Tag Archives: legislation

Do Republicans Really Want to Scuttle the Iran Deal?

by ShoshanBeavers Posted on July 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent reports that Republicans are gearing up to torpedo the Iran nuclear deal:

Republicans are very, very confident that they have the political advantage in the coming battle in Congress over the historic Iran deal announced yesterday. Multiple news reports today tell us that Republicans are gearing up their “attack plan,” and those reports are overflowing with GOP bravado.

Well, of course they are. That’s just smart politics. If you want to build a bandwagon, you have to act like a winner.

In fact, though, Republicans have very little chance of blocking the deal. To do so they have to vote to disapprove the agreement, which President Obama will veto. Then they have round up a two-thirds vote to override the veto. That’s very, very unlikely.

(And why this odd procedure where the deal takes effect unless Congress disapproves it? They can thank one of their own, Sen. Bob Corker, for proposing this unusual procedure. And anyway, his legislation passed 98-1, so it was pretty unanimously the will of the Senate. The theory behind it was that Obama could simply enact any deal as an executive order without involving Congress at all, and this was at least better than that.)

But then Sargent brings up another one of those 11-dimensional chess conundrums:

But here’s the question: Once all the procedural smoke clears, do Republicans really want an endgame in which they succeeded in blocking the deal? Do they actually want to scuttle it?

Perhaps many of them genuinely do want that. But here’s a prediction: as this battle develops, some Republicans may privately conclude that it would be better for them politically if they fail to stop it. The Iran debate may come to resemble the one over the anti-Obamacare lawsuit that also recently fell short.

The idea here is that if Congress kills the deal, several things will happen. First, the rest of the signatories (UK, France, Germany, EU, China, Russia) will still lift their sanctions if Iran meets its end of the bargain. So that means the sanctions regime will effectively disintegrate. Second, our allies will blame us for tanking the deal. Third, Iran will have an excuse for pushing the boundaries of the agreement and remaining closer to nuclear breakout than they would be if the deal were intact.

And Republicans would take the bulk of the blame for all this. Do they really want that? This is an international agreement, after all. Conservatives like Angela Merkel, David Cameron, and Vladimir Putin have approved it. If we don’t, will they conclude that the US is no longer a partner worth negotiating with? These are things worth pondering, especially if Republicans expect one of their own to be president 18 months from now.

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Do Republicans Really Want to Scuttle the Iran Deal?

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The NFL Is About to Pay Taxes for the First Time in More Than 70 Years

by Charity1825 Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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The National Football League paid its commissioner, Roger Goodell, a staggering $44.1 million in 2012. The year before, he took home $29 million. The year before that, $11 million. That’s corner-office-at-Goldman-Sachs-level money—to run what for decades has been a tax-exempt organization.

Soon, however, the public won’t have a clue what Goodell or anyone else in the NFL league office earns. On Tuesday, Goodell announced that the NFL will give up its tax-exempt status, claiming that it has turned into a “distraction” that “has been mischaracterized repeatedly.” Here’s what that means: For the first time in more than 70 years, pro football’s league headquarters will pony up its share of federal taxes. But it also means the NFL won’t have to file the tax forms that require it to be transparent about salaries, revenue, spending, and more.

Congress granted the NFL tax-exempt status way back in 1942, long before it was the global juggernaut that it is today, with estimated revenues of $9.5 billion a year. (Goodell wants to grow that to $25 billion by 2027.) For years, budget hawks in Congress and good-government groups have called for stripping the league of its nonprofit status and forcing it to join Major League Baseball’s front office in operating like a normal taxable business. Former Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who never saw a piece of pork he didn’t want to trim, waged a lonely war to revoke the NFL’s 501(c)(6) status with a piece of legislation called the Properly Reducing Overexemptions for Sports Act (PRO Sports Act). (The bill specifically targeted the NFL, even though the National Hockey League and Professional Golf Association are also nonprofits.) And in December 2013, I wrote about an anti-corruption group’s campaign to gin up public support for eliminating the NFL’s tax break.

