“The Long-Predicted Comeuppance”: House Falls Apart When The GOP Actually Tries To Implement The Ryan Budget Plan
House Republicans failed to pass an appropriations bill on Wednesday that would have cut federal transportation spending by $4.4 billion, halting their first attempt to implement the deep cuts to federal spending they have campaigned on and supported in the past.
In March, for the third time, House Republicans passed a budget outline written by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). This Ryan Budget included a radical re-do of Medicare for anyone 55 and under along with even more cuts than the previous two because it kept the sequestration in place, while shifting the defense cuts to other areas of the budget, and set a course for the budget to be balanced within 10 years.
“With this action, the House has declined to proceed on the implementation of the very budget it adopted three months ago,” said appropriations chair Hal Rogers (R-KY). “Thus I believe that the House has made its choice: sequestration — and its unrealistic and ill-conceived discretionary cuts — must be brought to an end.”
It’s much harder to vote for $4.4 billion in cuts when you — and your opponents — see how those cuts would actually hit your district and you know they have no chance of passing the Senate or being signed into law by the president.
Talking Points Memo‘s Brian Beulter called the collapse of the bill as the House breaks for its August recess “the GOP’s long-predicted comeuppance.”
“It might look like a minor hiccup, or a symbolic error,” he wrote. “But it spells doom for the party’s near-term budget strategy and underscores just how bogus the party’s broader agenda really is and has been for the last four years.”
Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) in a press conference on Thursday asserted that the votes were there to pass the bill, even though the bill’s manager, Tom Latham (R-IA), said, “I’m not sure that the votes were all there,” on Wednesday.
Boehner assured reporters that his caucus’ strategy was not falling apart, but he did call for a short-term continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown.
“It’s clear that we’re not going to have the appropriations bills finished by September 30,” Boehner said Thursday morning. “I believe a continuing resolution for some short period of time would probably be in the nation’s interest. But having said that, the idea of operating for an entire year under a CR is not a good way to do business. And I’ve been working with [appropriations chairman Hal Rogers] to try to find a way to actually do all of these appropriations bills. I think it’s important for Congress to do its work.”
It’s so important that Boehner has the House scheduled to be in session for nine whole days in September.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, August 1, 2013
“A One Trick Pony”: The Tea Party’s Unhealthy Obsession
Bipartisanship is a four letter word to the tea party zealots in Congress.
This week, Congressional Republicans dismissed President Obama’s proposal for corporate tax cuts out of hand. Last year, the president proposed the American Jobs Act, which House Republicans didn’t even consider despite the inclusion of tax cuts for businesses that hired new employees.
The president generously proposes and the House GOP caucus automatically disposes. Corporate tax cuts are the holy grail of the Republican Party, so the GOP’s resistance to the president’s proposals makes me think that House Republicans would automatically reject any proposal from the White House. I’m sure that Republicans would even find a reason to reject a plan initiated by Obama to build a memorial on the capital mall dedicated to conservative hero Ronald Reagan.
The president has given up on congressional Republicans, but he hasn’t given up on the American people.
In a series of speeches and proposals, Obama has discussed the urgent need to invest in projects that will put Americans back to work and rebuild our sagging infrastructure of bridges, water systems and transportation. The president has also explicitly denounced the politics of austerity as a road to prosperity. The sequester budget cuts have already slowed the economic recovery and the additional cuts that the tea party wants will reverse the fragile economic recovery.
The president has said that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s package of budget cuts, his so called Path to Prosperity, is really the path to austerity, which runs directly into the road of recession. Besides austerity, the only thing that congressional Republicans have to offer is the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which would, in turn, repeal the new restrictions against predatory health insurance company rip offs.
The public worries about jobs and the economy. Congressional Republicans have not only rejected the president’s constructive economic proposals, but they have an unhealthy obsession with destroying the progress created with the passage of the Affordable Care Act. House Republicans have voted 38 times to repeal the new health care reform law. Now, Tea Party zealots like Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, want to force repeal of the law with the threat of a government shutdown.
