Tea Party: A Koch Industry

Let’s call a spade a spade. Let’s call the Tea Party the Koch Party. The Koch Party is the tail that is wagging the GOP’s lead dog, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch bankrolled Tea Party groups from their beginning in addition to funding FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and Citizens for a Sound Economy. The Kochs have been referred to as “the financial engine of the Tea Party.” Their agenda opposes the extension of unemployment benefits, opposes a federal deficit, and calls for a freeze on federal regulations regarding oil, mining, and financial concerns. 

As the New Yorker reported, “In Washington, [David] Koch is best known as part of a family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal government and on the Obama Administration in particular.” 

Just before Christmas Boehner’s song was that the Keystone XL pipeline was the keystone of the payroll tax cut bill. “We will make changes,” Speaker Boehner said. “I will guarantee you the Keystone pipeline will be in the bill when it goes back to the Senate.” Increasing Canadian oil imports benefits Koch Industries, which is responsible for close to a quarter of the oil sands crude that is imported into the United States. Pipeline approval would be a windfall for Koch, with its deep involvement in the Canadian petroleum industry.

The Senate gave the Speaker the song he wanted to sing, a payroll tax extension with the Pipeline project rider. It then adjourned and left Washington. But the Koch Party House members rebelled and the Speakers’ tune changed to another piece of brinkmanship, for which the 112^th Congress has become renowned. At stake this time were 2 million Americans losing their long-term unemployment benefits and 160 million workers seeing their taxes rise by 2-percentage points.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) slammed the GOP. “The public has to be concerned and wondering why on Earth are we not getting a payroll tax cut when everybody says they're for it?" The answer to her question is the Koch Party, led by Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), who opposed the Senate bill and urged his caucus to reject it.

Job creation is just the lip service that Speaker Boehner gave to the Keystone XL pipeline project. Blocking the middle class tax cut could cost between 400,000 and 1 million American jobs. Jobs are not on the Koch Party agenda. Its Tea Party surrogates do not understand who creates jobs or how a tax increase would impact consumer spending. Koch Industries is big business concerned about regulations and corporate tax loop-holes.  

Big business does not create jobs: it eliminates jobs. Small business creates jobs, but it can only create jobs when consumer spending goes up.

Well-funded Republicans do not grasp the concept that taking $40 a month away from the average US households is hardly a way to increase consumer spending. The non-partisan National Federation of Independent Business says, “It is going to take a rebound in consumer spending, particularly in the service sector to make a significant dent in the number of unemployed. The manufacturing sector is doing very well, but it does not create many jobs.”  

The Koch Party has had a strategy for the 2012 election. In order to thwart the re-election of President Barack Obama, it has exercised considerable effort to keep unemployment high and to restrain economic growth. The effect has been for the House of Representatives to abdicate its legislative responsibilities to the Senate and to foment a split between the two chambers.

However, the Koch Party strategy is flawed. Its usual Rupert Murdoch ally, the Wall Street Journal, critiqued, “After a year of the tea party House, Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats have had to make no major policy concessions beyond extending the Bush tax rates for two years. Mr. Obama is in a stronger re-election position today than he was a year ago.”

The Republican Party has not necessarily sold out to big business such as Koch Industries. The GOP has been traditionally regarded as the party of business. But it is difficult and expensive to be elected to congress, let alone to the presidency. So Mitt Romney, who has been courting a Koch endorsement, took no sides on the payroll tax standoff. Nor has the Koch Party endorsed his candidacy. They do not trust him.

Koch money funded and organized its surrogate Tea Party wing of the GOP. However, the Koch Party has yet to produce anything other than obstruction of the legislative process, record low congressional approval ratings, and a downgrade of the US credit rating. The Koch Party assertion that such an achievement record is what voters sent them to do in 2010 is dubious. The Speaker and his party are going to take a hit. A big hit.

Originally published as Tea Party: A Koch Industry on Blogcritics.

Class Warfare: Boo--Hiss

Well, “Boo-Hiss,” say the Republicans. “It’s class warfare!” They object to the president, of course. That is just doing their Republican job. It is politics, after all, and they have to object to the incumbent Democrat chief executive and all things Obama. But the GOP would prefer that we have no perspective, as evidenced in the “class warfare” mantra and that oft repeated and tired bit about a “resounding defeat in 2010” referring to the mid-term election. That “referendum on the Obama presidency” elected a fractured Republican majority that now has approval ratings that are approaching single digits. Boo-Hiss.

