Tag Archives: democrats

California Water Bill Rewards Farmers, Screws Environment

by ClifforG80 Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

A controversial bill that would override environmental rules to supply farmers with more water from California’s ecologically sensitive Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta sailed through the House of Representatives on Thursday. The bill may come up for a vote as soon as today in the Senate, where it is being championed by California senior Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat and powerful ally of agribusiness interests.

California’s other Democratic US senator, Barbara Boxer, staunchly opposes the bill and has threatened to filibuster it, potentially keeping her fellow senators from leaving for the year. It would be a dramatic last act for Boxer, an ally of environmental groups who is retiring this year after working closely with Feinstein in the Senate for 24 years. “I guess that’s how it goes,” Boxer said on the Senate floor this morning. “You come in fighting, you go out fighting.”

The contentious California provisions, which also include policies that would make it easier to build dams, were added on Monday by Bakersfield Republican Kevin McCarthy as a rider to the sprawling Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act, a popular bipartisan bill that would also provide aid to Flint, Michigan. The provisions reflect negotiations between Feinstein, California’s 14 Republican lawmakers, and a handful of Democrats.

The bill represents the culmination of a fight that has been brewing over the course of California’s six-year drought. It pits Central Valley farmers and Los Angeles area homeowners against environmental interests, fishermen, and farmers in the Delta region east of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Los Angeles Times‘ Sarah D. Wire summarizes the conflict. (Today she is following the hearings live on Twitter):

At issue is that the measure would allow officials at state and federal water management agencies to exceed the environmental pumping limits to capture more water during storms. Those limits have been a pet peeve of water contractors, including the Westlands Water District and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which complained of water supplies “lost to the sea” during last winter’s heavy rains.

Federal biologists have said certain levels of water flowing through the delta are vital for native fish, which have suffered devastating losses during the state’s prolonged drought, and help maintain the quality of the delta’s freshwater supplies. In short, if fish are determined to have enough water, or are not near the pumps, the excess water could be sent to the south.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) characterized it as placing political wants above science to go around federal law.

“When an act of Congress specifically supersedes peer-reviewed biological opinions that are the very mechanism of how the Endangered Species Act gets implemented, that is a grave undermining of the act,” Huffman said.

Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee’s powerful energy and water panel, typically serves as the key negotiator on California-related water bills. Progressives often accuse her of ignoring environmental interests in favor of agricultural ones, particularly the billionaire California farmers Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who use more water than all the homes in Los Angeles combined. For more on Feinstein’s ties with the Resnicks, read our profile of them here.

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California Water Bill Rewards Farmers, Screws Environment

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The House GOP Just Revealed Its Plan To Cut Social Security

by KelleeKarr3 Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

Late Thursday, Congressman Sam Johnson (R-TX), the Chairman of the House Social Security subcommittee, introduced a bill to “reform” (i.e. cut) Social Security.

Josh Marshall warns, “Republicans apparently aren’t going to be satisfied with phasing out Medicare. They’re going to try to pass huge cuts to Social Security this year too. Not Bush-style partial phaseout but just big, big cuts. And you’re out of luck even if you’re a current beneficiary. “

The Washington Examiner describes it thusly:

The bill…would reduce costs by changing the benefits formula to reduce payments progressively for high earners. It would also gradually raise the full retirement age from 67 to 69 for people who are today 49 or younger. Lastly, it would change the inflation metric used to calculate benefits to one that shows lower inflation, essentially slowing the growth in benefits, and eliminate cost of living adjustments for high earners.

You can read the full bill below. Democrats are not pleased.

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The House GOP Just Revealed Its Plan To Cut Social Security

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The Wall Street-Washington Complex Invades Trump’s Cabinet

by DwightDugger Posted on December 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Of all the ways Donald Trump has fallen short of his campaign promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington politics with his Cabinet appointments, none is starker than his choice of Elaine Chao as transportation secretary. Chao is as much of a Washington insider as they come: She served as deputy transportation secretary under George H.W. Bush and as secretary of labor for eight years under George W. Bush. She’s also married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and this year he used his perch to undermine a federal agency that was going after the bank where she works.

Since 2011, Chao has sat on the board of Wells Fargo, earning more than $1.2 million in pay over that period. This year, it was revealed that the bank had fraudulently set up millions of fake accounts that customers had never requested. That activity earned Wells Fargo a $185 million fine from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the largest penalty levied so far by the new financial watchdog agency.

The Senate called in Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf in September, and both Democrats and Republicans attacking the company’s behavior. “This is about accountability,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who helped create the CFPB, said at the hearing. “You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated.” Stumpf resigned a few weeks later.

