“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
“Drag-Racing Off A Political Cliff”: Republicans Attack Immigrants While Putting America In Danger
The House of Representatives’ Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill, which is really a law seeking the mass deportations of undocumented people, including children, died on the Senate floor, victim of arithmetic certainty.
Mathematical reality seems to be a challenge to the GOP House majority. While most Americans have heard about the 60-vote rule in the U.S. Senate that impacts most legislation — the cloture/filibuster, as it is commonly known — House Republicans insist in passing bills that cannot make that threshold, and are subsequently dismayed that their legislation dies an ignominious death.
Yet once again, and this would now seem to be par for the course for Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) House, Republicans have passed a bill that, with zero support of Senate Democrats, failed to meet the basic 60-vote threshold — three times.
It has been clear for some time that Democrats will not support the liquidation of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Moreover, should such a bill pass by some deus ex machina event, the president would veto it.
So why insist on passing a bill that cannot become law? One must assume that the potency of a quixotic quest to achieve the impossible is irresistible to many members of the Republican caucus in the House. Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) seemed to insist that two plus two does not equal four when he told The Hill that “There’s not a Plan B, because this is the plan.”
In other words, after the mass deportation bill crashed and burned in the Senate, the House has no other plan, no other path forward to fund America’s shield from terrorism, Homeland Security.
Showing the triumph of ideology over logic, The Hill further reports that Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) said before the Senate vote that: “[M]any of us agree that we should stand behind the one bill that we sent over there. Most of us feel that way. … Anything less than that, we’re not going to get any better result anyway. So why not just go for what’s really right?”
Of course, the obvious “better result” would be not to put America’s security at risk, and instead pass a clean DHS funding bill that would keep the nation safe. Immigration can always be tackled as a separate issue by the Republican-controlled Congress.
In fact, Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) recently told me on my radio show that the House leadership has given immigration-reform Republicans encouragement to develop a set of sweeping immigration reform bills. So at least in the pro-arithmetic wing of the Republican Caucus, there is a reality-based path forward to deal with immigration without the perennial government shutdown threat — implicit in Scalise’s “not a Plan B” comment — that has become Republicans’ go-to tactic for forcing through their agenda when they fail to muster the votes necessary to pass legislation in both chambers.
It would be refreshing to see the big House Republican majority have as much passion for governing as they do for deportation. As Americans look at our society, polling clearly suggests that bread-and-butter issues dominate the agenda of the people. The economy, of course, and education, healthcare and the sense of economic insecurity that hangs like a shadow over most American families are the issues that should be tackled by a giant majority with ambitions to govern for more than two years.
I have yet to see one poll in which Americans rank mass deportations of undocumented immigrants as a top priority. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine that Americans favor such deportations over the continued funding and smooth operation of the country’s principal anti-terrorist agency, DHS.
Ironically, the party that has claimed the mantle of being the true fighters against a global jihadist threat is willing to drag-race off a political cliff to deport people rather than fund Homeland Security.
This is a choice that has both practical and symbolic resonance. The practical impact is obvious: Even one day, contrary to Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart’s (R-Fla.) jaunty declaration otherwise, when DHS is not funded is one day too many. Republicans willfully weakening America’s national security would be irresponsible, bordering on seditious.
And the political and symbolic effects would also be notable. Will Americans easily forget that Republicans bet with their safety, indeed the safety of the nation, for the unachievable policy goals of deporting millions of people?
Perhaps we’re seeing here the inherent weakness of a Republican majority so divided among ideologies and passions that it is literally incapable of governing for the benefit of the nation.
At the very least, we are witness to the fact that even GOP leaders such as Rep. Scalise are a little weak on the universal truths of basic arithmetic.
By: Fernando Espuelas, Univision America Host; THe Blog, The Huffington Post, February 6, 2015
“A Dynamic GOP Often Bemoan’s”: Don’t Mess With Government Giveaways To The Well-Off
The Obama administration has given up on its plan to remove the tax benefits of 529 college investment accounts, which under current law allow parents to put money away, then withdraw it to pay for their children’s education without paying any taxes on the profits. Republicans not only basked in what looked like a White House defeat, but were emphatic in their defense of the 529 tax break: John Boehner called the proposal “a tax hike on middle-class families.”
As often happens with a punctured trial balloon, we say afterward, “How could they not have known this would never fly?”
If you want to know whether an idea like this has any chance of getting support in Congress, the first question to ask is, who is going to be harmed? The 529 proposal was targeted at what may be the single most dangerous constituency to anger: the upper middle class. That’s because they’re wealthy enough to have influence, and numerous enough to be a significant voting block.
The administration’s proposal may not have been policy genius, but it was certainly defensible. While 529 plans are open to anyone, they give their greatest benefit to those who have the disposable income to make substantial contributions to them, which of course are the wealthy and near-wealthy. While different surveys have produced slightly different figures (some are discussed here), it’s clear that most of the tax benefit was flowing to parents with six-figure incomes who could afford to pay taxes on the profits of their 529 accounts.
