“Defense Hawks Swoop”: House Republicans Pushing Back Strongly Against John Boehner On Defense Cuts
John Boehner should probably stop doing interviews.
His reported talk with the Wall Street Journal‘s Stephen Moore that was published Monday under the provocative title “The Education of John Boehner” (an illusion, I am confident, to William Greider’s famous “The Education of David Stockman” piece in late 1981 that nearly got Stockman fired as Reagan’s budget director) is continuing to cause him problems. Intended, presumably, to convey a sadder-but-wiser-and-tougher sense of his negotiating posture on fiscal issues after the “fiscal cliff” deal, the story got lots of attention for Boehner’s assertion that “the tax issue is resolved,” and some for his depiction of the stark differences between himself and the president on every basic fiscal and economic issue.
But the part of the story that’s biting him in the butt right now involves the spending sequestration that was recently delayed for two months, and that had been widely considered a leverage point for the White House with Republicans, given their frantic desire to spare the Pentagon any cuts. The Hill‘s Russell Berman and Jeremy Herb explain:
In his interview with The Wall Street Journal, Boehner said that during the late stages of the fiscal-cliff negotiations, it was the White House — and not Republican leaders — that demanded a delay in the $109 billion in scheduled 2013 cuts evenly split between defense and domestic discretionary programs. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Vice President Biden ultimately agreed to push the sequester back by two months, partially offsetting it with other spending cuts and leaving $85 billion in remaining 2013 cuts in place.
The Speaker suggested the sequester was a stronger leverage point for Republicans than the upcoming deadline to raise the debt ceiling, for which he is insisting on spending cuts and reforms that exceed the amount in new borrowing authority for the Treasury. Therefore, the willingness of Republicans to allow the sequester to take effect is “as much leverage as we’re going to get,” Boehner told the Journal.
Negotiating 101 tells you that you don’t make that kind of assertion unless you’ve got your ducks in a row and know you won’t be undercut by the people you claim to be speaking for. It seems Boehner did not do any of those things:
House Republican defense hawks are pushing back strongly against Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) claim that he has GOP support to allow steep automatic budget cuts to take effect if President Obama does not agree to replace them with other reductions….
Not so fast, two defense-minded House Republicans told The Hill.
“I don’t support that,” said Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a member of the Armed Services Committee whose district includes one of the nation’s largest military installations. “You get into dangerous territory when you talk about using national security as a bargaining chip with the president…”
One defense-minded Republican lawmaker said Boehner’s position would amount to a broken promise to his conference.
“In order to get the Republican Conference to pass the debt-limit increase last time, he promised them sequestration would not go in place,” the Republican House member said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “To be using sequestration and these defense cuts in the next debt-limit talks certainly is pretty bad déjà vu for the Republican Conference.”
So all Boehner really accomplished in his boast to Stephen Moore was supplying further evidence that he had it backwards: Obama has the leverage on the defense sequester, and Boehner is just blustering.
You know, there’s a natural tendency to think that people who have risen to the top of any profession are reasonably bright, and are advised by dazzlingly bright folk who truly earn their bloated salaries as strategic wizards. Time and again, that turns out not to be so true.
BY: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 10, 2013
“Reasonable Defense And Adaptive Security”: Yes, We Have A Defense Spending Problem
Last year, in 2012, the U.S. government spent about $841 billion on security—a figure that includes defense, intelligence, war appropriations, and foreign aid. At the same time, the government collected about $1.1 trillion in individual income taxes. (And about $2.4 trillion in revenues overall if you include payroll, corporate, estate, and excise taxes.)
In other words, about 80 cents of every dollar collected in traditional federal income taxes went for security.
That’s an astonishing statistic, and it captures the most underappreciated aspect of today’s fiscal challenges: We have a security spending problem. Such spending is significantly higher than all non-defense discretionary domestic spending.
Worse yet, almost nobody in Washington seems interested in seriously curtailing defense spending that is greater in real terms than what the U.S. spent in the Cold War—despite the fact that the U.S. will be officially at peace when we withdraw from Aghanistan next year and the U.S. faces no major global adversaries.
While the Simpson-Bowles Commission advocated over a trillion dollars in defense cuts, President Obama’s budget would only reduce spending modestly, and even that’s a hard sell on Capitol Hill. Both parties happily suspended planned defense cuts under sequestration as part of the fiscal cliff deal.
Given all this, it was great to read a new report by the Project on Defense Alternatives entitled “Reasonable Defense: A Sustainable Approach to Securing the Nation” and written by Carl Conetta. PDA has long been a leading voice for responsible defense spending. But today, with the fiscal heat on, their work is more timely and important than ever.
