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Religious groups battle over Johnson Amendment as House Republicans eye last-minute repeal
By Karl Evers-Hillstrom
December 19, 2018

The Johnson Amendment, a provision in U.S. tax code that prohibits religious groups and 501(c)(3) organizations from endorsing, opposing or contributing to political candidates, has stood for more than six decades without much resistance.

That changed with the election of President Donald Trump, who promised to “totally destroy” the law. In May 2017, Trump signed an executive order to promote free speech for religious groups. Though the order did not overrule the longstanding law, Trump’s rhetoric emboldened a small group of conservative Christian groups to fight for a repeal.

An overwhelming majority of religious and nonprofit groups oppose repealing or weakening the Johnson Amendment. A group of 4,300 religious leaders opposed the repeal effort last year, saying the law “protects houses of worship from becoming centers of partisan politics.”

Another coalition of more than 5,800 charitable and religious organizations sent a “Community Letter in Support of Nonpartisanship” to Congress earlier this year. An August poll found that just 13 percent of Americans supported “allowing religious leaders to endorse candidates while retaining their tax-exempt status.”

That wave of opposition successfully defeated repeal efforts over the last two years, but a new tax bill from Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) once again includes a repeal of the amendment. The effort never seems to die out completely, and it follows two years of lobbying from a handful of conservative religious organizations.

The National Religious Broadcasters, a group that represents Christian media professionals and “enthusiastically” endorsed Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, advocated for the inclusion of a repeal in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and spent more than $51,000 on lobbying between 2017 and 2018. The repeal ultimately didn’t make it into the final bill.

“The sword of the Johnson Amendment has been permitted to dangle dangerously over the heads of pastors and charitable leaders for too long,” the group’s President Jerry Johnson said in a 2017 statement.

The Pat Robertson-founded Christian Coalition supported a repeal of the Johnson Amendment in 2017 and 2018 in its lobbying disclosure forms. Once an extremely powerful voice in American politics, Christian Coalition spent $6.4 million on lobbying in 1998 but experienced a consistent decline. It spent $54,000 in the last two years, with almost all of its lobbying efforts advocating for Republican policies.

Another conservative Christian group, the Family Research Council, has pushed to change the law, arguing 501(c)(3) groups should be able to advocate for candidates and contribute to them as long as it falls within the organization’s purpose. The group spent $65,000 lobbying between 2017 and 2018, with most of its attention going to bills relating to religious freedom and abortion.

Several groups, including Public Citizen, Anti-Defamation League, Common Cause, National Council of Nonprofit Associations and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, lobbied against changes to the law.

A wide variety of groups have weighed in on the issue, including arts organization Opera America, which argued a repeal “would pressure charitable organizations to take sides in partisan political campaigns and would erode the public trust in organizations that exist to serve community needs.”

With the growing prevalence of “dark money” in state and federal elections, experts say a full repeal of the Johnson Amendment would make things darker.

Campaign Legal Center Director of Federal Reform Brendan Fischer argued a repeal could release “super dark money” into elections by encouraging special interests to funnel anonymous money through 501(c)(3) organizations to get a charitable tax deduction.

The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the U.S. Treasury would lose $2.1 billion by weakening the amendment, as political donors shift their contributions to a new kind of dark money group to get a tax break.

The House Rules Committee will meet Wednesday to consider the bill. It’s unclear whether it will pass the House before the lame duck session ends, as a large number of GOP Representatives have already left the building.

Thank you.

Rail plan puts North and South Korea on track for closer ties

Border ceremony could lead to the reopening of road and train links between the two countries, officials hope

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/26/rail-plan-puts-north-and-south-korea-on-track-for-closer-ties?CMP=twt_gu

Worrisome.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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Thank you @USRepKCastor for deciding to no longer accept fossil fuel contributions!

This is an important move that should be considered square one for any climate leader.

Rejecting lobbyist money is the foundation for impactful policy that puts people before profits.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez added,
Justice Democrats
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BREAKING: We’re winning.

@USRepKCastor "will not accept contributions from the fossil fuel industr…
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Corporate Democrats Are Already Punching Left Ahead of 2020
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/corporate-democrats-are-already-punching-left-ahead-of-2020/


Well-informed public discussion is a major hazard for Democratic Party elites now eager to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the 2020 presidential nomination. A clear focus on key issues can bring to light the big political differences between Sanders and the party’s corporate-friendly candidates. One way to muddy the waters is to condemn people for pointing out facts that make those candidates look bad.

