[(TPE)]
OOPS! Here it is,
you decide
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Republicans party has become the “Almond Joy Party”. Sometime they
act like a nut and sometime they don’t.
Editorial Comments by Clarence Piner Jr
The Sequester was set up by the
Republicans in congress to block the President 2013 agenda. If you recall the
Republicans in congress stated in President Obama first term they were going to
do everything in their power to make sure he failed. Why would you want the
leader of our country to failed? These are the same bible toughing; flag waving
so call Americans who have been thumbing their nose at people of color all of
their lives. When you are so brazen and callous with your words Republicans
must believe that the people are with them and their agenda. The polls tell
them a different story however; it’s unclear to me what statement the people
are sending. One thing I have recognized is the Americans people have a nasty
habit of being ill informed about issues that affect them. They tend to vote
against their best interest even when they have been clearly given the
information to make an informed decision.
Sequestration was put into effect
as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. Both parties had already agreed to
about $1 trillion in cuts but couldn’t agree on what to do next to get the nation's
fiscal house in order. They were also desperate to raise the national borrowing
limit to prevent a default an occurrence that would arguably inflict more
damage than sequestration. To achieve both goals raising the borrowing limit
and improving the nation’s fiscal standing they borrowed from a Reagan-era law.
The idea was simple: Schedule
automatic cuts for the future that were so harmful to everybody that Congress
would be compelled to implement better, smarter cuts before they hit.
Sequestration was initially scheduled for the start of the year. Lawmakers
delayed it then, but it now seems unlikely that anything will be done before it
goes into effect on March 1 (although it could be addressed retroactively).
If these guys and gals were
really serious about solving the nation debt there is a very simple solution to
fix the budget deficit short fall. My solution is to pass the “American Job
Act” sent to Congress in August 2011. If congress put people to work doing all
the repairs that needed in this country it seem to me that will go a long ways
in reducing our deficit. “What congress
needs to work on are jobs”. I know they will not do that because they are
concerned with their right wing Tea Party members. What they will say or worse
yet do with their votes. This is a prime case of putting your personal interest
above the interests of the people whom sent you to public office. I think this
is a dawn shame that politicians put their business ahead of the business of
the people who vote them into office. This is why we need “terms limits” to
control these politicians. If we never get the courage to bring these
politicians under control then we deserved whatever they give us. I can tell
you this if this continues we will have a broken republic one in which we will
never survives. Left to their own devises we will not like what they have in
mind. Republicans politicians will not be happy until everyone and everything
is under their complete control.
When Americans are dealing with
President Obama and anything he and his administration try to do they say one
thing but the minute he is out of site they say and do something difference.
They continue to elect people who are against everything they stand for or
maybe they are running a game on everybody including themselves. America, the
right wing Tea Party members are not on your side.
In my opinion Republicans
politicians don’t want any progress made or anything done by the Obama
administration regardless of how much good it will do for the country. With
bibles in one hand and a U.S. flag in the other all you hear from these flag
waving people is how much they love America. Well you could fool me with that
kind of love who need enemies.
They want things to remain as
they were in the eighteen hundreds. There is one exception to this is their
wallets. It seem to me during my life time Republican politicians at all levels
of government have been working overtime to make sure they remain in office and
very few others in particular people of color can gain any political office. By
blocking the vote and gerrymandering the voting districts they are able to stay
in power. They are stealing as much as possible from the middle class to
support their greedy life styles. They want it all; just listen to what they say
and what they do. Republicans have forgotten that America was built by the
“middle class” and the “rich class” doesn’t care. They really wish the middle
class would go away never to be heard from again. I am not sure what they would
do then. I guess they would get a cheaper work force of “guess workers” from
who knows where.
Some of you are saying, what are
you talking about? I say all you need to do is look at what all these rich
Republicans are doing with trying to get rid of “labor unions”. These unions
stand up for its members to help them get higher wager and better benefits. The
latest thing in this area is trying to get minimal wage raised and listen to
all of the hype over that. Guess what, Republicans are against that too.
Anything good for Americans, Republicans hate it and they are doing everything
in their power to screw it up. These are the same people with the bible in one
hand and the flag in the other claiming how much they love America. These guys
and gals aren’t for anything they are against everything. Republicans in
Washington liked heath care as soon as President Obama came on board with their
idea they didn’t like it anymore. You can see this all over the place. America
we must fire these “do nothing” legislators their time is up.
