UPDATED: The Benefits Are Restored, But At What Cost?

Update is below

Ladies and gentlemen, the wait is finally over.  Today, unemployment benefits are on the verge of finally being reauthorized after nearly two months of the nation’s unemployed having nothing to rely on other than whatever savings they might have had left.  Technically, the benefits have not been restored, but with today’s successful cloture vote in the Senate, passage is essentially guaranteed.  Once again, the vote split along party lines, with the exception of Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) joining the attempt to maintain the filibuster, and Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins siding with the Democrats.  We know tonight the cost of the legislation, and other important specifics, so the “cost” in my title is of course beyond the actual dollar amount.

Playing With Fire

Ah, another Congressional recess without addressing the unemployment benefits crisis.  According to the Huffington Post’s count, it’s now been 37 days since the impending specter of that final benefit check was hung over the collective heads of the millions of unemployed Americans.  I hate to say it, but it doesn’t look like it will be resolved any time soon.  Of all the issues dotting the political landscape these days, the sad tale of the fate of the unemployed is perhaps the one that affects the most people and is also one of the most pressing.

It may not be as flashy an issue as health care reform, or more recently the Arizona law that was officially challenged by the Obama Administration this week, but at its core, the unemployment issue needs to be dealt with or the economic recovery will not happen for a while at least.  With our economy based so heavily on consumer spending, we cannot recover until the unemployment problem is addressed.  Of course, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman points out in his New York Times editorial, there’s a simple catch-22, a version of the classic “chicken or the egg” question: we can’t have much of an improvement in consumer spending until unemployment is addressed, but many companies won’t feel like hiring again until there are signs that consumer spending is rebounding.  I believe that at the core, unemployment benefits are the key to breaking into this loop; by giving the unemployed a lifeline and a bit of cash they can use to buy groceries, pay bills, and so on, they are able to put money back into the system and contribute to a rebound in spending which should hopefully lead to more job openings.  Even beyond that, lawmakers are playing with fire by not renewing the unemployment benefits.

Congressional Dems, It’s Time to Stand Up to the GOP

A brief note before jumping into this week’s post: I love writing the longer posts, though they take so much time to do the way I would like to do them that one or two of them a week is about all I could do with the longer ones.  Therefore, I will be putting more of a focus on the “Brief Thoughts” posts than before.  I’ll still do the longer ones of course; you can expect a big one on financial reform sometime after Independence Day, likely timed to the Senate vote on the bill.  However, here’s a shorter piece involving a bit of financial reform, and a whole lot of Congress.

If there’s one narrative that can be told about the current Congress, it is a story of weak leadership that is too willing to compromise and settle for less than what the majority of Democrats want.  Of course, compromise is an integral part of politics, and it could be argued that the unwillingness of Republicans to budge from blanket opposition is even more reason to compromise, but seriously it’s getting annoying at this point.  Indeed, on just about every piece of legislation that has come up in the last year, as far as the Senate goes we have seen the same “try to appease the same three Republicans (Senators Snowe, Collins, and more recently Brown) so they’ll vote for the bill” storyline.  The result is pretty much the same: the bill gets watered down significantly and there’s still a desperate scramble for votes at the end.

In other words, the Republicans in the Senate keep bluffing, and the Democrats keep falling for it.  The fact is, we still need 60 votes in the Senate to get anything done, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the rest of the Democratic leadership is content to just give the Republicans every last concession possible, with no guarantee whatsoever that the effort will translate into votes.  The prime example of this is the Wall Street reform bill, with Senator Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts) having almost single-handedly carved out of the conference report the $19 billion fee on banks that would have helped pay for the whole thing.  Instead, Senator Brown wants the money to come from the savings found by winding down the TARP program.

You know, for a party so worried about the deficit, they seem to be doing all they can to avoid taking concrete steps to pay it down (other than passing unemployment benefits, of course).  We’ve known for a while that the Republicans were going to try and be the “party of no”, but still, you’d think they’d be a bit more open to at least debate instead of just falling in lockstep with the GOP leadership.  This absolute black-and-white that we have seen is just about unnatural.  Politics (and life in general) is about shades of gray, at least normally, and the kind of behavior we have been seeing from Congressional Republicans is quite frankly childish.