Goodell’s announcement will no doubt be cheered as a victory by the league’s critics. So what I’m about to say will make me few friends, but here goes: The commish has a point. And the NFL giving up its tax-exempt status is bad news.

Goodell frames this decision not as a financial one but as a way to move past what he sees as the misguided controversy and anger over the league’s tax status. As he’s quick to point out, the league’s 32 teams pay taxes on all that revenue. The Pats, the Colts, my beloved Detroit Lions: None is tax-exempt. It’s the NFL front office—which reported $326,882,787 in 2013 revenue—that doesn’t pay taxes. Sure, $327 million is a lot of money, but it’s a pittance compared to $9.5 billion. How much do we lose in tax revenue from this? The Joint Committee on Taxation crunched the numbers and found that the 10-year cost for giving the NFL and NHL tax-exempt status is roughly $109 million—a relatively paltry sum.

Nonetheless, critics like Coburn and government watchdog groups argue that eliminating the NFL’s subsidy is the right thing to do. Any waste, they say, is bad waste. Okay, sure. But at what cost?

There’s a wealth of information in each of the NFL’s annual tax forms—detailed breakdowns of where the league’s money comes from, front-office compensation packages, which law firms the league retains, the amounts and recipients of league grants. Goodell doesn’t mention this in his announcement, but it’s hard to imagine the league not relishing the opportunity to pull some of that information out of the spotlight.

Perhaps the silver lining is this: By taking the tax-exempt issue off the table, activists can instead focus their work on more-meaningful reforms. Take, for example, the grand scam of taxpayer financing for stadiums. A 2012 Bloomberg analysis calculated that federal taxpayers lost $4 billion in the last 25 years’ worth of stadium construction deals. It’s one of the great boondoggles in sports today, an issue where the fleecing is very real.

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The NFL Is About to Pay Taxes for the First Time in More Than 70 Years

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Politician Tasked With Oil Industry Oversight Gets a Paycheck From Big Oil

by GingerL03dib Posted on April 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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The BP oil spill turned five years old on Monday, and as my colleague Tim McDonnell reported, we’re still paying the price: There’s as much as 26 million gallons of crude oil still on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. But the story of the Deepwater Horizon wasn’t just about environmental devastation—it was also a story about regulation.

In Louisiana, where many politicians rely on oil and gas companies to fill their campaign coffers (and keep their constituents employed), environmental consequences often take a back seat to business concerns. But sometimes, things go even further. Take the case of Republican state Sen. Robert Adley—the vice-chair of the committee on environmental quality and the chair of the transportation committee (which oversees levees)—who played a leading role in trying to stop a local levee board from suing oil companies for damages related to coastal erosion. As Tyler Bridges reported for the Louisiana investigative news site The Lens, Adley doesn’t just go to bat for oil companies—he works for them as a paid consultant. He even launched his own oil company while serving as a state representative, and he didn’t cut ties to the company until nine years into his stint in the senate:

“He has carried a lot of legislation for the oil and gas industry over the years,” said Don Briggs, the industry association’s president. “I’ve never seen him carry one that he didn’t truly believe was the right thing to do.”

Adley’s numerous ties to the oil and gas industry have led critics to say he is the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse.

…

Adley said calls that he should recuse himself from the issue because of his industry ties are “un-American” and “outrageous.”

“It’s what I know,” Adley said. “Is it wrong to have someone dealing with legislation they know?”

For the time being, at least, voters in northwest Louisiana have decided that the answer is no.

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Politician Tasked With Oil Industry Oversight Gets a Paycheck From Big Oil

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Nebraska Conservatives Take On GOP Governor Over Death Penalty

by AlphonsVarnum Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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A group of conservative legislators in Nebraska are gearing up for what could be a multi-day battle to end the state’s death penalty. The fight pits the right-wing anti-death penalty crusaders against their fellow conservatives and the state’s Republican governor. Here’s the Omaha World-Herald:

Nine conservative lawmakers have signed on as co-sponsors of a repeal measure the Nebraska Legislature will begin debating Thursday. One of their key platforms: Repealing the death penalty makes good fiscal sense.

