“Fools On The Hill”: “Nothing” Is Why Some Members Of Congress Went To Washington
We used to have a ship of state, and now we have a ship of fools.
To call what happened on Capitol Hill over the past few days Kabuki is to insult Kabuki. What actually happened was more like ancient farce when actors used to come out and hit each other over the head with socks full of cowpies.
Contrary to what you have heard, we did not face up to a financial or economic or budgetary crisis. All Congress and the White House did was slog through another political crisis.
And the way they did it was comical: a 2 a.m. vote in the Senate followed by an 11 p.m. vote in the House. This is drive-by government.
That the White House was going to win was never in doubt. Barack Obama won reelection in November by nearly 5 million votes. According to CBS News, his approval rating is at 57 percent.
The members of Congress, on the other hand, are close to being put in stocks and pelted with vegetables. According to CBS, congressional job approval is at 11 percent. Any lower than that and Congress might as well move to Canada and try there.
One of the reasons our politicians are held in such low regard is that what they do is so divorced from reality.
What was the No. 1 issue of the last election? What did both sides promise the American people? As I recall, it was jobs, jobs and more jobs. But what did the recent fiscal cliff law do about creating more jobs? Nothing.
Some politicians like nothing. Nothing is why they went to Washington. They want to shrink government, in the famous words of Grover Norquist, “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Why? Because as Mitt Romney said in the campaign, 47 percent of voters “believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”
(If you haven’t heard much from Romney since the election, it’s probably because he has been down in the Cayman Islands visiting his money.)
In this view, the government spends far too much on “entitlements” like Medicare. Medicare costs are strangling America, we hear, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, spending for Medicare in 2012 was a very hefty $555 billion.
But Medicare recipients are not exactly rolling in dough. In 2006, the last study my ace research team (Wikipedia) could find, the “average household income of Medicare enrollees was $22,600 compared with a U.S. median income of $48,201.”
Yet these people are viewed as greed-heads sucking up precious dollars that could be better spent on … defense contractors!
The defense budget for 2012 was more than $600 billion, which is nearly twice as much as the rest of the planet combined. We outspend China, the next biggest military power in the world, by about 6-to-1.
Maybe this wild spending would not be so bad if it bought us quick and easy victories over ill-armed opponents. But it doesn’t. We have poured more than a trillion dollars into the war in Afghanistan over the past 11 years — to say nothing of more than 2,000 precious U.S. lives lost — and we are still fighting there.
Some say this is good for the U.S. economy because it means we have to buy more and more bullets and bombs and drones, but personally I’d rather buy more liver transplants for the 47 percent.
Yet nobody in Washington is talking about serious cuts to the defense budget. On the contrary, they are talking about ways to avoid making serious cuts to the defense budget.
In the meantime, the government borrows more and more money, which means it keeps bumping up against the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling was invented as a way to keep Congress from spending too much, but it doesn’t work.
So we keep raising the debt ceiling. We raised it 18 times under Ronald Reagan, four times under Bill Clinton, seven times under George W. Bush and three times, as of August 2011, under Barack Obama.
As Obama points out, the debt ceiling does not allow Congress to spend more money. It merely allows the government to pay the bills Congress has already racked up.
In just a few weeks, we will face another crisis over the debt ceiling. It shouldn’t be a crisis, but politics will make it a crisis.
It’s a broken system. It’s why Americans hate politics.
Late on Jan. 1, President Obama briefly addressed the nation from a nearly empty White House briefing room. “I think, hopefully, in the new year we’ll focus on seeing if we can put a package like this together with a little bit less drama, a little less brinksmanship, not scare the heck out of folks quite as much,” he said.
A little bit less drama? Drama is what government is about these days. Drama is the only thing our elected leaders seem good at.
So you bring the socks. I’ll bring the cowpies.
By: Roger Simon, Politico, January 3, 2013
“A Terminally Angry Man”: John McCain’s Dark Quest For Relevancy Has Turned Him Into A Comic Book Villain
It’s a story as old as literature and as modern as a current edition of a Marvel comic book.
