Hitting The Ceiling

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's ability to get just enough votes to pass a federal-budget reduction resolution that cuts domestic spending while raising the debt ceiling has been seen as an empty victory that will never be endorsed by the Democratic Senate and will never get anywhere, and Speaker McCarthy won't be able to score any victories against President Biden.  Don't you believe it.  

Now that the resolution has passed, McCarthy can now say he has a plan to cut the debt and the deficit, and he can now challenge - and has challenged - the President into offering a proposal that both sides can negotiate over.  Biden says he will negotiate on the budget but he refuses to negotiate over the debt ceiling.  Biden doesn't get it.   Now that McCarthy has united House Republicans behind the resolution, he is never going to decouple the budget from the debt ceiling, and he can frame the argument by saying that he has taken a step toward resolving the issue while the President remains obstinate over it.  The optics will be terrible for the White House.  McCarthy knows how to manipulate things to get his way and advance his party's priorities.  

How do you think he got to be Speaker of the House?

Default is coming.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid. 

Paul and Paul

Hey, Paul!

Am I referring to Mr. Paul of the Senate or Mr. Ryan, Speaker of the House?  Both, actually.  The Senate worked out a bipartisan deal to keep the government running, spending more money on the military and on vital domestic programs, but the Kentucky senator doesn't want to commit the government to more spending (and so is blocking a Senate vote on the deal), and the Speaker can't muster the votes for it in the House.  And even if he could, Democrats don't want to vote on anything that doesn't fix the DACA immigration issue.

"Yes, I want a strong national defense," Rand Paul wrote on his Twitter account.  "I believe it's actually the most important thing the federal government does. But you have to ask yourself whether a $20 trillion debt makes us a stronger country or a weaker country."

I have to ask myself whether another shutdown - which will happen less than fifteen minutes after I post this - will make us weaker.   

Oh well, at least the Democrats won't be blamed for a shutdown this time.  Not that they had any power to stop it.

Nancy Pelosi's floor stunt?  I'll get to that . . ..

I'm glad the Winter Olympics are starting.  I'll get to talk about that instead.

Shut Down, Vol. 19

There are no winners here.

The federal government has just shut down, per a failed Senate vote on a continuing resolution passed by the House.  Although five of ten Democratic senators from states Trump won voted for the resolution, four Republicans - including South Carolina's Lindsey Graham - voted against it, Graham in particular fed up with Trump's irrationality.  

The Democrats stood their ground on a permanent solution to the children of undocumented immigrants, but they were probably playing politic at the wrong time on the wrong issue.  Republicans tried to use the Children's Health Insurance Program - unfunded since September - as a bargaining, er, chip to cow the Democrats into submission while refusing to deal with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients.  And neither side seems to have a clue abut how to maintain troop readiness in the military.  No one will budge, and nothing is happening.

This is the nineteenth time the government has shut down.

As far as I'm concerned, the whole damn country can shut down.  Our representative form of government has only been in effect for 229 years, a few moments in the Big Bang scheme of things, is still brief enough to be considered an experiment.  

It just failed.

Congress can still get something worked out by Monday morning, before the shutdown has a noticeable effect on the country.  Don't bet on it.

Night of the Living Dead Health Care Bill

The Senate Republican leadership pulled the plug on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, as too many members of the GOP's Senate caucus have refused to back the Senate bill in any way, shape or form.  Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer has offered to work with the Republicans to fix the law, but Mitch McConnell, Schumer's Republican counterpart, has decided to schedule a vote to repeal it without replacing it.

Too bad for him that he doesn't have the votes for even that.

Attempts to "reform" health care will go on, but in broad daylight, with hearings, markups, and all those other old-fashioned things that Congress used to be good at.  And the House repeal-and-replace bill is still floating out there.   It looks like the Republicans will have to actually work with the Democrats in - HORRORS! - a bipartisan fashion.

The GOP isn't done decimating the middle class, though.  Wait until the Republican House releases its budget.  It will have more in common with Trump's budget than you think.       

Air Shows

Michelle Obama had a scare in the air when the Boeing 737 airplane on which she and Second Lady Jill Biden were aboard was about three miles away from a C-17 cargo plane as each plane was preparing for a landing at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, outside Washington. The 737 had to do a number of turns in the air to get enough distance from the C-17. But when that didn't separate the planes enough for the cargo plane to clear the runway in time for Mrs. Obama's plane to land next, the 737 pilot had to abort the landing and begin climbing after its initial descent to provide enough time to land safely. Had it gotten much closer to the C-17 in the air, the 737 could have been caught in a wake of nasty turbulence.

In what is only the latest in a series of screw-ups on the part of federal air traffic controllers - this one affecting both Mrs. Obama and Dr. Biden directly - the C-17 and the 737 didn't have the proper separation when controllers in Warrenton, Virginia handed them off to the controllers at Andrews. The First and Second Ladies, we are told, were never in danger.

Meanwhile, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour blasted the Obamas, saying that the First Family let this happen to promote passenger rail as a safer alternative to flying. All right, I just made that up.

Meanwhile, President Obama was in Annandale, Virginia showing off his tough side by promoting his deficit reduction plan. He insisted that his proposal was superior to that of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, and that he would hold firm on protecting Medicare. He did so having failed to understand that he had already lost the first round of the budget debate because Republicans framed it on an issue that benefits them (deficit reduction). Also, the President woke this morning to find that his overall approval rating in an ABC News-Washington Post poll was at 47 percent and his disapproval rating on his handling of the economy was at 61 percent in that same poll.

Mrs. Obama landed safely in Maryland. Meanwhile, in Virginia, her husband crashed trying to get off the ground.