“If capital punishment were any other program that was so inefficient and so costly to the taxpayer, we would have gotten rid of it a long time ago,” said Sen. Colby Coash of Lincoln.

The bill is unlikely to become law. There are currently enough votes for passage, but advocates warn that anything could happen when the bill comes up for a final vote. Death penalty advocates could mount a filibuster to block the legislature from even voting on the measure. If they don’t, Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican, has vowed to block the legislation, and it’s unclear that there are enough votes to override his veto.

Still, the upcoming debate and vote on the bill marks a victory for a small conservative group working on a state-by-state basis to end the death penalty and replace it with life in prison without the possibility of parole. This group, Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, argues that capital punishment violates core conservative beliefs about the sanctity of life, small government, and fiscal responsibility.

The Nebraska chapter of the group held a press conference Wednesday in advance of today’s floor debate on the bill. “I may be old-fashioned, but I believe God should be the only one who decides when it is time to call a person home,” said state Sen. Tommy Garrett, a conservative who supports repeal. “The state has no business playing God.”

Nebraska has not carried out an execution since 1997, when the state was still using the electric chair, but that might change, according to the World-Herald:

Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson said this week that his staff is working to restore the viability of a lethal injection protocol. He did not, however, predict when executions could resume.

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Nebraska Conservatives Take On GOP Governor Over Death Penalty

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Arkansas Governor Asks For Changes to Religious Freedom Bill

by Eleanor59W Posted on April 1, 2015

Mother Jones

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson called for changes in the state’s controversial religious freedom bill on Wednesday, amid mounting criticism from businesses, local leaders, gay rights advocates, and even members of his own family.

Hutchinson said in a press conference that he would not sign the bill as presented to his desk and asked state lawmakers to change the bill’s language to “mirror” the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Twenty other states, including Indiana, have similar religious freedom legislation.

“This is a bill that in ordinary times would not be controversial,” Hutchinson told reporters. “But these are not ordinary times.”

In a press conference on Tuesday, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, whose state has also faced a barrage of criticism from businesses, celebrities and athletes alike, called on lawmakers to clarify Indiana’s religious freedom bill that “makes it clear that this law does not give businesses a right to deny services to anyone.”

Though Hutchinson had once said he would approve the bill with amendments, the governor shifted his stance after receiving backlash from local leaders and businesses, including Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who called on the governor to veto the bill.

“Today’s passage of HB1228 threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present throughout the state of Arkansas and does not reflect the values we proudly uphold,” McMillon said in a statement. “For these reasons, we are asking Governor Hutchinson to veto this legislation.”

Hutchinson told reporters that the controversial legislation, which critics say would allow individuals and businesses to discriminate against gay men and lesbians, hit home. His son, Seth, a labor organizer with the Texas State Employees Union, asked him to veto the legislation. “I love my dad, and we have a good, close relationship,” Hutchinson’s son told the New York Times. “But we disagree a lot on political issues. This is just another one, but a lot of families disagree politically. But we stay close.”

“The issue has become divisive because our nation remains split on how to balance the diversity of our culture with the traditions and firmly held religious convictions,” Hutchinson said. “It has divided families, and there is clearly a generational gap on this issue.”

The Arkansas General Assembly has not yet agreed to recall and amend the bill. The governor declined to say whether he would veto the bill if it returned to his desk unchanged.

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Arkansas Governor Asks For Changes to Religious Freedom Bill

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This Lawmaker Publicly Discussed Her Rape and Abortion. And Some Dude Laughed.

by ShelliMcWilliam Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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While speaking out against a proposed bill in Ohio that aims to ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, Rep. Teresa Fedor (D-Toledo) revealed on Wednesday she had been raped during her time in the military and chose to have an abortion.

“You don’t respect my reason, my rape, my abortion, and I guarantee you there are other women who should stand up with me and be courageous enough to speak that voice,” Fedor said before the state senate. “What you’re doing is so fundamentally inhuman, unconstitutional, and I’ve sat here too long.”

