Politics Congress - the body you love to hate

cynthetiq · May 12, 2012

redux said: ↑

Right. We're much better off with Tea Party types who dont know squat about public policy other than taking an axe to the govt and have no interest in compromise.
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yeah Charlie Rangel does so much.

redux · May 12, 2012

cynthetiq said: ↑

yeah Charlie Rangel does so much.
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I'm certainly not going to defend Rangel.

My point was that the move farther and farther right by the Republicans, particularly with Tea Party candidates, has made bi-partisanship for the greater good increasingly difficult.

Look at the recent Senate primary in Indiana where Richard Luger, a conservative by any measure, was beaten by a Tea Party candidate because he (Luger) had the nerve to work across the aisle with Democrats on a handful of issues. That is now unacceptable. Mourduck, the guy who beat him, campaigned on a theme of bi-partisanship as "part of the problem in Washington" and evidently enough Republicans in Indiana agree.

I think it will bite the Republican party in the ass in the long run, but in the meantime, this kind of extremist thinking (our way or no way) does little to address the problems facing the country in a rational and meaningful manner.

And as a side effect of the Indiana vote, the country has lost the most experienced and knowledgeable member of Congress on foreign affairs, even if I might not have always agreed with him.

rogue49 · May 12, 2012

As with any stretched rubber band, sooner or later it snaps back
or it breaks...

But I think our rubber is strong at the moment.
It's just a matter of withstanding the tension until that moment.

rogue49 · May 15, 2012

The man who stated, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President."
may be in trouble himself...

The neutering of Mitch McConnell
How the Tea Party is destroying the Senate GOP leader’s clout – and why it’s bad for America
By Steve Kornacki

The possibility that Mitch McConnell might be ousted when Senate Republicans pick their leader after the November elections was raised by a Sunday New York Times story, which found several Tea Party-aligned GOP candidates refusing to commit to backing him. McConnell, though, still has plenty of allies and remains the prohibitive favorite to retain his post.

But there’s a more interesting question at work here than whether he can hang on: Why would he even want to?

The impetus for the Times piece was the landslide victory of Richard Mourdock over Richard Lugar in an Indiana Republican primary last week, which refocused attention on the rising influence of Tea Party-style conservatism in the upper chamber. Mourdock, if he’s elected, will join a bloc of Republican senators whose governing approach mirrors that of South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, the Tea Party’s de facto leader on Capitol Hill.

To promote unity within his ranks and to secure his grip on power, it’s important for McConnell to respond to his party’s evolution toward the DeMint/Tea Party style, something he’s been doing lately. The problem, though, is that this style severely constrains his ability to exercise the traditional prerogatives of a Senate leader and threatens to render him the upper chamber’s equivalent of John Boehner, who lives with the knowledge that any deal-making with the other side could spur an intraparty coup.

This reflects an important point about Tea Party Republicanism: It isn’t really about ideology; it’s about governing tactics.

After all, the battle for the Republican Party’s ideological soul was fought and settled decades ago. In the late 1970s, a movement somewhat similar to the Tea Party gave rise to a number of primary challenges to sitting GOP senators. The targeted incumbents, though, were genuine liberals – New Jersey’s Clifford Case, Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, and New York’s Jacob Javits. The Republican Party of that era was in the midst of a sweeping geographic and demographic evolution, one that established it as the home for white Southerners and newly mobilized evangelical Christians and left the old Rockefeller wing extinct. When Ronald Reagan triumphed in 1980, it certified the GOP as the conservative party it remains today.

The primary challenges of the current Tea Party era are not defined by similarly vast ideological gulfs. Lugar, for instance, was generally a party man in his Senate votes, racking up a fairly conservative record and voting against President Obama’s major domestic initiatives. But he did leave some room for independence and compromise, particularly in his specialty area of foreign policy. His opponent, Mourdock, was to Lugar’s right on some issues, but what really distinguished him is his belief that the Senate is a venue for partisan warfare.

“Bipartisanship,” Mourdock declared last week, “ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”

This is as concise a distillation of the Tea Party’s governing vision as you’ll find. It’s not really about moving the GOP to the right; the party is already there, and has been for a while. It’s about reflexively opposing the other party on every issue, resisting compromise at all costs, and exploiting every available legislative tool to stymie the other side. This mind-set is already pervasive in the House, and as the Times story shows, it’s now making its way into the Senate.

The lesson that Lugar’s defeat sends to individual Republican senators is that they risk the same fate if they don’t get with the Tea Party program. Traditionally, there’s been room for them to carve out a specialty area – like Lugar with foreign policy – and to reach across the aisle to advance legislation that affects it. But that model is fast giving way to the Tea Party’s expectation of relentless, 24/7/365 partisan warfare.

A case study in how this works can be found in Orrin Hatch, who was spooked when his Utah colleague Bob Bennett was denied renomination in 2010. Hatch’s voting record is reliably conservative, but he has (or had) a reputation as a deal-maker. When Bennett went down, though, Hatch swore off compromise and recast himself as a Tea Party-friendly partisan warrior. It will probably be enough to save his job, which only reinforces the message of Lugar’s defeat.

All of this affects what McConnell is, and isn’t, able to do as the GOP’s leader. In the past two years, he’s played a crucial role in resolving standoffs with the White House that House Republicans instigated – over the debt ceiling last summer and expiring payroll taxes before Christmas. But his ability to keep doing this depends on having space to negotiate and cut deals with Democrats, and with every Tea Party primary triumph, that space erodes a little more.

The Senate is not the House yet, but the Tea Party is pushing it in that direction. As Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann explain in their new book, the principles of a parliamentary system – absolute party loyalty and reflexive, unyielding opposition from the out-of-power party – are coming to define Capitol Hill. For McConnell, this will force a personal reckoning over whether he’s comfortable functioning as the kind of leader such a system demands. For the rest of the country, it will force a different kind of reckoning, as the total incompatibility of the parliamentary style with the American system becomes apparent.

Salon
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It's going to VERY interesting once all the dust settles this November...
God knows what Congress is going to look like.

rogue49 · May 16, 2012

They should get their ears cleaned, they look dirty. (potatoes are growing in them...)

Earmarks have friends in high places
By: Jonathan Allen
May 15, 2012 06:37 PM EDT

A provision for a uranium-enrichment plant in Ohio keeps cropping up all over Capitol Hill: $150 million in the Senate’s highway bill, $150 million in a Senate energy bill, $100 million in that bill’s House counterpart. There’s even talk of putting it in a final House-Senate transportation bill.

Weren’t grants like this — earmarks by another name — supposed to be banished by Republicans in Congress? Yes. And for most lawmakers, they are.

But the earmark has the top two Republicans in Congress on its side: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). And by Congress’ own rules, it’s not an earmark. Definitions aside, it is proof that when top politicians want to pay for a pet project, they can usually find a way.

Both men have a rooting interest: The company that would get the money, the United States Enrichment Corp., has a facility in Paducah in McConnell’s home state. Its new plant would be in Piketon, a little bit east of Boehner’s Ohio district. McConnell got the piece that he cared most about on Tuesday when the Energy Department extended operations at the Paducah site.

Even President Barack Obama has a stake in the outcome. In 2008, he promised then-Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland that he would support nuclear-energy programs like the one in Piketon. Now, he needs the state’s electoral votes again — and he wants the $150 million government subsidy, which could prevent layoffs in an election year.