The administration’s idea was to increase other tax credits for education alongside removing the 529 benefit, so that more tax benefits would go to those who need them more. If officials had been thinking more about the potential backlash, they might have instead proposed taking away the 529 benefit only for those with incomes over some high level like $200,000 a year. But they didn’t, perhaps because that would have been another layer of complexity to the tax code, and one of their rationales for this proposal was simplifying the available tax benefits for education.
Whatever the reason, this is what they came up with, and the details of the proposal made its demise inevitable. Not only was it opposed by Republicans, even Democrats didn’t like it; Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi personally lobbied the President to drop it, and had encouragement from Chris Van Hollen, the ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee. Is it a coincidence that both members — Pelosi from San Francisco, and Van Hollen from Montgomery County in Maryland — have lots of wealthy and upper middle class constituents who have no doubt taken advantage of 529 benefits? Probably not.
The Republicans who are crowing about the White House’s retreat ought to remind themselves that this is yet another illustration of a dynamic they often bemoan: that it’s easy to give people a government benefit, but much harder to take it away once it’s in place. And while they sneer in disgust at the moochers who get food stamps or Medicaid, the program they’re now celebrating is a government giveaway, too, just one that is mostly given away to people who don’t need it.
Here’s the real lesson from this whole affair: If you want to create a politically bulletproof government benefit, like the 529 program or the mortgage interest deduction (which costs the government about $70 billion a year), just make sure it’s technically open to anyone, but that the chief beneficiaries will be people who are doing well. They’ll squawk if it ever gets threatened, and it’s an absolute certainty that their representatives in Congress — Democrat and Republican alike — will hear them loud and clear.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 29, 2015
“GOP Wants To Define Rape… Again”: How Lindsey Graham Reawakened The Ghost Of Todd Akin
Ah, Lindsey Graham. The South Carolina senator who says he’s thinking about running for president no doubt thought he was helping the GOP get beyond its meltdown over its 20-week abortion ban bill, which leadership dropped unexpectedly when some GOP congresswomen balked, by asking antiabortion zealots attending the “March for Life” to help him “find a way out of this definitional problem with rape.”
One major issue with the bill was the way it defined rape: a women would have to have made a police report in order to get an abortion under the bill’s rape exception. (Katie McDonough has the details here.) Most rape victims don’t report the crime.
So Graham went to the “March for Life” today and came clean with the group, which is seething over its betrayal by GOP leadership. There’s going to be some kind of rape exception in the bill, and he needs their input to shape it.
“I’m going to need your help to find a way out of this definitional problem with rape,” Graham told the marchers, according to Dave Weigel. ”We need to find a consensus position on the rape exception. The rape exception will be part of the bill. We just need to find a way definitionally to not get us into a spot where we’re debating what legitimate is. That’s not the cause. We’re not here debating legitimate rape. We’re talking about saving babies at 20 weeks.”
So there it is again, the GOP’s lust for getting into the gritty details of defining rape, to make sure slutty women aren’t using rape exceptions to get around various types of abortion bans. That’s what former Rep. Todd Akin was getting at in 2012, when he talked about women rarely becoming pregnant as a result of “legitimate rape,” because “a woman’s body has a way of shutting that whole thing down.” As you’ll recall, instead, women shut the GOP down that November. Republicans don’t want that to happen again in 2016.
The funny thing is, clearly Graham thinks he’s smarter than Akin: he insists he doesn’t “want to get us into a spot where we’re debating what legitimate is.” But he doesn’t seem to understand that the whole effort to “define” rape, which he’s apparently now spearheading, is precisely about deciding whether a woman’s claim of rape is “legitimate” or not.
At its heart, this Republican project is predicated on the belief that women lie about rape, but Republicans can outsmart them. If some Republican women believe that requiring women to make a police report is draconian, then Graham is searching for another way to define a woman’s rape as legitimately deserving of an exception to their 20-week abortion ban.
Rep. Renee Ellmers, who supported the very same bill in 2013, had second thoughts this time around. “We got into trouble last year, and I think we need to be careful again; we need to be smart about how we’re moving forward,” Ellmers told National Journal. ”The first vote we take, or the second vote, or the fifth vote, shouldn’t be on an issue where we know that millennials — social issues just aren’t as important [to them].”
So Ellmers is not exactly the picture of integrity here. She’s not worried about passing a terrible bill that could hurt women; she’s worried about how it looks to millennial voters.
Still, there looks to be a real split between GOP congressional men and women over the issue. Only women came forward to take their names off the bill; then male leadership acquiesced to withdraw it from consideration. Reportedly the party had the votes to pass the bill in the House at least, but Speaker John Boehner and others were concerned about the “optics” of ignoring women in the caucus.
I guess that’s a kind of progress for women’s rights, albeit tiny. But in walks Lindsey Graham to try to mansplain the right way to handle this whole rape “definition,” and even as he thinks he’s helping, he’s making his party’s problems much worse.
