“Constitution? What Constitution?”: Paul Ryan Refuses To Provide For The General Welfare
When the members of the 113th Congress of the United States took office this week, they swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
The preamble to that Constitution establishes its purpose: “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
The Constitution rests a special responsibility in this regard on the legislative branch of the federal government, declaring that the Congress shall use its powers to tax and spend to “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”
A good debate can be had about the precise meaning of “the general Welfare of the United States.” The founders had that debate—with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton differing vociferously—and it has continued in the Congress and the courts to this day.
But even in the 1790s, there was broad understanding that providing for the “general welfare” involved the taking of steps to protect the people from “misfortune, sickness, calamity or evil”—and to help them respond to such circumstances. Then, as now, “calamity” was understood to involve epic storms, floods and natural disasters.
It is difficult to imagine a recent crisis that more precisely fits the definition of “calamity” than Superstorm Sandy and its aftermath, which has left hundreds of thousands of Americans with destroyed or damaged homes and made it impossible for thousands of businesses to operate along the East Coast of the United State. Whole communities are struggling simply to return to something resembling normal.
On Friday, mere hours after swearing an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” the House of Representatives faced a simple vote on the most basic federal intervention on behalf of the victims of Superstorm Sandy: a measure to temporarily increase the borrowing authority of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assure that the National Flood Insurance Program could meet its obligations.
One hundred and ninety-one Democrats voted for the first real response by Congress to a disaster that occurred more than two months earlier. They were joined by 161 Republicans, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota.
But sixty-seven House members —led by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan—voted “no.” The House Budget Committee chairman termed the maintaining of the existing flood-relief program to be “irresponsible.”
Ryan, as is frequently the case when it comes to matters constitutional, was precisely wrong.
One of his few clearly defined responsibilities, one of the few clearly defined responsibilities of any House member, is “to provide for the general Welfare.” They swear an oath to do so. And, barely hours into the new Congress, Ryan and his compatriots rejected that oath and a fundamental premise of the Constitution it supports.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 5, 2012
“Eric Cantor, Cornered”: Another Of The People Who Needs To Be Replaced
Ever since Eric Cantor became No. 2 to John Boehner four years ago, the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that the hyperambitious Cantor would knife his nominal boss in the back as soon as he had the chance. “You know Cantor’s trying to get your job,” President Obama tauntingly told the House speaker during their debt-ceiling talks in 2011. And yet, despite obvious tensions between Cantor and Boehner, the two Republicans always managed to strike a unified public front.
Until last week: On New Year’s Day, Boehner cast his lot with 172 Democrats and only 84 other members of his party and voted for the tax-hiking legislation that ultimately ended the “fiscal cliff” drama; Cantor, saying he couldn’t abide by the bill’s lack of spending cuts, voted against it. It was a shockingly brazen split, and some in Washington believed that with Boehner up for reelection as speaker two days later, it marked the opening volley of the long-awaited Cantor coup. Or as Breitbart.com put it in a headline: “ERIC CANTOR MAKES FIRST MOVE TO UNSEAT BOEHNER IN ‘FISCAL CLIFF’ KABUKI THEATER.” And then … nothing happened. “All is not well in the palace,” says one GOP member, “but it’s clear the prince is not trying to poison the king’s chalice.” Now Cantor loyalists worry that their guy, rather than seizing more power, has shot himself in the foot.
It’s a misconception that Cantor is reckless. Although he became the No. 2 House Republican at the tender age of 45 and clearly has designs on the top job, he is playing a long game. “He wants Boehner to have a successful speakership, which would maintain a Republican majority and give Eric the opportunity to become speaker down the road,” a House Republican close to Cantor explained to me in 2011, when talk of a Cantor coup was especially loud. “And Eric is young enough to wait for that.”
The problem for Cantor is that the longer he has waited, the more he has become identified in his fellow Republicans’ eyes with Boehner, who’s on his way to going down as the least effective speaker in modern political history. During the 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations, when Cantor privately signaled that he wouldn’t abide by any plan negotiated with Obama that raised revenues, he was a hero to the GOP rank and file and a clear alternative to Boehner. But during the fiscal-cliff talks, Cantor voiced strong public support for Boehner’s negotiating strategy while staying largely silent inside the House. When Cantor ultimately voted against the compromise legislation, some fellow Republican members, including those who voted with him, viewed it as a desperate stab at shoring up his future prospects.
“There was no predicate for his ‘no’ vote,” concedes one Cantor friend. “There was no setup to it.” Within the GOP caucus, there are solid supporters of the Virginia congressman, another bloc that would never get behind him for speaker, and a swing group in the middle, and it’s that last camp that is most put off by his move on the fiscal-cliff bill. Indeed, even if Cantor had tried to overthrow Boehner last Thursday, he wouldn’t have had the votes.
Cantor allies fear that by doing too little to differentiate himself from Boehner within the caucus since the fireworks of 2011, he may have missed his moment. “Eric has almost become Boehner Lite” to other GOP members, says the supporter. “The longer that goes on, it becomes increasingly likely that he doesn’t become the heir apparent. Instead, he becomes part of the people who need to be replaced once Boehner decides to walk off into the sunset.”
By: Jason Zengerle, New York Magazine, January 4, 2012
“It’s Really Not That Complicated”: Republicans Are At The Intersection Of Recklessness And Stupidity
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle today, explaining why he believes it’s responsible to hold the debt ceiling hostage until President Obama “puts forward a plan” that makes Republicans happy. The piece is filled with errors of fact and judgment, but there was one truly bizarre claim that stood out for me.
“The coming deadlines will be the next flashpoints in our ongoing fight to bring fiscal sanity to Washington,” the Texas Republican wrote. “It may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal well being of our country.”
