Last week, the co-chairs of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission released a report outlining their recommendations to reduce the budget deficit. Since then, a raucous debate has erupted over the proper measures that should be taken to rein in the U.S. debt.
Yesterday morning, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) appeared on CSPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss his thoughts on the commission and the proper steps to reduce the deficit in general. At one point, the senator explained that even though he “has said we don’t need increased taxes, I’ll take increased taxes if we cut spending. We have to look down the road and solve problems for everybody, no matter what their label is”:
HOST: The debt commission, the deficit commission rather. What is your take on their recommendations, and how realistic is it?
COBURN: Well, let’s set the stage for it. We have to do something. [...] Even though I’ve said we don’t need increased taxes, I’ll take increased taxes if we cut spending. We have to look down the road and solve the problems for everybody, no matter what their label is.
Watch it:
Coburn’s words are admirable at a time when literally hundreds of conservative legislators across the country have signed pledges to not raise taxes under any possible circumstances, whatsoever. The senator has been bold enough in the past to call for cutting the Pentagon’s “sacred cows” and has taken aim at defense spending. Given the upcoming battle over tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, it’s particularly important that Coburn is demonstrating a willingness to raise taxes.
But because Coburn is insisting that these tax increases be tied to spending cuts, ThinkProgress would like to present him with a list of cuts that would reduce government waste and favors to special interests without hurting job growth:
- Defense Spending: As previously noted, Coburn is already an advocate for defense cuts, saying that “taking defense spending off the table” for waste-cutting is “indefensible.” The senator can look to the Sustainable Defense Task (SDTF) report released earlier this year. The SDTF — which was assembled by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) was composed of some of the nation’s leading defense and budget experts — identified nearly $1 trillion in waste that can be cut from the defense budget over the next ten years simply by eliminating outdated Cold War-era programs. He can also reference a recent report by Center for American Progress (CAP) experts Lawrence Korb and Laura Conley that lays out $108 billion in defense cuts in the current 2015 budget forecast.
- Ending Giveaways To Big Oil: The government has currently set up a network of tax expenditures and other subsidies to Big Oil that cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars every year. Ending these subsidies would save an estimated $45 billion over ten years.
- Streamlining Federal Education Funding: The CAP paper “Education Transformation: Doing What Works in Education Reform” outlines inefficiencies in how the federal government handles its education funding and lays out ways we can save nearly $100 million simply by streamlining the process.
- Reducing Or Eliminating Wasteful Tax Expenditures: The CAP paper “Cracking the Code: A Closer Look at Tax Expenditure Spending” notes that “special credits, deductions, exclusions, exemptions, and preferential tax rates provide more than $1 trillion in subsidies intended to support public objectives,” yet are ineffective and should be reduced or eliminated. Eliminating tax expenditures for people’s second homes could save $100 billion, for example.
- Reducing or Eliminating Subsidies To Big Agribusiness: The federal government “paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009.” “Just ten percent of America’s largest and richest farms collect almost three-fourths” of these subsidies. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) has proposed — as a part of her progressive deficit reduction plan — a fifty percent cut in federal direct support for agriculture, which would save $7.5 billion in 2015.
It’s refreshing for a Republican senator to admit that there may be a need to raise taxes in order to deal with the deficit. Now it’s up to Coburn to examine smart cuts like the ones outlined above to couple with any revenue-increasing measures.
For the last 56 days, Office of Managagement and Budget director nominee Jack Lew has been held hostage by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA). Landrieu’s first ransom note to President Obama demanded that his administration lift the temporary moritorium on new deepwater drilling which was in place during the Gulf oil disaster, but that moritorium has since been lifted. Landrieu responded with a new set of demands, saying that she will not release her hostage until she is certain that the “lifting of the moratorium is actually putting people back to work.” Now that it’s clear that the moritorium had little impact on jobs, however, Landrieu has a third set of demands:
In September, Landrieu, D-La., blocked the nomination of Jacob Lew to head the Office of Management and Budget to protest the administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. Even though the moratorium was lifted Oct. 12, Landrieu said she remained displeased with new rules for drilling operations.
The new drilling rules are meant to prevent another catastrophic blowout like the April 20 explosion at a BP oil well off the Louisiana coast that led to the release of more than 200 million gallons of crude. . . .
But Landrieu said she would continue to block Lew’s nomination until the Interior Department fixes “the regulatory nightmare” hindering deepwater drilling. She said companies were struggling to interpret what the new rules required.
“I’m not asking to be easy on the oil and gas companies, I’m not asking to give blanket permits, I’m asking for clarity of the new regulatory regime,” Landrieu said during a teleconference with reporters upon her return from a trip to the Netherlands, where she looked for lessons to take home to Louisiana from the Dutch model of living below sea level.
Sadly, this kind of hostage taking happens all the time in the United States Senate — earlier this year, for example, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) placed a hold on over 70 nominees in an attempt to force the federal government to award a $35 billion defense contract to Northrop Grumman. But it’s unclear what Landrieu thinks she going to accomplish by playing Calvinball with her demands. Why should the Obama Administration deliver her a suitcase full of small, unmarked bills when she is simply going to turn around and demand a helicopter and free passage to a non-extradition country?
Moreover, as John Griffith explains over at the Wonk Room, Landrieu is playing a particularly dangerous game by targeting the official in charge of drafting the annual federal budget. OMB must present its initial draft of the next year’s budget at the end of November each year, and Lew could have contributed a great deal of expertise to this draft. Lew headed OMB from 1999 until the end of the Clinton administration in 2001, leaving office with a $200 billion federal budget surplus.