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What Is Sequestration
and What Does It Mean for Me?
Updated: February 28, 2013
| 11:52 a.m.
February 26, 2013 | 6:30 a.m.
February 26, 2013 | 6:30 a.m.
President Obama speaks about the
sequester, as he stands with emergency responders, Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013, in
the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office. (AP
Photo/Charles Dharapak)
The White House and Republicans
are trading blame over massive spending cuts scheduled to take effect on Friday
and an agreement to head off the reductions looks increasingly unlikely. How
the $85 billion reduction will be implemented depends on a lot of factors, some
of which aren’t yet clear. What is clear is that the spending cuts are broad,
bad for states, bad for business, bad for the economy, and bad for a lot of
people.
If you like to fly, are an
educator, have kids in school, work for the federal government, are poor, or
simply participate in the economy (aka anyone), sequestration could impact your
life.
The cuts could cost nearly 750,000
jobs by the end of the year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget
Office. No one expects sequestration to stay in place for long, though—the
effects are just too severe for lawmakers to do nothing about them. And the
immediate impact of the cuts is overhyped.
But here’s how sequestration
would affect your life if Congress doesn't act quickly to undo it, starting
with some background. (Scroll down to skip to the human impact.)
What is sequestration?
Sequestration is $1.2 trillion in
automatic spending cuts due to go into effect over the next 10 years, with
roughly $85 billion slated for this year. Make no mistake, a lot of people in
both parties want to cut spending. The reason so many people hate
sequestration, though, is that agencies and departments don’t have any input on
how it goes into effect—the spending cuts are implemented across the board.
Whose idea was it anyway?
It’s been widely reported that the idea for sequestration
came from Jack Lew, who was Obama’s budget director at the time and went on to
become his chief of staff and is now his Treasury secretary nominee. But to
stop there misses the point, many argue.
Sequestration was put into effect
as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. Both parties had already agreed to
about $1 trillion in cuts but couldn’t agree on what to do next to get the
nation's fiscal house in order. They were also desperate to raise the national
borrowing limit to prevent a default—an occurrence that would arguably inflict
more damage than sequestration. To achieve both goals—raising the borrowing
limit and improving the nation’s fiscal standing—they borrowed from a
Reagan-era law.
The idea was simple: Schedule
automatic cuts for the future that were so harmful to everybody that Congress
would be compelled to implement better, smarter cuts before they hit.
Sequestration was initially scheduled for the start of the year. Lawmakers
delayed it then, but it now seems unlikely that anything will be done before it
goes into effect on March 1 (although it could be addressed retroactively).
Ok, how will it effect me?
Sequestration
could affect you if you fit any of the following profiles.
Do
you work for the Pentagon? If so, you may be one of 800,000 civilian employees
who face possible unpaid leave after sequestration goes into effect. “There is
no mistaking that the rigid nature of the cuts forced upon this department, and
their scale, will result in a serious erosion of readiness across the force,”
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told employees in a
memo last week.
Are
you a fan of flying? Well, if nothing is done, airline passengers could start
seeing meaningful delays by April 1 under sequestration. That’s because the
Federal Aviation Administration, which is facing $600 million in cuts, may have
to start furloughing thousands of employees, Transportation Secretary and
former Republican lawmaker Ray Lahood said on Friday.
The cuts could also lead to the closing of hundreds of air traffic control
towers, making it harder for planes to land and take off.
Are
you a woman (or infant or child) who receives assistance through the
government’s Women, Infants and Children program? If so, you may become one of
the 600,000 dropped from
the program after sequestration goes into effect. The federal Head Start
program, which seeks to prepare young low-income children for school, also
faces cuts. Up to 70,000 of those kids could lose access to the program,
according to Health and Human Services
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
Are
you a military veteran or a dependent of an active service member? If you are
and rely on the military’s Tricare health insurance program, your benefits
could be affected. The program faces a possible $3 billion shortfall under
sequestration and, as The New York Times’ editorial board put it,
“could lead to denial of elective medical care” for those two groups.
If you’re an educator your job
might be affected by sequestration. The White House on Sunday outlined how
sequestration could affect individuals in each state. Nationwide, 10,000
teachers and 7,200 special education teachers, aides, and other staff could be
dropped as a result of cuts to federal spending on local education. The Huffington Post made a handy chart depicting the state-by-state
data:
Do you love the outdoors? Hope
you like garbage. And bears. Park administrators in Yosemite National Park say
the coming spending cuts could lead to less trash collection, which
could lead to more bears at campgrounds. The Cape Cod National Seashore plans
to shutter a visitor center, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park will close
five campgrounds. The way each park will deal with sequestration varies, according to Time magazine, but there is one constant: It’s
going to affect the visitor experience.
