“The Public Be Damned”: GOP Senators Threaten Obstruction Unless Consumer Protection Bureau Is Weakened
When the Dodd-Frank financial reform law first passed, Senate Republicans refused to confirm a director for the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They promised to block any nominee — regardless of that nominee’s qualifications for the job — unless the Bureau was weakened and made subservient to the same bank regulators who failed to prevent the 2008 financial crisis.
President Obama was thus forced to recess appoint Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the Bureau’s first director. Now that Obama has renewed Cordray’s nomination, the Senate GOP is again promising to block any nominee unless the Bureau is watered down:
In a letter sent to President Obama on Friday, 43 Republican senators committed to refusing approval of any nominee to head the consumer watchdog until the bureau underwent significant reform. Lawmakers signing on to the letter included Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee.
“The CFPB as created by the deeply flawed Dodd-Frank Act is one of the least accountable in Washington,” said McConnell. “Today’s letter reaffirms a commitment by 43 Senators to fix the poorly thought structure of this agency that has unprecedented reach and control over individual consumer decisions — but an unprecedented lack of oversight and accountability.” […]
In particular, Republicans want to see the top of the bureau changed so it is run by a bipartisan, five-member commission, as opposed to a lone director.
They also want to see the bureau’s funding fall under the control of congressional appropriators — it currently is funded via a revenue stream directly from the Federal Reserve.
Republicans want to implement a commission (instead of a lone director) and subject the CFPB to the appropriations process in order to stuff it full of appointees with no interest in regulating and starve it of funds. The other financial system regulators that have to go before Congress for their funds already don’t have the resources to implement Dodd-Frank, thanks the House GOP, leaving large swathes of it unfinished. There are also a host of other reasons that the CFPB needs to be both independently funded and have a strong, independent director.
The CFPB has done important work on behalf of consumers, winning wide praise from consumer advocates and the financial industry. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have made it abundantly clear that they believe that blocking any and all nominees is an acceptable strategy.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, February 2, 2013
“The Enemy Within”: Who’s Trying To ‘Annihilate’ The GOP?
When John Boehner whined last week that Obama’s goal for his second term is to “annihilate the Republican Party” and “shove us into the dustbin of history,” he was working the party into a psychological state much like James Franco had to in 127 Hours: They’re getting ready to accept that they will have to sequester their arm with a dull knife.
Of course, Obama’s War on the GOP is about as real as the liberals’ War on Christmas—both are paranoid, apocalyptic fantasies marketed to drum up fear and self-pity on the right. Obama telling Republicans to “Please proceed” is no more tantamount to annihilating the GOP than chirping “Happy Holidays” is to eliminating Christmas.
Instead, this is a classic case of psychological projection. Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich, Frank Luntz, and senators Bob Corker, Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint, among other right thinkers, actually held a meeting the night of the 2009 Inaugural to plot to undermine Obama’s newborn presidency with nonstop obstructionism. The next year, Mitch McConnell said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” And yet, after these plans failed to block Obama’s re-election and instead cost the GOP a number of House and Senate seats to boot, here is Boehner saying his party is the victim of existential aggression.
Paranoid projection—whether subconscious or deliberate—is part and parcel of the GOP’s broader denial of so much of contemporary reality, whether it’s climate change, demographic change, macroeconomics or polls that don’t go their way.
But mostly, they deny who that black man claiming to be president really is. And so they’ve created an Imaginary Obama, who is just as crazily radical as the Ryan budget would be, if it were passed, or as Bush’s war in Iraq actually was. In one of the funnier attempts to portray Obama’s insidiously well-cloaked but devastatingly destructive nature, Breitbart.com wrote that by supporting gay rights in his Inaugural speech, the president had “bullied” the Supreme Court justices on the dais into going gay-friendly in their upcoming decisions.
It’s a short step from believing that Obama wants to decimate your party to believing he’s making your party choose hard-right fringe policies that will alienate voters. And as Jonathan Chait writes, moderate Republicans like David Brooks and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who resent the extremists but won’t break from their party, are particularly susceptible to this “pathological” notion.
