Justin's Political Corner

WASHINGTON (AP) — It seems like a simple proposition: give employees who work more than 40 hours a week the option of taking paid time off instead of overtime pay.

The choice already exists in the public sector. Federal and state workers can save earned time off and use it weeks or even months later to attend a parent-teacher conference, care for an elderly parent or deal with home repairs.

Republicans in Congress are pushing legislation that would extend that option to the private sector. They say that would bring more flexibility to the workplace and help workers better balance family and career.

The push is part of a broader Republican agenda undertaken by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., to expand the party’s political appeal to working families. The House is expected to vote on the measure this week, but the Democratic-controlled Senate isn’t likely to take it up.

“For some people, time is more valuable than the cash that would be accrued in overtime,” said Rep. Martha Roby, R-Ala., the bill’s chief sponsor. “Why should public-sector employees be given a benefit and the private sector be left out?”

But the idea Republicans promote as “pro-worker” is vigorously opposed by worker advocacy groups, labor unions and most Democrats. These opponents claim it’s really a backdoor way for businesses to skimp on overtime pay.

Judith Lichtman, senior adviser to the National Partnership for Women and Families, contends the measure would open the door for employers to pressure workers into taking compensatory time off instead of overtime pay.

The program was created in the public sector in 1985 to save federal, state and local governments money, not to give workers greater flexibility, Lichtman said. Many workers in federal and state government are unionized or have civil service protections that give them more leverage in dealing with supervisors, she added. Those safeguards don’t always exist in the private sector, where only about 6.6 percent of employees are union members.

Republicans and business groups have tried to pass the plan in some form since the 1990s.

Democrats say the bill provides no guarantee that workers would be able to take the time off when they want. The bill gives employers discretion over whether to grant a specific request to use comp time. Opponents also complain that banking leave time essentially gives employers an interest-free loan from workers.

h/t: TPM

WASHINGTON — The House Ethics Committee said Wednesday it will continue an investigation of Illinois Republican Rep. Aaron Schock over allegations he solicited donations of more than $5,000 per donor to a super political action committee. The committee also said it’s continuing a probe of whether a trip New York Democrat Bill Owens took to Taiwan was arranged by lobbyists for the country’s government.

Both cases had been referred to the House committee by the Office of Congressional Ethics, a separate, outside ethics office. The House committee announced its decision to continue looking into each case on Wednesday, while releasing OCE’s report on both cases.

In a statement, the ethics committee said that in both cases merely “conducting further review … does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred, or reflect any judgment on behalf of the committee.” The committee also said it would refrain from further comment pending completion of initial reviews.

Both Schock and Owens said they expect to be exonerated by the House committee.

Schock’s case involves an allegation he asked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., to contribute $25,000 from his leadership PAC to a super PAC that backed Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., in a House primary against Rep. Don Manzullo. Kinzinger won the March 2012 primary. Redistricting following the 2010 census put the two congressmen in the same and the primary.

According to the OCE report, the Super PAC backing Kinzinger, the Campaign for Primary Accountability, received a minimum of $115,000 that came from “efforts of Rep. Schock and his campaign committee.”

Schock told investigators that he never requested the $25,000 from Cantor. According to the OCE report, Cantor told investigators that Schock had asked him if he would give the $25,000 donation to back Kinzinger. Cantor said he then gave money from his committee to the super PAC backing Kinziger in the primary.

The case involving Owens relates to a December 2011 trip he and his wife took to Taiwan. Owens and his wife were invited by the Chinese Culture University of Taiwan. But the trip may have been arranged by lobbyists for the country. Lawmakers are prohibited from taking trips that are paid for by lobbyists.

Owens said he expected the investigation would clear him of wrongdoing.

H/T: Huffington Post

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

Progress Illinois is reporting that Republican Congressman Aaron Schock of the 18th Congressional District of Illinois is contemplating a 2014 run for Governor of Illinois.

However, Schock has an “Eric Cantor” problem.

Schock goaded House Majority Leader Eric Cantor into donating $25,000 from Cantor’s own SuperPAC, ERIC PAC, to the Campaign for Primary Accountability, which supported Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger in the 16th Congressional District of Illinois Republican Primary, who narrowly won an incumbent-versus-incumbent primary against Donald Manzullo.

In the last 15 years, two of Illinois’s former governors, George Ryan, a Republican, and Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, have been sentenced to prison after being convicted on corruption charges. Simply put, Illinois does not need yet another unethical governor.

h/t: BlueDownstate

New York Republicans and Democrats are publicly furious with Speaker John Boehner for abruptly cancelling an expected vote late Tuesday night on a relief package for victims of superstorm Sandy.

