The new Republican House Majority

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Now that the symbolic bullshit is out of the way, will the Republicans pivot to actually governing the nation? Hard to say. There are no current bills in the books from them to address anything else and no announced plans to do anything else, other than 'investigate radical Islam.'

Cycloptichorn

Actually there is quite a bit that was left undone by the last Congress (particularly the House). For example the government's budget for the current fiscal year, which is now 1/3rd over. The previous Congress deliberately delayed legislation so as to avoid facing the public with this one during the recent election.

Now, after defeating a hurried attempt to pass an "omnibus" bill for every department of government in the lame duck session, the new Republican House must deal with it. It will be interesting to see what comes.

Meanwhile the Democrats in the Senate are preparing to delay and evade issues like the health care bill repeal sent to them by the House. It appears the role of "party of no and obstructionism" has shifted. However I'm confident the hypocrisy of the Democrats will be adequate for the occasion.

Part of the problem for modern Republicans is that their leaders are idiots.

Neither House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), nor House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) even attended a House Rules Committee hearing on the resolution Wednesday. Democrats pounced in what became a freewheeling, sometimes comical proceeding. And while Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is very much driving the train, he has kept himself divorced from the details of what represents an average 18 percent cut from 2010 spending levels.

“You’re asking me?” Boehner laughed, when asked by POLITICO how he thought the cuts would be first implemented in a stopgap spending bill next month. “I know how to delegate.”

As the new Appropriations chairman, Rogers bears the brunt of that burden, and the Kentucky Republican vowed again Wednesday “to craft the largest series of spending cuts in the history of Congress.” But in fact, his committee members are still struggling over how to proceed, and the final wording of the resolution may only complicate that task.

Yes, I'm aware of your heavily slanted partisan interpretation of the situation.

To be clear, the House didn't defeat the omnibus spending bill. The Senate did. House Republicans are going to have to come up with a bill that's acceptable to the Senate and Obama or face the brunt of the blame for shutting down the government. I know you seem to think that the public will love them for this - or something - but I think that's foolish in the extreme, and the public will instead hate them for it. The Dems and the media will make sure that's the case, and your side will fall into bickering and dispute as the hard-liners argue with the compromising faction of the party.

The majority can't obstruct business, George. The majority gets to set the schedule for what gets voted on and what doesn't. The Senate already passed a HC reform bill, it's not obstruction for them to refuse to revisit the topic. The Senate is not beholden to vote on any bill passed by the House.

Besides; you know as well as I do that the idiotic Republican plan won't pass the Senate and won't be signed by Obama. So why this insistence on wasting taxpayer money?

Because your party has no other plans or ideas for what to do, or how to lead the nation. There are no job creation bills or plans for them pending in the Republican-led House, even though the public has clearly indicated that this is the top priority for the nation right now. How do you address this discrepancy between what the public desires and what your political leadership is doing?

Cycloptichorn

Meanwhile the Democrats in the Senate are preparing to delay and evade issues like the health care bill repeal sent to them by the House.

Meanwhile the Democrats in the Senate are preparing to delay and evade issues like the health care bill repeal sent to them by the House.

CORRECTION:

David is using a red herring.

Hell... they might even have the audacity to filibuster it!

HOUSE GOP LEADERS LOSE ANOTHER ONE.... Let's just say the week isn't going as planned for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

He brought the Patriot Act to the floor yesterday, expecting easy passage. He lost. Boehner brought a trade bill to the floor, but had to pull it after rank-and-file Republicans balked.

This afternoon, the House GOP leadership "endured another embarrassing floor loss," this time on U.N. funding.

A bill that would retrieve money already paid to the United Nations failed Wednesday afternoon 259-169, 290 votes were needed for passage. The bill is the third to fail under House stewardship this week. The U.N. bill would have return $179 million that was paid into the U.N. tax equalization fund.

The measure was brought up under House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's (R-Va.) signature budget slashing initiative, known as YouCut, under suspension of House rules that required two-thirds vote for passage.

Several GOP sources said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) had lobbied against the U.N. bill, at the urging of New York city officials. King had spoken to New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly about the funding.

King spoke on the House floor Wednesday, saying defeating the bill is "a matter of life and death."

This didn't persuade many in the GOP caucus, but the argument nevertheless carried the day. As with the vote on the Patriot Act, a House majority supported the GOP proposal, but to expedite matters, the measure was placed on the suspension calendar, so it needed a two-thirds majority, and came up far short.

This morning, Boehner told reporters, "We've been in the majority four weeks. We're not going to be perfect every day."