Her testimony comes just weeks after an Arizona lawmaker shared details about her own abortion, which she had after being sexually assaulted by a male relative when she was a young girl. In a later editorial for Cosmopolitan, Rep. Victoria Steele said that while she was glad to have spoken out and share her story during the legislative debate, she resented the fact that “women have to tell their deepest, darkest traumas in public” in order for lawmakers to grasp how dangerous such anti-abortion bills were to women and their health.

In Fedor’s case, not only did she feel she had to share her trauma with her colleagues, at one point she was forced to pause and address the fact a man appeared to be laughing at her while she spoke.

“I see people laughing and I don’t appreciate that,” she said. “And it happens to be a man who is laughing. But this is serious business right now and I’m speaking for all the women in the state of Ohio who didn’t get the opportunity to be in front of that committee and make this statement.”

Ohio’s House Bill 69 eventually passed with a 55-40 vote. The legislation now goes to the senate, and if passed, will make it a fifth-degree felony and result in up to $2,500 and possible jail time for doctors who perform the abortions.

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This Lawmaker Publicly Discussed Her Rape and Abortion. And Some Dude Laughed.

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Walmart, Lowe’s, Safeway, and Nordstrom Are Bankrolling a Nationwide Campaign to Gut Workers’ Comp

by KimberlyHollins Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Nearly two dozen major corporations, including Walmart, Nordstrom, and Safeway, are bankrolling a quiet, multistate lobbying effort to make it harder for workers hurt on the job to access lost wages and medical care—the benefits collectively known as workers’ compensation.

The companies have financed a lobbying group, the Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers’ Compensation (ARAWC), that has already helped write legislation in one state, Tennessee. Richard Evans, the group’s executive director, told an insurance journal in November that the corporations ultimately want to change workers’ comp laws in all 50 states. Lowe’s, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Sysco Food Services, and several insurance companies are also part of the year-old effort.

Laws mandating workers’ comp arose at the turn of the 20th century as a bargain between employees and employers: If a worker suffered an injury on the job, the employer would pay his medical bills and part of his wages while he recovered. In exchange, the worker gave up his right to sue for negligence.

ARAWC’s mission is to pass laws allowing private employers to opt out of the traditional workers’ compensation plans that almost every state requires businesses to carry. Employers that opt out would still be compelled to purchase workers’ comp plans. But they would be allowed to write their own rules governing when, for how long, and for which reasons an injured employee can access medical benefits and wages.

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Walmart, Lowe’s, Safeway, and Nordstrom Are Bankrolling a Nationwide Campaign to Gut Workers’ Comp

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The House Is Set to Pass a GOP Bill Wiping Out Wall Street Reforms

by OnitaBledsoe Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

The Republican-dominated House is poised to approve legislation this week that would obliterate a slew of important Wall Street reforms. The legislation arrives just weeks after Congress and the Obama administration gave Wall Street two big handouts, and serves as an opening salvo in what will be a sustained Republican assault on financial reform over the next two years.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), is called the Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burdens Act, but its name obscures what it would actually do. The legislation is a compilation of deregulatory bills that failed to pass the Democrat-controlled Senate in the last Congress. It would alter nearly a dozen provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, loosening regulation of Wall Street banks. Here’s a look at the details of what the bill would do.

Delay the Volcker rule. The Volcker rule—one of the most important bits of Dodd-Frank—generally forbids the high-risk trading by commercial banks that helped cause the financial crisis. One high-risk product banks are supposed to stop trading are collateralized loan obligations, which are bundles of loans that are broken into pieces and sold to investors. In December, the Federal Reserve extended banks’ deadline to stop trading CLOs from 2015 to 2017. The Fitzpatrick bill would extend that deadline to 2019.

Water down rules on private equity firms. Private equity firms are required to register as brokers with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) if they get paid for providing investment banking services such as merger advice. Brokers are subject to additional rules and more regulatory oversight. The bill would exempt some private equity firms from having to register as brokers.