In other words, America needs Lew’s fiscal guidance a whole lot more than it needs Mary Landrieu looking out for big oil.
One of the key issues at stake in the ongoing lame duck congressional session is whether to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Conservatives have argued for extending these tax cuts, despite their cost of adding $830 billion to the federal budget deficit over the next ten years. Yesterday, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) took to the House floor to visualize the impact of the Bush tax cuts on the wallets of the richest Americans. The congressman explained that, for the top one percent of income earners in the United States — those who earn at least $1.4 million a year — the Bush tax cuts would give them a tax break of $83,347 a year.
“Let’s give some thought as to what the high and mighty might do with that money,” the Florida congressman said. Used floor charts, Grayson explained that the $83,347 a year was enough to buy 800 expensive cigars — “that’s one for the morning and one for the evening” — and “light each one of those cigars with a hundred dollar bill.” Watch it:
In addition to allowing the rich to buy 800 high-priced cigars and smoke them with 100 dollar bills, here are a few other luxuries that Grayson calculated the richest one percent of Americans could afford if the Bush tax cuts were continued:
- A Mercedes Benz E-Class Car Every Year: Grayson explained that the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans would provide them with enough money to purchase an “$83,000 Mercedes Benz E-Class car, not just once, but every single year for the next decade.”
- An Elite Designer Handbag Every Year: The congressman revealed that the richest Americans could purchase a “gorgeous Hermies bag, a Birkin, for $64,800 dollars. Not once, but every single year for the next ten years. For which they will say to the Republican party, ‘Thank you very much.’”
- A Bottle Of Wine Bottled in 1787 Every Year: Grayson explained that the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans would provide them with enough cash to buy a “bottle of Chatteau d’Yquem wine bottled in 1787 for only $56,588, that will leave them loose change in their pocket of $25,000. They can buy a bottle of wine from 1787 every year for the next decade. Thank you Republican Party.”
- 20,000 Jars Of Grey Poupon Every Year: “They can buy 20,000 jars of their favorite mustard, Grey Poupon. 20,000 jars,” Grayson exclaimed. “That’s certainly enough for them, their family, their friends, even a few poor people. Thank you Republican Party!”
As Congress continues to debate the fate of the Bush tax cuts, it’s unclear whether the richest Americans will face a tax hike soon. However, the American people side with Grayson, apparently believing that at a time when income inequality is higher than since the 1920s, the richest Americans don’t need extra tax breaks. A recent CNN poll found that 64 percent of Americans want to let the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire. A separate NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that only 23 percent want to keep the cuts.
A Federal District Court in Manhattan convicted Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani yesterday on one count of of conspiracy for the 1998 terror bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. While Ghailani — the first former Guantanamo detainee to be tried in civilian court — was acquitted of more than 280 other charges, he faces 20 years to life in prison.
On cue, conservatives are outraged at the result of the trial (even though he’ll spend time in a maximum security prison for least 20 years), claiming he should have been tried in a military tribunal. Liz Cheney’s group Keep America Safe claimed that “bad ideas have dangerous consequences. … We urge the president: End this reckless experiment. Reverse course. Use the military commissions at Guantanamo that Congress has authorized.” (The Center for American Progress’ Ken Gude notes on the Wonk Room that military commissions “deliver shorter sentences than civilian courts” and “the minimum sentence that Ghailani can receive is longer than the combined sentences” of three of the four detainees who have been convicted in military commissions.)
Yet some have taken the opportunity to take the issue a bit further. On Twitter yesterday, Michael Goldfarb, former McCain presidential campaign flack and current adviser to former governor Sarah Palin, said that Ghailani should have been executed while in CIA custody:
Maybe Goldfarb has taken Glenn Beck’s advice a little too seriously. The radical Fox News host once said that as President, he wouldn’t detain terror suspects, he’d “shoot them all in the head.” Perhaps Goldfarb is an avid National Review reader, where one write once said that all Gitmo detainees should be let go and then killed. Or maybe Goldfarb has been listening to his former boss over at the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, who said last year of Maj. Nidal M. Hasan after his attack on the Fort Hood Army Base: “They should just go ahead and convict him and put him to death.”
It seems execution without trial is fairly popular in conservative circles.
One of the Republican Party’s main electoral themes was that it was going to “listen to the American people,” as its “America Speaking Out” campaign claimed to do. In an op-ed published following the election, the incoming Speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), exclaimed that “current representatives have an obligation to listen to the American people” during the “lame duck” legislative session.
Last night, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) was asked about listening to the American people during an appearance on CNN’s The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer. Blitzer informed the congressman about a “brand new poll” from CNN that surveyed Americans about the Bush tax cuts. Blitzer explained that the poll found that only 35 percent of Americans want to extend the tax cuts across the board, including for the wealthiest Americans. Meanwhile, 49 percent of Americans want to extend the tax cuts just for Americans who make less than $250,000, and 15 percent want to extend them for no one. Having explained the poll results, Blitzer asked “So only a third according to this poll want all the tax rates to continue as is. You’re not listening to the American people right?”
Schock responded by saying he can only speak for the people in his district. He said “the message we heard in this election was we don’t want anyone’s taxes going up in a down economy.” Blitzer then adopted a mocking tone and asked, “And when you said do you want millionaires and billionaires to continue get the same tax rate, they said yes please make sure they get only 36 percent federal income tax rate as opposed to 39.6 percent?” Schock responded by saying that the president made that argument and that the American people “reject” it:
BLITZER: In our brand new poll we asked about the bush tax cuts, should they continue at the current rate? All Americans 35 percent, families making less than $250,000 49 percent, no one 15 percent. So only a third according to this poll want all the tax rates to continue as is. You’re not listening to the American people, right?