The new report sets the defense challenge in it’s proper context: Which is that the United States is operating in a much more competitive global economy and needs to rethink its ideas of national strength, along with its budgetary priorities:
Today, the challenge that will most affect America’s future prospects lies in the economic sphere, not the military one. In this respect the current era is distinct from the period of the Second World War and the Cold War. How America handles current fiscal challenges and reorders government priorities should reflect this fact. . . . In all areas of policy, new economic realities compel national leaders to adopt a longer view, set clearer priorities, seek new efficiencies, and attend more closely to the ratio of costs, risks, and benefits when allocating resources.
A centerpiece of the report’s strategic framework is the idea of Adaptive Security. This approach focuses:
America’s armed forces on deterring and containing current threats, while working principally by other means to reduce future conflict potentials and strengthen the foundation for cooperative action. This would move America toward a future in which threat potentials are lower and security cooperation greater. While the United States uses its military power to check real and present threats of violence, it would employ non-military instruments to impede the emergence of new threats and reduce future conflict potentials.
This strategy makes a whole lot of sense in a world where America’s real enemies, like Iran and Al-Qaeda, are quite weak while our main potential enemy, China, is very strong.
While many in the Pentagon—with their worst-case mindsets—may be inclined to maintain a military that could deal with all potential enemies, the Adaptive Security formula suggests that the U.S. focus other kinds of resources on making sure such enemies never materialize. If money were limitless, one could argue the merits of either approach. But in today’s fiscal climate, Adaptive Security is the only affordable path.
In any case, the rise of China in particular underscores how economic challenges are the biggest challenges facing the United States, as Conetta argues. If we’re really worried about being dominated by China, we should be focused on training more engineers not more fighter pilots.
Beyond its big picture contributions, “Reasonable Defense” makes many smart points about how to create a more cost-efficient defense sector and a leaner military—and reduce defense spending by a half trillion over the next decade.
Let’s hope this report gets widely read in Washington.
By: David Callahan, The American Prospect, January 7, 2013
“But For Protecting The Middle Class”: Still Believe President Obama Seeks A Permanent American Socialist State?
One of the strangest—and for me, most annoying—perversions of politics in the Obama era is the meme pursued by so many on the right suggesting that this president is a raging socialist who seeks to install a permanent welfare state in America—despite all evidence to the contrary.
In the wake of the fiscal cliff deal—supported not only by the President but by an overwhelming vote of elected Democrats—we should now be able to put this foolishness to rest once and for all as we acknowledge a simple and clear reality—
If Barack Obama is indeed a socialist, he must be the absolute worst socialist in recorded history.
How do we now know this beyond any reasonable question of a doubt?
Any good conservative will be among the first to tell you that financing a permanent welfare state takes huge amounts of money—money that can only be raised by taxing a wide swath of the nation’s citizenry. And yet, the President just pushed through a law permanently lowering taxes for some 99 percent of all Americans— and was hailed as a big winner for his effort to do so.
For someone who would prefer to be President of, say, Sweeden, such a deal could only be viewed as a crushing defeat, not a political victory.
And if you somehow imagine that the President believes he can accomplish the financing of his “European style welfare state” through the rather meager increase in progressive tax rates now to be levied on the nation’s largest earners, I would suggest you take heed of the many conservatives who have incessantly reminded us over these past few months that the sum total of the tax increases on the rich will only serve to fund government for a few days a year—clearly nowhere near enough cash to fund a true, socialist agenda.
Still, I know what you’re thinking…the President is planning to create his socialist paradise by borrowing and printing all the money required to pay the high cost of the expanded welfare state he covets.
Sorry…it just doesn’t work and the President would know this better than just about anyone.
While borrowing money may be the modus operandi for filling in the shortfalls when it comes to financing entitlement programs in an era of relatively low taxes (at least comparatively speaking) and a dramatic increase in the senior population depending upon entitlement programs, I suspect even the most conservative economists would tell you —correctly I would add—that all of our available borrowing power is strained just trying to stay even with our entitlement and defense obligations, let alone expand entitlements to the point where we would even approach a government philosophy that could be comparable with a European socialistic society.
Indeed, even if the President chose to press for more borrowing or printing, he could, at best, only do so in support of the existing entitlement programs as it would take an act of Congress to expand the system.
Does anyone believe the Congress is heading in the direction of expanding entitlements? We have a House of Representatives gerrymandered into GOP control for a period likely to last at least until the end of the decade—meaning it will outlive Obama’s second term.
Thus, when Obama got behind preserving the Bush tax cuts for all but the wealthiest Americans, he did so knowing that he would never be able to expand the entitlement programs at any time during the remainder of his term. If it was a socialist society he was seeking, he had but one chance and that was to raise taxes on everyone, not just the very wealthy.
