Tag Archives: Republicans

America Stuck in Neutral

Posted on by
Reply

There’s not much to say about the disgusting failure of the United States Senate to muster sixty votes to expand background checks for gun purchases that hasn’t been said already. Suffice it to say that if we can’t even agree to close a loophole that allows dangerous people such as felons and certified nutcases to purchase firearms through a legal seller, there can be no better example of our country’s abysmal dysfunction.

I’m not a big fan of Maureen Dowd but a recent column on President Obama’s failure to use his office effectively to get a better result on the gun bill did resonate with me. To some extent I accept the sharp rebuttal from his defenders that it’s unfair to blame Obama when the real problem is a radical GOP that provided just five votes for the expanded background checks and only one (Mark Steven Kirk of Illinois) for bans on assault weapons and large capacity magazines. The fact remains, however, that in addition to the four Democrats who voted down the expanded background check, ten also failed to support a ban on high capacity magazines and fifteen the banning of assault weapons – both of which were used in the mass shooting of children and teachers at Newtown.

Yet just four months into his second term, the president overall seems to have reached a dead end, and with him the country. The goals he set out in his most recent State of the Union address are laudable and dead right for the country – universal pre-school, significant investments in infrastructure and scientific/technological research and development to name a few key ones – but seem completely out of reach in the current political environment. And the president has suffered from a number of self-inflicted wounds as well.

In the debt ceiling debacle of 2011, for example, which yielded the monstrosity that is sequestration, it is clear he miscalculated the willingness of Republicans to tolerate steep across the board defense cuts which, in turn, led him to agree to omit tax increases from the automatic trigger, as he had originally proposed. We now have harsh cuts to worthwhile programs in the discretionary budget that disproportionately affect children and the poor. To add insult to injury, Democrats have retreated the first time the public at large actually felt the pain of sequester cuts and, in the process, handed the GOP a significant victory.

Another example is the fiscal cliff negotiations wherein he effectively held all the cards yet won a paltry $600 billion in new revenues; inequities such as the favorable tax rates enjoyed by hedge fund managers and the likes of Mitt Romney on his unearned income remain.

And the president seems almost passive in the face of the outrageous refusal of Senate Republicans to allow his nominations for federal district and appellate court vacancies and even some agency heads an up or down vote. Added to which is the fact that he has been slow to send up nominees for many such appointments. Things will hardly get better in the future as Republicans become increasingly confident of gaining control of the Senate in next year’s midterm elections. This does not bode well should a Supreme Court vacancy arise.

That the country is stuck in neutral is indisputable. And while it’s possible another Democratic incumbent with keener political and negotiating skills could have done better, you really have to wonder how much difference it would have made. The GOP has moved so far to the right it really has become a radical party, home to anti-tax and pro-gun zealots as well as Tea Party fanatics. It is clearly more intransigent and obstructionist with a Democrat in the White House now than it was even in the Bill Clinton years; to the point of a willingness to be destructive to the country’s economic interests if doing so furthers its ideological aims.

The reason is not hard to see in considering the yawning chasm between Blue and Red America, a development even the vapid editorial writers of The Washington Post have noted. And the GOP, driven by a base that brooks no compromise, will have ample opportunities for even more mischief in the days to come, what with the debt ceiling looming again. And next year when Obamacare kicks in and suffers inevitable teething troubles, the situation will be just ripe for exploitation by a party that couldn’t care less if millions of Americans don’t have adequate health insurance.

Like I said, with Democrats trying to move us forward and Republicans taking every opportunity to drag us back, we are stuck in neutral.

And what does all this presage? Merely that if you think things are bad now, just wait.

Republican Senate Filibusters are Destroying Democracy

Posted on by
Reply

James Fallows has written about the anti-democratic nature of the filibuster a few times for the The Atlantic. In this one he cites a Politico story and explains how it fails to distinguish between breaking a filibuster and passing a bill:

I recognize that this theme now lacks novelty value. But here is why it matters to track an engineered usage-change as it is underway:

It takes 51 votes to “pass the Senate.”

It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster.

Through the past six-plus years, the GOP minority-power strategy in the Senate has deliberately aimed to make the filibuster, historically a rarity, seem routine and acceptable. Every news account that presents the super-majority 60-vote threshold as the “necessary bar” for Senate passage, and a majority of 55 votes as “certain defeat,” ratifies this strategy. Especially in an “informed” insider political-specialist publication.