The  casualties of this nonsense are just about everyone in this country; health care reform, climate legislation, unemployment benefits, the DISCLOSE Act, and now Wall Street reform have all been completely torpedoed or otherwise weakened by the Republican obstructionism.  Enough is enough.  Assuming the Democrats manage to maintain control of the Senate through the midterm elections, one of the first orders of business next January should be to significantly rework the filibuster.  I don’t think the Senate should eliminate it completely as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggests, but rather they should substantially alter it so that business can actually get done in the Senate and we can have programs that actually have teeth.

The Fix to the Citizens United Ruling?

It’s been a crazy week in politics, particularly in Texas; the “silly season of politics”, as various people have called it, is in full swing.  Unfortunately, as much as I’d love to repost that video, I have no activists in chicken suits, nor do I have anything connecting certain politicians to chickens at all.  As much as I’d like to lazily put up a hilarious video on a Friday night, I’m not going to do that; plenty of people have already talked about that particular story, so I’ll give it a rest.  You might have heard about the recent Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission; decided in January, this case effectively eviscerated the existing McCain-Feingold campaign finance restrictions and has remained controversial since.

Finally, a proposed solution is almost done making its way through Congress.  According to the Huffington Post, the bill known as the DISCLOSE Act, or for those of you who love these crazy acronyms as much as I do, the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections Act, is intended to fix the mess that the Supreme Court started.  On a side note, if there’s one thing I particularly love about Congress, it’s when they come up with these epic acronyms.  Of course, the Patriot Act is still the reigning champion of legislation having an acronym as its name, but this one is still pretty good.

Anyway, campaign finance regulations: the details pertinent to this discussion is that in ruling for Citizens United, the Supreme Court essentially enabled the corporations and special interests to spend money on campaigns without restriction, whereas before there was a forest of restrictions that more or less was effective at keeping corporate and special interests at the very least regulated, if not outright restricted.  Faced with the possibility of unlimited spending in an election-year free-for-all, Congress came up with this legislation to try and plug the holes.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive? Changes Coming to a Congress Near You!

Outrage at Congress’ actions is nothing new, and this year it’s even worse than normal.  Let’s face it, between the bitter partisan infighting, the incessant filibusters, and still more earmarks than you can shake a hypothetical line-item veto at, who can blame you for such high displeasure at Congress.  If someone could come up with a surefire way to tackle this partisanship in Congress, they could become very rich indeed; it seems as if nothing short of a miracle or an extreme disaster would engender any major substantive bipartisanship these days.  The filibuster will prove to be a bit easier to reform, though it will still be a difficult one to crack, especially given the slim majority the Democrats enjoy in the Senate.  Even when they had their 60 votes, that was not technically enough to force a reduction in the power of the filibuster on their own, as all Senate rules changes require 67 votes.  Of all these points of displeasure, the earmark problem seems to be the easiest to deal with, especially since it is a point of reform that pops up every year or so.  Well, if certain Congressional leaders have their way, at least two of these three perceived problems with Congress are about to change.

Let us start with the easiest to discuss: earmark reform.  According to the New York Times, both the Democratic and Republican caucuses in the House of Representatives have decided to pursue a ban on earmarks at least for this year.  Makes sense to me, especially since both parties can try to profit politically off of this in the midterm elections.  Apparently, the Democrats were first, with Rep. David Obey (D-Wisconsin), Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, announcing that there would be a ban on earmarks going to for-profit companies.  House Republicans, on the other hand, are reviving Rep. John Boehner’s idea of a complete ban.  With the blatant attempts at political one-upsmanship, it is obvious that the partisan fighting in Congress is not ending any time soon.  However, there is a glimmer of hope at these signs: it is that both parties are serious about making reforms.