So, exactly how is it possible that a President and a Democratic Party—hell bent on creating this permanent welfare state in America—could support any deal that would not allow the Bush tax cuts to sunset as scheduled so that tax rates would return to the larger numbers of the Clinton era?
Such support would make no sense for anyone favoring expansion of the welfare state. And yet, this President chose to support the permanent lowering of taxes on the middle class as did his party.
While you may be displeased with the fiscal cliff compromise for any number of reasons, including the failure of the parties to do much of anything about spending, the simple fact remains that—for better or for worse—decades of Democratic Party/progressive tax philosophy went out the window last week when an overwhelming majority of Democrats voted to support the fiscal cliff deal—and with it went any rational support for the notion that President Obama and his party have some secret, European socialist vision in mind for the country.
All you need do to understand this is take a look at the number of Congressional Democrats who cast their votes in support of the two pieces of legislation that produced the Bush tax cuts and compare those votes to the vote of the Congressional Democrats making those very cuts permanent for approximately 99 percent of all Americans.
The vote tally for the 2001 bill that created the first round of the Bush tax cuts delivered just 28 votes in support from House Democrats. The second round—which came in 2003—could only muster up 7 Democratic votes in support.
The vote this week to make these very same tax cuts permanent received overwhelming support from House Democrats, who cast 172 votes in favor of very likely ending middle class tax increases during our lifetime—and they did so at the specific behest of the same Democratic president who many argue is committed to creating the American welfare state.
That simply does not add up for a President looking to create France in America.
As a result, one cannot rationally argue that the President, and his party— who cast their support in favor of leaving more money in the pockets of 99 percent of Americans so that they could spend the money supporting the businesses of America rather than handing it over to government to spend it for them—desire the path of socialism.
While I’m certain there will be no shortage of issues available to those wishing to attack the President, can we now dare to hope that the next time someone feels the need to vent, they might do so without the whole “Obama is a socialist” narrative?
I hope so. What was a silly narrative before the fiscal cliff deal, it is an embarrassingly preposterous narrative today.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, January 6, 2013
“A Hot New Republican Lie”: The Government Spends More On Welfare Than Everything Else
You are probably going to start hearing a hot new lie from Republicans soon: The government spends more money on welfare than on anything else, even the military!
This is apparently the conclusion of a new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (the same organization that recently said that Obama’s supposed “welfare reform gutting” was totally legal!), though in fact it is a claim made by Senate Republicans who are abusing the nonpartisan research of the CRS. Here’s the story in the Weekly Standard, complete with charts from the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee. Here’s the story in the Daily Caller, which is more upfront about all the material coming from Senate Republicans and not from the CRS. And here’s a Weekly Standard follow-up with some new charts.
They claim that “welfare spending” is the “largest budget item” for the federal government, with the fed spending $745.84 billion, more than is spent on Social Security, Medicare and “non-war defense.” (Hah.) Plus: “In all, the U.S. government, including federal and state governments, spends in excess of $1 trillion on welfare.”
That is a lot of welfare spending! Those poor people must be rolling in dough, right?
In the context of political discussions, “welfare” traditionally (as in pretty much always) refers specifically to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, the federal program that was created in 1996 to replace the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program — also known as “welfare” — that had existed since the New Deal. This is what people refer to when they say “welfare caseloads” and “welfare rolls,” and when conservatives accuse Obama of gutting “welfare reform” they are referring to TANF. The federal government spends $16.5 billion a year on TANF and, combined, the states spend another $10 billion.
Most of the federal budget is “defense” and war spending and Medicare, which should be common knowledge but that fact is regularly obscured by right-wingers who claim to be deficit hawks but refuse to cut defense spending and are scared of proposing real reductions to our programs for old people. This is how you get poll results where people think most of what the federal government spends money on is “foreign aid” and public broadcasting. So this is obviously just an attempt to rebrand “everything else” as “welfare.”
(On a state level, the majority of money goes, unsurprisingly, to healthcare and education. Less is spent on actual “public assistance” than is spent on prisons.)
The con is pretty easy to see when you read the actual CRS report. Senate Republicans are counting 83 separate (and wildly different) programs as “welfare” in order to make the case that the government is spending more on poor people than old people. The majority of this money is Medicaid and CHIP, which are healthcare spending, which is increasing for the same reason that Medicare spending is increasing, which is that healthcare costs are increasing. (And Medicaid is much less generous than Medicare, because it is a program for poor people, not old people.) But so many other things now also count as welfare, including Pell Grants, public works spending, Head Start, child support enforcement, the Child Tax Credit, Foster Care assistance, housing for old people, and much more. They’re also counting the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is, traditionally, the form of “welfare” that conservative Republicans actually support. Basically, all social spending (though specifically not spending on rich old people or on healthcare for veterans with service-related disabilities, which Republicans requested be excluded from the CRS report) now counts as “welfare.”