Fallows go on to say that it doesn’t take a lot of extra print to distinguish between the votes necessary to break a filibuster and the votes necessary to pass a bill.

It’s not just the media that needs to make this distinction clear. Democrats need to use the words “Republican” and “filibuster” in the same sentence much more often than they do. President Obama and Senator Harry Reid and his fellow Democratic senators need to stop saying things like, “We aren’t able to get the votes necessary to move the bill forward” and start saying things like, “We have the 51 votes required to pass this bill, but once again the Republicans are threatening a filibuster in order to kill a bill that a majority of Americans support.”

If the Democrats change their language, the change to the way the media speaks about the votes will follow.

GOP Filibuster Kills Bill to Expand Background Checks on Gun Sales

Posted on by
Reply

We at harikari have written much about guns, gun control, and the need to enact laws that make it more difficult for criminals and mentally unsound people to purchase guns. After the Newtown tragedy, Americans seemed to have had enough of the bullying by the NRA and they called for the expansion of mandatory background checks for nearly all gun-sale transactions. The Manchin-Toomey background-check bill was supported by nearly 90% of Americans. Polls show that a majority of Americans also supported a ban on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.

On Wednesday a bill to expand background checks was filibustered by Republicans, so it needed 60 votes to move forward. The senate voted for the bill 54-46. Yes, a clear majority of senators voted to move forward with the background-check bill but because of the Republican filibuster, the bill was killed. The senate also voted “down” the amendment to limit the capacity of ammunition clips 54-46.

90% of Democrats voted in favor of the bill, and 90% of Republicans voted against the bill that 90% of Americans supported.

For some smart commentary about how undemocratic the senate is and how the arguments of gun-control opponents are intellectually unsound, watch these two excellent segments from Thursday’s edition of The Daily Show.

First Jon,

and now John…

NRA and GOP demonstrate their paranoia on guns to the world.

Posted on by
Reply

The United Nations General Assembly voted 154-3 with 20 abstentions for the first international treaty to regulate the global arms trade. The treaty is designed principally to curb the supply of arms to terrorists, rogue regimes and human rights abusers such as Assad in Syria, warlords such as the groups in Africa who kidnap young boys to become brutal soldiers, and organized crime.

The United States played a key role in shepherding the treaty through to a vote, yet will likely not ratify it, which requires a two-thirds majority in the US Senate, because of opposition from paranoid Republican lawmakers doing the bidding of the even more paranoid leadership of the NRA.

These paranoids, you see, continue to believe, against all the evidence and the credible assurances to the contrary contained in a definitive paper by the American Bar Association’s Center for Human Rights, that the treaty could be used to supersede their rights under the Second Amendment.

In opposing the treaty, the GOP and NRA zealots join such worthies as North Korea, Iran and Syria who all voted against it in the UN.

It should come as a shock that senior Republican senators would join the truly deranged people who lead the NRA to oppose a treaty whose only opponents in the UN were countries which have regimes we count among the craziest and/or most murderous in the world. It should, but of course it doesn’t.

Gallup’s misery index highlights emptiness of GOP’s vision for the country.

Posted on by
Reply

The competing visions of the Democratic and Republican parties are clearly on display in their respective budget blueprints for the next decade. The Democratic vision includes the preservation of a strong role for government in providing a decent social safety net for the nation’s disadvantaged. The GOP on the other hand would slash government programs for the poor, cancel the expansion of health care insurance to millions of uninsured Americans, cut taxes on the rich and continue the sort of deregulatory policies that facilitated the financial meltdown and subsequent Great Recession of 2008.

It seems reasonable to ask where the GOP’s path would lead us and for the answer, a glimpse is provided by consulting Gallup’s annual Wellbeing Index, useful insight into the state of the states in terms of health, happiness (or misery), access to government services and other measurements.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the most miserable states are predominantly in the South, with their elevated rates of poverty, violence, medically uninsured and low level of government services. Not coincidentally, the South is the heart and soul of today’s Republican Party. Take Kentucky, the home state of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. He has a lot to say about the need for small government, and his red state is certainly an exemplar of GOP ideology so let’s see how that’s working out (thumbnail sketch from MSN Money 24/7):

Most miserable No. 2: Kentucky

Well-being index score: 62.7

Life expectancy: 76.2 years (seventh lowest)

Obesity: 29.7% (sixth highest)

Median household income: $41,141 (fourth lowest)

Adult population with high school diploma or higher: 83.1% (sixth lowest)

Kentucky has one of the lowest proportions of adults with at least a high school diploma, and the state’s median income is the fourth-lowest among all states. Kentucky ranked second from the bottom in terms of physical health.

