Characterized as the moral issue of our time, climate change not only poses significant risks to the environment but represents an opportunity to adapt and re-energize the economy through investment in clean energy technology. As the National Academies of Science notes, “the U.S. should act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop a national strategy to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change.”
Despite the overwhelming evidence and need to address its “inevitable impacts,” a huge contingent of the newly-empowered GOP members of Congress do not believe in climate change to begin with. A survey by the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson finds that a member of Congress from nearly every state in the union — the so-called “Climate Zombie Caucus” — explicitly reject the threat of man-made global warming. Of the incoming freshmen, 36 of 85 in the House and 11 of 13 in the Senate have publicly questioned the science and “there are no freshman Republicans, in the House or Senate, who publicly accept the scientific consensus that greenhouse pollution is an immediate threat,” Johnson found.
But this iron wall of denial does not sit well with all conservatives. In a Washington Post op-ed yesterday, former Republican Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (NY) articulated his confusion as to why “so many Republican senators and representatives think they are right and the world’s top scientific academies and scientists are wrong.” Allowing for debate over policy, Boehlert said he finds the GOP’s “dogged determination” to deny the actual science “incomprehensible”:
Watching the raft of newly elected GOP lawmakers converge on Washington, I couldn’t help thinking about an issue I hope our party will better address. I call on my fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become our party’s line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities.[...]
Why do so many Republican senators and representatives think they are right and the world’s top scientific academies and scientists are wrong? I would like to be able to chalk it up to lack of information or misinformation.
I can understand arguments over proposed policy approaches to climate change. I served in Congress for 24 years. I know these are legitimate areas for debate. What I find incomprehensible is the dogged determination by some to discredit distinguished scientists and their findings.[...]
There is a natural aversion to more government regulation. But that should be included in the debate about how to respond to climate change, not as an excuse to deny the problem’s existence. The current practice of disparaging the science and the scientists only clouds our understanding and delays a solution.
While normally walking lockstep with this crowd, the GOP is rebuking the approach of “leaders of some of our nation’s most prominent businesses,” says Boehlert. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, for example, is “no collection of mom-and-pop shops operated by ‘tree huggers’” but rather a group of “hard-nosed, profit-driven capitalists” like General Electric, Duke Energy, and DuPont pushing Congress to see climate change as an opportunity to “create more economic opportunities than risks for the U.S. economy.” “My fellow Republicans should understand that wholesale, ideologically based or special-interest-driven rejection of science is bad policy,” he said.
To former Republican Rep. Joe Scarborough (FL), its more than bad policy, “it’s embarrassing.” In a thorough roundtable discussion with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) on the “huge ideological tension” over climate change, MSNBC’s conservative host bemoaned the U.S.’s woeful standing in clean energy production that could “transform our economy.” Kerry, the leading lawmaker on climate change legislation, agreed that Congress’s failure was both “embarrassing” and “ridiculous.” Noting that “Republicans have made an art form out of calling everything a tax and running against it,” Kerry said, telling Scarborough why there’s little hope for improvement: “Too many of the people who’ve come into the Congress on the other side, all they want to do is cut. They’re not talking about investing in America. And if all we do is come down here and focus on the deficit without focusing on future investment, the United States is going to fall farther behind.”
Watch it (starting at 3:00):
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Earlier this week, seven Republican-appointed federal judges co-signed a letter warning of the consequences of the GOP’s systematic obstruction of President Obama’s judges. The letter from the Judicial Council of the Ninth Circuit, which includes Republican appointees Alex Kozinski, Ralph Beistline, Vaughn Walker, Irma Gonzales, Frances Marie Tydingco-Gatewood, Richard Frank Cebull, Lonny Ray Suko, explains:
In order to do our work, and serve the public as Congress expects us to serve it, we need the resources to carry out our mission. While there are many areas of serious need, we write today to emphasize our desperate need for judges. Our need in that regard has been amply documented (See attached March 2009 Judicial Conference Recommendations for Additional Judgeships). Courts cannot do their work if authorized judicial positions remain vacant.
While we could certainly use more judges, and hope that Congress will soon approve the additional judgeships requested by the Judicial Conference, we would be greatly assisted if our judicial vacancies–some of which have been open for several years and declared “judicial emergencies”–were to be filled promptly. We respectfully request that the Senate act on judicial nominees without delay.
