The election year was dominated by talk about jobs and the economy, but neither the administration nor Congress seems to have any grand ideas for jump-starting a still sluggish recovery — and they’re not even talking about it much.
President Obama sought to turn attention back to economic issues with a speech last week in Texas on manufacturing, but that’s already long since been forgotten. A cascade of scandals has driven the issue entirely off the Washington radar.
Even before Benghazi, the IRS and the Department of Justice controversies started heating up, the economy had consistently taken a back seat to issues such as immigration and gun control.
“The economy is by far the most important issue for voters,” says Karlyn Bowman, a polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s not unusual for Washington preoccupations to be different than those of the public.”
She says that the public is skeptical that Washington can provide economic answers at this point. Politicians themselves seem a little dubious.
Republicans are so intent on making sure Americans lose their health care and that heath insurance companies make as much profit as possible, that they are willing to anything to accomplish their goal.
Besides wasting taxpayers money with fruitlessly attempting to repeal the law over 37 times and counting, Republicans have now come up with another plan – stop the implementation of the law by refusing to provide a committee necessary for the full implementation of the law.
In a letter to President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) noted their original opposition to Obamacare, reiterated their intent to repeal it entirely, and declared that they would not make any appointments to the Independent Payment Advisory Board.
The IPAB is a 15-member panel whose members must be confirmed by the Senate. The President selects three members himself and is required by law to seek three recommendations each from the top Democrat and Republican in each chamber. With Thursday’s letter, Boehner and McConnell refused to make any recommendations.
The IPAB will be stood up in 2014 by Obamacare and tasked with making cuts to Medicare provider payments (it may not touch benefits) if costs exceed economic growth plus an additional percentage point in any given year. Congress can override it by passing equally large cuts with a simple majority or waiving the cuts entirely with a three-fifths majority.
“Because the law will give IPAB’s 15 unelected, unaccountable individuals the ability to deny seniors access to innovative care, we respectfully decline to recommend appointments,” Boehner and McConnell wrote in the letter.
But there is a catch: if IPAB fails to do its work for any reason, the Health and Human Services secretary must order the cuts herself. So in a way, Boehner and McConnell are surrendering some of their power in order to appear as though they’re thwarting Obamacare — when in reality they’re merely turning over more control to the executive branch.
If Republicans want to reduce the budget, then closing Guantanamo would be the perfect place to start. But they’re still fighting President Obama’s efforts to close the prison.
The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, which was set up 11 years ago to house foreign terrorism suspects. With 166 inmates currently in custody, that amounts to an annual cost of $903,614 per prisoner.
By comparison, super-maximum security prisons in the United States spend about $60,000 to $70,000 at most to house their inmates, analysts say. And the average cost across all federal prisons is about $30,000, they say.
The high cost was just one reason Obama cited when he returned this week to an unfulfilled promise to close the prison and said he would try again. Obama also said that the prison, set up under his Republican predecessor George W. Bush and long the target of criticism by rights groups and foreign governments, is a stain on the reputation of the United States.
Programs like Head Start and Meals on Wheels are being slashed because Republicans refused to end the self imposed Sequester, while we are flushing money down the drain in Guantanamo.
It would seem that closing the prison would be the smart and ideal thing to do, but doing so would fulfill one of Obama’s campaign promises, and that is simply not acceptable to the “deficit Hawks” in the Republican party.
So we continue. Wasting millions in Cuba, while precious services that protect children and poor people here in America, get slashed.
The House will mark April 15, the day federal taxes are due, by passing a bill that would require the government to fire federal workers with “seriously delinquent” tax debts.
Thousands of federal workers are cited each year for failing to pay their taxes on time. Last month, the IRS said more than 300,000 workers still owed $3.5 billion to the IRS for 2011.
In response, the House is expected to take up H.R. 249, the Federal Employee Tax Accountability Act, under a suspension of House rules. In addition to firing federal workers who still owe taxes, it would prohibit the government from hiring these people.
The bill, from Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), would require federal agencies to take “appropriate measures” to ensure no one is hired with a “seriously delinquent tax debt.”
You’ve all heard the claims, that the problem in Washington is not a revenue problem but a spending problem. Republicans have successfully led many to believe that Democratic presidents have contributed the most to our national deficit. But there is something called the truth, and the truth cannot be denied especially when it’s backed up by statistics.
Here’s a look at the spending in this nation over the last 30+ years. Something Republicans refuse to comprehend.
Thursday, 16 Republican senators voted to move forward with debate on gun control legislation. Texas Railroad Commissioner Barry Smitherman’s response: hang them.