National polling shows that the U.S. public strongly favors bold policy proposals that Sanders has been championing for a long time. On issues ranging from climate change to Medicare for All to tuition-free public college to Wall Street power, the party’s base has been moving leftward, largely propelled by an upsurge of engagement from progressive young people. This momentum is a threat to the forces accustomed to dominating the Democratic Party.

In recent weeks, Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke has become a lightning rod in a gathering political storm—largely because of the vast hype about him from mass media and Democratic power brokers. At such times, when spin goes into overdrive, we need incisive factual information. Investigative journalist David Sirota provided it in a deeply researched Dec. 20 article, which The Guardian published under the headline, “Beto O’Rourke Frequently Voted for Republican Legislation, Analysis Reveals.”

Originating from the nonprofit Capital & Main news organization, the piece reported that “even as O’Rourke represented one of the most solidly Democratic congressional districts in the United States, he has frequently voted against the majority of House Democrats in support of Republican bills and Trump administration priorities.”

Progressives have good reasons to like some of O’Rourke’s positions. But Sirota’s reporting drilled down into his voting record, reviewing “the 167 votes O’Rourke has cast in the House in opposition to the majority of his own party during his six-year tenure in Congress. Many of those votes were not progressive dissents alongside other left-leaning lawmakers, but instead votes to help pass Republican-sponsored legislation.”

The meticulous and in-depth reporting by Sirota was a public service, but some angry reactions were classic instances of blaming the messenger for the unfavorable news. At times vitriolic, the denunciations of Sirota came from people who apparently would have preferred for O’Rourke’s actual voting record to remain shrouded in a hagiographic haze.

But it’s better to learn revealing political facts sooner rather than later. Thanks to Sirota’s coverage, for instance, we now know “O’Rourke has voted for GOP bills that his fellow Democratic lawmakers said reinforced Republicans’ anti-tax ideology, chipped away at the Affordable Care Act (ACA), weakened Wall Street regulations, boosted the fossil fuel industry and bolstered Donald Trump’s immigration policy.”

The backlash to Sirota’s news article was in keeping with a tweet two weeks earlier from Neera Tanden, the president of the influential and lavishly funded Center for American Progress, who has long been a major ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton. On Dec. 6, Tanden went over the top in response to a tweet from Sirota simply mentioning the fact that O’Rourke “is the #2 recipient of oil/gas industry campaign cash in the entire Congress.”

Tanden lashed out via Twitter, writing: “Oh look. A supporter of Bernie Sanders attacking a Democrat. This is seriously dangerous. We know Trump is in the White House and attacking Dems is doing Trump’s bidding. I hope Senator Sanders repudiates these attacks in 2019.”

Such calculated nonsense indicates just how panicky some powerful corporate Democrats are about Sanders’ likely presidential campaign—and just how anxious they are to protect corporate-oriented candidates from public scrutiny. The quest is to smother meaningful discussions of vital issues that should be center stage during the presidential campaign.

Corporate Democrats are gearing up to equate principled, fact-based critiques of their favored candidates with—in Tanden’s words—“seriously dangerous” attacks that are “doing Trump’s bidding.” Such demagogic rhetoric should be thrown in the political trash cans where it belongs.

This is not only about O’Rourke—it’s about the parade of Democratic contenders lined up to run for president. Should the candidates that mass media and party elites put forward as “progressive” be quickly embraced or carefully scrutinized? The question must be asked and answered.

Norman Solomon
Columnist
Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org...
Norman Solomon IN THIS ARTICLE:

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/12/17/how-come-so-many-bernie-bros-are-women-and-people-color
A recent CNN poll shows that among potential Democratic candidates in Iowa caucuses Senator Bernie Sanders has the highest approval rating from people of color. And the diversity of the Sanders-inspired left was on display at the Sanders Institute Gathering in Burlington Vermont earlier this month, which I covered on my podcast, The Katie Halper Show.

But empirical evidence has not stopped much of the corporate press—including many "liberal" or "progressive" outlets and commentators—from condemning the senator as having "a race problem."

