“In Boehner We Trusted”: Netanyahu Throws Boehner Under The Bus; Biden To Skip Speech
There’s been scuttlebutt all week about congressional Democrats skipping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming speech as a way to send a message about the party’s disappointment. The way in which Netanyahu and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) went behind President Obama’s back, and partnered to undermine U.S. foreign policy, does not sit well with many Dems, and even an informal boycott of his congressional address would be a big deal.
Those Democrats inclined to skip the Prime Minister’s remarks will apparently have some cover.
Vice President Joe Biden is expected not to attend a March 3 speech at the Capitol by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because he will be traveling abroad, Biden’s office confirmed to NBC News Friday.
It is not clear yet where Biden will be traveling at the time of Netanyahu’s speech, which has become controversial both because of its proximity to the Israeli elections and because it was planned by Republicans without prior consultation with the White House.
The second part is of particular interest. As the AP’s report notes, the Vice President’s office didn’t point to a specific commitment abroad on March 3, only that Biden is “expected to be traveling.” The office didn’t say where or why.
It’s hardly unreasonable to wonder if this is the diplomatic equivalent of, “I’m washing my hair – somewhere.”
Just as striking, meanwhile, is the degree to which Netanyahu’s administration appears to be throwing the Republican leadership under the bus.
A senior Israeli official suggested on Friday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been misled into thinking an invitation to address the U.S. Congress on Iran next month was fully supported by the Democrats. […]
“It appears that the speaker of Congress made a move, in which we trusted, but which it ultimately became clear was a one sided move and not a move by both sides,” Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told 102 FM Tel Aviv Radio on Friday.
Or to put it another way, “We totally trusted Boehner to do this the right way; he didn’t; so blame him for this fiasco.”
We talked the other day about this increasingly messy problem, and the growing debate as to who screwed up more; Boehner or Netanyahu. These latest comments from a senior Israeli official suggest the Prime Minister is eager to tilt the scales in the GOP leader’s direction.
That said, in the same interview Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi suggested Netanyahu’s speech will go forward as planned. The question now is how many Democrats intend to show up.
I’ve generally been skeptical about whether a large-scale boycott would come together – a few House Dems have announced their intention to stay away, though it’s a pretty small group – but the news about Vice President Biden may very well change the entire dynamic for Democrats.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 8, 2015
“A Juvenile GOP”: If The Party’s Aim Is To Show Americans It Is Ready To Govern, We Are Witnessing An Epic Fail
Bang. Bang. Crash. That was the sound of the Republican majority in Congress shooting itself in both feet, then tripping over them.
At a moment of heightened concern that terrorists in the Middle East might stage or inspire attacks on U.S. soil, the GOP-controlled House and Senate are unable to agree on a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security. If the party’s aim is to show Americans it is ready to govern, we are witnessing an epic fail.
Rather than ensure the smooth operation of the agency charged with keeping the nation safe, Republicans would rather argue about a separate issue — immigration — and struggle over tactics for tilting at windmills. Meanwhile, a Feb. 27 deadline for passing an appropriations bill draws near. “I don’t believe we should shut down the Department of Homeland Security, given the threats that are obviously out there and the attacks on America,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Wednesday. But too few in his party are listening.
The problem is that Republican conservatives want to use the Homeland Security funding bill to reverse President Obama’s executive actions allowing millions of undocumented immigrants to stay without fear of deportation. A measure stripping out money to fund Obama’s initiatives easily passed the House, with its massive GOP majority and streamlined procedural rules. But the Senate is a different story.
It was obvious from the beginning that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did not have the 60 votes needed to get the bill through the Senate. Nevertheless, McConnell has dutifully brought the bill up three times — and seen it rejected each time by Democrats, who quite reasonably demand a clean funding bill with no extraneous bells or whistles.
“Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Voting for the same bill over and over again?” McCain asked.
Indeed, the whole episode does seem pretty insane. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) knew the bill he sent to the Senate would be dead on arrival. McConnell knew he didn’t have the votes to pass it. And both leaders knew that if the legislation somehow made it through — perhaps when Democrats weren’t looking, or through divine intervention — there was no way Obama would ever sign it into law.
Boehner and McConnell appear to be trying to teach House Republicans a lesson in basic arithmetic. The class, however, is busy throwing spitballs.