But McConnell didn’t quite share that sentiment. Instead, he chose to go after the federal agency that had penalized Wells Fargo. As liberal consumer rights group Public Citizen pointed out, less than a week after the CFPB announced its fine against Wells Fargo, McConnell used his authority to try to fast-track a bill that would defang the CFPB by changing its funding structure.

The bill ultimately failed to advance, although the CFPB could lose significant power under President Trump. And McConnell is far from the only Republican to target the CFPB. But for Trump, who ran a populist campaign decrying the power of Washington insiders and the moneyed interests they support, the selection of Chao for a top administration role seems to show he’s not as opposed to the Wall Street-Washington complex as he might have suggested.

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The Wall Street-Washington Complex Invades Trump’s Cabinet

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At Least a Few Republicans Want to Protect Undocumented Immigrants Who Came Here as Kids

by DemetriFarris Posted on December 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says he is preparing legislation intended to protect some undocumented young people whose parents brought them to the United States as minors.

The legislation would extend the legal rights gained under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a 2012 Obama policy that allows the hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who have signed up to legally work in the United States and be exempted from deportation. The November election has created much consternation among those currently protected. During the campaign, President-elect Trump said he would kill DACA, and immigrant advocates now worry that his administration could take the personal information DACA recipients submitted to the Department of Homeland Security while applying and use it to locate and deport.

“The worst outcome is to repeal the legal status that these kids have,” Graham told Politico Wednesday. “Whether you agree with them having it or not, they’ve come out of the shadows.”

The legislation would be pretty straightforward: “It’s going to be basically if you have legal status today, you’ll continue to have legal status,” Graham said. As Politico writes:

Graham said he is working with both Democrats and Republicans, and named Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) as one GOP supporter of the forthcoming legislation. While lawmakers are discussing the proposal now, actual legislation won’t be rolled out until the new Congress next year, Graham said. A spokesman for Flake said the senator is discussing “potential paths forward” in dealing with the DACA issue with several colleagues.

In the past, Graham has been less open to the plight of young undocumented people. In 2010, he said proponents of the DREAM Act, a bill that included, among other things, a path to citizenship for some of the kids in question, were “wasting their time.” The bill has been introduced several times since 2001 but has never made it past Republican opposition. “We are not going to pass the DREAM Act or any other legalization program until we secure our borders,” Graham said at the time.

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At Least a Few Republicans Want to Protect Undocumented Immigrants Who Came Here as Kids

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Ron Wyden Thinks We All Deserve the Truth About Russian Election Interference

by CharoletteWilfo Posted on November 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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This is a helluva tease:

That’s all the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee except Dianne Feinstein, who joined all the Republicans in apparently not wanting this to be made public. That’s quite a partisan divide in a mostly nonpartisan committee. I wonder what it’s all about?

The ball’s in your court, President Obama. To quote our president-elect: at this point, what the hell do you have to lose?

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Ron Wyden Thinks We All Deserve the Truth About Russian Election Interference

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Top Republican Won’t Respond to Call to Probe Trump’s Conflicts of Interest

by LidiaIrby906 Posted on November 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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In August, when it looked likely that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, insisted that no one should have any doubt that he would be tough on the next president when it came to personal financial entanglements.

“If you’re going to run and try to become the president of the United States, you’re going to have to open up your kimono and show everything, your tax returns, your medical records. You are just gonna have to do that. It’s too important,” Chaffetz said.

But Chaffetz, who just 11 days before the election quickly blasted out the news that FBI Director James Comey had “reopened” the FBI investigation in Clinton’s emails (which was not quite true), has become quiet on the question of what’s under Trump’s kimono.

Two weeks ago, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, sent Chaffetz a letter requesting that the committee’s Republicans open an inquiry into Trump’s potential conflicts of interest and his claim that he planned to put his assets into a “blind trust.” Based on the description offered by Trump and his surrogates, this supposed blind trust would allow his children to manage the sprawling Trump business organization, but the arrangement would not force Trump to surrender his interest in any of his enterprises. In other words, it would not be a blind trust. (An actual blind trust places assets under the control of an independent third party and prevents the owner from knowing the assets in his or her portfolio.)

Chaffetz responded to Cummings’s request for an investigation with silence. So on Monday, Cummings sent Chaffetz a follow-up letter, signed by all 17 Democratic members of the committee, re-upping the request for a probe examining Trump’s potential financial conflicts.