Add to its list of backers both of Ohio’s senators, potential Republican vice presidential candidate Rob Portman and Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who is up for reelection this year, who teamed up to put it in the highway bill.

With that kind of muscle, the provision’s backers just needed a way around the earmark ban. So the money isn’t directed to the facility by name, it was requested by the administration and the legislative language doesn’t specify a precise dollar amount — rather it gives the Energy Department the power to spend “up to” a certain amount on the project. They argue that it should be treated as a national issue, not a local one, because USEC is the only U.S.-owned company that could do the work.

“Technically, it’s not an earmark, but it operates effectively as one,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. “It’s definitely a backdoor earmark.”

It’s the kind that gave earmarks a bad name in the first place: Taxpayer dollars going to local projects sought by Washington’s power set, often without a hint of their fingerprints on it.

At times, the Ohio and Kentucky delegations have parted ways on the question of funding for the Ohio project. It could mean that the Paducah plant gets left behind in favor of a focus on the new technology that would be used in Piketon if it ever proves viable. But if USEC struggles, it’s bad for both states.

Last year, Boehner unsuccessfully pushed the White House to give USEC a $2 billion loan guarantee out of the same account from which the now-notorious renewable energy firm Solyndra got its government money. McConnell, a longtime supporter of loan guarantees for nuclear energy, appeared at an Appropriations Committee hearing last year to plead with Energy Secretary Steven Chu to save USEC jobs in Paducah.

The Energy Department didn’t award the loan guarantee — the company has run into some technological problems — but instead offered to enter into a cost-sharing arrangement to make it easier for USEC to do further research and development. USEC threatened to cut jobs. Boehner went public with his frustration.

“I urge the administration to not betray the citizens of Southern Ohio,” he wrote in his weekly column.

Early this year, the White House requested $150 million in taxpayer funds for the research in its fiscal 2013 budget.

USEC’s friends now are working to put up the government share of the money through the earmark.

McConnell is a member of the appropriations subcommittee that is trying to fund the new earmark. A Boehner spokesman said the speaker “has been kept apprised of these developments, but has not been actively involved” in pushing for it.

A source familiar with the provision noted that Boehner took criticism last year for not forcing money for the Piketon plant into a year-end spending bill.

In a brief hallway interview, McConnell declined to say whether he supports or opposes the Piketon provision, saying only that he backs Paducah’s operations.

A McConnell aide argued that his support for the bill in subcommittee does not amount to approval of the Piketon earmark but declined to say where McConnell stands on it.

It’s the Kentucky facility that McConnell cares about, and he did not put the language for Ohio in the appropriations bill, the aide said.

Other sources say it doesn’t take a forensic expert to figure out who has the power to get an earmark moving on four tracks at once and how Boehner and McConnell might use proxies to win its enactment.

Boehner appointed Rep. Ed Whitfield of Kentucky to the House-Senate negotiating team. Whitfield, who represents Paducah, is a close ally of both Boehner and McConnell, and his spokeswoman said he is hoping to get the money tucked into a final highway bill.

“Congressman Whitfield supports a domestic source of enrichment for our nuclear power plants,” Whitfield spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer said. “A domestic source of enrichment ensures competition in the marketplace and meets our national security needs, as well. The congressman looks forward to working on this and other issues as the transportation conference moves forward.”

Another Kentucky lawmaker, Rep. Hal Rogers, is chairman of the Appropriations Committee and will be involved in any discussions with the Senate on whether to keep a provision that is now in both chambers’ versions of the energy and water spending bill.

Whitfield and Ohio Rep. Jean Schmidt, another supporter of the plant, are the leading House recipients of money from USEC’s political action committee in the current election cycle, at $5,000 apiece, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The $3,000 USEC’s PAC gave McConnell is tops in the Senate, and Boehner got $5,000 from the PAC in the 2010 election cycle. USEC President John Welch has contributed to McConnell, Schmidt and Portman in the past.

Boehner says he’s never earmarked a dime during more than two decades in Congress, and several sources said they see the provision as a creation of the Ohio and Kentucky delegations — not Boehner or McConnell, specifically.

Only one lawmaker seems to object strenuously to the earmark. Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.), whose home state houses USEC rival URENCO, has been trying to stir up Republican opposition in the House. Without training his fire on Boehner, Pearce railed against the provision during a closed-door meeting of House Republicans last week, according to a GOP source. And he co-authored a letter to highway bill conferees that trashed the Piketon project.

In it, Pearce details how USEC was originally a government entity that was privatized in the late 1990s but has since been the beneficiary of federal subsidies even as it has hemorrhaged money. The company lost $540.7 million in 2011.

Forget the question of whether it’s an earmark, Ellis said.

“It’s a bad project. It’s a bad investment,” he argued. “This doesn’t make any sense for the government to be spending on this when they don’t have a viable product.”

The reason Pearce is the only one putting up a fight, according to a senior GOP aide: “Basic lack of information.”

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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rogue49 · May 19, 2012

OK, this is a new one...and a scary one at that.

Now, one politician can pay out of their campaign's fund a Super PAC to go attack another.
And they don't have to even be running against each other...

In this case, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint who was in his own party's leadership competition with Sen. Richard Lugar.
He sent money from his campaign fund to an associated Super PAC, which did what it could to oppose Lugar in his Indiana Primary.

PACs have been the political equivalent of Nukes.
And politicians are not hesitating to push the button.

The implications of this are profound.

They need to outlaw these PACs, somehow.

DeMint fueled Lugar fight
By: Robin Bravender
May 18, 2012 12:49 PM EDT

Sen. Jim DeMint plunged $200,000 into the Club for Growth super PAC just before the group helped topple his Republican colleague Dick Lugar in the contentious Indiana primary.

The South Carolina Republican’s campaign committee has donated at least $700,000 to the conservative super PAC this cycle, according to the latest federal filings released Thursday. His initial $500,000 contribution in February irked top Republicans on Capitol Hill after DeMint had promised he wouldn’t try to unseat fellow GOP senators in their primaries this cycle.

DeMint earlier this year denied that the his donations were meant to undermine Lugar, saying his leadership PAC and the Club for Growth were aligned in Wisconsin, Nebraska, Texas and Ohio — races where there are no Republican incumbents.

The Club for Growth Action super PAC was the biggest spender in the pricey air wars that dominated the Indiana primary, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. The group spent about $1.5 million on ads in the Hoosier State that helped fuel tea-party-backed Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock’s victory over Lugar last week.

Club for Growth Action spent a total of $2.2 million to run ads last month in Indiana, Nebraska and North Carolina. Those ads included attacks on Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning before he lost the GOP Senate primary to tea party favorite state Sen. Deb Fischer, as well as ads to boost North Carolina congressional candidate Scott Keadle.

DeMint also poured $1.4 million from his leadership PAC into the Nebraska race to boost another GOP candidate, Don Stenberg. DeMint’s involvement was credited with helping to defeat Bruning, the establishment favorite, and it drew the rebuke of Nebraska Republican Sen. Mike Johanns.

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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rogue49 · May 22, 2012

Not that this would surprise you cynics (me included)
but our esteemed body 'n honorable representatives ain't learnin' no more.
Is Idiocracy starting to occur???...Oi Vey.

Speech by members of Congress drops a grade level due to conservatives and new members, according to study
By Rachel Rose Hartman | The Ticket – 10 hrs ago

Are members of Congress dumbing down their discourse?

