Category Archives: United States Congress

May 16, 2013 · 5:40 AM

Four Better Ways To Spend The $55 Million Wasted On Votes To Repeal The Affordable Care Act

The irony seems to escape the GOP and their sycophants  in Congress.  They’ve implemented “sequestration” to curb superfluous spending yet waste $55 million dollars on trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act thirty-seven times…

Think Progress

For the 37th time since 2011, House Republicans will hold a vote to repeal Obamacare on Thursday, bringing the total cost of all of their failed repeal votes to roughly $55 million in taxpayer money, according to one estimate.

Last year, CBS News calculated that the number of hours spent on 33 repeal votes — then roughly 80 hours, or two full work weeks — cost taxpayers an estimated $48 million. Since then, Republicans have held three more votes (another $4.5 million) and will add another $1.5 million with their latest.

At a time when lawmakers have implemented $85 billion in across-the-board cuts on top of$1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, no dollar can be spared. And the country has serious health-related needs that could use funding. Here are some better health care uses for the more than $50 million these symbolic votes against the Affordable Care Act have wasted:

1. Restore cuts from sequestration to Title X family planning programs and Title V maternal and child health services. The National Women’s Law Center calculates that a 5 percent cut to the budgets of each program will reduce them by $15 million and $32.5 million, respectively. Rather than voting to repeal a bill that expands women’s access to preventative services, the House could use the money to expand them.

2. Double the Department of Justice’s budget for sexual assault services, which has currently been authorized a $50 million budget. The program gives money to states so that they can support rape crisis centers and other nongovernmental organizations that provide direct intervention, core services, and other assistance to the victims of sexual assault. Current funding is inadequate, as some states receive less than $300,000 and many programs lack the resources to meet victims’ needs.

3. Grant a request for $50 million to train 5,000 new mental health professionals as part of a new initiative to expand mental health treatment and prevention services. This proposal came in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting to address gaps in the mental health system.

4. Help states implement paid leave policies. President Obama included a $50 million State Paid Leave Fund in his 2011 budget to provide start-up support for states that want to enact paid leave for workers. More than 40 percent of workers don’t have access to paid sick leave, heading to work when they or their family members experience an illness, but this funding could help give them a better option.

The current Congress is on track to be the most unproductive since the 1940s, but still has time to hold votes that won’t result in actual legislative change. There are many other priorities lawmakers could focus on instead and better ways to spend taxpayer dollars.

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April 26, 2013 · 10:32 AM

SENATE: SORRY, POOR PEOPLE!

Senate fixes the (part of the) sequestration (that affects rich people)!

Washington is not just broken, it needs an exorcist!

Salon

Just in time for members to fly home, Congress averts the one cut it cares about. Hint: Not Head Start!

After a month or so of the sequestration budget cuts only affecting people Congress doesn’t really care about, the cuts hit home this week when mandatory FAA furloughs caused lengthy flight delays cross the country. Suddenly, sequestration was hurting regular Americans, instead of irregular (poor) ones! Some naive observers thought this would force Congress to finally roll back the purposefully damaging cuts that were by design never intended to actually go into effect. Those observers were.. sort of right! The U.S. Senate jumped into action last night and voted to… let the FAA transfer some money from the Transportation Department to pay air traffic controllers so that the sequestration can continue without inconveniencing members of Congress, most of whom will be flying home to their districts today. The system works! (For rich people, like I’ve been saying.)

The Washington Post says, “The Senate took the first step toward circumventing sequestration Thursday night” though in fact what they did was work to ensure that the sequester continues not affecting elites, who fly regularly. I am embarrassed that I did not predict this exact outcome in my column Tuesday morning. The Senate, which can’t confirm a judge without months of delay and a constitutional crisis, passed this particular bill in about two minutes, with unanimous consent. The hope is that the House can get it taken care of today, I guess in time for everyone to fly to Aspen or wherever people whom Congress listens to fly to on Fridays.

After that Congress will be done fixing all the various problems with the design and implementation of the sequestration:

But House action on a broader deal to undo the across-the-board cuts appears remote. House conservatives say much of the impact has been exaggerated by the White House, and they have relished the success of forcing visible spending cuts on a Democratic administration.

