Tag Archives: democrats

Mitch McConnell Has Met The Enemy, and It Is Him

by StepanieM07 Posted on December 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Politico has a fascinating story today. It’s all about Mitch McConnell’s months of LBJ-worthy maneuvering to get legislation passed that would repeal Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood, thus paving the way for a clean budget bill later this year. But here’s the kicker: he wasn’t engaged in Herculean negotiations with Democrats. He was engaged in Herculean negotiations with his own party. The goal was to somehow trick them into supporting the Obamacare/PP bill, which was entirely symbolic since President Obama would veto it instantly, paving the way for a budget bill later this month that Obama could sign.

How did he do it?

McConnell marshaled a secret weapon that ultimately would work in his favor: Anti-abortion groups.

Since the summer, the Senate majority leader had spoken with influential organizations opposing abortion such as National Right to Life and the Susan B. Anthony List to ensure they would back his move to link the Obamacare repeal with a measure to defund Planned Parenthood….Anti-abortion groups vowed to score against any senator who rejected the anti-Planned Parenthood provision, exerting additional pressure on conservative lawmakers who would have seen their sterling pro-life ratings tarnished if the defunding language was dropped.

Apparently McConnell persuaded the anti-abortion folks that their cause was better served by electing a Republican president in 2016, and the best way to do that was to avoid a protracted government shutdown over a budget bill that Democrats would fight if it included the PP defunding language. Instead, he proposed a symbolic standalone bill that allows everyone to vote against Obamacare and Planned Parenthood. Obama will veto it; everyone will shrug and say “we tried”; and then a clean budget bill will be negotiated and signed.

This is a strategy that firebrand conservatives opposed, but apparently they aren’t willing to risk their 100 percent scores from anti-abortion groups. So they caved.

And that’s that. In today’s Washington, passing bills isn’t a matter of getting Republicans and Democrats to agree. They can usually manage that. The trick is somehow neutering the wingnut faction of the Republican Party. Once that’s done, negotiations between the two parties are (relatively speaking) a piece of cake. Welcome to 2015.

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Mitch McConnell Has Met The Enemy, and It Is Him

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Quote of the Day: Ted Cruz Angling For Some of That Trump Magic

by RosalynAgee Posted on December 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Ted Cruz, apparently feeling gloomy today over Donald Trump’s ability to get attention with outrageous statements:

The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats. The media doesn’t report that.

Huh. Could be, I suppose. Most convicted felons are pretty poor, and poor people tend not to vote for Republicans. Why would they? Of course, they tend The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats. not to vote for Democrats, either. They just don’t vote.

Presumably, Cruz got his data from this study, which estimates that 73 percent of “hypothetical felon voters” would vote for Democrats. However, a more recent study that looks at how many actual felons register as Democrats puts the number at 62 percent for New York, 52 percent for New Mexico, and 55 percent for North Carolina. That’s still not bad, Democrats! You have the felon vote cornered. Except for one thing: only about a third of them registered at all, only about a fifth have active registration records, and only about 10 percent or so actually voted for president recently. Liberals may generally be in favor of allowing released felons to vote, but it sure isn’t because they think it will help them at the polls. Working for felon voting rights is about the most inefficient and futile way imaginable of getting out the vote.

In any case, anyone can play this game. Just find some demographic group that tends to vote for Party X, and then find some bad thing also associated with that group. In this case, poor people tend to vote for Democrats, and felons tend to be poor. Bingo. Most felons are Democrats.

Or this: rich people tend to vote for Republicans, and income-tax cheats tend to be rich. So most income-tax cheats are Republicans.

Or this: Middle-aged men tend to vote for Republicans, and embezzlers tend to be middle-aged men. So most embezzlers are Republicans.

We could do this all day long, but what’s the point? The whole exercise is kind of silly. If Ted Cruz wants some attention, he’s going to have to do better than this.

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Quote of the Day: Ted Cruz Angling For Some of That Trump Magic

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Elizabeth Warren Wants to Give Seniors a Raise

by KatlynHamel Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Elizabeth Warren wants to give seniors the same pay raise enjoyed by CEOs—and to raise taxes on some executive pay in the process. The liberal senator from Massachusetts is introducing a bill on Thursday to boost Social Security payments for 2016 with a one-time bump in benefits.

Social Security payments—for both retirees and people receiving disability insurance—are pegged to inflation, with the government calculating a cost-of-living adjustment, the percentage by which payments increase each year. But in recent years, with the economy still puttering only slowly upward following the recession, inflation has stalled, which has left Social Security recipients with no or minimal annual increases. 2016 is set to be only the third year since 1975 when Social Security won’t get any cost-of-living increase, joining 2010 and 2011.