The GOP would be a lot better off if it would bet the farm on a key economic issue. Playing chicken with a government shutdown to repeal Obamacare is a risky wager. Voting 38 times against the health care law makes it seem like the GOP is a one trick pony racing in the wrong direction.
The president is also trying to move his own party away from the politics of austerity. Democrats can’t beat Republicans in a battle of green eyeshades. Eyeshades have their uses, but mostly they limit vision.
The Grand Old Party’s obsession with the Affordable Care Act not only ignores the public concern about the economy, but it has created an internal Republic party crisis. This week, Cruz laid into Republicans who don’t want to play a game of chicken with ACA repeal and a government shutdown. The battle between the Tea Party radicals and establishment Republicans will be prime time TV for the next few months.
Gridlock has the economy in a headlock. Hopefully President Obama can use his bully pulpit to move Republicans off the dime.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, August 1, 2013
“The Character Of The Caucus”: Thanks To Republican Intrasigence, It’s All About 2016 Now
It wasn’t the House Republicans’ refusal to take up the president’s jobs plan before the last election. Or their reckless games with the debt ceiling when Paul Ryan’s budget called for trillions in fresh debt itself. Or House intransigence when it comes to the Senate’s bipartisan immigration fix. Or even its recent call to nix high, common school standards.
Not that these steps weren’t awful. But somehow they could be put down to “normal” petty politics. The “out” party never wants the jobs picture to improve before an election. The debt ceiling is one of a handful of “forcing devices” that pols of all stripes seize on in a town where nothing really has to happen. One can argue that immigration reform isn’t as urgent as, say, jobs. And stoking phony fears of a federal school takeover is the oldest slander in the book (never mind that these “common core” standards were adopted by states voluntarily, and that the world’s top-performing school systems all have something like them).
No, what finally made me lose it was House Republicans’ warped obsession with Obamacare. This fixation showcases so many noxious traits simultaneously that it reveals the ultimate character of the caucus.
At bottom, Obamacare is a moral assertion that it is wrong when a wealthy nation has 50 million people without health insurance, when medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy for families and when millions of luckless souls are unable to get coverage because they have preexisting conditions. The House GOP today says these are not real problems.
Obamacare addressed these problems with precisely the mechanism that conservative thinkers and Republican policymakers favored (subsidies to buy insurance from competing private carriers with a requirement that everyone be in the insurance pool). Yet the House GOP effectively has said: Even if you adopt the approach our party favors for a problem we used to say was real — a problem that our presidential nominee addressed successfully in his state — we still can’t be with you. We have to damn you as un-American. We have to deceive the public about your aims and methods. We have to do everything in our power to stop you from using our preferred approach to bring a measure of security to the middle class.
It’s the most perverse, irredeemable bait-and-switch since Lucy pulled the football away from Charlie Brown. Even Lucy didn’t do it 39 times.
I’ve long been a critic of the House GOP. But something in their poisonous Obamacare stance has made me snap. It’s one thing to think you can’t do business with these people. It’s another to realize these people aren’t operating in the same moral and economic universe.
So here we are. The only question for those seeking American renewal is what will break this gridlock. The only certain answer is that the president’s speech Wednesday will not. Obama is calling for an economy built from the “middle out” (hats off to progressive activists Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu, who pushed this smart messaging so relentlessly for two years that it’s become the official Democratic creed).
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 24, 2013
“Hoping For The Best”: In The Race For The Future, Virginia Foxx And House Republicans Are Willing To Tolerate Defeat
There’s been a fair amount of talk on Capitol Hill recently about student loans and interest rates, which led to an unsatisfying compromise in the Senate. But as part of the larger discussion, a notable lawmaker said something interesting that stood out for me.