The Sunlight Foundation determined that Congress is talking at nearly a full grade level below the level at which members spoke seven years ago, according to its study of the Congressional Record—the official record of members' proceedings and speech. The foundation applied the Flesch-Kincaid grade level test to congressional conversations and found that today's Congress speaks "at about a 10.6 grade level, down from 11.5 in 2005," senior fellow Lee Drutman wrote in his analysis. Sunlight also found that the newest as well as the most conservative members of Congress on average speak at the lowest grade level.

The following is a Sunlight Foundation graphic charting the grade levels of members' speeches:

(Sunlight Foundation - link to the more detailed study)

Republican Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina scored lowest with a 7.9 grade level average for his speech. But he told Yahoo News Monday that although he doesn't believe anyone equates "sentence length" and the "polysyllabic nature of words" with intelligence, his ranking is something to be proud of.

"I see it as an affirmation that we're doing something right," Mulvaney said of his fellow bottom-tier representatives. "You've got to speak clearly and concisely," Mulvaney said, if you want people to know what you believe.

He noted that he and some of his fellow bottom-rankers, including Republican Reps. Rob Woodall of Georgia and Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, speak extemporaneously and don't use prepared notes. "This is a group of people who are trying to sound like ordinary people and not like politicians," Mulvaney said.

Ranking one step above Mulvaney was Woodall, then Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Duffy and in fifth place, Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri—all Republicans.

Leading the list as the most advanced speaker is Republican Rep. Dan Lungren of California, who speaks like a college senior. He is followed by Democratic Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard of California, Democratic Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, Republican Rep. Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania and Republican Rep. Tom Petri of Wisconsin. (A complete ranking of members can be found here.)

So how to explain both the overall drop in grade level average and the conservative-heavy bottom tier?

Drutman emphasized in an interview with Yahoo News that the exact cause is difficult to determine, but the foundation's report concludes that an influx of new members is dragging down the grade level average for Congress overall. But Drutman said the results are neither good nor bad, in his opinion.

"On one hand, you might be concerned that members are speaking at a lower level," Drutman said. But he added on the other, "You might see it as just members speaking more directly to their constituents and being more accessible and plain-spoken."

Drutman noted that many public speakers, writers and others are educated on how to speak and write in simple terms to reach the widest audience.

Drutman said the shift "reflects some of the ways the institution has changed" and said the study was conducted in the "spirit of fun" and was not intended to "pass judgement."

It should be noted that the Congressional Record can be amended by members, meaning they can insert speeches they never actually issued and modify those they did issue. Drutman said he has no data to base a guess on how that may shape the grade level results overall.
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rogue49 · May 24, 2012

This is interesting...now the Dems get to play nay-sayer to their benefit.
Will this be a good or bad for the US?

Personally, on the things they are going to say No to....I don't mind at all.
Money doesn't get spent, revenue gets increased...debt goes down.
Which is one of the things everyone says they want.

Problem is, most people have their head stuck in the sand...to have their cake and to eat it too.
You cannot have more money in the bank and have less income and spend it on whatever at the same time.
Basic math.
This is not magic.

Both Dems and GOP are spenders.
They just spend on different things.

Dems stiffen spine on sequester
By: David Rogers
May 23, 2012 11:28 PM EDT

Power in Washington these days is most defined by saying “no,” which helps explain why Speaker John Boehner felt compelled last week — in the middle of May — to bring up a wintry debt ceiling fight more than six months away.

At one level it was an act of defiance to appease the right and embarrass President Barack Obama, with whom Boehner knew he would be having lunch the next day. But it was also an admission of weakness in what’s become a high-stakes budget poker game matching the speaker against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

More than $600 billion in year-end tax and spending changes are already in play, but the ground has shifted to the point where Boehner had to leapfrog still further ahead to the debt ceiling issue, when his “no” will mean something again.

He and other House Republican leaders don’t want another government shutdown in October and have already signaled they will backtrack then from the deeper appropriations cuts in their March budget.

So it is really Senate Democrats who are next in line to wield the power of “no.” In November and December, they’ll be in position to block Republican-backed legislation to stop an automatic 10 percent sequester of Pentagon funds and to extend high-end tax breaks for the wealthy.

Indeed, the new kid on the block is this tougher Democratic mind-set embodied by Reid. And the former Vegas gaming commissioner is ready to risk tens of billions in automatic spending cuts in January rather than give in any longer to Republican demands that all deficit reduction come from domestic savings — with no revenues.

In an interview with POLITICO, Reid said he was open to a compromise that would salvage about four-fifths of the Bush-era tax cuts. But absent some concession on revenues, the $110 billion in spending cuts ordered by the debt agreement last August would go into effect.

“I am not going to back off the sequestration,” Reid said. “That’s the law we passed. We did it because it wouldn’t make things easy for us. It made it so we would have to do something. And if we didn’t, these cuts would kick in.”

“To now see the Republicans scrambling to do away with the cuts to defense, I will not accept that,” Reid said. “My people — in the state of Nevada and I think the country — have had enough of whacking all the programs. We’ve cut them to a bare bone, and defense is going to have to bear their share of the burden.”

This is a major escalation from just months ago, when Obama’s 2013 budget cheerfully assumed that the sequester would never happen. And it takes direct aim at pro-defense Republicans, who have been a mainstay for Boehner inside the GOP and one very big reason the speaker had to fast-forward to try to add the debt ceiling to the fight.

“The largest tax hike in American history is scheduled for the end of this year. So are the defense cuts that President Obama and the secretary of defense have said will hollow out America’s armed services,” Boehner told reporters last week. “And out-of-control spending will force Washington to act on raising the debt limit or face a disastrous default.”

“People are looking at me like I am the guy carrying the sword around town and am going to bludgeon someone,” the speaker added, as if embarrassed by the headlines he triggered with his remarks. “I am suggesting is it is time for us to talk about this.”

It’s a little more than that, of course, and for both parties the reality of the potential sequester is only beginning to sink in.

Democrats worry that the economic impact will be felt before the election, as federal contract officers slow down spending in anticipation of the cliff ahead of them. And the fact that the party might risk this outcome reflects how extreme the budget debate has become.

Nonetheless, the recent House-passed reconciliation bill, which promises to forestall these very same cuts in January, was the last straw for Reid and helped fortify his position.

The package shields the Pentagon entirely from sequester and even allows for an $8 billion spending increase over 2012 and what was promised in the August debt accords. At the same time, poverty programs like food stamps, Medicaid and the Social Services Block Grant face real cuts together with wholesale reductions at the expense of Obama’s signature health care and financial market reforms.

Even conservative columnists have since argued that the GOP’s single-minded protection of defense — without any new revenues — is untenable. Roman Catholic bishops — allied with Boehner in the past — protested the cuts that hurt the poor.

But the real killer for many Democrats is that even if they were to agree to the House demands, it is just a one-year fix and Congress will be back facing the same Hobson’s choices next year.

Reid’s wrath is directed less at Boehner personally than the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, whose own “no” vote — the Taxpayer Protection Pledge — has done so much to stymie efforts to reach compromise on revenues.

“Unless Grover Norquist is reined in, the answer is yes,” Reid said when asked about the likelihood of the sequester going into effect. “These people all signed a pledge that they weren’t going to raise taxes. We cannot do this without raising taxes.”

