“They Had To Take Me Down”: A Democratic Win Of The House In 2014 Would Put Nancy Pelosi Back In Charge
You remember the Republicans’ 2010 midterm campaign message: Nancy Pelosi, engulfed in flames, demon-like. Nancy Pelosi, in charge, bossing you around with her crazy liberal values. An official “Fire Pelosi” bus tour sponsored by the Republican National Committee, and the specter of her leadership invoked in ad after ad.
All of this was a key Republican strategy in taking back the House, and while there were lots of reasons the Democrats lost and Pelosi was dethroned, it achieved the desired result. Since the next big electoral battle will be control of the House in 2014, and a Democratic win would presumably put Pelosi back in charge, expect to see more Pelosi boogeyman-ing.
“It didn’t bother me, I figured they thought I was effective and therefore they had to take me down,” Pelosi told Salon at the premiere Thursday night of “Fall to Grace,” her daughter’s HBO documentary on former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey. Still, she worries about the message it sends to other women who might be considering a run.
“What does concern me about it is that women that we want to be involved in politics, women like you, women who have options to do other things and we say, ‘Come over here and do this!’ And they’re saying, ‘No, I don’t want to subject myself to that. Why would I do that? I have a great life, I have plenty of opportunities.’ So what I’ve said is that if you lower the role of money in politics and you increase the level of civility, you will have more women running for office, elected to office, and that would be a very wholesome thing for our country.”
Of course, Pelosi is not as lonely as she once was on the Hill, and the more female leadership is normalized, the less likely such attacks are to resonate. As the New York Times notes in a story today on female senators, a critical mass is slowly but surely building, even if it creates long lines on the Senate floor’s bathrooms and female senators are still occasionally asked what they’re doing there. The piece also cites a recent American Journal of Political Science study, “When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men?” which found that “while men may choose to obstruct and delay, women continue to strive to build coalitions and bring about new policies.” Pelosi’s dealmaking as speaker can rankle, including on the left. It also, though, recently earned her the following designation from Vice President Joe Biden on the signing of the Violence Against Women Act: “If you ever want a partner to get anything important done, call Nancy Pelosi.”
In the meantime, Pelosi seems to be enjoying the Republican scramble to appeal to women and people of color, which they now concede is necessary to winning anything but a majority of gerrymandered House districts. (Or, to use their own words, “address concerns that are on women’s minds in order to let them know we are fighting for them.”) Does she have any advice for the other party?
“Respect,” she said. “I think respect would be a good place to start. We are fortunate in our House Democratic caucus — women, minorities, LGBT community members make up a majority of the caucus. We don’t need anybody to teach us how to speak to women, Hispanics, blacks, because that’s who we are. And not only do they have a seat at the table, they have a seat at the head of the table, because over half of our chairmen-to-be, our senior Democrats — people who would be chair if we were the majority — are women and minorities.”
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, March 22, 2013
“Laying Out The Best Options”: The Progressive Case For The Chained Consumer Price Index
Liberals are going to have to decide if they’ll stick with the president if the plan he floated this week to cut Social Security benefits by switching to the so-called chained CPI becomes a reality, and it’s not an easy choice. Progressive pressure groups and lawmakers are furious with Obama for proposing the cuts, as I noted yesterday, but House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said she’s confident that her caucus would ultimately support the plan if the president asks them too.
The case against moving to the chained CPI is easy to make: It represents a real cut to seniors’ Social Security benefits, which has so far been a non-starter. Even advocates of the switch acknowledge this. But since we may have to swallow it, it’s worth laying out the best progressive argument possible in favor of the chained CPI. We’re not saying it’s right, but it’s a case that should be made.
And the argument does exist. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, one of the most well-respected liberal think tanks on policy analysis, has endorsed the change. As has the Center for American Progress, Washington’s most powerful liberal think tank, which recommended the chained CPI in its comprehensive Social Security reform plan.