A month into the new Congress, it appears Republican leaders are still struggling a bit in the "leadership" department.
—Steve Benen 4:50 PM

Congressman Chris Lee Resigns After Shirtless Photo Posted on Internet

New York Republican Reportedly Sent Revealing Photos to a Woman He Met on Craigslist

By MATTHEW JAFFE and JOHN PARKINSON
Feb. 9, 2011

Rep. Chris Lee, R-N.Y., resigned from Congress after a report emerged that he had sent flirtatious e-mails, including one with a bare-chested photo of himself, to a woman he met on Craigslist.



Lee is married and has a child.

"It has been a tremendous honor to serve the people of Western New York. I regret the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents. I deeply and sincerely apologize to them all. I have made profound mistakes and I promise to work as hard as I can to seek their forgiveness," Lee said in a statement Wednesday night.

"The challenges we face in Western New York and across the country are too serious for me to allow this distraction to continue, and so I am announcing that I have resigned my seat in Congress effective immediately."

On Wednesday, the gossip website Gawker posted a story that included the e-mails allegedly exchanged between Lee and the unnamed woman. According to the story, a single 34-year old woman from Maryland posted an ad on Craigslist's "Women for Men" section on Jan. 14. Soon afterwards a man named Christopher Lee replied, identifying himself as a 39-year-old divorced lobbyist.

In the exchange that followed, Lee reportedly sent the woman an e-mail including a photo of him with his shirt off, flexing his arms and chest. The woman later broke off her correspondence with Lee when she did an online search for him and determined that he had lied about his age and his job, the Gawker story reported.

Lee is a Republican congressman representing the 26th district of New York. He and his wife Michele have a young son named Johnathan, according to a biography on his website.

The 2011 budget plan presented this week by the House Republican Majority strips $1.7 billion away from the Social Security Administration (SSA) for the remainder of the year, a cut so drastic that SSA would need to impose the equivalent of a month of furloughs. The entire agency would have to shut down all operations for 20 working days. The phones would not be answered, field offices would be closed, and claims processing would halt. Over half a million new retirees, disabled workers and survivors would be forced into a backlog before they could receive the benefits they earned....

House Republicans have proposed a $1.7 billion reduction in SSA funding for the remainder of 2011. That includes:

* Cutting SSA’s operating budget by over a billion dollars (8.5%) below what’s needed for 2011. That level is $506 million below what SSA actually spent in 2010 to process claims and operate Social Security offices.
* Cutting an additional $500 million by draining SSA’s reserve account. Most of the money in reserve is already allocated for this year’s expenses and the rest is budgeted for next year’s planned information technology improvements.
* Rescinding an additional $118 million from funds already set aside to build a new National Computer Center, which could delay equipping this mission-critical project.

SSA is already operating under a partial hiring freeze because of the current continuing resolution, which is likely to result in nearly 3,500 lost jobs for 2011. These additional cuts could lead to SSA offices closing their doors, stopping all claims processing, and not answering the phones for about a month – one month out of the seven remaining in 2011. If Social Security shuts down for a month:

* 400,000 people would not have their retirement, survivors, and Medicare applications processed this year, resulting in a large backlog of unprocessed retirement and survivor claims for the first time in SSA history.
* 290,000 people would not have their initial disability benefit applications processed, which means disabled workers, who already wait months for their applications to be processed, will wait an average of 30 days longer.
* 70,000 fewer people will get a disability appeals hearing this year, which means workers waiting to present an appeal to a judge, who already wait over a year, will wait longer.
* 32,000 fewer continuing disability reviews, which means wasting millions of dollars on improper payments now.

There are real-world consequences to the shennanigans the Republicans in the House are trying to pull these days. When one of you retired right-wingers suddenly stops getting their gov't check, or one of your family members can't get enrolled to start receiving back the money they've paid their whole lives into this program, remember who to blame.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

There are real-world consequences to the shennanigans the Republicans in the House are trying to pull these days. When one of you retired right-wingers suddenly stops getting their gov't check, or one of your family members can't get enrolled to start receiving back the money they've paid their whole lives into this program, remember who to blame.

Cycloptichorn

Good. They can blame themselves and everyone else who voted in the past 30 years and didn't pay attention while our government screwed the pooch.

They can also blame everyone who didn't vote, whether they were paying attention or not. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We need to pay the price.

Boehner's Spending Cuts Would Kill 1 Million Jobs
Megan Carpentier | February 16, 2011, 9:25AM
711Share
114tweetsTOP5Kretweet
23diggsdigg
At a press conference yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters that if some federal jobs were lost as a result of his proposed spending cuts, "so be it."

How many jobs are we talking about? According to federal budget expert Scott Lilly at the Center for American Progress, Boehner's proposed spending cuts could kill almost 1 million jobs.