The GOP majority in the House continues to value symbolic posturing over pragmatic action. Is this too sweeping a statement? Not if you consider what House Republicans were doing this week instead of working on a Homeland Security bill that might actually pass: Voting for the 56th time to repeal the Affordable Care Act, knowing full well that this attempt, like the previous 55, had no earthly chance of success.
GOP freshmen wanted to have their votes recorded in obeisance to what has become a Republican article of faith: Obamacare is evil incarnate. If I stipulate that the whole universe gets the message, would you guys please stop pretending that Obama is ever going to sign legislation abolishing the landmark health-care program that bears his name ?
Let’s see, what else have Republicans achieved since taking control of both chambers? Well, the House tried to pass a bill banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy but had to pull the legislation at the last minute over a requirement that rape victims report their assault to police before qualifying for an exemption. Republicans did manage to pass a bill authorizing the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, but Obama promises a veto and the GOP doesn’t have the votes to override him.
If this is the pattern, it’s going to be a long couple of years.
Let me suggest a different approach. First, Republicans must cross a big hurdle: acknowledging that with Democrats able to block legislation in the Senate and Obama still resident in the White House, passing legislation will require compromise. Once you get beyond that, the rest is easy.
No, you can’t repeal Obamacare, but you might be able to make it work better for your constituents. No, you can’t undo Obama’s immigration actions without passing legislation that the Senate and the president find acceptable. No, you can’t hijack funding for a crucial government agency without suffering political damage — and ultimately folding because you don’t have the cards.
The GOP apparently hopes the display of juvenile behavior we’re witnessing will inspire voters to give the party even more power in 2016 by electing a Republican president. Good luck with that.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 5, 2015
“More Worried About Their Reputation”: Republicans Don’t Really Care About Inequality
The Republican Party appears to accept that poverty and the inequities of wealth and political power that have prevailed over the last 15 years are issues it can no longer ignore. Not without paying a price. After all, Mitt Romney’s cool indifference to the everyday struggles of working Americans went a long way toward sinking his 2012 campaign.
But expressing concern about inequality is one thing. Doing something about it is another. The GOP so far appears more worried about its reputation as being the party of the very, very rich, than the empirical reality of its being the party of the very, very rich.
At a recent Republican gathering, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas gave voice to the party’s incongruity of perception and reality. “I think Republicans are and should be the party of the 47 percent,” he said. Later at that same event, billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch announced plans to spend nearly $1 billion through their political network in the next race for the White House, with virtually all of it going to the Republican Party’s nominee.
If the GOP were truly troubled by historic rates of income and wealth inequality, it would rubber-stamp President Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy and use the proceeds to fund infrastructure projects like roads, bridges, waterways, and sewer systems. Public investments like these have historically garnered broad support, because they are neutral vehicles for achieving the goals of statecraft. Such expenditures would not only create hundreds of thousands of seasonal jobs, as well as many thousands of permanent jobs, but also stimulate economic activity on a national scale. And they’d pay for themselves over time.
The president’s $4 trillion fiscal budget would tap into offshore accounts and Wall Street transactions that only the very, very rich possess and thus care about. In addition to public works, which Obama has been calling for since his took office, increased revenues would be used for free community college and universal child care.
This, or something like it, is what serious people talk about if they are serious about combating inequality. Progressive redistribution, however bitter-tasting the phrase may be, must be on the table. But all we are likely to hear, especially from Republicans aiming high, are platitudes steeped in conservative morality, homilies to the power of private enterprise freed from the bonds of bureaucratic red tape, or the benefits of cutting taxes. Really. Anything. Anything at all to avoid tax hikes even on the treasonous few who hide their money offshore.
All one needs to do to see the difference between what Republicans are saying and Republicans are doing is look at the current session of Congress. The very first item on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s to-do list was passing a bill authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. That project would indeed create thousands of seasonal jobs, but only about 40 permanent ones. It would have virtually no impact on the U.S. economy. Moreover, the public would get nothing in return, unless you count greater levels of global warming.
That’s not to mention other items being pushed which have nothing to do with serving the greater good. A short list: House Republicans have introduced legislation to restrict abortion (the melodramatically titled “fetal-pain bill”), to dismantle part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and to starve to death the president’s modest executive action on illegal immigration.
