The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: budget deal
Congressional Leaders Forge ‘Deal In Principle’ To Avoid Another Shutdown

Congressional Leaders Forge ‘Deal In Principle’ To Avoid Another Shutdown

Congressional leaders said on Monday night that they had reached a “deal in principle” over funding for border barriers — an agreement that if signed by President Trump would forestall another government shutdown at midnight Friday. But the negotiators noted that they have gotten no assurances from the White House, which didn’t immediately comment on the deal.

Trump’s assent is hardly assured, because the bipartisan and bicameral committee has allocated nothing close to the funding he demanded to finance his “border wall.” Their framework provides only $1.375 billion for barriers along the Mexican border — with 55 miles of new fencing — which is less than one-fourth of the $5.7 billion sought by Trump to build walls stretching 200 miles.

Democrats dropped a late demand for strict limits on the number of detention beds that could be used by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants. They had sought to reduce the number of detention beds in the budget to about 35,000, or 1 7,000 less than Republicans and Trump demanded. Democratic sources told CNN that the tentative agreement had compromised on just under 41,000 beds, approximately the same as in the current budget.

Trump’s determination to win wall funding in the budget resulted in a record 35-day government shutdown that began a few days before Christmas. When the shutdown began to interfere with aviation and other basic services, despite hundreds of thousands of federal workers showing up at their jobs unpaid, the White House folded. Trump agreed to a short-term spending bill that permitted negotiations to resume, with a deadline of Feb. 15.

The White House believes that even with far smaller appropriations from Congress, officials can reprogram money from other agencies to build the wall — or declare a national emergency to achieve the same purpose. But any such moves are certain to provoke litigation that could curtail or delay construction.

While Congressional negotiations to avert a shutdown continued on Monday evening, Trump held a campaign-style rally in El Paso, Texas, to promote the wall. “They say that progress is being made,” he told the rally crowd. “Just so you know. Just now, just now! I said wait a minute, I gotta take care of my people from Texas. I got to go. I don’t even want to hear about it. I don’t want to hear about it.” Not far from Trump’s event,  former El Paso Rep. Beto O’Rourke — who may seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 — led a march and rally against the wall. O’Rourke told his cheering crowd that “walls don’t save lives, walls end lives” — and that El Paso was a safe city “not because of a wall but in spite of it.”

 

 

 

 

White House And Republican Leaders Reach Budget Deal

White House And Republican Leaders Reach Budget Deal

By Lisa Mascaro, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — The White House and congressional Republican leaders reached a budget agreement late Monday that would resolve the stalemate over paying for federal programs and could end the threat of another government shutdown for the rest of President Barack Obama’s term.

The $80 billion, two-year budget accord would increase spending somewhat on defense and domestic programs, rolling back some of the automatic cuts known as sequesters that Obama repeatedly has denounced.

The deal is likely to face opposition from both right and left. Earlier in the evening, as news of the possible accord spread, some conservative groups denounced the additional spending as a betrayal, while some liberal groups warned against the possibility that trims in benefits would be agreed upon to pay for parts of the agreement.

The package also would raise the nation’s borrowing limit and avert the risk of a credit default, which could come as early as Nov. 3. In addition, the deal is expected to block price increases on seniors who use Medicare Part B, halting forthcoming boosts in their premiums and deductibles.

A vote on the deal could come as early as Wednesday.

Progress came as a surprise; many had doubted the White House and Republicans could come to terms. It would be one of the final legislative acts of House Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, who is preparing to retire this week after repeated confrontations with his party’s hard-right flank.

Boehner met with his leadership team Monday afternoon and convened rank-and-file lawmakers for a hastily called private evening session.

“Fiscal negotiations are ongoing,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as he opened the Senate. “As the details come in, and especially if an agreement is reached, I intend to consult and discuss the details with our colleagues.”

After abruptly announcing his retirement last month, Boehner had vowed to “clean up the barn” for his successor. Resolving the budget standoff would clear one of the most divisive issues from the agenda of Rep. Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., who is expected to be elected the next House speaker this week.

The more legislation Boehner can muscle through the testy GOP-led House in the days ahead, the smoother the transition will be for Ryan.