Warren’s bill, dubbed the SAVE Act (short for Seniors and Veterans Emergency Benefits Act), would offer a one-time 3.9 percent increase. Why such a specific percentage? Warren points to a study showing that pay for CEOs at the 350 largest companies increased by 3.9 percent in 2015. Warren’s bill would pay for this one-time benefit hike by eliminating a corporate tax exemption for performance pay packages—which would also extend the solvency of the entire Social Security program.

As Mother Jones‘s Pema Levy documented earlier this year, Warren has focused on Social Security since coming to the Senate—not just defending the current program against cuts, but fighting to expand benefits. Her proposal comes at a time when much of the political debate over entitlements has pulled in the opposite direction. New House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose earlier proposals would have privatized parts of Social Security, is promising to explore changes to entitlements, and the Republican presidential candidates have debated lowering Social Security benefits. But Warren may be rallying Democrats to her side. Earlier this year, during votes on amendments to a budget, Warren introduced legislation to expand benefits that failed to pass but won the backing of all but two Democratic senators.

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Elizabeth Warren Wants to Give Seniors a Raise

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Senate Republicans Are Blocking Obama’s Judges at a Nearly Unprecedented Rate

by DorisCreason006 Posted on November 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Gridlock has famously prevented Congress from enacting meaningful legislation in recent years, but it’s in another area that congressional inaction is truly setting new records. The Senate has confirmed just nine judges nominated by President Obama so far this year. It’s the slowest pace of confirmations in more than half a century, on track to match the 11 confirmations in 1960.

“It’s still like pulling teeth to move nominations,” says a senior Democratic Senate aide. “They’re being held by a number of different Republican senators for every reason under the sun. None of which have anything to do with the actual qualifications of the nominees.”

With Republicans in charge of both branches of Congress, odds are slim that Obama will sign major domestic legislation during the last two years of his presidency. Even keeping the government’s lights on and selecting a new House speaker have required protracted fights in this dysfunctional Congress. But judges are still one area where a hamstrung president can leave a mark, as district and circuit court judges who win confirmation receive a lifetime appointment.

It’s not unusual for a president to get fewer nominations through the Senate as the end of a White House term nears and the opposition party begins to dream of winning the next presidential election and tapping the judges it prefers. But the current rate is far off from the historical norm. According to the liberal Alliance for Justice, by this point in 2007, when Democrats controlled the Senate, 34 of President George W. Bush’s judges had been confirmed.

The lack of confirmations has provoked anger among Senate Democrats over what they see as politicking at the expense of a functional judicial system. Last week, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, put a statement in the congressional record blasting Republicans for dragging their feet on scheduling votes for uncontroversial judicial nominees. “The glacial pace in which Republicans are currently confirming uncontroversial judicial nominees is a failure to carry out the Senate’s constitutional duty of providing advice and consent,” Leahy said. “We should be responding to the needs of our Federal judiciary so that when hardworking Americans seek justice, they do not encounter the lengthy delays that they currently face today.”

This summer, Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat on the committee, got in a public tussle on the Senate floor with its Republican chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa. After Schumer’s request for unanimous consent to approve a slate of judicial nominations for New York courts was denied, Schumer called the Republican slowdown a “disgrace” that was hurting the judicial system. “Democrats will not stand by and watch our judicial system brought to its knees by death by a thousand cuts,” he said. Grassley, though, would have none of it. He argued that Republicans didn’t need to rush confirmations after Democrats approved 11 nominees in the 2014 lame-duck session, when Democrats were about to lose the Senate majority following the November midterm elections. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it, the senator from New York,” Grassley said.

Republicans have been gumming up the works at each step of the process. Judicial nominations are generally put forward by the president only once they’ve been approved by both of the home-state senators. Republicans have been slow to give their consent to any nominee, with 55 judicial vacancies currently lacking a nomination. “If you look where these empty seats are, they’re almost all in states with at least one Republican senator,” says the Alliance for Justice’s Kyle Barry. Even when Republican senators appears to support a nominee, they’ve dragged out the process. Sen. Marco Rubio, for example, recommended Mary Flores to the White House for a spot on a Florida district court, but has been withholding his so-called “blue slip” approval form, preventing her from moving forward to a hearing before the Judiciary Committee. (He says he is still reviewing her qualifications.)

Even after a judicial nominee has cleared the Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been slow about scheduling votes on the Senate floor, where 11 nominees are awaiting confirmation. The delays generally haven’t been due to controversy about the nominees. The last two judges confirmed, for district court seats in New York, were approved by votes of 95-2 and 88-0, respectively.

