AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

POLITICO 44

The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism."

The strategy was detailed in a confidential party fundraising presentation, obtained by POLITICO, which also outlines how “ego-driven” wealthy donors can be tapped with offers of access and “tchochkes.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/33866.html#ixzz0hE6LXuWI

This isn't even a valid sentence in English. What is it you are trying to say? Your original correspondent said NOTHING of the sort - in essence you are now trying to move the goalposts, because you were caught out in a lie.

For a bill to be passed in reconciliation after at least one Senator's declaration to filibuster the bill, AND there were NOT at least two-thirds of those voting in the Senate to end the filibuster.

A large number of bills [were] passed after House and Senate versions were reconciled.

It is a rare occurrence for a bill passed in reconciliation after at least one Senator's declaration to filibuster the bill, AND there were NOT at least two-thirds of those voting in the Senate to end the filibuster.

What evidence or link can you supply that supports this statement: "The 1995 Balanced Budget Act was passed in reconciliation" after at least one Senator's declaration to filibuster the bill AND there were NOT at least two-thirds of those voting in the Senate to end the filibuster?

What evidence or link can you supply that supports this statement: "The 2001 Bush Tax Cut was passed in reconciliation" after at least one Senator's declaration to filibuster the bill AND there were NOT at least two-thirds of those voting in the Senate to end the filibuster?

What evidence or link can you supply that supports this statement: "The 2003 Bush Tax Cut was passed in reconciliation" after at least one Senator's declaration to filibuster the bill AND there were NOT at least two-thirds of those voting in the Senate to end the filibuster?

What evidence or link can you supply that supports this statement: "The 2005 Deficit Reduction Act was also passed in reconciliation" after at least one Senator's declaration to filibuster the bill AND there were NOT at least two-thirds of those voting in the Senate to end the filibuster?

What evidence or link can you supply that supports this statement: "The 2006 Tax Relief Extensions Act was passed in reconciliation" after at least one Senator's declaration to filibuster the bill AND there were NOT at least two-thirds of those voting in the Senate to end the filibuster?

You edited your post after I cut and pasted from it.

I am not interested in your statements, because - as I said - you are moving the goalposts from what your correspondent and you claimed was true.

Do you understand the difference between the House-Senate Reconciliation process, and the BUDGET reconciliation process which is currently being described? They are two completely different things, yet you are confusing them here - this post indicates that you think we are talking about the first, when in fact we are talking about the second.

This is not an indicator of expertise on your part when it comes to discussing the way Congress works. I would be embarrassed to make such an amateurish mistake, myself.

Radicals should be political relativists and should take an agnostic view of means and ends;
The radical is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer;
The revolutionary’s purpose is to undermine the system by taking from the haves and giving it to the have-nots, and then see what happens;
The most basic principle for radicals is lie to opponents and disarm them by pretending to be moderates and liberals;
The radical organizer does not have a fixed truth"truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing;
The issue is always the revolution;
The stated cause is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is accumulation of power to make the revolution;
The radical is building his own kingdom, a kingdom of heaven on earth.

The House-Senate Reconciliation process for BUDGET reconciliation consista in reconciling differences in the versions of a BUDGET bill passed by the House and the Senate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation
Reconciliation (United States Congress)
...
Reconciliation is a legislative process in the United States Senate intended to allow consideration of a contentious budget bill without the threat of filibuster. Introduced in 1974, reconciliation limits debate and amendment, and therefore favors the majority party, just as with all bills passed in congress. Reconciliation also exists in the United States House of Representatives, but because the House regularly passes rules that constrain debate and amendment, the process has had a less significant impact on that body.

A reconciliation instruction (Budget Reconciliation) is a provision in a budget resolution directing one or more committees to submit legislation changing existing law in order to bring spending, revenues, or the debt-limit into conformity with the budget resolution. The instructions specify the committees to which they apply, indicate the appropriate dollar changes to be achieved, and usually provide a deadline by which the legislation is to be reported or submitted.[1]

A reconciliation bill is one containing changes in law recommended pursuant to reconciliation instructions in a budget resolution. If the instructions pertain to only one committee in a chamber, that committee reports the reconciliation bill. If the instructions pertain to more than one committee, the House Budget Committee reports an omnibus reconciliation bill, but it may not make substantive changes in the recommendations of the other committees.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_committee
Conference committee
...
A conference committee is an ad hoc joint committee of a bicameral legislature, which is appointed by, and consists of, members of both chambers to resolve disagreements on a particular bill. While such committees are common in the United States Congress and other U.S. legislatures, they are no longer in use in the Parliament of the United Kingdom or most other bicameral Westminster system parliaments. In the U.S. Congress, the conference committee is usually composed of the senior members of the standing committees of each House that originally considered the legislation. A Conference Committee is a temporary panel of House and Senate negotiators. A conference committee is created to resolve differences between versions of similar House and Senate bills.