Although the letter is written in the respectful tone that judges generally adopt when speaking to their colleagues, this kind of advocacy by judges is exceptionally rare. Indeed, judges so rarely speak out about the judicial confirmation process that when conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist spoke out against GOP obstructionism of President Clinton’s nominees in 1997, the event stunned senators into action. Judicial confirmations increased from only 36 in 1997 to 65 in 1998. GOP obstructionism has become so serious that only 41 judges have been confirmed during Obama’s entire presidency.
An op-ed co-authored by retired conservative Judge Timothy Lewis provides a grim accessment of what will happen if Republicans continue their “delay for delay’s sake” tactics: “They are creating an unprecedented shortfall of judicial confirmations and, ultimately, a shortage of judges available to hear cases. For many Americans, this means justice is likely to be unnecessarily delayed — and often denied.”
Yesterday, the Miami Herald reported that “[a]s one of its first acts” next year, the GOP-controlled Congress will advance a bill by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) — the incoming chairman of the subcommittee that oversees immigration — that would modify the 14th amendment to deny “birthright citizenship” to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants.
In an interview with Fox News’ Bill Hemmer this morning, King explained just how he plans to go about radically changing citizenship requirements. According to King, it doesn’t involve a Constitutional amendment, but rather, simply reinterpreting the 14th amendment in a way that would treat undocumented immigrants like foreign diplomats and exclude them from being subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. laws:
HEMMER: The critics are going to say “why deny citizenship to a child?” Your argument is what?
KING: Well it’s really pretty simple. There is an industry that has grown up out of this that pregnant woman come into the United States illegally so that they can have a family that’s anchored to their citizenship and anchored to American benefits.
HEMMER: You can find countless examples of that I’m certain. [...] But you would need a Constitutional amendment to do away with this. That is a huge mountain to climb.
KING: I don’t agree Bill. Let me say that when you look at the scholarship on this — and I don’t present myself as a lead scholar — but I listen to some of them however and I read the text of it: all persons born within the United States and subject to jurisdiction thereof shall be American citizens. [...]HEMMER: So you would argue that it’s the language and the interpretation of the amendment?
KING: I would say so. That clause is there. If it weren’t there, then I think they would have a case. But the proper way to go about this is: pass the law banning birthright citizenship and then certainly the people on the other side will litigate…and we’ll fight out on the other side of this what the will in the Supreme Court is.
Watch it:
King clearly doesn’t understand the dangerous implications of mandating that anyone who comes to the U.S. illegally is not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. government. King’s interpretation of the 14th amendment could create a situation in which, rather than being legally defined and treated as removable “illegal aliens,” undocumented immigrants could only be declared personae non grata — a legal term under international law used to refer to “unwelcome” foreigners, usually diplomats, who are inherently under the jurisdiction of their home governments.
The personae non grata designation is completely discretionary and “[e]xpulsion is not the automatic consequence of the declaration.” In other words, by reinterpreting the 14th amendment in the manner that King suggests, when undocumented immigrants (or their children under this new schema) commit a crime they are no longer subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and legal authorities. It’s hard to imagine King — or anyone else for that matter — would be on board with that.
The WonkRoom has more on why King is wrong about “anchor babies” and how dangerous his legislation would be.
Thanks to a coordinated propaganda campaign to smear President Obama’s health care law with misinformation, Republicans have found support on the right for their effort to repeal the law. But while Americans are divided on the law as a whole, “most parts of the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, are actually quite popular and any attempt to repeal them could very well turn public sentiment against the repeal advocates.” These include items like tax credits for small business to offer health care coverage (supported by 78 percent of Americans) and a provision stopping insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions (supported by 71 percent).
Asked about these popular provisions yesterday on NPR, Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) — who will play a key role in the new GOP-controlled Congress next year as the likely chairman of the Rules Committee — said that the Republicans have “said all along” that they want to keep those parts:
INSKEEP: So given that the law is there, I mean, what do you do with it? What do you do with portions of the law that may seem beneficial to people that are probably Republicans.
DREIER: We have said all along that we want to make sure that provisions there that are in fact beneficial in ensuring that people have access, without a huge expansion of government, we don’t want to repeal. We want to make sure that we have these very very market driven provisions that I just went through and have those put in place.
