George Zornick | The Nation
The Eleven Craziest Things Newt Gingrich Has Ever Said
Today, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will announce a run for the presidency. Over his long and checkered career, Newt has said some wild and crazy things—most are deeply offensive, while some are outright bizarre. Here’s the most unhinged Newt-isms, 1989-present.
(1) “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” [Address to Cornerstone Church in Texas, March 2011]
(2) “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.” [To Mother Jones magazine, October 1989]
(3) “All I would say is, why did it take so long? The whole thing is strange.” [Speaking to TPM about the recent release of President Obama’s long-form birth certificate, April 2011]
(4) “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.” [To the National Review, September 2010]
(5) “It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.” – [Newt’s explanation for why his multiple affairs won’t damage his political fortunes, as told to his jilted wife.]
(6) “The secular socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” [In his book To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, May 2010.]
(7) “This is one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. The more successful they’ve been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we’re in danger…. It’s almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.” [At a book talk in Huntington, NY, April 2008]
(8) "A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about.” [At the Republican National Convention, August 1996]
(9) “I want to say to the elite of this country—the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton… of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.” [Speaking about the Columbine shootings, May 1999]
(10) “How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane.” [Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 2007]
(11) “I’m running for President.” [5/11/2011]
GOP Bill Would Require Drug Testing of Welfare Recipients
Late last week, Rep. Charles Boustany, a Republican representing a rural area of Louisiana, introduced without fanfare a bill that would require drug testing of anyone on—or applying to—the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
TANF, formerly known as welfare until Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich overhauled the program in 1996, provides cash assistance to low-income families with children. But as Greg Kaufman noted yesterday, the Clinton-Gingrich “reforms” resulted in a dramatic decrease in the proportional number of families eligible for help, because of many different barriers erected by states that dole out the assistance. Only 28 families out of every 100 in poverty receive TANF benefits.
Boustany’s bill would create yet another obstacle for poverty-stricken families in need of help. It would require states to “implement a drug testing program for applicants for and recipients of assistance” under TANF. It is similar to a proposal by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) last summer that went nowhere in the Senate after many Republicans failed to support it.
Drug testing TANF recipients is already a popular idea in many states. The policy group CLASP says that 27 states have proposed mandatory, suspicionless drug testing for those who receive TANF benefits or other forms of public assistance.
In Florida, the Republican legislature passed a bill that requires TANF drug testing, and Gov. Rick Scott (R) is expected to sign it this week. The Missouri Senate gave initial approval to a similar bill in late April.
Drug testing public assistance recipients is problematic for many reasons, the first being that it may be unconstitutional. A decade ago, Michigan was the first state to propose such a program, and the Sixth Circuit court found that it violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. The court found that “upholding suspicionless drug testing would set a dangerous precedent” and that drug tests should satisfy “a special need, and that need must concern public safety.”
There are obvious social concerns as well. If a family in poverty has a parent with drug addiction problems—a situation that one might think requires additional help—it could instead lose benefits entirely. A Missouri activist noted last month that her state’s bill would “leave many children with less money in the household and addicted parents.”
It’s difficult to see how drug testing TANF recipients isn’t simply a punitive measure against the poor. If one believes that “we don’t want tax dollars to be spent on drugs,” as the Republican sponsor of the Missouri bill said, why not drug test anyone else who receives state assistance?
Pat Dougherty of the Catholic Charities of Archdiocese of St Louis said last month the Missouri bill “targets low-income individuals, particularly women with children…We have women who come to our program and who are successful, who are getting their lives back together, who are trying to get straight, and yet, you’ve got a penalty there,” he said.
And while keeping precious tax dollars from being “used on drugs” may appeal to conservatives hungry for spending cuts, analyses show that drug testing is vastly more expensive than the savings it would reap in reduced benefits for addicts.
The ACLU of Utah calculated that testing every TANF recipient in that state just once would cost over $1.4 million, accounting for the cost of the tests, transportation to testing sites for at least some TANF recipients, and the cost of defending the inevitable lawsuits.
Meanwhile, if five percent of TANF recipients tested positive in that first round—a very generous estimate—the state would save only $153,376 in benefits. That money could not be used for any non-TANF purpose by the state afterwards, either.
Boustany’s bill was referred to the House Committee on Ways and Means, of which he is a member, and chairman of its Oversight Committee. If passed out of committee for a House vote, it could face a tough road—as noted, Hatch’s bill died a quick death last summer after several moderate Republican Senators balked. Boustany is stepping very lightly so far, especially for a member that's guaranteed to lose his seat to redistricting in the next Congress. On the day he introduced the drug testing bill, his office put out five press releases—none related to the measure.