Even if the Republicans really did believe, as Jeb Bush is trying to convince us, that addressing inequality is the right thing to do, don’t bet on any action. Doing the right thing had rarely been an incentive, because this is a party now committed to total warfare against Obama and the Democratic agenda. The only way the Republicans will take action on inequality is if they are forced to, but even then, they’ll likely do everything short of raising taxes on the very, very rich.
That’s why we should keep our eyes on the minimum wage and paid sick leave. House Speaker John Boehner has said he’d rather kill himself than raise the minimum wage. Conservatives are poised to attack Republicans entertaining mandated sick days. But in terms of inequality, these are the easiest ways to say you’ve done something without raising taxes on the very, very rich.
So yes, inequality is emerging as a major issue in the 2016 presidential race, and Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and others are going to try hard to convince us that the Republican Party cares, really cares, about the plight of the poor and an ever-shrinking middle class. But remember the last time a major candidate talked about such “compassionate conservatism.” By the end of his second term, the greatest beneficiaries of that compassion were the very, very wealthy.
By: John Stoehr, Managing Editor of The Washington Spectator; The National Memo, February 6, 2015
“An Active Republican Insider”: Not So ‘Fresh’; Political Careerist Scott Walker Has Been Running For A Quarter Century
When Mitt Romney, who is anything but a fresh face in the Republican hierarchy decided to forego a third run for the presidency, he announced that, “I believe that one of our next generation of Republican leaders — one who may not be as well-known as I am today, one who has not yet taken their message across the country, one who is just getting started — may well emerge as being better able to defeat the Democrat nominee. In fact, I expect and hope that to be the case.”
Full-on Republican presidential contender Scott Walker just presumed that the man who Republican primary voters rejected in 2008, and who the rest of the American electorate rejected in 2012, was talking about a certain governor of Wisconsin.
Never mind that, in his book, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge, Walker ripped the party’s 2012 campaign – and, by extension, its nominee – for doing a “lousy job of presenting a positive vision of free market solutions to our nation’s problems in a way that is relevant to people’s lives.” Never mind that Walker griped just days before Romney quit the race that a 2016 run by the 2012 loser would be “pretty hard” to justify. Never mind that Walker, one of the most relentlessly negative campaigners in contemporary American politics, was more than ready to beat up on Romney if that has been necessary to advance his own 2016 run. With Romney’s decision to sideline himself, Walker chirped, “I would love to have his endorsement.”
Walker actually went a step further, going on Twitter to suggest that he was precisely the sort of “next generation” leader Romney was referring to. “Had a great conversation w/ @MittRomney,” Walker announced. “He’s a good man. Thanked him for his interest in opening the door for fresh leadership in America.”
There’s only one problem with this calculus.
Scott Walker isn’t fresh.
The governor is a political careerist who has sought office – as a winner and loser – more times that Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz combined.
In a permanent campaign that began a quarter century ago – when he quit college and launched a losing state legislative campaign against future U.S. Congresswoman Gwen Moore – Walker has run 24 primary and general election races. That doesn’t include a 2006 bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Wisconsin, which he scrapped after national party officials elbowed him aside in favor of another candidate, or his all-but announced 2016 presidential run.
Hyper-ambitious yet strikingly disciplined, Walker has used every office he has ever held as a platform from which to run for the next. Even when scandals have led to the arrests, indictments and convictions of campaign donors, campaign aides and official staffers, Walker has maintained a steady focus on climbing the political ladder that is perhaps most comparable to that of former President Bill Clinton.
As a state legislator, Walker backed an effort to recall the sitting Milwaukee County Executive and then jumped into the race for that job. After winning his first full term as county executive in 2004, Walker immediately began running for the 2006 Republican gubernatorial nomination.
When that run was scuttled, Walker sought and secured a second term as county executive in 2008, only to immediately begin running for the 2010 Republican gubernatorial nomination. After securing the governorship, Walker quickly began positioning himself on the national stage – not just by picking high-profile fights with Wisconsin unions that would, ultimately, lead to a rare gubernatorial recall challenge but by jetting around the country to court the wealthiest campaign donors and to appear in the first caucus state of Iowa and the first primary state of New Hampshire.