Listen here:
This is, of course, flat out untrue. In fact, Republicans have been saying “all along” that they want to repeal the entirety of the law. This was one of the key drivers behind the tea party movement and the Republican campaigns they supported this fall. Congressional Republican leaders like future House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have vowed to “repeal and replace” the law with more right-wing reforms. Meanwhile, more extreme lawmakers led by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) have called for repealing the law “lock, stock, and barrel,” irrespective of replacement.
And Dreier should know about this, as he signed a petition circulated by King to repeal the entire bill. The text of the bill Dreier vowed to support — all one sentence of it — is unequivocal: the “Act is repealed…as if such Act had not been enacted.”
And King has been explicitly clear about his intentions. “Obamacare must be ripped out completely, lock, stock and barrel — root and branch — no vestige left behind, not a DNA particle of Obamacare retained,” he wrote in an op-ed. King even went so far as to demand a “blood oath” from Boehner to include a full repeal of health care reform in every appropriations bill next year, even if it results in a government shutdown. There is zero room in King’s pledge, which Dreier signed, to keep popular provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
ThinkProgress contacted King’s office for comment on Dreier’s apparent flip-flop, but an interview with the congressman was canceled without explanation hours after they agreed to it.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has become the face of GOP obstruction regarding President Obama’s push for the Senate to ratify the New START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia. Without the treaty in place, the U.S. has no legal authority to monitor Russia’s nuclear arsenal. And if New START isn’t ratified, not only will U.S.-Russian relations suffer but so will American credibility on issues such as Iran and nonproliferation. “The world’s nuclear wannabes, starting with Iran, should send a thank you note to Senator Jon Kyl,” the New York Times editorialized this week referring to Kyl’s obstruction. Today on MSNBC, Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) urged Republicans such as Kyl to support the treaty and called on Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to hold a vote on it in this lame-duck session of Congress:
LUGAR: Please do your duty for your country. We do not have verification of the Russian nuclear posture right now. We’re not going to have it until we sign the START treaty. We’re not going to be able to get rid of further missiles and warheads aimed at us. I state it candidly to my colleagues, one of those warheads…could demolish my city of Indianapolis — obliterate it! Now Americans may have forgotten that. I’ve not forgotten it and I think that most people who are concentrating on the START treaty want to move ahead to move down the ladder of the number of weapons aimed at us.
Watch it:
For more on New START, read today’s Progress Report.
This week on CNN, host Wolf Blitzer confronted Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) with a recent poll that found Americans don’t want to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and wondered why Schock — who has made both extending all the tax cuts and listening to the American people a priority — isn’t exactly listening to what they want. But Schock simply ignored the poll, saying, “The American people reject” letting the tax cuts expire for the wealthy.
Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) got caught playing a similar game yesterday, also on CNN with Blitzer. Pence — who has also made listening to the American people a priority — argued that in order to reduce the deficit, the government should cut spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But when Blitzer told Pence that a recent poll showed that Americans don’t want cuts to those programs, the Indiana congressman pulled a Schock:
PENCE: Well, I don’t know if they’re saying don’t touch it. I think they’re saying for people who are on Medicare and Social Security or depending on Medicaid today, let’s keep the promises we’ve made to seniors.
To his credit, Pence did say that cuts in defense spending should be on the table as well, but he also argued that Social Security should be revamped for those under 40 years old — an age that conveniently leaves Pence out of any potential changes to the popular social program. Watch it:
Indeed, as Blitzer noted, according to a new CNN poll, while Americans do want to reduce the deficit, employing significant cuts in social programs to do it is very unpopular:
For most of the government programs tested in the poll, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, college loans, and aid to farmers and unemployed workers, Americans say that avoiding significant spending cuts is more important than reducing the deficit.
“Many of the budget cuts proposed last week by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, who are heading up a presidential commission on deficit reduction, appear to be highly unpopular, including changes to Social Security and the federal tax code,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “The public opposition to some of the proposals made by Simpson and Bowles illustrates what a hard sell spending cuts will be.”
In a recent interview with right-wing radio host Steve Deace, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee claimed that lawmakers may flout court decisions they happen to disagree with:
A president has certainly got to respect a ruling of the court, but if the ruling of a court is wrong, and it’s fundamentally wrong, and you have two branches of the government that determine that it’s wrong, then those other two branches supersede the one. . . . The two branches of government, legislative and executive, have every right to make it clear to the Supreme Court that their interpretation is wrong. And whether they do that by constitutional amendment to spell it out to the court, or by passage of further amplification of law, there are many means, I think, at hand to do that.
