Tag Archives: House of Representatives

House GOP still valiantly chasing fictional IRS “scandal”

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It’s been about a year since the House Republicans made up a scandal from whole cloth, and even less time since it was revealed to have never actually happened (see below). And yet, somehow, this just happened anyway:

The House voted Wednesday to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress for her refusal to testify about the agency’s targeting of conservative groups.

The 231-187 vote attracted just six of the most politically vulnerable Democrats. It was quickly followed by a 250-168 vote calling on Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. to appoint a special prosecutor to take over the Justice Department’s investigation of the Internal Revenue Service scandal.

 
congress-200At least when they won’t shut up about Benghazi, there’s some room (but not much!) for mystery and debate. In stark contrast, this is a scandal where the precipitating event actually never happened.

I wonder how one goes about covering up something that didn’t happen in the first place?

I’m starting to feel like a broken record just copying & pasting the same post over and over every time news about this comes up:

Did someone forget to tell [insert any Republican here] that it turned out that the supposed IRS “scandal” was made up? Like, not even partially a thing that ever actually happened? Because, you know, the rest of us got that point cleared up quite a while back, last June. As I wrote then:

The so-called IRS scandal just fell apart completely as documents surfaced showing they were also scrutinizing applications for left/liberal/progressive code words, not just tea party code words. In other words, they were doing their jobs, not being partisan.

So why did it take so long for IRS documents showing targeting of progressives to show up after those showing tea party targeting? Oh, no reason, except that House Republicans specifically asked the IRS to audit ONLY its records on tea party groups. So NBD, they just 100% manufactured a fake scandal from thin air.

 
The IRS doing its job, and applying that equally to both conservative and liberal scofflaws, is not a scandal.

The U.S. Congress has a Team Russia?

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New York Times: “Kremlin Finds a Defender in Congress”

Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, is speaking up for Moscow with pride.

 
Dana-RohrabacherWow, there is so much to unpack in that article.

Now, for a start, Rep. Rohrabacher has always been a bit “unique” in his views and behavior — and the article spends some time on that. But he’s particularly delusional about the freedoms of the current, post-Communist version of the Russian Federation, as well as newly Russian-occupied Crimea:

“There have been dramatic reforms in Russia that are not being recognized by my colleagues,” he said. “The churches are full. There are opposition papers being distributed on every newsstand in Russia. You’ve got people demonstrating in the parks. You’ve got a much different Russia than it was under Communism, but you’ve got a lot of people who still can’t get over that Communism has fallen.”

What about Pussy Riot, the Russian protest group? Its members were jailed for criticizing Mr. Putin, released, then publicly flogged when they showed up at the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

“Well, I don’t think that happens often,” Mr. Rohrabacher said with a shrug. “There are lots of people demonstrating in the streets of Russia who are perfectly free to do so.”

 
Yet, this isn’t limited to one foolish Republican: as the article notes, progressive Florida Democrat Alan Grayson is similarly eager to endorse the Crimea referendum as “a virtually bloodless transfer of power establishes self-determination for two million people…”

Which is such a laughable fiction that it makes me question everything I know about Rep. Grayson. (Is he just trying to be contrarian for the sake of it at this point?)

But I also strongly suspect Rohrabacher’s love of Putin’s Russia and support for the Crimea annexation is partially grounded in Vladimir Putin’s violent and militarized opposition to “Islamic terrorism” (in the form of Chechen persecution and other state terror campaigns in the predominantly Muslim northern Caucuses):

By last year, Mr. Rohrabacher was accompanying the action star Steven Seagal to Russia in search of a broader Islamist plot behind the Boston Marathon bombing. The actor and the congressman had often discussed “thwarting radical Islamic terrorism,” he explained.

House Republicans still really struggling with easy concepts

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A majority of the House Republicans (169 of them) voted in favor of the Ryan-Murray budget deal in December — a deal which was not debt-neutral in the short term — but today only 28 of them voted to raise the debt limit.