You don’t need to be in any of
the above categories to feel the impact of sequestration. You simply have to be
a participant in the economy. (Which you are if you have a job or spend money
on things.) That’s because sequestration would slow down economic growth,
according to various projections. And economic growth has a
far-ranging impact on everything from how much consumers spend to how much
businesses hire and invest. Of course, it’s highly unlikely lawmakers will let
things get to that point. Then again, sequestration was never expected to go
into effect in the first place.
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THE
COOK REPORT
The Threat to
Republicans
A new poll shows the majority of
Americans believe the party is "out of touch" and "too
extreme."
This article appeared in print
as Bad to the Bone
Updated:
March 1, 2013 | 8:26 a.m.
February 28, 2013 | 2:45 p.m.
February 28, 2013 | 2:45 p.m.
A recent poll by the Pew Research
Center attracted a great deal of attention because it found that 62 percent of
respondents agreed with the statement that the Republican Party was “out of
touch with the American people”; only 33 percent disagreed. Even 36 percent of
Republicans thought their party was out of touch. Sixty-five percent of
independents also held that view, and, unsurprisingly, 77 percent of Democrats.
By 52 percent to 42 percent, Americans said the Republican Party was “too
extreme.” Conversely, only 39 percent saw the Democratic Party as too extreme,
while 56 percent did not.
As Republicans enter this month
of budget battles, their leaders seem keenly aware of these numbers. Among
rank-and-file GOP members of Congress, it’s a different story. Some acknowledge
the party’s problems, but others do not. The divisions in the ranks are
reflected in their approaches to sequestration. One group wants to give House Speaker
John Boehner a free hand to negotiate a deal. Another faction doesn’t
particularly like sequestration but thinks that, for all of its problems, it is
perhaps the only way to get meaningful budget cuts. A third group thinks that
the cuts slated under sequestration don’t go nearly far enough. Given these
divergent viewpoints, it is no wonder the GOP leadership is having a hard time.
But there is still a threat that
public ire is aimed more institutionally—at Congress, at Washington, and at all
politicians who work in Washington. The turbulence caused by this universal
anger could manifest itself in many ways, selectively hurting members of both
parties, depending on their political circumstances. So all sides should take
notice of the mounting public disgust.
But, for Republicans, worrying
about a generic anti-Washington, anti-incumbent dynamic is something of a
luxury. More pressing is the damage occurring to their party’s fabric.
In upcoming polls, keep an eye on
party identification, both normal three-way party identification (Democrat,
Republican, independent) as well as “leaned party identification,” when
pollsters push the independents to see if they lean toward one party. If you
begin to find the gap between self-identified Democrats and Republicans
widening—it was 8 points on Election Day—it is a sign of more than just a flesh
wound; it has progressed to bone damage.
The new Pew poll, for example,
found that 32 percent of respondents identified with Democrats, 10 points more
than the 22 percent who called themselves Republicans; 41 percent initially
called themselves independents. When the independents were pushed and asked
which side they leaned toward, Democrats’ share rose to 51 percent. Republicans
moved up to 37 percent, opening up a 14-point gap between the two parties. That
is substantially wider than the 9.6 percentage point gap in leaned party
identification that Pew Research found from all its polling for 2012.
Of course, one poll isn’t a
trend. Heck, two or three don’t really make a trend, but given today’s
pulsating political dynamics, this measurement is worth watching. The “lean”
metric allows us to see the bottom-line impact on the public’s perception of
the parties, a more significant finding than polling results that can be influenced
by a question’s wording—when, for example, various pollsters ask which party
should be “blamed” or held “more responsible” for layoffs or government
shutdowns. The media tend to give such charged questions a great deal of
prominence, drawing grand conclusions that may or may not be backed up by more
durable data.
Democrats had an 8 percentage
point advantage in pure party identification for all of Pew’s 2012 polling: 33
percent called themselves Democrats, and 25 percent said they were Republicans.
The current 14-point gap in leaned party identification, 51 percent leaned
identification for Democrats, 37 percent for Republicans, is sobering. This is
wider than what we are used to, and if the trend continues, it means the bone
damage is burrowing toward the marrow.
