Morning Briefing
For January 18, 2013
1. The Allure of Moving On
Bend over Republicans, here they come again.
Phil Klein is out with a column that I can only assume comes from House Republican Leadership talking points. I can only assume that because House Republican leaders and those close to them have been whispering about this scenario for about a month now to as many Republican strategists, pundits, and others as would listen.
They want to move on.
They want the next fight. So desperate are they to move on, in January of 2013, House Republicans want their base to know they think they’ll lose the House in November of 2014unless they cave now so please let them cave.
Truth be told, it is alluring. Superficially, I see the merit. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
2. Spending at Gun Point
In the days leading up to President Obama announcing his gun control plans, and now that he has, the focus of Republicans and Conservatives has been squarely on his ever-encroaching attack on the Second Amendment. As Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus stated on the President’s move, “He paid lip service to our fundamental constitutional rights, but took actions that disregard the Second Amendment and the legislative process.” While Obama’s disregard for Americans’ Constitutional rights should absolutely be a primary argument against the President’s plans, we should not forget another vastly important detail.
President Obama has a spending problem. In his FY2013 budget, the President submitted $3.8 trillion in new spending which does not include the $500 million (or by some accounts $45 billion) he would like Congress to spend on his gun proposals. Obama, and his fellow Democrats, would like to point to his spending cuts to deflect his out-of-control budget going forward, but in truth he has admitted to cutting (over the next ten years) only $1.7 trillion. As Ed Morrissey notes at Hot Air, “the federal government is on track for a fifth straight year of trillion-dollar deficits under Obama.” Many Americans may think the President’s gun control spending is the first in 2013, forgetting that the federal government started its fiscal year last October. The government actually spent $638 billion before we even reached December. At the current rate, the government is spending $10.45 billion per day, 435.8 million per hour and borrowing 46 cents for every dollar it spends. The growth of the country’s spending is so much that the money it takes in, up 10% already this fiscal year, cannot keep pace. If this is avoiding the fiscal cliff, we’re in for a nasty fall. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
3. The Senate is dismantling the budget process and abdicating Congress’s spending authority
During the last debt ceiling fight, some pundits in the media and on the left wished for the “Gephardt rule” when the House automatically raised the debt ceiling when they passed a budget. Josh Green at the Atlantic praised it in 2011, saying we should ”bring [it] back.” Now he is at Bloomberg and at it again and again and again. These pundits, and this is my first point, misunderstand what they are advocating for. Second, what they are misunderstanding reveals a startling blindspot: they ignore the dysfunction in the Senate. And my third point is that this is rewinding the clock on deliberative congressional consideration of spending proposals back to 1921 or before.
But first, what is the Gephardt Rule? The Gephardt rule deemed the House to have passed a debt ceiling increase when the House passed a conference report, aka an agreement between House and Senate negotiators, on the budget resolution. That’s a lot of procedural mumbo-jumbo, but the critical fact about was that the House and Senate had a negotiation and agreed. So once the House endorsed that agreement, it endorsed the debt ceiling increase. This was invented by Dick Gephardt in 1979. It was repealed by House Republicans in 1995 due to criticism, correctly to my mind, didn’t properly focus the mind on the increasing debt.. . . please click here for the rest of the post →
4. Liberals Don’t Need Revenue to Grow Government Anymore
Once upon a time, liberals were somewhat principled in their pursuit of a utopian dirigisme. Sure, they always liked to play a bit of class warfare, but they fundamentally believed in taxing everyone. After all, if you want a cradle-to-grave government-run society, it’s got to be purveyed by the broad populace. There simply aren’t enough rich people to raise the requisite funds for a rapacious federal monstrosity. That’s why Walter Mondale openly campaigned on raising everyone’s taxes. “Look at em, we’re gonna tax their a**es off,” he declared privately after his 1984 convention speech. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
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