SCHOCK: Well I can only speak about the district that I represent in the center part of the country in Midwestern Illinois. The message we heard in this election was we don’t want anyone’s taxes going up in a down economy.
BLITZER: And when you said do you want millionaires and billionaires to continue get the same tax rate, they said yes please make sure they get only 36 percent federal income tax rate as opposed to 39.6 percent?
SCHOCK: That’s certainly the argument the president was making. But unfortunately for him he didn’t win that argument, because not only did the American people reject it, but Republican members of congress and Democrat members of congress overwhelmingly agree in a bipartisan away that that top bracket of high income owners […] are small business owners.
Watch it:
It’s worth pointing out that Schock isn’t just breaking his party’s own promise to “listen to the American people,” but his economic argument falls flat as well. While it’s true that there are small business owners in the upper income tax bracket, they would largely be unaffected by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the top brackets — “the yearly tax increase at the lower end of that bracket, for those with earnings between $200,000 and $500,000, would amount to $700 — which ‘isn’t enough to hire anyone.’”
This November, the future House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) rode the Tea Party rhetoric to power, promising to gut “business as usual” on Capitol Hill. Touting an earmark ban and public access to bills as clear moves toward transparency, Boehner seemed demonstrably clear on another accountability issue – congressional ethics. “I think the American people expect that their members of Congress should be held to a high ethical standard,” he said in August.
In spite of that expectation, Boehner is threatening to axe the Office of Congressional ethics. Established in March of 2008 after the Jack Abramoff scandal, the Office of Congressional Ethics is responsible for “launching investigations of wrongdoings by House Members” in order to “stiffen the spine of the House ethics committee.” Operating as an inspector general of sorts, the OCE has “won praise for reviving the House’s notoriously moribund and secretive ethics process.”
Despite strong conservative support for OCE, “GOP leaders are gearing up to kill the fledgling” OCE. In doing so, Boehner is clashing head-on with the rhetoric of many newly-elected Republicans and the driving force behind them — the Tea Party. In Boehner’s home-state, the Tea Party has not only noticed this fact, but has issued him a warning:
The Ohio Liberty Council, the main umbrella organization for 58 Tea Party groups in the state, supports efforts to strengthen the OCE and is warning House GOP leaders that any attempt to weaken it will upset Tea Party activists.
“I[f] they move in the opposite direction of transparency that this office provides, I think we will be very upset about that,” said Chris Littleton, president of the Ohio Liberty Council and the Cincinnati Tea Party. “Symbolically, it’s a huge problem for them … they should be as transparent as they can be. Any opposition to that would be inappropriate on their part.”
Boehner’s antipathy for the OCE is no secret. He voted against its creation in 2008 and has repeatedly questioned its value. Asked whether Boehner would “heed the call to strengthen, not shutter, the OCE,” his spokesman Michael Steel said “we haven’t made a decision” at this time, which, as the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel notes, “appears to leave open the possibility that it may be defunded.” Indeed, the Sunlight Foundation, which is working with the GOP transition leaders on their transparency agenda, said GOP leaders “won’t vote publicly to kill the OCE but will simply quietly defund it next year.” As the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington notes, Boehner is “an establishment, country-club Republican trying to embrace the tea party folks without making any of the changes they require.”
As a New York Times editorial notes, “outraged taxpayers who voted against business as usual in Washington” will undoubtedly be “dumbfounded” if Boehner weakens or eliminates this linchpin of congressional ethics. The destruction of the OCE will signal “a retreat to the days of good old boy self-policing and no real accountability.” To the Tea Party, that’s decidedly off message.
Fox News host Glenn Beck has spent the better part of the last two years advancing his paranoia-induced conspiracy theory that the allegedly “evil” liberal philanthropic financier George Soros is supposedly a “puppet master” controlling the media, Democrats, and the Obama White House to bring “violent revolution” to “our shores.” Beck continued with this meme Wednesday on his radio show, adding new villain into the mix: veterans’ advocate group The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA).
During the show, a caller, who described herself as an Iraq war veteran, said she marched in a Veteran’s Day parade in New York last week and that IAVA “treated us like royalty,” providing a wide array of food for the vets throughout the day. “Wow where did they get the money for all this,” the caller said, saying that she later discovered that MoveOn.org funds IAVA:
CALLER: The next day and checked them out online and come to find out that they’re actually funded by MoveOn.org which totally shocked me. I mean my heart literally just dropped. And I immediately came home and I told my boyfriend, “You are not going to believe what I found out today. George Soros has his hands even in the military. In our American military.” And I was very very disturbed by this.
Beck was incensed, claiming that Soros, MoveOn, the SEIU and the communists are organizing “under the guise of labor unions or something as innocuous as sounding as, you know, the Iraqi and Afghanistan Veterans Foundation [sic]. But it is Soros and uh, communist and uh, radical money.” They are “duping people in as much as they can,” Beck said. Media Matters has the segment:
While the caller never said where she got her information regarding IAVA’s funding, the organization told ThinkProgress that it does not receive money from MoveOn. But the irony of Beck’s newfound boogeyman is that in 2007, he praised the organization and its founder Paul Rieckhoff:
BECK: Let me tell you something. If you are a vet and you’re watching this show and you’ve got a problem, you either get it to Paul and his organization or you get it to me. This is absolutely inexcusable. And we will take care of it. Its the right thing to do.