“That’s why we did it,” he said of the calculations that went into writing the automatic cuts into the Budget Control Act last August. The threatened reductions were designed to be severe enough to force some compromise between the warring parties, but those hopes were dashed months later when the supercommittee talks collapsed.

“We did it knowing the pain, and maybe the pain would cause Grover Norquist to wither away,” Reid said. “But he hasn’t. He’s become more emboldened and threatening and they are running from him just as they always have.”

“The cuts are bad for defense, and they are bad for domestic discretionary. But the alternative is to do nothing about the debt.”

Reid would not speak for Obama directly but has kept the White House informed of his stand. Asked whether the president was on his side, Reid said, “I would think he is.”

Others could include deficit hawks like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who signed on to a May 15 letter with Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) telling Reid and Boehner that it would be “inappropriate to delay” the automatic cuts absent some larger deficit deal that included not just spending but also tax expenditures.

“I don’t think there is the stomach out there to stop the sequester,” Reid said.

Pro-defense Democrats are certainly nervous at this prospect, but Reid needs only 40 senators plus himself to block action before the deadline in early January.

In the case of the Bush tax cuts, he spoke first in terms of shielding those households earning less than $250,000 but then signaled later that he was open to a higher threshold, closer to the $1 million cutoff suggested by House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday.

The tax component is important given the warning from the Congressional Budget Office this week that too much austerity at the end of the year could throw the economy into a recession.

Eliminating all of the expiring Bush tax cuts would represent a $221 billion revenue increase in fiscal 2013 alone compared with fiscal 2012, CBO said. But if those under $250,000 were left whole, the rough rule is that the increase would be only about a fifth that size or about $44 billion.

Given that Congress will almost certainly act to protect Medicare physician reimbursements, it would be easy to see how the $600 billion in changes forecast could be reduced to about $400 billion or less. And this is not so far from an alternative CBO scenario, in which economic growth next year slows but is still positive in the range of 1.7 percent to 2 percent.

Within these numbers, CBO estimates that the automatic sequester will result in an immediate $65 billion reduction in outlays for fiscal 2013 and then a further $41 billion spread over subsequent years.

Nonetheless, it would be as if Congress pushed a huge reset button, taking the entire discretionary budget back in real dollars to the 2001-2002 fiscal years at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency and pre-Iraq War administration of President George W. Bush.

Total discretionary spending would be cut $98 billion from the caps agreed to last summer for fiscal 2013. Defense spending would drop to $491 billion, a reduction of $55 billion, and nondefense to $458 billion, a $43 billion cut.

Measured again the House Republican budget, the shift is more dramatic. Defense would fall $63 billion while nondefense spending — already reduced by the GOP — suffers a net loss of just $15 billion.

These are the numbers most important to Reid’s calculus if he hopes to get a bargain with the House.

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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redux · May 28, 2012

Former Senate Republican leader Alan Simpson is the latest Republican (among many former party leaders) to slam the party for its unwillingness to compromise:

In his characteristically colorful style, Simpson told CNN's Fareed Zakaria that Republicans' rigid opposition to new tax revenues has hampered productivity and diminished the chances of reaching an agreement with Democrats on debt reduction.

"You can’t cut spending your way out of this hole," Simpson, who was appointed as co-chair of President Obama's Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in 2010, said. "You can’t grow your way out of this hole, and you can’t tax your way out of this hole. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, we tell these people. This is madness."

Simpson continued: "If you want to be a purist, go somewhere on a mountaintop and praise the east or something. But if you want to be in politics, you learn to compromise. And you learn to compromise on the issue without compromising yourself. Show me a guy who won’t compromise and I’ll show you a guy with rock for brains."
...
"I guess I'm known as a RINO now, which means a Republican in name only, because, I guess, of social views, perhaps, or common sense would be another one, which seems to escape members of our party," Simpson said. "For heaven’s sake, you have Grover Norquist wandering the earth in his white robes saying that if you raise taxes one penny, he’ll defeat you. He can’t murder you. He can’t burn your house. The only thing he can do to you, as an elected official, is defeat you for reelection. And if that means more to you than your country when we need patriots to come out in a situation when we’re in extremity, you shouldn’t even be in Congress."

Alan Simpson Slams Fellow Republicans For Unwillingness To Compromise
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Every Tea Party type candidate elected only brings more of this intransigence. They may win the battle, but will ultimately lose the war...sooner rather than later, IMO. People want solutions, not rigid ideology.

rogue49 · May 28, 2012

Problem is this...

A significant portion of those who vote the way they are told to, do vote.
And many who think for themselves and can smell BS, don't vote.

So it's the Idiocracy premise, but in a political context.

rogue49 · Jun 8, 2012

Have they all gone insane???
Yet we still keep voting them in...

The Bills to Nowhere
NYTimes, June 7, 2012

This is now the pattern of business in the House of Representatives: Spend most of the time passing bills designed not to become law but to satisfy the ideological desires of conservative voters. And block laws that actually need to get passed.

This colossal waste of time, punctuated by moments of real destruction, has been going on since early last year, and is well-illustrated this month. The House voted Thursday to repeal crucial parts of the health care reform law, and an upcoming bill would make government regulation virtually impossible. None of these bills have a chance of enactment. In the meantime, though, House Republicans won’t bring up a desperately needed transportation bill.

Political-message bills have sprouted like weeds in the last few years, the product of extreme polarization and stalemate. Elected officials have to show that they’re doing something, so they propose bills designed only to create a talking point against the other side. Senate Democrats do it, too. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which was predictably filibustered to death by Republicans on Tuesday, was the latest example. We supported that bill as an important vehicle for reducing the wage gap between men and women, but the principal reason Democrats introduced it was to embarrass Mitt Romney and other Republicans over their pronounced indifference to the issue.

Nonetheless, House Republicans have refined this practice into an art and have passed nearly two dozen of these bills. The latest example was Thursday’s vote to repeal the tax on companies that sell more than $5 million in medical devices, a component of the health care reform law. Another provision in the bill would let people use health savings accounts to pay for over-the-counter drugs, changing an aspect of the health care law in a way that would primarily benefit higher-income taxpayers.

Both provisions would cut the amount of revenue the government will need to subsidize health insurance for low-income people, though Republicans (and 37 Democrats) voted to make up for the loss with disincentives for people to accept health care subsidies. The device industry will recoup the tax with new business from currently uninsured people. The bill is designed to please conservative voters, and will not be taken up by the Senate.

Another ridiculous bill coming up would prohibit the adoption of any major new government regulation until the unemployment rate falls to 6 percent or less.

Yet the House, so eager to take these kinds of votes, won’t move the stalled transportation bill, holding up billions of dollars — and millions of jobs — on road and transit projects, apparently out of fear it might help the economy and thus the political fortunes of Democrats. Because of internal Republican divisions, the House could pass only a 90-day bill extending existing highway programs. But when the Senate overwhelmingly approved a two-year bill (on a 74-to-22 vote), House leaders held it up in conference committee, while insisting on attaching unrelated provisions, like approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline and restricting any regulations on toxic coal ash from power plants.

So far, the House Republicans have done little but show that they have no real interest in governing.
Click to expand...

redux · Jun 8, 2012

Republican hypocrisy rears its ugly head again with their refusal to support the Disclose Act of 2012 (version2.0 reintroduced in both the House and Senate this year with their objectionable provisions from the 2010 bill removed). The bill now basically just requires groups spending $10,000 or more on election ads to immediately report spending to the FEC and disclose the identity of donors contributing more than $10,000 in the ads.