The GOP Jobs Plan That Wasn't
It’s been over three months since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and strengthened their caucus in the Senate. The central premise of the GOP midterm campaign was that it could create badly needed jobs—the Republican National Committee drove a bus through the lower 48 states emblazoned with the slogan: “Need a Job? Fire Pelosi!”
Now, after focusing its initial legislative efforts on repealing “ObamaCare,” pushing Tea Party-backed dreams like a balanced budget amendment, and fighting to strip regulatory agencies of their authority, the GOP has finally released a job plan…that consists of a balanced budget amendment, the repeal of Obamacare, and several assaults on regulatory authority.
Freshman Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), who headed the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush, released the official Senate GOP jobs plan yesterday. The unveiling received a surprisingly scant amount of media attention. Surely the ongoing bin Laden saga helped overshadow the announcement, but the complete lack of any new ideas might also have been a factor. Beyond the aforementioned goals, the GOP job plan advocates expanded off-shore drilling, steep tax reductions, medical malpractice reform, and other well-worn conservative policy tropes.
Aside from being unoriginal, few of these measures could be said to have even an ostensible effect on jobs. “It is very hard to see this as much of a jobs bill,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The first part of the plan attempts to attack the federal deficit. It outlines three provisions: a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, a statutory spending limit that “provides a budget strait-jacket so that Congress is forced to make difficult decisions each year to live within its means,” and immediate spending cuts.
This method of job creation by way of government austerity was, of course, the preferred path of Herbert Hoover in 1932. The GOP plan asserts that “out of control spending spree creates uncertainty in the economy and stops the investment,” but economists have long since dispensed with what Paul Krugman calls the “confidence fairy”—the idea that the only thing preventing companies from hiring is a lack of confidence in the government’s long-term fiscal health. Slashing federal spending often has the exact opposite affect—countries like Ireland, Latvia, and Estonia enacted steep spending cuts in the recent global downturn, and each saw subsequent slumps in output and employment.
Quite paradoxically, the plan immediately moves on to a series of proposed tax cuts, which would of course make the federal deficit much larger. It calls for a reduction of the corporate tax rate to 25 percent along with lowering individual rates, reducing taxes on capital gains, and making tax credits for research and development and small business investment permanent.
Baker said the R&D tax credit might have a “modest positive effect” on job creation—but Congress has voted to extend it every year since the early 90s anyhow. Otherwise, the idea that jobs are created by reducing tax rates for big corporations and individuals is widely discredited. (See Bush tax cuts and job growth, 2001-08).
The GOP “jobs” proposal also calls for a broad assault on what the government is allowed to regulate. It advocates passage of the Reins Act, which would allow Congress to veto almost any regulation imposed by the federal government, and also once again demands the EPA lose its ability to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Losing that authority may be a precondition for the next part of the GOP jobs plan: expanded offshore drilling for fossil fuels while allowing “greater access” to federal lands for energy exploration.
Once again, it’s very hard to see how these provisions—which are harmful in their own right—have anything to do with job creation. Baker acknowledged that expanded oil drilling “may lead to a small number of additional jobs in the oil industry,” but would also “almost certainly lead to more environmental damage, which will cost jobs.”
The gulf between the GOP “jobs” plan and reality was evident even in Portman’s rollout. Last week he previewed his party’s blueprint at Lincoln Electric in Euclid, OH. “What we’re trying to do is to create an environment for companies to succeed and, right now, America’s tax policies, our energy policy, the regulatory policy, the legal policy is making it harder for us to create jobs here in America,” he said. “So what we’re trying to do is to create more certainty, to create a more pro-growth, pro-jobs policy framework and companies, like Lincoln, will benefit directly.”
Portman noted the company added 50 production jobs in the first part of this year. But he didn’t mention one of the company’s major new projects: assembly of the largest wind turbine in northeast Ohio. The GOP plan calls for nuclear energy subsidies, but no green technology investments.
Additionally, federal and local governments helped fund the turbine project. Funds from the 2009 stimulus provided $1.12 million for the project, and the Cuyahoga County government kicked in another $350,000 loan.
(Finally, Lincoln Electric might not be the best place to push for reduced EPA authority. USA Today reported in 2008 that Lincoln emits a wide array of toxic chemicals that affect five nearby elementary and middle schools).
So nobody can now say the GOP doesn’t have a jobs plan. But nobody can really say it would create many jobs, either.