“I think it’s the first time we’ve saved money in Washington, D.C.,” said Representative Raúl Labrador, Republican of Idaho. “I think we need to move on from the subject.”

Move on, people who may become homeless! We fixed the airports, what more do you want?

There was a big to-do yesterday about a Politico story insisting — explosively! morning-winningly! — that Congress was trying to exempt itself from Obamacare. Because this is Politico, the story was based on equal parts misunderstanding of policy and desire to create a fuss. The actual story is that Republicans proposed forcing members of Congress and their staffs to only use healthcare plans created by Obamacare or available in the exchanges. Democrats passed the amendment, as a sort of fuck you. But the exchanges are designed for people who don’t have employers who pay for healthcare. Congressional staffers get employer-sponsored health benefits. The exchanges are explicitly not designed for employees of large employers who pay for healthcare, so some people are right now trying to figure out how to make sure staffers continue to get healthcare. It may end up not being a big deal, or it may require a tweak to the law. But it’s not a scandal. (Honestly it’s all a pretty good argument for ditching employer-based healthcare in favor of universal single-payer but then again everything is.)

But the fuss was already created. The story will live forever, and no amount of debunking in the world will kill the popular myth that Congress attempted to secretly “exempt” itself from Obamacare. So self-serving!

Their staffers are generally the poorest people members of Congress know, and trying to make sure their healthcare is paid for is seriously the closest our legislature gets to altruism. But while the story of Congress working to make sure its staffers don’t have to shoulder the entirety of their premium costs because of Republican political stuntmanship was treated as a scandal and an example of everything rotten about Congress, the story of Congress hurriedly making sure the well-off minority of Americans who fly regularly don’t get briefly inconvenienced — while ignoring the costs of brutal cuts on programs for low-income Americans facing housing or hunger crises — is treated as a wonderful and encouraging display of bipartisanship.

Have a great flight home, senators!

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February 17, 2013 · 8:38 AM

GOP ‘Savior’ Marco Rubio Falls Back On The Same Old Anti-Woman Policies

The recently passed Violence Against Women Act had no help from 22 Republican male Senators.

Great way to open their arms out to minorities and women to elevate their low approval ratings by the American people. <snark>

Think Progress

In an interview on Thursday with conservative magazine Newsmax, Tea Party standard-bearer and so-called ‘savior’ of the Republican party Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) revealed that he will become a cosponsor of the “Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act.” The bill is a concerted effort to prevent girls in dangerous family situations from going across state lines to receive abortions.

Familiarly known as “the Grandmother Incarceration Act,” CIANA bills have come up in Congress several times in recent years. Nearly every iteration of the legislation would prevent even a victim of rape or incest from getting a ride to an abortion clinic beyond state lines from her grandmother or older sibling, if she is under the age of 18. Instead, the girl would be forced to inform her parents or legal guardian, and be required to have them present.

While the bill has not yet been introduced, previous versions of the text would even apply the requirements to girls who require a medically necessary, potentially lifesaving abortion.

The fact that Rubio will serve as a co-sponsor on the legislation reveals a lot about the supposed new face of the Republican party. The policy, like many of Rubio’s policy choices, is actually an old trick from the Grand Old Party, not some new approach to Republican ideals. And it falls in line with Rubio’s party’s, and the Senator’s own, recent anti-woman efforts:

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Rubio voted against the Violence Against Women Act because it allocated money to rape victims.

MINIMUM WAGE: He won’t support a minimum wage, despite its huge benefits for women.

BIRTH CONTROL: The senator introduced a bill that would have prevented millions of women from accessing birth control.

PAY EQUITY: He called a bill to promote pay equity between men and women “nothing but an effort to help trial lawyers.”

With his post-State of the Union rebuttal, Rubio signed up to be the face of a Republican party that is working hard to win over women and people of color, the groups that cost Republicans the election last time around. But with Rubio’s history of anti-woman policies, and now his renewed commitment to co-sponsor more of the same, he may just on the vanguard of a new Republican path back to the same Republican problems.