A once young and talented protagonist sets out on the road to glory, intent on using his special abilities for the good of mankind in his noble quest to become a hero of mythic proportion.
Along the way, life deals our hero a catastrophic blow—one that turns our protagonist away from the road of righteousness and onto the very different and destructive path of the antagonist. Suddenly, his clarity altered by the indignities, disappointments and tragedies life has unexpectedly visited upon him, our hero resolves to prove to the world the terrible mistake they made when casting him aside—no matter what it takes to do so.
You see, in our character’s mind, he is not the evil one. It is the world that is to blame for failing to accept the greatness our once heroic figure so generously offered to us, something the world will finally understand when our protagonist—now the antagonist—forces us to acknowledge his worthiness, even if it means using dark and dastardly methods to make us appreciate the terrible error the world or, in this case, his country has made in rejecting him.
Earlier this week, as I watched Senator John McCain threaten, during a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer, to lead an effort to take the world’s economies hostage by refusing to raise the debt ceiling until he accomplishes the spending cuts he desires, I could not help but be reminded of this classic, “hero to villain” literary scenario just as I could not help but feel profound sadness for the transformation that has taken place in this man I once respected—a transformation that can be traced directly to the disappointment McCain suffered when losing his life’s objective, the presidency of the United States.
If you doubt the impact of McCain’s threat, you need only consider the words of Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics and one-time senior economic advisor to John McCain’s presidential campaign:
“The cornerstone of the global financial system is that the United States will make good on its debt payments. If we don’t, we’ve just knocked out the cornerstone and the system will collapse in turmoil.”
This is, indeed, very serious business.
And yet, the 2013 version of John McCain was giddy with joy as he filled the television screen with his warnings of the havoc he plans to rain down upon the American and world economies via the hostage drama the Senator and his accomplices are cooking up, a drama that could aptly be billed as “Debt Ceiling II- Revenge Of The Republicans.”
I have no objection to Senator McCain having his position on spending reduction, although I think he would be far more credible on the subject if he was willing to, at the least, choose to consider spending cuts in all government programs— including his beloved defense budget—rather than looking solely to entitlements as the object of his chainsaw’s desires.
I also recognize that a majority of Americans likely share the GOP’s belief that spending cuts are required if we are to get the nation on a more realistic and sustainable financial footing. And while the timing of such cuts remains a critical question—lest we bring our economic recovery to a screeching halt by cutting too deeply and too quickly—getting things on the right track will no doubt involve changes to our entitlement programs just as we will need to alter our defense spending habits.
However, using the threat of destroying the world’s economies to accomplish the direction preferred by McCain, and those who share his objectives, is a plot line far better suited to an old James Bond movie than it is to a rational policy discussion among the leaders of the world’s largest economic power, the United States of America.
Certainly, no American should be willing to stand for anyone who would adopt the tactics of fictional villains as the means to accomplish their wants and desires—even if they believe that their desires are in the best interests of the nation. There is no shortage of leverage points available to Senator McCain in pursuing his agenda—none of which involve taking our nation, and by extension, the nations of the word, hostage by threatening to do unspeakable damage in order to get his way.
You have to ask yourself whether—prior to suffering the loss of the presidency—the one-time “Maverick of the Senate” would have so much as considered blackmail as an acceptable tactic in pursuing a policy direction he believed to be in the nation’s interest.
I truly do not think so.
McCain of old would have hit the television talk show circuit and done his best to sell his countrymen on the merits of his position—not hold a gun to the nation’s head until we cried ‘uncle’. The McCain of old would have campaigned for his point of view with the self-effacing charm and reasonableness we came to expect of him, maybe even dropping by “Saturday Night Live”—the comedy program he used to regularly appear on for a quick cameo—in an effort to bring us around to his point of view.
But that John McCain has disappeared, replaced by a terminally angry man who would now be completely out of place in any environment designed to remind us that it is precisely because he did not take himself too seriously that we should take him all the more seriously.