Over the past week we saw Jonathan Martin of the New York Times (who happens to be white) claim that Sanders "has done little to broaden his political circle and has struggled to expand his appeal beyond his base of primarily white supporters." Meanwhile, Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones (also white), recently presented not only Sanders' supporters but the left movement in general as white. Linking to a written exchange between two Splinter journalists about Sanders, she tweeted, "In which white lefties have a debate that somehow does not discuss the fact that Bernie has no real purchase among the POC base of the Democratic party. And that problem has not improved for him, if anything it seems larger…"

Even those who openly mock the concerns of the white working class, undermine their own alleged commitment to marginalized voices when they ignore the diversity of Sanders' supporters.
But despite evidence like the new CNN poll, in which Sanders had the highest approval among non-white voters, outlets reporting on the survey studiously avoided mentioning that key finding which undermines the media narrative about Sanders' struggle to appeal to minority voters. While it's only one poll, and his favorability among voters of color isn't far ahead of Joe Biden's, it's newsworthy and significant precisely because it undermines the media narrative about Sanders' alleged struggle to appeal to non-white voters. On social media people who happily call Sanders #FakeJews, and defend Hillary Clinton's use of prison slave labor, continue to vilify Sanders as somehow "racist."

Most politicians could "do better," when it comes to addressing and speaking about racial inequities, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and classism. But the claim that Sanders is exceptionally problematic is absurd, given, for example, that Biden opposed integrated busing in the 1970's; mistreated Anita Hill during the confirmation process of Clarence Thomas; called Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy"; and said "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking."

Sanders' critics smear him as blinded by straight, white, male privilege. The mere mention of class gets Sanders and others condemned as class reductionists. The irony is that many of the most vocal critics attacking him for being insufficiently intersectional fail to address class altogether as an aspect of identity.

It's cruel, immoral and politically disastrous to dismiss the experience of working class people of all colors and backgrounds. But even those who openly mock the concerns of the white working class, undermine their own alleged commitment to marginalized voices when they ignore the diversity of Sanders' supporters. By ignoring the people of all ages, backgrounds, genders, sexuality, and ethnicity who support Sanders, they engage in the very erasure and marginalization of the women, people of color, LGBTQ people (and all the intersections thereof) that they claim to oppose.

The real story is very different, as I found at the Sanders Institute Gathering. Organized by Jane Sanders and David Driscoll, the 3-day event was more about the movement that Sanders helped spark than it was about the man. Though Sanders delivered the keynote and participated in several panels, the gathering focused on issues, bringing together leaders, thinkers, organizers and activists. Participants included physician and public health activist Abdul El-Sayed; San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz; actor and activist Danny Glover; executive director of Good Jobs Nation, Joseph Geevarghese; Our Revolution director, Nina Turner; Presente.org's executive director Matt Nelson; and many others. Over the weekend, the panels and roundtables addressed healthcare, climate change, criminal "injustice," civil rights, immigration, Puerto Rico, the housing crisis, the international progressive movement, and other issues with attention to class, race, and gender.

The following are excerpts from my interviews, which you can hear in full here and here:



Bernie Sanders: Bringing people together

The first person I ran into at the gathering was, believe it or not, Bernie Sanders himself. I told the senator, "One of the things that's really frustrating to progressives who support you is this narrative about your not being a feminist or not being anti-racist." Then I asked, "How can we push back on that, given how much the corporate media seems to be interested in that narrative?"

"What we are fighting for is to bring people together—Black and White and Latino, Native American and Asian American—around an agenda that speaks to the needs of ordinary Americans and not just the one percent."
—Sen. Bernie SandersTo which he replied:

What we are fighting for is to bring people together—Black and White and Latino, Native American and Asian American—around an agenda that speaks to the needs of ordinary Americans and not just the one percent. We want Medicare for All, we want to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, we don't want our kids to be living in a planet ravaged by climate change. So we are making progress. We expect opposition to continue. And we're gonna do the best in this fight that we can.

When you look at corporate media, you're looking at media owned by large, often international corporate conglomerates, which are owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country or in the world. They will do anything and everything they can do to protect their own interest and they will say anything about anybody that they want.

During a panel discussion later that day, he went spoke further about the dangers of divide-and-conquer strategies deployed by the enemies of equality:

When people are pushed aside, when people are hurting, you have demagogues who step in and say "Our problem is that Mexican who is picking strawberries." So you take that anger and frustration and pain that people are feeling and you turn them against people who are in worse shape than [they] are. And our job is to bring people together and say, "No. It is not some Mexican who is picking strawberries who is our enemy. It is Wall Street, it is the fossil fuel industries, it is the drug companies, it's the insurance companies." Let's stand together and take those people on.

