Tea Party Puts The Screws To House Republicans Over Debt Ceiling
Tea party activists have taken some lumps lately, but they’re not going down without a fight.
With TV ads, petitions and grassroots lobbying, tea party organizers are gearing up to send an absolutist message to Capitol Hill: Don’t raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances. Tea party activists have already clashed publicly with some of the 87 GOP freshmen they helped elect last year, and they’re warning that Republicans who don’t keep their fiscal promises will pay a political price.
“We will remove as many incumbents as we can that do not do the job they were hired to do,” Darla Dawald, national director of the tea party group Patriot Action Network, said in an e-mail. “We are watching every member of Congress, their votes, position and language.”
A newly formed conservative political action committee has released an ad opposing a debt ceiling increase and disputing the $100 billion in cuts that House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, touted in the recent budget agreement. The ad cites the Congressional Budget Office finding that cuts totaled less than $400 million. But its real target is President Obama and his “massive deficit spending.”
The ad was released by the new Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama PAC, a spinoff of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, the party of the Tea party Express. The latter is about to launch its own national TV ad campaign opposing a debt ceiling increase, said Amy Kremer, who chairs Tea party Express. The PAC raised and spent $7.7 million in the 2010 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Another conservative activist group, Grassfire Nation, is gathering signatures from its 1.8 million members on a petition opposing “any increase in the legal federal debt limit,” to be delivered by hand in the coming weeks to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. A Grassfire Nation poll found that close to 80 percent of its members opposed raising the debt ceiling, even if conditions such as spending cuts or caps were attached.
“It’s no secret that the tea party movement’s unhappy,” said Kremer. “You’re seeing people on a local level really upset with their congressmen and women.” Reps. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., Tom Price, R-Ga., and David Schweikert, R-Ariz., are among the House Republicans who have fielded flak from conservative bloggers, demonstrators, or town hall hecklers upset that Congress isn’t acting faster to bring down the deficit.
“There’s a frustration that we can’t move faster,” said Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, referring to the tea party movement. “But also an understanding that their job is to say: Let’s do more, let’s do more, let’s do more.”
The debt ceiling vote will be a key test of both the tea party and of the GOP on the threshold of the 2012 election. Technically, the federal government will run out of money in mid-May, but Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has signaled that accounting adjustments may give Congress until early August to actually vote.
It’s an open question how successful the tea party will be, both in the debt ceiling fight and on the campaign trail next year. Of the GOP freshmen, who’ve played a pivotal role in the unfolding budget drama, one bloc would raise the debt ceiling on the condition of substantive budget reforms or spending cuts, sources say. Another bloc opposes a debt ceiling increase flat out. And about a third are undecided.
Tea party activists are up against expert and administration warnings that failing to raise the debt limit could send the economy and the stock market into a tailspin. The tea party’s star, moreover, may be fading.
A Capitol Hill protest in March to demand more budget cuts proved underwhelming. The movement’s national leaders, most notably former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., have drifted to the fringes of the GOP White House nominating contest. A couple of tea party PACs unveiled to much fanfare last year–Ensuring Liberty and Liberty First–have fizzled. And GOP leaders have signaled that certain tea party goals–repealing the health care law, partially privatizing Medicare–may or may not be on the table in ongoing debt limit negotiations.
It “absolutely is not true” that the movement is losing steam, countered Kremer. “You’re not seeing the great big rallies that you did before, because people are engaged on a local level doing things.”
Virginia tea party activist Jamie Radtke, who’s launched a Senate campaign for the seat now held by Democratic Sen. Jim Webb, concurred that the movement is shifting from a national to a local focus: “There is a strong desire in the tea party movement to keep the tea party local.”
Radtke predicted that activists will take the fight over the debt limit to the mat. “The GOP is on probation, because under President Bush they spent a lot of money, and added $3 trillion to the national debt,” she said, adding: “You will see that the tea party will have no problem whatsoever challenging the very freshmen they put in.”
Such warnings still make some on Capitol Hill very nervous. But as Republicans struggle between idealism and pragmatism, the GOP–and the tea party–might soon face a moment of truth.
By: Elizabeth Newlin Carney, Contributing Editor, National Journal Daily, May 9, 2011
Big Government Bailout Worked
Don’t expect to see a lot of newspapers and Web sites with this headline: “Big Government Bailout Worked.” But it would be entirely accurate.