GOP on the Brink of Weakening Flight Safety Rules
In March, Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) introduced a brief amendment to an aviation bill that will fund the Federal Aviation Administration for the next several years. Shuster’s seemingly innocuous amendment called on the FAA to draw up separate flight safety rules for commercial, charter, and cargo airlines, and imposed several procedures the agency must follow in crafting those rules.
The measure, which narrowly passed the Republican House of Representatives on April 1 and might soon be made part of the final aviation legislation, is actually far from harmless. If enacted it will slow down or stop some common-sense flight safety rules from being created through the various stringent procedures it places on the regulatory process. While it’s not as dramatic as recent GOP attempts to gut environmental protection or regulation of Wall Street, Shuster’s amendment is a telling example of how far the current GOP will go to protect industry interests.
The new flight safety rules that Shuster is trying to slow down would create tougher guidelines for how pilots are trained, and how much rest they must get before flying. The rules are a product of a lengthy campaign from families of a recent crash in Buffalo, NY that proved the dangers of lax federal regulation in airline safety.
On February 12, 2009, Continental Flight 3407, operated by the smaller carrier Colgan Air, crashed into a suburb of Buffalo. The young co-pilot had taken an overnight, cross-country flight the day before the crash and slept briefly in an airport lounge in Newark, NJ before piloting Flight 3407.
When the plane encountered an ice storm as it attempted to land, the pilots made some critical errors in judgment and lost control of the flight, sending it plummeting downwards. The National Transportation Safety Board found that their “performance was likely impaired because of fatigue.” Both pilots were heard yawning on the cockpit voice recorder.
The families of the crash victims channeled their grief into an effort to toughen federal regulations on pilot fatigue, and other safety measures. After 15 months of lobbying, they got a bill passed last summer that required the FAA to create an array of new pilot safety and training rules.
The families gathered in Washington yesterday to urge a conference committee working on the final aviation bill not to include Shuster’s amendment. Karen Eckert, who lost her sister Beverly in the crash, blasted the sneaky language of the measure. “It doesn’t have the word safety in it….It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Eckert. They were joined by the Western New York Congressional delegation. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) also called out Shuster’s sneak attack on flight safety regulations. “This amendment is the preverbal nose under the tent designed to undermine our hard won safety improvements,” he said.
It’s possible the conference committee of legislators will strip Shuster’s language, as Schumer promised to fight for yesterday. But the amendment has been surprisingly resistant to public outcry so far. In the days before it passed, famed pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger mounted a fruitless public campaign to defeat the amendment. Saying the language “creates a huge obstacle to new regulations,” Sullenberger said he believed that “at some point in the future, we don’t know when, it’s likely people will die unnecessarily.” He also said on MSNBC that it was a “slap in the face” to the Flight 3407 families while decrying “special interests only interested in the bottom line.”
Special interests are, of course, at the heart of the matter. Shuster is a five-term Republican who has received $115,750 from the aviation industry over the course of his career. That money has led Shuster to advocate for an outright weakening of basic flight safety rules despite all the opposition from grief-stricken relatives of crash victims to possibly the most famous pilot in America. The question now is whether the aviation industry’s money will keep Shuster’s language in the final bill.
Senator Dick Durbin Questions Sending 'One More' Soldier to Die in Afghanistan
Early on in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing about Afghanistan today, Medea Benjamin of Code Pink interrupted a discussion about whether the United States should maintain current troop levels or draw down to a smaller force focused on counter-terrorism operations. “There is another opinion—just leave,” she said.
Senator John Kerry (D-MA), the committee’s chairman, quickly gaveled the hearing into a brief recess, and Benjamin left the room. Had she stuck around, she might have been surprised to hear the number-two Democrat in the Senate essentially echo her position.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the Democratic Party whip, asked by far the hearing’s most important question and one of the most pointed by a Democratic leader to date: “If you believe that resolution of this conflict by military means is highly unlikely and not a realistic basis for US policy, how can we send one more American soldier to fight and die in Afghanistan?” he said.
Durbin noted that “Afghanistan has been a graveyard of empires,” and repeatedly invoked the human cost borne by American soldiers. “We are now in a very sterile conversation about diplomacy and foreign policy,” he said. “The reality is they’re fighting and dying over there. And the question is—how long will we keep sending them?”
Aside from Durbin, other senators who attended the hearing—both Republican and Democrat—voiced serious concerns about extended commitments to Afghanistan. Not one openly called for staying the current course.
Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) cited President Obama’s recent $100 billion budget request for fighting the war in fiscal year 2012, along with a strategy that “appears to be devoted to remaking the economic, political, and security culture of that country,” and said that “it is exceedingly difficult to conclude that our vast expenditures in Afghanistan represent a rational allocation of our military and financial assets.”
