The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: senate gop
Obama Touts Economic Policies As Republicans Fight Internally Over Budget

Obama Touts Economic Policies As Republicans Fight Internally Over Budget

By Michael A. Memoli and Lisa Mascaro, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

CLEVELAND — As congressional Republicans find themselves tangled over their newly introduced spending plans, President Barack Obama tried Wednesday to seize the moment to talk about government spending on his terms, namely a focus on opportunities for the middle class.

Noting that Republican House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio often asks, “Where are the jobs?,” Obama told a crowd in Cleveland he was there to “not only answer that question” but also to renew a central debate over the two major parties’ economic visions.

Obama said that his administration’s policies, such as investing in manufacturing and the landmark Affordable Care Act, have helped the nation emerge from a deep recession but that the Republican budget would “double down” on the theory that wealth trickles down from the rich to the rest.

“Reality has rendered its judgment,” Obama said in a speech to the City Club of Cleveland. “Trickle-down economics doesn’t work and middle-class economics does,” he said, using the White House’s umbrella term for its fiscal policies.

Meanwhile, Republicans who have the majority in both chambers of Congress are bogged down in trying to make their budgets workable as well as palatable to the party’s competing factions.

More than two months into the new Congress, they are grasping for legislative victories and looking to the House and Senate budgets unveiled this week as chances for a win in Washington. The chambers are expected to approve the budgets next week.

“Hopefully that will be an opportunity for us to show some success,” said GOP Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee.

Republicans are trying to present a unified front in their budget proposals, as internal debates have spilled out publicly between defense hawks, who want to bolster military coffers, and deficit-minded conservatives, who prefer to hold the line on new spending.

Although both of the party’s budgets largely boost military spending at the expense of domestic social programs, House and Senate Republicans are at odds over how to accomplish that goal while still adhering to strict budget caps agreed to in a 2011 deal with the White House.

Senate Republicans made clear Wednesday that they view the House approach as essentially a gimmick. It calls for hiking defense spending by increasing money for an account used for wars that was not subject to the so-called sequester limits established in the 2011 deal. Senate Republicans prefer establishing a separate, new defense account funded with unspecified savings elsewhere, but it also would not be held to the 2011 caps.

Either way, those cause “real heartburn for conservatives” because they maneuver around the limits, Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) said.

Those differences and others — including the House’s proposed Medicare overhaul that the Senate rejects — risk leaving the GOP unable to pass one budget.

Such a setback would derail not only the goal of increasing Pentagon spending, but also other priorities, including the effort to repeal Obama’s health care law.

“I’m absolutely confident we’ll do our duty,” said Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, head of the Republican Senate’s campaign committee. “It’s one of the most important votes we’ll have this year.”

The GOP’s scramble to make the numbers add up with concrete legislative proposals while Obama spoke in broad, aspirational terms further illustrated the contrast between the White House and Republicans who control Congress.

Obama no longer has to worry about being re-elected, and since the November midterm election has made full use of the presidential bully pulpit to present his vision for the country without necessarily fretting over the short-term political consequences for him or his party.

On Wednesday, he said he wanted to “take a little credit” for the nation’s economic recovery.

Republicans have been loath to acknowledge any role Obama’s policies might have had in the nation’s improved economic picture, with deficits on the wane and rising confidence among voters.

“Republicans are proud to take credit for helping force some fiscal responsibility on the Obama administration,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Wednesday as his party’s Senate majority released its budget for the fiscal year that begins in October.

The White House countered that the House GOP is trying to balance the budget in part by further slashing investments that would benefit the middle class.

“House Republicans start their deficit reduction plan by promising large, expensive new tax cuts to high-income households,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “In fact, the only specific tax proposals in the House Republican budget are tax proposals that benefit the wealthy.”

White House officials are eager to promote the notion that Obama has kept Republicans on their heels with a vigorous start to what he calls the “fourth quarter” of his term, a time when presidents often see their influence wane. Obama began the year with campaign-style trips in the run-up to a State of the Union address that challenged Congress’ new Republican majorities on a host of domestic issues.

