First of all, I should say that I respect Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) for having the guts to release his budget plan, as it’s not politically popular at all. His plan also shows that balancing our budget is going to be a tough undertaking. That said, it is a terrible, terrible plan. I’ve been meaning to talk about this for a few days now, as it’s really stunning in its dismantling of our country’s promises to the elderly. Here’s the gist:
The Republicans’ budget would privatize Social Security and Medicare. Privatizing Medicare wouldn’t actually save any money in itself — so the government would slowly decrease the value of its Medicare vouchers, forcing seniors to dip into their own pockets. There are also a variety of smaller spending freezes, and the obligatory tax cuts. An analysis by the CBO shows that the plan would end the deficit… sometime between 2060 and 2080.
My job is to protect the interests of the people of Minnesota. Now, how are they to trust you, when you come in and to my face say something that either you know wasn’t true, or you didn’t know, and I don’t know which is worse. How are the people of Minnesota supposed to trust you?
As you can see, Al Franken is not happy about the proposed merger of NBC and Comcast. I can’t really blame him. After all, Comcast, as one of our very few cable companies, is responsible for the fair distribution of content. But they would also become creators of content with their purchase of NBC. It’s hard to see how that wouldn’t become a conflict of interest.
And I would get even more nervous, as Al clearly has, if the CEO of Comcast gave me a reassurance that was the exact opposite of what his lawyers had just argued in front of the FCC.
The whole video (after the break) is well worth a watch. Al Franken is steaming mad at Comcast, and he’s mad because he thinks Comcast is going to take advantage of us here in Minnesota. To be honest, I wish all of our public servants would get so serious about things they think are threats to their constituents.
Great news! It looks like Barack Obama has finally figured out how to get Republicans on board with health reform! The answer was so simple the whole time: Hold another summit.
President Obama made a dramatic attempt to jump-start the stalled health care debate Sunday, inviting Republicans in Congress to a half-day summit on the subject to be televised live later this month.
No doubt, by the time the summit is over, Republicans will be ready to move forward on health reform. After all, I think the only problem is that we haven’t discussed this enough yet.
In January, the economy shed 20,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the unemployment rate fell by 0.3% percentage points, to 10%. Considering that a year ago, the economy had shed 779,000 jobs, we are making excellent progress. The usual caveats apply — it’s going to take a long time to dig out of this recession, etc. — but it looks like a real recovery is beginning, and hopefully within the next few months, we will start adding some jobs.
The Speaker of the House’s office posted the graph below, showing just how far we’ve come. It’s taken two years, but it looks like things are finally stabilizing.
“That brings me to the second thing I want to tell you. In 2008, America elects a black man President.”
“What? Really? Like Morgan Freeman in ‘Deep Impact’?”
“No, you anachronistic goober. That movie doesn’t even come out until 1998.”
“So, he’s like Disraeli or Thatcher, right? Only Nixon can go to China? He’s really conservative? Please tell me you don’t elect Alan Keyes President.”
“No, no. His name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
“OK, now you’re just screwing with me.”
“No. Totally serious. He’s liberal, intelligent, deliberative, pretty much everything the country needs after Bush.”
“Bush? But Bush is President now. Please don’t tell me that he’s still around in 2008!”
“Oh, no. You’ve got the good Bush. The other one is who Obama is cleaning up after.”
“Wow! That’s awesome. That’s wonderful to hear. People must be really— Oh. You’re going to do that thing again, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am. A lot of his supporters are disappointed.”
“With what? A liberal black guy got elected President!”
“And in his first year, he prevented a second Great Depression, has stopped torture as official policy, is winding down an unnecessary war, has dramatically opened up the transparency of government and has gone a good way towards restoring America’s place in the world.”
Surely this will be the last straw for people who are fed up with Republicans’ outrageous abuse of arcane Senate procedures. Richard Shelby (R-AL) is now holding up all of President Obama’s nominations until he receives two large earmarks for his home state.
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, according to multiple reports this evening. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.
…
According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track [get more details at Talking Points Memo].
There’s a word for this: extortion. It’s not just unacceptable — it’s downright criminal.
In a strange way, though, I’m glad he did it. His move is so completely outrageous that maybe it will finally get people talking about the minority party’s use of arcane procedures to take over a body that is supposed to be democratic. At first, they were simply stalling and keeping the Senate from its business. Now, Shelby has taken it far beyond that and is actually using Senate procedure to commit extortion. This has to stop.
In an age when political and policy discussions are often crammed into soundbites, President Obama and the House Republicans advanced transparency and honest debate with their unprecedented live, televised question-and-answer session on January 29. Since then, people of all political persuasions have been talking about the value of what’s being called “Question Time.” It’s time to start a new American political tradition. We, the undersigned, call on President Obama and the leaders of the Republican Party in Congress to hold regular, frequent, and public Question Time sessions between the President and the opposition party.
It’s time to finally make Republicans in the Senate put up or shut up and force them into what would essentially be a filibuster.
First, a little bit of background. The leading plan for health reform since the Democrats lost their Senate seat in Massachusetts has been to have the House simply pass the Senate bill exactly, so another vote wouldn’t be required in the Senate. Then, certain changes could be made through the budget reconciliation process, which requires only 50 votes. Now, however, The Hill reports that Senate Republicans have figured out a procedure for stalling even the reconciliation process:
Though it has never been done, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) says he’s prepared to test the Senate’s stamina to block the Democrats from using the process to expedite changes to the healthcare bill.