The Republicans' big lie about reconciliation

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Thursday, March 4, 2010; A21

For those who feared that Barack Obama did not have any Lyndon Johnson in him, the president's determination to press ahead and get health-care reform done in the face of Republican intransigence came as something of a relief.

Obama's critics have regularly accused him of not being as tough or wily or forceful as LBJ was in pushing through civil rights and the social programs of his Great Society. Obama seemed willing to let Congress go its own way and was so anxious to look bipartisan that he wouldn't even take his own side in arguments with Republicans.

Those days are over. On Wednesday, the president made clear what he wants in a health-care bill, and he urged Congress to pass it by the most expeditious means available.

He was also clear on what bipartisanship should mean -- and what it can't mean. Democrats, who happen to be in the majority, have already added Republican ideas to their proposals. Obama said he was open to four more that came up during the health-care summit. What he's (rightly) unwilling to do is give the minority veto power over a bill that has deliberately and painfully worked its way through the regular legislative process.

Republicans, however, don't want to talk much about the substance of health care. They want to discuss process, turn "reconciliation" into a four-letter word and maintain that Democrats are "ramming through" a health bill.

It is all, I am sorry to say, one big lie -- or, if you're sensitive, an astonishing exercise in hypocrisy.

In an op-ed in Tuesday's Post, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) offered an excellent example of this hypocrisy. Right off, the piece was wrong on a core fact. Hatch accused the Democrats of trying to, yes, "ram through the Senate a multitrillion-dollar health-care bill."

No. The health-care bill passed the Senate in December with 60 votes under the normal process. The only thing that would pass under a simple majority vote would be a series of amendments that fit comfortably under the "reconciliation" rules established to deal with money issues. Near the end of his column, Hatch conceded that reconciliation would be used for "only parts" of the bill. But why didn't he say that in the first place?

Hatch grandly cited "America's Founders" as wanting the Senate to be about "deliberation." But the Founders said nothing in the Constitution about the filibuster, let alone "reconciliation." Judging from what they put in the actual document, the Founders would be appalled at the idea that every major bill should need the votes of three-fifths of the Senate to pass.

Hatch quoted Sens. Robert Byrd and Kent Conrad, both Democrats, as opposing the use of reconciliation on health care. What he didn't say is that Byrd's comment from a year ago was about passing the entire bill under reconciliation, which no one is proposing. As for Conrad, he made clear to The Post's Ezra Klein this week that it's perfectly appropriate to use reconciliation "to improve or perfect the package," which is the only thing that Democrats have proposed doing through reconciliation.

Hatch said that reconciliation should not be used for "substantive legislation" unless the legislation has "significant bipartisan support." But surely the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which were passed under reconciliation and increased the deficit by $1.7 trillion during his presidency, were "substantive legislation." The 2003 dividends tax cut could muster only 50 votes. Vice President Dick Cheney had to break the tie. Talk about "ramming through."

The underlying "principle" here seems to be that it's fine to pass tax cuts for the wealthy on narrow votes but an outrage to use reconciliation to help middle-income and poor people get health insurance.

I'm disappointed in Hatch, co-sponsor of two of my favorite bills in recent years. One created the State Children's Health Insurance Program. The other, signed last year by Obama, broadly expanded service opportunities. Hatch worked on both with his dear friend, the late Edward M. Kennedy, after whom the service bill was named.

It was Kennedy, you'll recall, who insisted that health care was "a fundamental right and not a privilege." That's why it's not just legitimate to use reconciliation to complete the work on health reform. It would be immoral to do otherwise and thereby let a phony argument about process get in the way of health coverage for 30 million Americans.

[email protected]

The Democrat leadership in each house of Congress has recommended a reconciliation process for reconciling the differences between the Senate and House versions of a medical health care bill.

The Republican leadership in the Senate objects to a Senate-House reconciliation process for passing a medical health care bill with a simple majority vote that bypasses a Republican Senate filibuster of the bill. The Senate's rules require a 60 vote majority to end a filibuster.

The end of the road for Barack Obama?
By Simon Heffer, UK Telegraph - March 8, 2010
Barack Obama is turning all of America into Detroit
It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama’s regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president, has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons.