Democrats who shied away from the president before the midterm election now praise Obama’s approach. Some, including Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is the Democrats’ ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, have more leeway to push the party toward even more liberal policies.

“The president feels liberated,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the assistant Democratic leader in the chamber. “He doesn’t have to measure his actions against the impact on a campaign, and there are many things that he wants to say to the American people in the last two years of his presidency.”
___
Memoli reported from Cleveland and Mascaro from Washington. Tribune Washington Bureau staff writer Christi Parsons in Washington contributed to this report.

U.S. President Barack Obama meets with the Council of the Great City Schools Leadership in the Roosevelt Room of the White House March 16, 2015 in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss efforts to strengthen educational opportunities for students in city schools. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)

Cotton And The War Caucus Count On Constituents’ Ignorance

Cotton And The War Caucus Count On Constituents’ Ignorance

When a Man’s fancy gets astride on his Reason;

When Imagination is at Cuffs with the Senses; and

common Understanding, as well as common Sense,

is Kickt out of Doors; the first Proselyte he makes,

is Himself.

Jonathan Swift, 1704

As near as I can determine, Senator Tom Cotton’s biggest worry about Iran is that its government is as bellicose and fanatical as he is.

The good news is that based on the Islamic Republic’s response to the condescending, adolescent tone of the “open letter” he and 46 Republican senators addressed to Iran’s leaders, that seems unlikely. Judging by their measured responses, Iranian politicians appear to understand that they weren’t its real audience.

Rather, it was a grandstand play directed at Cotton’s own constituents among the GOP’s unappeasable Tea Party base. Its actual purpose was to express contempt and defiance toward President Obama, always popular among the Fox News white-bread demographic — basically the same motive that led Cotton to repeat Obama’s name 74 times during a 2014 election debate with Senator Mark Pryor.

That big doodyhead Barack Obama’s not the boss of them.

Except that particularly with regard to foreign policy, he is. But hold that thought.

Javad Zarif, the American-educated Iranian foreign minister involved in intense negotiations with Secretary of State John Kerry, observed that the senators’ letter has “no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy.”

The Persian diplomat pointed out that the agreement’s not being hashed out between the U.S. and Iran, but also among Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. Any deal would be put before the UN Security Council and have the force of international law.

A future U.S. president could renounce it, but at significant political cost unless Iran clearly violated its terms.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan points out chief executives from FDR and Reagan to George W. Bush have negotiated arms control deals negotiated in ports of call from Yalta to Helsinki. “In other words,” Kaplan writes, “contrary to the letter writers, Congress has no legal or constitutional role in the drafting, approval, or modification of this deal.”

Presidents negotiate arms agreements, not raw-carrot freshman senators.

Iran’s crafty old “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamenei lamented “the decay of political ethics in the American system,” but added that he stood by the process. “Every time we reach a stage where the end of the negotiations is in sight,” Khamenei said, “the tone of the other side, specifically the Americans, becomes harsher, coarser and tougher.”

Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus reported the score: “Qom Theological Seminary 1, Harvard Law 0. When an ayatollah sounds more statesmanlike than the U.S. Senate, it’s not a good sign.”

Bargaining is practically the Persian national sport. They’re inclined to see a my-way-or-the-highway type like Tom Cotton as unserious and immature.

As if to confirm that impression, the Arkansas senator took his newfound notoriety to CBS’s Face the Nation, where he complained about Iran’s growing “empire.”

“They already control Tehran, increasingly they control Damascus and Beirut and Baghdad and now Sana’a as well,” Cotton said. “They do all that without a nuclear weapon. Imagine what they would do with a nuclear weapon.”

You read that correctly. Arkansas’ brilliant Harvard law graduate complained about Iran’s control of Tehran — the nation’s capital since 1796.

