Tag: Default in 2011

There’s much for them to be angst-ridden about. If they think it’s bad now, wait ‘til next year.

Mitch McConnell, never one to beat around the bush, describing the prospects for bipartisan comity in the Senate in the next Congress.
I’m sure we’ll all be very sick of the media pushback against what is clearly pure partisan politics, precisely what the 93% of the public says it is sick of. I imagine the firestorm will ultimately force McConnell to give a tearful retraction somewhere around 5pm EST today. So clear your calendars.
But, by all means Democrats, keep handing over hostages.

Jon John: Cornyn and Thune

Reporter 1: Senator Thune, I was just looking at the list of earmark requests that you requested this year [in the Omnibus spending bill] and it adds up to over a hundred million dollars
Thune: I support those projects, but I don’t support this bill [to which my own earmarks are attached; I do not support it because of earmarks.]
Reporter 2: Going through this bill, there is earmark after earmark from the both of you, millions of dollars in earmarks, why do you have any credibility on this?
Cornyn: Because we’re going to vote against the bill.
Reporter 3: It appears like you’re saying one thing and doing another.
Cornyn: Not at all,
Thune: [also stepped in to defend their stance on the Omnibus]
GOP aide: We’ve got to leave it there – we’ve got to get going.

Mitch McConnell, Earmark Opposer

Mitch McConnell plans to filibuster an omnibus spending bill because of the earmarks larded onto it. Worth noting that he personally added several of these earmarks to the bill. Your 2010 GOP, staunch earmark opponents as recently as a week ago:

the legislation includes provisions requested this year by McConnell, including $650,000 for a genetic technology center at the University of Kentucky, according to an analysis of the bill by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog.

[…]

But McConnell, like other new earmark opponents, stopped short of asking for his projects to be removed from the bill.

Rest assured, we shall never speak of this again. Or now, really. Just forget any of this happened.

Mitch McConnell, Earmark Opposer

The Numbering Shall Be Eight

Ezra Klein relates that an array of left-leaning interest groups have signed onto a letter spelling out an eight point description of what the Senate should be doing on the first day of the next Congress:

  1. On the first legislative day of a new Congress, the Senate may, by majority vote, end a filibuster on a rules change and adopt new rules.
  2. There should only be one opportunity to filibuster any given measure or nomination, so motions to proceed and motions to refer to conference should not be subject to filibuster.
  3. Secret “holds” should be eliminated.
  4. The amount of delay time after cloture is invoked on a bill should be reduced.
  5. There should be no post-cloture debate on nominations.
  6. Instead of requiring that those seeking to break a filibuster muster a specified number of votes, the burden should be shifted to require those filibustering to produce a specified number of votes to continue the filibuster.
  7. Those waging a filibuster should be required to continuously hold the floor and debate.
  8. Once all Senators have had a reasonable opportunity to express their views, every measure or nomination should be brought to a yes or no vote in a timely manner.

I’d only say that the amount of delay on a cloture motion should be reduced all the way to zero: you fail to produce people on the floor 24/7 then regular order begins immediately; no waiting, no marinating, no anything. Put up or shut up. Same goes for “reasonable opportunity” in point eight. Spell that out and ratchet up the required population of Senators needed to uphold the filibuster; cap it with a very brief interregnum between filibuster-broken and vote-held: as in less than one legislative day. Otherwise, I agree completely.

Perhaps the involvement of these non-dirty-fucking-hippy interest groups combined with the letter from the opposition (in which the GOP duly promised to filibuster everything forever; and if you think they’ll stop once the millionaire tax giveaway is sealed, you really are out there on drugs) will in some way nudge the feckless idiots that run the Senate into doing something. I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.