I think these people must have been hit in the head too many times or something. You can’t vote through a package that increases the debt and then vote against raising the debt limit to accommodate that increase you already approved.

As a refresher, let’s check back in on part of a popular post I wrote in October, “Shutdown Myth 2: The Debt Ceiling Can Stop Spending”:

The debt ceiling is a limitation set by Congress on the executive branch’s ability to borrow money to pay for expenses Congress has already authorized. Failure to raise the debt limit does not prevent these authorized expenditures happening because the executive branch is constitutionally required to spend the money Congress has ordered to be spent.
[…]
Again, no new money is being spent when the ceiling is raised so this doesn’t somehow rein in the spending. It’s merely a cap on the ability to borrow to pay for expenditures Congress already directed the executive branch to make.

 
To recap: Six times more House Republicans voted to raise the debt itself last year than voted to raise the limit on that debt today.

Thank goodness the Democrats in the minority were allowed to vote through a debt ceiling increase in the absence of people who can add two and two.

Pelosi’s Parliament

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In the United Kingdom, parliamentary elections in each constituency (district) are generally decided more by voters’ overall party choice than by the individual candidate standing (running) for election as member of parliament in that district. There are certainly exceptions, but as a general rule people are voting in UK general elections for which party leader they would like to become the next prime minister. In the United States, except during wave elections (which are generally referenda on the president or presidential nominees of each party than anything else), people tend far more to vote for the specific person running in a district. Local politics are more important than the congressional leaders.

Therefore it has been interesting to me to see how much the leaders in Congress, particularly in the House have been discussed during races, whether in ads, speeches, debates, or articles. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader John Boehner it seems are on everyone’s lips. Now partly that is just how it seems, because I’m a political junky more than the average voter by far, but still there’s an unusual fixation on Pelosi, especially, from the electorate mostly on the right.

Here are excerpts from an article from the New York Times today looking at her campaign efforts recently to defend her Democratic majority:

In recent months, the 70-year-old speaker’s days have been packed with private fund-raising events across the country for many of the Democrats who have been publicly avoiding her like bedbugs. (Since the beginning of 2009, she has raised $52.3 million for Democratic incumbents, candidates and the party’s Congressional campaign committee, second only to President Obama among Democrats.)
[…]
It is hard to find anyone who claims to have heard Ms. Pelosi entertain doubts about winning. “She believes deep in her soul that the Democrats will keep the majority,” said Larry Horowitz, a friend and adviser.

Whether that is denial, superstition, insight or spin is a subject of some debate. Ms. Pelosi is fully aware that the bad economy, the electoral map and historical trends favor Republicans, said Roz Wyman, a longtime Democratic activist in Los Angeles.

“She knows the situation and exactly what she is up against,” said Ms. Wyman, a frequent late-night phone buddy. “We pretty much talk about everything, especially our grandchildren. But we never talk about losing.”

By all accounts, Ms. Pelosi has been engaged in district-by-district assessments of races, a type of political card-counting she learned as the daughter of a Baltimore mayor and congressman. She knows which of her members are in trouble, which need her help — and which ones absolutely do not want it. She can spout real-time reports on Republican chances of netting the 39 seats required for a majority.
[…]

While her Congressional seat appears safe, it often seems now as if Ms. Pelosi’s name is on the ballot in every Congressional district in the country.

“My opponent wants to make this election about a congresswoman from California,” Representative John Boccieri, Democrat of Ohio, told Roll Call, noting that his Republican rival, Jim Renacci, mentioned Ms. Pelosi’s name 14 times in a recent debate.

And a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll revealed that Ms. Pelosi and Sarah Palin are two of the country’s most polarizing political figures. Fifty-one percent of respondents said it was unacceptable for Ms. Pelosi to continue as speaker, a figure exceeding the percentage who say it would be unacceptable for Democrats to retain control of Congress.

Ms. Pelosi said she did not care that she was a target, as long as Democrats get re-elected — even if that means distancing themselves from her. (On Thursday, Representative Bobby Bright of Alabama became the first Democrat to publicly say he would not support Ms. Pelosi for speaker if he were re-elected.)