As for Iran’s alleged “control” of Baghdad, you’d think an Iraq veteran like Cotton would have some clue how that came about. Hint: President George W. Bush invaded Iraq. The Bush administration deposed Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, whose invasion of neighboring Iran led to an eight-year war killing roughly a million people. They installed as prime minister Nouri al Maliki, a Shiite nationalist who’d spent 24 years exiled in, yes, Iran.

How Iranian-armed Shiite militias came to be leading the fight against ISIS terrorists west of Baghdad is that the Iraqi government begged for their help. It’s in Tehran’s national interest to defeat ISIS even more than in Washington’s. Can this possibly be news to Cotton?

Probably not, but he can count on his constituents’ ignorance. It would be astonishing if 20 percent of Arkansas voters could locate Iran on a world map, much less grasp that if Iran looks stronger, it’s because the U.S. keeps attacking its enemies. “Like all the Iran hawks before him,” Daniel Larison writes in American Conservative, “Cotton claims to fear growing Iranian influence while supporting policies that have facilitated its growth.”

For President Obama, a verifiable agreement preventing the Iranian regime from developing nuclear weapons they say they don’t want could be a diplomatic triumph, reshaping the entire Middle East without firing a shot.

To the War Party, that would be a bad thing. Meanwhile, Tom Cotton gave his first speech in the U.S. Senate, prating about “global military dominance” and “hegemonic strength” like the villain in a James Bond movie.

It was a performance calculated to make him a star.

Photo: U.S. senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and former ambassador John Bolton speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, MD. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

White House Attacks McConnell Over Impasses On Capitol Hill

White House Attacks McConnell Over Impasses On Capitol Hill

By Michael A. Memoli, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — The White House on Monday delivered a starkly negative assessment of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s ability to deliver on his promises, faulting him for an “unconscionable delay” of President Barack Obama’s choice for attorney general and “inept leadership” that threatens a bipartisan trafficking bill.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest accused McConnell of breaking his commitment to give fair consideration to Loretta Lynch, Obama’s nominee for attorney general, and urged Republicans to stop “playing politics” with the post.

“There is no question that Republicans are playing politics with the nomination of the nation’s top law enforcement official, and it should come to an end,” he said.

In unusually pointed criticism of a congressional leader, Earnest also faulted McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, for a dispute over abortion that threatens to derail the otherwise bipartisan, popular bill to address sex trafficking.

Before the new Congress convened in January, the question of whether Obama and McConnell could forge a strong partnership was seen as key to the prospect of any major bipartisan legislation. When the two met after November’s midterm elections, both parties expressed confidence that they could find common ground on areas like trade and tax reform despite political differences on a host of other issues.

The relationship appears to already have hit a low. On Sunday, McConnell said on CNN that a vote to confirm Lynch could be delayed if Democrats continue to block further consideration of the trafficking bill. McConnell noted that Senate Democrats could have moved to confirm Lynch, now the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, when they still controlled the Senate last fall.

In response, Earnest noted that Obama, in a show of good faith, had agreed to McConnell’s request that consideration of Lynch be put off until this year. Earnest called it “unconscionable” that Lynch, whose nomination was recommended by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, still has yet to receive an up-or-down vote by the full chamber.

“I get asked a lot about whether or not Senator McConnell was a man of his word and whether or not he’s willing to live up to commitments that he makes to the president of the United States,” Earnest said. “For him to suggest that, ‘Well, it hasn’t been that long, because Senate Democrats delayed introducing her until after the first of the year,’ that’s not a very good sign of faith.”

Earnest also held McConnell responsible for the impasse over abortion that has tied up what was expected to be swift approval of a bipartisan bill to give law enforcement new tools to target human trafficking and establish a $30 million victims’ fund.

Democrats say Republicans slipped in a provision to block the fund from being used to pay for abortion services without their knowledge. Republicans counter that Democrats should have been paying closer attention to the legislative language.

Earnest said McConnell should drop the abortion language to allow the bill to proceed, mocking the GOP for taking a “common-sense” bill and turning “it into partisan controversy.”