The prevalent expression of this psychological pain is the belief that President Obama is largely or entirely responsible for Republican extremism. It’s a bizarre but understandable way to reconcile conflicting emotions—somewhat akin to blaming your husband’s infidelity entirely on his mistress. In this case, moderate Republicans believe that Obama’s tactic of taking sensible positions that moderate Republicans agree with is cruel and unfair, because it exposes the extremism that dominates the party, not to mention the powerlessness of the moderates within it.
Yes, Brooks wrote that Dems think Obama should “invite a series of confrontations with Republicans over things like the debt ceiling—[to] make them look like wackos willing to endanger the entire global economy.”
Chait:
Worse, argues Brooks, Obama is nastily choosing an agenda intended only to harm Republicans. Obama’s proposals on gun safety and immigration, he writes, are “wedge issues meant to divide Southerners from Midwesterners, the Tea Party/Talk Radio base from the less ideological corporate and managerial class.”
Brooks asserts, but does not actually explain, that Obama chose these issues for the purpose of dividing the opposition—as opposed to trying to cut down on mass murders and fix a huge field of broken policy.
What Obama does do, by being a politically moderate and emotionally calm leader with a beautiful family, is hold a mirror up to the chaotic and hysterical Republican leadership. This strikes them as very mean, and they blame Obama for what they see, Man of La Mancha style.
So now they are struggling to dream an Impossible Dream: taking back the political momentum by simply agreeing to the “poison pill” plan that the sequester was supposed to be, cutting $1.2 trillion from the budget spread equally between defense and domestic spending. The corporate end of the party will scream at those cuts, and fear the economic impact of austerity; the ultra base, now increasingly gerrymandered into scarlet congressional districts with little incentive to compromise, would get, given the $1.2 trillion Obama has already agreed to cut from the budget, something like the Ryan budget’s $2.4 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years. “I think the sequester’s going to happen,” Ryan said today on Meet the Press.
In a game of chicken like this one, the GOP has to convince us all that they mean it in order to win, so there may be a lot of play-acting here. But they also need to concentrate the minds of every Republican in the House to make the threat real. And nothing does that like the threat of “annihilation.”
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, January 27, 2013
“Oppose, Oppose, Oppose”: Why President Obama Is Right About The GOP
In a revealing interview with The New Republic that was published over the weekend, President Obama laid plain the strategic choice that he believes faces the Republican party heading into 2014 — and beyond.
“Until Republicans feel that there’s a real price to pay for them just saying no and being obstructionist, you’ll probably see at least a number of them arguing that we should keep on doing it,” the president said. “It worked for them in the 2010 election cycle, and I think there are those who believe that it can work again.”
While GOP strategists might dismiss Obama’s analysis of the way forward for their side as overly simplistic, there is considerable truth in what he says. And the direction the party decides to head on that very question will be a telling indicator of the nature of both the 2014 midterm elections and the 2016 Republican primary fight.
Remember back to the immediate aftermath of the 2008 election? Some Republicans, stunned by the breadth and depth of their defeats, began to talk about the need to reimagine the party to fit the modern American electorate.
Then came Obama’s economic stimulus plan and his health care law — not to mention the bank bailouts. The tea party was born and, with it, those within the GOP who regarded the 2008 election as a fluke won the day. The Republican Party united around its opposition to Obama and was rewarded (in spades) for doing so in the 2010 midterm elections.
(Sidebar: Many people — read: Democrats — blame Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) for articulating the “opposition at all costs strategy.” While McConnell did say the goal for the GOP and its voters was to make Obama a “one-term president,” he did so mere days before the 2010 election and, therefore, was not the strategic father, for good or bad, of the oppose-at-all-costs approach. Besides that, what McConnell was saying was that to accomplish the goals Republicans believed in, Obama would have to be removed as president, which is a somewhat indisputable notion.)