Smitherman, a Republican who oversees the state’s oil and gas industry (the name is a bit of an anachronism) retweeted an image listing all 16 GOP senators, along with an image of a noose with “treason” on top of it.
Smitherman still has a long way to go if he wants to claim the biggest overreaction to gun control legislation. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) alleged that national firearms databases could lead to “evil consequences”—such as genocide.
Update: The image has been taken down, but here it is:
Vice President Biden on Tuesday said GOP lawmakers who are threatening to block a vote on gun legislation are making an “almost mind-boggling” move but said he holds hope that the Republican lawmakers will come around and support a vote.
Fourteen GOP lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have said they would likely move to block a vote on gun legislation out of concerns that the bill — which includes a provision to expand background checks —would infringe on American’s right to bear arms.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced Tuesday that the Senate will vote on Thursday to try to end the GOP filibuster.
“Why don’t people up there understand this?” Biden said in a speech to law enforcement officers in Washington. “What has to happen to break through the consciousness of the people up on (Capitol) Hill?”
The Senate is expected to begin debate on the gun legislation this week. The current version of the Senate gun bill would strengthen current laws on gun trafficking and straw purchasers, increase grants for improvements in school safety as well as expand background checks to nearly every gun purchase.
I guess desperate times call for desperate measures.
In an attempt to reach a deficit-reduction deal, President Obama is offering to cut essential programs such as Social Security and Medicare in his new budget proposal. The President’s proposal will include a cut of $1.8 trillion over 10 years and replace the budget cuts that went into effect on March 1. This deal also revisits an earlier proposal to House Speaker, John Boehner, where $400 billion in savings to Medicare would occur over those 10 years.
A senior administration official commented,
The President’s budget to be presented on Wednesday will show how we can invest in the things we need to grow our economy, create jobs and strengthen the middle class while further reducing the deficit in a balanced way
The Social Security portion will include a ‘chained CPI’, an inflation formula which should attract many Republicans as the CPI is argued to be a more accurate calculation of inflation which could possibly help minimize the growth of consumer prices. The idea of whether or not this is truly the case is still being heavily debated.
There’s little doubt that this proposal will cause some dissent against President Obama as cutting Social Security and Medicare is an unpopular choice for many Democratic supporters.
However, this has been an ongoing battle between the President and many Republican incumbents and it’s clear that the President is ready to move forward with some type of compromise that pleases most, if not all, members of each party.
This report conducted by Think Progress is based on a recent Quinnipiac poll released today, showing that if the election were held today, 43 percent of the electorate would support a Democratic U.S. House candidate, as opposed to just 35 percent who would back a Republican.
That 8 point lead for Democrats is significantly more than the GOP’s margin of victory during the 2010 Republican wave election (6.6 percent) and even more that the Democratic margin of victory during the 2006 wave (7.9 percent) — when Democrats were bolstered by both an unpopular Republican president and a failing war in Iraq. And yet, if Democrats succeed in maintaining this substantial lead through next year’s congressional election, they will likely emerge with a tiny majority of just 5 seats.
Last January, the Republican Party published a triumphant report bragging that “Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans.” The report touts the role GOP gerrymandering played in enabling Republicans to keep the House despite losing the popular vote, citing states like Michigan, where “Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress.”
Indeed, Republican gerrymandering was so successful during the last redistricting cycle that Democrats would likely need to win the national popular vote by more than 7 points in order to win the barest of majorities in the House. In 2012, gerrymandering enabled 215 House Republicans to win their elections by at least 8 points or more — only 218 seats are needed to control a majority of the House.
Thus, assuming Democratic gains are evenly distributed nationwide, even if Democrats won the 8 point landslide predicted by the Quinnipiac poll they would control the House by only a narrow 220-215 margin. If this poll is off by just one point, and Democrats win by only 7 points, Republicans will retain control of the House by a single seat.
Twenty young kids were gunned down in Newtown Connecticut last December. That’s in addition to the thousands who are killed each year from gun violence. But is all that enough to appeal to the cold hearted nature of the Republicans?
Not even close. Congressional Republicans are promising to block any attempt by Democrats to implement sensible gun laws.
Sens. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are threatening to filibuster gun-control legislation, according to a letter they plan to hand-deliver to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office on Tuesday.
“We will oppose the motion to proceed to any legislation that will serve as a vehicle for any additional gun restrictions,” the three conservatives wrote in a copy of the signed letter obtained by POLITICO.