Lugar’s concerns were echoed by Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who said plainly that “I’ve been supportive of the administration so far, but I have a real hard time as we move forward.” Menendez wondered aloud whether there was “an amount of money or plan that can actually work here.”
The only other Republican to speak, Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), also raised questions about the amount of money being spent. “I think the one thing that would stun the American people on the ground in Afghanistan, is how much we are investing in this country, and what we are investing in,” he said.
President Obama will soon decide whether the July drawdown of troops will be substantial or simply a matter of optics. The hearing’s witnesses divided into two camps. Ann Marie Slaughter, late of the Obama administration, and Ronald E. Neumann, who served as President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005–07, both advocated for extended American investment in the country.
Slaughter said she envisions a “secure, stable, and self-reliant” Afghanistan, despite the continued elusiveness of anything resembling that situation. “It may seem like an impossible job,” Slaughter testified. “But the sooner we embark on it, the better the chances that we can get it done.”
The Council on Foreign Relation’s Richard Haass, on the other hand, called for the end of combat operations against the Taliban, though not a total withdrawal—he wanted a small number of US troops to remain in the country, performing counter-terrorism operations.
“I do not believe…a quote-unquote ‘self-reliant Afghanistan’ is a reasonable goal,” Haass said. “I think that is an open-ended commitment for the United States, militarily and economically, and I do not believe that that can be strategically defended, given the costs and given the opportunity costs; given all else we need to worry about in the world and given all else we need to worry about here at home.”
Nobody yet knows to what degree President Obama will withdraw troops from Afghanistan this summer, but it is clear he’s gaining cover on Capitol Hill for substantial action.
Rep. Barney Frank told Think Progress’s Faiz Shakir he now favors withdrawal. “People say, well, America can't look like it was driven out with the mission not accomplished. We went there to get Osama bin Laden!” The Atlantic’s Elspeth Reeve counted seven other House Democrats who spoke up in favor of reconsidering current troop levels in the wake of bin Laden’s death,
Even before bin Laden was killed, Obama may have been considering a serious drawdown. The Atlantic's Yochi Dreazen reports that Obama was already moving away from the idea of a token drawdown, and “with bin Laden now out of the picture, the White House may feel even freer to order a larger drawdown than most in the military would prefer.”
Lugar’s criticism aside, Republicans aren’t likely to support a perceived retreat. House speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has already said bin Laden’s death “makes our engagement in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan more important not less.” But with eroding Congressional support and polls showing the public wants out of Afghanistan even if it’s not stable, that could be a tough position to hold.
The Tables Turn in Town Halls, and Maybe DC
In the summer of 2009, raucous town halls were a central turning point in the healthcare reform debate, as angry constituents bombarded legislators with furious monologues and protests over the legislation.
Many of the protests were organized by lobbyist-run groups like Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which was busing in people to crash the meetings and providing them with guidelines on how to do so.
Over the past two weeks, town halls are once again a big political story. Ever since Republicans in the House of Representatives passed Representative Paul Ryan’s draconian budget, which cuts taxes on top earners while essentially ending Medicare, there have been widespread reports of angry voters challenging Republicans who voted for it.
This time, to the extent AFP is involved, they are mainly playing defense. The Democratic National Committee's (DNC) Hari Sevugin tweets that AFP may be busing some people to Ryan town halls to help him counter the constituents that are critical of him.
Slate’s Dave Weigel has also reported that the American Action Network, a front group for several Wall Street investment bankers, also tried to stem the tide of constituent anger by providing lists of possible softball questions for anyone interested in attending a town hall in support of Ryan’s plan.
Signs that the tables are turning are apparent elsewhere as well—most strikingly, perhaps, in the case of freshman Representative Allen West (R-FL). Over the past year, West became a Tea Party star—and the town hall was his stage. As he mounted a campaign to represent Florida’s 22nd Congressional district, a seat then held by Democrat Ron Klein, West began holding fiery public events that became online sensations.
At one forum hosted by a Tea Party group, which got over 2 million hits on YouTube, West thundered: “We need to meet in places and start talking about restoring our liberty and fighting back against a tyrannical government. It starts right here, it starts right now, with each one of you that’s gathered here today.” The crowd went wild.
Once he beat Klein, West—a former lieutenant colonel in the Army—continued to capitalize on his commanding public presence and held town halls in which he would take on all comers. People would line up at microphones and ask West whatever they wanted. Often the questioners heaped praise on West, but not always.
On two separate occasions, representatives of the Council on American Islamic Relations showed up to challenge West on his inflammatory statements about Islam. (West has said that Islam is not a religion but rather a “totalitarian theocratic political ideology.”)