People’s political preferences
start off in a fluid, almost liquid state. Over time, attitudes start to jell
and, eventually, if the process is uninterrupted, gradually turn solid and very
difficult to change. This holds true to a certain extent among all voters, but
it particularly applies to young people. Americans tend to develop their
political philosophy and partisan leanings in their teens and 20s; once they
get into their 30s, they are less likely to change, and into their 40s and beyond,
even less likely. That’s why we have generational voting patterns. Americans
who grew up during the Great Depression vote differently from baby boomers.
Those voters who came of age politically during the Carter-Reagan presidencies
have tended to vote pretty strongly Republican. Will those growing up in the
next cohort swing strongly in the other direction?
This article appeared in the
Saturday, March 2, 2013 edition of National Journal.
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President
Obama’s Losing Hand on the Sequester Fight
By spending all his political capital over the budget cuts, the president
risks losing it all on immigration reform and gun control.
Updated:
February 28, 2013 | 10:23 a.m.
February 28, 2013 | 8:53 a.m.
February 28, 2013 | 8:53 a.m.
To
understand why the White House is aggressively contesting Bob Woodward’s
account of who’s responsible for the sequester, you only have to take a look at
how high the political stakes are for President Obama. Instead of tactically
conceding on a short-term fix that would provide for smarter spending cuts --
as the Republicans did during the fiscal-cliff fight, when the White House held
more leverage -- Obama has chosen to pick a fight over the fairness of deep
spending cuts, at the expense of more significant items on his plate.
Now
the White House’s entire agenda, from guns to immigration, is in jeopardy, and
the president’s approval is taking a hit, with much more on the line in the
coming month.
The
headlines from the NBC/Wall
Street Journal poll,
released Wednesday, seemed like good news for the president, but there are
plenty of warning signs embedded within the survey. President’s Obama’s
job-approval rating dropped 3 points overall since last December, to 50
percent, and his economic job approval is a mediocre 44 percent, down 5 points
in the past two months. Despite the GOP’s deep unpopularity, Democrats hold
only a statistically insignificant 2-point edge, 32 percent to 30 percent, over
which party was best able to handle the economy. Republicans hold a 16-point
edge on which party is best-equipped to control spending, even higher than
their pre-2010 midterm standing.
Most
notably, on the sequester, the White House held only a narrow advantage when
respondents were presented the arguments for and against it. A bare 50 percent
majority agreed with the president’s argument that the cuts “are too severe,”
while 46 percent argued it is “time for dramatic measures.” Asked what Congress
should do, 53 percent supported either keeping the cuts or implementing more
significant spending cuts, with 37 percent backing a plan with fewer cuts. It’s
hardly the sign of a presidential mandate on the subject, and a reminder that
there is widespread concern over spending and the federal debt.
The
White House’s strategy to exaggerate the immediate impact of the cuts has
backfired, at least to some degree. The Washington Post reported that Education Secretary Arne
Duncan falsely claimed that public school teachers were
already receiving pink slips. The Pew Research Center this week found that only 30
percent of voters thought the spending cuts would have an impact on their
personal finances – much lower than the 43 percent who believed the fiscal cliff
posed a danger on that front.
And
even if you concede that the president holds the upper hand in the coming month
as the cuts are implemented (a point that seems awfully tenuous), it’s worth
remembering the cost he’s paying for putting all his focus on the sequester. As
I pointed out in last week’s
column, there’s
a reason why presidents from both parties have angered their bases by promoting
legislation to the middle – be it Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, George W.
Bush’s education package or George H.W. Bush’s tax hike.
Obama
has a lot more to gain politically on immigration and gun control -- winning
long-term issues for Democrats -- and there’s plenty of evidence that
congressional Democrats and Republicans are (gasp!) working together to forge
bipartisan agreement. On gun control, liberal Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York
and conservative Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma are negotiating a possible deal
that would expand background checks for gun sales, with signs that some of the
Senate Republican Caucus would be on board. On immigration, Republican leaders
are all but begging for a deal so they can improve their outreach with
Hispanics well before the 2016 presidential election. Passing bipartisan
immigration reform and some gun-control measures would provide Obama with a
long-term legacy and provide Democrats with twin political victories of their
own heading into the midterms.