The actual headlines make the point. “Demand for fuel-efficient cars helps GM to $3.2 billion profit,”declared The Post. “GM Reports Earnings Tripled in First Quarter, as Revenue Jumped 15%,” reported the New York Times.
Far too little attention has been paid to the success of the government’s rescue of the Detroit-based auto companies, and almost no attention has been paid to how completely and utterly wrong bailout opponents were when they insisted it was doomed to failure.
“Having the federal government involved in every aspect of the private sector is very dangerous,” Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) told Fox News in December 2008. “In the long term it could cause us to become a quasi-socialist country.” I don’t see any evidence that we have become a “quasi-socialist country,” just big profits.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) called the bailout “the leading edge of the Obama administration’s war on capitalism,” while other members of Congress derided the president’s auto industry task force. “Of course we know that nobody on the task force has any experience in the auto business, and we heard at the hearing many of them don’t even own cars,” declared Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) after a hearing on the bailout in May 2009. “And they’re dictating the auto industry for our future? What’s wrong with this picture?”
What’s wrong, sorry to say, is that you won’t see a news conference where the bailout’s foes candidly acknowledge how mistaken they were.
The lack of accountability is stunning but not surprising. It reflects a deep bias in the way our political debate is carried out. The unexamined assumption of so much political reporting is that attacks on government’s capacity to do anything right make intuitive sense because “everybody knows” that government is basically inefficient and incompetent, especially when compared with the private sector.
Government failure gets a lot of coverage. That’s useful because government should be held accountable for its mistakes. What’s not okay is that we hear very little when government acts competently and even creatively. For if mistakes teach lessons, successes teach lessons, too.
In the case of the car industry, allowing the market to operate without any intervention by government would have wiped out a large part of the business that is based in Midwestern states. This irreversible decision would have damaged the economy, many communities and tens of thousands of families.
And contrary to critics’ predictions, government officials were quite capable of working with the market to restructure the industry. Government didn’t overturn capitalism. It tempered the market at a moment when its “natural” forces were pushing toward catastrophe. Government had the resources to buy the industry time.
What’s heartening is that average voters understand that broad assaults on government provide better guidance for the production of sound bites than for the creation of sensible public policy. That’s why House Republicans are backpedaling like crazy on their plans to privatize Medicare — even as they pretend not to.
Conservatives really believed that voters mistrusted government so much that they’d welcome a chance to scrap Big Government Medicare and have the opportunity to purchase policies in the wondrous health insurance marketplace. Don’t people assume that anything is better than government?
But there were deep potholes on the road to a market utopia. Put aside that the Republican budget wouldn’t provide enough money in the long term for the elderly to afford decent private coverage. The truth is that most consumers don’t have great confidence in the private insurance companies, with which they have rather a lot of experience.
When it comes to guaranteeing their access to health care in old age, most citizens trust government more than they trust the marketplace. This doesn’t mean they think Medicare is without flaws. What they do know is that Medicare does not cut people off in mid-illness and that its coverage is affordable because government subsidizes it.
It’s axiomatic that government isn’t perfect and that we’re better off having a large private sector. It ought to be axiomatic that the private market isn’t perfect, either, and that we need government to step in when the market fails. The success of the auto bailout and the failure of the Republicans’ anti-Medicare campaign both teach the same lesson: The era of anti-government extremism is ending.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 8, 2011
Are There Any Pro-Choice Republicans Left In The House?
Yes, America, there are pro-choice Republicans. But after this week, there’s some question about whether are any left in the U.S. Congress.
H.R. 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act” that passed the House May 4 is not likely to become the law of the land. But the fact that it passed the House with unanimous Republican support means the pro-life members of the party, which includes all the House leadership, can tout their attachment to social issues, even after the supposedly fiscal-first tea party movement helped take over the GOP last year.
For pro-choice Republicans, the vote means embarrassing questions. Basically every pro-choice group says H.R. 3 is an anti-abortion bill that goes far beyond the government’s current prohibitions on abortion funding and actually raises taxes on women who want to seek abortion coverage in their private insurance plans.
That’s a double-whammy for pro-choice Republicans. One, raising taxes under any circumstances is a no-no for anyone in the modern GOP. And, two, the bill has been cast as the biggest assault on abortion rights in years.
Voting against such a measure, then, would seem like a no-brainer. Except it wasn’t. None of the about a dozen House GOP members of the Republican Majority For Choice PAC considered as allies, voted against H.R. 3. In fact, all of them voted yes.