In the Bush years, Republicans had argued that transparency was the way to go rather than limiting financial contributions. Now such transparency is an attack on free speech and will be used by Obama and the Democrats to create enemy's lists.

rogue49 · Jun 20, 2012

Problem is...Now if they can just get The House of Representatives to work too.

Don’t look now, but the Senate’s actually working
By: Manu Raju | June 19, 2012

Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell sat down for a rare joint interview last week with “60 Minutes” at a time when few Americans think the Senate can accomplish much of anything.

But if you scratch just past the cries of gridlock and dysfunction, you’ll find something else is happening in the Senate: It’s working — albeit incrementally.

No, Reid and McConnell aren’t about to solve the nation’s fiscal problems and announce a historic tax and spending agreement. But on a wide range of issues before the Senate, the chamber has been functioning on a surprising level lately.

The Senate leaders cut a massive deal to move forward with a farm bill — and allow votes on more than 70 amendments, some of which are fairly controversial. Liberal California Sen. Barbara Boxer and conservative Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe have bonded over a bipartisan highway bill and are pushing the House to pass it. Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have tag-teamed on an ethics bill and a U.S. Postal Service bill.

The committees are introducing bills; they’re moving to the floor; and leaders are allowing amendments — it’s like a lesson out of “Schoolhouse Rock,” if you can ignore for a moment the constant partisan wrestling over the airwaves.

So is this a new moment for the Senate?

“The only thing I can tell you that would get a bipartisan crowd here is if you screw with the [National] Guard and Reserves or start messing with farmers,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “And that’s about it. Roads, too — anything that deals with your backyard.”

To be clear, the Senate is still the Senate and avoiding some of the defining issues of the day — major judicial nominations have been punted; the heavy lifting on fiscal matters is being put off until after the election; and Democrats refused to propose a budget blueprint. Senate leaders are still teeing up political votes they know will fail — such as Democrats’ efforts to paint the GOP as beholden to the oil industry and the rich by maneuvering so Republicans vote against raising taxes on those groups.

But the key to legislative accomplishments in an election-year summer appears to be this: Giving senators a say in the process by letting the system work — while avoiding the intractable issues like taxes and the deficit.

And now, senators are clamoring for similar say on the major issues of the day.

Senators in the rank and file are prodding their leaders to move a year-end fiscal package through the regular process rather than attempt to cut a deal between a small group and the White House and leave the legislative committees out in the cold. In separate private meetings earlier this month, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) urged Reid and Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to let the tax-writing panel begin “laying the groundwork” on major fiscal issues involving the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, sources say.

Others who are not part of the leadership tend to echo that sentiment, saying the Senate can come together if a vast majority of senators feel like they’ve had input in the process — either in the committee process or if Reid and McConnell allow amendments to be considered on the floor.

“There’s so much distrust here, people worry about embarrassing amendments, but so what?” said Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who saw his panel’s bills on congressional ethics and the USPS overhaul pass the Senate after the leadership allowed senators to offer amendments on the floor.

Of course, it’s not always that easy.

With such monumental issues that may be dealt with in a deficit deal — how to deal with the Bush-era tax cuts, whether to cut benefits on Social Security and Medicare, how deeply to cut federal spending levels and defense programs — Hill leadership in both parties and the White House are certain to play a heavy hand.

The Senate could take up less politically toxic measures, such as a long-awaited cybersecurity bill, as early as next month.

But for now, the return to regular order seems to be working on a bevy of bills in the Senate after 2011 witnessed a series of backroom negotiations between leaders from both parties over raising the debt ceiling, the threat of the government shutdown and a range of unsuccessful talks to slice the deficit, including the failed supercommittee.

After a procedural stalemate threatened the bipartisan farm bill, the heads of the Senate agriculture committee, Michigan Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow and Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, helped cut a deal with Reid and McConnell on Monday night to allow votes on 73 amendments this week. The vote-a-rama is almost certain to lead to final passage later this week.

When asked how the deal came together, Roberts said Tuesday, “Great leadership from Stabenow and Roberts.”

The same process held true for a Food and Drug Administration user fee bill, which was the product of negotiations in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee by Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.). The Violence Against Women Act cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee and later the Senate after the GOP offered a handful of amendments. A two-year highway bill cleared the chamber following negotiations in several committees and after Senate leaders allowed for a spate of amendments on the floor.

While some see the latest efforts as positive signs for the Senate ahead of the fiscal cliff, others note that the lingering fiscal issues are so politically sensitive and monumental in nature that the Hill leadership may have no other choice but to take matters in their own hands.

“The problem is the big issues, the difficult ones, like the fiscal issues are so political, and they touch third rails for each party that it’s hard to make it happen,” Lieberman said Tuesday. “But it could happen by this model after the election.”

There have been legislative successes this year that have skipped regular order, such as the extension of the Social Security payroll tax cut and a bill designed to allow startup firms to raise capital.

But more often than not, when bills move straight to the floor, partisan sniping is involved, such as efforts to keep student interest rates low, a top priority for President Barack Obama. McConnell has long criticized Reid for pre-emptively blocking amendments to protect his vulnerable members from taking tough votes, while Reid has accused Republicans for engaging in record-breaking filibuster attempts.

The Senate Democratic leader is now actively considering paring back senators’ ability to block a bill in one instance: on whether bills can even be brought forward for debate.

But some members say such moves would be completely unnecessary if the Senate simply follows the normal legislative process, the model that seems to be working these days.

“I know nothing is going to happen before Election Day,” Corker said of the fiscal cliff. “I just encourage we go through regular order and be prepared to go until the end of the year to actually do something to solve this problem.”

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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redux · Jul 20, 2012

Who says this a do-nothing Congress?

Because they only passed and sent 54 bills to Obama so far this year, making it one of the least productive sessions on record....17 of which renamed post offices and other stuff.

Way to go!

rogue49 · Jul 25, 2012

Our representives viewpoints and efforts on these fronts are pathetic.

Why can't we find a group that actually thinks about the nation and its citizens?
CASH?
Influence?
Bias?
All the above?

When are we going to hold them accountable???
We have a responsibility to ourselves to do so.

If not, then who are we to blame but ourselves...

Ignorance is NOT bliss.
Neglect is a cost.

The U.S. Economic Policy Debate Is a Sham
By Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers - Jul 23, 2012

Watching Democrats and Republicans hash out their differences in the public arena, it’s easy to get the impression that there’s a deep disagreement among reasonable people about how to manage the U.S. economy.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In reality, there’s remarkable consensus among mainstream economists, including those from the left and right, on most major macroeconomic issues. The debate in Washington about economic policy is phony. It’s manufactured. And it’s entirely political.

Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.

Or consider the widely despised bank bailouts. Populist politicians on both sides have taken to pounding the table against them (in many cases, only after voting for them). But while the public may not like them, there’s a striking consensus that they helped: The same survey found no economists willing to dispute the idea that the bailouts lowered unemployment.
No Support

Do you remember the Republican concern that Obama had somehow caused gas prices to rise, a development that Newt Gingrich promised to reverse? There’s simply no support among economists for this view. They unanimously agreed that “market factors,” rather than energy policy, have driven changes in gas prices.