The measure to lift the nation’s debt limit, currently at $18.1 trillion, through March 2017 would be tacked on to the budget deal, according to congressional aides, who did not want to be identified speaking about the sensitive negotiations.

Boehner’s critics on the right quickly sought to galvanize Republican opposition, and conservative lawmakers left the evening meeting fuming that the speaker was cutting a last-minute deal before stepping aside.

“The only reason you negotiate in the dark is because Republicans won’t accept it,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan. One lawmaker stood up during the private session and asked why Boehner, not Ryan, was at the negotiating table. Ryan, according to those in the room, did not address the issue.

“In Washington, cleaning the barn is apparently synonymous with shoveling manure on the American people,” said Heritage Action Chief Executive Michael A. Needham. “John Boehner is clearly a rogue agent negotiating on behalf of well-connected special interests, not the voters that gave him the gavel.”

Liberal groups voiced their own concerns.

“The White House needs to know that any budget deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits, or eligibility for those benefits, is unacceptable to the American people and roughly equivalent to declaring a holy war on struggling working families,” said Jim Dean, chairman of Democracy for America.

For weeks, aides to congressional leaders and the White House have been meeting behind closed doors on a possible budget deal. The aim has been to roll back some of the steep sequester cuts that were agreed to after a 2011 debt ceiling showdown. Both parties have wanted to undo the sequester cuts, for different reasons.

Republicans have wanted to halt cuts to the Pentagon, while Democrats have sought to ease reductions to domestic programs.

Talks had dragged, though, as the two sides tried to figure out how to pay for the increased spending.
The deal probably would be paid for with a combination of budget cuts elsewhere, new fees and partial reliance on an overseas contingency fund set aside for military operations.

The deal would adjust spending caps for two years by a total of $80 billion — $50 billion the first year and $30 billion in the second — equally divided between defense and nondefense spending, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.

An additional $32 billion in spending over the two years will come from the overseas contingency account, which brings the total package to $112 billion. Republicans had suggested tapping that account before to boost military funding, but Democrats and even some Republicans argued it was an accounting gimmick because the emergency war fund was not intended for such a purpose.

The bulk of the costs would be paid for by clipping government programs and raising fees on others in ways that would cause political discomfort on both sides of the partisan line.

Democrats probably will object to cuts in the Social Security Disability Insurance program that would lower part of the benefits individuals receive based upon any wages they earn. Republicans probably will pan new tax-filing fees.

The GOP will score a victory with another provision that would do away with an Affordable Care Act requirement that larger companies automatically sign up workers for health care unless the workers specifically opt out. Businesses have fought the requirement.

Passage is a multi-step process, giving opponents ample opportunity to derail the deal. Even if the deal is approved this week, Congress still would need to pass a separate spending bill to keep the government running after the Dec. 11 deadline. If it fails to do so, the specter of a government shutdown could reappear.

This final effort by Boehner could result in a politically heroic act to resolve looming crises despite deep resistance from the GOP majority in the House — or it could cement his reputation among hard-right Republicans that his willingness to compromise with Obama makes him insufficiently conservative.

“Listen, this is not about us,” Boehner said last week. “Our job is to do the right thing for the American people every day. You have heard me say this multiple times, and I will say it one more time: If you do the right things for the right reasons every day, the right things will happen for our country.”

Also Monday, the House advanced legislation to salvage the Export-Import Bank, a Depression-era financing entity that big business says is vital for exports but conservatives deride as crony capitalism.

This year, conservatives succeeded in beginning to close the bank by failing to authorize new lending. A brutal lobbying campaign over the bank has been underway on both sides of the issue.

A bipartisan majority in the House that wants to revive the bank pushed the vote forward with a rare “discharge petition” procedure, which hasn’t been fully deployed since the 1970s. Boehner did not stand in the way.
___
(Staff writer Christi Parsons in Washington contributed to this report.)

Photo: This is the last thing House Speaker is dealing with. For reals. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

‘Tea’ Cools, And House Speaker Boehner Is Back To Making Deals

‘Tea’ Cools, And House Speaker Boehner Is Back To Making Deals

MCT NEWSFEATURES
By David Lightman
McClatchy Washington Bureau
(MCT)

WASHINGTON — House Speaker John Boehner is making deals again.