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Senate Republicans Are Blocking Obama’s Judges at a Nearly Unprecedented Rate

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Hillary Clinton’s Newest Ad Zeroes in on Calls for Increased Gun Control

by Luz67Wegjv Posted on November 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign debuted a new television ad that zeroed in on the need for increased gun control laws—an issue the Democratic front-runner is using to position herself as a markedly different candidate to her rival, Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont. The spot is being shown in the early battleground states of Iowa and New Hampshire, according to the New York Times, and stands out as novel compared to recent presidential campaigns in which Democrats have mostly been on the defensive about gun control.

“We need to close the loopholes and support universal background checks,” Clinton is seen telling a crowd in the clip titled “Together.” “How many people have to die before we actually act?”

The ad comes just one day after Clinton held a private meeting with several family members of victims of gun violence, including the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice:

Shortly after the deadly rampage in Oregon last month, Clinton announced a series of proposals to help combat rising gun violence, including using executive authority to close the so-called “gun show loophole” if she became president.

In recent months, Clinton has accused Sanders of being too lax on gun control, taking swipes at the Vermont senator for supporting a controversial law in 2005 that protected gun manufacturers from being sued by victims of violence.

Her momentum on the issue has been steadily growing, particularly after she charged Sanders with not doing enough to tackle gun violence at the first Democratic debate in October. You can watch that tense exchange below:

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Hillary Clinton’s Newest Ad Zeroes in on Calls for Increased Gun Control

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It’s Time to Change Up the Debate Rules

by CarenRubensohn Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Question for those of you who watched last night’s debate: what did you think of the questions the moderators asked?

It was an odd display. The wording of the questions often veered close to outright rudeness. For example:

Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?
You’re skipping more votes than any senator to run for president. Why not slow down, get a few more things done first or least finish what you start?
In terms of all of that, it raises the question whether you have the maturity and wisdom to lead this $17 trillion economy.

At the same time, if you take a look an inch below the surface, most of the questions the CNBC crew asked were actually very substantive. The candidates generally didn’t feel like engaging with anything other than their plans to cut taxes and slash regulations, but that’s not the fault of the moderators. That’s because it’s a Republican debate, and these are pretty much the only economic issues Republican candidates like to talk about.

This year’s debates have all followed a similar pattern, with the moderators asking each candidate at least one “tough” question near the beginning of the show. Fox did it too, and Anderson Cooper did it to the Democrats, so it’s not a liberal media conspiracy. Mostly it seems to be some kind of alpha chimp display to demonstrate that the moderators are real live journalists, not just pretty faces letting the candidates make stump speeches.

I didn’t really mind this the first time or two, but I’m starting to find it annoying. Fine: you folks are real journalists. Now let’s move on and ask questions that are really tough. Dig a little more deeply into policy and then follow up. Maybe switch up the rules and get rid of the “anyone who’s named gets 30 second to respond” nitwittery. Give the moderators a couple of minutes for each question, and make it a real back-and-forth. Less mud wrestling and more policy depth.

It probably wouldn’t work. I’m not sure there’s any power on earth that can get the candidates off their rehearsed talking points. But it might be worth a try.

POSTSCRIPT: And on the candidate side, how about giving the attacks on the media a rest? I know it’s a great applause line, but honestly, who cares? It’s just pandering. Find something new to get applause for.

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It’s Time to Change Up the Debate Rules

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Everyone Hated Sequestration, But Its Effect Was Never All That Huge

by ChristaU73 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Kevin Williamson doesn’t like the new budget deal. That’s no surprise: the reason Boehner is trying to pass this while he’s a lame duck is that he knows no one will like it. But that doesn’t matter to him anymore, so he’s willing to shrug and just get it done.

So what is Williamson’s specific gripe? That the deal basically does away with sequestration:

Democrats hated sequestration. Republicans hated sequestration.

Why?

Sequestration worked.

Sequestration is the reason why in recent years we’ve reduced federal spending substantially in GDP terms, from about 25 percent to about 20 percent. It is the main reason that we have reduced the federal deficit in GDP terms. Democrat-supporting welfare entrepreneurs hated it, and Republican-supporting military contractors hated it. Ordinary Americans did not have much in the way of strong views on the matter, which often is the case when a policy actually does what it is supposed to. Effective government rarely is dramatic government.

No argument with the first sentence. Sequestration was specifically designed to be so unlikable that neither party would ever support it. The fact that it took effect anyway is a testament to the dysfunction of the federal government, not to the budget-capping wonders of sequestration.