Despite the efforts of some sections of opinion to talk the place up, America is mired in unhappiness, all the worse for the height from which Obamania has fallen. The economy remains troublesome. There is growth " a good last quarter suggested an annual rate of as high as six per cent, but that figure is probably not reliable " and the latest unemployment figures, last Friday, showed a levelling off. Yet 15 million Americans, or 9.7 per cent of the workforce, have no job. Many millions more are reduced to working part-time. Whole areas of the country, notably in the north and on the eastern seaboard, are industrial wastelands. The once mighty motor city of Detroit appears slowly to be being abandoned, becoming a Jurassic Park of the mid-20th century; unemployment among black people in Mr Obama’s own city of Chicago is estimated at between 20 and 25 per cent. One senior black politician " a Democrat and a supporter of the President " told me of the wrath in his community that a black president appeared to be unable to solve the economic problem among his own people. Cities in the east such as Newark and Baltimore now have drug-dealing as their principal commercial activity: The Wire is only just fictional.

Last Thursday the House of Representatives passed a jobs Bill, costing $15 billion, which would give tax breaks to firms hiring new staff and, through state sponsorship of construction projects, create thousands of jobs too. The Senate is trying to approve a Bill that would provide a further $150 billion of tax incentives to employers. Yet there is a sense of desperation in the Administration, a sense that nothing can be as efficacious at the moment as a sticking plaster. Edward B Montgomery, deputy labour secretary in the Clinton administration, now spends his time on day trips to decaying towns that used to have a car industry, not so much advising them on how to do something else as facilitating those communities’ access to federal funds. For a land without a welfare state, America starts to do an effective impersonation of a country with one. This massive state spending gives rise to accusations by Republicans, and people too angry even to be Republicans, that America is now controlled by "Leftists" and being turned into a socialist state.

The Tea Party Movement Has Momentum
Posted: 05 Mar 2010 08:42 AM PST
If the Tea Party movement is irrelevant, ineffective and out-of-touch " why does the left even bother with it? If the Tea Party movement is a small group of angry Republicans - why it is being treated as a huge threat to the liberal agenda and ideology? If the Tea Party movement is as insignificant as many liberals would like to believe " why spend the time to participate in smear campaigns against it?
The reality is the Tea Party movement has dramatically changed the political landscape of the 2010 election cycle. It was not too long ago that the only voices being heard across the nation were those of the politicians, but today we are hearing the voices of the American people. In many instances, people who once sat in their living rooms watching the evening news have now become the evening news themselves. What were once one-sided political speeches are now open dialogues between the politicians and the people.
Only someone in a state of complete denial would fail to recognize the voice of the American people has been restored (in great part) through the Tea Party movement. People, who used to look around the room before making political statements, are now making their statements in the public arena without regard for who may hear them.
Of course the liberals are angry with and in opposition to the Tea Party movement - it is not politically correct and it does not hide its head in the sand while allowing the world to go by in Washington, DC. And finally!….decisions that are made in Washington, must be made in light of the voices of the American people which have become too vocal to be ignored.
The Tea Party movement is being misrepresented and mischaracterized by the liberals, progressives and leftists " some of it intentional, some of it out of ignorance. One of the most blatant examples was a segment on the MSNBC program, “The Dylan Ratigan Show” in what was supposed to be an interview of Mark Williams from the Tea Party Express. Instead, it became a passionate and personal tirade from Ratigan manifesting his “anger”. Oddly enough, the left thrives in attaching the word “anger” to the Tea Party movement.
One of the most vivid illustrations of the recognizable force of the Tea Party movement is seen in Nancy Pelosi’s changing perception. It was not too long ago that she said the movement was not “grassroots” , but “astroturf” . In doing so, her purpose was to tie the Tea Party movement to the special interests of the wealthy by giving them tax cuts that would not be enjoyed by everyone else. Now she says, “we share some of the views of the Tea Partiers in terms of the role of special interest in Washington, D.C., as " it just has to stop. And that’s why I’ve fought the special interest, whether it’s on energy, whether it’s on health insurance, whether it’s on pharmaceuticals and the rest.”
It is not of importance as to what the liberal left paints the Tea Party movement to look like - they will paint what they will paint. What is important is that we know who we are and what we are about. Some in the Tea Party movement are trying to paint themselves as the “official leader or group within the movement” . The fact remains that there are thousands of freedom loving American people, with each individual “officially” making up what we know as the Tea Party movement. The day that fact changes, we will cease to be a movement and we will become an organization, with the power being transferred from the “many activists” across the country to the “few leaders” in the home office.
Movements are born in momentum, and right now, we must keep the momentum moving……..