Experts on Senate procedural rules, from both parties, note that such a filibuster is possible. While reconciliation rules limit debate to 20 hours, senators lack similiarconstraints on amendments and could conceivably continue offering them until 60 members agree to cut the process off.
The article concludes that without 60 votes to cut off debate, the Democrats would be unable to pass the bill. However, I disagree. As David Waldman points out, Republicans would be required to stay on the Senate floor, continually proposing amendment after amendment. If they stopped at any point, debate on the bill would expire. In other words, this would be a good old-fashioned filibuster — except tougher, because the Republicans wouldn’t even really be able to make speeches, they’d just need to keep proposing amendment after amendment. So I say let’s do it. Let’s force them to stand in front of the American people and offer hundreds of useless amendments. It’s time we had our showdown.
I wrote last week that the Democrats should be making a stronger case against Republican obstruction in the Senate:
If the Democrats want to get anywhere, it’s time for them to make Republican obstruction the issue. Stop capitulating, stop sacrificing your agenda. Get a spine and use your massive majorities and Obama’s bully pulpit and demand that Republicans do some actual work for a change.
In case the anecdotal evidence wasn’t enough, a new Pew Public Knowledge Poll shows that only 32 percent of Americans even know that Republicans refused to support health reform. If that’s not serious proof of the Democrats’ communication failure, I don’t what is.
It’s not too late to turn this around, but the Democrats are running out of chances. Right now, they have one of their best chances in a while. After Obama’s State of the Union, they have what is perhaps their final opening to start making a bigger issue out of Republican obstruction. Will they take it? Given their history, I sincerely doubt it.
Good grief. While Republicans continue to rail about Federal spending and the deficit, it has apparently become verboten to ask them to go into details. Presumably because they don’t have any. Here’s what happens when you ask a Republican Senator like Judd Gregg what he would cut from the budget:
Okay, it’s becoming quite clear that this isn’t just about policy differences. Senate Republicans are going to vote against every single thing the Democrats do, even if it’s fiscally conservative. The latest example: pay-as-you-go:
60 Democratic senators voted to adopt the pay-go measure (short for “pay-as-you-go”), which would require that new spending measures be offset in the budget by other funds, typically raised through tax increases or cuts to spending.
Republicans have said that by installing the rule, pay-go would become an excuse for tax hikes, since spending cuts are frequently unpopular.
All Democrats voted for the measure, and all 40 Republicans voted against it. The House adopted such a rule in a 265-166 vote last July.
They voted against it because spending cuts are frequently unpopular? Give me a break. So are tax hikes. I know it was never the practice during Republican rule, but sometimes, our leaders need to actually make tough decisions, and that means doing things that are unpopular. Yes, we’re going to have to do unpopular things to get the budget balanced. If you’re not willing to make the occasional tough choice, you’re not fit to be a U.S. Senator.
Finally, some straight talk from House Minority Leader John Boehner on how Democrats can get some Republican voters. It’s so simple: Just abandon all of your principles and use only the GOP’s ideas, and you might get some Republican support. That’s the gist of Boehner’s comments in an interview yesterday:
When it comes to bipartisan legislation you’ve got to look at the balance. If the balance leans in our direction, and things that we believe in, I would think that we would support it.
Democrats simply aren’t going to get any support from Republicans until they learn to respect the GOP’s 178 to 256 majority.
On a related note to my discussion of the voting public’s anger at politicians, corporate interests, and anyone else who could be considered a part of the “power structure,” I can’t imagine that this video clip will play well for the GOP. Here’s Obama saying that the banks can afford to pay a small fee to help out the American public which helped to bail them out, to the applause of Democrats, and the complete silence of Republicans.
Somehow, it’s hard to imagine that continuing to support the “anything-goes” policies of Wall Street can be a recipe for success in an election that will be dominated by angry populism.
That was pretty interesting. Obama has definitely come out with a different tone; he’s less grandiose, more direct and plain-spoken, and more confrontational.
For instance, talking about health care reform, he sarcastically said “if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.” Explaining that the budget freeze wouldn’t go into effect until next year, he testily told Republicans “that’s how budgeting works.”
He also chided both parties for gridlock and partisan games in Congress. There was at least a small taste of the sort of language I want to hear more of from Obama:
Greg Sargent articulates my frustration with Obama exactly:
This gets at, I think, an underappreciated aspect of liberal disappointment with Obama: On multiple fronts, Obama seems to be abandoning the idea that Dems can win arguments and achieve fundamental shifts in public opinion.
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Obama is one of the most gifted public communicators in decades. His campaign was premised on the idea that liberals needn’t shy away from arguments with the right or cede them any rhetorical turf. For this reason, each time Obama does cede rhetorical ground on this or that issue, liberals see Obama engaging in a larger capitulation. He seems to be giving up on his own potential for persuasion.
Bingo. I was desperately hoping for a communicator who could do for liberalism what Ronald Reagan did for conservatism: shift the entire national debate a few clicks in our direction.
Now, that’s not to say it’s too late. Obama still has seven (yes, seven) years to go, and I can only hope that at some point in the near future, the lessons of the past year make themselves apparent. Tonight’s State of the Union Address is another chance to make the argument for liberal policies, and I’ll be hoping against hope that Obama takes it.
People Are Shouting
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