But let’s review that last paragraph. Is sequestration really the “main” reason we’ve reduced federal spending from 25 percent of GDP to 20 percent? Hmmm:

Spending hit 24.4 percent of GDP during the recession year of 2009. It was already down to 21.9 percent of GDP by 2012 and hit 21 percent in 2015.
Sequestration started in 2013, so at most it could be responsible for 0.9 out of 3.4 points of that reduced spending.
Was it? It theoretically reduced spending by $200 billion or so.
That’s about 1 percent of GDP.
In reality, CBO estimates that adjustments—primarily to fund overseas wars—ate into half of that. This means that sequestration lowered actual spending by about 0.5 percent of GDP.
The rest of the decline from 21.9 percent to 21 percent comes from the fact that GDP recovered.
So: of the spending reduction Williamson cites, about 0.5 percentage points was due to sequestration.

Now, I suppose that any kind of spending cut is a good cut to a conservative. But sequestration is responsible for only about a seventh of the spending reduction since 2009. The rest is due to (a) the end of stimulus spending, (b) reduced safety net spending as the recession eased, (c) the 2011 budget deal, and (d) the recovery of GDP growth, which automatically reduces spending as a percent of GDP.

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Everyone Hated Sequestration, But Its Effect Was Never All That Huge

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Congress Just Created a Benghazi Committee for Planned Parenthood

by RenaHort470 Posted on October 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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The three congressional investigations into Planned Parenthood this year have all turned up nothing, but that hasn’t stopped House Speaker John Boehner from yet again attempting to take down the nation’s largest women’s health care organization. On Friday, he announced that Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn will chair a select panel charged with investigating the group—and that she’ll be joined by seven other anti-abortion Republicans, all of whom cosponsored a recent bill to defund Planned Parenthood.

“Recent videos exposing the abortion-for-baby parts business have shocked the nation, and demanded action. At my request, three House committees have been investigating the abortion business, but we still don’t have the full truth,” Boehner said in a statement on the new panel, which will report to the House Energy and Commerce Committee and which he hopes will have more success than the others in defunding the organization. “Chairman Blackburn and our members will have the resources and the subpoena power to get to the bottom of these horrific practices, and build on our work to protect the sanctity of all human life.”

In the wake of the series of deceptively edited videos that showed Planned Parenthood staff discussing fetal tissue donation, Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, spent hours in September answering Congress’ questions about her organization’s use of taxpayer dollars. Described as a “partisan attack based on ideology” by committee member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the hearing turned up no evidence of wrongdoing. State investigations into local Planned Parenthood providers have similarly turned up no wrongdoing.

Blackburn, one of four women selected to serve on the panel, has a record of opposing abortion. Earlier this year she teamed up with Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) to push forward a measure that would ban nearly all abortions after 20 weeks. She’s also an advocate for the argument that women wouldn’t be hurt by Planned Parenthood’s closure because there are community health centers that provide the same services, despite evidence to the contrary. Earlier this month, Blackburn said, “There are still many questions yet to be answered surrounding Planned Parenthood’s business practices and relationships with the procurement organizations. This is exactly why the House is investigating abortion practices and how we can better protect life.”

Democrats, meanwhile, have drawn comparisons between the Planned Parenthood investigations and the House committee on Benghazi, which this week heard testimony from Hillary Clinton.

“After my experience yesterday I am just amazed they are talking about setting up another special investigative committee, this time to investigate Planned Parenthood,” Clinton said early Friday morning. “And I think we all know by now that is just code for a partisan witch hunt. Haven’t we seen enough of that?”

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Congress Just Created a Benghazi Committee for Planned Parenthood

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Jim Webb Just Dropped Out of the Democratic Race and Feels Great About It

by BrendanOtis Posted on October 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb announced on Tuesday afternoon that he’s no longer running for president as a Democrat. Whether he’s still running for president at all is still an open question.

The announcement for his press conference said that Webb was considering running as independent. He didn’t explicitly commit to such a run on Tuesday, saying only that he would spend the coming weeks trying to assess potential support. “I am not going away. I am thinking through all of my options,” he told reporters at the National Press Club. But he insisted that he’d not only be able to raise more money and earn more support as an independent, but that he could beat current front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. “If we ran an independent race that worked and got traction, I honestly could see us beating both of them,” he said. Craig Crawford, Webb’s spokesman, told CNN that he expects Webb to make a decision on whether he’ll make an independent bid for the presidency “by the holidays.”

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Jim Webb Just Dropped Out of the Democratic Race and Feels Great About It

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Congressional Republicans Are in Total Chaos

by EloisaBastow Posted on October 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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GOP land went crazy on Thursday when Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) abruptly pulled out of the race to replace Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) as House speaker. Tweets and headlines frequently employed the word “chaos” to describe what happened after McCarthy withdrew. The news caused major reverberations throughout the political world, yet much of the rest of the country was probably wondering why everybody was freaking out. Here’s a quick primer:

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Congressional Republicans Are in Total Chaos

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