The key question is this: Do you believe Obama can get a deal without cutting anything from social safety entitlement programs, or is he going to have to do something? If you fall in the former camp, then the chained CPI is dead on arrival. But, if you think we’re going to have to cut entitlements at some point, then the chained CPI is probably the least bad option of a menu of bad possibilities, including raising the Medicare retirement age, which is the most likely alternative and would be far more harmful.
On its own, the chained CPI is unquestionably bad, but as part of a deal to raise taxes, extend unemployment benefits and do the other good things Obama wants to do, and if it includes major mitigating tweaks, it can be made almost palatable.
First of all, it’s important to note that the CPI formula doesn’t affect just Social Security. Rather, it appears in hundreds of different places on both the revenue and spending side of government. Almost every government retirement, disability and income-support program pays annual cost of living adjustments that are linked to the CPI. On the tax side, dozens of elements, from the standard deduction to limits on contributions to 401K plans to the earned income and child tax credits, are adjusted every year based on the CPI.
The whole point of the CPI is make sure benefits keep pace with inflation on the one hand, and to ensure that people are paying enough taxes as inflation changes on the other hand. So while the chained CPI cuts benefits, it also raises revenues in a way that’s palatable to Republicans. The change is estimated to save about $220 billion over 10 years, $72 billion of which would come from increased tax revenue.
Moreover, both CBPP and CAP, along with many independent economists, believe the chained CPI is a more accurate measure of inflation than the current index, called the CPI-W. The CPI is calculated by measuring price changes in a basket of 250 common consumer goods, but only the chained CPI takes into account that people shift their buying habits in response to price changes. Adjusting for that, the chained CPI grows about .3 percent slower than the current rate.
Liberals rightly note that this substitution effect isn’t really true for the very poor and very old, who spend a disproportionate amount of their income on non-substitutable goods like healthcare and housing. That’s why the only acceptable way to shift to the chained CPI is to include exemptions for some of the most vulnerable groups.
There are two major changes necessary. First, add a bump in benefits to the very old, who are more likely to have high healthcare bills and to have exhausted their savings that supplemented their Social Security income. Second, exempt Supplemental Security Income, which serves the poorest, disabled and blind but still often leaves people below the poverty line. SSI benefits should actually be increased, but that would require a different effort, so it should at the minimum be exempted from the CPI change.
Obama has indicated that he will demand these changes. The Simpson-Bowles and Rivlin-Domenici deficit reduction plans, which both included a move to the chained CPI, also included similar caveats. Nancy Pelosi said the changes would be included in a final deal: “The details of this are not all ironed out, but they all mitigate for helping the poorest and neediest in our society, whether they’re Supplemental Security Income recipients, whether they’re 80 and older or whether they’re truly needy in-between.”
With the changes, CBPP says, “we believe that the chained CPI is a reasonable component of a comprehensive package to put the budget on a sustainable course.”
But wait, aren’t there more progressive ways to change Social Security? Yes, but.
Dylan Matthews yesterday laid out three alternative ways to cut the plan that is far progressive in the economic sense and appealing to progressives in the political sense. Two of the plans are different ways to reduce benefits for the wealthy, while the third option would be to raise or eliminate the tax cap, which prevents any income over about $110,000 from being taxed. These plans would all save far more money than the chained CPI, and do it all by hurting only the rich, unlike the CPI change. Great, right?
There are two major political problems with either approach. The first is in the short term: Republicans will never support raising or eliminating the tax cap as it would be a huge tax increase. Even Democrats would have trouble embracing it, since it would mean raising taxes on people who make under $250,000 a year, whose taxes they’ve promised not to hike.
The second problem is in the long term. Social Security was designed to be not a welfare program but a social insurance program. You get out what you paid into it over many years of working, with only marginal changes to redistribute income downward. Making it a welfare program would undermine the programs long-term political strength.
This was a cornerstone of FDR’s vision for the plan. He had to defend the plan from attacks from the populist left, which called for more aggressive redistribution from general taxation. Some means testing may be possible without transforming the perception of the program into a welfare plan, but it’s a potentially dangerous precedent.