Mayor Michael Tubbs: We absolutely have to be intersectional

I also interviewed Stockton, California Mayor Michael Tubbs, who—as he put it during a panel at the Gathering in Burlington—grew up a "poor black child on the south side of Stockton with an incarcerated father and a mother who had me at sixteen as a teenager. The things we fight for like affordable healthcare, affordable childcare, entitlement programs like WIC and Head Start all paved the way for me to be here today."

After the round table he spoke to me about how Sanders' 2016 run pushed him to embrace bolder more progressive ideas:

Senator Sanders came and spoke in Stockton in a presidential campaign, which was unheard of—someone running for president to come to Stockton. And I was able to introduce him. And I was also impressed with the number of people who were at that rally in the middle of the day like five- or six-thousand people. And Stockton's not a super rabid political town and I was like, "Wow, this message is resonating." And I think that gave me the confidence to be a little more bold in my policy prescriptions or pilot programs that we're doing in the city because I saw the hunger and the want for a government that is actually responsive and works for regular everyday people.

The mayor sees such bold progressive policies as crucial to defeating the equally bold but opposingly reactionary policies of Trumpism. There is "no middle ground," Tubbs said, when you're battling fascism. "Some of Trump's supporters wanted to see—and I don't think that discounts racial resentment—something bold, shocking, say something that's different, that's not vanilla."

"We absolutely have to be intersectional in how we think about things. It's not just one thing, we have to be intersectional in our policies and programs."
—Mayor Michael TubbsThe president's rhetoric and policies are xenophobic, Tubbs continued, and his solutions are bad. "But some of the problems he articulated with trade deals and the way they impact regular people are clear problems that we have to address," he said. "So I think it's about how do we give people something bold that relates to their everyday life that says [to them]: 'I am seen. I am heard. This leader cares about what I'm dealing with.'"

Tubbs sees intersectionality and multiracial organizing as challenging but crucial.

"Historically since Bacon's Rebellion," Tubbs explained, "poor white folks have voted against their best interest and I don't think we've done enough work to actually show people why is it in your best interest to cast your lot with these folks that don't look like you. We absolutely have to be intersectional in how we think about things. It's not just one thing, we have to be intersectional in our policies and programs."

Mayor Gus Newport: Neoliberals are single-issue people

Right before speaking to the mayor of Stockton, I interviewed the former mayor of another California city. Eighty-three year old Eugene "Gus" Newport worked with Malcolm X, is the great grandson of a slave and was the mayor of Berkeley from 1979-1986. He and Sanders were mayors at the same time and Newport had stumped for Bernie earlier during Sanders' unsuccessful runs for governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976.

Newport recalls that as the two campaigned in Burlington, a reporter asked Sanders, "Why does a Jew from Brooklyn, who's a Socialist, invite Gus Newport, a former black nationalist and a socialist from Berkeley to campaign for him in a state that is 97% white?" Bernie's answer was short: "Because we're gonna talk about the issues." After that, Newport explained, the reporters had no more questions. "I've loved him ever since," he said.

"Why does a Jew from Brooklyn, who's a Socialist, invite Gus Newport, a former black nationalist and a socialist from Berkeley to campaign for him in a state that is 97% white?" Bernie's answer was short: "Because we're gonna talk about the issues."
Sanders would later appoint Newport to the Democratic Unity Commission in 2017 in the wake of Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump. "I found out more than I ever wanted to know about the Democratic National Committee than I ever wanted to know," he said, but "nobody in the Democratic Party has ever spoken to all the issues in the depth that Bernie Sanders has."

When I asked him what he thought about the claim, often perpetuated by the media, that socialism is a white project, Newport responded:

The media—look who they work for, that's corporate America. You must remember Malcolm X was a socialist and Martin Luther kIng was moving towards socialism when he talked about the war against Vietnam. But a lot of Black leaders didn't go along. We've got to educate our own to become an integral part of this. And we're gonna do it. Danny Glover and I, we've gone down to Mississippi and South Carolina with Bernie. And the minute it appears that Bernie's going out there [to run in the 2020 primary], we're gonna go organize. I'm gonna be ready to campaign 9 to 10 months out of the year. I'm going to rehab now for this bad knee but as soon as I can—I'll do a lot of walking.