Watch it:
Did Beck not know in 2007 that IAVA was part of this alleged grand plot to bring down the country? Or did the ever opportunistic Beck, once again armed with absolutely zero facts, take the chance to turn a distinguished organization dedicated to America’s veterans into part of his delusional “shadow” conspiracy that Soros and the communists are taking over the country?
This morning, a rejuvenated General Motors made its initial public offering of stock, hoping to raise $23.1 billion. As a result of the offering, which is the largest in the nation’s history, the federal government’s ownership in the auto company was halved “and billions of dollars in bailout money was returned to the federal government.” According to the New York Times, “a complete exit by the government could happen even within the next two years.”
“Supporting the American auto industry required tough decisions and shared sacrifices, but it helped save jobs, rescue an industry at the heart of America’s manufacturing sector, and make it more competitive for the future,” said President Obama in a statement today. At the time of the auto company rescue, however, Republicans severely criticized the administration’s effort, warning that keeping the companies from a catastrophic collapse would lead the country down “the road to socialism,” and end in “predictable” disaster:
Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): “Does anyone really believe that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington can successfully steer a multi-national corporation to economic viability?” [6/1/09]
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL): “It’s basically going to be a government-owned, government-run company. …It’s the road toward socialism.” [5/29/09]
RNC Chairman Michael Steele: “No matter how much the President spins GM’s bankruptcy as good for the economy, it is nothing more than another government grab of a private company and another handout to the union cronies who helped bankroll his presidential campaign.” [6/1/2009]
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC): “Now the government has forced taxpayers to buy these failing companies without any plausible plan for profitability. Does anyone think the same government that plans to double the national debt in five years will turn GM around in the same time?” [6/2/09]
Rep. Tom Price (R-GA): “Unfortunately, this is just another sad chapter in President Obama’s eager campaign to interject his administration in the private sector’s business dealings.” [6/2/09]
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX): The auto company rescues “have been the leading edge of the Obama administration’s war on capitalism.” [7/22/09]
Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ): When government gets involved in a company, “the disaster that follows is predictable.” [7/22/09]
According to the Center for Automotive Research, “if the government had not invested in the automotive industry, up to 80,000 automotive jobs would have been lost, and General Motors alone would have lost one million units of sales in 2009. Once Chrysler and GM emerged from their ‘orderly’ bankruptcies, the growth of automotive sector employment has been strong, with 52,900 workers added since July 2009. Had GM and Chrysler not successfully emerged, those jobs would have been permanently lost.”
Cross-posted on The Wonk Room
Dismantling the arguments against the New START treaty on the NewsHour last night, Richard Burt, the Reagan administration’s chief U.S. negotiator for the original START treaty, noted that “there are only two governments in the world that wouldn’t like to see this treaty ratified, the government in Tehran and the government in North Korea.”
Aside from the fact that nearly 75 percent of Americans want to see it ratified, Burt also warned that, if the treaty fails, not only would “we miss the opportunity to improve relations with the Russians, who have supported us on Iran and U.N. sanctions and increasingly in Afghanistan,” but the U.S. would also “lose all credibility on the problem of stopping nuclear proliferation.”
Discussing the jockeying over the treaty on Rachel Maddow’s show last night, The Cable’s Josh Rogin made a similar point, noting that a failure to ratify New START “hurts Obama’s credibility to negotiate future treaties with any other countries around the world.”
But as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has already — repeatedly — admitted, the GOP’s main goal is making sure that President Obama is “a one term president.” Severely handicapping the President’s ability to credibly conduct American foreign policy — regardless of the actual consequences — is just one tactic in that larger effort.
Very much related, a fairly comprehensive new report on Iran from the Stimson Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace describes how Iranian political jockeying has impacted U.S.-Iran diplomacy over the years:
Iran’s domestic politics have repeatedly undercut US efforts to engage Tehran. In a country where the political system is based in part on an enduring hostility to US political, economic, and even cultural power, Iranian leaders are fearful of any wider solution to the nuclear program that points to rapprochement with Washington. Supreme Leader Khamanei is the most powerful representative of this intensely suspicious view of the US, and thus may resist a wider normalization of relations with the US.
The rise of a new generation of ultra-hardliners, whose most visible spokesman is President Ahmadinejad, poses a host of further challenges. Iran’s president and his allies view the quest for an independent nuclear fuel cycle as central to Iran’s efforts to forge a new alliance of middle-size powers that can challenge the “hegemony” of the capitalist Western countries. That is why their on-going efforts to quell the Green Movement and seize political control from more mainstream conservatives poses a real threat, not merely to many Iranians, but to the region as a whole.
Leaving aside the obvious point about the mutually reinforcing relationship between Iran’s ultra-hardline neoconservatives and the U.S.’s, just as it’s important to try and understand how Iranian domestic politics affects Iranian foreign policy and U.S. perceptions of Iranian aims, we also have to consider this in the other direction: How might Iranians might view the ability of a small group of Republican ultra-hardliners to scuttle as manifestly reasonable and bipartisan a nonproliferation treaty as START? What does it say to them about President Obama’s ability to ratify any future treaty with Iran, which would likely be far more controversial? Will a failure of START strengthen those Iranian voices — either inside the government or out — who oppose nuclear weaponization? Or will it strengthen the hardliners who see the international nonproliferation regime as a joke, and argue that a nuclear weapon is essential for Iranian power and prestige?