“You have the authority to launch a Committee investigation, and we are calling on you to use that power now,” Cummings wrote. “You acted with unprecedented urgency to hold ’emergency’ hearings and issue multiple unilateral subpoenas to investigate Secretary Clinton before the election. We ask that that you show the same sense of urgency now.”

Last week, Trump told reporters at the New York Times that the president “can’t have a conflict of interest.” It is true that Trump is not covered by conflict-of-interest rules that govern other high-ranking federal officials. But potential conflicts still exist, and it’s possible that Trump’s international business dealings run afoul of a constitutional clause banning federal officials from taking gifts from foreign governments. Ethics experts have told Mother Jones that only Congress is in a position to address Trump’s conflicts of interest.

His spokeswoman did not return a request for comment.

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), a member of the committee, has raised the issue of Trump’s conflicts. On November 21, he tweeted at the president-elect, “You rightly criticized Hillary for Clinton Foundation. If you have contracts w/foreign govts, it’s certainly a big deal, too. #DrainTheSwamp.” But Chaffetz has been mum on this front. So far, Chaffetz, like most Republican leaders, is leaving Trump’s swamp alone.

The full letter sent by Democrats today is below.

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2016 11 28 EEC Et Al to Chaffetz Re Trump Conflict of Interests 0 (PDF)

2016 11 28 EEC Et Al to Chaffetz Re Trump Conflict of Interests 0 (Text)

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Top Republican Won’t Respond to Call to Probe Trump’s Conflicts of Interest

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Voucherizing Medicare Is a Death Ride for Republicans

by AngieCervantes Posted on November 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Are Republicans really going to start off the 115th Congress by mucking around with Medicare?

For nearly six years, Speaker Paul D. Ryan has championed the new approach, denounced by Democrats as “voucherizing” Medicare. Representative Tom Price of Georgia, the House Budget Committee chairman and a leading candidate to be Mr. Trump’s secretary of health and human services, has also embraced the idea, known as premium support.

….Democrats say that premium support would privatize Medicare, replacing the current government guarantee with skimpy vouchers — “coupon care for seniors.” The fear is that the healthiest seniors would choose private insurance, lured by offers of free health club memberships and other wellness programs, leaving traditional Medicare with sicker, more expensive patients and higher premiums.

….Republicans say their proposal would apply to future beneficiaries, not to those in or near retirement. But the mere possibility of big changes is causing trepidation among some older Americans.

….“I’m scared to death,” said Charles Drapeau, who has multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, and takes a drug that costs more than $10,000 a month. “We don’t know exactly how it will work, but just the fact that they are talking about messing with Medicare, it’s frightening to me.”

Just for the record, that drug is actually $10,500 every four weeks. So Mr. Drapeau should be 14 percent more scared to death than he already is.

But back to Medicare vouchers premium support. It’s pretty plain that it would be worse for seniors than the current Medicare system. After all, if it were better, Ryan wouldn’t feel like he has to exempt current Medicare recipients. But everyone currently on Medicare is keenly aware of how their benefits would be affected by Ryan’s vouchers, and if they aren’t, AARP will tell them in no uncertain terms. So they’ll fight Ryan’s cuts tooth and nail.

So why is Ryan doing this, anyway? I suppose because it’s one of the few ways to open up a significant amount of budget room for his gigantic tax cuts. If you want big tax cuts, after all, you need big spending cuts too, and that means cutting big programs. Unfortunately for Ryan, there really aren’t all that many big spending programs, especially once you take defense off the table. So he has little choice but to chop away at Medicare if those top marginal rates are going to come down.

And yet, why now? In one sense, I suppose doing it right at the start, when political capital is highest, makes sense. You do the hard stuff when you have the biggest majorities and everyone is eager for change. That’s why Obama went after health care first. At the same time, this would be a huge, messy battle that would almost certainly be wildly unpopular. Medicare is probably even more beloved than Social Security, after all. A battle like this could easily up in an epic defeat, and wipe out whatever goodwill the new Congress has.

So it’s a bit of a mystery. I don’t think Ryan can win this battle unless he offers up a plan that doesn’t really save much money. That’s possible, of course: just take a look at the difference between Ryan 2011 and Ryan 2014. But if you don’t save much money, what’s the point?

I dunno. If it were me, I’d do the popular stuff first. Cut taxes, build the wall, repair some bridges, bomb the shit out of ISIS, etc. More to the point, if I were Donald Trump, that’s what I’d do. Trump wants to be adored by the masses, not hated by them. Voucherizing Medicare is very definitely not the way to get there.