How about the oft-cited Republican claim that tax cuts will boost the economy so much that they will pay for themselves? It’s an idea born as a sketch on a restaurant napkin by conservative economist Art Laffer. Perhaps when the top tax rate was 91 percent, the idea was plausible. Today, it’s a fantasy. The Booth poll couldn’t find a single economist who believed that cutting taxes today will lead to higher government revenue -- even if we lower only the top tax rate.

The consensus isn’t the result of a faux poll of left-wing ideologues. Rather, the findings come from the Economic Experts Panel run by Booth’s Initiative on Global Markets. It’s a recurring survey of about 40 economists from around the U.S. It includes Democrats, Republicans and independent academics from the top economics departments in the country. The only things that unite them are their first-rate credentials and their interest in public policy.

Let’s be clear about what the economists’ remarkable consensus means. They aren’t purporting to know all the right answers. Rather, they agree on the best reading of murky evidence. The folks running the survey understand this uncertainty, and have asked the economists to rate their confidence in their answers on a scale of 1 to 10. Strikingly, the consensus looks even stronger when the responses are weighted according to confidence.

The debate in Washington has become completely unmoored from this consensus, and in a particular direction: Angry Republicans have pushed their representatives to adopt positions that are at odds with the best of modern economic thinking. That may be good politics, but it’s terrible policy.

The disjunction between the state of economic knowledge and our current political debate has important consequences. Right now, millions of people are suffering due to high unemployment. Our textbooks are filled with possible solutions. Instead of debating them seriously, congressional Republicans are blocking even those policy proposals that strike most economists as uncontroversial.
Raw Politics

This inaction has no basis in economics. Instead, it’s raw politics -- a cynical attempt to score points in a phony rhetorical war or a way of preventing their opponents from scoring a policy win.

The debate about the long-run challenge posed by the federal budget deficit has also become divorced from economic reality. The same panel of economists was almost unanimous in agreeing that “long run fiscal sustainability in the U.S. will require cuts in currently promised Medicare and Medicaid benefits and/or tax increases that include higher taxes on households with incomes below $250,000.” Only one in 10 was uncertain. None objected.

Likewise, popular tax deductions such as that for mortgage interest didn’t fare well in the surveys and would be on almost any economist’s list of targets for reform. Yet neither party is willing to propose such policies.

The consensus, of course, can be wrong. On the probable consequences of economic reforms, though, leading economists are more likely to be right than politicians running for re- election. Their solidarity needs to be taken seriously. Too much of what passes for economic debate in Washington is the product of faith, not evidence.

It’s time to put economics back into the economic debate.

(Betsey Stevenson is associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. Justin Wolfers is associate professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution. Both are Bloomberg View columnists. The opinions expressed are their own.)

Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View. Subscribe to receive a daily e-mail highlighting new View editorials, columns and op-ed articles.

Today’s highlights: the editors on how to replace Libor and on Europe’s wake-up call; Jeffrey Goldberg on what’s next for the Arab Spring; William Pesek on the price of economic growth in South Korea; Ramesh Ponnuru on Obama’s welfare mistake; A. Gary Shilling on higher education’s broken financing model; Bill Mallon on obscure sports in past Olympics; Ilian Scarlatov on why Greece should act like Bulgaria.
Click to expand...

rogue49 · Aug 8, 2012

Congress...a body of representatives that we elect as "authority figures" to determine the best course and laws for our Nation.

Yet, are they TRULY qualified??
Can they really make that determination?

I see this at all levels, in real-life, everyday...where those "in-charge" are making arbitary decisions according to various conflicting factors,
including their own absorbtion of the matter, awareness, bias...or simply "warm & fuzzies".

Often I fight against a Project Manager or otherwise, who's made the decision to ignore a recommended action.
Or stress another unnecessary task/change, due to the client's or another executives' whims or perceived "needs".

Congress is the ultimate example of this ongoing frustration.
(although, unlike a non-representative government where we can NOT change or pure democracy where it'd be the masses/mob)

Is there a more efficient route?

The U.S. Economic Policy Debate Is a Sham
By Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers - Jul 23, 2012

Watching Democrats and Republicans hash out their differences in the public arena, it’s easy to get the impression that there’s a deep disagreement among reasonable people about how to manage the U.S. economy.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In reality, there’s remarkable consensus among mainstream economists, including those from the left and right, on most major macroeconomic issues. The debate in Washington about economic policy is phony. It’s manufactured. And it’s entirely political.

Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.

Or consider the widely despised bank bailouts. Populist politicians on both sides have taken to pounding the table against them (in many cases, only after voting for them). But while the public may not like them, there’s a striking consensus that they helped: The same survey found no economists willing to dispute the idea that the bailouts lowered unemployment.

No Support

Do you remember the Republican concern that Obama had somehow caused gas prices to rise, a development that Newt Gingrich promised to reverse? There’s simply no support among economists for this view. They unanimously agreed that “market factors,” rather than energy policy, have driven changes in gas prices.

How about the oft-cited Republican claim that tax cuts will boost the economy so much that they will pay for themselves? It’s an idea born as a sketch on a restaurant napkin by conservative economist Art Laffer. Perhaps when the top tax rate was 91 percent, the idea was plausible. Today, it’s a fantasy. The Booth poll couldn’t find a single economist who believed that cutting taxes today will lead to higher government revenue -- even if we lower only the top tax rate.

The consensus isn’t the result of a faux poll of left-wing ideologues. Rather, the findings come from the Economic Experts Panel run by Booth’s Initiative on Global Markets. It’s a recurring survey of about 40 economists from around the U.S. It includes Democrats, Republicans and independent academics from the top economics departments in the country. The only things that unite them are their first-rate credentials and their interest in public policy.

Let’s be clear about what the economists’ remarkable consensus means. They aren’t purporting to know all the right answers. Rather, they agree on the best reading of murky evidence. The folks running the survey understand this uncertainty, and have asked the economists to rate their confidence in their answers on a scale of 1 to 10. Strikingly, the consensus looks even stronger when the responses are weighted according to confidence.

The debate in Washington has become completely unmoored from this consensus, and in a particular direction: Angry Republicans have pushed their representatives to adopt positions that are at odds with the best of modern economic thinking. That may be good politics, but it’s terrible policy.

The disjunction between the state of economic knowledge and our current political debate has important consequences. Right now, millions of people are suffering due to high unemployment. Our textbooks are filled with possible solutions. Instead of debating them seriously, congressional Republicans are blocking even those policy proposals that strike most economists as uncontroversial.

Raw Politics

This inaction has no basis in economics. Instead, it’s raw politics -- a cynical attempt to score points in a phony rhetorical war or a way of preventing their opponents from scoring a policy win.

The debate about the long-run challenge posed by the federal budget deficit has also become divorced from economic reality. The same panel of economists was almost unanimous in agreeing that “long run fiscal sustainability in the U.S. will require cuts in currently promised Medicare and Medicaid benefits and/or tax increases that include higher taxes on households with incomes below $250,000.” Only one in 10 was uncertain. None objected.

Likewise, popular tax deductions such as that for mortgage interest didn’t fare well in the surveys and would be on almost any economist’s list of targets for reform. Yet neither party is willing to propose such policies.

The consensus, of course, can be wrong. On the probable consequences of economic reforms, though, leading economists are more likely to be right than politicians running for re- election. Their solidarity needs to be taken seriously. Too much of what passes for economic debate in Washington is the product of faith, not evidence.