In an op-ed in Politico today, Center for American Progress president and CEO John Podesta noted the importance of ratifying New START vis-a-vis Iran and Russia. “The U.S.-Russia ‘reset’ has paved the way for greater Russian cooperation on pressuring Iran to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons and on supply and support for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. If New START goes down, or is further delayed, Russian cooperation could wane, if not end,” he wrote.
Cross-posted on The Wonk Room
Yesterday, responding to Rep.-elect Andy Harris’ (R-MD) hypocritical demand for government-sponsored health care benefits, Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) began circulating a letter among his Democratic colleagues calling on Harris and other members of Congress who want to repeal the new health care law to forego the government health care plans they receive as Members of Congress. In a letter to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Crowley writes, “If your conference wants to deny millions of Americans affordable health care, your members should should walk that walk.”
This morning, a caller to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal asked Rep.-elect Mike Kelly (R-PA) — who “strongly opposes” the health care law — if he would be willing to give up his government-sponsored health insurance. Kelly said that he would:
KELLY: There is no reason for anybody to get anything different than anybody else. I personally have always paid for my own health care… why should my pension as a public official be any different from anyone else’s pension? Why should my health care, as a public official, be any different than anybody else’s? No, level across the board. [...]
Q: So will you have a Congressional plan?
KELLY: No, I do not need. I got my own plan, I don’t need a congressional plan. I’ve taken care of myself for a long time.
Watch it:
The Congressional health care system — the Federal Employees’ Health Plan (FEHBP) — is very similar to the Exchanges established in the Affordable Care Act. Like federal employees, beginning in 2014, many Americans will be able to choose coverage from a series of private options competing for their business within a new health care marketplace — the state-based Exchange.
Kelly, however, will not have the choice of enrolling in an FEHBP plan by 2014 and then could have coverage that is “the same as everyone else’s.” Under a Republican amendment to the Affordable Care Act, “the only health plans that the Federal Government may make available” to Members of Congress and congressional staff are “health plans that are I) created under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act); or (II) offered through an Exchange established under this Act.”
Will other Republican lawmakers wanting to repeal health care put their money where their mouth is?
In June, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) became one of the first incumbent Republicans to be knocked off by a far-right insurgent Tea Party candidate. Since then, Inglis — who has maintained a very high 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union — has blasted the GOP for using “racism” to whip voters into a frenzy, for “following those personalities [such as Fox News host Glenn Beck] and not leading,” and for deceiving voters with conspiracy theories about death panels and “preying on their fears.”
Yesterday morning, at a House subcommittee hearing on climate change, Inglis mocked his Republican colleagues for refusing to acknowledge the truth and danger of global warming, saying, “They slept at a Holiday Inn Express last night, and they’re experts on climate change.” He also warned that while they posture to score political points, China will surpass the U.S. in clean technology:
INGLIS: Because 98 of the doctors say, “Do this thing,” two say, “Do the other.” So, it’s on the record. And we’re here with important decision to be made. And I would also suggest to my Free Enterprise colleagues — especially conservatives here — whether you think it’s all a bunch of hooey, what we’ve talked about in this committee, the Chinese don’t. And they plan on eating our lunch in this next century. They plan on innovating around these problems, and selling to us, and the rest of the world, the technology that’ll lead the 21st century. So we may just press the pause button here for several years, but China is pressing the fast-forward button. And as a result, if we wake up in several years and we say, “geez, this didn’t work very well for us. The two doctors didn’t turn out to be so right. 98 might have been the ones to listen to.” [...]
There are people who make a lot of money on talk radio and talk TV saying a lot of things. They slept at a Holiday Inn Express last night, and they’re experts on climate change. They substitute their judgment for people who have Ph.D.s and work tirelessly [on climate change].
Watch it:
Indeed, a ThinkProgress analysis found that 50 percent of the incoming freshman GOP class deny the existence of manmade climate change, while a shocking 86 percent are opposed to any legislation to address climate change that increases government revenue. Meanwhile, all of the Republicans vying to chair the House Energy Committee — which handles climate and energy issues — in the new Congress are climate change deniers. They include Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), who infamously apologized to BP shortly after the company’s catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico this summer.
Transcript: More »
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) vowed yesterday to hold votes on two key Democratic priorities: the DREAM Act and a repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t tell policy. Senate Republicans blocked both measures this fall when Reid tried to attach them to a defense authorization act.
A bipartisan group of budget experts led by former GOP Sen. Pete Domenici (NM) and former Clinton administration budget director Alice Rivlin yesterday called for steep cuts in future military spending, intensifying pressure to reduce defense spending to help reduce the deficit. Their plan includes a five-year freeze on Pentagon spending and would reduce projected deficits by $5.9 trillion through 2020.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs “expressed confidence” yesterday that the START treaty has the 67 votes necessary to pass the Senate in the lame duck Congress. Gibbs said that Senate GOP Whip Jon Kyl’s (AZ) opposition “won’t be enough to derail the treaty” and President Obama “will push forward” to see it ratified “before the end of the year.”
Ahmed Ghailani, the first former Guantamo Bay detainee to be tried in a civilian court, was acquitted of all but one charge against him related to the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He was “convicted of one count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property,” and faces at least 20 years in prison.
“As one of its first acts,” the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives will consider ending birthright citizenship, which has been guaranteed by the 14th Amendment for over one hundred years. Rep. Steve King (R-IA), the incoming chairman of the subcommittee that oversees immigration, “is expected to push a bill” early in the next session that would deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants.