The congressman was eager to fight. Without even letting him finish, West told Nezar Hamze of CAIR that “I’ve been on the battlefield my friend. Don’t try to blow sunshine up my butt.” As the crowd roared, he demanded that Hamze “put the microphone down and go home.” The confrontation was a hit, one eagerly gobbled up by Fox News, which frequently replayed the clip and invited West on air to discuss it.
However, the town hall West held this week in Fort Lauderdale was suddenly and dramatically different. For the first time, West’s staff did not allow constituents to get anywhere near a microphone. ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes reported from the event that all of the questions were pre-screened, and the questioners couldn’t even pose their queries themselves—event organizers read them aloud.
Some attendees were not dissuaded. “How about our Medicare that you’re stealing!” shouted one. Several people were ejected by security, and one person was arrested. So much for taking on all comers.
As Congress reconvenes this week, voter backlash during recess has dimmed already dark prospects for the Ryan budget to pass the Senate. Though she praised Ryan for his “courage,” moderate Republican Susan Collins said she will not support his plan. Most of the major Republican presidential candidates have taken the same approach—lauding Ryan but not explicitly endorsing his budget proposal.
In perhaps the most telling indication of how toxic the Ryan budget is for many Republican Senators, it’s not the Republicans who will bring up the budget for a vote but rather majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV). “Republicans seem to be in love with the Ryan budget,” Reid teased on a conference call with reporters yesterday. “We’ll have an opportunity to vote on the Ryan budget, to see if [Republican Senators] like it as much as their House colleagues did.”
In Recent Budget Deal, GOP Bleeds Environmental Protection
When a government shutdown was averted earlier this month with the passage of a spending agreement that cut $38 billion from the federal budget, the Obama administration was quick to boast that it avoided serious limits to environmental protection pushed by Republicans.
“We…made sure that at the end of the day, this was a debate about spending cuts, not social issues like women’s health and the protection of our air and water,” President Obama said in a late-night public address. “These are important issues that deserve discussion, just not during a debate about our budget.
It’s true that measures intended to severely hamstring the Environmental Protection Agency were avoided. Republicans were pushing a $3 billion reduction to the agency’s budget—a 29 percent spending cut—and a measure to strip the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases in any form.
In the final compromise, however, the EPA still got a $1.49 billion haircut, a 16 percent reduction and more than other targeted agencies. Moreover, a line-by-line examination of the bill reveals nearly $1.8 billion in additional cuts to other environmental initiatives outside the EPA, which more than doubles the total harm done to environmental protection. Many of these cuts still target climate change-related programs.
The EPA is still reviewing how it will operate with nearly $1.5 billion less than it did last year. In a statement to The Nation, the agency said it was “reviewing the funding levels and will have more details when that review is complete. We understand the need to make difficult decisions to ensure the government lives within its means.”
In comments to Reuters after the deal was struck, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson indicated many of the cuts would come in funding to states to help pay for pollution abatement and to some programs on climate change.
Environmental groups are a little more direct about the effect the cuts will have on the EPA’s agenda. “Republican opponents of EPA clearly have wounded the agency in a big way,“ Frank O’Donnell, the president of Clean Air Watch, told Reuters.
A more direct assault on climate change programs came in the non-EPA cuts. Funding was blocked entirely for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate service, which was to allow the NOAA to “provide a reliable and authoritative source for climate data, information, and decision support services.”
The compromise also limited funds to the Interior Department’s “wild lands” policy, introduced in December and designed to protect land that had not yet been designated as wilderness land. Beyond preserving natural spaces, the program could prevent those areas from being used for oil and gas drilling. Republicans are strongly opposed to the program.
Some of the other reductions to environmental programs throughout the government include:
The Department of Agriculture lost $34 million for a renewable energy program, $119 million for a wetlands protection program and $80 million for a program providing environmental incentives to farmers.
The Department of Energy saw $438 million taken from energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, $20 million from nondefense environmental cleanup and $101 million from nuclear waste disposal.
The Interior Department lost nearly a billion dollars for clean drinking water programs and an additional $49 million for climate change efforts.
Funding for these programs can of course be re-instituted at a later date, but activists worry even temporary delays will slow the environmental agenda. “The cuts are coming just at the time the EPA is finally waking up and starting to adopt basic safeguards [and] is going to have a significant impact,” Gabe Wisniewski of Greenpeace told Bloomberg News.