According to the Huffington Post, the event that kick-started the push to ban earmarks for the year was a series of Ethics Committee investigations that alleged abuses of the process by various people in government.  Though the Committee acquitted the individuals at the center of the investigation, Democrats are using this as a way to score points with the electorate, especially after the scandals around Reps. Eric Massa and Charlie Rangel damaged the Democrats’ image among voters.  It will certainly help with their image if they can be seen as the ones taking a stand against the earmarks- which is exactly why the Republicans are trying to steal their thunder.  Personally, I don’t care how it gets done and who takes credit for doing it, as long as it gets done.

But not so fast.  Even if the House acts, the Senate is not bound by their declarations; in fact, Representative Obey’s counterpart in the Senate, Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), is a supporter of earmarks, though I would suspect in a limited manner, at least publicly.  Thanks to the conference Committees that form after both houses of Congress pass legislation on a given topic, earmarks are another thing that will need to be ironed out.  This likely means that the plan to reject earmarks in the House is near-worthless, as the Senate has no negotiating room at all at this time.  Fortunately, earmarks are just the beginning.

The Filibuster Showdown

Last week, we all got a wonderfully explicit view of Republican obstructionism.  No, I’m not talking about the marathon seven-hour healthcare summit in which the Republicans repeatedly stuck to their position of starting over rather than offer any constructive ideas for reform.  I am talking about Senator Jim Bunning’s (R-KY) lone objection to extending a package of benefits in the Senate on Friday.  While he dressed up his objection in seemingly noble, anti-deficit logic, Senator Bunning could have chosen a better bill to protest deficit spending.  The one he chose was actually relatively small by Washington standards; only about $10 billion according to CNN, and of all things was focused on extending unemployment benefits and the benefits under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA), among other things.  As a result: about 1.2 million people nationwide lost their unemployment benefits today until the funding for the Federal program is reauthorized.  Further, the loss of the COBRA benefits means that many Americans will have even more trouble paying for health insurance, which if they are receiving COBRA payments, they need the assistance more than anyone else.  With the standoff only intensifying in the Senate, it does not look like that will happen any time soon.

I originally planned to publish this post last night, but I thought I would wait for developments today and expand it a bit.  Well folks, it was worth the wait.  According to the Huffington Post, Senator Jon Kyl (R-Arizona), the Republican Whip, or the number two Republican behind Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, argued today that extending the unemployment and COBRA benefits is a disincentive to find a job.  Oh here we go again.  This argument pops up from time to time by speakers on the Right, and it is nearly always ridiculous.  However, this time it is even worse than usual; in case anyone forgot, we are still in a recession, and the unemployment rate is still around 10%.  Apparently, Arizona is in a different world than the rest of us; either that, or Senator Kyl is out of touch with reality himself.  The fact is, Senator Kyl may have a job, but millions of people do not, not by their own fault, mind you, but as a result of the worst economic trouble in more than half a century.  If Senator Kyl has a few million extra decent jobs lying around for people to take, by all means, get in the media and on the record as creating them.  Now, if this episode teaches us one thing, it is that we need to change something in the Senate.

A First Step Toward Fiscal Responsibility

Sometimes, things just have to get done in Washington, regardless of political gridlock.  This is exactly why the President has the power of issuing executive orders; he can enact certain things that Congress cannot seem to agree on, which will prove to be very valuable in this polarized political climate.  Today, we saw a great example of its use when President Obama used one to create the bipartisan commission on the national debt.  As you may recall, he and people on both sides of the aisle in Congress have been trying to figure out how to tackle the debt problem, however for various reasons they were deadlocked over the idea of forcing an up-or-down vote on spending cuts and tax increases proposed by a bipartisan commission.  Now, they do not have to worry about creating the thing; President Obama has done it for them.  Of course, there are still questions surrounding it, and the actual proposals it will suggest are actually the last thing on the minds of Congress right now.  More importantly, will Congress even vote on the proposals?  Will the Republicans even participate?

The Drumbeat Continues

Over the past year, Congress has had to endure many delays to its agenda; Republican obstructionism, the miscellaneous twists in the healthcare debate, a “snow-pocalypse” as the media calls it, and so on. Yet, still, they seem to take just about every other week off. You would think that they would have a sense of urgency, given that the November midterm elections are only ten months away and the Democratic resignations just seem to keep piling up. On Monday, Senator Bayh of Indiana announced his retirement; joining Senator Dodd and Senator Dorgan in retirement and making the Democrats’ hold on the Senate appear far more tenuous. At this time, the Democrats do not appear to be in danger of losing control of the Senate, however they will certainly have to work with Republicans much more closely.

