“Exposing Republican Intransigence”: John Boehner Rejects Obama’s Offer To Cut Social Security
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) preemptively rejected President Barack Obama’s upcoming budget proposal Friday, slamming the president’s offer to cut Social Security as “only modest entitlement savings.”
President Obama’s budget plan, which he will send to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, will reportedly seek $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction through a combination of new revenues and spending cuts. The most controversial cut is the move to the chained consumer price index (“chained CPI”) for Social Security, which would significantly reduce annual cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security beneficiaries. President Obama has long suggested that he could support the measure, which would cut federal spending by about $130 billion over the next decade, only if Republicans agree to raise new tax revenues.
To many of the president’s liberal allies, such a proposal has been a non-starter. When he floated the idea in late 2012, many House Democrats warned that they would rather go over the “fiscal cliff” than accept the cut. Similarly, in an exclusive interview with The National Memo in March, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka vowed that America’s largest labor federation would oppose any budget deal that included chained CPI, saying the index is “another example of how Washington creates fancy-sounding phrases to mask stupid policies that only work for the rich.”
The public seems to stand with Trumka; recent polling suggests that Americans strongly oppose any Social Security cuts.
The budget reportedly includes several other cuts, such as $400 billion in health care savings (including additional means-testing for Medicare,) and $200 billion in cuts to farm subsidies, federal employee retirement programs, and unemployment compensation. Obama’s budget also aims to raise $600 billion in new revenues, including an increased cigarette tax, which would be used to finance the president’s proposal for universal pre-K.
“While this is not the president’s ideal deficit-reduction plan, and there are particular proposals in this plan like the CPI change that were key Republican requests and not the president’s preferred approach, this is a compromise proposal built on common ground, and the president felt it was important to make it clear that the offer still stands,” a senior Obama administration official told The Hill.
Obama’s offer to meet in the middle has already failed to move House Republicans, however. Not waiting for the full proposal to be released, House Speaker John Boehner quickly released a statement Friday blasting Obama’s plan.
“Despite talk about so-called balance, the president’s last offer was significantly skewed in favor of higher taxes and included only modest entitlement savings,” Boehner said. “In the end, the president got his tax hikes on the wealthy with no corresponding spending cuts. At some point we need to solve our spending problem, and what the president has offered would leave us with a budget that never balances.”
“If the president believes these modest entitlement savings are needed to help shore up these programs, there’s no reason they should be held hostage for more tax hikes,” Boehner added.
Although Boehner’s statement still completely ignores the $2.5 trillion in deficit reductions to which the White House has agreed since 2010, it does at least acknowledge that Obama is offering “entitlement savings” — even if Boehner rejects the compromise out of hand. This is a modest step in the right direction, considering that until this budget, Republicans have consistently denied that Obama has offered them anything at all.
In the end, that subtle shift may end up as the most significant result of Obama’s budget deal. Although the proposal has no real chance of becoming law — as evidenced by Boehner’s immediate rejection — making a highly publicized compromise offer will further expose the Republicans’ intransigence.
In March, President Obama reportedly offered congressional Republicans a choice: accept a deal that raised revenue in exchange for chained CPI and means-testing of Medicare, or walk away with no budget deal at all. In April, it appears that Boehner has made his decision.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, April 5, 2013
“Remembering The Affair To Remember”: In New Bipartisan Spirit, Have Members Of Congress Tell Each Other About Their Affairs
It’s kind of nice to have Mark Sanford back.
Perhaps not if you’re from South Carolina. It is my strong impression that many South Carolinians are tired of their former governor, who so famously snuck off to Argentina for some extramarital recreation while his aides claimed he was camping on a national hiking path. A resident of Columbia, the state capital, told me that he had been in Peru, on a train to the legendary ruins of Machu Picchu, when a local resident asked him where he hailed from.
At the mention of the words “South Carolina,” the Peruvian nodded happily. “Appalachian Trail!” he cried.
After skulking around in political exile for several years, Sanford staged a sort of a comeback on Tuesday, winning the Republican nomination for his old House seat. It was a triumph of sorts, although one that only required defeating a former county legislator who did not live in the district, in a race that attracted the excited participation of about 10 percent of eligible citizens.