While some smear Sanders for being a "single issue" candidate, Newport believes it's the centrist "neoliberal" Democrats who deserve that label. "They are a single issue people," he declared. "They do not work around other issues [like class or poverty]. They're usually not a part of the working class. We're looking for real people."

Newport was thrilled that the Gathering—for which "Jane Sanders needs to be given all the credit in the world"—provided participants with "a challenge to pull ourselves together and make sure there's a worthwhile future for the next generation."

Though people often consider the intersection of race, gender and sexuality—class and age are often excluded. A popular narrative which pits people of different ages against each other is that of the spoiled, entitled and lazy millennial. Newport has sympathy, empathy and righteous outrage for the bleak economic reality that millennials face.

As he said at the Democratic Unity Commission, it is time to get "past our own egos and look at the issues." He added, "Too many of us who get into body politic eventually just focus on ourselves. We got retirement for life, we got healthcare for life. But what about the people? You gotta think of the reality: the millennials have had enough. Many of them know they won't be able to buy a house in their life times. They gotta pay student loans. So I'm proud. But we have a lot more work to do."

Naomi Klein: connecting the dots between all issues

In some ways climate change affects us all, as writer and journalist Naomi Klein told me: "Climate change impacts everything because we're all inside the climate so there's no prying anything apart from it."

"[The left has to] deepen its analysis of what racial capitalism means. Too often race is an add-on. Too often gender is an add-on. And we have to take that on board and do a better job."
—Naomi KleinIn some ways, climate disasters don't discriminate: "As anyone who's lived through a hurricane knows, no matter how rich you are or how powerful you are those winds are absolutely terrifying; no matter how rich you are or how powerful you are if the flames are coming towards your house in Malibu, you're not safe." But, Klein added class perspectives to her analysis. "Climate change doesn’t affect all of us equally." She explained:

It's tricky. [Climate change] isn't a leveler. In the short term what it does is exacerbate pre-existing inequalities. It's already here for people who are very precarious and who have no protections. And it is true that wealth can buy you protection for a couple of generations. And in the meantime there are enormous profit potentials. It's not very comforting that there's such a keen interest in Mars. Because that really does start to feel like a Plan B. Not that it's a realistic one.

Ultimately this is a system that will collapse on everyone's head... eventually. But in the short term there are definitely rooms that are going to collapse first.

I'm not making the argument that it has to be the issue to trump all other issues. I think we need to have an analysis that is all about connecting the dots between all of these issues.

Klein pointed to the distinctions among Democrats that the Sanders campaign exposed. There were liberal centrists who were liberal centrists "because they honestly didn’t believe that more progressive, more redistributive policies were popular or possible. But when they saw that they might be, they got on board." And then there were liberal centrists who didn't shift to the left because, it turned out, they "just opposed those ideas."

"We've all have our eyes opened by that," Klein said. "And then you realize, we're not all on the same side."

Roseann DeMoro: The duplicitous Bernie Bro smear

Former executive director of National Nurses United and of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, Roseann DeMoro does not mince words when describing the dishonesty of the latter group.

"I was just talking to Susan Sarandon," she explains. "We were all accused of being Bernie Bros. It's to delegitimize us. It's a lie. It's a duplicitous, ugly, malicious, horrendous, calculated lie. It's a calculated lie by the DNC. It's a PR campaign masquerading as politics."



I agreed that many of the people who spread the Bernie Bro smear are, indeed, disingenuous and malicious. Others, however, are more misinformed by the coordinated propaganda campaign which portrays Sanders as "bad on race and gender" whose supporters are a monolith of white men or people who want to curry their favor.

DeMoro objected to prioritizing identity over policy and profits over people. "People are suffering across the spectrum," she said. "They can't take care of their families or of themselves. Their personal dignity is going down the drain. Ultimately, what we were supposed to do was to buy into a neoliberal paradigm to elect a neoliberal woman who didn't share our values because she was a woman. Well, Margaret Thatcher was a woman."

Of course, as DeMoro and I agreed, one of the differences between Clinton and Thatcher is that neither Thatcher, nor her fans, ever claimed the Iron Lady was a feminist.

An ardent supporter for Sanders to run again in 2020, DeMoro is prepared for more of the smears which started in 2016 and never really went away. "They're gonna throw everything at us, when it comes to Bernie, and we're gonna be like Wonder Woman and bounce 'em right back. So put on your bracelets."