The U.S. government’s stake in General Motors was halved yesterday as billions of dollars of bailout money was returned following a $23 billion stock offering by the company. The New York Times notes the offering was “bigger and more ambitious than had once seemed possible.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) claimed a historic victory last night in her write-in bid for the U.S. Senate in Alaska against Tea Party-backed, Sarah Palin-endorsed candidate Joe Miller (R). The state Republican Party called the race for Murkowski and asked Miller to “end his campaign in a dignified manner,” but Miller said he is not conceding until he can ensure “the counting process is a fair one.”
A Tennessee judge refused to stop an expansion of the Murfreesboro Islamic Center that has been protested for months and been the target of arson. The judge said “he could not find that the ‘county acted illegally, arbitrarily or capriciously‘ in approving the plan.”
And finally: “A caravan” of trucks is heading to Washington, D.C. today for a bi-partisan “Purple for the People” Slurpee summit. The idea came after President Obama criticized Republicans for sitting back and enjoying a Slurpee while he worked to save the economy. 7-Eleven, which sells the frozen drinks, is planning to send “very special Slurpee handblown glass cups” to Obama and presumptive House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).
With the House of Representatives coming under Republican control in the new Congress, many Americans are wondering how the new leadership will behave. A number of major Republicans have come out against any sort of compromise with Democrats in Congress, like Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, who has vowed to block middle class tax cuts if the tax cuts for the richest Americans aren’t extended as well.
GOP Rep.-elect Richard Hanna (NY) separated himself from hardliners in his party like Camp yesterday during an interview with a State of Politics reporter. The interviewer asked Hanna, “There’s a lot of people in your party that are already talking about taking a hard line and not compromising with the president. What do you think?” Hanna responded by saying that he doesn’t “feel that way. And I think that ultimately if the Republican Party takes that kind of posture, then they will be punished in two years, becaues people are sick of partisanship“:
INTERVIEWER: There’s a lot of people in your party that are already talking about taking a hard line and not compromising with the president. What do you think? Is it too early, are you going to get your feet wet and then decide, or are you going to take a hard line, are there certain things you won’t compromise on?
HANNA: I’m sure there are, but I’m sure there’s many things I’m sure we’ll be able to work together with. I don’t feel that way. And I think that ultimately if the Republican Party takes that kind of posture, then they will be punished in two years, because people are sick of partisanship. And I think if you live in New York you have a particularly good view of the product it makes over time. That’s not my goal, my goal is to find solutions and work for them.
Watch it:
While Hanna also came out against further continuing unemployment benefits that are set to expire at the end of this month, he came out against a full repeal of the recently passed health care law. He said that what the country wants is a “good progressive health care reform bill that does what we ultimately wanted it do, which is provide health care to people at a reasonable cost,” and that there are aspects of the law that he likes. He said that the law may be repealed but that it’s “ultimately up to both parties to come up with something that the public finds affordable and palatable in a lot more ways.”
With America caught up in an Islamophobic whirlwind, anything remotely tied to the Islamic faith sets off paranoid hysterics over an impending Muslim takeover. Rather than responsibly debunk these delusions, the Fox News network has contributed to the hysteria by promoting extremely radical guests, polarizing rhetoric, bigoted punditry, and racial profiling. Last week, FoxNews.com unveiled a new “investigation” targeting Muslim staffers on Capitol Hill. According to the report, the Congressional Muslim Staff Association’s (CMSA) have sought to bring the “Who’s Who” of jihadist sympathizers to its weekly Friday Jummah prayer meetings “for more than a decade.”
Right on cue, the right-wing American Center for Law and Justice demanded that the Justice Department to investigate and “take immediate action to halt” the congressional prayer sessions. Channeling its founder and indefatigable anti-Muslim Rev. Pat Robertson, the ACLJ said the “absurdity” of inviting “the very terrorists who want to destroy America” to Capitol Hill “raises a host of significant questions-including concerns about national security” and, based on Fox’s “report,” warrants a “thorough investigation”:
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to launch an investigation concerning reports that Islamic terrorists have appeared before a Congressionally sponsored Muslim group that meets at the U.S. Capitol. The investigative report by Fox News reveals that a number of well-known terrorists-including U.S. born Anwar al-Awlaki, the Al Qaeda cleric believed to be hiding in Yemen and the lone American on the U.S. government’s capture or kill list-have appeared at what’s been described as weekly ‘prayer’ sessions on Capitol Hill.
“It is unbelievable that that the very terrorists who want to destroy America are permitted to meet in a Congressionally-sanctioned setting on Capitol Hill,” said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the ACLJ. “This raises a host of significant questions-including concerns about national security. We’re demanding that the Department of Justice conduct an investigation and take immediate action to halt to what appears to be a pattern of inviting Islamic extremists with ties to terrorism to participate in these events. The absurdity is clear: the U.S. government disinvites Franklin Graham to a prayer service at the Pentagon, while Islamic terrorists take part in Capitol Hill events. A thorough investigation is warranted.”
In ginning up the hysteria over terrorist infiltration, Fox and the ACLJ missed one small fact – the Friday prayers have nothing to do with the CMSA. As Religion Dispatches’ Sarah Posner explains, the prayers are held by individual staffers “under the auspices of the House chaplain; they are not an official function of the CMSA.” In fact, the CMSA, which does not receive funding or support from the government, “didn’t exist” when Fox says the people with terrorist ties supposedly went to the prayer sessions. The report, says Posner, is less fact and more “red meat” for the “conservative culture that feeds on paranoia.”