Just at a surface level, this is ridiculous — to prevent possible trouble in the future, Cornyn intends to cause deliberate trouble now? But even putting that aside, I’m not sure if the senator understands the nature of the controversy. Failing to raise the debt limit — that is, choosing not to pay the bills for money that’s already been spent — doesn’t just “partially shut down the government,” it pushes the nation into default and trashes the full faith and credit of the United States.
Does Cornyn, a member of the Finance and Budget committees, not understand this? Just as importantly, is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) equally confused?
“By demanding the power to raise the debt limit whenever he wants by as much as he wants, [President Obama] showed what he’s really after is assuming unprecedented power to spend taxpayer dollars without any limit,” McConnell argued on the Senate floor.
At the risk of being impolite, McConnell’s comments are plainly dumb. As a policy matter, it’s just gibberish, and the fact that the Senate Minority Leader doesn’t seem to know what the debt ceiling even is, after already having threatened default in 2011 and planning an identical scheme in 2013, raises serious questions about how policymakers can expect to resolve a problem they don’t seem to understand at a basic level.
For the record, Congress, by constitutional mandate, has the power of the purse. Unless you’re Ronald Reagan illegally selling weapons to Iran to finance a secret and illegal war in Nicaragua, the executive branch can’t spend money that hasn’t already been authorized by the legislative branch.
If the president had the authority to raise the debt ceiling on his or her own, it would not give the White House the authority to “spend taxpayer dollars without any limit,” since any administration would still be dependent on Congress for expenditures. The debt limit has nothing to do with this — spending authority would be unchanged no matter which branch had the power over raising the limit, and whether the ceiling existed or not.
It’s really not that complicated. Congress approves federal spending, the executive branch follows through accordingly. When the legislative branch spends more than it takes in, the executive branch has to borrow the difference.
In the 1930s, Congress came up with the debt ceiling, mandating the White House to get permission to borrow the money that Congress has already spent. If McConnell, Cornyn, and their hostage-taking friends refuse to raise the ceiling, the administration can’t pay the nation’s bills. It’s that simple.
Either GOP lawmakers like McConnell and Cornyn haven’t yet grasped these basic details, or they’re cynically hoping the public is easily misled by bogus rhetoric. Either way, there’s little hope of a sensible public debate if Senate Republican leaders repeat nonsense about a looming national crisis.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 4, 2013
“Not Even Close”: Conservatives Can’t Win At The Negotiating Table What They Lost At The Ballot Box
The final, final results from the 2012 presidential election are now in. While we already knew President Obama won (and the House certified that result today when it tallied the electoral votes), it’s worth revisiting the final totals and reminding ourselves of one important fact: It wasn’t particularly close.
Sure the election was widely expected to be a nail-biter, but it wasn’t. But in the days and weeks afterward you still heard the occasional GOPer insist that it was—see Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling last month saying it was a tight, 51-49 race, for example.
Here are some final stats about Obama’s victory, courtesy of Bloomberg’s Greg Giroux:
Obama got 51.1 percent of the popular vote to Mitt Romney’s 47.2 percent, a four point margin. (Let’s all pause for a moment and savor the fact that history will show that Romney won … 47 percent.) That’s a wider margin than George W. Bush won by in 2004 (51-48), when pundits on the right like Charles Krauthammer declared that he had earned a mandate.
That makes Obama the first president to crack 51 percent since Dwight Eisenhower more than a half-century ago. (Sorry, conservatives, Ronald Reagan only reached 50.75 percent in 1980.)
Obama won 26 states and the District of Columbia, piling up 332 electoral votes. You can think of it another way: There is no state in Obama’s column which would have swung the election to Romney had he won it. In other words, if Romney had pulled a stunning upset and won California’s 55 electoral votes … he’d still have lost.
There were only four especially close states in the 2012 election. Only Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia were decided by less than 5 percentage points. (Note: Romney won one of them, North Carolina; had he swept those four states … he’d have still lost the election as Obama totaled 272 electoral votes in the rest of the country.) Four is the smallest number of close states in a presidential election since Reagan trounced Walter Mondale nearly 30 years ago.
So no matter how you slice or dice the election results, this was not a close race. It wasn’t a landslide, but it wasn’t a coin flip. The voters selected Obama and his vision over Romney and his, and they did it decisively.
And you can layer onto that the fact that, against all expectations, Democrats picked up seats in the U.S. Senate and also in the U.S. House. And while the GOP did retain control of the House, nearly 1.4 million more people voted for Democratic House candidates than for Republicans. 1.4 million—remember that figure the next time someone says Americans voted for divided government last year.
All of which brings me to a great point that the Maddow Blog’s Steve Benen made yesterday. He noted that South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham vowed that the upcoming fiscal fights, over raising the debt ceiling at the end of February and over funding the government a few weeks later, would be “one hell of a contest about the direction and vision of this country.”
Benen writes:
…what Graham and too many of his allies seem to forget is that we already had “one hell of a contest about the direction and the vision of this country.”
It was a little something called “the 2012 election cycle,” and though Graham may not have liked the results, his side lost.
Memories can be short in DC, but for at least a year, voters were told the 2012 election would be the most spectacularly important, history-changing, life-setting election any of us have ever seen…
Election Day 2012, in other words, was for all the marbles. It was the big one. The whole enchilada was on the line. The results would set the direction of the country for a generation, so it was time to pull out all the stops and fight like there’s no tomorrow—because for the losers, there probably wouldn’t be one.
Obama won. Republicans lost. And, again, it wasn’t especially close.
So it is not only tiresome but more than a little undemocratic for conservatives to suggest that, having lost at the ballot box, they should be able to dictate the direction and vision of the country at the negotiating table.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, January 4, 2013
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