Already, we are seeing an attempted shift in strategy, though it is unclear how well it will work. In case you haven’t heard, next week the White House is getting together with Congressional leaders to try and resurrect the health care reform effort. Senator Bayh cited the partisanship and obstruction in Congress as his primary reasons for quitting; it is doubtful that there will be a change in that atmosphere at the summit, and some Republicans are suggesting that the summit is not even worth it in the first place. I tend to agree with them for now anyway; we do need health care reform, but it is time that we made a good try of the rest of the agenda.

Except, we already have started to. Congressional Democrats tried to take a shot at the jobs picture, and the effort was even bipartisan, yet Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid canned it and replaced it with a scaled-back version. More than one Republican Senator has already stated something to the effect that Reid is the real problem in the Senate, not the GOP. Certainly, Mr. Reid’s leadership style is an interesting contrast to that of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. We have seen over this past year how much trouble Senator Reid has had holding the Democratic caucus together in the Senate, while Pelosi has just about turned the House into a well-oiled machine. Part of this is due to the more stringent rules in the House than in the Senate, however the personal characteristics of the leaders in each body also plays a large role.

But enough abstract talk of leadership styles; it is clear that something needs to change in Washington. If the election of Senator Scott Brown was not enough of a wake-up call, consider this: the Republicans are only having to defend one more seat than Democrats due to a resignation. Given the advantage incumbents typically enjoy, this is huge; both parties have used circumstances like these to swing the balance of power in their favor. First, Senator Reid needs to reinstate the Grassley-Baucus jobs bill. Concerns over adding to the Federal deficit are certainly legitimate these days, but seriously, is missing a chance to restore some sense of bipartisanship really worth saving about $70 billion over ten years, the difference between the estimated costs of the bills? Second, the GOP needs to meet the Democrats halfway on health care; stop talking about this nonsense about starting over as a prerequisite to negotiations. Oh, and of course, get rid of those elected officials who fail to live up to their duties of governing rather than campaigning in November. This may sound like idealism, and it certainly is more difficult than it sounds, but it could really work if it is done right. At the very least, the last item will definitely be effective.

A Thaw in the Healthcare Debate?

I apologize for both the lateness of this post and the lack of posts in recent days; for some reason I can’t seem to have enough work for the gods of college assignments to be satisfied.  Fortunately, Washington has been pretty much snowed in for the last couple of days anyway.  30 inches of snow in the capital means nothing has gotten done…even one inch would bring the city to a standstill.  While the city itself lies frozen, it appears that there may be signs of a thaw- in the healthcare debate anyway.  Remember healthcare reform, the debate that consumed much of Congress’ time over the last year and seemed all-but dead after the special election in Massachusetts effectively eliminated the Democrats’ supermajority?  It’s back…and it might just pass this time.  Several developments in recent days indicate a renewed push is coming.  President Obama made the opening move in one of the first high-stakes political chess games of the year by inviting Congressional Republicans and Democrats to a summit on healthcare reform, just before the Super Bowl of all things, according to the New York Times.  The Republicans are responding, of course, and this is shaping up to be quite interesting, to say the least.

See? They CAN Play Nice!

Today, something remarkable happened in Baltimore, Maryland.  After a year of bitter partisanship in Congress, with Republicans presenting a united front against everything the Democrats have put forward, most people thought a civil discourse between the two parties was just about impossible.  Until today, when President Obama addressed House Republicans during their retreat at a hotel in Baltimore, to the surprise of many political observers, including this one sadly enough, with cameras rolling.  After watching the discourse online, I can say it was simply refreshing to see our political leaders actually engaging something resembling a civilized debate.  However, the most telling sign of just how much of a home run this event was for the President is this: according to the Huffington Post, not only did Fox News cut their broadcast of the meeting before it ended, but a Republican aide happened to admit that “allowing the cameras to roll was a mistake.”