Getting American kids into college without saddling them with massive debt shouldn’t be the government’s job, according to a prominent House Republican and possible 2014 Senate candidate. “It is not the role of the Congress to make college affordable and accessible,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said Wednesday morning during a committee markup of legislation that would halt federal officials from regulating for-profit educational institutions.
Foxx likened federal standards for things like the definition of a credit-hour to totalitarianism.
Well, sure, of course she did. She’s Virginia Foxx.
But it’s worth noting that there’s nothing inherently incorrect about her views on the federal role in higher education. It’s an inherently subjective question — some people believe federal policymakers have a role in making college affordable and accessible, some don’t. Foxx has her opinions on the matter, I have mine.
I’ve long hoped, however, that this generates a larger conversation about the future of the United States as a global superpower. There’s a spirited competition underway, and we have real rivals who’d be delighted to see us settle for second place. To remain on top, we’re going to need an educated workforce and electorate, and with this in mind, it makes sense if Americans were represented by a Congress that prioritized access to affordable higher-ed.
Or perhaps the nation prefers Foxx’s vision: some states will help young people get degrees; some won’t; Congress doesn’t care. Under this approach, education is of relative importance, but it’s just not a national priority.
Long-time readers have no doubt seen me mention this before, but I often think about some specific remarks President Obama made in 2009. He’d just returned from a trip to East Asia, and Obama shared an anecdote about a luncheon he attended with the then-president of South Korea.
“I was interested in education policy — they’ve grown enormously over the last 40 years. And I asked him, what are the biggest challenges in your education policy? He said, ‘The biggest challenge that I have is that my parents are too demanding.’ He said, ‘Even if somebody is dirt poor, they are insisting that their kids are getting the best education.’ He said, ‘I’ve had to import thousands of foreign teachers because they’re all insisting that Korean children have to learn English in elementary school.’ That was the biggest education challenge that he had, was an insistence, a demand from parents for excellence in the schools.
“And the same thing was true when I went to China. I was talking to the mayor of Shanghai, and I asked him about how he was doing recruiting teachers, given that they’ve got 25 million people in this one city. He said, ‘We don’t have problems recruiting teachers because teaching is so revered and the pay scales for teachers are actually comparable to doctors and other professions.’
“That gives you a sense of what’s happening around the world. There is a hunger for knowledge, an insistence on excellence, a reverence for science and math and technology and learning. That used to be what we were about.”
Right. The United States used to be about a lot of things.
But as we discussed in April, many American policymakers have shifted their focus away from insisting on excellence and towards, well, a Virginia Foxx-like attitude. Countries like South Korea and China can have their hunger for knowledge; we’ll just keep cutting education spending and hope for the best.
We’re the wealthiest country on the planet by an order of magnitude, so maybe we can just coast for a while, neglecting key priorities. Maybe we can stop looking at areas like education, energy, health care, and transportation as national problems — the way our competitors do — and can instead hope states figure something out. Someday. With some elusive resources.
Put it this way: while some countries are insisting on excellence in education, our country shrugs its shoulders while kids get thrown out of pre-schools because of budget cuts and young adults get priced out of college. Which side of the ocean is preparing for the future?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 26, 2013
“Beneath Any Reasonable Standards Of Elected Officials”: The Unprecedented And Contemptible Attempts To Sabotage Obamacare
When Mike Lee pledges to try to shut down the government unless President Obama knuckles under and defunds Obamacare entirely, it is not news—it is par for the course for the take-no-prisoners extremist senator from Utah. When the Senate Republicans’ No. 2 and No. 3 leaders, John Cornyn and John Thune, sign on to the blackmail plan, it is news—of the most depressing variety.
I am not the only one who has written about House and Senate Republicans’ monomaniacal focus on sabotaging the implementation of Obamacare—Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, Jon Chait, Jon Bernstein, Ezra Klein, and many others have written powerful pieces. But it is now spinning out of control.