Maria Svart: You can’t understand class without understanding gender and race and vice versa

I also interviewed Maria Svart, the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for The Real News Network and my podcast. She also criticized the Bernie Bro narrative.

"Look at Bernie Sanders," Svart said, "the most popular politician in the country. And yet people that support Bernie are called Bernie Bros. You look at DSA. I am a Latina. I'm leading the organization. And there are many women of color in leadership, and yet we are characterized as a bunch of Bernie Bros."



Svartz went on to describe her own intersectional identity:

"You look at DSA. I am a Latina. I'm leading the organization. And there are many women of color in leadership, and yet we are characterized as a bunch of Bernie Bros."
—Maria Svart, Democratic Socialists of America
You can't understand class without understanding gender, and race—and vice versa. How can you possibly understand, for example, the life experience of my grandmother, who was an undocumented Mexican immigrant, without understanding the much bigger picture, the whole systems of our society, whether it's white supremacy or xenophobia or capitalism? They all intersect. And we need to talk about the complexity of that reality all the time, and we have to push back against lean-in feminism, mainstream feminism, all the time.

Whether or not Sanders decides to run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination (and in case you can't tell, I hope that he does), the movement he sparked is deepening its understanding and analyses of the intersectionality for the electoral and organizing work ahead in 2020 and beyond.


According to Klein, the left has to "deepen its analysis of what racial capitalism means. Too often race is an add-on. Too often gender is an add-on. And we have to take that on board and do a better job."

No matter what the landscape looks like in 2020, Klein continued, "we have to spend 2019 building as broad a coalition as possible, understanding as deeply as we possibly can that all these issues are so profoundly intertwined. To me what's clear is that if we fail, it is not because our ideas are unpopular. It is because we failed as organizers."

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Why Bernie Sanders Is (Still) the Most Progressive Choice for President

To See Who Stands With People Over Lobbyists, Progressive Campaign Pressures Democrats to Quickly Hold Vote on Medicare for All
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https://newrepublic.com/article/152811/left-taking-aim-pelosis-deficit-obsession
There’s also one major hurdle left to topple: the “pay as you go” rule, commonly known as “pay-go,” which demands that all new spending get offset with budget cuts or tax increases. Progressive critics argue that this creates an unlevel playing field, where Republicans blow giant holes in the tax code, as they did last year, while Democrats must pay fealty to the deficit. These critics are now mounting a fight to unshackle a future activist government.

Earlier this year, amid “internal divisions” in the party, Pelosi signaled her intention to put pay-go into the rules package. “Democrats are committed to pay-as-you-go,” her spokesman, Drew Hammill, said in June. Former Progressive Caucus chair Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) responded by calling pay-go “an absurd idea,” saying it’s “irresponsible to try to tie up Congress’s ability to respond to economic downturns or, in the current discussion, to slash programs.”

Pelosi has defended and expanded pay-go for over a decade. She first instituted it as a standing rule the day she received the speaker’s gavel in 2007, and was a driving force in passing the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act in 2010, signed by Barack Obama. That law puts the burden on the president to enforce across-the-board cuts if Congress violates pay-go. The prospect of any president implementing an unpopular hatchet job like that is remote. So the House rule looms large in this fight by constraining new spending at its source.

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Obviously, Pelosi and her allies on pay-go consider the rule good politics, allowing them to rebut charges about “tax and spend” liberals by insisting that every new program is fully paid for. If anybody actually cared about the deficit, instead of habitually using it as a weapon to rein in the opposition party, maybe that logic would be compelling. But even if the politics make sense, the rule leads to bad policy, as Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, which is quite close to House progressives, argues in a paper last week.

As Bivens explains, the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies were artificially made smaller because of pay-go rules. Democrats also created a long implementation period for Obamacare, with four years between signing and the effective date of the exchanges. That allowed adherence to pay-go within the ten-year budget window. But it also denied benefits to the public for an exceedingly long period, during which Republicans swept into virtually all levels of government.

A pay-go rule is even more dangerous in a time of economic downturn, when government needs to be the spender of last resort. “It is terrible economics to view federal budget deficits as always and everywhere bad,” Bivens writes, and that’s especially true when the economy is struggling. Democrats, he notes, were obsessed with President George W. Bush “running up the nation’s credit card” on wars and tax cuts when the real focus should have been on deregulation that was weakening financial markets.