Twenty-nine percent of state residents indicated they had health problems that prevented them from doing age-appropriate activities, a higher proportion than residents of any state except West Virginia.

Not a pretty picture and it mirrors the situation in most other Southern states. What’s more their record has been consistent. The region has promoted its business-friendly, non-unionized, low tax environment for many years, yet as evinced in the data on Kentucky – fourth lowest median income in the nation and sixth lowest percentage of adults with at least a high school diploma – the failure of southern states to invest sufficiently in their human capital continues to keep them mired at the bottom in most measurements of wellbeing.

Yet the failure of their low-tax, low government service model at home has not deterred McConnell and the GOP from trying to impose their failed ideology on the rest of the country. Most of us I suspect would rather not go there; turning out to vote on the next election day and every one thereafter is one way to make sure we don’t.

GOP is no more serious about curbing gun violence as it is in addressing the nation’s other problems.

Posted on by
Reply

Four bills that seek to curb gun violence in America made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee where they confront an uncertain fate in the full body. It is unclear which, if any, will prevail in an up or down vote even if Republicans don’t decide to filibuster.

Only one of them received significant GOP votes in committee, a relatively non-contentious bill that would increase funding for school safety measures. The most muscular bills, to expand background checks to private sales and a reinstatement of the assault weapon ban which includes curbs on large capacity magazines, received no Republican votes and face a particularly hard struggle.

The story has been the same in states such as Colorado, Connecticut, New York, Oregon and Washington State where gun control legislation proposed by Democrats has won minimal to non-existent support from Republicans. Some such as New York, Connecticut and Colorado have managed to pass meaningful and commonsense restrictions regardless, or seem close to doing so. In Oregon the struggle goes on. And in Washington, my home state, the effort failed.

Most states of course aren’t even bothering to try to strengthen their gun laws and, truth be told, while state laws are laudable and worthwhile, they cannot substitute for tough national laws. And the NRA has little to fear on that score, not with a GOP essentially in its pocket and a Democratic Party still fearful of the gun lobby’s power.

The ultimate responsibility for the looming failure in the other Washington, however, rests with the people of this nation. Even in the wake of the most horrendous mass shooting in our history, we have failed to generate the outrage and demand for action that is surely warranted. No political or electoral consequences will accrue to Republicans and the handful of Democrats who will, shamefully, join them, who will tow the NRA line to defeat even the most sensible restrictions such as banning military-style semi-automatic rifles and high capacity magazines that afford a deranged gunman or criminal inordinate firepower, or a universal background check.

We will prove to the world once again that we are a dysfunctional nation that has lost the ability to agree upon much less address our greatest problems, whether it is the budget, health care or our stunning level of gun violence.

Fault for this lies in part with arcane senate rules that require super majorities to get anything done and a GOP willing and able to abuse those rules to an unprecedented degree. And thanks to a supine United States Supreme Court, the GOP’s gerrymandering ways have managed to win them a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives despite the fact that they lost the popular vote.

However, it is also true that we have become a nation tyrannized by a minority of fanatics whether it is the Tea Party who dominate today’s GOP or the NRA and fellow gun-zealots, whose power to paralyze our public policy apparatus is disproportionate to their numbers but highly destructive to the nation’s well-being.

Unless and until we are willing to confront and defeat the extremists in our body politic, we will never make this a better country for our children.

March-Sequestration Madness and Obama Missteps

Posted on by
Reply

I hate to say it but in the short term at least President Obama, congressional Democrats and the country have lost the budget battle fight. Much of the responsibility rests with Obama himself albeit some of his mistakes are understandable.

For example, his miscalculation during the original debt ceiling negotiations – negotiations which we must recall were conducted with a gun to his head by a House GOP that seemed willing to default on America’s obligations – that Republicans would be compelled to negotiate on a more balanced deficit reduction package when faced with sequestration’s blunt cuts to the defense budget seemed to make sense at the time. Who knew that the GOP’s defense hawks would be subsumed by the now dominant cut-government-at-any-price zealots of the party?