Just ask the Muslim Republicans who are involved. Suhail Kahn, a conservative Republican who served as a political appointee in the Bush administration and who currently serves on the American Conservative Union board, was once a Republican hill staffer. According to Khan, the services are open to the public and are “very pro-American, and tend to be about public service, and the honor of public service.” In fact, the member who granted Khan’s room request for a small number of Muslim staffers to pray was then-Speaker and current Islamophobe Newt Gingrich. If CMSA truly posed some national security issue, Gingrich or Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) — who’s staffer is CMSA’s vice-president — would avoid any semblance of support.
But, as Khan points out, unfounded “guilt-by-association” claims like this are nothing more than “good old fashioned bigotry.” “Ninety-nine point nine percent of honest reporters” would “know a smear when they see it” and “toss it into the garbage can,” he said. Kudos to Fox News for making that 0.1 percent.
Earlier this week, Rep.-elect Andy Harris (R-MD), who ran on a platform of repealing the recently-passed health care law, ironically demanded access to his taxpayer-subsidized congressional health care plan upon arriving in Washington. Yesterday, Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) began circulating a letter among his Democratic colleagues calling on Harris and other members of Congress who want to repeal the new health care law to forego their own government health care plans. In a letter to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Crowley writes, “If your conference wants to deny millions of Americans affordable health care, your members should walk that walk“:
“If your conference wants to deny millions of Americans affordable health care, your members should walk that walk,” Crowley writes in a letter to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
“You cannot enroll in the very kind of coverage that you want for yourselves, and then turn around and deny it to Americans who don’t happen to be Members of Congress. We also want to note that in 2011, the Federal government will pay $10,503.48 of the premiums for each member of Congress with a family policy under the commonly selected Blue Cross standard plan.”
Conservative members of Congress receiving taxpayer-subsidized health care benefits while opposing the same benefits for the general public is nothing new. During the height of the health care debate, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) identified 55 Republicans who were enrolled in Medicare, the country’s single-payer universal health care system for the elderly. Not one of those Republicans supported offering such a plan to everyday Americans.
Yet at least one Republican has taken up Crowley’s challenge. Rep.-elect Bobby Shilling (R-IL) told ABC’s Top Line today that he will not be taking part in the congressional health care plan, nor will he take part in many other benefits members of Congress receive, like the congressional pension plan. “Congress shouldn’t have anything better than the American people,” he said. Watch it:
In Texas, a leadership battle is brewing over the election of the next state Speaker of the House. State Rep. Joe Straus (R-TX) appears to have the votes to win, but a coalition of Tea Party and right-wing Republican groups — including the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Austin Tea Party Patriots, the Texas Pastor Council, and Texas Eagle Forum — are staging an effort to elect a more radical right Speaker. This morning, the Dallas Morning News reported that several of the Tea Party activists in the aforementioned coalition have been circulating e-mails with anti-Semitic messages against Strauss, who is Jewish:
– “Straus is going down in Jesus’ name,” said one e-mail, whose origins were unclear.
– Straus “clearly lacks the moral compass to be speaker,” said another, written by Southeast Texas conservative activist Peter Morrison. A Morrison e-mail said that Straus’ rabbi sits on a Planned Parenthood board and then pointed out that Straus’ opponents in the Speaker’s race “are Christians and true conservatives.” Morrison is a contributor to the white supremacy website VDARE.
– The Tea Party-backed groups are now running anti-Straus robo-calls and e-mails demanding a “true Christian speaker,” reports News 8 Austin.
– The Quorum Report, an online newsletter, reported extensively late Monday on e-mails that mentioned Straus’ Judaism, his rabbi and the Christian faith of his House critics, who include Rep. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola.
– Patrick Brendel reported that David Barton, leader of the group WallBuilders, has helped organize much of the anti-Straus campaign. Barton is a frequent contributor to the Glenn Beck program.
– Kaufman County Tea Party Chairman Ray Myers sent an e-mail last week praising a Straus opponent as “a Christian Conservative who decided not to be pushed around by the Joe Straus thugs.”
These Tea Party groups work within the larger mainstream conservative movement. Myers, Morrison, and others have signed letters and worked in conjunction with major right-wing and Republican groups, like Americans for Prosperity. Americans for Prosperity, funded and financed by billionaires David and Charles Koch, is one of the most prominent conservative organizations in the country. Its leader, Tim Phillips, ran a similarly anti-Semitic campaign before being asked by David Koch to manage Americans for Prosperity.
Previously, Phillips maintained a group called the Faith and Family Alliance to slime his political opponents with an organization that appeared to represent a grassroots community. The Richmond Times Dispatch reported that Phillips was hired by State Sen. Stephen Martin to manage his direct mail campaign against State Del. Eric Cantor in the 2000 Republican primary for the congressional seat being vacated by Rep. Tom Bliley (R-VA). Phillips used his Family Alliance to blast robo-calls and mass mailers claiming Cantor — who is Jewish — did not represent “Virginia values” and that his opponent was the “only Christian in the contest.” After Phillips’ anti-Semitic attacks, Cantor went from the clear favorite in the race to winning only by 264 votes. Larry Sabato, a political analyst and the director of University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, called Phillips’ efforts “a despicable, underground campaign that was unquestionably anti-Semitic.”
Tea Party groups want a more conservative Speaker than Straus to push Texas to the far right. State Rep. Leo Berman (R-TX), who ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes wrote about earlier today, said he wanted a more conservative Speaker than Straus to push through anti-immigrant bills, an anti-Obama birther bill, and an effort to privatize public schools.