I reject the word

Incoming Speaker John Boehner: We have to govern. That’s what we were elected to do.
Leslie Stahl: But governing means compromising.
Boehner: It means working together.
Stahl: It also means compromising.
Boehner: It means finding common ground.
Stahl: Okay, is that compromising?
Boehner: I made it clear I am not gonna compromise on my principles, nor am I gonna compromise…
Stahl: What are you saying?
Boehner: …the will of the American people.
Stahl: You’re saying, “I want common ground, but I’m not gonna compromise.” I don’t understand that. I really don’t.
Boehner: When you say the word “compromise,” a lot of Americans look up and go, “Uh-oh, they’re gonna sell me out.” And so finding common ground, I think, makes more sense. […]
Stahl: Why won’t you say you’re afraid of the word [compromise]?
Boehner: I reject the word.
Lemkin: I’ll give the Obama team 45 minutes to dig up the old Rhythm Corps song “Common Ground” and get Clinton out to the lectern to run a few bars for us.

[President Obama] announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.
So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.
[…]
[He] apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. […] There were no comparable gestures from the other side. Instead, Senate Republicans declared that none of the rest of the legislation on the table — legislation that includes such things as a strategic arms treaty that’s vital to national security — would be acted on until the tax-cut issue was resolved, presumably on their terms.

Paul Krugman bringing the shrill. Excellent stuff.
Find me a single MSM story that in any way frames this as a GOP minority temper tantrum and willful, dangerous obstructionism in the face of overwhelming public opinion. This is before you even get to utterly foolish in light of the GOP’s supposed deficit focus. I think you’ll find it being framed systematically and pervasively in quite the opposite direction. Liberal Media.

Right on, Kevin Drum. Implicit here is what nobody ever seems to say: if your taxable income is $250,001, you will see tax increase only on that last one dollar. You still get the tax break on the first $250K, just like every single other American. Compare that to the GOP plan (red portion of bars). Utter and indefensible lunacy.

And yet The Democrat is absolutely getting his clock cleaned on this.

I don’t see any possible repercussions to this fecklessness and timidity in the face of a fight on which you hold the economic, moral, and public-opinion high grounds once we get to the real fight early next year on the debt ceiling.

The Wrath of the Bond Vigilantes

At first, the vigour with which Dublin wielded the spending axe won plaudits from bond markets. But the deflationary impact of the cuts has since seen the deficit widen.

Clearly the answer to this is simply deeper cuts. But only to services for the poor and unemployed. Couple that with a massive tax cut for the top 2% and you’ve got yourself a recipe for runaway growth…

The Wrath of the Bond Vigilantes

Roadmap to Catfood for Dinner

GREGORY: But then, but where, but where do you make the cuts? I mean, if you’re protecting everything for those, the most potent political groups like seniors who go out and vote, where are you really going to balance the budget?
DEMINT: Well, look at Paul Ryan’s Roadmap to the future. We see a clear path to moving back to a balanced budget over time. Again, the plans are on the table. We don’t have to cut benefits for seniors, and we don’t need to cut Medicare.

As many have noted, the Ryan Roadmap not only cuts benefits for seniors, it eliminates Medicare entirely. DeMint is either utterly misinformed about the content of said “Roadmap”, a blithering idiot, or lying through his teeth. Working out the full slate of combinations possible in the previous sentence is left as an exercise for the student.

What I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere is that not only are these new and exciting Ryan Medicare Vouchers initially of lower value than the current benefit, their value never increases against inflation or other cost increases. So, barring some later legislative intervention, you’d have less of a benefit each and every year until you finally saw fit to just go die in the streets. Presumably a number of golden years subsisting on catfood and other low-cost comestibles would precede that fine day you scuttle out into the gutter to die, but still. That’s just not an “America’s Future” that I want a roadmap to.
And I’m confident that the vast majority of Americans agree with me on this one; it’s just that we’re not allowed to actually talk about any of this. Ever. Gregory, who never bothers to follow up on anything actually manages to get close for once, but then seemingly panics at witnessing such undiscovered professional realms and gives it the old “we’ll leave it there.” Top notch work as per usual. Look, a shiny penny!