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Voucherizing Medicare Is a Death Ride for Republicans

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Obamacare’s Individual Mandate Is No Big Deal. But Something Else Is.

by LatishaEyre1860 Posted on November 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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As Republicans go about their plans to repeal and replace Obamacare, attention is now turning to the second half of that mantra: what will they replace it with? Oddly, this is not something that Republicans have come to a consensus on even though they’ve had seven years to do it. It’s almost as if they never had any intention of replacing it in the first place.

But that’s just me being cynical. There may not be any consensus, but there are Republican plans out there. Andrew Sprung rounds up a few of them and concludes that one particular piece of Obamacare shouldn’t cause any real trouble:

One change that need not be too disruptive, I suspect — if done right — is replacing the individual mandate with continuous coverage protection — that is, protection from medical underwriting for anyone who maintains continuous coverage.

“If done right” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, isn’t it? But that’s just me being cynical again. So let’s get serious. Is Sprung right?

Yes he is. The details get a little complicated—click the link if you want to dive into them—but the “individual mandate” is nothing more than an incentive: buy insurance or else you’ll pay a tax penalty. Likewise, “continuous coverage” is an incentive too: buy insurance or else you’re going to be screwed when you get sick and no one will sell you a health care policy. Both are ways to motivate young, healthy people to buy coverage and help subsidize all the old, sick people like me. Honestly, the biggest difference between them is semantic: “mandate” just sounds a whole lot more coercive than “continuous coverage.”

So sure, there are more ways to skin the incentive cat than a tax penalty. But I think we’re putting the cart before the horse here. We really ought to be talking about something else: the pre-existing conditions ban. Unlike the individual mandate, which can be repealed by a simple majority because it affects the federal budget, Republicans can’t repeal the pre-existing conditions ban without Democratic votes. And if it’s not repealed, Republicans can’t do much of anything else. As long as the ban is in place, any Republican plan is almost certain to cause total chaos in the health care market.1 It would be political suicide.

So if Republicans want to do something that’s not political suicide, they need Democratic votes. And that means Democrats have tremendous leverage over the final plan. They can either negotiate for something much better than what Republicans are proposing, or they can simply withhold their votes and leave Republicans between a rock and a hard place: either abandon Obamacare repeal, which would enrage their base, or pass a plan that would cause chaos for the health care industry and for millions of registered voters. This is not leverage to be given up lightly.

1If you don’t understand why, shame on you! My blogging has been in vain. However, Jon Gruber explains it here. Also, check out conservative Michael Cannon at National Review. He gets it too. The pre-existing conditions ban is the key roadblock in the way of Republicans repealing Obamacare.

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Obamacare’s Individual Mandate Is No Big Deal. But Something Else Is.

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Why Did Trump Win? A Roundup of the Most Popular Theories.

by JessikaLetters Posted on November 15, 2016

Mother Jones

In the past week, I’ve seen hundreds of pieces about why Donald Trump won and why Hillary Clinton lost. In the next few months, I’ll see thousands more. So do we have an answer yet?

Ha ha. Of course not. For the most part, people are just blaming all the stuff they already believed in. I recommend skipping those pieces entirely. I haven’t entirely made up my mind yet, but for the record, here’s how I’m currently feeling about all the usual suspects:

James Comey. Yeah, I think he made a big difference. Pretty much everyone on both sides agrees that support for Clinton shifted in response to Comey’s first letter and then again in response to his second letter. My guess is that his last minute intervention swayed the vote by about 2 percent. That’s not a lot, but in this election it was the difference between winning and losing.

Whitelash. In general, I’m unconvinced. White voters made up 72 percent of the electorate in 2012 and 70 percent in 2016. This doesn’t suggest that Trump motivated white voters to turn out in unprecedented numbers. Nor did white voters support Trump at a higher rate than they supported Romney. However, there’s more to this….

The white working class. Maybe. They did vote for Trump in greater numbers than they voted for Romney, but that merely extended a trend that’s decades old. The white working class has been getting steadily more Republican since Nixon, so it’s not clear if Trump accelerated this trend or merely benefited from it. It’s also possible that rural blue-collar whites had a substantial effect in a few key swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) even if they didn’t have a big effect nationally. We need more data here.

Racism. This one is tricky. Obviously Trump appealed to white racism, but it’s not as if racism suddenly spiked in 2016. It’s about the same as it’s always been, and it’s hard to see in the data that it made a big difference compared to previous years. However, we did learn something new and disheartening: it didn’t make a difference. In 2012, 93 percent of Republicans voted for Romney. This year, 90 percent voted for Trump. It turns out that Republicans just don’t care about explicit appeals to racism and misogyny. You can be as openly bigoted as you want, and you’ll only lose 3 percent of the Republican vote.