But
these issues also hang at the mercy of congressional Republicans, who don’t
have much goodwill with this White House. Poisoning the well on a sequester
fight focuses on the short game instead of the long. Picking fights with Bob
Woodward underscores how much this White House has gambled on the issue, and
how much it has to lose. Already, Democrats are concerned there’s no backup
plan on gun control if the Schumer-Coburn negotiations break down. Reaching a
deal on immigration, meanwhile, relies on winning over some skeptical House
Republicans, whom the president has been relentlessly bashing in this sequester
fight.
What’s
ironic is that the much-maligned Congress is actually pretty close on crafting
bipartisan legislation on long-intractable subjects of gun control and immigration.
But it’s the White House, with the political attention span of a cable news
cycle, that is risking losing it all for betting Obama will come out ahead in
this messy fiscal fight.
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OFF
TO THE RACES
Pain From
Sequester Could Make Voters Angry At Both Parties
As all signs point to
sequestration taking effect, politicians need to realize there will be some
casualties.
This
article appeared in print as Collateral Damage
Updated:
February 26, 2013 | 8:36 a.m.
February 25, 2013 | 6:30 p.m.
February 25, 2013 | 6:30 p.m.
Cruelest cuts: Those the sequester hurts could
blame both parties for the pain. (AP/Al Behrman)
Now that budget sequestration
seems inevitable, the remaining question is, who gets hurt? The White House and
Democrats seem supremely confident that the public will cast blame on
congressional Republicans. To be sure, the GOP, in its weakened condition, is
blamed for virtually everything short of the weather and the flu. This column a
few weeks ago likened the party’s plight to a sports team that has virtually
all of the officials’ calls going against it, deserved or not. In other words,
this is not a fun time to be a Republican on Capitol Hill.
Having said that, assuming that
sequestration kicks in, with $85 billion in mandatory budget cuts pretty much
across the board—exempting only Social Security, Medicaid, and, to a lesser
extent, Medicare, and disproportionately hitting defense—many Americans will
begin to feel some inconvenience after a few days, and a few will feel real
pain. It’s only when, or if, it persists for a week or more and affects more
people that impatience and annoyance will turn into anger, then rage. At that
point, it becomes difficult to know whether voters will still vent these
emotions exclusively at Republicans. Democrats will likely get tarnished as
well, with voters echoing Mercutio’s call for “a plague on both your houses.”
We live in a period when
politicians tend to see the world in a binary fashion; everything is either a
one or a zero, and there is a clear winner and a clear loser in every
situation. But with the sequester, at least after the first few days, it’s
possible that both sides could lose, that people won’t distinguish between
Democrats or Republicans but will instead excoriate “those politicians in
Washington” as a whole.
As a practical matter, thanks to
the phenomenon that journalist Bill Bishop calls “the clustering of like-minded
America” in his terrific book, The Big Sort, as well as to redistricting and
the general power of incumbency, very few House members live in potentially
competitive congressional districts. For that matter, the first and third
factors apply to the Senate as well. According to The Cook Political Report,
208 of 234 House Republicans are from districts currently rated “Solid
Republican” and were won by the GOP in November. Similarly, 166 of 201 House
Democrats are in “Solid Democratic” districts won by their party last year. In
other words, only 26 Republican and 35 Democratic House seats are currently
competitive or even potentially competitive (with our “Toss-Up” and “Lean
Democratic” or “Lean Republican” categories considered competitive, and “Likely
Democratic” or “Likely Republican” considered just potentially competitive).
And those numbers include members who either have already announced or will at
some point announce retirements. Similarly, most senators come from what are
effectively one-party states or those where candidates of one party have a
distinct advantage.
But even districts and states
that are normally neither competitive nor potentially competitive can get that
way in the face of public anguish and rage. During these times, anger against
Washington reaches a certain point and creates an environment in which an
unusually large (relatively speaking) number of incumbents either lose or have
surprisingly close primary contests. For those looking at running for the
Senate, a governor’s mansion, or the White House, being tagged as a candidate
running from Congress is no prize either. In short, this kind of debacle hurts
all incumbents, regardless of whether they wear red or blue jerseys.
In the end, though, it’s not the
politics that matters; it is the hardship for real people. It’s the nonelected
who are the innocent collateral damage in such a partisan fight. They are the
ones hurt by the standoff—people who had no say in the decisions not to reach a
compromise before it is too late. And that is the group President Obama and
Democrats, the 2012 election victors, should think about. How many of these
people who voted for the president and his party, thinking they would be
protected from gridlock, might now feel let down, concluding that maybe “all of
those people in Washington are the problem”? That’s why the rather cavalier
attitude that some Democratic operatives seem to have—relishing this fight,
anxious to score yet another win over Republicans—could be risky. Hubris is
never a good thing.