At his victory party, Sanford said the campaign had been “an amazing journey.” Since the great disaster of 2009, Sanford has taken to mentioning “this journey called life” rather frequently. Perhaps, in a perfect world, a guy who got in trouble for jetting off to assignations on the taxpayers’ dime would not focus quite so much on travel metaphors.
Sanford will now run against Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a local businesswoman and sister of the comedian Stephen Colbert. She seems to be planning a deeply noncomedic campaign. But, still, hosting this race would be way more fun than being in Texas, wondering whether Rick Perry is going to run for a fourth — or is it fifth? — term.
Or in Tennessee, where lawmakers have just introduced bills to eliminate U.S. Senate primaries and let the state legislators pick the nominees. These new decision-makers would presumably include the members who recently expressed concern that the mop sink in a newly renovated Capitol men’s lavatory might actually be a special foot-washing facility for Muslims.
Or New York City, where a Democratic state senator has just been indicted on a charge of trying to bribe his way into the Republican nomination for mayor. Through the alleged services of a Republican city councilman, who has represented himself as a member of both the Tea Party and a tribe of Theodish pagans, making him what The Village Voice called “the first openly elected heathen in the nation.”
O.K., the heathen part was pretty good. However, dwelling on this story will only cause New Yorkers to revisit the fact that three of the last four full-time majority leaders of the New York State Senate have wound up under felony indictment.
I’d rather keep track of Mark Sanford’s evolution. So far, his spin strategy has been all about empathy and forgiveness. (“It’s only really in our brokenness that we really begin to understand each other.”) By the end of the primary, you had the impression that the key to a new bipartisan spirit in Washington would be having all the members of Congress tell each other about their affairs.
“There are too many people in politics who think that they know it all. And I think that they project this whole image of perfection,” he told Jake Tapper on CNN.
Not a problem here.
Since we last had Sanford to kick around, he’s been divorced and gotten engaged to the Argentinian squeeze. He virtually never mentions her and she barely got a shout-out on primary victory night. (“She completely surprised me,” claimed Sanford, who told Tapper that he just turned the corner on his way into the ballroom and there she was.)
His ex-wife, Jenny, has written a book about her marriage, and now South Carolinians know that Sanford is not just fiscally conservative; he’s also so personally cheap that he once gave his spouse a $25 used bicycle as a combined birthday-Christmas present. Also, there’s the revelation that he excused some of his mysterious absences from home by saying he needed to go off and relieve the stress he felt due to thinning hair.
Sanford has always had a terrible case of chronic self-absorption. Now that he’s talking about his feelings so much, it’s turned into a creepy New Age egomania. It began with his post-Appalachian-Trail press conference, when he rambled on and on about his love life as if the assembled reporters were best pals who’d invited him out for a drink. (“It was interesting how this thing has gone down. …”) More recently, according to New York magazine, he went to visit Jenny, who used to run his campaigns, and asked his still deeply estranged ex-spouse if she’d do another. “I could pay you this time,” he added empathetically.
Her refusal was probably a surprise. Like the victory night fiancée.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 3, 2013
“Dealing With A Supine Congress”: Will The GOP Be Allowed To Block Background Checks?
Is Congress on the verge of turning away from the lessons of the slaughter in Newtown even as Connecticut enacts sweeping laws to curb gun violence? Is the gun lobby hellbent on aligning our country with such great friends of liberty as Iran, North Korea and Syria by opposing efforts to condition international gun sales on the human rights records of buyers?
The gun lobby seems to want the rest of the world to look upon the United States of America as a nation so crazed about guns that its supine Congress will always collapse before the National Rifle Association.
The bleak future envisioned by the gun extremists was laid out for all to see by the small town of Nelson, Ga., whose council voted Monday to require all its citizens to own guns. The town says it won’t enforce the measure, but Nelson sends us a dark message: Guns matter more than freedom. The right not to bear arms can be infringed freely.
The vote in the United Nations on Tuesday for a global convention to keep conventional arms out of the hands of human rights violators, terrorists and organized-crime figures was overwhelming, 154 to 3, with 23 abstentions. North Korea, Iran and Syria provided the no votes, while China and Russia were among the abstainers.