Appearing on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell today, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) attempted to justify the threatened Republican obstruction of the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. But in doing so, he wrongly called Russia the Soviet Union — not once, but twice. Watch it:
While Barrasso may say this was a slip of the tongue and that he knows that the Soviet Union collapsed nearly twenty years ago in 1991, this is not the first time far-right senators have made this mistake when talking about START. Barrasso also tellingly concluded his remarks by asserting that he disagrees “with the component [of START] that weakens our own missile defense against all enemies, not just the Soviet Union.”
Grouping the Soviet Union (meaning Russia) with other “enemies” of the U.S., is reflective of an outdated Cold War mindset that can only lead to renewed tensions with Russia.
Should Republicans kill the New START treaty, the “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations may collapse. This could endanger U.S. troops in Afghanistan, who depend on supply routes through Russia, and could derail Russian cooperation on Iran sanctions. Perhaps most worrying is that without New START, the U.S. will be unable to monitor Russia’s nuclear arsenal as it has since the end of the Cold War, potentially creating significant nuclear instability. As Andrea Mitchell explained to Barrasso:
With all due respect senator…if you believe in trust and verify this enables us to put people back on the ground there and verify what the Russians are doing where as right now we can’t.
Barrasso’s claim that the treaty undercuts missile defense is also just flatly untrue. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly the head of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency — who was appointed under President Bush — said that New START would “reduce the constraints on the development of the missile defense program.” This is why the U.S. military stands in unanimous support of the treaty and is calling on Senate Republicans to support it as well.
Our guest blogger is Rebecca Lefton, a Researcher with Progressive Media.
Today, Senate Republicans voted unanimously against legislation to close the pay gap between women and men. The Senate voted 58-41 against allowing debate on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would help end discriminatory pay practices against women. It had already passed the House.
More than 45 years after passage of the Equal Pay Act, the pay gap shockingly persists with women still earning on average 77 cents to every man’s dollar. According to the National Women’s Law Center, “This persistent pay gap translates to more than $10,000 in lost wages per year for the average female worker.” The gap is even worse for women of color: African-American women earn 61 cents and Latinas earn 52 cents for every dollar a white non-Hispanic man earns.
This afternoon on MSNBC, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said it was “outrageous” and “egregious” that “these senators voted against fair pay.” Watch it:
Women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. The Paycheck Fairness Act would be critical to strengthening the economic security of these families. The bill would have updated the landmark Equal Pay Act of 1963 by closing loopholes, strengthening incentives to prevent pay discrimination, and prohibiting retaliation against workers who inquire about employers’ wage practices or disclose their own wages. The act would have also addressed pay secrecy, which is a prevalent problem prohibiting employees from knowing whether discriminatory practices are occurring.
Not a single Republican supported the bill, including Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Susan Collins (R-ME), who had previously voted in favor of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which removed barriers blocking workers from seeking compensation from discriminatory pay practices. At the time, Snowe said, “This new law[] sends a clear message to the American people that this Congress is committed to these core principles and will continue to work in bipartisan fashion to break down the barriers of wage discrimination in our nation.”
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), who also voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Act, was the lone Democrat voting against the bill today. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was not present for the vote.
Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has a long record of opposing women’s rights urged Congress to vote against the act, as it did with Lilly Ledbetter in 2009.
Texas State Rep. Leo Berman (R)
Asked about his motivation for introducing the bill, Berman told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that he believes Obama may have been born in Kenya:
“This bill is necessary because we have a president whom the American people don’t know whether he was born in Kenya or some other place.” Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, said in reference to President Barack Obama and of House Bill 295. “If you are running for president or vice president, you’ve got to show here in Texas that you were born in the United States and the birth certificate is your proof.”
So-called birther bills like Berman’s, which peddle the conspiracy theory that President Obama was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii, have become a staple of the far right. In March 2009, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) introduced a birther bill in the House that garnered a dozen Republican co-sponsors. The birther paranoia also seeped down to the state level, where right-wingers from Missouri to Arizona to Oklahoma took up the issue. Though none of the bills have passed, Texas Republicans currently hold the governorship and strong majorities in the both houses of the legislature.
President Obama released his birth certificate over two years ago.
One of the first issues that Congress will take up next year is the ever-important vote to raise the debt ceiling. While the national debt has been a pet cause of Tea Partiers, failing to increase our debt ceiling would likely result in a government shutdown and a worldwide economic catastrophe. A report from the Center for American Progress detailed the possible consequences, including a run on U.S. Treasury bonds, which “would cause the cost of U.S. debt to soar, putting even more stress on our budget,” likely throwing us into a “second, very deep, recession.”
Unperturbed, many in the GOP are steadfast in their opposition to raising the debt ceiling. Incoming Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA) is the newest member of this growing caucus. In an interview with ThinkProgress on Monday, Denham declared that he would “absolutely” vote against an increase. Rather than planning to cast a symbolic “nay” vote, Denham predicted that the GOP would be able to prevent “this next Congress [from] raising the debt ceiling”:
TP: One of the first things that Congress will take up next year is going to be the debt ceiling. Have you determined what your feelings are on how you’re going to approach that vote?
DENHAM: I just don’t see this next Congress raising the debt ceiling. But it’s certainly a challenge we’re going to have to deal with. I mean, there’s a lot of things at play here in this lame duck session.
TP: So you think that’s something that you’ll probably vote against?
DENHAM: Absolutely, yes.
Watch it:
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the second-highest ranking House Republican, told reporters last month that Republicans will bring up a clean “up-or-down vote” on increasing the debt ceiling next year. It remains to be seen if Cantor will honor this pledge when he likely becomes the Majority Leader during the 112th Congress.
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