Lilly ran the numbers for Dana Milbank of the Washington Post:

Quote:

using the usual multipliers, [Lilly] calculated that the cuts - a net of $59 billion in the last half of fiscal 2011 - would lead to the loss of 650,000 government jobs, and the indirect loss of 325,000 more jobs as fewer government workers travel and buy things. That's nearly 1 million jobs - possibly enough to tip the economy back into recession.

Milbank additionally notes that Boehner's spending plan includes some $450 million for the development of a second engine for the F-35 Joint Striker -- which is done in a GE plant in Boehner's district that employs 7,000 people. Lilly wrote Sunday that, despite Boehner's promises to end earmarks, the job-saving money for the engine's development looks a lot like an earmark.

Does anyone take this **** seriously, outside of the far-right wing?

Issa press aide scandal is like bad reality TV

By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, March 2, 2011;

If Washington's political culture gets any more incestuous, our children are going to be born with extra fingers.

The latest symptom of our deformed political-journalistic complex presented this week, when news broke that the office of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House committee in charge of probing the Obama administration, had been secretly forwarding private correspondence with journalists to an author writing a book about Washington. This caused a great kerfuffle among reporters and a fear that the release of the e-mails could prove them to be sycophants: flattering Issa and his staff in hopes that favorable coverage would be rewarded with scraps of news.

The episode makes everybody look bad. Issa, a man with subpoena power, was having his staff work as his personal publicists rather than doing honest government work. Issa's spokesman, Kurt Bardella, was justifiably fired for his double dealings with reporters. And reporters were (or soon will be) exposed as currying favor with the powerful.

In the middle of all this is the book author, the New York Times' Mark Leibovich, a friend of mine, who set out to write about this town's culture and finds himself being sucked into the dysfunctional drama, which resembles nothing so much as a bad reality-TV show in which people put their honesty and judgment second to their quest to be players.

This particular episode begins with the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza, another friend of mine (see what I mean by incestuous?) who wrote the definitive profile of Issa in January, describing his history as a car thief, among other things. Lizza also got Bardella to make some some surprisingly candid statements.

"I'm going to make Darrell Issa an actual political figure," Bardella said. "I'm going to focus like a laser beam on the five hundred people here who care about this crap, and that's it . . . so Darrell can expand his sphere of influence here among people who track who's up, who's down, who wins, who loses."

Bardella also disclosed contempt for reporters he described as "lazy as hell. There are times when I pitch a story and they do it word for word. That's just embarrassing. They're adjusting to a time that demands less quality and more quantity."

Lizza learned that Bardella had been sharing reporters' obsequious e-mails with Leibovich. Lizza didn't include the anecdote because Bardella wasn't his focus, but word spread via journalistic pillow-talk after Lizza mentioned it in conversations, eventually making its way to Politico. That publication had done more than any other to increase Issa's profile, with items such as "Issa aims to unmask health care deals" and "Sheriff Issa's top six targets."

Put on your PJs: It's about to get even cozier. Politico reporters were making inquiries on Friday about their e-mails being forwarded to Leibovich, but on Saturday night they partied with Leibovich at the American Legion Hall on Capitol Hill for the 40th birthday party of Politico's executive editor, Jim VandeHei.

A few hours before the party, Leibovich got a call from Politico's editor-in-chief, John Harris - who, along with VandeHei and reporter Mike Allen, used to work at The Post with Leibovich (and me! So very cozy!). "Couldn't this wait until VandeHei's party?" Leibovich joked to Harris.

The bash itself was a celebration of the politically powerful. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and White House official Austan Goolsbee joined the likes of Bob Woodward and Tom Brokaw in a video tribute to VandeHei. The party received a 600-word write-up, which included Leibovich's attendance, in Allen's Politico Playbook the next day.

Also Sunday, Politico's Harris wrote to Issa calling for an investigation into the "egregiously unprofessional" release of e-mails. On Monday, Politico published a story on the controversy co-written by Marin Cogan, a friend of Lizza's.

From what I understand, the e-mails won't look good for Politico if and when Leibovich releases them. There are expected to be many from Allen and reporter Jake Sherman. There could be embarrassments for other outlets, including The Post, that played footsie with the 27-year-old Bardella as part of a culture in which journalists implicitly provide positive coverage in exchange for tidbits of news.

But this isn't real news. The items Bardella fed journalists were "exclusive" previews of announcements designed to make Issa look good. Now that Bardella has been fired, Issa has been embarrassed and a few reporters are set to be humiliated, it might be a good time for those who cover the news to regain a sense of detachment from those who make the news.