Tag: GOP

…nobody, and I mean nobody, in a position of influence within the GOP cares about deficits when tax cuts for the affluent are on the line. Deficit hawkery is just a stick with which to beat down social programs.

Paul Krugman, reacting to the shocking news that the rising GOP House Majority will be moving to change the rules in ways “clearly designed to pave the way for more deficit-increasing tax cuts in the next two years. These rules stand in sharp contrast to the strong anti-deficit rhetoric that many Republicans used on the campaign trail this fall […] these new rules […] could have a substantial impact and risk making the nation’s fiscal problems significantly worse.”
As Krugman says: these guys don’t care about the deficit, now or ever. They simply use concern to whip up anger against then-as-now non-existent “Cadillac Queens of Welfare” and whatnot such that ever more wealth can be transferred to the richest of the rich. And rest assured: they won’t be satisfied until they have it all. It’s what is going on in corporate America, and it’s what is going in political America. Well, such as the two spheres are even distinguishable anymore it’s what’s going on…

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.

Respectable Buisinessmen’s Club

Haley Barbour (R. Gov MS): You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders.
Citizens Council: The Citizens’ Council is the South’s answer to the mongrelizers. We will not be integrated. We are proud of our white blood and our white heritage of sixty centuries.

Recap and Trade

Mike Huckabee, 2007: I also support cap and trade of carbon emissions. And I was disappointed that the Senate rejected a carbon counting system to measure the sources of emissions, because that would have been the first and the most important step toward implementing true cap and trade.
Mike Huckabee, 2010: In a recent internet post, a contributor makes the claim that I supported cap-and-trade in late 2007 while running for President. To put it simply, that’s just not true.
McCain|Palin 2008 platform: …will establish … a cap-and-trade system that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A cap-and-trade system harnesses human ingenuity in the pursuit of alternatives to carbon-based fuels.
Palin, in VP debate: [Ifill asks “Do you support capping carbon emissions?”] I do. I do.
Palin, 2010: I am deeply concerned about President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.
Lemkin: What’s remarkable is that she didn’t call it “Cap and Tax.” They think you have the memory of a goldfish. And, it seems, they are mostly right. We shall never speak of any of this again.

You can’t jam a major arms control treaty right before Christmas. What’s going on here is just wrong. This is the most sacred holiday for Christians.

Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), explaining his highly principled opposition to NewSTART. Which I still think is most likely a dead letter. And, frankly, now that I know The Lord has come out categorically agin it, well, I fear for ‘Merica. Somebody get Pat Robertson on the horn.

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.

Death-spiral Escape Hatch

Paul Starr of the American Prospect provides a way to lose the mandate and but also not destroy the private insurance system:

The law could give people a right to opt out of the mandate if they signed a form agreeing that they could not opt in for the following five years. In other words, instead of paying a fine, they would forgo a potential benefit. For five years they would become ineligible for federal subsidies for health insurance and, if they did buy coverage, no insurer would have to cover a pre-existing condition of theirs.

Fine by me. However, I can state categorically that the GOP will be against this, against the mandate (originally their idea anyway), and thus are implicitly for the destruction of the current insurance-based system and its inevitable replacement with single payer. But let’s not talk about that. Shrill.

Death-spiral Escape Hatch