It’s time to put economics back into the economic debate.

(Betsey Stevenson is associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. Justin Wolfers is associate professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution. Both are Bloomberg View columnists. The opinions expressed are their own.)

®2012 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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redux · Aug 13, 2012

Jeff Flake, the likely Republican nominee for Senate from Arizona is the latest to suggest repealing the 17th amendment (direct election of US senators) and other extreme positions.

....the wholesale repeal of federal regulations... any restrictions on guns, ammunition or magazines.....eliminating both the federal Department of Energy and the Department of Education...
Click to expand...

He joins other Tea Party candidates for Senate in Missouri (the Christocrat, anti-gay rights, anti-Muslim darling of social conservatives) and Indiana (campaigned on no compromise with Democrats on any issue) as well as Utah Senator Mike Lee (wants to abolish Medicare, Social Security, food stamps and eliminate all income assistance to the poor) , Texas governor Perry and Justice Scalia in reverting back to state legislatures appointing its two US Senators.

Welcome to today's Republican Party.

rogue49 · Aug 13, 2012

The funny thing is this...look how many threads we have dedicated to the presidency...at least 4, and they are all replied on many time.
Congress...one thread, and some replies...not all that much.

But Congress is the one that MAKES the LAW, the budget for it...they are the ones you vote for to represent you...
And yet, they are mostly ignored.
Sure, we say they are shit in general...but we end up supporting our local rep for the most part.
We want fiscal conservativism or at least fiscal restraint...but we LOVE the funds our rep brings back to our area.

But we target and cry about the primary man in the seat...as if they have all the control.
I make you a bet most don't even get close to paying attention to the Congress and its soap operas...and its "actors"

rogue49 · Aug 21, 2012

Yes, PLEASE STOP putting up insane and shitty candidates.

Now, funny part of this...is they are talking about Congress here...but there was a pack of stupid presidential candidates too.
If you softball them...how do you truly vet them??

Sure they'll be scared/offended if you are going to drill them on the hard questions and hold them to their answers.
But, DAMN...you're asking me to put you up there to make decisions for me...to impact the State & Nation.
And you're concerned about your EGO or sweating a bit???

Welcome to the Big League, boys & girls.
Time to Nut Up or Shut Up...

2012 brings bevy of bumbling candidates
By: Alexander Burns
August 21, 2012 04:31 AM EDT

It took a catastrophic, unforced error from a major U.S. Senate nominee to prove the point: In 2012, candidate quality matters – a lot.

After three consecutive wave elections – the Democratic landslides of 2006 and 2008 and the Republican revolution of 2010 – both parties have rapidly remembered that they can’t always count on a national tide to sweep their candidates into office. In those cycles, an array of sub-par candidates managed to win largely on the strength of their party label, from lackluster campaigners like Virginia Democrat Jim Webb to offbeat ideologues like Kentucky Republican Rand Paul.

This year, the battle for control of the Senate has turned into a far more muddled and unpredictable affair because there’s no overwhelming national tide. While Democrats started out back on their heels, defending 23 seats to the GOP’s 10, the unexpected weakness of several Republican candidates has left Republicans far short of the easy takeover that some once anticipated.

On both sides, political missteps and candidate defects have reshaped the map in surprising ways. The most astounding example came this week, when Missouri Rep. Todd Akin threw his Senate candidacy into a state of crisis by suggesting that rape victims can stop themselves from becoming pregnant.

Akin has since apologized for the remark, but a long list of Republicans have pressured him to end his campaign and salvage the GOP’s chances of knocking off Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill.

But Akin is not the only bumbling candidate to befoul his party’s grand 2012 strategy. Republican strategists have voiced dismay for weeks over the Senate contest in North Dakota, where GOP Rep. Rick Berg was expected to dominate the race but instead finds himself tied or trailing Democrat Heidi Heitkamp, a sympathetic former state attorney general. On the other side, Democrats find themselves struggling to gain traction in Nevada after Rep. Shelley Berkley, the party’s nominee, found herself embroiled in an ethics investigation in the House of Representatives.

The list of flaws and flubs goes on: Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate nominee in strongly liberal Massachusetts, spun out a biographical flap about whether she has Cherokee heritage into a controversy that hobbled her for much of the summer. In Indiana, conservative state Treasurer Richard Mourdock has failed to establish a lead over Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly in the aftermath of a slashing GOP primary that turned off moderate voters.

If both parties have suffered from candidate malpractice in 2012, the brunt of the damage seems to have fallen on Republicans. With more than half a dozen credible takeover opportunities, many of them in conservative-leaning states, today only one Democratic-held seat looks like a sure thing for the GOP: the one currently occupied by retiring Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson.

Now, with 11 weeks to Election Day, Republican and Democratic strategists have begun to reflect on the reality that these races really might come down to the tactics and performance of individual candidates. And Republicans are starting to fume that the party may have jeopardized a historic opportunity.

“For all the criticism of professional politicians, there’s something to be said for being a professional politician and knowing what you’re doing,” said Republican super-strategist Mike Murphy, who said the Akin debacle was enough to make one yearn for the age when “bosses were in charge of making sure that things are kept under control.”

“Forget about the disgusting premise of [Akin’s] statement, when you commit an act of candidate incompetence, it’s totally justified to ask if you want that person to carry the standard,” Murphy said. “The parties are weaker now so they can’t discipline. Primary voters can run amok.”

If candidate and campaign quality matter immensely in the 2012 cycle, it’s not as though the performance of individual nominees hasn’t been decisive at other times over the past half-decade. Democrats came just shy of winning a Tennessee Senate seat in 2006, when Republican Bob Corker outfoxed Democrat Harold Ford and drove the up-and-coming congressman to pull up stakes and leave the Volunteer State. In the 2010 Republican wave, nominating ideologically extreme – and in some cases, downright kooky – candidates denied the party Senate seats in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada.

“Candidates always matter. Even in wave elections like 2010, you saw a handful of races where the wave was stopped, in part because of the quality of the candidates,” said Democratic strategist Mo Elleithee. “This ain’t a wave election, which means that the candidate quality matters even more. Candidates that are that out of touch with the electorate, they just can’t get very far in election years like this.”

Republican media consultant Curt Anderson said the party left Senate “seats on the table” two years ago “by nominating terrible candidates in Nevada and Colorado,” and said the GOP would have to be more aggressive about recruiting compelling nominees in the future.

“We’ve got to get out of the business of nominating the next congressman whose turn it is,” Anderson said.

Taking corrective action is easier said than done. Both parties seek to goad their strongest candidates into Senate races. This year, they’ve had some success at stretching the map by recruiting impressive contenders for long-shot races: Republicans persuaded former Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle to take a shot at her state’s open Senate seat, while Democrats are putting up former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, a decorated Vietnam veteran, in Arizona.

In an ever more democratized political age, parties also risk backlash if they meddle too overtly in an activist-dominated nominating process. And they pay a price when, as in Akin’s case, a more vulnerable candidate comes out on top in a primary.

If Republicans couldn’t stop Akin and other feeble candidates from winning their party’s primaries, the national GOP is bringing down the hammer now. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has indicated that it will not put money into the Missouri Senate race this fall if Akin stays on the ballot, while the conservative independent expenditure group Crossroads GPS canceled a set of TV reservations there.