The Senate recently passed an aid package for Sandy victims worth $60 billion, a price tag that made many House Republicans nervous. So they decided to divide it up into two parts: $27 billion and $33 billion. The first part was vetted by appropriators for wasteful spending but the second wasn’t. And most of the latter chunk would not have been spent in the first year, anyway. So one school of thought was to vote separately on both and let the chips fall where they may.

The likely upshot was that the House would immediately authorize $27 billion for victims and give themselves time to determine, in the next Congress, how much of the rest was necessary. A two-track vote was expected after the bill to avert the fiscal cliff. But it never happened. Why was it pulled?

Wednesday morning on the House floor, New York Republican Reps. Peter King and Michael Grimm blamed Boehner for what they described as a betrayal.

“It was entirely the speaker’s decision,” said a GOP leadership aide, who doesn’t work in Boehner’s office. “As to why we’re not voting on it now? That’s a question I can’t answer.”

At a press conference in New York, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters Wednesday that he’s “distraught” and “angry” over the House’s failure to hold a vote, blaming it on a House GOP “leadership squabble.” He said Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has been “truly helpful” in piecing together the package and blamed Boehner.

“Cantor has been very much for us, but Speaker Boehner … pulled the rug out from under us,” Schumer said. “It’s a Boehner betrayal.”

A Cantor aide affirmed that the majority leader has been pushing for the package.

h/t: TPM

Washington (CNN) – House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Tuesday he opposes the Senate version of the fiscal cliff bill, as the hours wind down for the House to vote on a deal that would avert a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts.

“I do not support the bill,” Cantor told reporters while leaving a House GOP meeting.

After the Senate passed the legislation in the early hours of the morning with 89 senators in favor of the deal, the ball is now in the House’s court to act.

Cantor said no decisions have been made on the bill and leaders are looking for the best path forward.

Meanwhile, several members said they were unsure whether the House would vote Tuesday.

h/t: CNN.com

After the failure of his fiscal cliff negotiations with the White House, followed by his humiliating inability to get even his ridiculous “Plan B” proposal approved by House Republicans, John Boehner gave up and punted the whole thing over to the president and the Senate. Why? Matt Yglesias says Boehner likes the idea because the only way to get anything through the Senate is to compromise with Republicans, which will produce a deal to the right of Obama’s current proposal. “Then once something like that difference-splitting bill passes the Senate, Boehner gets to take it up as the new baseline for negotiations and pull the ultimate resolution even further to the right.”

True enough. But I doubt this was Boehner’s intent from the beginning. Remember that during the debt limit talks last year, Boehner initially handed off negotiating duties to Eric Cantor, hoping that if Cantor signed off on a deal it would get the rest of the tea party caucus to throw in their votes as well. But Cantor double-crossed him after a few weeks, pulling out of the talks and pushing them back in Boehner’s lap so that Boehner would have to take the heat for agreeing to any tax increases. But even at that, Boehner didn’t give up: he tried to keep negotiating until it became clear that the Cantorites just flatly wouldn’t approve any feasible deal. Eventually a deal got done after Mitch McConnell got involved.

Yep. However, for PR reasons, Obama has to remain the adult in the room at all times, continuing to negotiate honestly even in the face of seemingly relentless intransigence. No ultimatums, no walking out of talks. But on January 1, taxes on the middle class go up and the economy slowly begins to slide into the great Republican Recession of 2013. That’s the leverage that will finally force GOP leaders to get serious. Obama will never say so publicly, but I imagine he knows this perfectly well.

h/t: Kevin Drum at Mother Jones

So some chick is all “Oh maybe Cathy McMorris-Rodgers will be the new Speaker or something because everything I say is not completely laughable fiction.” And then Laura Ingraham is all “I am doing my best not to smirk at your uninformed drivel, fellow television pundit, but everyone knows that some random male source says that the next Speaker of the House will be Paul Ryan, because stud.” But be careful, GOPpies! You come at King Boehner, you’d best … haha, sorry, we are just kidding. That dude is Dead Drunk Walking. So the winner of yesterday’s brain tickler quiz is everybody who answered “a pile of human shit.” Congratulations, everyone in the world!