“We opposed the bill, we considered it an anti-choice, big government intrusion and politically we think it’s a bad move for the Republicans to keep focusing on this,” K.R. Ferguson, executive director of the PAC told TPM.
Still, she says that she’s not prepared to say the members who voted for it have given up their pro-choice credentials. She pointed to the refusal of some Republicans to sign on to the House plan to defund Planned Parenthood as the kind of thing that will keep the PAC’s endorsement coming.
“I would not say we would stop supporting any of the members who took this vote,” Ferguson said. She said that though it’s hard to rectify being pro-choice and voting for H.R. 3, support from her PAC isn’t “an all or nothing” prospect.
There are still Republicans who run as pro-choice members, despite the fact that the party in the House is about as far from supporting a woman’s right to choose as it could possibly be these days.
Rep. Robert Dold (R-IL) touted his endorsement from Ferguson’s PAC back in 2010. Ferguson said he might get it again, despite his vote for H.R. 3. Dold’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Though repeatedly expressing her extreme disappointment with the vote, Ferguson suggested Dold and his fellow pro-choice Republicans really had no choice.
“The extreme who was pushing this bill did a masterful job of spinning it as a no taxpayer fundings for abortion [measure] and putting these members in an almost impossible position,” she said. “We don’t like it, we will continue to call on our members to try to educate them” on the truth of the bill.
Illinois Republican Rep. Judy Biggert, a past co-chair of the House pro-choice caucus, says that her vote for H.R. 3 was completely consistent with her pro-choice views.
“Rep. Biggert is pro-choice. She supports a women’s right to chose, but she does not support public funding for abortion,” spokesperson Zachary Cikanek told TPM. “Abortion is a private decision, and it should be paid for with private dollars – without government involvement. That’s why she voted for H.R. 3.”
Cikanek noted that Biggert “has stated publically that she thinks Congress should be keeping its attention focused on spending and jobs, and not spending its time locked in debate on divisive social issues.”
Not all pro-choice advocates are willing to accept that kind of answer. NARAL President Nancy Keenan told TPM that a pro-choice vote for H.R. 3 is a political oxymoron. Though her group is non-partisan, NARAL hasn’t endorsed any Republicans serving in the current House, despite the fact that members like Biggert claim to be supporters of the cause.
“No member of congress can vote for this egregious bill and be considered pro-choice,” Keenan said. “Bottom line.”
By: Evan McMorris-Santoro, Talking Points Memo, May 7, 2011
Health Care Hypocrisy: How Paul Ryan And House Republicans Are Contradicting Themselves Over Medicare
In the debate over the House Republicans’ budget plan championed by Representative Paul Ryan, it’s been remarkable to watch the contortions and contradictions in the GOP on the issue of health care. The cornerstone of the Republican critique of the Affordable Care Act over the past year or so has been that it would lead to rationing. While Republicans initially manufactured lies about this issue—anyone remember death panels?—they eventually focused on one provision in the bill that was focused on cutting costs: the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). As specified in the legislation, the IPAB is a 15-member board of medical experts who are appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and tasked with cutting costs in the Medicare system, unless Congress acts to alter the proposal or discontinue automatic implementation. The legislation also specifies that a goal of such cost-cutting should be to actually improve access for beneficiaries. At a time when rising health care costs are a concern for families’ pocketbooks and the federal budget, the IPAB was a means to maintain public oversight of Medicare but insulate it from the normal politics of congressional decision-making, thus helping ensure that best medicine was the driver of cost reductions.
Republicans, however, viciously attacked the IPAB as being a bunch of unelected bureaucrats making decisions to cut costs at the expense of the quality of care seniors would receive. The rhetoric became quite heated: Congressman Phil Roe went so far as to call the IPAB the “real death panel.” Other Republicans, like Representative John Fleming, likened the IPAB to communism, saying, “It will take you back to the old Soviet Union, that’s the way they did things—with a central planning committee that set prices, targeted costs.”
Now, more than a year after health care reform passed, Paul Ryan, facing stiff opposition to his plan to end Medicare as we know it, has taken to attacking the IPAB as a way to rebut his critics. He’s arguing that, while his plan would keep Medicare the same for current beneficiaries, the IPAB “puts a board in charge of cutting costs in Medicare” that will “automatically put price controls in Medicare” and “diminish the quality of care seniors receive.” It’s this sort of dishonest vitriol that has led to 73 House Republicans, as well as some Democrats, to cosponsor legislation to eliminate the IPAB.