Riding high on that “oppose, oppose, oppose” strategy, Republicans galloped into the 2012 presidential election full of bravado and apparent momentum. Then the strategy started to fail. As much as Republican presidential candidates tried to shine a light on Obama and his policies, the debate kept coming back to Mitt Romney, his view of the world and what he would do as president. And Romney never came close to fully articulating that alternative vision.
Now, four years after some Republicans were pushing for a reexamination of what the party believes and why they believe it, it appears as though that reckoning is underway.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), in a speech last week at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting, said that “if this election taught us anything, it is that we will not win elections by simply pointing out the failures of the other side.” And already people including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (like Jindal a potential 2016 candidate) are pushing to break the partisan logjam on overhauling the country’s immigration laws.
The question for Republicans is whether that spirit — voiced by Jindal and Rubio among others — holds steady amid what will be an epic fight over debt and spending over these next few months. And it may not. Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, for example, said Sunday that he expects Congress to fail to reach a deal to avoid automatic across the board cuts known as the sequester.
The easiest path for Republicans will be to define themselves wholly in opposition to the president and what he proposes. And, such a path — as demonstrated by the 2010 midterm elections — could well have short-term political benefits.
But to sustain and to thrive as a party, Republicans almost certainly need to cut deals on matters of political necessity (immigration is the most obvious) while simultaneously staking out new ground with a rigorous — and positive — set of policy proposals.
The top leaders of the party are well aware of that reality. But do they have enough control over the rank and file to put it into practice between now and 2014?
Time will tell.
By: Chris Cilliza and Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, The Fix, January 28, 2013
“The Urgency Of Growth”: Congressional Doom-Mongers Need To End Their Campaign Of Government By Deadline And Emergency
If you care about deficits, you should want our economy to grow faster. If you care about lifting up the poor and reducing unemployment, you should want our economy to grow faster. And if you are a committed capitalist and hope to make more money, you should want our economy to grow faster.
The moment’s highest priority should be speeding economic growth and ending the waste, human and economic, left by the Great Recession. But you would never know this because the conversation in our nation’s capital is being held hostage by a ludicrous cycle of phony fiscal deadlines driven by a misplaced belief that the only thing we have to fear is the budget deficit.
Let’s call a halt to this madness. If we don’t move the economy to a better place, none of the fiscal projections will matter. The economic downturn ballooned the deficit. Growth will move the numbers in the right direction.
Moreover, the whole point of an economy is to provide everyone with real opportunities for gainful employment and economic advance — the generational “relay” that San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro affectingly described at last year’s Democratic convention. When we talk only about deficits, we take our eyes off the prize.
But there is good news. Gradually, establishment thinking is moving toward a new consensus that puts growth first and looks for deficit reduction over time. In the last few months, middle-of-the-road and moderately conservative voices have warned that if we cut the deficit too quickly, too soon, we could throw ourselves back into the economic doldrums — and increase the very deficit we are trying to reduce.
Here, for example, is excellent advice from the deservedly respected (and thoroughly pro-market) economic columnist Martin Wolf, offered last week in the Financial Times: “The federal government is not on the verge of bankruptcy. If anything, the tightening has been too much and too fast. The fiscal position is also not the most urgent economic challenge. It is far more important to promote recovery. The challenges in the longer term are to raise revenue while curbing the cost of health. Meanwhile, people, just calm down.”
“Calm down” is exactly what we need to do. We have been inundated with apocalyptic prophecies about our debt levels. While they come from the center as well as the right, Republicans are using them to turn the next two years into a carnival of contrived crises. These will (1) make normal governing impossible — no agency can plan when budgets are always up in the air; (2) distract us — we need to think about measures, such as an infrastructure bank, that would promote prosperity now and into the future; and (3) drive business people crazy — no enterprise would put itself through the contortions that are becoming part of Washington’s routine.