It is important to emphasize that this set of moves is simply unprecedented. The clear comparison is the Medicare prescription drug plan. When it passed Congress in 2003, Democrats had many reasons to be furious. The initial partnership between President Bush and Sen. Edward Kennedy had resulted in an admirably bipartisan bill—it passed the Senate with 74 votes. Republicans then pulled a bait and switch, taking out all of the provisions that Kennedy had put in to bring along Senate Democrats, jamming the resulting bill through the House in a three-hour late-night vote marathon that blatantly violated House rules and included something close to outright bribery on the House floor, and then passing the bill through the Senate with just 54 votes—while along the way excluding the duly elected conferees, Tom Daschle (the Democratic leader!) and Jay Rockefeller, from the conference committee deliberations.
The implementation of that bill was a huge challenge, and had many rocky moments. It required educating millions of seniors, most not computer-literate, about the often complicated choices they had to create or change their prescription coverage. Imagine if Democrats had gone all out to block or disrupt the implementation—using filibusters to deny funding, sending threatening letters to companies or outside interests who mobilized to educate Medicare recipients, putting on major campaigns to convince seniors that this was a plot to deny them Medicare, comparing it to the ill-fated Medicare reform plan that passed in 1989 and, after a revolt by seniors, was repealed the next year.
Almost certainly, Democrats could have tarnished one of George W. Bush’s signature achievements, causing Republicans major heartburn in the 2004 presidential and congressional elections—and in the process hurting millions of Medicare recipients and their families. Instead, Democrats worked with Republicans, and with Mark McClellan, the Bush administration official in charge of implementation, to smooth out the process and make it work—and it has been a smashing success.
Contrast that with Obamacare. For three years, Republicans in the Senate refused to confirm anybody to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the post that McClellan had held in 2003-04—in order to damage the possibility of a smooth rollout of the health reform plan. Guerrilla efforts to cut off funding, dozens of votes to repeal, abusive comments by leaders, attempts to discourage states from participating in Medicaid expansion or crafting exchanges, threatening letters to associations that might publicize the availability of insurance on exchanges, and now a new set of threats—to have a government shutdown, or to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, unless the president agrees to stop all funding for implementation of the plan.
I remember being shocked when some congressional Democrats appeared to be rooting for the surge in troops in Iraq to fail—which would mean more casualties among Americans and Iraqis, but a huge embarrassment for Bush, and vindication of their skepticism. But of course they did not try to sabotage the surge by disrupting funding or interfering in the negotiations in Iraq with competing Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish power centers. To do so would have been close to treasonous.
What is going on now to sabotage Obamacare is not treasonous—just sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials with the fiduciary responsibility of governing. A good example is the letter Senate Republican Leaders Mitch McConnell and Cornyn sent to the NFL, demanding that it not cooperate with the Obama administration in a public-education campaign to tell their fans about what benefits would be available to them and how the plan would work—a letter that clearly implied deleterious consequences if the league went ahead anyhow. McConnell and Cornyn got their desired result. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell quickly capitulated. (When I came to Washington in 1969-70, one of my great pleasures was meeting and getting to know Charles Goodell, the courageous Republican senator from New York who took on his own president on Vietnam and was quietly courageous on many other controversial issues. Roger Goodell is his son—although you would not know it from this craven action.)
When a law is enacted, representatives who opposed it have some choices (which are not mutually exclusive). They can try to repeal it, which is perfectly acceptable—unless it becomes an effort at grandstanding so overdone that it detracts from other basic responsibilities of governing. They can try to amend it to make it work better—not just perfectly acceptable but desirable, if the goal is to improve a cumbersome law to work better for the betterment of the society and its people. They can strive to make sure that the law does the most for Americans it is intended to serve, including their own constituents, while doing the least damage to the society and the economy. Or they can step aside and leave the burden of implementation to those who supported the law and got it enacted in the first place.
But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one’s breath away.
By: Norm Ornstein, The National Journal, July 24, 2013
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