After three years of taking tough stands pushed by no-compromise tea party types — positions that ultimately led to last fall’s partial government shutdown — he’s returned to his roots as a conservative consensus-builder, and suddenly the House of Representatives is passing major bipartisan legislation.

He remains on fragile ground. The Republicans he leads in the House are still fractured over some of the day’s biggest issues, notably immigration and federal spending. But he’s returning to his roots as a dealmaker, and the result is a House that’s moving toward compromise, and action.

Since December, Boehner has pushed through budget deals crafted with Democratic support. He’s moved compromise legislation on farm policy. He’s led the effort to write immigration principles that include a path to legal status for those who are already in the country illegally.

Whether the 64-year-old Ohio Republican, now in his fourth year as speaker, continues to build on his newfound stature as the great compromiser might determine how his party fares in Congress and in November’s congressional elections. Also to be determined is how history regards Boehner.

“For years, he gave his caucus veto power over deals he could negotiate,” said Darrell West, the director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a research group. “The result was that he couldn’t cut any deals.”

In his new role as compromiser, “It creates problems with his caucus,” West said, “but it strengthens him as speaker.”

Many conservatives aren’t buying that. “He’s still figuring out how to be speaker,” said Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action for America. “Conservatives who gave Republicans the majority think he should be a speaker who pushes the most conservative causes that he can.”

Boehner’s emergence as a consensus-builder began during October’s 16-day partial government shutdown. Hard-core conservatives pushed the strategy, their latest tactic in a yearslong war to dramatically cut federal spending.

Privately, Boehner wasn’t comfortable with the confrontational tactics. He was long known as a dealmaker, someone who could argue the conservative cause but bend enough to get things passed. He was a familiar sight in the speaker’s lobby in the back of the House chamber, smoking and schmoozing, and he helped write major education legislation a decade ago with the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

In 2010, though, the tea party was ascendant, vowing to pare the size of government once and for all. The grass-roots movement was instrumental in electing 87 House Republican freshmen that year — and making Boehner the speaker. Claiming a mandate, tea party members pressed for budget battles rather than compromise. The shutdown was their ultimate weapon.

“He would talk about how dumb that strategy was. He thought it was a fool’s errand, but he had an obligation as a leader to execute it,” said former Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio, a Boehner friend who’s now the president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a moderate group.

The shutdown, ironically, helped Boehner.

Many conservatives appreciated his embrace of the strategy, not only because he embraced it publicly but also because it isolated and even discredited the hardest of the hard core, while establishment Republicans liked his private reluctance.

On Dec. 11, Boehner made his declaration of independence.
Hard-core conservative groups blasted a budget agreement negotiated by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-WA)that averted another shutdown.

Boehner regarded Ryan as a virtual little brother; the two had long been friends. Ryan had gone out on limbs for the conservatives, including budget plans that took the politically risky step of revamping Medicare and Social Security. When the conservatives ripped Ryan, Boehner was furious.

“They’re using our members and they’re using the American people for their own goals. This is ridiculous,” he said. “Listen, if you’re for more deficit reduction, you’re for this agreement.”

The agreement passed with 169 Republican and 163 Democratic votes. But the right made it clear that it still wasn’t satisfied; 62 Republicans voted no. A month later, 64 opposed a more detailed spending bill. Last week, 63 voted no on a farm bill that passed.

Meeting last week at a retreat in Cambridge, Md., Republican leaders worked to present a unified front. It wasn’t easy, and there were signs that any consensus on the two most incendiary issues — immigration and debt — is shaky at best.

Conservatives were unhappy about the immigration principles. Boehner chose his words carefully as he described to colleagues what the statement meant.

“These standards are as far as we’re willing to go,” he said.

There was also turmoil over raising the debt limit. The government needs new authority from Congress to pay its bills, probably sometime this month. President Barack Obama wants to pass it with no conditions. Conservatives want some assurances that spending will be reduced or the Affordable Care Act will be trimmed.

Boehner doesn’t want an ugly fight. “We know what the obstacles are that we face. But listen, we believe that the defaulting on our debt is the wrong bet,” he said.

So far, Boehner — with the backing of Republican Party officials — wants to present easy-to-understand alternatives to Democratic ideas.

