Tag Archives: debt

Here’s the Pitiful Micro-Drama Behind Yesterday’s Debt Ceiling Vote

by RafaelCatts Posted on February 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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After the House finally decided to just pass a damn debt ceiling bill and head out of town, everyone figured the Senate vote wouldn’t produce any drama. But it did, though only in a sad, craven key. It all started when Ted Cruz insisted on filibustering the bill because it gave him a chance to pull off some cheap tea party theatrics, and that’s all Cruz cares about. (Apparently he’s under the sad delusion that this kind of thing might pave his way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.) Then the vote got up 58 ayes, and sort of stalled. Why? Dave Weigel points me to this report from Manu Raju and Burgess Everett:

Miffed that they have long been asked to take tough votes when the GOP leaders voted “no,” Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski, privately pressured McConnell and Cornyn to vote to break the filibuster, sources said. Murkowski resisted voting for the measure without the support of her leadership team.

As the drama grew in the chamber with the vote’s prospects in doubt, McConnell turned to his colleagues and said: “We’re not doing this again,” according to a source familiar with his remarks.

So McConnell and Cornyn — both facing reelection this year and battling tea party-inspired challengers in their states — took the plunge and risked the political backlash by voting to break a filibuster, the type of vote the two wily leaders have long sought to avoid in this election season.

It was a mini-revolt of the backbenchers. There’s a standard bunch of GOP moderates who keep getting asked to take one for the team, and they finally got tired of it. So they told Mitch McConnell they were through bailing out the party unless they got some help. McConnell and Cornyn caved, and that opened the floodgates for a bunch of other Republicans to follow suit. In the end, the debt ceiling increase passed 67-31.

But McConnell managed a small, almost touchingly meager victory. Apparently Harry Reid took pity on him and played along with a plan to keep the votes semi-private by not having the clerk call the roll. Everyone’s votes were still recorded, but at least they weren’t called out in stentorian tones on CSPAN-2. Weigel:

If this sounds pathetic, that’s because it is. Carl Hulse puts it very well here: Most Republicans want the country to keep running, but don’t want to provide tough votes if they can be used against them in primaries. But I’d go further than Hulse. More than ever, most members Congress are structurally protected from any consequences for any votes they take. Like I wrote yesterday, only four incumbent Republicans in the House and Senate, total, lost primaries in 2012. None of them lost only because they voted to raise the debt limit.

Individually, they’re totally safe. Collectively, they often can’t act. So the only real pressure exerted on a party is the external backlash that follows a big, collective failure — the definitive case this year being the government shutdown, the definitive case in 2011 being the collapse of a House Republican debt limit bill.

Four incumbents! But that’s all it takes to make all the rest of them petrified with fear of the Koch brothers and the Club for Growth. Senators these days are like our fabled youth who are supposedly so smothered with parenting that they’re afraid to face the real world on their own. Senators are so smothered with entitlement to their seats that they’re afraid of even the tiniest chance of a primary challenge. The result is a gutlessness in the face of mau-mauing from blowhards like Cruz that makes you want to avert your eyes. Even when it’s being done to a bunch of guys you can’t stand, it’s just too painful to watch.

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Here’s the Pitiful Micro-Drama Behind Yesterday’s Debt Ceiling Vote

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The Right to Vote Is Too Important to Be Denied to Ex-Felons

by Tamera4915 Posted on February 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Roger Clegg is seriously unhappy about Eric Holder’s call for the restoration of voting rights to felons who have served their sentences:

He conveniently ignores the reason for felon disenfranchisement, namely that if you aren’t willing to follow the law, then you can hardly claim a role in making the law for everyone else, which is what you do when you vote….The right to vote can be restored, but it should be done carefully, on a case-by-case basis, once a person has shown that he or she has really turned over a new leaf. The high recidivism rates that Mr. Holder acknowledges in his speech just show why that new leaf cannot be presumed simply because someone has walked out of prison; he’ll probably be walking back in, alas. A better approach to the re-integration that Mr. Holder wants is to wait some period of time, review the felon’s record and, if he has shown he is now a positive part of his community, then have a formal ceremony — rather like a naturalization ceremony — in which his rights are restored.

Let’s concede the obvious up front: Released felons are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans, so there’s an obvious partisan motivation on both sides of this debate.

That said, I favor restoring voting rights to felons, and I’m willing to meet Clegg halfway. I’d be OK with waiting some reasonable period of time1 before restoring voting rights, but I think restoration should be the default after that time has elapsed. That is, after, say, five years, you automatically get your voting rights back unless there’s some specific reason you don’t qualify. And those reasons should be very clear and spelled out via statute.

My position here is based on a simple—perhaps simplistic—view of political freedom. I believe that liberal democracies require three minimum rules of law: free speech, the right to a fair trial, and universal suffrage. At the risk of stating the obvious, this doesn’t mean that nothing else is important.2 But I do mean that if you have these three things, then the odds are very strong that you qualify as a free country. Countries that enforce these rights differ considerably on a wide variety of other metrics and still strike us as mostly free. But I can’t think of a country that fails on any of them that we’d consider mostly free.