Class warfare, huh? Let’s talk about that. The richest 10 % of Americans control two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. Between 1979 and 2007, the income gap between the richest 1% of Americans and the poorest 40% more than tripled. Statistically speaking, 88% of the increase in real national income went to corporate profits as the US economy grew in 2009 and 2010. Recently released census data shows that real incomes of average Americans declined by 2.3% in 2010. If it is class warfare, the rich are the only ones doing the fighting.

The 112^th Congress has yet to address the fact that almost one in 10 Americans is unemployed and 15% live at or below the poverty level. It cannot even get the government funded for more than a few weeks at a time. But I have written a lot about the Republican majority inventing problems it wants to solve and I want to stick with class warfare. The real problem, as opposed to a make believe one, is that the president is not in capitulation mode, anymore. In fact, Obama is taking the argument to the Republicans with the American Jobs Act and calling them out in the process. He has gone on offense. Boo-Hiss, again.

"We're going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party," Obama told the crowd of union members in Detroit. "The time for Washington games is over. The time for action is now. No more manufactured crises. No more games. Now is not the time for the people you sent to Washington to worry about their jobs; now is the time for them to worry about your jobs." That’s got to sting as only the truth can.

At a Denver campaign stop on September 20^th, the president told a crowd that Republicans in Washington have "a habit of becoming curiously deaf to the voice of the people. They have a hard time hearing what the ordinary people of the country are saying. But they have no trouble at all hearing what Wall Street is saying. They are able to catch the slightest whisper from big business and the special interests." That president was Harry S. Truman and the year was 1948. “What I am really telling you is not that the Republicans are coming, but they are here. They have been in Washington for the last 2 years in the form of the notorious Republican ‘do-nothing’80th Congress.”

Truman represented the middle class and took it to his Republican opposition who gave him a load of Boo-Hiss. “Big business is against any aid to the farmers, and the Republican leaders in Congress are the errand boys of big business and special privilege,” Truman told his Winona, Minnesota audience on October 14, 1948. He explained the term he had coined, a handle if you will, that the 112^th Congress is trying to avoid being called – “do-nothing.” Truman said, “That is why the Republican 80th ‘do-nothing’ Congress--I mean do nothing for the people, they did something for the special interests all right . . .”

Republican sympathizers like to point to President Obama’s decline in the polls, as if they are proud of their low polling numbers. It is a point that the administration notes as well. Republicans pointed to Truman’s polling more 60 years ago, too. In fact, here is the Gallup comparison of presidential approval in September: 1951 Truman -- Approve 32%, Disapprove 54%; 2011 Obama -- Approve 41%, Disapprove 51%.

“By 1948, Truman began to employ a more relaxed, folksy, and sometimes fiery speaking technique,” according to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “He combined both style and substance in launching effective attacks against the Republicans.” He took his argument to the people by train. On Truman's "whistle-stops”, he attacked the Republican Congress, warned that a Republicans White House would repeal the New Deal, and reminded voters that the Democrats had saved the country from the depression.

"If you give the Republicans complete control of this government, you might just as well turn it over to the special interests and we'll start on a boom and bust cycle and try to go through just what we did in the twenties. And end up with a crash which in the long run will do nobody any good but the Communists," he said. Truman won the 1948 election against all odds.

The Republican class warfare charge is also dated in our relatively recent political history. A Republican opposition originally accused President Franklin D. Roosevelt of turning class against class. Although FDR came from elite wealth, he championed the middle class in his opposition to such wealthy elite. “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” Roosevelt said. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred.” Evidently, so does Obama.

“If asking a millionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher makes me a class warrior, a warrior for the middle class, I will accept that; I’ll wear that as a badge of honor,” President Obama said in a speech promoting his jobs bill recently in Denver. “Because the only class warfare I’ve seen is the battle that’s been waged against the middle class in this country for a decade now.” So President Obama’s new strategy is similar to Truman’s – be aggressive, push new ideas, and call out those who oppose him. They do not like him anyway.