Listen:
Huckabee is, of course, wrong about the separation of powers — and embarassingly so. While Congress does have the authority to overrule court decisions that wrongly interpret its own acts, the whole point of having a Constitution is that it draws lines that can’t be crossed by elected officials. What’s the point of announcing that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” if Congress can ignore any court decision preventing it from establishing a religion?
Indeed, even Huckabee doesn’t agree with Huckabee’s stance on the separation of powers. He has been an outspoken opponent of the Affordable Care Act, even touting the absurd view that the health reform law is unconstitutional. Yet if the President and Congress are free to ignore court decisions declaring acts of Congress unconstitutional, than it really doesn’t matter what the Constitution has to say about health reform because Congress passed the law and the President signed it.
In the end, it seems Huckabee doesn’t care much about what the Constitution actually has to say. He’s just reading out of the same right-wing playbook that says that the Constitution means whatever he wants it to mean.
Yesterday, the House of Representatives failed to pass a (far too short) three-month extension of unemployment benefits. If Congress does not act to extend benefits by the end of the month, 2.5 million Americans will lose their benefits, right in the midst of the holiday season.
At the same time, Congress is intensely debating whether or not to extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans, at a cost of $830 billion over the next decade. Earlier this week, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called for a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the rich, while deriding extending unemployment benefits as “some new massive spending.”
And in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio, the incoming chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, Rep. John Kline (R-MN), pronounced that extending benefits is not a priority for the incoming Republican Congress because “we can’t fund everything.” “We just don’t have the money,” Kline said:
KLINE: That’ll be a tougher lift in the 112th Congress. We’ve had unemployment benefits be extended for almost two years in some states, a little bit less in Minnesota. When you’re running a one and a half trillion dollar deficit per year, that’ll be part of the discussion as to whether that’s a priority for how we’re going to spend money. I would just reiterate what I said earlier, that the obligation for the Congress is to look at the entire budget and recognize that we’re borrowing over forty cents of every dollar that we spend, and say what are the priorities going to be. We can’t fund everything.
Q: But what do you tell those folks hanging on by a thread who really need those benefits?
KLINE: Well, they, heh, the best thing to do for them is to get the economy back on track and get businesses hiring so that they have a job that they can go to. We simply don’t have the money to keep extending unemployment benefits indefinitely. We just don’t have the money.
Listen here:
Kline also supports extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich. So in his world, $830 billion to finance tax cuts for the wealthy is fine, but $12.5 billion to extend unemployment benefits for three months is too expensive.
Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) is also a part of this crowd, supporting a full extension of the Bush tax cuts, but saying today, “we’re facing a fiscal crisis. If we’re going to choose to extend unemployment, we’ve got to find a way to pay for it.” Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) added, “we can both provide this help and pay for it by cutting less effective stimulus spending. That’s what we should be debating today.”
In the last forty years, the U.S. has never allowed extended benefits to expire with the unemployment rate above 7.2 percent, far below today’s rate of 9.6 percent. Plus, there are currently five unemployed persons for every job opening in the country. In fact, there are so few job openings, that even if every open position in the country were filled, four out of five unemployed workers would still be out of work. But for Kline and the other House Republicans, extending tax cuts for the rich is much higher on the priority list then ensuring that these households have an adequate safety net.
Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.
At an international papal conference on health care yesterday at the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI and other Catholic church leaders said it is the “moral responsibility of nations to guarantee access to health care for all of their citizens, regardless of social and economic status or their ability to pay.” Saying access to adequate medical care is one of the “inalienable rights” of man, the pope said, “Justice in health care should be a priority of governments and international institutions”:
The pope lamented the great inequalities in health care around the globe. While people in many parts of the world aren’t able to receive essential medications or even the most basic care, in industrialized countries there is a risk of “pharmacological, medical and surgical consumerism” that leads to “a cult of the body,” the pope said.
“The care of man, his transcendent dignity and his inalienable rights” are issues that should concern Christians, the pope said.
Because an individual’s health is a “precious asset” to society as well as to himself, governments and other agencies should seek to protect it by “dedicating the equipment, resources and energy so that the greatest number of people can have access.”