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· 8:21 AM

Why Americans hate Congress

The Week

Congress justified its absurdly low approval rating this week as Senate Republicans blocked the nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary. 

Hagel, who is perfectly qualified for the post, made the unforgivable mistake of disagreeing with his former colleagues while he was still in the Senate.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) candidly told Fox News that Hagel had committed the sin of saying President Bush was “the worst president since Herbert Hoover” and that the escalation in Iraq “was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War.”

But Hagel’s biggest mistake was that he was very “anti his own party, and people don’t forget that.”

Democrats then postured for political purposes, and according to the New York Times, “decided to press ahead and require Republicans to record a vote against Mr. Hagel, allowing Democrats to accuse them of a new level of obstructionism.”

To end the pitiful week, lawmakers then left for a 10-day recess.

As Ron Fournier points out, “In addition to an empty seat at the Pentagon, the unfinished business in Washington is staggering: Billions of dollars of haphazard cuts due to automatically take effect, immigration reform, gun control, climate change, and millions of Americans left behind in a wrenching economic transition. If you took 10 days off with this much work undone, you’d be fired.”

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January 8, 2013 · 9:58 AM

Poll: 77 percent say Washington politics causing serious harm

Finally, someone asked the American people about the toxic politics going on in Washington.

The resounding answer should make pols and pundits alike take notice and work at fixing the problem…asap.

The Hill

A vast majority of Americans worry that politics in Washington is causing serious harm to the country, according to a new Gallup survey released Monday.

Of those surveyed, 77 percent said the way politics works is causing the nation serious harm, versus just 19 percent who say the effects were not serious. Republicans were most pessimistic, with 87 percent arguing federal politics was damaging the country. But support for the sentiment was broad — 79 percent of independents and 68 percent of Democrats responded in the same way.

“The finding that most Americans think politics are hurting the country fits with a number of additional measures showing that Americans hold the federal government in general and Congress in particular — the main instruments of how American politics work — in low regard,” said Gallup’s Frank Newport in a release.

“The 19 percent of Americans who do not feel negatively about the way politics are being handled is quite close to Congress’ current 18 percent job approval rating,” he added. “Confidence in Congress as an institution — the percentage with a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it — is at 13 percent, and 10 percent and 14 percent of Americans rate the honesty and ethics of members of Congress and senators, respectively, as high or very high.”

But despite a gloomy opinion of Congress and politics, Americans remain optimistic about the future. Of those surveyed, 52 percent said they believed the way politics worked would improve in Washington over the next 10 years.

That optimism is driven primarily by Democrats, who believed in a better coming decade by a 63-34 percent margin. By contrast, 56 percent of Republicans were pessimistic, believing politics would get worse over the next 10 years. Young respondents were the most likely to be optimistic, with 55 percent of those between 18 and 29 years old hopeful about the future. Older voters were more evenly split on whether things would improve.

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August 15, 2012 · 7:57 AM

Congress Approval Rating Hits All-Time Low In Gallup Poll

 

Really?  You mean “The American People” (GOP’s favorite phrase repeated dozens of times a day by various GOP politicians) are unhappy with Congress’ overall performance?  Of course Democrats share this dubious honor as well.

Congress Approval Rating

The Huffington Post

Just one in 10 Americans approves of the job Congress is doing, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday, tying the branch’s lowest approval rating in 38 years. Congress originally hit the 10 percent mark in February, before bouncing back several points.

The approval rate for Congress hasn’t passed 20 percent in more than a year, according to Gallup, and is far lower than the personal approval ratings for most members of Congress. Prior to 2007, it sank below 20 percent only twice.

From Gallup’s analysis:

It is difficult to pinpoint precise causes for these extraordinarily negative views, although the continuing poor economy is certainly a major factor. The fact that control of Congress is now divided, with a Republican majority in the House and a Democratic majority in the Senate, may provide an opportunity for Americans of all political persuasions to dislike some aspect of Congress. With Congress divided, however, it is difficult to assess what impact its low ratings will have on the November elections, now less than three months away.