It will be years at best before the treaty is implemented, and the NRA (of course) wants to block its ratification by the Senate — in effect, preventing background checks for human rights violators. But we can be proud that the United States ignored the weapons fundamentalists and voted yes.
Meanwhile, on a bipartisan basis, the Connecticut General Assembly was moving to pass a broad background-check bill that would also regulate the private sales of shotguns and rifles, ban high-capacity magazines and expand the list of prohibited assault weapons.
Connecticut Republicans should lobby members of their party in the U.S. Senate. These days, the GOP is all about trying to improve its image. But on guns, it may prove once again that when it matters, extremists rule.
Only one Republican senator, Mark Kirk of Illinois, has had the courage to work with Democrats for a meaningful background-check law. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has shown some boldness in negotiating on a bill with Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y). But Coburn has yet to close a deal that wouldn’t severely weaken background-check requirements. Otherwise, GOP senators have declined to engage seriously.
There has been much speculation about whether President Obama should have moved even faster after Newtown. And yes, it would have been better if gun-control advocates had united two months ago behind a focused agenda that the president could have pushed immediately.
But contrary to the late-inning analysis you’re hearing, the game isn’t over.
A lot has been said about the four to six Senate Democratic holdouts on background checks, but Democrats are likely to provide roughly 50 votes for a strong bill. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a traditional NRA supporter, deserves particular kudos for his persistence on behalf of a decent outcome. The real barrier in the Senate comes from Republicans. The question for many of them is whether they honestly think that letting weapons manufacturers dictate the party’s positions on gun violence is a recipe for renewal.
Based on what they have said, a host of GOP senators just might find the daring to tell their party that gutting a background-check bill is foolish, substantively and politically. Their ranks include John McCain, who has been brave on this issue in the past, as well as Pat Toomey, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Jeff Flake, Mike Johanns, Dean Heller, Johnny Isakson, Saxby Chambliss, Lamar Alexander, Bob Corker and Rob Portman. They hold the key.
Farther down the road, gun-control advocates need even more discipline, and they cannot stop organizing after this fight is over. It will take years to build the kind of muscle the gun lobby has. Doing so will create the political space for other measures, including an assault weapons ban.
The good news is that the mobilization for gun sanity is farther along now than it has ever been. Members of this anti-violence coalition have proved their strength in Connecticut, Colorado and New York, and they should keep pursuing progress at the state level. Change will eventually bubble up to the halls of Congress.
We are in a long battle. Victory in this round is well within reach. Future victories will require staying power, not recriminations.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 3, 2013
“A Fatalism About Life”: Surprise, Surprise, Gun Violence In Red States
Pooh-poh this if you like, since it comes from the Center for American Progress, but the group just released a big study showing that–across 10 measures like the number of firearms homicides, number of total firearm deaths (including accidents etc.), law enforcement agents killed by firearms, and so on–the deadliest states are those with the most lax gun laws.
The “top” 10: Louisiana, Alaska, Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, South Carolina, New Mexico, Missouri, Arkansas, and Georgia.
Now I know conservatives are thinking: No way these places are deadlier than New York and other states with big cities that have very violent neighborhoods. But according to CAP, New York and New Jersey, for example, rank 46th and 47th in gun violence. The full “bottom” 10: Nebraska, Maine, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Iowa, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Hawaii. That’s basically a combination of sparsely populated states and states with strong gun laws.
Does this check out with other information? Here’s another study showing Louisiana as the “least peaceful” state in the country. Here’s a third that also has Louisiana at the top (yes, I know that’s mainly because of Nawlins), but also features largely Southern and Southwestern states as the most violent, with New York in the bottom half.
This will never change, unless gun laws undergo some kind of serious revolution, because obviously the people who live in these places accept these levels of violence. I think it’s not merely that they are resistant to changing gun laws. There’s some deeper thing about the relationship between violence and concepts like justice and fate. That is to say, for example, that I think cultural responses to a seven-year-old girl accidentally killing herself with her father’s rifle are different in Georgia than they are in Connecticut.
I’m not saying Georgians wouldn’t care. Obviously, they’re human beings. But I am saying that they on some level would be more likely to accept that this is just how life goes sometimes. It’s a fatalism about life that probably has to do with some combination of comparative lack of opportunity and religious attitudes (that is, matters are in the Lord’s hands, etc.).