In a separate statement, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said, “Justice requires guaranteed universal access to health care,” adding that minimal levels of medical care are “a fundamental human right.” “Governments are obligated, therefore, to adopt the proper legislative, administrative and financial measures to provide such care,” the cardinal explained, saying that, “The governments of richer nations with good health care available should practice more solidarity with their own disadvantaged citizens.”
Saul Anuzis, the former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, announced this week that he’s running to replace Michael Steele as the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Anuzis — who also ran against Steele in 2009 — is widely considered to be a front-runner, and says that he plans to keep a low profile, telling Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on Monday that he just wants to “make sure the trains run on time.”
Keeping a low profile may be a good strategy for Anuzis — this week, the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that Anuzis has defended and endorsed a vocal right-wing extremist named Kyle Bristow, who was the head of the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (MSU-YAF). “This is exactly the type of young kid we want out there,” Anuzis said on a radio program in May 2007. “I’ve known Kyle for years and I can tell you I have never heard him say a racist or bigoted or sexist thing, ever.”
Throughout the “years” Anuzis professes to have know him, Bristow and MSU-YAF have engaged in a series of disturbing racist and homophobic activities. MSU-YAF staged events like “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day,” held a “Koran Desecration” competition, jokingly threatened to distribute smallpox-infested blankets to Native American students, and posted “Gays Spread AIDS” fliers across campus. Bristow is on record saying “Homosexuality kills people almost to a degree worse than cigarettes,” adding, “these [pro-gay rights] groups are complicit with murder.” He also invited Holocaust denier Nick Griffin, who is the leader of the whites-only British National Party, to give a speech at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, MI.
Many students quit MSU-YAF after Bristow began engaging the group in these activities; one student said she left MSU-YAF because it gained a reputation as a home for “racists and fascists” under Bristow. “Frankly,” she said, “he’s embarrassing.”
Thanks to Bristow’s leadership, the SPLC — which tracks extremist groups — designated the MSU-YAF as a hate group in 2006. Bristow appears to have taken the designation very personally. He recently wrote a novel with a plot that “evolves around a series of violent revenge fantasies against Jewish professors, Latino and Native American activists,” and also includes a graphic murder targeting a character only thinly veiled as an SPLC staffer:
The supersonic projectile hit the leftist agitator one inch below the eye, and the bullet exited the back of his head nanoseconds later. … Brain, blood, and skull fragments burst forth from what was once Greenberg’s head, and the leftist was blown off both of his feet. Greenberg died instantly, and his last words were “We must destroy the plague that is Western culture.” Ironically, Western culture got him first. From Valhalla [a celebration hall in Scandinavian mythology], Thor, the archenemy of trolls, smiled at the accomplishment of the epitome of Western Man.
“Several notable white supremacists and anti-Semites have endorsed the novel.” It should be noted that Anuzis’ defense of Bristow came almost a full year after MSU-YAF’s exploits were made public, and after the SPLC designated him as the leader of a hate group.
Anuzis would hardly be the first high-profile RNC chair candidate in recent years with a checked history on race. In 2008, former Tennessee GOP Chair Chip Saltsman, who also ran Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign that year, infamously sent out a “Christmas gift” to RNC members, including a song titled, “Barack the Magic Negro,” which parodied Obama “as a black man acceptable to whites.” Another song, “Star Spanglish Banner,” disparages Latinos.
Last week, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the co-chairs of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission, released a report outlining their recommendations for reducing the federal budget deficit. One of their most contentious proposals is to gradually raise the retirement age to 69, a move the co-chairs claim is meant to maintain the system’s solvency.
This morning, Simpson and Bowles appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss their proposals. At one point, Simpson explained his view that balancing the budget would require going “to where the meat is. And the meat is health care, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.” Host Joe Scarborough then complained that while AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka attacked the proposals for cutting Social Security, Scarborough said he doesn’t think the co-chairs went far enough (co-host Mika Brzezinski agreed). Bowles then defended their proposal, saying, “What we’ve done is make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years. As you all know, Social Security runs out of money in 2037. We’re not making it up. That’s the law”:
SIMPSON: You’ve gotta go where the meat is. And the meat is health care, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Not balancing the books on the backs of poor old staggering seniors to make the damn thing solvent for 75 years.
SCARBOROUGH: We were stunned, Erskine, by some of the things that were said after the commission report came out, saying, “Seniors are going to be thrown out on the street!” I looked at the numbers to be really honest with you, and I didn’t think you moved fast enough on Social Security and Medicare. We calculated that I guess, it was Trumka, who I like very much, Trumka said that this throws old people out. My two year old son Jack will get Social Security at 69. People in their 20′s and 30′s will be just fine.
