“Flying Under The Radar”: Senators Quietly Do The NRA’s Bidding In Spending Bill
Most lawmakers in both parties believe there will not be a government shutdown in two weeks, but to avoid one, Congress will need to pass something called a continuing resolution. It’s a temporary spending bill that will keep the government’s lights on through the end of the fiscal year. The House has already passed its version and the Senate is advancing its alternative.
Ordinarily, you might think the partisan disputes over the stopgap bill would be over spending levels and possible cuts, but as it turns out, the most contentious issue might be, of all things, gun policy. The New York Times reports that some unnamed lawmakers “quietly” added some “temporary gun-rights provisions largely favored by Republicans” to the CR.
The provisions, which have been renewed separately at various points, would prohibit the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from requiring gun dealers to conduct annual inventories to ensure that they have not lost guns or had them stolen, and would retain a broad definition of “antique” guns that can be imported into the United States outside of normal regulations.
Another amendment would prevent the A.T.F. from refusing to renew a dealer’s license for lack of business; many licensed dealers who are not actively engaged in selling firearms can now obtain a license to sell guns and often fly under the radar of the agency and other law enforcement officials, which gun control advocates argue leads to a freer flow of illegal guns.
A final measure would require the bureau to attach a disclaimer to data about guns to indicate that it “cannot be used to draw broad conclusions about firearms-related crimes.”
Keep in mind, it’s pretty tough to defend the provisions in question. What’s wrong, for example, with having gun dealers conduct inventories to make sure firearms haven’t been lost or stolen? I don’t know, but under a Republican measure in the temporary spending bill, the ATF would be prohibited from enforcing this basic regulation.
Also note, some of these ideas aren’t new — they’ve been temporary policies included in previous spending bills — but the new GOP-backed proposals make the policies permanent.
What’s worse, these provisions appear likely to pass because Senate Democrats see related measures in the House bill as even worse.
[A Democratic Senate] aide characterized the permanent provisions as a trade-off in negotiations that occurred late last year with House appropriators, who had sought to make additional gun-related riders permanent in the continuing resolution. Other riders — such as one banning the activities of the ATF from being transferred to another government entity, such as the more powerful FBI — are included in the Senate bill but not on a permanent basis.
According to the Senate aide, House appropriators also sought to include another provision that Democrats and the White House viewed as far more objectionable. […]
Although the Senate’s gun language was agreed to late last year — before the fatal shooting of 20 first-graders at a Connecticut elementary school — gun-control advocates and some Democratic members of Congress said the deal now looks like poor timing. They said it undermines a concurrent effort in both chambers to crack down on gun violence.
Third Way’s Jim Kessler, a former aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), told Roll Call, “It shows that the NRA is always on offense and rarely on defense. Even in a very adverse situation for them, in which many in Congress and the White House are trying to do something constructive to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and crazy people, the NRA continues to advance its agenda.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 15, 2013
“Fool Me Once”: The Sequester Is Proof That Washington Thinks We Are All Idiots
The tales of sequester woe are starting to mount. Congressmen are complaining about cancelled White House tours, freaking out over potential furloughs of meat inspectors, and fretting over budget cuts in Yellowstone National Park. Republican officeholders are starting to realize that the parochial government services that businesses and consumers in their districts need and care about are getting hit.
And for what? We’ve argued that the primary deficit—the mismatch between the amount of money the government collects each year and the amount of money it spends each year—is melting away. We received further confirmation of this melting trend Wednesday, with the release of the latest Treasury Monthly Statement. It was overlooked, as it dropped just a couple hours before the new pope was announced. But it’s worth examining.
The headline was that February wasn’t a great month for the profit-and-loss sheet of the federal government. It took in $122.8 billion and spent $326 billion, notching a $203.5 billion deficit. That’s pretty grim. But February is always a bad month for receipts. And when you dig into the number, it is possible to see significant improvement.
Compared with February 2012, revenues in February 2013 were up an impressive 18.8 percent. Meanwhile, spending was actually down 2.6 percent from February 2012. So the February 2013 monthly deficit was 12 percent smaller than the February 2012 monthly deficit. This is not an anomaly. For the first five months of fiscal 2013, which started in October, revenues were $1.01 trillion, up 13 percent from the first five months of fiscal 2012, while spending was up just 2.1 percent. The deficit in the first five months of fiscal 2013 is $494 billion, down nearly 15 percent from the first five months of fiscal 2012.
To what do we owe this? Revenue is tied to growth. When the economy grows consistently, more people go to work, more people earn higher wages, and they pay more income and payroll taxes. Companies tend to make more profits, and even though they spend lots of time and effort dodging taxes, they still wind up paying more corporate income taxes. Meanwhile, as we’ve pointed out before, when jobs increase and the economy grows, spending on programs like unemployment benefits fall. That helps narrow the deficit, too. In February, spending on unemployment benefits was off 25 percent from the year before.