 
This unusual parliamentary-style attention to the House leaders is even more fascinating considering this observation by David Roberts at Grist last March, after the passage of health reform:

Nancy Pelosi is a G. Not only did she push the entire Democratic establishment to stiffen its collective spine after Scott Brown’s victory; not only did she masterfully and implacably whip votes for health care reform; under her leadership, the House has passed major progressive legislation on health care, climate change and energy, financial reform, and economic stimulus, to say nothing of many other smaller efforts. Were the U.S. a unicameral parliamentary system like most developed democracies, this past year would have changed the course of history and Democrats would have secured a generational majority. But: the Senate.

 
In other words, she ran the House like parliament, so maybe it’s not surprising she’s facing a parliamentary style referendum on her leadership, to some degree. No wonder the Republicans are desperate to stop her.

Why the Stupak Amendment is so bad

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Perhaps the United States House of Representatives believes that all men are created equal—but it does not believe that all women are created equal, or that women are equal to men. These views it has made clear with the passage of the Stupak Amendment, which limits the right to choose for women who can afford to pay for an abortion up front, or for women who can afford a private insurer whose policy covers abortion.

As for the rest, well, that’s what coathangers are for.

HR-3962 describes itself as “[an act t]o provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans.” Abortion is legal in the United States to provide quality health care; in delivering the opinion of the Court on Roe v. Wade, Justice Blackmun explicitly stated that one reason for legalizing abortion was that, unregulated, it was deadly, but regulated it was much safer: “Mortality rates for women undergoing early abortions, where the procedure is legal, appear to be as low as or lower than the rates for normal childbirth. (…) The prevalence of high mortality rates at illegal “abortion mills” strengthens, rather than weakens, the State’s interest in regulating the conditions under which abortions are performed.” The passage of the Stupak Amendment, then, undermines the purpose of the healthcare reform bill, because it does not provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans. Not only does it bar the public health option from covering abortion, it also bars people who receive “affordability credits”—reduced premiums granted to people with lower income levels—from using those credits to purchase an insurance plan that covers abortion.

The consequences will be exactly those that Roe v. Wade tried to prevent: despite abortion limitations and bans, women will get them anyway, and the risks they incur will be much more severe.

In the United States, abortion is a legal medical procedure. For a bill whose purpose is to provide affordable healthcare to explicitly ban funding for abortions is absurd. Furthermore, the Stupak Amendment makes it in private health insurance companies’ best interest to take abortion coverage out of their policies: because of affordability credits, more people will be able to buy government-subsidized private health insurance, but only companies that don’t provide abortion coverage will see any of that new money. They can get more customers through the insurance exchange if the new customers get subsidies, but they can only get those customers if they don’t include abortion coverage.

I should add that this amendment is not about saving a fetal life, but about using pregnancy as punishment for sexual activity. If it were equating a fetus to a child, it would not permit abortion in cases of rape or incest; killing a child because it is the result of incest or rape would still be infanticide.

Many women simply cannot afford children or even childbirth right now—and given that many health insurance companies will not cover a c-section if a women has already had one, and that over 30% of births are c-sections, that’s understandable (the lowest price estimation I have seen for an uninsured c-section is $5,000, and most are upwards of $10,000 assuming everything goes smoothly). Consequently, the Stupak Amendment puts women in a damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don’t position.

Advocates for free-market capitalism ought to oppose the Stupak Amendment because it imposes a de facto artificial handicap on health insurance companies, without allowing customers to vote with their money. Advocates for socialism ought to object to this gross gap in healthcare provision between rich and poor women. Women ought to object because their rights are being stripped. Men ought to object because their lovers, daughters, sisters and friends could soon find themselves in the emergency room –or in a coffin– after an unsafe abortion. This amendment benefits no one and is a dangerous step backward for everyone.

This post originally appeared at Starboard Broadside.