BRZEZINSKI: In fact, I think you could’ve gone further.
SIMPSON: I know Rich very well. He’s a good egg. He has to say for what he has to say for his membership. But he knows I’m right.
BOWLES: What we’ve done is make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years. As you all know, Social Security runs out of money in 2037. We’re not making it up. That’s the law.
Watch it:
Social Security is currently projected to be fully solvent until the year 2037. After that, it is expected to be able to pay out 75 percent of benefits until 2084, which basically equals full benefits, once inflation is accounted for. There is no threat of the program running out of money any time soon — certainly not in 2037. That does not mean that there aren’t positive and progressive changes that could possibly be made to the system.
However, the hike in retirement age that the MSNBC co-hosts and deficit commission co-chairmen are praising would be a very punitive way to ensure further solvency. As a Government Accountability Office report recently obtained by the AP found, “Raising the retirement age for Social Security would disproportionately hurt low-income workers and minorities, and increase disability claims by older people unable to work.”
Scaborough may not be entirely wrong to shrug off the possibility of his son Jack retiring at 69, if his son ends up being in the same socioeconomic class as him. Almost all of the gains in life expectancy over the past few decades have been among upper income earners. If current trends continue, middle and lower class Americans will see very little gain in life expectancy by the time the co-chairs plan to hike the retirement age. And “nearly half of workers over the age of 58 [today] work at jobs that are either physically demanding or involve difficult work conditions,” meaning that if those trends continue, blue-collar workers will be hurt particularly hard by raising the retirement age.
Unfortunately, most Americans are not highly-paid TV hosts like Brzezinski and Scarborough.
President Obama has decided to confront Senate Republicans, daring them to block the New START treaty “at the risk of disrupting relations with Russia and the international coalition that opposes Iran’s nuclear program.” Flanked by Henry Kissinger, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, Obama said yesterday that “it is a national security imperative that the United States ratify the New Start treaty this year.”
House Republicans successfully blocked the extension of unemployment benefits for millions of Americans yesterday. Because the vote was brought up under fast-track authority, it needed two-thirds in favor to succeed; but the measure failed 258-154.
Financial services industry lobbyists have descended on Capitol Hill to press lawmakers to protect its ability to package mortgages as securities and resell them around the globe. The Washington Post reports that companies “are flying top executives to Washington for one-on-one meetings with lawmakers…and they are blanketing Congress with white papers, memos and other documents that lay out their arguments.”
Yesterday, the House failed to pass a Republican proposal to defund NPR. Seeking to take action against NPR after it dismissed news analyst Juan Williams, Republicans put the item on the floor through their YouCut program but the House voted 239-171 to move forward on a teleworking bill without taking up the provision.
Grover Norquist, the head of the influential conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, is encouraging the new House Republican majority to prepare to shutdown the government if they don’t get their way on spending cuts. Norquist, who played a key role in the 1995 government shutdowns, said President Obama “will be less popular if — in the service of overspending and wasting people’s money — he closes the government down.”
The Senate confirmed Jacob Lew as the new director of the Office of Management and Budget yesterday, a post he previously held from 1998 to 2001. After blocking Lew’s nomination for months to protest the administration’s ban on offshore drilling, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) lifted the hold on the nomination yesterday, saying, “I figured it would get their attention, and I think it has.”
The House Ethics Committee recommended censure for Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) yesterday, the most serious punishment it can hand out short of expulsion. Rangel was found guilty of 11 ethics violations, including failing to pay taxes on rental property, failure to report personal income, and improper fund-raising.
“Tea Party-backed Joe Miller is asking a federal judge to prevent state elections officials in Alaska from certifying” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) the winner of the state’s U.S. Senate election. “Murkowski leads by more than 10,000 votes and even if all of the ballots challenged by Miller’s legal team were thrown out,” she would still win.
And finally: Despite conservative rhetoric that this month’s election represented the will of the American people uniting together to refute President Obama, a new poll shows that fewer than half of Americans even know that Republicans won a majority in the House. “Three times as many young people, aged under 30, could properly identify Google’s new phone software, Android, as could identify” presumptive House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).
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 this tax expenditure 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 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 writer 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
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