“That is not a reflection of a flaw in the bill. It’s a reflection of inept leadership,” he said. “The fact that Leader McConnell can’t build bipartisan support for a child sex-trafficking bill, I think is an indication that his leadership here in the majority is not off to a very strong start.”

Photo: Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky speaking at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Republicans Struggle To Present Unified Front Over 2016 Budget

Republicans Struggle To Present Unified Front Over 2016 Budget

By Lisa Mascaro, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans are poised this week to release their proposed 2016 budget, an annual blueprint that usually serves as a political rallying cry for smaller government.

This year, however, with Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress, the process promises to ignite a fresh round of GOP infighting as the party faces the limits of its budget-slashing aspirations.

The party’s ambitious goals to rein in the nation’s $18 trillion debt load will require deeply painful reductions in government spending that GOP defense hawks refuse to stomach, particularly when it comes to the Pentagon.

But facing pressure from fiscal conservatives for a tough approach that cuts across all aspects of the federal government and its safety net programs, Republican leaders are struggling to produce a document that can unify its ranks.

Whether House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will be able to usher a budget to passage remains highly uncertain.

The party’s budget problems are the latest challenge for the Republican-led Congress that swept into power promising not only to cut spending but also to use the budget process to attack President Barack Obama’s top priorities — including the GOP’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Those ambitions may need to be scaled back as the party struggles to find common ground on the fiscal blueprint itself.

On Monday, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) announced that he is working with a group of like-minded lawmakers to preserve Pentagon spending, setting up a potential showdown.

“Providing for our national defense is the most fundamental test of our ability to govern,” McCain said. “Republicans cannot afford to fail this test.”

Even before the GOP took control of Congress this year, rolling back what many lawmakers have characterized as out-of-control federal spending had been a hallmark of the party’s platform.

Republicans vowed to balance budgets with 10 years — a goal set by the party’s leading budget guru, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the onetime vice presidential candidate and former chairman of the House Budget Committee.

“It’s a plan to get Washington’s fiscal house in order,” said Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), the committee’s new chairman, in a video preview of the budget plan before Tuesday’s scheduled release.

But reaching that milestone has proved difficult — especially while adhering to the GOP’s no-new-taxes pledge.

Democrats have refused to go along with Republican proposals to cut domestic accounts and substantially overhaul Medicare and Medicaid safety net programs.

Senator Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent who heads the Senate Budget Committee for Democrats, has warned against a budget that represents “the Robin Hood principle in reverse.”

“We must not take from the poor to give to the rich,” Sanders said. “We must not cut programs that the elderly, the children, the sick, the poor and working families desperately depend on, in order to give more tax breaks to large, profitable corporations.”

At issue are the so-called sequester cuts that both parties reluctantly agreed to as part of the 2011 budget showdown.

Most of those cuts had been postponed because lawmakers decided they were too politically painful.

But now those cuts are set to roar back in full with the start of the new fiscal year, Oct. 1, setting up a budget showdown not only between Democrats and Republicans but also between the GOP’s defense and deficit hawks.

Obama proposed doing away with the sequester cuts in his own 2016 budget, which proposed new taxes on wealthier households and corporations as a way to pay for reversing reductions planned for the Pentagon and other programs.

Improvements in the economic outlook, including the smallest federal deficits since the start of the Great Recession, gave the White House the political momentum to rebuff the GOP’s push for more austerity.

Republicans are loath to allow the president’s budget to provide greater Pentagon funding than their own, and are desperately seeking an alternative.

One option for Republicans would be to set up a two-part strategy in which Congress preserves the sequester cuts, but also establishes a so-called Deficit Neutral Reserve Fund that could be used to offset the Pentagon cuts.

“It leaves open a negotiation for a few months down the road,” Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) said as he emerged from a closed budget briefing with GOP senators last week. “The military hawks are becoming comfortable (with it).”

But the most hardened fiscal conservatives may view that strategy as little more than a punt that opens the door to more spending — and one they will not support.

And more pragmatic members were considering the options. “It’s still a work in progress,” said Senator Susan Collins (R-ME).

Photo: Speaker Boehner via Flickr