We all remember the scene in the
cinematic masterpiece The Godfather when the mafia gangs are poised for war,
threatening to “go to the mattresses.” There is a sense of dread, knowing there
will be casualties. Politicians going into this fight should all know there
will be casualties.
This article appeared in the
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 edition of National Journal Daily.
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Is the White
House's political strategy on sequestration going to be shredded? (AP
Photo/Steve Helber)
President Obama stood in front of
a giant five-blade propeller at a Newport News, Va., shipbuilding plant on
Tuesday, warning the public about the dire “meat-cleaver approach” that
automatic budget cuts will have on the economy. It was the third time this
month the president took his case on sequestration to the public.
But even as Obama proclaims dire
consequences from the cuts, he is already hedging his bets.
“The impact of this policy won’t
be felt overnight, but it will be real,” the president said.
This was a key concession. With
further skirmishes over the debt ceiling and government funding not far off,
the White House finds itself in choppy political waters for the first time
since Obama won reelection. Its best-case political course hinges on the
economy screeching to a halt, assumes that Republicans will again cave on
revenues, and relies on the public being on his side. It’s a political gamble
that could go bust.
The stakes for Obama could not be
higher. At risk are high-priority items such as immigration reform and gun
control, which are languishing as the sequester hogs the
limelight. It’s not only the president’s agenda that could be at risk--the
full-time attention to the fiscal fight is sucking valuable attention on
more-pressing progressive priorities.
“There's real risk in saying that
the sky is falling … especially if you consider that sequestration is
structured to come in slowly,” said William Galston, a former adviser to
President Clinton who is now with the Brookings Institution. “If after three
weeks people look around and the sky is where it traditionally has been. ... he
has to be careful he doesn't get too far out on that limb.”
There are signs, though, that the
administration has gone in that direction. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said
pink slips have been issued to teachers because of sequestration, which The Washington Post showed
to be false. Arguing his case that the cuts would damage national security,
Obama suggested recently that criminals would be let go, which PolitiFact rated as mostly false.
One way to explain why the White
House is taking its case to the public is Obama's comfortable reelection
victory in November. The White House wielded leverage over House Republicans as
the Bush tax cuts were expiring, and the president repeatedly made the case
that the public was on his side on taxes. His argument eventually prevailed,
and the Bush tax cuts were made permanent on people who earned $400,000 and
under. But now Republicans are in no mood to put more revenues on the table.
“The problem is this: There is
essentially zero-percent chance that the Republicans will agree to any further
revenue increases outside a grand bargain,” Galston said. “It's not going to
happen. They deeply resent the way Obama forced them to swallow tax increases.
Obama may have believed once he got them to give a little, they would give
more.”
And while it’s nearly certain the
GOP won’t offer further revenues, it’s far from clear that the public sides with
the president over the cuts. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that a majority of
Americans support cuts to the budget. More than half--53 percent--want Congress
to leave the current cuts in place or cut even more. When asked to choose
either the president’s argument that the cuts are too severe or whether it’s
time for more dramatic reductions, Americans were nearly split, with 50 percent
siding with Obama’s argument and 46 percent with the GOP's. As my
colleague Josh Kraushaar pointed out, the poll contained
other warning signs: The president’s job approval is down 3 points in the last
two months, and while the GOP is unpopular Democrats have only a 2-point edge,
32 percent to 30 percent, on the question of who can best handle the economy.
“I don't know that an additional
$85 billion in cuts—I don't know how draconian that will be," said a
senior Democratic strategist and former Hill leadership aide. “During the
campaign, it was all about taxes, and I think they feel emboldened that it
helps them."
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House
Speaker John Boehner speaks to reporters after a House GOP meeting on the debt
ceiling in July 2011. (Chet Susslin)
Updated:
March 1, 2013 | 6:04 p.m.
March 1, 2013 | 12:53 p.m.
March 1, 2013 | 12:53 p.m.
Who
really birthed the sequester?
To hear Republicans tell it, the White House all but single-handedly spawned
the huge across-the-board cuts to defense and domestic programs, the
enforcement “trigger” of the summer 2011 debt-ceiling deal.