Reid plans to bring up a gun-control measure that focuses on broadening background checks and cracking down on interstate gun-trafficking after the current Senate recess.
Conservatives are concerned that once that bill reaches the floor, amendments could stiffen restrictions on gun control.
The President did something most Americans do every year, so naturally, Republicans found a problem with what he did. The latest example is Mr. Obama taking a few minutes out of his schedule to fill out his March Madness brackets. Most Republicans naturally have a problem with this, but we’ll look at what Senator Lindsey Graham and Rudy Giuliani has to say about this unbelievable thing the president did.
“Do you realize he’s never received one vote for any of his previous budgets? If he can pick one winner right in the brackets, he’s trumped on what he’s able to do on getting votes for his own budget,” Graham (R-S.C.) said Wednesday on Fox News’ “On the Record.”
Obama picked Indiana University to win the NCAA March Madness tournament, which begins Thursday.
“I think his basketball picks are good news stories and his budget is a lousy news story for him, and so he’s trying to do a good news story,” Graham said on Fox News.
He added: “So why he’s doing this? It’s a good soft news story. His budget is going to be met with absolutely no support from Democrats and Republicans.”
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that he has no issue with Obama filling out a bracket — provided he gets his work done.
“I have no problem with the president doing his brackets. That’s fine. He’s having fun. He’s entitled to have some fun, but usually the way I look at it is you have fun after you do your work. And the president hasn’t done his work,” said Giuliani, a Republican, on Fox News. “He hasn’t done it in years. He hasn’t proposed a budget that’s serious since he’s been president. As Lindsey pointed out, he can’t even get a Democrat to vote for one of his budgets.”
Yep. Pay no attention to the fact that since the President’s policies took effect in 2009, the economy has been steadily adding millions of jobs that were lost under the previous Republican administration. And pay no attention to the fact that most Americans have regained the losses they suffered in their 401k and other annuity accounts. Or that the stock market recently hit an all time high due in part to the President’s policies, or that most economists agree that things are better now than when Obama took office.
Those are just facts Republicans would rather you not pay attention to. As far as they’re concerned, the President is not working.
Imagine that a group of conservatives get together to talk about pressing issues, deliberate about a leader that will take them into the near future and debate their organization’s role in world affairs. Of course, I’m talking about the Conservative Political Action Conference. Or the recent conclave of Cardinals. At this point, the two are interchangeable.
That’s the problem for conservatives.
Pope Francis 1
As far as the College of Cardinals is concerned, now that we finally have the answer to all of those prayers, we can reveal the Almighty’s intentions. The Holy One clearly prefers that a rather old man from Argentina, who is so humble that he names himself after an even more humble saint, run the Church.
Adonai, if I can be so informal, also clearly wants the red hats to come back to Rome sooner than later (will Francis make it to 90?) to choose yet another man so the Church can gauge how long it can stall on 1. reforming itself, and 2. including ALL of the world’s Catholics in its warm embrace. Until then, enjoy and rejoice as the world celebrates the second most famous Argentinian in the world today (after Lionel Messi).
As for the conservative Republicans, their meeting this week reflects the brawl that was the inevitable result of its losses in November, when only the time-tested strategy of gerrymandering saved their House majority. We’ve already seen some splintering as nine Republican governors have decided to take ACA Medicaid money, some GOP Senators are ready to discuss compromises on taxes to get a fiscal deal, and one, Rob Portman of Ohio, who has come out (no pun intended) for marriage equality on account of his gay son.
Who came out to him. Two years ago. No hurry.
Yes, put another nail in the “it’s a lifestyle choice” school of determining gayness. I can’t imagine the Portman house being anything other that hetero-centric. Maybe the Senator can talk to Dick Cheney about it.
The GOP’s problem is that it’s out-of-touch with what most Americans want for their future and the future of the country. They scold, seem to be anti-everything, and don’t see that adapting to the world in not surrender of your core beliefs. It’s called tolerance and respect, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum or Marco Rubio saying it, the message is the same. The messenger will lose in 2016 if they don’t change.
Liberals took a hit this week too, as Mayor Bloomberg’s soda gambit was snuffed out by the courts although he promises an appeal. And he should. Further, Twinkies will soon be back in stores after Hostess sold the brand for $410 million dollars, so the score stands at Junk Food 2-Health Food 0. Oh, and the new Twinkies will still have the Hostess name on them so as not to confuse anybody.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s visit with the Congress produced some positive reviews, but to expect a change of heart among the true believers would require a Providential act. Maybe a trip to Israel is not a bad idea, or is really part of the plan.
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