of their argument: the free market is supposed to make everything wonderful, but they fall all over themselves to promise senior citizens that they won’t disturb the big-government, socialist program that seniors love.
Now on to the cost question. As it happens, the Medicare Trustees just released their annual report on the future of the program. And as Kevin Drum noted, things are looking a lot sunnier than they were a few years ago:
Ten years ago, Medicare was a runaway freight train. Spending was projected to increase indefinitely, rising to 13 percent of GDP by 2080. This year, spending is projected to slow down around 2040, and reaches only 6 percent of GDP by 2090. Six percent! That’s half what we thought a mere decade ago. If that isn’t spectacular, I don’t know what is.
Those are projections for what’s going to happen decades from now, so things are doubtless going to change. But the presumption of the Republican argument is that Medicare is eventually going to eat the entire federal budget, and so we have no choice but to fundamentally alter it. And that’s just not true.
The other assumption they make is that the way to alter Medicare is simple: privatize it. But they’re wrong about this, too. Medicare is expensive, but that’s not because it’s an inefficient big-government program. In fact, Medicare is remarkably efficient, more so than private insurance. That’s because it benefits from economies of scale, and because it doesn’t have to spend money on things like marketing, underwriting, and big salaries for executives. The reason Medicare is expensive is that American health care is expensive, and it serves a lot of people. The retirement of the large Baby Boom generation is what’s producing its current funding challenges.
Let’s not forget that at the same time Republicans cry that Medicare is unaffordable and so must be dismantled, they fight any effort to actually lower costs in a rational way. For instance, they’re adamantly opposed to comparative effectiveness research, which involves looking at competing treatments and seeing which ones actually work better. That this isn’t something Medicare already takes into account sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. If there are two medications for a particular ailment that are equally effective, but one costs $100 a year and one costs $100,000 a year, wouldn’t it make sense for Medicare to 1) find that out, and 2) make coverage decisions accordingly? But Republicans have said no — Medicare should just pay for both, no matter what it costs.
Republicans also oppose the most significant effort to reduce Medicare costs in decades, something called the Affordable Care Act, which included all kinds of provisions meant to achieve this goal. Perhaps most critically, the law starts a move away from the fee-for-service model, in which doctors and hospitals make more money the more procedures they do, to a model where they get paid a single rate for treating a patient. Under the fee-for-service model, if your hospital screws up, you get an infection, and you have to get re-admitted, they make more money; the ACA actually punishes them for that, giving them a greater incentive to provide better and less expensive care.
But Republicans not only want to repeal the ACA, which means repealing all those kinds of payment provisions, they have nothing much to say about how, specifically, we might save money in Medicare. Their only answer is that if we privatize it, the magic of the market will produce savings. Of course, if that were true America would have the cheapest health care system in the advanced world, since ours is already more private than in any other similar country. And yet we don’t — ours is far and away the most expensive, and that’s precisely because the market has failed.
So to sum up, this is the Republican argument on Medicare: We absolutely can’t do anything in particular that would bring down the cost of Medicare, but the cost of Medicare is so outrageous that we have no choice but to privatize it.
When Jeb Bush and the other candidates talk about this subject, pay close attention to what they say. They’ll use the word “strengthen” a lot — we want to strengthen Medicare! They’ll tell seniors, who vote in great numbers, that they aren’t going to touch their precious Medicare. And they’ll ignore what we’ve learned in the last few years, talking as though things look just as bad as they did before the Affordable Care Act was passed and health care spending slowed. But the truth is that their solution is no solution at all.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 24, 2015
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