There’s another factor at play. And Republicans might want to avert their eyes for this next paragraph. On January 1, the government raised taxes. The payroll tax, which had been cut temporarily to 4.2 percent from 6.2 percent, went back up—a 48 percent increase. And so the 130 million or so Americans with payroll jobs have been paying higher federal taxes for the past two months. Meanwhile, as part of the fiscal cliff deal, higher income taxes were also put in place for high earners. They’re now paying more, too.
A funny thing happens when you raise taxes—you get more tax revenue.
Since the higher tax rates kicked in on January 1, Americans haven’t Gone Galt. They haven’t stopped working in protest of higher taxes and companies haven’t stopped hiring. In fact, they’ve been working more. As a result, revenue has been flooding into Washington. In the two months of the new tax regimen (January and February 2013), receipts are up 17 percent from the comparable period in 2012. Meanwhile, for all the charges of socialism, spending remains muted. A look at the daily Treasury statement suggests the higher revenue trend has continued through the first half of March.
The sequester, universally derided as a stupid way to get deficit reduction, is designed to bring $84 billion in deficit reduction in this fiscal year. Well, in the first five months of fiscal 2013, the deficit is already, wait for it, $85.8 billion smaller than it was in the first five months of fiscal 2012. And that’s all before the sequester takes full effect.
Quiet as it is kept, we are living in a great age of deficit reduction. If we project the numbers from the first five months of this fiscal year into the rest of it, it’s quite likely that the deficit will come in under $900 billion—even without the sequester. That’s high, and it is still a lot of money. But it would represent a deduction of nearly 20 percent from fiscal 2012. And with the economy continuing to grow steadily, the deficit as a percentage of GDP would shrink by an even larger margin.
Washington told itself it needed the sequester in order to make a significant dent in the annual deficit. With each passing month, and with each passing Treasury Monthly Statement, we’re learning that’s not true.
By: Daniel Gross, The Daily Beast, March 14, 2013
“Reaching Out, Finding Nothing”: Remind Me Again Of How All The President Has To Do Is “Lead” & Offer Good-Faith Compromises
It’s hard to blame President Obama for at least making an effort. For four years, he took a variety of steps — some social, some formal, some professional — to establish relationships with congressional Republicans. The outreach didn’t amount to much.
But it appears the president, either out of necessity or stubbornness, will continue his newly revamped charm offensive, including a trip to Capitol Hill for another round of budget talks. It’s clearly intended as a major gesture on Obama’s part — presidents usually summon lawmakers to the White House, not head to Capitol Hill for meetings on lawmakers’ turf.
Time will tell, obviously, whether the efforts pay dividends, but the New York Times has an interesting report today on the ineffectiveness of recent outreach, including a great anecdote I hadn’t heard before.
For all the attention to President Obama’s new campaign of outreach to Republicans, it was four months ago — on the eve of bipartisan budget talks — that he secretly invited five of them to the White House for a movie screening with the stars of “Lincoln,” the film about that president’s courtship of Congress to pass a significant measure.
None accepted.
For all the pundits who complain bitterly that Obama hasn’t done enough to schmooze with lawmakers, doesn’t an anecdote like this suggest the problem is not entirely the president’s fault? Are we to believe that all five — invited in secret so they wouldn’t have to take heat from Fox or the GOP base — were all washing their hair that night?
On a more substantive note, the piece also included this key piece of information:
What spurred Mr. Obama to reach out to rank-and-file Republicans with a flurry of phone calls, meals and now Capitol visits were the recent announcements by their leaders — Speaker John A. Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — that they will no longer negotiate with Mr. Obama on budget policy as long as he keeps demanding more tax revenues as the condition for Democrats’ support of reduced spending on Medicare and other entitlement programs.
This is important. Congressional Republican leaders are now saying they won’t even talk to the president unless Obama agrees — before any meetings even take place — to give them what they want. In other words, when the White House announces that all efforts at deficit reduction in the coming years will include literally nothing but 100% spending cuts, then GOP leaders will be prepared to negotiate with the president.
Please, Beltway pundits, remind me again how all the president has to do to resolve political paralysis is “lead” and offer good-faith compromises.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 12, 2013
“From Tragedy To Farce”: Paul Ryan’s Obamacare “Repeal” Fails The Laugh Test And The Cry Test
Paul Ryan releases his budget plan today and the rollout and coverage of the document and its author represent a test for both Ryan and the media. I’m speaking specifically of its provisions regarding repealing Obamacare—or more precisely “repealing” Obamacare.
The test for Ryan is the extent to which his reputation as a straight-shooting budget wonk survived the ill-fated Romney campaign. Longtime Ryan observers know that that standing was more contrivance than reality (he cast a string of budget-busting votes during the Bush years before finding his inner fiscal warrior when a Democrat was in the White House, and his budgets have been less intellectually honest than advertised), but its durability showed it to be impervious to reality.