With Economy as a Hostage, the GOP Presents Extreme Demands
The standoff du jour in Washington is about a vote to raise the federal debt ceiling. Democrats and the White House insist it must be done—as does Wall Street—while fiscal conservatives and Tea Party activists are demanding serious concessions, and in some cases, an unconditional “no” vote. As the conversation reaches a crescendo, it’s useful to take a quick look at what the debt ceiling actually is, and what forces are at play in the debate.
When the United States needs to borrow money, the Treasury Department issues bonds in order to pay for the deficit spending. Before 1917, Congress had to approve this borrowing every time it happened, but World War I created a need for more flexibility and lawmakers gave the federal government unchecked borrowing powers, provided the total amount was less than a certain limit.
Congress now needs to approve any borrowing past the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, which the United States will reach “no later” than May 16, according to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. If Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, the government would have to stop spending—including stopping interest payments on those Treasury bonds, meaning that the United States would effectively default on its debt.
Opportunistic Republicans have correctly understood this vote as a chance to force Democrats into approving several goals held by fiscal conservatives and the Tea Party. Though the debt ceiling will be reached because of past spending—including many Republican initiatives like the Medicare drug benefit and the costly invasion of Iraq—Republicans insist that concessions on future spending are needed before they will agree to raise the limit.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said last month that all forty-seven Republican Senators were unified in their opposition to raising the debt ceiling unless “credible” efforts were made to cut federal spending. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) has also said his caucus would not vote to raise the debt ceiling unless “it is accompanied by meaningful action by the President and Congress to cut...the job-killing spending binge in Washington.”
Tea Party activists, meanwhile, are working furiously to ensure Republicans in Congress stand firm. The Tea Party Patriots, the largest organized Tea Party group in the country, warned that “Republican credibility as fiscally responsible managers of public resources is on the line” with the debt ceiling vote.
The group is holding a televised town hall this week on the issue, and urging activists to crash Congressional offices on Thursday to demand their representatives hold the line. The far-right website World Net Daily is has already sent 250,000 letters to 242 House Republicans, urging them to vote against a debt limit increase.
The conservative position makes sense on both messaging and strategic levels. It's simple to push the idea that the United States has somehow reached the limit of what it can spend—though of course this “limit” is arbitrary, and has been raised ten times just since 2001, again often by Republicans who needed to finance expensive tax cuts or wars.
From a strategic perspective, the threat of default is a gun to the head of Democrats who would otherwise be unwilling to even negotiate on many of the demands currently being made by Republicans. As Representative Michael Burgess (R-TX) told World Net Daily, “I must be convinced we have wrung every nickel of spending out of this.... This is the one tool available to us, and unilateral disarmament leads to financial Armageddon.”
However, Republicans—to their detriment—haven’t really made it clear what they want in return for approving a debt ceiling increase, beyond the aforementioned "credible cuts." When they have, these demands are often wildly unrealistic.
Republican leaders in Congress are proposing “a wide range of major structural reforms” to the budget process, including statutory spending caps, a constitutional amendment mandating balanced federal budgets and a two-thirds threshold for approving tax increases or debt limit increases in the future.
The balanced budget proposal is simple posturing, since it would require sixty-seven Congressional votes along with the approval of thirty-eight state legislatures. It would also impose almost impossibly stringent requirements on a government that often needs to deficit spend, especially in times of multiple wars and economic distress.
The two-thirds approval requirement on new taxes, meanwhile, would essentially spell the end of tax increases in America. California has such an amendment on the books, and the impossibility of getting legislative approval of new taxes left the state with “no choice but to cut its budget to ribbons during the economic downturn,” as the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo noted. It’s easy to imagine conservatives might actually enjoy this outcome, but not easy to imagine that the current Congress would impose such a strict measure.
Tea Partyers in the House and presidential candidates eager to ride the activist wave building around the debt limit vote are issuing even more preposterous demands. Former senator and current presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said yesterday he would “absolutely” let the United States default on its debt unless healthcare reform was entirely defunded first. Fellow White House hopeful Newt Gingrich doesn’t want the debt ceiling to be raised unless Congress immediately enacts the Ryan plan to block-grant Medicaid spending. Freshman Tea Party Representative Allen West (R-FL) says he would like to cut corporate tax rates in half before approving a debt ceiling increase.
Representative Michelle Bachmann (R-MN)—a professional one-upper of Tea Party rage—has given up issuing any demands at all, and is advocating a straight “no” vote. In her view, the United States wouldn’t have to default on its debt—it would make the Treasury bond payments with money that would otherwise have been used to send out those pesky Social Security checks, or whatever other spending that would no longer be “prioritized,” in her words.