And by the way, if you haven’t been checking Joe Nocera’s blog (the NYT columnist), you may wish to do so. He’s just listing gun violence reports from around the country. It’s pretty chilling to read. There’s also the Slate gun-death tally; 3,293 gun deaths since Newtown.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 3, 2013
“Punishment And Humiliation”: Why Is North Dakota Torturing Women?
According to a recent United Nations report, North Dakota is torturing women. Seriously. Juan Méndez, the United Nation’s special rapporteur on torture, has included lack of access to abortion in his yearly report on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Considering North Dakota’s new law which bans abortion after six weeks, it stands to reason that the state is torturing its female citizens.
I’m not trying to be trite—I do believe, as Méndez does, that forcing women to carry pregnancies they don’t want is cruel:
International and regional human rights bodies have begun to recognize that abuse and mistreatment of women seeking reproductive health services can cause tremendous and lasting physical and emotional suffering, inflicted on the basis of gender. Examples of such violations include abusive treatment and humiliation in institutional settings; involuntary sterilization; denial of legally available health services such as abortion and post-abortion care.
But if you believe abortion is a “convenience,” rather than a human right, saying as much is controversial. To the American anti-choice movement, it’s even laughable.
But how else would you describe laws that are meant to punish women for being sexually active? Sure, anti-choice legislation and activism prides itself on showy pro-woman rhetoric. Women’s Right To Know! Women Deserve Better Than Abortion! But at the end of the day, forced pregnancy is less about protecting women or “life” than it is about punishment and humiliation.
Rape exceptions are the clearest example. While I agree that forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy that is the result of rape is an even further assault on women’s bodily integrity, the foundation of a rape exception is that some women “deserve” abortions and some don’t. The underlying message is pretty clear—a woman who has been forced to have sex has done nothing wrong, a woman who had consensual sex has. (Bill Napoli’s now-infamous example of a “sodomized virgin” comes to mind.”)
Other restrictions and attempted limits on abortion access prove just as transparent. In 2007, for example, legislators in Ohio pushed a bill that would have mandated women get a written not from the father of the fetus before being able to obtain an abortion. If they didn’t know who the father was, they would not be allowed to access the procedure. This is about humiliating women and making the decision to have an abortion as difficult as possible.
A report from the Center for Reproductive Rights, Reproductive Rights Violations as Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment: A Critical Human Rights Analysis, points out that degrading treatment is defined as an act “aimed at humiliating the victim, regardless of whether severe pain was inflicted.” Anti-choice legislation seems to be written with that exact goal in mind.
Ultrasound laws—frequently called women’s “right to know” laws—are pushed under the guise of making sure women fully understand what they’re about to do. As if women are so stupid that they don’t realize what getting an abortion is. One Rhode Island doctor said a bill mandating ultrasounds before abortions “turned the ultrasound into a torture machine.” And for women whose wanted pregnancies are ending, these laws are beyond cruel. One woman in Texas who was forced to have three sonograms in one day and listen to a doctor describe her doomed fetus in detail called the experience a “superfluous layer of torment” and recalled sobbing throughout the procedure.
Can anyone really argue that Savita Halappanavar was not tortured in Ireland? Despite excruciating pain and the fact that her pregnancy was ending, Savita was denied an abortion because doctors wanted to wait for her fetus’s heartbeat to stop. She died in pain asking for help. It’s the same fate Republicans would have for American women—don’t forget the ironically named “Protect Life Act” that would have allowed hospitals to deny dying women life-saving abortions.
Americans are catching on. The majority of people in the U.S. consider themselves “pro-choice,” and though most support some sort of limits on access, many are wary of punitive legislation like ultrasound laws and laws that allow health care providers or pharmacists to deny procedures or medications. And the more people find out what these restrictions are really about—as they did with ultrasound mandates thanks to media and social media—the more likely, I believe, they’ll be to oppose them.
So perhaps there is progress being made. But the fight won’t end until all women—whether they’re in North Dakota, Ireland or anywhere else—can access abortion without shame, fear, humiliation or government interference. Anything else is cruel—and yes, torture.
By: Jessica Valenti, The Nation, April 3, 2013
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