Only if you believe that deficits mean the end is near can any of this be justified. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, perfectly encapsulated the effort to diminish the importance of all else (including growth) when he declared recently that “deficit and debt” constitute the “transcendent issue of our era.”
No, it’s not. As Bruce Bartlett, the bravely dissident conservative economics specialist wrote a few days ago: “In fact, our long-term deficit situation is not nearly as severe as even many budget experts believe. The problem is that they are looking at recent history and near-term projections that are overly impacted by one-time factors related to the economic crisis and massive Republican tax cuts that lowered revenues far below normal.”
Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers warned in The Post that we can’t “lose sight of the jobs and growth deficits that ultimately will have the greatest impact on how this generation of Americans lives and what they bequeath to the next generation.” And economists at the International Monetary Fund have offered some honorable mea culpas about underestimating the damage that ill-timed austerity programs have done to growth — and to the fiscal positions of the nations affected by them.
You have to hope that President Obama will use his State of the Union message to speak forcefully for growth and the public investments that will foster it. But sensible people also need to rise up and tell the congressional doom-mongers that they have to calm down and end their wholly destructive campaign to turn our great system of self-rule into a government by deadline and emergency.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 27, 2013
“Time Is Running Out”: The GOP Needs To Figure Out Its Position On Entitlement Programs
The White House’s weekend ultimatum that Congress either lift the debt ceiling cleanly or take responsibility for default puts Republicans in a bind over their goal of reforming entitlement programs.
In ruling out all executive options, such as minting a high-value platinum coin, the White House put the onus on congressional Republicans to agree to raise the nation’s borrowing limit — without spending cuts or strings attached — or permit the first ever credit default.
President Obama has steadfastly rebuffed their calls to cut social spending in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, and Democratic leaders support his position.
“There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” said Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney.
“The President and the American people won’t tolerate Congressional Republicans holding the American economy hostage again simply so they can force disastrous cuts to Medicare and other programs the middle class depend on while protecting the wealthy.”
That leaves Republicans in a difficult position vis-à-vis their promise not to raise the debt ceiling without improving the long-run solvency of programs like Social Security and Medicare.
If they propose safety net cuts that Democrats oppose, they risk political blowback. If they back off, conservatives will accuse them of surrender on a top priority.
The situation has left Republicans flummoxed. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) lashed out at Democratic leaders after they sent a letter Friday calling on President Obama to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally if Republicans block congressional action.
“The Democrat leadership hiding under their desks and hoping the President will find a way around the law on the nation’s maxed-out credit card is not only the height of irresponsibility, but also a guarantee that our national debt crisis will only get worse,” McConnell said in a statement. He swiped Democrats for refusing to offer “any plan to break the spending habit that’s causing the problem.”
Republican leaders understand the risks of pushing near-term entitlement cuts without Democratic buy-in. During the fiscal cliff battle, they abstractly demanded scaling back entitlements but avoided putting specifics on paper. House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) failed fallback plan didn’t touch entitlements.
As he did then, McConnell is again calling on Obama to put forth a debt ceiling plan with spending cuts, in effect suggesting that the president be the one to call for scaling back the safety net.
The other option, backing down on entitlements, is also problematic after Republicans demoralized their anti-tax base by swallowing some $620 billion in tax increases to resolve the fiscal cliff. In accepting the deal, GOP leaders assured conservatives that the debt ceiling was where they would make their stand on retirement programs.
Achieving meaningful savings requires making unpopular cuts beyond what’s been considered recently. Policies under discussion in prior negotiations included reducing future Social Security benefits via Chained CPI and gradually raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67. Both amount to benefit cuts that the public opposes. And the savings they’ll produce would only address a fraction of the programs’ long-term solvency problems.
That’s the GOP’s dilemma in a nutshell: fulfilling their promise to their base requires pushing for something highly unpopular. And this time, not only are Democrats diligently refusing to provide them political cover, but forcing the issue would also require Republicans to court severe economic consequence as their price of political victory.
By: Sahil Kapur, Contributor, Business Insider, January 15, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 