Paul Ryan, if he is indeed the next Speaker of the House, will be the worst one this country’s ever had. He is worse than the last three GOP Speakers (Gingrich, Hastert, Boehner) we had combined. I’d rather have Pelosi back as Speaker anyday.

H/T:  Wonkette.com 

And why is Eric so cranky? Via email alert:

House Republican leaders abruptly pulled their fallback tax bill from the floor Thursday night, conceding that they did not have the votes to pass it.“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass,” Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement. “Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.”The decision was a major setback for the speaker, who was pushing his so-called Plan B to prevent lower tax rates from expiring on most Americans. It came after the House had narrowly approved a plan to suspend planned Pentagon cuts.

 Plan BS was aborted. Will there be a Billhood proposal?

We on Twitter got a million of ‘em folks, a million of ‘em. Oh, but I kid.

More here.

h/t: ThePoliticalCarnivial.com  

As the last window of opportunity to pass a fully-inclusive Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) Reauthorization comes close to shutting in the final days of the 112th Congress, many are wondering why Republican House leadership, particularly Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), are so opposed to the provisions protecting Native American women on tribal reservations. Other Republican leaders — including Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA), John Kline (R-MN), Mike Simpson (R-ID), Tom Cole (R-OK), and Patrick McHenry (R-NC) — have proposed a reasonable compromise that protects Native women, but it puts them at odds with the Majority Leader.

Here’s everything you need to know about the GOP’s opposition to new protections for Native women on tribal lands:

1) Non-Native men will continue to receive a jurisdictional free pass for abusing Native women:

In response to the epidemic rates of domestic violence against Native women on reservations, the Department of Justice issued a legislative proposal that would restore Tribes’ ability to prosecute misdemeanor crimes of domestic and dating violence committed by non-Natives against Native women. This proposal also requires that the non-Native offender either live or work on the reservation and be in an existing relationship with the victim. DOJ statistics show that 3 out of 5 Native women had been assaulted by their intimate partners and 56 percent of American Indian women have non-Indian husbands.

Today on Indian reservations, the local governments don’t have the ability to respond to domestic violence crimes in their community if the perpetrator isn’t Native. Without this ability, non-Native offenders often go unpunished on tribal land because the only ones who can bring them to justice are federal prosecutors who are often hundreds of miles away and lack local resources to properly investigate and prosecute these crimes. The result, according to a recent National Institute of Justice (NIJ)-funded report, the offenders become emboldened, and the violence escalates to rape and in some cases homicide. On some Indian reservations, the homicide rate of Native women is 10 times the national average.

2) Republicans are more concerned with Non- Native perpetrators than Native victims:

So why do some Republicans like Cantor still have issues with a well-reasoned, narrowly-scoped DOJ proposal to reduce violence against Native women on reservations? An unbalanced concern for the rights non-Native men accused of these crimes. Even though the current Senate version of VAWA includes a full set of constitutional protections for suspects of abuse, including due-process rights and a right to counsel, Cantor and other Republicans continue to stall the VAWA Reauthorization because of baseless constitutional concerns for those accused of abusing Native women.

In the spirit of compromise within their own caucus, Issa and his colleagues proposed a powerful extra protection for defendants in their bill last week: a new right to remove the case to a federal court if the defendant’s rights are violated by a local tribal court. Although advocates for Native women would prefer to see the Senate version passed, this compromise is a reasonable way to get a deal done and improve the system of justice on reservations. It will clarify that all persons who commit a crime of domestic or dating violence on an Indian reservation will be arrested and held accountable, regardless of their race.

3) Local tribal law enforcement is more responsive to Native women:

The Senate version of VAWA would end jurisdictional black holes that give non-Native men a free pass to abuse Native women and evade justice. It would provide local tribal law enforcement with the much-needed ability to investigate and prosecute crimes against Native women in their own communities, just as other state and local authorities do for other victims in the country. Prosecuting these crimes requires sensitive and time-consuming work with family and community members. Tribal prosecutors are down the street on the reservation and work closely with the tribal police who respond to these crimes. Restoring local control will provide the victim, the family, and the community the ability to seek responsive justice locally. There’s no reason that their ability to fully prosecute these crimes should rest on the skin color of the accused abuser.

h/t: Think Progress Health

Vandals spray-painted the words “Baby Killer” on the campaign headquarters of Wayne Powell, the Democrat challenging Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), and wrote “N*gger Lover” on a sign in front of another one of his offices, a Powell spokesman confirmed Saturday to The Huffington Post.