So we’ve learned that when you count everything — especially Medicaid and CHIP — as “welfare,” it is easy to make it look like “welfare” is very expensive, because healthcare is very expensive. This dumb lie will live forever, and you will hear until the end of your days that “the government spends more on welfare than it does on defense.”
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, October 18, 2012
“He Who Has No Name”: At News Conference, Republicans Made No Reference To Party Standard-Bearer Mitt Romney
Republican leaders had all kinds of things to talk about in their first day back on Capitol Hill from their month-long recess.
They spoke about jobs and the economy, about military spending and automatic budget cuts, about the national debt and the need for energy legislation.
But there was one thing House Republican leaders did not mention in their statements to the cameras after Tuesday morning’s caucus: Mitt Romney.
They uttered 1,350 words in their opening remarks at the news conference but made no reference to the party standard-bearer who would be at the top of their ticket in just 56 days.
NBC’s Luke Russert tried to help the lawmakers address this omission. “Governor Romney said that it was a bad decision for Republicans to agree to the bipartisan debt deal,” he pointed out. “What’s your response to him?”
House Speaker John Boehner, who negotiated the deal, looked unwell.
“I don’t think there’s anybody that worked harder than Eric and I to try to work with the president to come to an agreement,” he said, with Majority Leader Eric Cantor standing just behind him. Boehner tried to pin the agreement’s automatic cuts in defense spending on President Obama, but he ultimately defended the package: “Somehow, we have to deal with our spending problem.”
That Romney would go on “Meet the Press” and say that last year’s bipartisan spending deal was a “mistake”— never mind thatRomney had applauded Boehner for negotiating the deal at the time — made clear that the GOP nominee does not wish to run on the record of congressional Republicans.
That House Republicans would not so much as breathe Romney’s name makes clear the sentiment is mutual.
The seven leaders at the microphone didn’t mention Romney even when asked about him — as though he is some sort of political Voldemort. Instead, they kept contrasting House Republicans’ record on jobs bills with those of Senate Democrats and the White House while leaving Romney out of it.
For good measure, the Republican lawmakers also praised a bill that would remove trade restrictions on Russia, a country Romney has called “our number one geopolitical foe”; Romney opposes the trade measure unless Russia is also punished over human rights.
The estrangement seen in the past few days is part of a broader dynamic in which the Republican Party seems to be readying itself to cut and run from its nominee. At the convention in Tampa, a gaggle of younger Republicans — Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Nikki Haley, Rand Paul — delivered speeches light on mentions of Romney and heavy on self-promotion. Overall, Romney was mentioned far less at his convention than Obama was at the Democratic convention.
This tepidity furthers the impression that Romney is a placeholder for the next generation of Republicans, tempered by partisan squabbles and disciplined by conservative activists, and unwilling to negotiate or compromise. Romney himself, though a businessman by temperament, had to affect the younger Republicans’ mannerisms to win the nomination. He further ingratiated himself with the young conservatives by tapping as his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan — one of a trio of self-styled “young guns” in the House, with Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy.
In the House GOP caucus meeting Tuesday, Boehner told his members privately that the choice of Ryan “validated all the work House Republicans have done over the past 19 months.” Boehner is correct about that. The Ryan choice was a bow to where the power is in the party, where it’s going and who its future leaders are. If Romney wins, congressional conservatives would drive his agenda from Capitol Hill. If Romney loses, congressional conservatives would immediately inherit the party in preparation for 2014 and 2016.
Either way, it promises to be a cacophony. At the news conference that followed the caucus gathering, a campaign-style backdrop proclaimed “Focused on American Jobs” and repeated the phrase “American Jobs” 30 times. But it was also Sept. 11, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.) argued that the hijackers “didn’t attack us as a Republican or a Democrat; they attacked us as Americans, and we would do well to remember that.”
The leaders had difficulty sticking to either theme in their zeal to campaign against the president: “There’s a lack of leadership in this administration. . . . Can’t find a job in the Obama economy. . . . The president has done nothing.” Boehner said he was “not confident at all” about avoiding downgrades of U.S. debt, accusing Obama of being “absent without leave.”
Actually, Obama has been present; Republicans just find his presence objectionable. The notable absence from congressional Republicans’ calculations is Romney.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 11, 2012
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