When the Great Recession hit, the stimulus package was deliberately targeted lower than what was required to fix the economy. In 2010, Obama pivoted toward deficit reduction, and fiscal policy started to go negative in the middle of that year, while Democrats still controlled Congress and unemployment was still unforgivably high. Public sector jobs fell every year from 2009 to 2011. Bivens highlights a remarkable stat: “If this public spending following the Great Recession had followed the average path of the recoveries of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, a full recovery with unemployment around 4 percent would have been achieved by 2013.”

Pay-go can always be waived—as it was for the stimulus, and for the Republican tax cuts. But it creates an environment where legislation must be mindful of deficits first and helping people second. Bivens’s paper and other unconventional economic thinkers like Stephanie Kelton have taken their mission as re-educating Capitol Hill that the goals of fiscal policy must be broader than the budget deficit.

The Trump tax cuts actually provide a wide range of “pay-fors” that could be used to fulfill pay-go—just reverse the gifts to corporations and the wealthy to pay for programs. But it still puts Democrats in a box, having to propose tax increases up front, which Republicans gleefully broadcast. Republicans get to play Santa Claus, able to promise endless tax cuts and endless spending, while Democrats pray that voters see them as the party of fiscal responsibility.

Beth Houston ⏳
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Millions are familiar w/the Wizard of Oz. Remember when the curtain got drawn back to expose the manipulation?

That's what Progressives are doing. By reviewing a candidate's record/platform we're determining if they'll be voting on behalf of the 1% or 99%.

Nothing wrong w/that.

Personally I find the 'progressives' a bit cultish and arrogant in thinking they are the ones to sit in judgement with their yardsticks of progressive measurements.

When you finally get universal healthcare and a meaningful response to global warming, you’ll be grateful people made serious demands of lawmakers and embarrassed that we had to do it with no help from you.

You mean a carbon tax. The standard of living will be in the toilet and American wealth and power will be a thing of the past. In other words, the world will really be on borrowed time.

Absolutely. They’ve won one low turnout primary race and they think they’ve taken over the soul of America and the other 90% of us are to be shat upon and shunned at all times.

Beth Houston ⏳
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@MacBethSpeaks
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Those extinction bound estbl. Dems sure have a way with words, don't they?

Tone deafness brought to unimaginable heights - widely amplified by their colluding neo-lib MSM - much to the delight of their low-info viewers who allow corporate pundits to define "reality" for them.Beth Houston ⏳ added,
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When asked about the hardships young people face (exorbitant student loans, underemployment, etc), neoliberal centrist Biden said, “The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break. No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break” https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-says-millennials-dont-have-it-tough-780348 …
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And all their energy will be concentrated into a self-defeating, circular firing squad to damage any democratic candidate who isn't Bernie.
They either don't see or don't care about how their encouragement of disunity makes it easier for the REAL opponents.

A thumbs-up on that last sentiment. Sanders is a carpet-bagger. He was never a Democrat, and vaunted his independent stance--that is, until he wanted to run for president, and needed money and wide-spread support. He made promises which, as a long-serving congressman, he knew he could not keep given the Republican control of Congress. Now they want to run him again? Dog help us. What the Democrats need to do is to take over the Congress. That is far more important than taking the presidency, which is actually a relative powerless position. (Something that vexes the fat boy in the White House every day.)

We have to forget about the geezers, take a long-term view, and get Democrats into Congress. It would be nice to dump Plump, but taking over Congress is far more important, and Sanders did nothing to contribute to that effort in 2016.

(Bold added by me)
He knew it, and any honest person who'd been listening and watching him for the last several years knew it. It takes a special kind of googly-eyed hero-worshipping denial to think he was going to do any of the **** he preaches. He's been spouting the exact same chicken-in-every-pot lines the whole 38 years he's been in D.C.




He certainly didn't help, did he? I think yours is a very interesting take on the relative importance of dumping 45 vs getting control of congress, and I think you're right. Gotta say though that it'd be a hell of a lot more to me than just "nice" to get rid of that amoral fraudulent sack.

Oh, I'd like to see someone kick him in his fat ass, right down the drive to Pennsylvania Avenue. But I think the Democrats need to keep their eyes on the prize, and Congress is the real prize right now. Of course, in my own, never humble opinion.