I have no doubt that Senator McCain believes he is acting in the best interest of the nation. Isn’t that always the way of the ‘hero turned villain’ who believes that imposing his will on the world—by doing whatever it takes—is what is required of him? Don’t these characters always persuade themselves that, while the medicine they are forcing down our throats may be painful, illegal or immoral, we will all thank them for it in the end when we’ve finally seen with our own eyes just how right they are?
It’s tragic that this is the path that John McCain has chosen to pursue. However, it is not a path that we, as a nation, can tolerate from McCain or anyone else.
No matter how much you may agree with Senator McCain’s cost-cutting objectives…no matter how strong your belief that extreme cuts to any particular government program is essential to our financial survival… our national survival cannot be accomplished by giving in to those who would threaten to take us down if we fail to give in to their blackmail.
If Senator McCain— and those who share his point of view— wish to hold up every bit of legislation or appointment offered up by the President or the Democratic leadership in Congress, or utilize any of the many legitimate levers of power that come with the roles they have been granted by way of their being elected to office, that is their right.
It will then be up to the American people to determine whether or not the behavior of those willing to legally obstruct government in furtherance of their conscious was appropriate and in the best interest of the nation—an opinion that will be expressed by the voters during the 2014 election cycle and beyond.
However, threats to create an economic cataclysm as a means to accomplish a political or policy goal is not such a permissible tactic as such are the tactics of thugs and blackmailers. They are the tactics best left to the characters of comic literature and the movies—not the elected officials of a great democracy.
The President is right when he says he will not have a debate nor negotiate with those who seek to blackmail the nation into doing things their way. And whether you support this president or not, every Americans should stand up and reject this profoundly disturbing behavior on the part of Senator McCain and his cohorts. In America, we don’t negotiate with anyone who would threaten to destroy our country, no matter how much they have convinced themselves that it is, in some sick way, in the nation’s best interest to do so.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, January 2, 2013
“Lessons Not Learned”: Republicans Who Put Principle Above Country
A lot of the time, politics is about picking the least worst option. Well, the “fiscal cliff” deal jointly crafted by Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was the least worst option, and those who voted against it should not hide behind any phony commitment to principle. This deal or nothing were the two options left after weeks of failed negotiations. Nothing else was possible last night. And while nothing about the deal makes America stronger, the absence of an agreement would make us weaker.
The GOP needs to be the party of low taxes and smaller government. This deal produces the opposite of that. It does nothing to slow spending, reduce the debt or diminish dependency. All it did was avoid a financial shot to the head for millions of U.S. taxpayers.
Of course it is easy to oppose the deal when you don’t consider context, the alternatives and the consequences of doing nothing. It is convenient to believe that, if the GOP had let us go over the cliff, it would have been so bad for so many taxpayers and for the economy that the president and the Democrats in Congress would have agreed to a better deal, including spending reform. In other words, taxpayers were being held hostage and if we would have let them endure a little torture, we could have gotten Obama and the Democrats to cave in to our will.
What a bunch of baloney. The Republicans who voted “no” hid behind the courage of those who recognized that the McConnell-Biden deal was better — at this time — than the consequences of doing nothing.
Obviously, America’s future depends on our ability to rein in spending. Fights over our spending, including the debt-ceiling debate, will be critical. But no Republicans should boast of their opposition to the McConnell-Biden deal and consider themselves more philosophically pure or more courageous than their colleagues who had to vote for the bill. They are the opposite.I hope party leaders will band together and punish any Republican or Republican organization that tries to use this vote against those who voted for it. Nobody should be vulnerable in a future primary because they voted “yes” last night. If anything, the lesson learned for Republicans should be how hard it’s going to be to get our financial house in order and slow the quickening decline of America.
By: Ed Rogers, The Insiders, The Washington Post, January 2, 2012
“Loud Kazoos And Angry Threats”: House GOP Clown Car Crashes Again As Fiscal Deal Passes
Observing the Congressional Republicans repeatedly stumble in and out of their caucus clown car, blowing loud kazoos and muttering angry threats, should be painful, embarrassing, and highly instructive to any American voter with the patience to watch. When their latest performance concluded late Tuesday night with a 257 to 187 vote passing the stopgap fiscal deal negotiated by the Senate and the White House, an unavoidable question lingered: What is wrong with those people?