So much like the recent budget showdown, the Republican base is animated and the demands of the party’s elected leaders are increasingly extreme and do not really coalesce around a specific list of reasonable proposals. The White House has been asking for a simple, “clean” reauthorization of the debt limit with no string attached, though it recently opened the door to adding “defict-reduction elements.”
An additional factor working against Republicans is that the threat of default may be so dangerous that Americans realize the party is playing with gasoline next to a flammable economic recovery. If the debt limit is not raised, Treasury bonds would suddenly become a shaky investment and, as Annie Lowery outlines in Slate, financial markets could start dumping bonds en masse, possibly even before an actual default occurs. They might never be viewed as a safe investment again, meaning also that the US dollar would lose its position as the default currency. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told Ezra Klein that “the system will collapse into turmoil.”
Other analyses say the end-game might not be that bad, and that the Treasury Department could take several to avoid default and calm investors. Perhaps that’s true, but nobody involved really wants to find out. Boehner was told in no uncertain terms by Wall Street that debt ceiling politics risk “catastrophic outcomes.”
Republican leaders are caught in a place they’d probably rather not be—between diametrically opposite demands of Wall Street and the Tea Party. Leadership will ultimately cut a deal to get loose from this situation, and safe money is on Tea Partiers being disappointed--the Constitution won’t be rewritten to include balanced budgets. The only real question now is what the consolation prize will be.
GOP Struggles to Dent the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Last month, Representative Randy Neugebauer (R-TX)—the powerful chair of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight—told the Huffington Post exactly how he felt about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “I don’t like them,” he said of the agency created under the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul and which aims to protect consumers from predatory purveyors of mortgages, credit cards and other financial products. He added that he didn’t want the CFPB to “work at all” in the future.
This bold statement was actually a departure from the Republican strategy to date. Instead of attacking the popular idea of consumer protection and attempting to destroy the CFPB outright, the GOP has tried to push a variety of funding and organizational changes that could slowly and quietly diminish the bureau’s effectiveness.
Despite his unusually frank talk, Neugebauer was simply proposing a measure that would prevent the CFPB from being housed in the Federal Reserve—something that will happen later this year—thus making the bureau’s cash flow easier to target in the future.
Another GOP House proposal tried to reduce the bureau’s funding in the meantime, but only in the name of austerity. “I am not opposed to strong financial regulation,” Representative Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) said during a House debate about CFPB funding. “But at a time when we’re trying to do more with less, I think it’s important for the agencies to do more with less too.”
Republicans brought these indirect assaults into the recent government shutdown standoff, requesting many of these funding reductions and structural changes. But none of them were accepted in the final appropriations bill signed by President Obama last week.
The most Republicans could get—or were ultimately willing to insist upon—was a provision requiring two annual audits of the CFPB. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) claimed on his website that there would now be “mandatory audits of the new job-crushing bureaucracy set up under Dodd-Frank,” and that they would be conducted by both the Government Accountability Office and the “private sector.”
That sounds troubling for advocates of financial regulation—will a big bank suddenly be auditing the CFPB? Well, no. Boehner’s chest-thumping statement didn’t mention the CFPB gets to choose the auditor, which the bill text doesn’t say must be from the private sector, but rather “independent”—so it could just as easily be a think tank or university.
In fact, the language requiring the independent audit is brief and quite vague about the scope of the study, and House Democrats who back the CFPB are not very concerned. “The independent private audits of the CFPB will not be consequential,” Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA) told The Nation.
Sherman, who worked closely on the Dodd-Frank legislation, also noted that GAO audits trumpeted by Boehner are already required in the original bill. He said the audit provisions were meaningless “except to the extent it gave [House Speaker John] Boehner the political cover to agree to the CR compromise.”
Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) agreed, and told The Nation that the new audits are essentially cosmetic and were “a consolation prize for not getting the funding reductions.” Frank believes that if anything, the CFPB emerged from the appropriations debate in a stronger position. “It’s an implicit acknowledgment that [CFPB] is too popular to take away,” he said.
While the GOP wasn’t able to slow the CFPB’s mission, and directly attacking Wall Street regulations will likely remain a tricky endeavor for Republicans, there are more opportunities for subtle troublemaking on the horizon. A permanent director for CFPB must be in place by July 21, and that post requires Senate confirmation.
If no director is in place by that date, the bureau will be deprived of many of its regulatory powers. President Obama may permanently nominate Warren, something Republicans will almost certainly try to block—just don’t expect them to be honest about their motivations.
Deepwater Horizon 2.0? Why It Can Happen Again
It’s been one year since a the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and ultimately flooding the surrounding sea with over 200 million gallons of oil in the worst environmental disaster in American history.