But is there really any “Rosebud”
moment to be recollected from that year's agonizing fiscal negotiations to
illustrate that Obama or any other individual, or party, was solely responsible
for conceiving this idea?
House Speaker John Boehner,
R-Ohio, and other Republicans keep insisting that there is, even while there
can be no dispute that they had to collaborate with Democrats in seeing the
sequester become law. Yet Republicans still see some gain in saying it was
Obama who came up with the idea for the sequester, explaining that the
president didn’t want the debt limit to get in the way of his 2012 presidential
campaign. Lately, they have sought to brand the cuts the
"Obamaquester."
Support for this Republican
mantra gained momentum with the release in September of the book The Price of Politics,
by Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward. In
it, Woodward asserts that the sequester was the idea of then-Office
of Management and Budget Director Jacob Lew and White House Director of
Legislative Affairs Rob Nabors. The debate got fresh fodder last weekend when Woodward wrote an op-ed article on the same topic for The Post.
But Democrats and senior administration
officials have said that is not the complete picture and that Boehner and other
Republicans have been engaging in revisionist history by disingenuously trying
to downplay their contributing roles. For instance, Rep. Chris Van Hollen of
Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, has told National Journal: “I find it curious that the speaker
is now disavowing the deal [the final 2011 Budget Control Act, including
the sequestration], considering he had said he got 98 percent of what he
wanted.” He was referring to Boehner saying during an interview aired Aug. 1,
2011, on the CBS Evening News that “when
you look at this final agreement that we came to with the White House, I got 98
percent of what I wanted. I’m pretty happy.”
And on the House floor Thursday,
Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland pushed back on the GOP effort to blame
the White House for the sequester.
In fact, Hoyer noted, six
days before Republicans claimed Nabors first presented
the sequester idea to them on Capitol Hill during a July 25, 2011, meeting, a
House Republican bill had been passed to limit government spending — known as
the “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act” — that “had as its fallback a sequester if the
objectives of that bill were not reached.”
Boehner spokesman Michael Steel
responded: “The idea of a sequester dates back to Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act in
the 1980s. No one is saying President Obama—or Jack Lew—invented it. The point
is that they insisted it be included in the Budget Control Act, because they didn’t
want to face another debate over the debt limit before the president's
reelection.”
With $85 billion in first-year
sequestration cuts set to kick in on Friday, it’s worth looking back on how the
idea came to be—if for no other reason than to offer a lesson in how
Republicans and Democrats, Congress and the White House make policy when
there’s a gun to their heads, as was the case in the summer of 2011 when the
debt-limit crisis loomed over Washington.
Senior congressional Republican
aides claim that the first time a sequester plan was broached was during a
visit to the Capitol on July 25, 2011, from Nabors, who met with Boehner’s
then-chief of staff, Barry Jackson, and the speaker’s policy director, Brett
Loper.
What Nabors had to deliver at
that meeting was a sequester concept devised at the White House by Lew and
others as a way to end months of haggling over raising the debt ceiling.
At that time, Republicans and
Democrats deadlocked over rival approaches to extend the $14.3 trillion debt
ceiling. There were just 10 days left before the Aug. 2 deadline by which the
Treasury Department said the nation would lose the ability to pay all of its
bills.
Nabors is described as putting
forth to Jackson and Loper during that closed-door meeting a “sequester” plan
as the White House’s latest compromise. Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid also got a similar rundown. The idea was not novel or plucked out of
thin air; such an enforcement process dated from at least the Balanced Budget
and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985—better known as the
Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act—which set deficit targets and called for a sequester
to go into effect if they were not met.
In this case, the idea was
pitched as a way to address what had been a key issue: how to accommodate
congressional Republicans’ demands for dollar-for-dollar spending cuts in
return for Obama’s request to raise the borrowing authority by $2.1
trillion—and to authorize that entire amount in a single vote so that another
debt-ceiling crisis would not have to be addressed during the 2012 election
year.
The two sides were seen as fast
agreeing on about $900 billion in cuts, some identified in earlier bipartisan
negotiations. But the rub against doing what Obama wanted was the question of
how to ensure Congress would follow through with the remaining roughly $1.2
trillion in cuts once the full amount of the debt ceiling he was requesting was
already approved. The White House’s proposed sequester would compel Congress to
follow through with the further reductions by November or face unappealing
automatic cuts, split between domestic and defense spending.