The simple explanation is that the House of Representatives has increasingly been dominated over the past two decades by a coterie of tantrum-prone extremists, who lack the probity and steadiness required for democratic self-government. Their diminished capacity is reflected in the low quality of leadership they have chosen during this long twilight, from Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay to John Boehner and Eric Cantor, even as their politics have grown more and more extreme.
Under the stress of their incoherence, the Republican caucus is unable to escape one humiliating mess after another. The damage they routinely inflict on the country’s economy and future is reaching incalculable levels – and is almost certain to grow worse when they again hold the debt ceiling hostage next month.
By the end of the current episode – which is only an interlude rather than a true resolution – the top Republicans in the House had split, with Boehner casting a rare vote in favor, and House Budget Committee chair and former vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan (R-WI) voting yes, along with 84 fellow Republicans and almost all of the House Democrats, while House Majority Leader and would-be Speaker Eric Cantor (R-VA) voted no. On the floor, House Ways and Means chair Dave Camp (R-MI) tried to claim that this bill is “the largest tax cut in history,” although he might have difficulty explaining why more than 150 Republicans voted against it.
The Republicans’ incompetence in government is inextricably connected with their ideological extremism, as the latest events demonstrate. Hogtied by the craziness of the ultra-right Tea Party faction, the House GOP leadership cannot even cooperate with other Republicans in the Senate – who overwhelmingly voted for the “cliff” deal negotiated with Vice President Joe Biden – let alone conduct serious discussions with the White House.
Having refused to support the leadership’s “Plan B” scheme to raise taxes only on households making $1 million or more annually – despite confident claims by Boehner and Cantor that they had counted the necessary votes — the Republican caucus made both themselves and their leaders look ridiculous. It was a dreadful right-wing plan, but still much too liberal for too many of them. Tacitly acknowledging that he could no longer manage his restless wingnuts, Boehner insisted that the Senate and White House should come up with an emergency measure on their own.
Yet when the Senate leadership, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, offered a bill negotiated with Vice President Joe Biden — just as Boehner had urged — the House Republicans descended into crisis. Their leaders couldn’t endorse the bill, fearing that the GOP caucus crazies would defenestrate them. But they could hardly employ their usual partisan tactics to keep the bill off the House floor, after the Senate had passed it by a vote of 89-8, with only five Republican defections. They might have noticed as well their declining numbers in every public poll, with the latest Republican-leaning Rasmussen survey showing a Democratic lead in the generic congressional contest of 11 points and climbing.
Astonishingly, they nevertheless wasted several hours debating whether to amend the bill with new spending cuts and then send it back to the Senate, where leaders of both parties would have surely and justly rejected such tardy handiwork. Consistent only in their ineptitude, the House Republicans were reportedly unable to agree among themselves on exactly how to change the bill, in any case.
Finally, they folded – or at least their leaders did – and proclaimed that they were girding themselves for the battles to come over the budget and the debt ceiling, which have now been postponed for another month or so.
The deal itself is not a bad one, from the Democratic perspective, raising significant new revenues from the wealthiest taxpayers and excluding any “grand bargain” (or raw deal) to weaken Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Its specific provisions are still far too generous to the highest-income taxpayers and will not, in the long run, raise enough revenue to sustain decent government, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, and prepare for the future.
The struggle over what government should do and how to pay for its functions continues, almost immediately. And perhaps soon the president and his party will explain, without hesitation, what this brief tumble over the “cliff” has shown us, and what we may hope they have finally learned: That there is no negotiating partner among the House Republicans, who must be defeated if progress is to be possible.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, January 2, 2013
“What’s A Speaker To Do”: Will The John Boehner-Eric Cantor Rift Blow Up The Fiscal Cliff Deal?
Here is how it was supposed to go –
After failing to get a fiscal cliff deal with the President through his own efforts, Speaker John Boehner turned the entire mess over to the Senate, promising that if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell could put together a deal with the White House and Senate Democrats that could nail down a decisive amount of support from both parties, he would put such a bill to a vote before the entire House of Representatives.