In other words, I believe the right to vote is on the same level as free speech and fair trials. And no one suggests that released felons should be denied either of those. In fact, they can’t be, because those rights are enshrined in the Constitution. Voting would be on that list too if it weren’t for an accident of history: namely that we adopted democracy a long time ago, when the mere fact of voting at all was a revolutionary idea, let alone the idea of letting everyone vote. But that accident doesn’t make the right to vote any less important.

A probationary period of some kind is probably reasonable. But once you’re released from prison and you’ve finished your parole, you’re assumed to have paid your debt to society. That means you’re innocent until proven guilty, and competent to protect your political interests in the voting booth unless proven otherwise. No free society should assume anything different.3

1What’s reasonable? Let’s just leave that for another day, OK?

2No, really, I mean that. There’s other important stuff. Honest. But these are the big three. Even freedom of religion can vary a lot within liberal democracies, with a minimum floor set by the fact that most religious expression is protected as free speech. Other important rights—including property rights—can largely be protected as long as majorities can freely express their views and freely elect representatives who agree with them.

3This is doubly true in a country like ours, where incarceration is so rampant and so racially unbalanced.

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The Right to Vote Is Too Important to Be Denied to Ex-Felons

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In the Republican Party, the Yahoo Wing is Winning

by anjunonstennyao Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Thanks to massive internal disarray, Republicans are unable to agree on any kind of immigration reform plan. They can’t say that, though, so they’re blaming it on the fact that President Obama is a rogue despot who can’t be trusted to enforce the law no matter what it is. He’ll implement the parts he likes and ignore the rest, just as he’s been doing for years with his sun-king presidency. So no immigration reform.

Also thanks to massive internal disarray, Republicans are unable to agree on a plan to raise the debt limit. Plan A was to demand the end of risk corridors in Obamacare (aka the “insurer bailout”), but that went nowhere. Plan B was to repeal the benefit cut for veterans that was enacted last month, which might have gone somewhere since Democrats are probably willing to go along with that in any case. But that didn’t make the cut either because it would have made it tough for tea partiers to vote against the bill. Plan C is to “wrap several popular, must-pass items around a provision to extend the federal government’s borrowing authority beyond the November midterm elections.” But even this plan is looking shaky.

The common thread here is that the Republican Party is unable to get its act together enough to look beyond next week. Both immigration reform and a quiet debt limit increase would benefit the GOP in the long term. But both would also infuriate the yahoo wing of the party in the short term. So far, the yahoo wing is winning.

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In the Republican Party, the Yahoo Wing is Winning

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Please Tell Me Republicans Aren’t Going to Touch Off Yet Another Idiotic Debt Ceiling Fight

by HaydenFornachon Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner:

The speaker has said that we should not default on our debt, or even get close to it, but a “clean” debt limit increase simply won’t pass in the House. We hope and expect the White House will work with us on a timely, fiscally responsible solution.

Somebody please tell me that this is just derpy boilerplate because Steel didn’t have anything better to say. Even Republicans have got to have better things to do than once again threaten default on US debt unless President Obama caves in to yet another list of hopeless right-wing pet rocks. Don’t they?

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Please Tell Me Republicans Aren’t Going to Touch Off Yet Another Idiotic Debt Ceiling Fight

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New York subway riders swipe back at fare hikes

by pedzacastrzala87 Posted on March 5, 2013

New York subway riders swipe back at fare hikes

By Susie Cagle

Today, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority boosted subway and bus fares by another quarter, making it $2.50 per ride in the Big Apple (which is about equivalent to four actual apples).

In response to the hikes, some citizens are taking matters and MetroCards into their own hands with a “Swipe Back!” campaign. It’s simple enough: 18 minutes after you use your unlimited card (which now costs $30 per week or $112 per month), you can swipe someone else in for a ride. Says Swipe Back!: “Since you’re giving the swipe away, not selling it, this is perfectly legal.”

agent j loves nyc

A less legal form of swiping back against fare hikes.

The MTA tells Gothamist that fares are up to compensate for “costs for employee healthcare, pension contributions, mandatory paratransit service, energy and other costs out of our control.” No mention of a shit-ton of debt service. Here’s journalist and activist Jesse Myerson to explain how those debts work:

I asked Myerson how a small-scale campaign like Swipe Back! can make a difference.

“It helps out people who can’t afford a too-expensive public transit system. More importantly, though, it hopes to create a united community of riders, which is a crucial prerequisite for engineering the type of mass mobilization that can secure concessions from those in power,” said Myerson. “[Swipe Back!] is therefore a small but important part of the larger strategy to resist transit austerity, which, in turn, is a small but important part of the even larger strategy to liberate public projects of massive social benefit from the extractive clutch of finance capital “

Sarah Goodyear at the Atlantic Cities looks at the Swipe Back! campaign and the history of similar initiatives:

This isn’t the first time the free swipes have been used to raise awareness among the harried riders of the city’s transit system, which carries seven million passengers every day. A group called the People’s Transportation Program offered free rides during a previous round of fare hikes in 2009, with very few people taking notice (except, of course, the lucky ones who benefited directly).

It’s hard not to notice the rising costs of daily needs, though, at least for those of us not lounging in the 1 percent. The No Fare Hikes initiative has a breakdown of ridership and costs throughout the subway system compared to neighborhood incomes. Sure, it’s just a quarter — for now — but those quarters can really add up.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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New York subway riders swipe back at fare hikes

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