Justin's Political Corner

When President Obama won in November the electorate also rendered a verdict on the priorities of the two major political parties. Democrats, most voters believe, are more concerned with the plight of the middle class than Republicans, who ran on a platform of actually lowering income taxes on wealthy Americans.

In the intervening months, Republican operatives have become practitioners of a new kind of alchemy, attempting with little success to convince voters that the right’s long-standing agenda — reduced regulation for big business, lower taxes for the wealthy and big corporations, privatized and diminished social services — is actually an array of policies that coincidentally meets the needs of the middle class.

Enter House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who’s hit upon a new plan. If you can’t turn lead into gold, go out and buy some gold paint.

In a major policy address at the conservative American Enterprise Institute Tuesday, Cantor said Republicans are looking beyond the budget brinksmanship that’s gripped the right for years to a new, more narrowly tailored agenda for the middle class.

“In Washington, over the past few weeks and months, our attention has been on cliffs, debt ceilings and budgets, on deadlines and negotiations,” he said. “All of this is very important, as there is no substitute for getting our fiscal house in order. … But today, I’d like to focus our attention on what lies beyond these fiscal debates.”

Some of the ideas he described were old, some new. Some would genuinely serve the interests of a wider electorate, others would not. But even if Republicans shift their rhetorical focus to less objectionable policies they’re still devoting all of their legislative heft to the same platform and style of governance that cost them the election.

Nevertheless, as Cantor delivered his remarks, GOP leaders simultaneously denounced Obama’s proposal to pay down the sequester’s deep spending cuts with a mix of more gradual cuts and higher taxes on wealthy interests. For them, the sequester — all $1.2 trillion worth — can only be paid down with cuts to other programs. No new revenue, no matter the source, according to influential Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK).

In order then, replacing the sequester with cuts to food stamps and Medicaid would be preferable to letting the sequester take effect, but both would be preferable to any sequester replacement that includes even a thimble full of tax revenue wrung from closing loopholes that benefit powerful interests.

The GOP’s real, immediate priorities are thus no different than they were before the election.

Those priorities didn’t carry the day in November. And in the months since, Republicans, and the conservative movement writ large, have been debating amongst themselves whether their priorities need an overhaul, or whether they just need to shoehorn them into packaging that will appeal to the broad middle class.

h/t: TPM

President Obama today held the final press conference of his first term, and used the opportunity to reiterate that he is not interested in negotiating with House Republicans over the debt ceiling. “They will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy,” Obama said:

Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize more spending. It simply allows the country to pay for spending that Congress has already committed to. These are bills that have already been racked up and we need to pay them… [House Republicans] will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy. The financial well-being of the American people is not leverage to be used. The full faith and credit of the United States of America is not a bargaining chip.

h/t: Pat Garofalo at Think Progress Economy

Appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation this morning, Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) enthusiastically called for a government shut down:

SALMON: I was here during the government shutdown in 1995. It was a divided government. we had a Democrat [sic] President of the United States. We had a Republican Congress. And I believe that that government shutdown actually gave us the impetus, as we went forward, to push toward some real serious compromise. I think it drove Bill Clinton in a different direction, a very bipartisan direction. In fact, we passed welfare reform for the first time ever, and we cut the welfare ranks in the last decade and a half by over 50%. These are good things. We also balanced the budget for the first time in 40 years in 1997, 1998, 1999. And when I left we had an over $230 billion surplus. This was with a Democrat [sic] president, A Republican —

SCHIEFFER: You think that’s a good idea?

SALMON: Yes, I do. I really do. I think it’s about time!

Watch it:

Salmon’s theory, that the government shutdown somehow led to balanced budgets during President Clinton’s second term, was floated by Newt Gingrich in 2011, and it was no more true then than it is now.

Gingrich claimed that the shutdown led to the misleadingly named Balanced Budget Act of 1997, but the law was so laden down with conservative pet projects that it actually increased the budget deficit.

H/T: Ian Milliser at Think Progress Economy

After weeks of uncertainty, bluffing and posturing in Washington D.C., the Senate voted in the early hours of Tuesday morning to avoid the “fiscal cliff” of tax increases and spending cuts. However, the fiscal bargaining is far from over and more budget drama is likely on the way.