In contrast to the partisan gridlock within Congress, Americans’ distaste for the institution is entirely bipartisan: Only 11 percent of independents, 10 percent of Republicans, and 9 percent of Democrats approved.

The trend in the Gallup poll roughly matches that found by other national surveys that track congressional job approval. A CBS News/New York Times survey conducted in July found just 12 percent of U.S. adults approve of the job Congress is doing. Congressional job approval was slightly better (19 percent) in a July survey of likely voters conducted by National Public Radio, but even that result was the lowest NPR had measured since 2009.

Another poll, released Wednesday by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos and the SEIU, found that 60 percent of voters agreed that “this is the worst Congress ever.”

The Gallup poll interviewed 1,012 adults by live phone interviews between Aug. 9 and 12, and had a 4 percent margin of error. The PPP poll was conducted with automated telephone interviews of 1,000 registered voters between Aug. 9 and 12, and had a 3.1 percent margin of error.

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December 3, 2010 · 3:12 AM

“Crap”-gate: Democrats used procedural trick to hold symbolic vote!

Salon

Did you hear? The method by which House Democrats voted in favor of extending low tax rates for all households but not extending an even lower top marginal rate on particularly high-earning households was declared to be “chicken crap” by the next speaker of the House of Representatives. Not that Boehner is against “middle-class tax cuts,” or what-have-you. He is outraged at the maneuvering. Because I guess this is his first day in this “House of Representatives” place.

And his “chicken crap” quote made its way to cable news, and Drudge, and Twitter, because it is amusing to hear a grown man pretend he swears like a character in an edited-for-broadcast-on-basic-cable cop movie, but also because other people apparently agree that it was “chicken crap” to hold this vote in this fashion.

I am no longer surprised by the strategic ineptitude of the White House. The fact that, in order to avoid procedural chicanery by the Republicans, House Democrats had to engage in procedural chicanery in order to hold a purely symbolic vote is similarly unsurprising. But the sight of a professional observer of politics finding the inner strength necessary to whip up any sort of high dudgeon about this procedural chicanery is, I admit, puzzling. And yet here’s National Review’s Daniel Foster — no moron — sounding positively disgusted to see mildly tricky parliamentary maneuvering.

Continue reading here…
 
 
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November 8, 2010 · 4:17 AM

Taliban Writes Letter to Congress

Daily Beast

A spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan has written a 2,300-word letter to Congress, calling upon American lawmakers to get “a true picture of the ground realities” of the war in Afghanistan.

In what appears to be the first letter that the group has written to Congress, specifically, its spokesperson, Qari Mohammad Yousaf Ahmadi, claims that U.S. troop commanders give their legislators “distorted information about a losing war, trying to conceal from you their failures.”

The letter—addressed to “Messers American Congressmen” and written in poor English—also denies any Taliban links to the September 11th attacks and insists that the Taliban is still in control of their stronghold, Kandahar, despite an aggressive recent push by U.S. forces there. Unlike many government offices in Afghanistan, the Taliban are known to run a savvy media operation.

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November 7, 2010 · 5:43 AM

Bloomberg: ‘THEY CAN’T READ’

Bloomberg: Congress ‘Can’t Read’ And Some Members Don’t Know What, Or Where China Is

Huffington Post

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Saturday that some newly elected members of Congress “can’t read” and don’t know what or where China is.

Bloomberg delivered his stinging assessment of Washington’s newcomers during an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“If you look at the U.S., you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate–they can’t read,” he said. “I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports.”

The three-term, billionaire mayor warned against a trade war with China — something both major parties found politically helpful in last Tuesday’s election — and suggested that America assess its policies for answers:

“I think in America, we’ve got to stop blaming the Chinese and blaming everybody else and take a look at ourselves,” he said.

Last month, The New York Times reported that at least 29 candidates on both sides of the aisle ran ads critical of China and opponents who would support policies that help foreign workers–not Americans.

In one of its last acts before the midterm elections, Congress passed legislation retaliating against China, contending that the nation is undervaluing its currency.

Time‘s Zachary Karabell believes Americans are wrong.  Continue reading…

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