A tipster gave HuffPost a heads up on the incidents, and Powell campaign spokesman Brendan MacArthur confirmed the vandalism at the Midlothian and Henrico offices. MacArthur said the attacks happened Friday night and police departments in both counties have been alerted.

Campaign staffers discovered the attacks on Saturday morning. One staffer snapped a photo at the Midlothian office, where “Baby Killer” was painted on the exterior of the building. At the Henrico office, a Powell campaign sign was vandalized with the racist epithet.

H/T: Huffington Post

The federal government’s ability to respond to natural disasters, like Hurricane Sandy currently bearing down on the East Coast, would be significantly hindered under a Romney-Ryan administration.

At least three times, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have publicly demanded that the federal government only disburse disaster relief funding if Congress agreed to offsetting budget cuts elsewhere. This would hold desperately-needed disaster relief funding hostage unless Congress agreed to cuts elsewhere in the budget, an extraordinarily difficult prospect even in normal circumstances.

Though GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) became the public face of such intransigence in the wake of natural disaster last year, Romney and Ryan have repeatedly made clear they agree with Cantor’s position.

Last year, after a major tornado and flood struck the United States, Romney was asked in a debate about federal disaster relief funding. Romney not only suggested shuttering FEMA and sending responsibility for disaster relief “back to the private sector,” but also said it would be “immoral” for the federal government to fund disaster relief efforts without cutting the budget elsewhere. “It makes no sense at all,” Romney concluded. 

Ryan’s 2012 budget took a similar approach to disaster funding. As The Hill noted in May 2012, Ryan’s budget called for any disaster relief funding to “be fully offset within the discretionary levels provided in this resolution.”

This is not a new position for Ryan. Long before he entered the political limelight, Ryan was still pushing a similar line on disaster funding. In a March 23, 2004 speech on the House floor, Ryan proposed that any emergency spending legislation, including disaster relief, be automatically offset by an “across-the-board” budget cut. 

h/t: Scott Keyes at Think Progress Elections

After losing all three previous debates, thirty year old unexplained millionaire Jason Plummer will be fed D.C. talking points from Washington Party leadership for his next match-up. Plummer is flying in Washington Tea Party Republican Leader Eric Cantor for a steak lunch on October 10^th, where he will bone up on plans to end the Medicare guarantee for seniors just to give more tax breaks to millionaires like the two of them.

Although Mitt Romney has released a year of taxes, Jason Plummer still refuses to have an honest discussion with voters about his financial records or even say what his tax rate is.

“Washington Republican Leadership can’t wait to have 30 year old millionaire Jason Plummer’s vote in Congress so they’re flying in to beef him up on their out of touch agenda that raises taxes on the middle class and ends the Medicare guarantee for seniors,” said Haley Morris of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “With Plummer already on talking points from Washington Party insiders, there should be no question that he will fall in line to give himself and other millionaires new tax breaks and make Southern Illinois workers and seniors pay for them.”

h/t: dccc.org

The annual Values Voter Summit in Washington is always pulsating with worry that God and Christianity are being pulled from the national fabric at a frightful pace. That concern was more elevated than ever this year at the social conservative confab hosted by the Family Research Council, thanks to an ordeal that took place during the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte earlier this month.

Christian leaders have been warning for years that modern elections boil down to a fight between those who would have God as part of the United States and those who would not. But the DNC episode — in which Democrats added the word “God” and support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, to a chorus of boos from some of the audience — was all the evidence social conservatives needed to prove they’ve been right all along.

Though most Americans who watched the Democratic convention didn’t catch the brief and chaotic fight over the amendments, which came early on the second night of festivities, Values Voter Summit attendees were intimately acquainted with the episode. And just about all the speakers on stage at the conference were clear on its ramifications.

“Let us not mistake: The fight for religious freedom starts here at home, because we are one nation under God,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Friday. “This is despite what that other party has put in their platform.”

Cantor wasn’t the only speaker to make an issue out of the Democratic platform fight. It was mentioned in countless other addresses, and was on the lips of attendees throughout the conference. Mainstream Republicans have attempted to leverage the Democratic platform changes — which were reportedly pushed by President Obama — to attack the president’s campaign, to limited effect. Mitt Romney was widely criticized after he seemed to suggest Obama would remove the phrase “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency.

For “values voters,” the three votes required in Charlotte to get the platform amended are just the kind of thing its base needs to get fired up before the election. Democrats, social conservatives say, are now unabashed in their support for the removal of God from the national conversation.

H/T: Evan McMorris-Santoro at TPM