Third parties. This doesn’t explain anything. Third-party candidates did double their vote share compared to 2012, but so what? Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were candidates in 2012 too. If they got more votes this year, it’s because the two major party candidates were less appealing than Obama and Romney—which is what we’re trying to explain in the first place.

The fundamentals. This probably had a bigger effect than it’s getting credit for. There are lots of models out there, but generally speaking they mostly suggested that 2016 was a very winnable year for Republicans. The economy was OK but not great; Democrats had been in office for eight years; and Obama’s approval rating was mediocre. Clinton was fighting a modestly uphill battle the whole way.

The media. I think the press played a significant role in Trump’s victory, though the evidence is all anecdotal. Two things were in play. First, Trump hacked cable news. He figured out that they’re basically in the entertainment business and will provide endless coverage to anyone who drives ratings. The more outrageous he was, the more coverage he got. Second, the media’s gullible willingness to cover Clinton’s email woes so relentlessly hurt her badly. It’s easy to say that Clinton has no one but herself to blame for this, and there’s something to that. Still, even long after they should have known better, the press reported every new development in breathless tones and 60-point headlines—even though, time after time, it turned out there was nothing there. They got played—and what’s worse, they got played by the same wide-ranging cast of Hillary haters that’s played them before.

Sexism. I don’t know. It obviously seems likely that it played a role, but I haven’t seen any real data to back it up.

Lousy turnout from Democrats. Maybe. It appears that voter turnout in general was down from 2012, but only slightly—and once all the votes are counted it might be dead even. In any case, turnout seems to have affected Democrats and Republicans about equally. We need more data before we can say much about this.

Millennials. This clearly had an effect. Young voters abandoned Clinton in much greater numbers than older voters (about 5 percent vs. 1 percent, by my calculation). Likewise, third parties got about 9 percent of the millennial vote, compared to 3 percent of the older vote. There’s not much question that Clinton did poorly among millennials, and this reduced her overall vote total by 1-2 percentage points. The question is why this happened. The options are (a) Clinton was a corrupt, neoliberal sellout that young voters were never likely to warm up to, or (b) Bernie Sanders convinced millions of millennials that Clinton was a corrupt, neoliberal sellout who didn’t deserve their vote. Take your pick.

Voter suppression. This had, at most, a small effect. Among the key “firewall” states that Clinton lost, Pennsylvania has no voter ID law; Michigan has a loose ID law that allows you to vote without ID if you sign an affadavit; and Wisconsin has a strict photo ID law. Wisconsin was very close, and voter ID might have made the difference there. But Clinton still would have lost.

The electoral college. Yeah, there was that.

Once again: this is my best take on all of these theories right now. But the actual evidence is still weak. CPS data won’t be available for years, and in the meantime we have exit poll data—which is suggestive but not much more—and a lot of people looking at county and precinct level data, trying to tease out who voted for whom. We’ll eventually know more, but it will take a while. Until then, it’s probably best not to be too sure of whatever your own pet theory is.

Except for James Comey, of course. That guy sucks.

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Why Did Trump Win? A Roundup of the Most Popular Theories.

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Hillary Clinton: Yeah, It Was Comey

by NoraCrusep Posted on November 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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On a conference call today, Hillary Clinton blamed her last-minute loss on FBI Director James Comey:

Speaking with Democrats who raised over $100,000 for her failed bid for the presidency, the former secretary of state said Comey’s second letter — just three days before the election — did more damage than the first, which landed just 11 days out, according to one individual on the call, who described her tone as clearly sad but hopeful.

Clinton told participants that the campaign’s data saw her numbers plunge after the first letter, then rebounded. But the second letter, she said, awakened Donald Trump’s voters.

So Comey’s first letter, which revived suspicions that Clinton had done something wrong, hurt her, but the second letter was even more damaging. Although it theoretically cleared her, its real effect was to remind everyone that “charges” had been on the table in the first place. And of course, the nation’s headline writers played right along:

For what it’s worth, we now know that both the Trump campaign and the Clinton campaign agree that Comey’s intervention played a significant role in the election. It wasn’t Clinton’s only problem, but at this point it’s just special pleading to pretend that it wasn’t a key reason for her loss. If it weren’t for Comey, nobody would be talking about the white working class or disenchanted millennials or third-party candidates. We’d be talking instead about the implosion of the Republican Party and arguing over who Clinton should choose as her Treasury Secretary.

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Hillary Clinton: Yeah, It Was Comey

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