Line In the Sand

President Obama made it plain on Wednesday: No more Mr. Nice Guy.

In his speech on deficit reduction, Obama laid out his own plan to save $4 trillion over twelve years. He made it clear that he has no intention of going along with the budget plan laid out by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) that guts Medicare and Medicaid to the point of irrelevance, or, to where Nancy Pelosi is.

Obama wants to repeal the Bush tax cuts on families with annual incomes of $250,000 or more (and much more) once and for all, as well of cut spending on federal pensions, agricultural subsidies, and yes, the Pentagon - although he stopped short of zeroing out war spending. Medicare and Medicaid spending would be reduced based on per beneficiary growth in spending in accordance with the per capita growth of gross domestic product, with a savings of $480 billion by 2023. Whatever. That still sounds like a cut, but at least it doesn't sound like a gut.

Naturally, his tax increase proposal was greeted by the Republicans - Ryan, Speaker Boehner, Senator McConnell - with outright hostility. Once again, they painted a tax increase on the rich as a tax increase on all, even though the wealthiest Americans have made out like bandits at the expense of everyone else for the past thirty years. Rush Limbaugh bemoaned any plan that would tax those who, as he put it, create wealth earned by the time and money they spent building their businesses and hiring workers. This is the same "trickle-down" theory that has been used repeatedly to justify tax breaks for the rich, and it obviously hasn't worked for the traveling salesmen who listen to Limbaugh's show - although it's worked very well for Limbaugh. When Republicans talk about growing the economy and getting more tax revenues from creating more jobs, it means one thing and one thing only - they want to tax work, not wealth.

This certainly draws a line in the sand for the 2012 election, but I sometimes wonder if Obama's proposal amounts to too little, too late. First of all, the Republicans control the House and thus control the power of the purse; the Democratic Senate cannot produce expenditures on its own. Secondly, with the House already in Republican hands, the Senate may follow, given the whopping 23 seats Democrats have to defend next year - some of them rather vulnerable - versus the ten safe Republican seats up net year. Some Senate Democrats up for re-election in 2012 might be reluctant to back Obama's ideas if they think that will cost them votes. Thirdly, just the fact that the Republicans have moved the debate to government spending means that Obama's speech was as much a concession to that reality as it was a throwing of the gauntlet.

One mistake Obama made in his speech, by the way, was not in the message but the messaging. While he dropped his professorial tone, he said that, like Warren Buffett, he didn't need another tax cut. All he did with that remark was call attention to the fact he, too, has lots of money.

Neither Obama's plan nor Ryan's plan is likely to get us to fiscal stability; some of the numbers in either plan don't add up, and the future is too unpredictable to depend on to make any long-term fiscal plan work. But there is a difference between the Obama plan and the Ryan plan: The Obama plan is sane.

Shut Down, Volume Two

It looks like the federal government has avoided a shutdown for at least two weeks. House Republicans passed a continuing resolution that cuts $4 billion in federal spending through March 18, and Senate Democrats - despite the Senate's misgivings about cuts in social programs that affect vulnerable people like children and the poor - feel compelled to pass it as well and send it to President Obama for his signature, since many of the cuts in the resolution are cuts the White House favored anyway. Obama would prefer to avoid a repeat of the 1995 government shutdown. By forcing the Democratic Senate to accept these cuts, the Republican House has achieved what many in the media are calling a victory.

Senate Democrats think they can win the next round of negotiations for a budget for the rest of the fiscal year, but their hope seems to rely on very wishful thinking. Some moderate Democratic senators representing states that currently lean Republican - Pennsylvania's Robert Casey, Jr., Missouri's Claire McCaskill - want to support more cuts, dividing the majority caucus in the upper house while the Republican majority in the lower house are more united. And congressional watcher Norm Ornstein reports that the idea of a new budget deal hammered out in a fortnight remains very slim. "The odds are minuscule that the Tea Party-driven freshmen would accept the equivalent of 15 or 20 cents on the dollar from their pledge to cut $100 billion this year," Ornstein says of newly elected House Republicans, "without first pushing for a confrontation. They did not come here to cave barely three months into their terms."

Several Democrats have suggested that the wind will be more at their backs once Americans see how draconian some of these cuts are, but I suspect that the wind at their backs will be their own. The arguments that such cuts would cripple an improving but still weak economy, valid as they are, are politically irrelevant. These cuts mostly affect poor people. The Tea Party, which calls for deep cuts in everything except defense (gotta protect ourselves from the British!), appeals to Middle Americans. Middle Americans, by and large, hate poor people, as some of the Tea Party demonstrations in the health care debate proved. So I imagine that cuts to aid for the poor and the less fortunate will prevail. To quote Bob Dole, where's the outrage?

Some of it was in the House. Seven House Republicans - including Rodney Frelinghuysen, my congressman - fought to protect federal funding for Planned Parenthood. (The others were Judy Biggert of Illinois, Mary Bono Mack of California [Sonny Bono's widow], Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, Charles Bass of New Hampshire, and freshmen Robert Dold of Illinois and Richard Hanna of New York.) I'm proud of Frelinghuysen for that. But the efforts of these seven representatives have put them in an unenviable situation, as the House Republican majority has injected social conservatism in the debate of fiscal responsibility, forcing them to walk a fine line between voting their consciences and reducing government spending.

We need cuts in agriculture subsidies, as Rand Paul has suggested. We need cuts in highway spending; mass transit moves more people for less cost. We need deep cuts in "defense" spending. And, we also need to do something about entitlement programs to keep them solvent. But most especially, we need so tax the rich. To generate more money for the federal government, we need to follow legendary bank robber Willie Sutton's advice and go where the money is.