The deal brokered by Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Republican Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky would raise income taxes on single earners with annual incomes above $400,000 and married couples with incomes above $450,000.

The measure will now be turned over to the House, which needs to give its backing and will hold a session on Tuesday starting at noon.

House Speaker John Boehner — the top Republican in Congress — said the House would consider the Senate deal. But he left open the possibility of the House amending the Senate bill, which would spark another round of legislating.

“The House will honor its commitment to consider the Senate agreement if it is passed. Decisions about whether the House will seek to accept or promptly amend the measure will not be made until House members … have been able to review the legislation,” Boehner and other House Republican leaders said in a statement.

Next big fight
Although the Senate agreed at the last minute to avert broader tax increases, the very idea of a “deadline” has lost some of its meaning since each budget deal seems to be merely a prelude to another fixed date when some critically important action must be taken – next up: Congress will have to decide what to do about the “sequester” spending cuts which will come up again in February, as well as decide in March on whether to increase the federal borrowing limit.

Congress is also set to embark on fundamental tax reform legislation in the New Year – as Obama himself seemed to acknowledge Monday when he said he’s intent on “doing some more work to reform our tax code so that wealthy individuals, the biggest corporations can’t take advantage of loopholes and deductions… that aren’t available to most Americans. So there’s still more work to be done in the tax code to make it fair….”

The indecision over taxes, spending, and borrowing has become chronic, in part a reflection of the fact that neither party controls both the executive and legislative branches. Ever since the Republicans won the House in 2010, the intermittent rounds of bargaining between GOP congressional leaders and Obama have run aground over the fundamentals: the future cost of the entitlement programs — especially Medicare — and who should bear the burden of paying for their growth.

The two sides’ clashing definitions of “fairness” make it hard for them to decide who should be paying a bigger tax bill.

And while tax revenues have been increasing – they’re up 10 percent in the first two months of fiscal year 2013 even under the current tax law — the increase, even if it is sustained, won’t be enough to pay for future benefits that have been promised.

Domestic spending in the cross-hairs
As part of an accord with GOP leaders last year to raise the government’s borrowing limit, Obama signed the Budget Control Act. The law requires about $100 billion in spending reductions in 2013, out of a total of roughly $3.5 trillion in spending.

While an approximately 3 percent cut in spending might not seem drastic, the Budget Control Act exempts most entitlement spending from the cuts, so the reductions would be concentrated on military outlays and domestic discretionary spending programs ranging from air traffic control to immigration enforcement.

h/t: NBCpolitics.com

It took until after 2 a.m. on the morning of January 1, 2013 — a few hours after the Bush tax cuts had technically expired — but the Senate passed legislation that will reinstate tax cuts for middle-class taxpayers, and lock in a variety of higher rates on income above $450,000.

The final vote was 89-8.

Opposing the legislation were Democratic Sens. Tom Carper (D-DE), Tom Harkin (D-IA), and Michael Bennet (D-CO) along with Republican Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Richard Shelby (D-AL), Rand Paul (R-KY), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and Marco Rubio (R-FL).

By passing the legislation with overwhelming support from members of both parties, the Senate has handed House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) responsibility for following suit, and averting the vast majority of the austerity measures in the so-called fiscal cliff.

For that reason, and because House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has held her cards close to her vest, House passage remains unclear. It may require Boehner to break the so-called Hastert Rule, that legislation does not come to the floor without the support of more than half of the majority party.

But it’s not all upside for Democrats, substantively or strategically. The bill approved by the Senate does not resolve the so-called sequester: deep spending cuts to everything from defense to the social safety net. Instead, it delays the sequester for two months.

Many in the party are particularly concerned that the fiscal cliff bill deals Democrats a losing hand, setting up an enormous March fight over federal spending, when government funding bills will have to pass, the sequester kicks in, and the debt limit has to be increased.

Tim Scott is America’s newest senator today after getting tapped by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) to fill the vacancy left by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). DeMint announced this month that he was leaving the Senate to head up the Heritage Foundation, an arch-conservative think tank in Washington DC.