Loosen regs on derivatives. Derivatives are financial instruments with values based on underlying numbers, such as crop prices or interest rates. The Fitzpatrick bill would allow Wall Street firms that own commercial businesses such as oil or gas operations to trade derivatives privately instead of in central clearinghouses, which are subject to more oversight. The bill would also forbid regulators from requiring that banks take collateral from companies that buy derivatives. Collateral can help offset losses if one of the parties involved in the transaction defaults.

Weaken transparency rules. The bill exempts about 60 percent of publicly traded companies from certain rules regarding how those companies must file financial statements with the SEC. The measure would also allow certain smaller companies to omit historical financial data in their financial statements. “This allows firms to choose a convenient history as they promote their securities,” the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen noted last week.

Last week, House Republicans tried to force Fitzpatrick’s bill through the House using a procedure typically used for uncontroversial bills or technical fixes. This process, known as fast-tracking, requires the bill to receive a yes vote from two-thirds of the chamber, or at least 290 members. But on Friday, just 276 of the 435 members of the House voted for the measure—well short of the two-thirds majority required. Now GOP leaders have resurrected the bill, and will push it through under the normal rules, which require just a simple majority. The bill is expected to pass the House easily, although it’s unclear whether the Senate would approve it. President Barack Obama would likely veto it. But GOPers could force the legislation into law by attaching bits of it to must-pass bills—such as spending legislation—later this year.

Fitzpatrick is a member of the House financial services committee. Between 2013 and 2014, he received more than $310,000 in donations from the finance and banking sector, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Fitzpatrick legislation signals the beginning of a sustained assault on Dodd-Frank by the new GOP Congress. Up next: the consumer protection bureau that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) helped create. (More about that here.) “We’re going to see repeated attempts to go in with seemingly technical changes that intimidate regulators and keep them from putting teeth in regulations,” Marcus Stanley, policy director at the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform told the New York Times this weekend. “If we return to the pre-crisis business as usual, where it’s routine for people to accommodate Wall Street on these technical changes, they’re just going to unravel the post-crisis regulation piece by piece. Then, we’ll be right back where we started.”

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The House Is Set to Pass a GOP Bill Wiping Out Wall Street Reforms

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Are Republicans Really Ready to Embrace Net Neutrality?

by IvoryT33yv Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, this is unexpected. Democrats are generally in favor of net neutrality, the principle that all websites should be treated equally by internet service providers. Companies can’t pay extra for faster service and ISPs can’t slow down or block sites they don’t like. Naturally, since Democrats are in favor of this, Republicans are opposed. But maybe not all that opposed:

Republicans in Congress appear likely to introduce legislation next month aimed at preventing Internet providers from speeding up some Web sites over others….Industry officials said they are discussing details of the proposal with several Republican lawmakers, whom they declined to name. The officials also said the proposal is being backed by several large telecommunications companies, which they also declined to name.

One important piece of the proposed legislation would establish a new way for the FCC to regulate broadband providers by creating a separate provision of the Communications Act known as “Title X,” the people said. Title X would enshrine elements of the tough net neutrality principles called for by President Obama last month. For example, it would give FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler the authority to prevent broadband companies from blocking or slowing traffic to Web sites, or charging content companies such as Netflix for faster access to their subscribers — a tactic known as “paid prioritization.”

….“Consensus on this issue is really not that far apart,” said an industry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were ongoing. “There’s common understanding that rules are needed to protect consumers.”

Huh. I wonder if this is for real? The reported price for supporting this legislation is relatively small: the FCC would be prohibited from regulating the internet as a common carrier under Title II, something that even net neutrality supporters agree is problematic. The problem is that although Title II would indeed enshrine net neutrality, it comes with a ton of baggage that was designed for telephone networks and doesn’t really translate well to the internet. This would require a lot of “regulatory forbearance” from the FCC, which is almost certain to end up being pretty messy. A new net-centric Title X, if it truly implements net neutrality, would be a much better solution. It would also be immune to court challenges.