I never thought Graham had a prayer of winning the presidency, or even the GOP nomination, but his chances just got a lot worse. Republicans did well in 2014 by avoiding Akin-like controversies over defining rape and holding forth on the intimate workings of women’s bodies generally. It seems they just can’t help themselves, and that’s good for Democrats generally in 2016.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 22, 2015
“The Biggest, Most Important 2016 Debate”: Writing The Obituary Of Supply-Side Economics
It’s now shaping up that wages and the condition of the middle class are going to be the dominant issues as we enter this first phase of the 2016 slog. Don’t take it from me, or even from Elizabeth Warren. Speaker John Boehner said as much (well, almost) on the day he opened the new session of Congress.
This is a very big deal, and it’s about more than our usual, tug-of-war politics. Boehner’s mention of wage stagnation was clearly opportunistic, because it’s a current problem that can be hung around the President’s neck. But middle-class wage stagnation is much more than an Obama problem. It’s our main economic reality for 30-plus years now.
The first chart in this article tells the basic story. Since 1979, American workers’ productivity has increased by 80 percent. The income of the top 1 percent has increased 240 percent. And the average American wage, adjusted for inflation, has gone up just a few percentage points, maybe 8 percent. It wasn’t always this way, and it isn’t nearly this bad in other advanced countries. The median wage in the United States today is around $50,000. If wages had kept pace with productivity gains, the median wage would be more than $90,000.
But look: It’s highly serendipitous that the wage problem is something the Republicans can use against Obama (at least for now). That means they’ll talk about it. What they’ll come up with in terms of solutions beyond tax cuts and deregulation is another matter, but the mere fact that they’ll talk about it means that both parties will be talking about it, and when both parties are talking about an issue, that issue tends to rise to the top of the charts.
On paper at least, this is great for Democrats, because wage stagnation is basically a Democratic issue, one that most voters would probably trust the Democrats to do a better job on than Republicans. Although of course, if it comes to be October 2016 and wages are still as flat as they’ve been since the crash, that could be a problem for the Democrats. So what they need to do is frame wages not as a post-crash, Obama-era problem, but instead to make sure Americans know that this is a deep historical problem, and that the moment to address it is right now.
To that end, you should know that this past week was a really good one for progressive economics in Washington (and none of it had anything to do with Warren!). Two major proposals were floated to address these problems. They’re real and meaty. And if events go in the direction I hope they do, their release in mid-January 2015 will be remembered as the moment when the debate turned.
First, on Monday, Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland put out a report by the Democratic staff of the House Budget Committee called “An Action Plan to Grow the Paychecks of All, Not Just the Wealthy Few.” All right, a bit cumbersome as a title. But give it credit anyway for getting to the point.
“I sat down with our team many months ago,” Van Hollen told me Thursday, “and we began to really tackle what would need to be done to deal with wage stagnation.” The plan is built around nine ideas. The one that’s gotten the most attention because of the obvious “class warfare” angle is the so-called Wall Street tax, a fee of .1 percent on financial market transactions.
But there are much more interesting ideas in the paper. The most notable may be a limit on the amount of deductions corporations can take for executive pay if those executives are keeping wages stagnant or laying off workers. “From 2007 to 2010,” Van Hollen says, “corporations took $66 billion in deductions on executive pay. That’s a huge amount of money. We say here that if you want to take a tax deduction, you’d better be giving your employees a raise.”
Van Hollen unveiled his proposals at the Center for American Progress on Monday. Then, two days later, CAP president Neera Tanden led a press conference unveiling a major new report on inclusive prosperity, under a panel co-chaired by Larry Summers and Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer for the British Labour Party. The CAP plan, which Tanden stressed is international in the scopes of its analyses and proposed fixes (hence Balls’s inclusion), is aimed at the same basic problem Van Hollen is shooting at—the need to raise the incomes of the middle class.
Summers, speaking at the press conference, emphasized an issue he’s been talking up for a long time, a “very substantial” increase in infrastructure investment. “When we can borrow at 1.8 percent in our own currency, and when construction unemployment approaches double digits,” as it is now, Summers said, “that’s the moment when Kennedy Airport should be fixed.”
No one is under the illusion that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are going to rush out and pass these measures. That isn’t the point. The point is to influence the direction of the debate, especially the presidential campaign debate. And that, of course, raises the question of the extent to which a certain former senator and secretary of state will embrace these ideas. Tanden was a longtime Hillary Clinton staffer. The imprimatur of Summers on these progressive ideas should raise Clinton’s comfort level with them. If Clinton runs on half of these ideas, and she’s signaling that she might, she’ll be a more progressive candidate than she was in 2008.
It’s hard to believe that we’ve lived with this kind of wage picture, this kind of raging unfairness, for nearly 40 years. Of course, part of the reason that we have lived with it for 40 years is that the Democratic Party wasn’t always much good at articulating a theory of economic growth that could counter the Republicans’ trickle-down argument. They’re finally finding their voice on this. And so, the real importance of the next election is not the Supreme Court, not climate change, not foreign policy, crucial as all those things are. It’s that it could write the obituary of supply-side economics.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 17, 2015
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