Though DeMint left big, controversial shoes to fill for Republicans, few conservatives will be disappointed with Scott’s record. Elected to Congress just two years ago in the Tea Party wave, Scott has already garnered headlines for his plan to impeach President Obama, his legislation to cut off union members’ children from food stamps, and his defense of Big Oil.

Here’s a quick look at Scott’s record:

• Floated impeaching Obama over the debt ceiling. As the debt ceiling debate raged in the summer of 2011 because of the intransigence of Tea Party freshmen like Scott, the nation inched perilously close to defaulting on its obligations. One option discussed by some officials to avoid that scenario was for the president to assert that the debt ceiling itself was an unconstitutional infringement on the 14th Amendment. However, Tim Scott told a South Carolina Tea Party group that if Obama were to go this route, it would be an “impeachable act.”
• Proposed a bill to cut off food stamps for entire families if one member went on strike.One of the most anti-union members of Congress, Scott proposed a bill two months after entering Congress in 2011 to kick families off food stamps if one adult were participating in a strike. Scott’s legislation made no exception for children or other dependents.
• Wanted to spend an unlimited amount of money to display Ten Commandments outside county building. When Scott was on the Charleston County Council, one of his primary issues was displaying the Ten Commandments outside the Council building. According to the Augusta Chronicle, Scott said the display “would remind council members and speakers the moral absolutes they should follow.” When he was sued for violating the Constitution and a Circuit Judge’s orders, Scott was nonplussed: “Whatever it costs in the pursuit of this goal (of displaying the Commandments) is worth it.”
• Defended fairness of giving billions in subsidies to Big Oil. Scott and his Republican allies in Congress voted repeatedly last year to protect more than $50 billion in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil corporations. When ThinkProgress asked Scott whether it was fair to do that, especially at a time when oil companies are earning tens of billions in profit every quarter, the Tea Party freshman defended the industry: “fair is a relative word,” said Scott.
• Helped slash South Carolina’s HIV/AIDS budget. As a state representative, Scott backed a proposal to cut the state’s entire HIV/AIDS budget, despite the fact that South Carolina ranks in the top-third of reported AIDS cases. The cuts were ultimately included in the state’s budget, impacting more than 2,000 HIV-positive South Carolinians who needed help paying for their medication.

h/t: Scott Keyes at Think Progress

Senate Democrats stand ready to pass legislation permanently empowering the President to raise the debt ceiling.

The bill is based on an idea Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) first introduced last year to avoid a debt-ceiling-driven economic disaster, and now the White House wants it incorporated into an end-of-year plan to avoid automatic, across-the-board tax increases and spending cuts this January.

Republicans, who hope to use the debt ceiling once again as leverage to force Democrats to accept deep cuts to domestic social programs, are unsurprisingly opposed to the idea. And they’re using their opposition to mislead the public about what the debt ceiling is, and the implications of vesting the power to raise it within the Executive Branch.

“By demanding the power to raise the debt limit whenever he wants by as much as he wants, [President Obama] showed what he’s really after is assuming unprecedented power to spend taxpayer dollars without any limit,” McConnell argued on the Senate floor.

This sounds awfully sinister. But it’s a knowing misreading of the Constitution, which provides Congress and only Congress the power to spend money.

The debt limit is a nearly century old historical artifact. It’s a statute, not a Constitutional requirement. By contrast, the Constitution explicitly grants Congress, not the Executive Branch, the power to raise and spend money. When Congress orders the Executive Branch to spend more money than it collects in revenue, the Executive must finance the difference by borrowing — with debt.

But the Executive Branch can only spend as much money as Congress tells it to, even if there were no limits on the amount of debt it could issue. The country’s debt, in other words, has nothing to do with the debt limit, but with the tax and spending decisions Congress has made over the past two-plus centuries.

At a Capitol press availability on Wednesday, Reps. Jon Fleming (R-LA) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) introduced a non-binding resolution to express the sense of the House that “Congress should retain its authority vested in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution to ‘borrow money on the credit of the United States.’”

But the Obama plan wouldn’t give him the power to borrow or spend a single penny more than required by Congress and existing commitments to creditors.