One possibility for such a law would be a modified version of net neutrality. My sense has always been that the real goal of net neutrality supporters is to make sure that internet providers don’t provide fast lanes for companies willing to pay more, and don’t slow down or block companies they dislike (perhaps because the companies provide services they compete with). At the same time, everyone acknowledges that video requires a lot of bandwidth, and internet providers legitimately need incentives to build out their networks to handle the growing data demands of video. So why not have content-neutral rules that set tariffs based on the type of service provided? Video providers might have to pay more than, say, Joe’s Cafe, but all video providers would pay the same rate based on how much traffic they dump on the net. That rate would be subject to regulatory approval to prevent abuse.

I dunno. Maybe that’s too complicated. Maybe it’s too hard to figure out traffic levels in a consistent way, and too hard to figure out how much video makes you a video provider. Maybe rules like this are too easy to game. In the end, it could be that the best bet is to simply agree on strong net neutrality, and then let ISPs charge their customers for bandwidth. If you watch a ton of Netflix, you’re going to pay more. If you just check email once a day, you’ll get a cheap plan.

In any case, it’s interesting that President Obama’s announcement of support for strong net neutrality has really had an effect. It apparently motivated the FCC to get more serious about Title II regulation, and this in turn has motivated the industry to concede the net neutrality fight as long as they can win congressional approval of a more reasonable set of rules. The devil is in the details, of course, and I have no doubt that industry lobbyists will do their best to craft rules favorable to themselves. Luckily, there’s a limit to how far they can go since it will almost certainly require Democratic support to pass a bill.

Anyway, this is all just rumors and reports of rumors at this point. Stay tuned to see if it actually pans out.

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Are Republicans Really Ready to Embrace Net Neutrality?

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Mitch McConnell Wants to Open a Giant Loophole for Superrich Donors. Harry Reid Has Vowed to Stop Him.

by BenedicShultz Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is vowing to block any effort by his GOP counterpart, Mitch McConnell, to loosen the nation’s campaign finance limits as part of a bipartisan budget deal taking shape in Congress.

Last week, the Huffington Post reported that McConnell, who will take over as majority leader in January, wanted to slip into a major government funding bill a measure that would give presidential and congressional candidates more leeway to coordinate their campaign spending with political parties. Right now, candidates for federal office can coordinate some of their election spending with the parties—but only up to a certain amount. (The limit ranges from tens of thousands to several million dollars, depending on the size of the state’s voting-age population.) Beyond that threshold, parties and candidates can’t coordinate their spending plans, and the parties must spend their funds independently of the candidates they back.

The existing rule is intended to prevent donors from using political parties to skirt legal limits on donations to candidates. As it stands, donors can give up to $5,200 every two-year election cycle to each candidate for federal office. But McConnell’s measure, if enacted, would create a massive loophole in that rule, says Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21, a group that supports limits on money in politics. If McConnell gets what he wants, rich donors who hit the $5,200 limit could simply route further donations to candidates by giving to political party committees—which may accept far larger donations and could work directly with the candidates to ensure the money was spent as the donors intended. “The practical effort here is to repeal the limits,” Wertheimer says.

McConnell has a broader plan here. Politico recently noted that McConnell is seeking to direct more big money to political parties, as opposed to outside groups such as super-PACs that in theory must remain independent of candidates. In a subsequent interview with Roll Call, McConnell suggested he might not force the issue, saying his proposal is “not on the agenda” but that the coordination limit he wants to eliminate is “an absurdity in the current law.”

That doesn’t mean the plan is dead. Should McConnell reverse course and attach this change to the budget bill, Reid’s office says the majority leader will block such a maneuver. “Reid strongly opposes and will fight against any efforts to include the McConnell measure,” an aide in Reid’s tells Mother Jones.

House and Senate members hashing out the budget bill were expected to release a version of the legislation as early as Monday evening.

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Mitch McConnell Wants to Open a Giant Loophole for Superrich Donors. Harry Reid Has Vowed to Stop Him.

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