In a statement Monday, NRSC Chairman John Cornyn called Akin’s offending comments “indefensible” and sent a none-too-subtle message that he should step back from the race.

“I recognize that this is a difficult time for him, but over the next 24 hours, Congressman Akin should carefully consider what is best for him, his family, the Republican Party, and the values that he cares about and has fought for throughout his career in public service,” Cornyn said.

However the Akin situation shakes out, J.B. Poersch, the former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, sounded an upbeat note in an email Monday musing over the GOP’s field of recruits.

“The tea party has boxed Cornyn in from doing any real recruiting. Heitkamp and [Montana Sen. Jon] Tester and Donnelly are better candidates. They just are,” he said.

One Republican acknowledged that “the world order is different these days,” explaining: “If there’s any lesson that anyone learned from 2010, it cannot be seen as Washington hand-picking the candidates.”

Akin has given little indication so far that he intends to withdraw, and it’s too soon to say whether his remarks about rape will leave him doomed against McCaskill. Still, Republicans sounded a despairing note about the state of the Senate map this week and there’s broad consensus in Washington that the party’s path to a majority has grown slimmer over the last year.

“It’s a big freakin’ disaster,” said one frustrated strategist, who said Akin was only the most flagrant example of political malfeasance. “We just have a bad crop right now, of candidates, who are running bad campaigns.”

The Akin example is particularly galling to some Republicans because of the way he emerged as their nominee; he got a late boost in a three-way primary when McCaskill aired commercials attacking him as “too conservative” – not exactly a turnoff to primary voters.

That revived memories of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s successful campaign to tear down his more formidable 2010 opponents and make Sharron Angle, an eccentric and politically amateurish former state legislator, the GOP’s exceedingly beatable nominee.

“When liberals are helping a Republican in the primary, there’s a strategic reason,” said Florida-based GOP strategist Brian Hughes. “Akin wasted no time proving that McCaskill’s team made an excellent investment. Republicans should either find a way to replace him, or the party should focus its resources on other Senate races.”

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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rogue49 · Nov 11, 2012

Since the presidential election is over...now the fun & games goes back to the Congress.
With mostly the same old players and those in control.

The Senate in Democrats hands...and the House held by the GOP.
Each previously refusing to approve the others bills.

The Senate has the extra current difficulty of getting anything done because of the over-use of the filibuster,
or even worse...nothing gets done just because of the threat of it. (no one actually ever DOES it )

Hopefully they can get their act together finally,
but here are some nice ones that would have good to pass to our benefit...and perhaps save some money to boot.

13 things that would have passed the Senate if there were no filibuster

The filibuster in recent years has allowed the Senate minority to block routine legislation by requiring 60 votes to end debate.
Here are 13 significant bills or nominations that received more than 50 votes — a majority — but failed to overcome the 60-vote filibuster.
That does not mean these bills would have all become law. They would still have had to pass the House and be signed by the president.
However, passing the upper chamber would have put more pressure on the House to act in some cases.
Also, when regular votes in the Senate are 50-50, the vice president votes to break the tie.

Prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases

After climate change legislation stalled in Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency declared it would use existing air pollution regulations to address greenhouse gas emissions. This bill would have prevented the EPA from doing so. If it were subjected to a majority vote and tied at 50-50, however, Vice President Joe Biden would have been allowed to vote and he presumably would have voted against it.

Failed: 50-50, April 6, 2011, Senate Roll Call No. 54, 112nd Congress, 1st Session

Confirm Goodwin Liu as a U.S. Circuit Court Judge

Goodwin Liu, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was nominated for an appeals court by President Obama. But Republicans objected to his harsh criticism of justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts during their confirmations.

Failed: 52-43, 1 Present, 4 Not Voting, May 19, 2011, Senate Roll Call No. 74, 112nd Congress, 1st Session

End tax breaks for oil companies

This bill would have ended certain tax breaks for large oil companies.

Failed: 52-48, May 17, 2011, Senate Roll Call No. 72, 112nd Congress, 1st Session

President Obama’s 2011 jobs proposal

In an effort to boost the economy in 2011, President Obama proposed a package of measures that would spend money on infrastructure and help state and local governments hire more teachers and police officers, among other things. The package failed, as did several of its components when brought up separately.

Failed: 50-49, 1 Not Voting, Oct. 11, 2011, Senate Roll Call No. 160, 112nd Congress, 1st Session

Hire more teachers and police officers

President Obama proposed giving $30 billion in grants to state and local governments for hiring (or keeping) school teachers and $5 billion for more police officers and emergency personnel as part of a broad jobs package.

Failed: 50-50, Oct. 20, 2011, Senate Roll Call No. 177, 112nd Congress, 1st Session

Spend $60 billion improving transportation infrastructure

President Obama proposed spending $60 billion improving transportation infrastructure such as highways. The bill, which was part of a broad jobs package, also would have created a national infrastructure bank.

Failed: 51-49, Nov. 3, 2011, Senate Roll Call No. 195, 112nd Congress, 1st Session

Approve Richard Cordray as head of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection

When President Obama couldn’t get Elizabeth Warren through the Senate to head the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he nominated former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray instead. After Republicans filibustered Cordray, Obama named him through a recess appointment that doesn’t last as long as a Senate-approved appointment.

Failed: 53-45, Dec. 8, 2011, Senate Roll Call No. 223, 112nd Congress, 1st Session

Overhaul of the U.S. Postal Service

The U.S. Postal Service has faced mounting financial troubles because of increased use of the Internet. This bill would have allowed it to restructure retirement accounts to recoup $11 billion and use some of that money to encourage 100,000 postal workers to retire.

Failed: 51-46, 3 Not Voting, Senate Roll Call No. 60, 112nd Congress, 2nd Session, March 27, 2012

Repeal tax breaks for oil companies

This bill would repeal some tax breaks for large oil companies and use the money generated to pay for the extension of renewable energy tax credits and incentives.

Failed: 51-47, 2 Not Voting, Senate Roll Call No. 63, 112nd Congress, 2nd Session, March 29, 2012

Raise tax rates on millionaires

This bill would have raised tax rates on taxpayers earning more than $1 million.

Failed: 51-45, 4 Not Voting, Senate Roll Call No. 65, 112nd Congress, 2nd Session, April 23, 2012

Allow victims of gender discrimination to sue for punitive damages

People who discover that their employers have not paid them fairly because of gender discrimination can currently receive back pay if they win a civil lawsuit. This bill would have expanded that to allow them to sue for punitive damages as well.

Failed: 52-47, 1 Not Voting, Senate Roll Call No. 115, 112nd Congress, 2nd Session, June 5, 2012

Requiring more disclosure of election spending

Amid concerns about spending from super PACs this election, Democrats proposed the DISCLOSE Act, which would require groups to disclose contributors that give $10,000 or more for election-related communications, among other things.

Failed: 53-45, Senate Roll Call No. 180, 112nd Congress, 2nd Session, July 17, 2012

End tax deduction for moving jobs overseas

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich., pictured above) proposed a bill to end a provision in tax law that allows companies to deduct the cost of moving jobs overseas as a business expense. The bill would have given an additional tax credit for moving jobs back to the U.S.

Failed: 56-42, 2 Not Voting, Senate Roll Call No. 181, 112nd Congress, 2nd Session, July 19, 2012
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