Is it working for Obama? Just listen to the Boo-Hiss. The right’s most ardent Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer protests that Obama’s new tack is “anti-millionaire populism” from a “self-proclaimed class warrior.” Speaker John Boehner tweets, “Pitting one group of Americans against another is not leadership.” Yes, the Speaker of the House tweets.

Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says, “Members of Congress will have a lot of explaining to do when they go home at the end of the year if they’ve done nothing, nothing, to address the urgent need to help our economy and create jobs. ... Their constituents are demanding it.”

American Enterprise Institute political scholar Norm Ornstein says, "Republicans came in believing the radical, conservative ideology is what voters were aiming for -- and more confrontation." However, President Obama’s inability to quickly solve the nation’s economic situation has only reinforced the right’s ideological advantage, according to others. Even though poll after poll shows that the public wants less confrontation, toned-down rhetoric and a spirit of bipartisanship, it has not worked for Obama.

The president has been recast. Like Truman before him, Obama has decided that populism only works when it is taken out of Washington and out of a studio. He has changed his tone and is again on the public speaking circuit. That the fractious right has taken up class warfare as an issue demonstrates that Republicans have become defensive. Boo-Hiss.

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Article first published as Class Warfare: Boo--Hiss on Blogcritics.

The Tea Party Shutdown Movie

Since January 5, 2011, for John Boehner (R-OH), his position as Speaker of the House has been just a title in words not in deed. The words are those of the 1789 US Constitution. The Speaker presides over the proceedings of the House and is the highest position in the House leadership. However, the deed is that Boehner does not demonstrate leadership of the majority party. The Tea Party wing that enabled the GOP to achieve its majority status has also rendered it factious. Once again it has compromised Boehner’s speakership by its handling of a Continuing Resolution to fund the government. Once again, oblivious to public opinion, House action threatens us with a government shutdown.

Tea Party Republicans defied their leaders and brought down a bill to keep the government running after September 30 because it did not meet their demands to make deeper spending cuts. In the past, disaster relief rushed out of Congress with strong backing from both parties. Not this time. Instead, the House Republicans made it the focus of a political issue: offsetting the cost of funding the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with cuts elsewhere.

The bill failed. Boehner and his operatives cobbled together support for a slightly different but essentially similar bill. They brought some recalcitrant freshmen on board in video and photo opportunities with the old pros to recite sound bites, and then narrowly passed a stopgap bill two days later.

“We are now watching the Tea Party shutdown movie for the third time this year,” said Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) of the House not passing the CR. “The ending isn’t surprising,” Durbin said on MSNBC. “It isn’t even interesting anymore. They can’t get together the basic Republican votes on the House side to even pass the continuing resolution they agreed to just a few weeks ago, let alone some disaster aid for a country that’s been hard-hit by a lot of disasters.”

A Continuing Resolution is a temporary measure designed to buy time for negotiations to continue when the fiscal year ends. In the past, as with raising the debt ceiling, passing a stopgap was routine business. It becomes necessary when the House and Senate fail to agree on appropriations bills to fund government for a whole fiscal year, as is the case. Tea Party Republicans said they believed their party should push for deeper cuts at every turn. 50 of them signed a letter to Boehner calling for those deeper budget cuts and when those demands were not met, 48 of them voted against their own party’s bill.

So did Democrats, but for different reasons. Former Speaker of the House and now House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters that Democrats believed disaster funds were for emergencies and no offset spending cuts would be acceptable to her members. Asked whether there might be any offset that House Democrats would back, Pelosi said, “I think I answered that question: there has never been an offset for disaster assistance.”

Boehner and other House leaders had to rewrite the measure to appease Democrats and to appeal to the Tea Party wing of their own party. Democrats saw the amount of disaster assistance as inadequate and objected to the Republicans’ insistence on offsetting some of the cost with cuts elsewhere. They remained nearly united against the measure. So, Boehner cracked the proverbial whip with his members and the revised bill passed by seven votes to go to the Senate in time for the House to go on recess.

"The House bill is not an honest effort at compromise," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). "It fails to provide the relief that our fellow Americans need as they struggle to rebuild their lives in the wake of floods, wildfires and hurricanes, and it will be rejected by the Senate." Saying that he had hoped House Republicans would move toward the middle Reid said, "Instead, they moved even further toward the Tea Party." 

The Senate voted 59 to 36 to table the House bill, which effectively killed it.