So the question now is whether that disconnect will endure? Because even before it’s fully unveiled Ryan’s budget fails both the laugh test and the cry test—both, as I said, regarding its treatment of the Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare.
The laugh test regards the fundamental premise that Ryan’s budget anticipates the law’s repeal. Agree or disagree with the idea of repealing the law, you have to admit that it’s about as likely as Mitt Romney signing any bills into law any time soon.
National Journal‘s Jill Lawrence wrote an article yesterday looking at the political logistics of repeal, and they’re daunting, to put it mildly.
For the health-care law to be repealed before 2017, you’d have to believe that either Obama would, lamb-like, accept repeal of his signature domestic accomplishment, or that Republicans in 2014 would somehow win veto-proof two-thirds majorities in the House (290 votes if all 435 representatives are present, 58 more seats than the GOP held as of mid-March) and the Senate (67 votes, which would require a net gain of 22 seats).
For repeal to be feasible in 2017, a Republican would have to win the White House in 2016; Republicans would need to hold their House majority, and Republicans would need a filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate (15 more than they have now).
That latter scenario, Lawrence notes, also doesn’t take into account the day to day reality of the law in 2017—the practical problems of unwinding a system that will have become entrenched as people use it to get health coverage and so forth.
“The continuing assumption that Obamacare will be repealed, even with Obama reinstalled in the White House, is just one more factor that makes Ryan’s budget more wishful than credible,” Lawrence concludes. That’s putting it politely. The fact is that if we’re to take Ryan and his budget seriously, it should be grounded in reality, not in the wishful thinking of the right wing.
But Ryan’s Obamacare repeal also fails the cry test for being so intellectually dishonest as to make a noncynical citizen weep. You see Ryan’s repeal of Obamacare isn’t actually a full repeal of Obamacare. As the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein points out, “Ryan’s version of repeal means getting rid of all the parts that spend money to give people health insurance but keeping the tax increases and the Medicare cuts that pays for that health insurance.” So the $716 billion which Obamacare cut from Medicare and which Ryan and running mate Mitt Romney campaigned so hard against last year? Those cuts are in Ryan’s budget … just like they were in his previous budgets. He was, as TPM’s Sahil Kapur points out, against those cuts before he was for them before he was against them before he was for them. Or something.
As the Washington Post‘s Jonathan Bernstein notes, “This is no garden-variety flip-flop. It’s a fundamental decision to govern one way and campaign the exact opposite way.” It’s breathtaking, really.
And the governance/campaigning dichotomy is the more striking for the results of the campaign. You would think that after losing a race that the GOP insisted was a grand philosophical showdown, Republicans would attempt some sort of course correction other than reverting to their we say we hate it, but we’re happy to use it stance on Medicare cuts. Voters disapprove of both the party and its policies, and Ryan’s response is more of the same. To paraphrase his least favorite philosopher, his budgets seem to repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce.
The question remains whether Ryan will be called on it in news reporting or whether he will reclaim his reputation as honest-green-eye-shade guy. Stay tuned.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, March 12, 2013
“A Lobbyist By Any Other Name”: Scott Brown Makes It Official With Wall Street
Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown announced today that he’s joining the government affairs department of a giant multinational law firm with major Wall Street clients.
“Brown will focus his practice on business and governmental affairs as they relate to the financial services industry as well as on commercial real estate matters,” the firm, Nixon Peabody LLC, said in a press release. Brown will not be a lobbyist, the firm said, but whether he meets the specific legal requirements to be a registered lobbyist or not, it’s clear that he will draw on his contacts and status to help advance clients’ agenda in government. “He can offer many types of legal services to his broad network of contacts,” the firm said.
The head of the Nixon Peabody’s Government Relations practice is ex-New York congressman Tom Reynolds, who now lobbies for Goldman Sachs on “[f]inancial services regulatory and tax issues.” According to the firm, Brown will also work with fellow Massachusettsian Jim Vallee, who abruptly left his job as majority leader of the state House of Representatives last year after getting hired by the firm.
Nixon Peabody contributed $2,500 to a PAC associated with Brown’s reelection campaign last year, the most it gave to any candidate in the country (tied only with a Democratic House member).
Brown was a reliable ally of the financial services industry in the Senate, where he helped water down the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law and influence other bills of interest to banks. It was no surprise, considering how much money they threw at his campaigns. The Securities and Investment sector was the top industry donor to Brown’s 2012 campaign, giving him $3.2 million, on top of the millions he received from the insurance, real estate and finance industries, according to Open Secrets.
The move, however, is a blow to Massachusetts Republicans, who see Brown as their best — and possibly only — hope of retaking a Senate seat or winning the governor’s mansion. Perhaps Brown didn’t think he could win or perhaps he was more interested in cashing in.
It’s notable that Massachusetts voters have replaced Brown, who is now almost literally a Wall Street lobbyist, with Elizabeth Warren, one of the most outspoken critics of the finance industry in the country.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, March 11, 2013
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