Confusion reigned while oil gushed from the damaged rig, as engineers tried to stop the flow with everything from a giant underwater dome to thousands of golf balls. But there was one thing nearly everybody agreed upon—stronger regulation of offshore drilling was needed, to both prevent leaks and contain the damage if they did occur.
President Barack Obama declared that “we’re going to make sure that any leases going forward have those safeguards,” and his administration imposed an offshore drilling moratorium until safety protocols could be updated. Polls found over 70 percent of Americans favored stronger regulation of oil exploration. Even some Republicans agreed—Senator Lindsey Graham said he wanted to “find out what happened in the gulf and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
The offshore drilling moratorium was lifted in October. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that a new “gold standard” of safety measures was in place, and the first permit for offshore drilling was issued in February—to a company partially owned by BP. Nineteen permits have been issued since.
In his energy speech late last month, Obama assured the public these new leases require maximum safety. “What we learned from [the Deepwater] disaster helped us put in place smarter standards of safety and responsibility,” he said. “For example, if you‘re going to drill in deepwater, you‘ve got to prove before you start drilling that you can actually contain an underwater spill. That‘s just common sense.”
There’s just one problem—that’s not at all true. Some of the same fundamental engineering failures that created the gulf oil spill are still in place, and may not be addressed any time soon.
On the Deepwater Horizon rig, a blowout preventer should have kept oil from spilling into the ocean after the initial explosion, but it failed. A government-backed forensic study of the blowout preventer failure released last month found that the failure was not an aberration but rather a product of a basic design flaw. One critical part of the blowout preventer—“shear rams,” a pair of blades designed to cut through pipe and seal an oil well off in an emergency—functioned properly, but failed to completely seal the well. The report found a second pair of shear rams is probably needed to ensure wells are sealed in an emergency.
But the Senate killed a bill requiring that second set of shears last year. The Bureau of Offshore Energy Management (BOEMRE), which issues offshore drilling permits, has also declined to require a second set of shear rams “because of the time and costs associated with retrofitting the entire industry's inventory.”
The forensic report’s authors strongly criticized this failure to have a second set of shear rams, since the first set clearly doesn’t always do enough to stop leaks. "It feels like your fail-safe equipment shouldn't require optimal conditions to work," one researcher told the Houston Chronicle, in a notable understatement.
So contrary to Obama’s assertion that “you‘ve got to prove before you start drilling that you can actually contain an underwater spill,” the blowout preventers currently being used for new and existing offshore drilling are the exact same faulty models that couldn’t stop the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Rachel Maddow--who has been aggressively following the persistent blowout preventer problems—interviewed BOEMRE director Michael Bromwich this week about the problems, and his answers hardly inspired confidence. When confronted with the continuing blowout preventer problems, Bromwich, a former prosecutor with no engineering or energy experience, said that “no one in our agency, and certainly not me, has ever suggested that these are failsafe devices.” So much for the new “gold standard” of safety.
Bromwich claimed that other new safety measures could still limit leakage to seventeen days—something he acknowledged is “not fabulous, but...a lot better than [the] 87 days” it took to stop the Deepwater Horizon leak. Even if that’s true, considering that as many as 3.4 million gallons of oil per day spilled from Deepwater Horizon at the height of the crisis, a seventeen-day leak would still create a catastrophic environmental problem. After the interview, Maddow said she has “never been more freaked out about this story and about these permits.”
Beyond the issue of shear rams, deeper regulatory issues remain, calling into further question whether offshore drilling permits should continue to be issued. Under the Bush admistration, BOEMRE was known as the Minerals Management Service, and was beset by widespread corruption and bribery. (Remember the prostitutes provided by oil companies to MMS officials?) William K. Reilly, a former administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, told the New York Times that the new organization under Bromwich is better than Bush’s MMS, but still falls far short of what is needed. “They changed the name, but all the people are the same,” Reilly said. “It’s embarrassing.”
The Interior Department is now “examining” improvements to the shear systems, and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) is calling for a similar Congressional examination. It’s possible the safety measures will be strengthened—but if another leak occurs in the meantime, it’s likely the government will once again be left scrambling for large inventories of golf balls.
For more on the BP oil spill from The Nation, see:
The editors, “There Will Be Blood”
Naomi Klein, “A Hole in the World” and “The Search for BP's Oil”
Christopher Hayes, “BP: Beyond Punishment” and “The Breakdown: What Is the True Cost of BP's Oil Spill?”
Abe Louise Young, “BP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents Struggle”
Mark Hertsgaard, “Kicking the Oil Habit”
Raj Patel, “We Have Yet to See the Biggest Costs of the BP Spill”
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