The funding for the federal government got wrapped up into the debate about FEMA funding and they became tied together. Speaker Boehner had assumed and hoped that the stopgap bill to keep government operating until November 18 would be a routine matter, as such resolutions usually are. Instead, the matter blew up and illustrated that his control of the House majority only exists on paper.

The government’s funding will run out Friday evening, September 30, if something is not passed by then. Of course both Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly said that they do not want a government shutdown and they do not want to have FEMA run out of funds. However, just how they are going to achieve that is anything but clear.

So House Republicans decided to blame the Senate and its Majority Leader Harry Reid for the impasse. Led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), they contend that the Senate is responsible for blocking desperately needed disaster dollars from flowing to FEMA.

“Harry Reid is now talking about perhaps bringing up a clean CR without disaster relief funding,” Cantor said, and that the House acted to provide the disaster relief. “If that happens, FEMA will run out of money, and it will be on Harry Reid’s shoulders because he won’t act,” Cantor said.

For the record, in October 2004, Cantor voted against an amendment to an emergency supplemental bill for disaster aid that would have "fully offset" the cost of that supplemental with "a proportional reduction of FY05 discretionary funding" elsewhere. The 2004 emergency supplemental was proposed after five hurricanes hit the United States, including Tropical Storm Gaston, which did damage to Cantor's home district of Richmond.

Meanwhile, Speaker Boehner shrugged off the defeat as the price of trying to get legislation through the democratic process. "I have no fear in allowing the House to work its will," he said. "Does it make my life a little more difficult? Yes it does." Boehner added, "There is no threat of a government shutdown. Let's just get this out there."

Are there philosophical differences within the Republican Party, as has been suggested in our media, particularly in the House of Representatives? If there are, that would require intelligence and thought such that would lend it to making compromises in the best interests of House member constituencies. As the polls suggest, however, that does not appear to be the case. Instead, the differences are not philosophical but ideological. That relies on slogans and sound bites, scripts that are rehearsed and recited that require neither thought nor care. Unfortunately, such last minute play acting is making the audience weary of disagreement and threats.

The threat of a government shutdown proved to be just a threat back in April. Likewise, the threat of government default proved to be just a threat in August, but with collateral credit rating fallout. With this threat of a government shutdown, it should be of little wonder that Gallup’s Congressional Approval poll finds 15% of Americans approve of Congress and 82% do not. It is also clear that despite his efforts, the current Speaker of the House is only the leader of the majority of the majority which has compromised his leadership. Boehner maybe acting as a leader, but he is just part of the audience.

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Article originally published as The Tea Party Shutdown Movie on Blogcritics

H.R. 3: An End Sweep of Rights

While so much attention has been paid to the death of Osama Bib Laden, yet another Republican House majority attack on civil liberties has moved forward under a new guise. Introduced in the House back in January and renamed H.R.3 to symbolize its importance, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” made its way through committees to the House floor on Wednesday. Not surprisingly, it passed. Essentially, the bill codifies what has already been practice, which is to bar federal employees, members of the military and those who receive federal assistance from using taxpayer money to pay for abortions, with few exceptions.

It is also an end sweep of the 14^th Amendment and Roe v Wade and re-regulates women’s reproductive rights in the process.

A top priority of top Republican leaders, co-sponsors John Boehner and Eric Cantor specifically, under the language of H.R. 3, rape becomes "forcible rape." Presumably that modifier distinguishes it from other kinds of sexual assault that are typically recognized as rape, such as statutory rape and attacks that occur because of drugs or verbal threats.

"We want to live up to our commitment to make sure that there is no government funding of abortion," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. "And the provisions . . . have some connect with a government's support and funding of abortion." The bill effectively eliminates tax incentives on employer-provided health care benefits if those benefits cover abortion as a medical procedure. Cantor’s contention is that those incentives essentially constitute federal spending on abortion.

Sponsored by Republican Representatives Chris Smith of New Jersey and House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, the legislation also enacts strict procedural requirements for private insurance companies that cover abortions and deny tax credits to small businesses that purchase health insurance plans offering abortion coverage. Eighty-seven percent of private insurance plans currently include such coverage.