Yet it’s hard to be so forgiving for some of his other critical errors. In the first place he should never have allowed the focus to shift to debt-reduction in the 2011 negotiations over the debt ceiling, and dared the GOP to drive the United States into default. He had a perfectly defensible and sensible alternative position: that the economy was still very fragile, that any sort of near-term austerity was foolish and very likely counterproductive, as the experience of Great Britain and other European countries showed quite clearly with their weak and even contracting economies, and that while the deficit was an important issue to be dealt with, that time was not now. In addition, the deficit was and still is largely driven by health costs which we could tackle in a more substantive way in the future as part of a more comprehensive deal.

However, having decided to play on the GOP’s turf, his weak negotiating skills resulted in the current sequester reductions because while he proposed a sequestration deal that included both tax increases and spending cuts, he did not insist on it. And therein lays the source of the GOP’s current victory.

Finally, it’s hard not to shake one’s head over the outcome of the fiscal cliff negotiations when Obama and Democrats seemed to hold most of the cards and yet ended up with just $620 billion in new revenues which was below anyone’s expectation even that of most Republicans I suspect.

Make no mistake: the sequester will hurt and the pain will only increase over time, particularly for the poor and vulnerable in our society as made clear in these pieces in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The cuts will also hurt our international competitiveness by reducing funding to basic and applied scientific, medical and engineering research. This will be a particular hit to our excellent universities, which still lead the world.

It’s hard to see any way out since there is no reasonable expectation that the GOP will reverse course.

And with Republicans able and certainly willing to stymie any new initiative of the president’s to boost the nation’s economic competitiveness and overall well-being by making significant and sorely needed investments in such disparate imperatives as infrastructure modernization and universal daycare/pre-school for our children, the future does indeed appear somewhat bleak.

If recent reports are to be believed, some in the administration are hoping that the mid-term elections in 2014 may loosen the GOP’s grip on the House but, given the reality of the GOP’s pervasive gerrymandering in recent years, it would take a tidal wave of discontent to dislodge Boehner and his cronies.

On the other hand, Democrats would be fools not to resist the GOP’s transparent efforts to mitigate the harm to their image and interests by turning the sequestration’s blunt axe approach into merely a meat-cleaver by affording the administration greater flexibility. The sequestration was never a policy choice but a deterrence; to accept flexibility in how the spending cuts are administered would make them the administration’s own, something the GOP would love.

We must never forget that it was the GOP’s fanaticism and blinkered ideology that put us in this mess no matter what Obama’s missteps in failing to stop them.

Republicans plan for complete minority control of US Government

Posted on by
Reply

The Republican Party officially controls only one body of government – the House of Representatives. They control it only because in 2010 they redrew congressional districts to protect their seats. The squeezed as many Democrats as possible into their own blue districts and made as many districts as possible safely Red. As a result of their gerrymandering, they have a majority in the House in spite of more than a million more voters choosing Democrats over Republicans. Consequently, the minority party has more votes in the house than the party that received the most votes.

Democrats have a majority in the Senate, but they don’t have a super majority of sixty votes to overrule filibusters by the minority Republicans. The Republicans filibuster pretty much everything, so the majority has been scuttled.

Voters rejected Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential elections. President Obama won by a margin of 51.1% to 47.2% and won the Electoral College by a vote of 332 to 206.

Because Republican ideas are so out of touch with the majority of the electorate, the only way they can win presidential elections is to either moderate their hardline positions on social issues, taxation, and the role and size of government or change the way presidents are elected. Moderation has not been a characteristic of the GOP for the past 25 years.

So now they are proposing that electoral votes be allocated to presidential candidates by congressional districts instead of the current “winner takes all” approach that has, been used for the past 200+ years.

Four key swing states; Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, are considering making the change. If we applied the proposed change to the 2012 election results, Mitt Romney would have won the Electoral College vote 273 – 262 and would be our president today even though he lost the popular vote by four percentage points. And with that, the Republicans would have pulled of a trifecta: Control of the House, the Senate (via filibuster control), and the White House without receiving a majority of votes for any of them.

Anybody see anything wrong with that? Stephen Colbert does.