What’s fascinating about the posture of these cosponsors is that it runs into direct conflict to the vote the House took mere days ago on the overall Ryan budget, which passed thanks to broad Republican support. Indeed, the budget, which the co-sponsors voted for, changes Medicare into a voucher program in which seniors can only choose from among private insurance options, eliminating the public insurance that is currently at the heart of Medicare. In other words, rather than public officials, elected or unelected, making decisions as to what is covered in Medicare, the Republicans just voted to more or less privatize the program. So, , after all of their complaining about how the IPAB moved too far away from public accountability, they’ve just proposed eliminating all such accountability, insisting instead that private insurance companies know best.
Would Americans really feel better with insurance companies deciding whether they or their parents get the care they need? Probably not. The truth is that Republicans are not actually worried about accountability or giving Americans more health care options. They are not even worried about cutting costs: Medicare has a much lower cost per beneficiary than private health care now, so it makes no sense to privatize it in order to lower costs. What they are worried about is public health care; they can’t stand it—and are even willing to contradict themselves and hand people’s health over to unelected, private insurers to defeat it.
By: Neera Tanden, Chief Operating Officer, Center for American Progress, April 30, 2011
The Ryan Plan For Medicaid: Not Good For Low-Income Americans Or State Budgets
With Washington looking for ways to rein in costly entitlement programs and state governments struggling to balance budgets, conservatives have revived an old nostrum: turning Medicaid into a block grant program.
The desire for fiscal relief is understandable. Medicaid insures low-income people and in these tough economic times, enrollment and costs — for the federal government and state governments — have swelled.
Representative Paul Ryan, and the House Republicans, are now proposing to ease Washington’s strain by capping federal contributions. Like his proposal for Medicare, that would only shift the burden — this time onto both state governments and beneficiaries.
Still, some governors may be tempted. His plan promises them greater flexibility to manage their programs — and achieve greater efficiency and save money. That may sound good, but the truth is, no foreseeable efficiencies will compensate for the big loss of federal contribution.
Mr. Ryan also wants to repeal the health care reform law and its requirement that states expand their Medicaid rolls starting in 2014. Once again Washington would pay the vast bulk of the added cost, so states would be turning down a very good deal to save a lesser amount of money.
Here’s how Medicaid currently works: Washington sets minimum requirements for who can enroll and what services must be covered, and pays half of the bill in the richest states and three-quarters of the bill in the poorest state. If people are poor enough to qualify and a medical service recommended by their doctors is covered, the state and federal governments will pick up the tab, with minimal co-payments by the beneficiaries. That is a big plus for enrollees’ health, and a healthy population is good for everyone. But the costs are undeniably high.
Enter the House Republicans’ budget proposal. Instead of a commitment to insure as many people as meet the criteria, it would substitute a set amount per state. Starting in 2013, the grant would probably equal what the state would have received anyway through federal matching funds, although that is not spelled out. After that, the block grant would rise each year only at the national rate of inflation, with adjustments for population growth.
There are several problems with that, starting with that inflation-pegged rate of growth, which could not possibly keep pace with the rising cost of medical care. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that federal payments would be 35 percent lower in 2022 than currently projected and 49 percent lower in 2030.
To make up the difference, states would probably have to cut payments to doctors, hospitals or nursing homes; curtail eligibility; reduce benefits; or increase their own payments for Medicaid. The problems do not end there. If a bad economy led to a sharp jump in unemployment, a state’s grant would remain the same. Nor would the block grant grow fast enough to accommodate expensive advances in medicine, rising demand for long-term care, or unexpected health care needs in the wake of epidemics or natural disasters. This would put an ever-tightening squeeze on states, forcing them to drop enrollees, cut services or pump up their own contributions.
This is not the way to go. The real problem is not Medicaid. Contrary to most perceptions, it is a relatively efficient program — with low administrative costs, a high reliance on managed care and much lower payments to providers than other public and private insurance.
The real problem is soaring medical costs. The Ryan plan does little to address that. The health care law, which Republicans have vowed to repeal, seeks to reform the entire system to deliver quality care at lower cost.
To encourage that process, President Obama recently proposed a simplified matching rate for Medicaid, which would reward states for efficiencies and automatically increase federal payments if a recession drives up enrollments and state costs. The president’s approach is better for low-income Americans and for state budgets as well.
By: The New York Times, Editorial, April 30, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 