However, it is not the use of federal money that is at stake. It is a Congressional attempt to legislate around the Roe decision. The American Civil Liberties Union has cautioned against H.R. 3 “making access to abortion services harder to obtain for low-income women.” The ACLU says, “No woman plans to have an abortion, but that is the point of health insurance.” It further says, “That’s why the majority of plans currently include coverage for abortion care. Politicians should not be working to take away coverage that already exists for most women.”

Speaking of which, of the 227 co-sponsors of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, count the number of women on the list. But the overwhelming majority of co-sponsors are men, for whom abortion is only a concept.

In the Roe decision Justice Blackmun wrote, “We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified, and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.” H.R. 3 goes after the regulation and not the right of privacy. Republican legislators and candidates, like Donald Trump, may be confused about the right of privacy. Men in Congress will never have to consider having an abortion, but they can regulate women’s reproductive rights, as they always have.

Article first published as H.R. 3: An End Sweep of Rights on Blogcritics.

House Crier: Faking a Shutdown

Hypocrisy is a pretense of having a virtuous character and principles that one does not really possess. Bare that in mind while I offer an observation that the threat of a government shutdown is just a threat. It is a bully’s threat that is about as credible as the tears of Speaker Boehner. The speaker’s tears demonstrate one of two things, that the shut-down threat is a fake or that the man is emotionally unbalanced. In either case, the threat will last until the very last minute, when it will be averted. Deals have already been cut.

Here is a quick example of this hypocrisy. Republicans especially are all about National Defense. They would sooner burn autographed pictures of Ronald Reagan than touch the Defense Budget, as they have demonstrated. However, as ABC News reports, if the government shuts down, US military personnel won’t get paid.

The Speaker is responsible for ensuring that the House passes legislation supported by the majority party, in this case the majority of the majority. Boehner’s freshmen are challenging his ability to do so. Representative Paul D. Ryan (R, WI), recently of Budget Committee fame, had very telling words about the tea party contingent who have propelled the threat of shutdown forward. “The new people did not come here for a political career,” he said. “They came here for a cause.”

Their “cause” is a risky government shutdown that they seem to think is alright. That opinion found voice in a former member of the House Budget Committee, Thad McCotter (R, MI), who says he thinks the “majority of the public would agree” that a partial shutdown of the federal government wouldn’t be that bad in their lives, according to ABC.

For Boehner the worse outcome is a split conference that pits the Republican establishment against the tea party contingency. Of course senior members of the Republican caucus like Mike Pence and Michele Bachmann, who seek to raise their profiles by establishing themselves as rebel leaders, make out but all future Republican progress would be undermined.

Republicans seem to intend to cut benefits and programs for the nation’s retirees and neediest citizens while protecting corporate America and the wealthiest people from paying their share of taxes. The ACLU opposes enacting their FY11 spending bill because it contains amendments that would eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood to legislation that would impose an “abortion tax” on small businesses who want to provide abortion coverage in their employees health plans.

The government did shut down in 1995 and 1996 under Newt Gingrich’s speakership. Two years later, voters sent 20 Republican members packing and the speaker took the blame. The hypocrisy of the tea party ideological “cause” begs the question that if the Republicans cannot govern themselves, how they are supposed to govern the country?

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originally published on Blogcritics, April 6, 2011 as House Crier: Faking a Shutdown

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A couple of notes, April 8, morning of the shutdown threat:

“It’s not realistic to shut down the government on a debate dealing with abortion,” Senator Harry Reid (D, NV) said. “It’s not fair to the American people. We haven’t solved the issue in 40 years. We’re not going to solve it in the next 38 hours. We should not be distracted by ideology. This is a bill that funds the government.” (see ACLU above)

Gallup reports "The American public has clearly and consistently expressed a desire for elected officials in Washington to pass a new fiscal year budget without bringing government operations to a halt."

The New York Times reports that it is “the policy riders that are the real holdup to a deal.” To Republicans it’s all about abortion, environmental protection and health care. The hold up has nothing to do with jobs or the economy. Negotiators at the White House say “the issue of the spending cuts barely even came up. All the talk was about the abortion demands and the other issues.”

The shutdown is a made for TV event. Neither the White House nor the Republican leadership will let it happen and, contrary to Dave’s right intentions, there is already a continuing resolution in the breach ready for the moment of truth.

Aaron Sorkin has written a better teleplay, but it was performed by real actors.

Tommy