Perhaps the best argument against the chained CPI is that even if it is a more accurate measure of inflation, Congress should not cut benefits because it would be almost impossible to restore or raise them (which is probably what actually needs to happen) through a change in the benefit structure. This would require an enormous congressional fight and Republicans would almost surely kill it, so the current CPI should be preserved, the thinking goes. This is convincing. The only plausible response is a good government argument that the CPI should be used to calculate inflation, not monkey with benefits in a backdoor way.
To Paul Krugman, the plan put forward by Obama is barely acceptable, and anything more would be unacceptable, but he’s not convinced the chained CPI is an outright deal killer.
Since the chained CPI may become a reality, liberals should at least begin thinking critically about it, even if just to decide once again that it is unacceptable.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, December 19, 2012
“Lying Isn’t A Sin, It’s A Business Plan”: Mitt Romney, In The Land Of Many Falsehoods
Among the attributes I most envy in a public man (or woman) is the ability to lie. If that ability is coupled with no sense of humor, you have the sort of man who can be a successful football coach, a CEO or, when you come right down to it, a presidential candidate. Such a man is Mitt Romney.
Time and time again, Romney has been called a liar during this campaign. (The various fact-checking organizations have had to work overtime on him alone.) A significant moment, sure to surface in the general election campaign, came during a debate held in New Hampshire in January. David Gregory, the host of “Meet the Press,” turned to Newt Gingrich and said, “You have agreed with the characterization that Governor Romney is a liar. Look at him now. Do you stand by that claim?”
Gingrich did not flinch. “Sure, governor,” he started off, and then accused Romney of running ads that were not true and, moreover, pretending he knew nothing about them. “It is your millionaire friends giving to the PAC. And you know some of the ads aren’t true. Just say that straightforward.”
Me, I would have confessed and begged for forgiveness. Not Romney, though — and herein is the reason he will be such a formidable general-election candidate. He concedes nothing. He had seen none of the ads, he said. They were done by others, he added. Of course, they are his supporters, but he had no control over them. All this time he was saying this rubbish, he seemed calm, sincere — matter of fact.
And then he brought up an ad he said he did see. It was about Gingrich’s heretical support for a climate-change bill. He dropped the name of the extremely evil Nancy Pelosi. He accused Gingrich of criticizing Paul Ryan’s first budget plan, an Ayn Randish document whose great virtue is a terrible honesty. (We are indeed going broke.) He added that Gingrich had been in ethics trouble in the House and ended with a promise to make sure his ads were as truthful as could be. Pow! Pow! Pow! Gingrich was on the canvas.
I watched, impressed. I admire a smooth liar, and Romney is among the best. His technique is to explain — that bit about not knowing what was in the ads — and then counterattack. He maintains the bulletproof demeanor of a man who is barely suffering fools, in this case Gingrich. His message is not so much what he says, but what he is: You cannot touch me. I have the organization and the money. Especially the money. (Even the hair.) You’re a loser.
There are those who maintain that President Obama, too, is a liar. The president’s recent attack on Ryan’s new budget proposal sent countless critics scurrying to their thesauruses for ways to say lie — “comprehensively misrepresenting” is the way George F. Will put it. (He also said Obama “is not nearly as well educated as many thought.”) Obama does indeed sometimes play politics with the truth, as when he declared that a Supreme Court reversal of his health care law would be unprecedented. He then backed down. Not what he meant, he said.
But where Romney is different is that he is not honest about himself. He could, as he did just recently, stand before the National Rifle Association as if he were, in spirit as well as membership, one of them. In body language, in the blinking of the eyes, in the nonexistent pounding pulse, there was not the tiniest suggestion that here was a man who just as confidently once embodied the anti-gun ethic of Massachusetts, the distant land he once governed. Instead, he tore into Obama for the (nonexistent) threat the president posed to Second Amendment rights — a false accusation from a false champion.
A marathon of debates and an eon of campaigning have toughened and honed Romney. He commands the heights of great assurance, and he knows, as some of us learn too late in life, that the truth is not always a moral obligation but sometimes merely what works.