 

I do to. Voters listened to Obama and Romney discuss the major issues for several months, and they chose Obama. People voted for a balanced, long-term deficit reduction plan calling for moderate increases in taxes on the rich and modest cuts to government programs. They decided Obamacare was okay and that we should get out of Afghanistan. Had Romney won, the minority party would be busy making changes that the majority of Americans rejected. The Republicans would be slashing government spending on everything but the military, implementing their “broader base, lower rates” tax plan that cuts taxes for the rich and raises taxes on the middle class, and repealing Obamacare.

If we are to remain a Democratic country “of the People, for the People, by the People” we must reject the Republican plan to implement minority rule that is of the Rich, for the Rich, and paid for by the middle class.

Cowardly GOP needs to be specific on spending cuts

Posted on by
Reply

The striking aspect of the recently concluded (or postponed, or delayed – call it what you will) fiscal cliff debate was the extraordinary lengths to which GOP negotiators went to avoid spelling out the cuts they wanted in government spending. In fact, throughout the negotiations, they constantly pressed President Obama to put on the table larger spending cuts whilst refusing to do so themselves. And this is not unusual. The party of smaller government seems to have a problem specifying which parts of the federal budget they want to see reduced. On the face of it this is more than a little perplexing but actually it’s not.

Polls show that in the abstract the American public expresses support for smaller government. The problem for the GOP is that when you get to the specifics of programs to actually reduce or completely defund, that support largely evaporates. Or to paraphrase an old cliché Americans want to have their cake and eat it too.

This can be seen even in the most fanatical segment of the GOP’s own base in the form of the many white seniors who are ardent Tea Party supporters but who adamantly oppose any cuts to Medicare. Their silence in the recent fiscal cliff debate was telling. Of course these selfish seniors are strong supporters of federal spending cuts as long as it doesn’t impact them. But then as we all know, Medicare is one of the big drivers of federal spending and its share promises to get larger with each year that passes.

The point is that if we are to have a worthwhile debate on the relative merits of or necessity for government spending cuts versus increased taxation, the GOP has to display some guts and lay out what government programs they deem to be expendable. After all, it’s not Democrats who want to slash Medicaid and other programs for the poor and vulnerable, or who don’t place much of a value on infrastructure spending or expenditures on basic science research compared to keeping taxes low.

It’s simply not good enough for the GOP to talk about the need for smaller government and drastic spending cuts to reduce the federal budget deficit without allowing the electorate an opportunity to understand what that would mean in terms of government services denied or severely reduced, or to our future economic and social well-being.

A comprehensive debate would be a healthy thing for the nation. The GOP’s unwillingness to join that debate with any honesty is, on the other hand, contemptible.

How long before Chris Christie becomes a Democrat?

Posted on by
Reply

Governor Chris Christie is pissed off at his fellow Republicans in the House because they did not vote to authorize $60B in federal aid to the Northeastern states hit hard by Hurricane Sandy.

He singled out John Boehner for his most vitriolic ire: “There’s only one group to blame for the continued suffering of these innocent victims — the House majority and their speaker, John Boehner.” Christie said he called Speaker Boehner four times after 11:20 p.m. and received no response. And of the Republicans’ refusal to vote, he said “it was disappointing and disgusting to watch.” Followed by, “Last night, the House of Representatives failed that most basic test of public service, and they did so with callous indifference to the suffering of the people of my state.”

You might recall that Governor Christie was the keynote speaker at the Republican Convention. Now he says he will not provide any support for House Republicans.

When Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey in October, he called President Obama and Obama responded immediately. Governor Christie praised Obama for his quick response and attention to the crisis. Christie was tested on Fox News with questions about his support for the Obama and the way he handled the disaster, but he did not waiver in his support for the president doing the right thing even if it gave a Democrat a little bump in the polls.

And by entering into Obama’s circle, Christie finally got to meet New Jersey’s most famous citizen, The Boss, who he has seen in concert something like 130 times. No reports were available as to whether Chrisite creamed his jeans when he got a hug from Bruce Springsteen.

So it doesn’t seem too crazy of an idea to think that maybe Christie will become so upset with his party of out-of-touch whackos that he’ll switch parties. He should have no problem getting re-elected governor as a Democrat in the very blue state of New Jersey. And just a couple years after that, he could be running for president with his new friend Bruce Springsteen supporting him on the road.

Am I right? I might be and, if I am, you read it here first.