Before his 2014 reelection race was complete, Walker was already visiting Las Vegas with other 2016 Republican presidential prospects seeking the favor of billionaire campaign donor Sheldon Adelson. Despite the fact that he said during that 2014 race that he intended to serve the full term he was seeking — “I want to be governor and that’s the only thing I’ve been focused on,” “My plan — if the voters approve — is to serve as governor for the next four years” – Walker was already actively preparing a 2016 run. He even wrote (well, sort of wrote, with the help of a politically-connected DC insider who had worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush) an autobiography/manifesto that was so transparent in its ambition that Glenn Beck’s The Blaze described as “the archetype of a book for a future Presidential candidate (written) without ever so much as hinting as to any intent to run for President.”
Walker is now well beyond the hinting stage. And the run is going well, so far, with the governor beginning to climb in the polls. One survey even puts him in first place among Iowa Republicans, one point ahead of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and further ahead of prominent prospects such as Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. No surprise there: Walker has a lot more experience contending for public office than most of the other Republicans who are preparing to run in 2016.
Walker ran his first campaign for elective office four years before Jeb Bush and eight years before Rubio. Walker was an elected official in Wisconsin seventeen years before Rand Paul was elected in Kentucky and nineteen years before Ted Cruz was elected in Texas. Walker was running even before party elders such as Mike Huckabee, who won his first election in Arkansas in the summer of 1993 – a month after Walker was first elected to the Wisconsin legislature.
It’s worth noting that, even when he was running in 1993, Walker was not considered “fresh.” When it endorsed him that year, the conservative Milwaukee Sentinel referred to Walker not as a newcomer but as what he already was decades ago: “an active Republican insider.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, February 1, 2015
“GOP Struggles With Phony Deficit Pretense”: Literally The Same People Who Ignored The Deficit In The Previous Decade
The perception of the Republican Party as the anti-deficit party used to be 100% true. A couple of generations ago, the GOP actually saw the deficit as a legitimate concern, and shaped their policy agenda accordingly. During the Eisenhower era, Republicans kept very high tax rates in place, first approved to pay for WWII, in the name of fiscal conservativism. Many Republicans balked at JFK’s tax breaks out of fear of higher deficits.
Obviously, those eras are long gone. The GOP’s shift began in earnest under Reagan, but became almost ridiculous under George W. Bush – an era in which Republicans put the cost of two wars, a Wall Street bailout, massive tax cuts, and Medicare expansion on the national charge card for some future generation to worry about.
But once the Obama era began, GOP leaders decided they cared about the deficit again. It was impossible to take seriously – we’re talking about literally the same people who ignored the deficit in the previous decade – but Republicans actively pretended they had both credibility and genuine concerns about budget shortfalls.
It’s hard not to notice, however, that much of the new congressional Republican agenda has a common thread. See if you notice what these measures have in common. On health care:
A Republican bill to change how Obamacare defines a full work-week would raise the deficit by $53.2 billion over the next decade.
And abortion:
The official budget scorekeeper of Congress says the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would ban abortions after 20 weeks, would increase Medicaid costs by as much as $400 million…. CBO officially estimates that the bill increases federal deficits by $75 million between 2014 and 2018, and $225 million between 2014 and 2023.
And immigration:
Senate Democrats threatened Thursday to block action on legislation funding the Homeland Security Department until Republicans jettison House-passed provisions that reverse President Barack Obama’s key immigration policies…. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the measure would increase the federal deficit by $7.5 billion over a decade.
How would Republicans prevent these proposals from increasing the deficit? With offsetting cuts? Higher taxes? Neither, actually – GOP lawmakers are content to approve their priorities regardless of the impact on the budget shortfall.
It seems about once a week or so, GOP lawmakers unveil some new priority, they learn their idea would make the deficit worse, and they quietly make clear they couldn’t care less.
All of which made it quite amusing to see Republicans complaining about President Obama’s upcoming budget plan, claiming that it – you guessed it – doesn’t go far enough to reduce the deficit that Republicans created in the Bush/Cheney era.
Danny Vinik is absolutely right:
Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this two-faced policymaking. If they care about the deficit, they have to care about it in all contexts. If not, then they shouldn’t justify their opposition to Obama’s policies on grounds that they increase the deficit. When Republican congressmen react to Obama’s budget and undoubtedly invoke the deficit, the media should ask them why they didn’t care about the deficit last year. Maybe there will be some accountability for a change.
Well, there certainly should be some accountability for a change, but Republicans seem awfully confident that that they’ll face no consequences whatsoever for their incoherent whining about the deficit. Given recent history and misplaced public perceptions, I suspect their expectations are probably correct.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 29, 2015
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