He often cites his business background as commending him for the presidency. That’s his forgivable absurdity. Instead, what his career has given him is the businessman’s concept of self — that what he does is not who he is. This is what enables the slumlord to be a charitable man. This is what enables the corporate raider to endow his university. Business is business. It’s what you do. It is not who you are. Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan.
By: Richard Cohen, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 17, 2012
“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
Newt Gingrich’s Revisionist History
For a man who likes to tout his expertise as a historian, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has a decidedly revisionist approach when it comes to his own history.
In 1997, Gingrich became the only speaker in history to be reprimanded by the House of Representatives. He agreed to pay $300,000 to settle the matter, which involved using charitable groups to promote his political views and submitting misleading documents to the House ethics committee.
The ethics charges sound like ancient history. They involve dreary matters of tax law. But the episode is worth revisiting because it offers insights into Gingrich’s bombastic, push-the-boundaries style. More troubling, in recent days, Gingrich has been blatantly dishonest in his self-interested rewriting of this history, dismissing the ethics sanction as the action of “a very partisan political committee.”
As Gingrich relates the story, “The Democrats filed 84 charges against me; 83 were dismissed. The only one which survived was the fact that my lawyers had written a letter inaccurately and I signed it.”
Referring to California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who served on the panel, Gingrich said last week, “If she was in the middle of it, how nonpartisan and just do you think the process was?”
How partisan? The ethics panel, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, voted 7 to 1 in favor of the reprimand. The dissenting Republican, Lamar Smith of Texas, said Gingrich had made “real mistakes” but called the penalty “way too severe.”
The House agreed to the reprimand by a similarly overwhelming margin, 395 to 28. “The penalty is tough and unprecedented,” the committee chairman, Connecticut Republican Nancy Johnson, said on the House floor. “It is also appropriate.”
Another Republican on the ethics panel, Porter Goss of Florida, said he found “the fact that the committee was given inaccurate, unreliable and incomplete information to be a very serious failure on [Gingrich’s] part.” Indeed, Gingrich’s own lawyer told the ethics committee that the speaker “recognizes the serious nature of the charges and the seriousness of his admission.”
The ethics investigation stemmed from a Gingrich-inspired enterprise during the early 1990s to spread his conservative message — and engineer a Republican takeover of Congress — through a satellite broadcast and a college course that would also be televised.
Both efforts were connected with GOPAC, a political action committee that Gingrich then headed, and were funded by tax-deductible contributions to various nonprofit groups.
For example, the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation, originally designed to help inner-city youth, served as the vehicle to fund the satellite broadcast. GOPAC lent money to the Lincoln foundation to take over the program, then steered its donors to the foundation and was ultimately repaid by the charitable group.
In Gingrich’s defense, the Internal Revenue Service concluded that the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which underwrote the college course, should not lose its charitable status. After initially revoking the tax-exempt status of the Lincoln foundation, the IRS agreed to reinstate it.
Yet the tax questions show Gingrich’s characteristic willingness to skirt close to the edge, if not beyond. Having been involved in a previous case about the permissible use of charitable groups, Gingrich “had ample warning that his intended course of action was fraught with legal peril,” the committee’s report found. The speaker’s own tax lawyer said he would have advised against the “explosive mix.”
The ethics committee ultimately concluded that Gingrich was, at the very least, reckless in not seeking tax advice.
Then there was the matter of repeated incorrect statements made to the committee as part of the effort to persuade it to dismiss the case. Gingrich twice assured the committee — incorrectly — that GOPAC played no role in developing or financing the college course.
Gingrich blamed the inaccurate statements on his lawyer and said he did not review the letters carefully enough. The four members of the investigative subcommittee found that there was “reason to believe” that Gingrich knew the information was wrong. But they settled for Gingrich’s admission that he “should have known” it was false.
“The violation does not represent only a single instance of reckless conduct,” the report found. “Rather, over a number of years and in a number of situations, Mr. Gingrich showed a disregard and lack of respect for the standards of conduct that applied to his activities.”
This is the bipartisan judgment of his peers. Is Gingrich really the man Republicans want to be their nominee?
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 13, 2011
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