Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly asks a tough question. If the “Tea Party” folks say that what they’re upset about is too much taxation, and Obama signed a major tax cut, what are they so upset about? Well, apparently, they’re upset about the perception that taxes are too high.
Archive for the 'Misc. National Politics' Category
Page 2 of 26
Barack Obama cut taxes for 95 percent of working Americans. That’s not debatable; it’s a fact. The stimulus bill included significant payroll tax cuts, Obama signed them into law, and you’ve been seeing the results in lower withholding on every single paycheck you bring home.
Having your leader defeated in an election is obviously embarrassing for a political party. Republicans crowed for weeks after Democratic leader Tom Daschle was defeated in a close election in 2004, and it’s been looking like the same was likely to happen to Harry Reid.
Now, Reid has a new breath of life with news that the Tea Party has qualified as a third party in Nevada and will have a candidate in the Senate race. That could easily split the Republican vote.
That brings up a tough question for me, given Reid’s ineffectiveness as majority leader. In the long run, will it be worse for the Democrats if he loses, or if he wins? I have to say, I think it would be worth the embarrassment of losing two majority leaders in 4 elections if it would mean Reid is no longer leading Democrats.
This is spectacular. Rachel Maddow makes a heck of a case that it no longer matters whether Republicans support a policy or not — if the Democrats support that same policy, they’ll vote against in unanimously. She comes up with a number of examples: a deficit commission, pay as you go rules, the bank bailouts, etc. These were all originally Republican policies, but they now oppose them because Obama supports them.
Most damning is the Republicans’ reaction to the stimulus. Maddow shows clip after clip after clip of Republicans trashing the stimulus, then presenting giant checks and taking credit for funds they voted against.
Most definitely worth a watch.
The Democrats are finally starting to get mad. They’re only about six months behind me. I’ve been fuming as I’ve watched Republicans take a 41-to-59 minority and use it to control the Senate with an iron fist on practically every single vote, no matter how insignificant. I appreciate that the filibuster allows the minority party to maintain some power, but the operative word here is some. 41 votes out of 100 is not a mandate from the American people to lead, and the fact that it is being treated that way tells me that we need to reform the process. Elections matter, and having a large majority needs to mean something.
The Huffington Post has more on Democrats starting to think about modifying the filibuster:
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.
Our own Michele Bachmann apparently thinks we should go even farther and completely eliminate Social Security and Medicare:
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.
This is so good:
“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.”
“And people are disappointed?”
“They want more.”
“Like the people disappointed with the computer?”
“Yes.”
“So people in 2010 are dicks?”
“They’re cynics.”
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.
Here’s the gist of the story:
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.
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.
People Are Shouting
RSS