With a vote of 89-8 in the Senate, clearly a decisive, non-partisan agreement was achieved meaning the bill produced would get an up or down vote on the floor of the House.
However, in the Speaker’s latest in a long line of political miscalculations, Boehner didn’t figure on Eric Cantor choosing this moment to stab him in the back.
Despite Boehner’s promise, it now appears that the GOP House caucus—led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor—will force Boehner to break his promise by demanding that any bill put to a full vote of the House of Representatives include amendments to the Senate passed legislation. Should such an amended version pass, the bill would be sent back to the Senate where the amended legislation would have to be adopted by noon on Thursday. After that time, this Congress will have come to an end and all outstanding bills will die.
Not only would it be difficult to reassemble all of the Senators in time to deal with this—as they’ve all scattered to the winds in the belief that their work was done—anyone who knows Majority Leader Harry Reid knows that there is little chance that he would accede to the efforts of the House GOP to scuttle his deal.
How did Boehner not see this coming? Where is all that political acumen one is supposed to have when rising to the level of the Speaker of the House?
This is the same John Boehner who, just days ago, could have closed a deal on “Plan A”—a deal with the President that would have placed the threshold for tax increases at $400,000 (just $50,000 less than what was negotiated by Senate Minority Leader McConnell), delivered some $800 billion in spending cuts and very likely could have gotten into the package the chained CPI that would have lowered Social Security benefits, accomplishing a big entitlement win for Republicans.
Instead of just saying yes, Boehner elected to move forward with his Plan B option, calling for a tax increase on only those who earn in excess of one million dollars a year. The Speaker ended up with a big, fat goose egg when he was unable to gain the support of a majority of House Republicans to bring the measure to a full vote.
As a result of his political fumbling, rather than getting a “Plan A” that would have delivered dramatically more of what the Speaker wanted than what the Senate compromise ultimately provided, Boehner now finds himself fighting Rep. Cantor—ostensibly Boehner’s “number two”—just to be permitted to make good on his promise to bring the Senate version to the floor for an up or down vote—and it appears, at this point, that the Speaker is losing that fight.
So, what is a Speaker to do?
Assuming that the objection to the Senate bill in the GOP caucus is such that there are enough votes to require Boehner to bring the amended version to the floor (a majority of his conference if Boehner is to honor the Hassert Rule requiring that he only take bills to the floor that a “majority of the majority” support) , and knowing that the amended version would likely mean killing the deal and casting the country over the fiscal cliff, Boehner could seek enough of his own party members to join with Democrats in voting against the amended version, effectively stymying his own party’s efforts to pass an amended version of the bill.
Were such a measure to go down to defeat, Boehner could then put the original Senate bill to a vote and likely push it through with Democrats and Republicans voting in favor.
Should Boehner do this, it could very well come at the price of his Speakership which, given his poor display of political savvy these past few weeks, might be an appropriate result.
What is the moral to this story?
The Speaker of the United States House of Representatives is supposed to be able to see the political ramifications of his or her actions and is expected to be able to explain these ramifications to members of his caucus who are less adept at seeing the consequences of their own actions—and we all know who I’m talking about.
Boehner’s failure to see what was coming and his total inability to make sure that the extremist wing of his GOP conference understood what was likely to happen, is an exercise in political malpractice. He should have taken the Plan A deal when he had the chance.
If the Senate bill is rejected by the House Republican caucus, and the cliff deal is allowed to die, you can forget all that leverage the Republicans expect to have when they attempt to hold the nation hostage in February in the next debt ceiling fight in the effort to get significant spending cuts.
In fact, it is highly likely you can forget the Republican party altogether when it comes to the United States Congress as it is difficult to believe that Americans will forget what the GOP put them through, even if the cliff is ultimately resolved in a way that protects most Americans from tax hikes.
If the House GOP screws up this compromise, I certainly wouldn’t want to have to run as a Republican in 2014.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, January 1, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 