“If we’re just seen as the opposition party … we miss a great opportunity to actually woo voters over to our side, because, frankly, we have really good alternatives,” said Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

The wild card in this strategy is likely to be a string of congressional primaries this winter and spring. Tea party candidates are challenging incumbents in several states, and if the insurgents do well, their Capitol followers will be energized.

That threat, though, is for another day. For now, Brookings’ West figured, “Boehner is thinking about his legacy. A speaker is judged by what he or she passes.

“He doesn’t want to go down in history as a weak speaker.”

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

The GOP Will Remain United By One Issue — Not Helping The Unemployed

The GOP Will Remain United By One Issue — Not Helping The Unemployed

A Republican thinker did something radical this week: He proposed an agenda for job creation.

Michael R. Strain’s “A Jobs Agenda for the Right” includes all of the right’s compulsive instincts to cut taxes for the rich, eliminate environmental regulations and suspend the minimum wage. But it begins with the premise that long-term unemployment is a crisis and a crisis that can’t just be solved by doing those who have been out of work for months the “favor” of cutting off their only income, as Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) suggested.

Strain even seems to be in favor of a program that would feature infrastructure spending.

LOL.

“Um, OK. There are people who’ve been trying to do just that. And not only Barack Obama,” The Daily Beast‘s Michael Tomasky pointed out. “John Kerry led this effort in the Senate, and he was joined by Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison (who’s since retired). Their attempts to fund a modest infrastructure bank were supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But it could never get anywhere because of rock-solid GOP opposition.”

Tomasky notes that Republican obstruction is the key element that prevents any sort of job creation. This has continued past 2012, when it seemed the GOP’s only goal in life was to keep unemployment over 8 percent. And it will continue as 1.3 million being cut off from benefits likely sends the unemployment rate even lower as hundreds of thousands of Americans in the prime of the work lives decide to give up even looking for a job.

And there’s no better explanation of why we shouldn’t expect any movement toward job creation from the right than to point out that the person who replaced Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Senate was Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Cruz understands the base of the Republican Party better than any Canadian citizen alive.

He knows the only things that truly unite it are opposing anything President Obama does and pissing off liberals. Unfortunately for Cruz, it seems that major funders of his party recognize that these fixations of the right wing-media and the primary electorate are actually what will prevent it from winning the White House.

When it comes to bashing Obama and infuriating the left, it doesn’t get better than the last few months. Republicans have been blessed by the fumbled rollout of HealthCare.gov as they’ve collectively pretended that millions of people getting health insurance is a terrible thing.

The adrenaline of the last few months has helped the GOP erase most of the damage of the Cruz-led government shutdown. The memories of that fiasco and the focus on Obamacare’s struggles have empowered the party’s leadership to boldness few thought it was capable of.

Both House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have publicly blasted the outside conservative groups actively attempting to usurp their power. And they’ve consecrated a budget deal that likely indicates that government shutdowns and debt limit crises will not be an issue again for at least a couple of years.

In the next few months, the Republican leadership will mollify their members by offering various Obamacare repeals. But when the deadline to file for a primary election passes, their trouble begins.

Speaker Boehner has signaled that he will pursue some sort of immigration reform. It will probably not be enough to satisfy advocates but any sort of legalization at all — even just for people brought to this country as children — will be enough to enrage the right wing of the party. This will be happening as more than a half-dozen contested Senate primaries pit incumbents against Tea Partiers whose entire goal in life is to move the party to the right.

Both the right and the far right will accuse each other of corrupting the conservative movement. Millions will be wasted as the GOP likely faces its third chance to regain the Senate in as many election cycles as divided as it’s been in decades.

But what will always bring the party together is its true agenda when it comes to job creation.

That agenda is “denying Medicaid to 5 million poor Americans in states they control, proposing $40 billion in cuts to food stamps, and cutting off unemployment benefits to workers who can’t find jobs,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait explained.

This agenda — and its increasing cruelty and obliviousness to the shrinking deficit — will remain in place as long as President Obama or any Democrat is in the the White House.

Then on the day a Republican enters the Oval Office full of promises to restrain government and empower job creators, we can expect a repeat of the only strategy that the conservative movement has ever successfully employed to create jobs — growing massive deficits that make even more cruelty inevitable when a Democrat returns to power.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr