“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”: House Republicans To Democratic Committee On Women’s Health
First, House Democrats couldn’t get a woman onto the all-male panel at a contraception hearing last week.
Now, they’ve invited her to testify at their own unofficial hearing — and they say the Republicans won’t let them televise it.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi is organizing a Democratic Steering and Policy Committee event on Thursday to allow Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law student who tried to testify at last week’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, a chance to talk about the issue.
Pelosi aides say the House recording studio has denied a request to broadcast the event, “apparently” at the behest of the Republican-controlled Committee on House Administration.
Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill pointed to a July 2008 decision in which the committee lifted restrictions on use of the studio.
“If Chairman [Dan] Lungren has reversed this policy, he has done so in secret and not consulted with CHA Democrats,” Hammill said in an email. “This leaves us only to think that the House Republican leadership is acting out yet again to silence women on the topic of women’s health.”
Salley Wood, a spokeswoman for Republicans on the Committee on House Administration, said the policy wasn’t updated in 2008. Instead, she said the recording studio is operating under policies set in 2005.
Wood said the committee did not play a role in the decision not to broadcast this week’s hearing.
Pelosi’s office said this event is the first in which the studio has not covered a hearing or told Democrats that it couldn’t because of other commitments.
By: Jennifer Haberkorn, Politico, February 21, 2012
“The World We Live In”: Yes, Tax Cuts Increase The Deficit
On Thursday, House Republicans unanimously rejected a resolution from Rep. Gary Peters stating, among other things, that the Bush tax cuts added to the deficit. If you read the text they were voting on, it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t built for bipartisanship: It’s phrased to suggest that Bush was a liar and Republican governance was a fraud. That kind of thing doesn’t pick up votes across the aisle.
But there’s a more important economic debate here. Republicans occasionally flirt with the idea that tax cuts don’t increase deficits. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has said this directly. Speaker John Boehner has decreed that tax cuts don’t need to be offset, but spending proposals do. But there’s a very easy way to see that Republicans don’t really mean this: They believe that tax cuts cause deficits when Democrats are behind them.
The ongoing debate over the payroll tax is a good example. When Republicans proposed a payroll tax cut as stimulus in 2009, it wasn’t offset. When they agreed to it in the 2010 tax deal, it wasn’t offset. But since it has become the White House’s favored policy, House Republicans — the same House Republicans who passed the CUTGO rules stating that spending proposals had to be paid for but tax cuts didn’t — are insisting the payroll tax cut be offset.
Then there’s the Bush tax cuts. When Republicans tally up Obama’s deficits over the last few years, they’re adding $620 billion for the two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts. When they project his deficits for the next five years, they’re assuming the extension of the Bush tax cuts. And they’re doing so explicitly. Earlier in the week, I worked with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on a column summing up the projected budgetary impact of every single piece of legislation Obama had signed into law. In the end, my numbers showed, Obama has passed policies adding about a trillion dollars to the deficit. But Keith Hennessey, who directed the National Economic Council under George W. Bush, responded that I had ignored the trillions of dollars in deficits “from policies President Obama proposes to enact in the future (like extending most but not all tax cuts rates beyond 2012)”.
And Hennessey is right. Not about my analysis, which was restricted to actual policies, not proposed policies (should I also have subtracted $4 trillion from the deficit because Obama favors a deficit deal of that size?). But about the Bush tax cuts, which will add trillions of dollars to the deficit if Obama extends all or most of them in 2012.
Finally, there is a particularly odd claim you occasionally hear about the Bush tax cuts: Revenue increased in their aftermath. Dan Holler, the communications director for the Heritage Action, tweeted as much at me yesterday. “revenues increased between 2003 and 2007…how does @ezraklein argue Bush policies ‘pushed revenues’ down?”
This relies on mixing up the effects of inflation, economic growth, and taxes. The normal way to measure how much revenues a given tax regime is pulling in is to look at taxes as a percentage of GDP. In 2001, taxes revenues were 19.5 percent of GDP. In 2002, they fell to 17.6 percent of GDP. In 2003, 16.2 percent of GDP. In 2004, 16.1 percent of GDP. Some of that is the 2001 recession. But at no point in Bush’s presidency, and at no point since, have taxes returned to 19 percent of GDP.
Or, to put it slightly differently, if tax cuts actually increased revenues, then it would have been absurd for George W. Bush to propose tax cuts as a way of paying down the surplus. In that world, tax cuts would have made the surplus larger, and given the government even more of the people’s money. We would end up in a fiscal paradox, with the government constantly trying to give back its surplus, but ending up with an even larger surplus as a result. But that’s not the world we live in.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, February 3, 2012
“A Model Of Deception”: For House Republicans, A Game Of Debt Charades
Lawmakers went home for the holidays and got an earful from constituents about their juvenile behavior in Washington.
So, in their first major act of 2012, House Republicans picked up exactly where they left off: They staged a duplicitous debate in which they pretended that they were going to deny President Obama permission to increase the government’s borrowing limit.
The pretense had been clear since last summer, when 174 House Republicans voted for a budget deal that guaranteed that the debt limit would continue to increase this year unless two-thirds of the House and Senate voted otherwise — a practical impossibility.
But that didn’t stop many of those same 174 Republicans from marching to the floor Wednesday afternoon to vote for a resolution “disapproving” of the very same debt-limit increase they had already blessed. It was a model of deception: claiming to oppose something they had guaranteed would take effect.
“My resolution that is before this chamber will send a message that the constant borrowing from our children, our grandchildren, must come to an end,” declared Rep. Tom Reed (N.Y.), one of the 174 Republicans who voted to allow the borrowing last summer.
“During my time in Congress, I voted nine times against raising the debt limit because it was not tied to spending controls. This is another time to say no,” argued Rep. Don Manzullo (R-Ill.), who said yes last year to the increase he voted against on Wednesday.
“If we do nothing, American prosperity will drown in debt,” said Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (Pa.), another of the 174 Republicans who had authorized the drowning.
“The culture of Washington must be reformed from the ground up,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) thundered in opposition to the debt-limit increase to which he consented last summer. “The future of our nation depends on it.”
Actually, if the culture of Washington is to be reformed, a good place to start would be for Kinzinger and his colleagues to be more honest about their shenanigans.
The role of calling out Republicans for their two-faced behavior fell on Wednesday to one of their own, conservative Rep. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), who, unlike most of his colleagues, was perfectly consistent: He opposed increasing the limit last year, and he continued to oppose it on Wednesday.
“This vote has been called a charade,” Flake said on the floor. “That is true. It is. Let’s face it.”
Flake, one of the few grownups in the chamber, was not done with his fellow Republicans. “I think we have to admit that even if the Senate had passed the House-passed budget, the so-called Ryan budget, we would still have to raise the debt ceiling,” he reminded them. “I don’t think anybody really disputes that. We are going to have to raise the debt ceiling again and again.”
Then Flake did something truly heretical: He reminded Republicans that “we were headed toward this cliff long before the president took control of the wheel.”
What Flake said was demonstrably true: Both parties created the debt mess, and to fix the problem both would have to be honest. Instead of being honest, however, House Republicans were staging a show so that they could tell voters they opposed the very debt limit hike they had authorized.
Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) accused the Republicans of donning “flip-flops.”
“I do prefer Crocs, if anybody cares,” Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) retorted.
Apparently, most of the 174 Republicans who blessed the debt-limit increase last year were embarrassed about going to the floor to argue against it, because most of those who spoke were from that GOP minority who voted against the debt-limit increase last year, too.
“We should never have passed that Budget Control Act the way we did,” said Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who voted no last summer. As a result, he said, Obama is “raising the debt ceiling without us being able to do a thing about it. We made a big mistake.”
Maybe they made a big mistake. Or maybe they did the right thing last year in reaching an agreement that kept the federal government from defaulting.
Reed, the floor leader for Republicans on Wednesday, wanted to have it both ways. “It’s so important, in my opinion, for the future of this nation, the future of the world,” he pleaded, with an urgency that he apparently lacked last summer. “The national debt is a serious threat to our very existence as an American nation.”
Reed and 232 fellow Republicans then voted to “disapprove” of the debt-limit increase — well short of the two-thirds majority needed to overcome a presidential veto. The House’s first legislative act of 2012 had been utterly pointless — which was just the point.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 18, 2012
Top Tea Party Republican Admits To GOP Hostage Strategy
GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa is one of the leading spokespeople for the Tea Party wing of the House GOP. With the national press continually asking King whether he’ll be making an endorsement in the Iowa caucuses, he has been built up into something of an important GOP figure.
So it’s good to see that King is candidly admitting that the House Tea Party wing has been employing the threat of a government shutdown as nothing more than a deliberate hostage strategy designed to wring maximum concessions from Democrats.
King made the concession in an interview with Laura Ingraham. Dems are highlighting the interview because King bashes House Speaker John Boehner for his weak leadership, but the bolded portion below is the real news here:
KING: We have not lead in a clear way. American people don’t know what House Republicans believe in, and they surely don’t know what we’re willing to fight for. And I am as disappointed as the public is…
It’s clear to me that Speaker Boehner made a decision, either before, but I am convinced it was at least shortly after the election last November, a year ago last November, that we would not be in a position where we would be blamed for shutting down the government … that’s the only place where you bring the leverage to this Congress, to take on Harry Reid and Barack Obama, is you have to be willing to face a shutdown and you have to have the debate among the American people.