In response, Boehner aides
Jackson and Loper expressed reluctance and skepticism, suggesting to Nabors
that this “sequester” was not as good a plan as one the House Republicans
already had. The Republican strategy had come to involve voting on about $1
trillion in cuts right away and allowing a smaller debt-limit increase, then
working on more cuts and tax and entitlement reform before voting on another
debt-limit increase in 2012.
But Obama was ruling that out,
even threatening to veto it, arguing that a shorter-term debt-limit increase
could create uncertainty by risking another bitter partisan fight and a default
within only a matter of months.
“The only bottom line that I have
is that we have to extend this debt ceiling through the next election, into
2013. And the reason for it is we’ve now seen how difficult it is to get any
kind of deal done,” Obama said during a July 22, 2011, news conference.
The sequester plan that Nabors
outlined at the Capitol was refined, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden both weighing in. As part of a
final, negotiated deal, called the Budget Control Act, there was agreement on
$900 billion in spending cuts and the creation of a bipartisan Joint Select
Committee on Deficit Reduction, which would negotiate the $1.2 trillion more in
cuts. If that so-called super committee failed, or if Congress did not follow
through with its recommendation, automatic cuts would begin on Jan. 2, 2013.
Administration officials do not
deny that a sequester plan was discussed at the July 25, 2011, meeting between
Nabors and Jackson and Loper. But they say that was not the first time the
discussion of such an enforcement mechanism—a la Gramm-Rudman-Hollings—had been
brought up in various negotiations, dating from bipartisan talks with House and
Senate members led by Biden earlier in the year. “It was always in the air,” a
senior White House aide told National Journal.
In fact, there is some outside
evidence that this is true, beyond the fact House Republicans had passed a bill
only six days earlier containing its own sequester back-up plan. News accounts
of even earlier talks involving congressional leaders and Obama at the White
House mention the notion of a deal involving “triggers” that would force
Congress to follow through with agreed cuts.
Democrats also note that even a
plan offered by McConnell which would have given the president authority to
raise the ceiling in several steps would, by its own nature, have had to also
involve a kind of trigger mechanism. Under McConnell’s plan, the president
would have been granted the authority to raise the ceiling to the full amount
requested by the White House in two subsequent tranches, both of which could be
blocked through congressional resolutions of disapproval that required a
two-thirds majority. That gave the White House the opportunity to raise the
debt ceiling while also giving Republicans a chance to vote against it.
But there was a part missing in
that equation: How do you ensure that $1.2 trillion would be cut? According to
one senior Senate Democratic aide, “That’s where the sequester came in, but it
was a pretty obvious solution since there needed to be some kind of enforceable
mechanism if Republicans were going to go along with the McConnell plan. They
[Republicans] would not accept a plan where they voted against the second
tranches of the ceiling, but were left with no guarantee that the cuts would
actually happen.”
The aide said that is what
Democrats mean when they argue that the sequester came about at the
Republicans’ behest. “We obviously would have been OK with just the $900
billion in cuts, and some kind of an agreement to seek more. But because Republicans
demanded dollar-for-dollar, we were forced to find a way to get from $900
billion to $2 trillion. It is really ridiculous for them to try to wriggle out
now. If they had not insisted on dollar-for-dollar or had been open to
revenues, the sequester would not exist.”
Van Hollen also noted that an
offer had been made to have revenues, such as closing special-interest tax
loopholes, incorporated into the plan instead. But he said that Republicans
dismissed that, and that they are the ones who decided to leave the defense
cuts in the plan. Those military cuts are the ones House Republicans now spew
the most anger about, and they have even since passed once-chamber legislation
to soften them through deeper cuts to social and safety-net programs.
All the while, Democrats
reiterated that the final deal—ultimately supported by majorities in both
chambers—was later depicted by Boehner as “98 percent of what I wanted.”
But a senior GOP congressional
aide has told National Journal it is simply
not fair to refer to that remark by Boehner without also noting the context in
which it was made—that is, that it was made months before the super committee
failed, and after what the aide said had been personal commitments to Boehner
from Reid and Obama that the panel would get its work done.
Based on those assurances, the
aide said, Boehner truly felt that the Budget Control Act would result in the
$1.2 trillion in discretionary spending caps and a package of entitlement and
tax reforms that were being promised, and so he went along with the agreement,
including its sequester trigger. “Obviously, the second part didn’t happen,”
the aide said.
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