A reporter pressed them on this point — too much deficit spending has required the Congress to raise the debt ceiling fairly regularly, but “that wouldn’t be the president’s fault. It would be the Congress’ fault.”

“That’s exactly right,” Lummis said. “It’s also a check on Congress.”

Conservatives certainly want it to serve that purpose, particularly as a tool to gut social programs they deplore. But that’s not what they’re telling the public, and what they’re telling the public is false.

h/t: Brian Beutler at TPM

Fox News host Steve Doocy misrepresented President Obama’s proposal to avoid the possibility of a federal government default on its financial obligations in order to claim that the president has proposed changing the Constitution.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner proposed that Congress should pass a law giving the president authority to avoid default by raising the ceiling on how much the federal government can borrow. Under the proposal, the president’s authority would be subject to a vote of disapproval by Congress. Geithner’s proposal was based on an idea originally put forward by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

Geithner’s proposal is urgent because the federal government is expected to reach the debt ceiling early in 2013, meaning that if Congress does not act, the federal government will begin defaulting on some of its obligations for the first time in history.

On the December 7 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, Doocy interviewed Republican Sen. John Thune (SD) and opined that it was “good news for the Republicans” that there would soon be a fight between Obama and congressional Republicans over the federal debt ceiling because Republicans would “obviously have the upper hand on that.” Thune responded in part by saying that “what we’re told is the president is even thinking about what he might be able to do to raise the debt ceiling without going through Congress, which would be a huge mistake and ought to be unconstitutional.”

Rather than amend the Constitution or change the way it has been interpreted, Obama has proposed legislation that would amend the current statute that puts a limit on the federal government’s borrowing.

The debt ceiling is merely a provision of law passed by Congress, which can be amended or repealed at any time through ordinary legislation without any change to the Constitution. 

H/T: MMFA

Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s headlining speech at the GOP convention in Tampa Wednesday night touched on many of the election’s defining issues. But it was also filled with prevarications — not just recitations of the conventions “you didn’t build that” theme, but on the very policy matters that have endeared him to the political establishment in Washington.

The speech effectively rallied his supporters in the audience. But on the merits it was chock full of misstatements of fact that undermine his reputation for brave, big ideas — which has hastened his rise through the ranks of the GOP.

Medicare

Ryan forged his reputation in large part by drafting and advancing an unpopular plan to dramatically cut and privatize Medicare. Though he didn’t mention that plan once on Wednesday, he included it in his last two budgets, both of which preserved the Affordable Care Acts cuts to Medicare — taken mostly from overpayments to private insurers and hospitals.

Instead, Ryan once again dubiously accused President Obama of being the true threat to Medicare.

“You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn’t have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So, they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it.”

Obama did use those Medicare savings — in the form of targeted cuts in payments to providers, not in benefits to seniors — to pay for the health care law. Ryan’s budget calls for using them to finance tax cuts for wealthy Americans, and deficit reduction. But by now calling to restore that spending commitment to Medicare, Ryan and Romney are pledging to hasten Medicare’s insolvency by many years.

U.S. Credit Rating

Ryan said the Obama presidency, “began with a perfect Triple-A credit rating for the United States; it ends with a downgraded America.”

Standard & Poors downgraded the country’s sovereign debt rating in 2011 because congressional Republicans, of which Ryan is a key leader, threatened not to increase the country’s borrowing authority — risking a default on the debt — unless Democrats agreed to slash trillions of dollars from domestic social programs and investments. 

Janesville GM Plant

Ryan criticized Obama for — yes — not using government funds to prop up an auto plant in his district.

“A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years,’” Ryan recalled. “That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day.”

Ignoring the inconsistency of a Republican chastising Obama for not bailing out more auto manufacturers, the plant in question closed before Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

Protecting the Poor

Near the end of his speech, Ryan claimed the campaign’s top priority is protecting the poor. “We have responsibilities, one to another — we do not each face the world alone,” he said. “And the greatest of all responsibilities, is that of the strong to protect the weak.”

Just under two thirds of the dramatic spending cuts in Ryan’s budget target programs that benefit low-income people. That plan also calls for large tax cuts for high-income earners.

h/t: Brian Beutler at TPM