INGRAHAM: You think that would have helped the Republican Party and you guys would be in a better position today if the government had been shut down?
KING: The shutdown isn’t the point so much as, I don’t want the shutdown either. But if you are afraid of the shutdown you can’t have the confrontation and you lose every negotiation along the way.
And there you have it! During each impasse — the first government shutdown fight; the debt ceiling debacle; the payroll tax cut showdown — we keep being told that Tea Partyers really are crazy enough to allow the worst to happen. During the government shutdown fight, we were even told that Tea Partyers viewed that outcome as a positive. Their willingness to take us over a cliff is why Dems simply must make the concessions they’re demanding.
But now a top Tea Party leader has given away the game, admitting that not even Tea Partyers want a shutdown. Creating the impression that they’re willing to let it happen is only about winning maximum concessions in negotiations. Let’s hope Dems keep this in mind the next dozen times this happens.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, January 3, 2011
“The Langoliers Are Coming”: What Boehner Faces In 2012 After Payroll Tax Debacle
In the immediate aftermath of the GOP’s payroll tax debacle, a handful of conservative House Republicans publicly attacked their leaders — particularly Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).
“I am disappointed that our Republican leadership in both the House and Senate chose a course of political expediency rather than standing on conservative principle,” said Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) in an official statement.
Others appealed to Fox News, where conservatives and Republicans feel more comfortable expounding on party/movement contretemps.
“He’s (Boehner) got a big problem when he comes back,” one anonymous congressman claimed. “He may have a hard time keeping his Speakership after this.”
“We were hung out to dry by our leadership,” said another unnamed member.
The list goes on. But the holidays calmed the backlash, and with a week’s hindsight a consensus of sorts has emerged among party strategists, aides (current and former) and congressional scholars. Not all agree on the question of how well or poorly Boehner handled the situation. But though Boehner’s 2012 won’t be easy, those House conservatives who were seeing blood last week are likely to be disappointed again.
“I don’t think his leadership is going to be taken away from him over the course of the next year,” said Norm Ornstein — a Congress expert at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “But I’m expecting a pretty difficult year ahead for him next year.”
“Going into next year he has to reassert his authority going into the payroll tax debate, and frankly other debates,” said a former senior House aide. “In addition to that he will most likely take a conference-wide stance on the payroll tax fight and will work to fight and win.”
Boehner’s 2012 depends to a huge extent on how much the GOP conference is still spoiling for a fight. If they’re chastened by the horrendous month they had — and thus resigned to ceding the payroll tax issue to the Democrats — then Boehner will have it pretty easy. The payroll tax cut will be extended through the end of the year, and, in a sense, his original judgment will have been vindicated. His members won’t lead the party astray again. But if a substantial number of Republicans return from recess breathing fire, and try once again to use the expiring payroll tax cut to extract massive concessions from Democrats then Boehner and the rest of the GOP are likely in for a politically costly battle.
“When you start with the Republicans rejecting even a dime of taxes on millionaires and you want to take money out of other programs that benefit the middle class or poor people, you’re going to have a tough time doing this,” Ornstein said. “The other part is the Republicans in the House settled on a narrative to justify their action. They said they want a full year payroll tax cut. The fact is a very substantial share of those Rs don’t want anything. They don’t want any payroll tax cut.”
This is correct — and it’s worth recalling that GOP leaders originally solved that problem by tying the payroll tax cut to the Keystone XL oil pipeline. But they already got that — and now that Republicans have built a consensus for a yearlong payroll tax cut almost by accident, it’s unlikely Democrats are going to be willing to concede much of anything to them.
“He tried to throw in this lever, which was this pipeline. Well, they got it,” Ornstein said. “The incentive for Obama to give in more is pretty much zero.”
Despite the unfavorable dynamic for the GOP, most see the worst-case scenario for him as a leadership challenge … in 2013 (assuming the GOP retains its majority in the 2012 elections).
“[Y]ou’re always going to have squeaky wheel members who are never going to be satisfied,” the senior aide said. “And there may be some members who don’t like Boehner who are using it as a way to complain.” However, if the dissent starts creeping beyond that rump in the next couple weeks, “then he’s got a big problem,” the aide says. “[But] I doubt that’s going to happen.”
By: Brian Beutler, Talking Points Memo, December 29, 2011
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