All Hat, no Cattle

Have you ever had the experience of hearing somebody claim to be the exact opposite of what they are?

It can be jarring, but that's hardly surprising from Andy Tobin, the speaker of the Arizona legislature. Tobin has been wearing a new hat lately to try and convince voters in CD-1 that he fits into rural Arizona despite the fact that he doesn't actually live in the district and spends most of his time in Phoenix.  So I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to hear Andy Tobin tout his 'bipartisanship' in a debate this week with Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick. He even had a statistic, claiming that 90% of what was passed by his legislature was 'bipartisan.'

In fact, if you were to lift the brim up and take a peek under Andy's new hat you will find a baldly partisan speaker.    Democrats have routinely been shut out of negotiations, denied the opportunity to offer amendments either in committee or on the floor,  and even been cut off to prevent them from speaking on legislation.

As for the 90% number, it is little secret that most bills passed by any legislative body are non-controversial, and will be passed unanimously or nearly unanimously.  Typical of this type of bill might (just for example) be HB 2307 clarifying the rules for driving golf carts.  It passed the House (and Senate) unanimously, as did numerous technical clarifications, memorials and resolutions (after all, who would vote against HR 2008, designating the first Friday in September as ovarian cancer awareness day?) 

Counting these sorts of bills helps mask the truly partisan nature of the Tobin legislature.  All of the important bills (such as HB 2305 last year, the voter suppression bill, or SB 1062 which would have allowed discrimination on the grounds of 'religious freedom' or the past few years' budgets which slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from education) you would find that all of them were written and sponsored by only Republicans and passed with only Republican votes. Which is exactly the way Andy Tobin wanted it.  As Speaker he had the right to hold a bill or get everyone on board but he put those bills on the floor anyway for a strict party-line vote. He does have that right since his party controls the legislature and he controls his party, but don't call him 'bipartisan' because he is NOT bipartisan. Not at all.

If you want 'bipartisan' where it counts, then look at the congresswoman he is trying to replace, Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick.  As most people know or should know, Kirkpatrick has put aside differences with Republican congressman Paul Gosar (the man who defeated her in 2010) and worked on moving a mine project forward that promises to deliver thousands of jobs.  Recently, in a Congress that is so warped by partisanship and divided control of the government that it has literally set a record for getting very little done (no Congress back to the founding of the Republic has passed into law fewer bills) it was Ann Kirkpatrick who became the first member of the Arizona delegation to do the ridiculously hard work of writing a bill that both parties could sign onto and shepherd it through the house and the Senate so that it eventually could be signed by the President. The bill improves service at the Veterans' Administration.  In the past, that might not have been that hard to pass but this year, with everything as a political football, it shows Rep. Kirkpatrick's doggedness and determination to do the work to get something done instead of political posturing. More recently, Rep. Kirkpatrick issued a press release  opposing publically the EPA's new proposed regulations on coal burning power plants.  And while Rep. Kirkpatrick has continued to support the Affordable Care Act, she has been among the first to suggest that it can and should be improved.

Further, some may recall that Republicans made commercials saying that Kirkpatrick voted '88% of the time' with Nancy Pelosi.  This is the other side of the coin we referred to above in regard to Andy Tobin's claim that his legislature is '90% bipartisan.'  Congress too, passes a lot of non-controversial bills over stuff like naming post offices or remembering somebody's service (I wonder if  a vote to adjourn is counted in their 88% statistic?)  But on the bills that Ann Kirkpatrick has differed on, they are substantive bills, but bills that matter to the district (for example she opposed bank bailouts and cap-and-trade legislation because this is a district where energy production is a lot more important to the local economy than Wall Street.)

And therein is the difference. Does anyone expect that Andy Tobin will reach across the aisle on VOTES THAT REALLY MATTER?  I don't.  Ann Kirkpatrick however does have the courage to do so when it will benefit her constituents.

A century already, and the GOP still wants 'more time?'

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal is the latest to publish the notion that the President should hit the 'reset' button on health care. This notion, pushed by Republicans, is that if he and Democratic leaders simply threw out everything that has been done already and returned to the table on health care reform, they could come up with a wonderful, bipartisan bill that would make everyone happy.

Only I don't believe that this would happen. The real test of how the GOP would react to the Obama administration came back in the first few weeks as Congress debated the stimulus plan. There was a palpable sense of urgency as the economy was in free fall and jobs were being lost at a record pace. Economists gave us dire warnings that if the Government did not put together a stimulus bill quickly then we would almost certainly face a second Great Depression.

Against this backdrop the President took the unusual step of going from the White House over to Capitol Hill and sitting down with Republican leaders to try and work something out. And in the end he did work out a 'bipartisan' bill, in which the original stimulus was shaved down by 20%, all funding for new school contruction was thrown out and he got a bill that is 43% tax cuts. After this, zero Republicans in the house and three in the Senate (including Arlen Specter, who has since become a Democrat) voted for it. In other words, Republicans, including many in the house, were happy to suggest compromises, many of which were included in the bill, but then they lined up and voted uniformly against it.

Given this history, do you really believe that the GOP would really negotiate in good faith on health care?

If you do, just ask Max Baucus. For months he and two other Democrats on the Finance Committee met with three Republicans on the committee, supposedly to work out a bipartisan compromise. Despite word back in late July that the group was nearing a 'consensus' and pressure from the Senate leadership to at least come up with a committee bill by the August recess, he at the request of the Republicans agreed to continue negotiating and come back after the recess. Then two of the three Republicans he had been talking to, Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Mike Enzi (R-WY) both came out during the recess and all but pledged to vote against any bill.

Yeah, 'good faith' with these guys is a knife in the back. Baucus was duped into doing what they wanted-- delaying the bill-- and by the time he came back was essentially down to one Republican he might have been able to convince (Olympia Snowe of Maine.) Snowe couldn't support his compromise for other reasons (some of which I agree with, such as the fact that individuals might be forced to pay more than they could afford just to buy insurance.) However, it is clear now that the whole GOP strategy of delaying action on the bill was what was behind Grassley and Enzi even pretending to negotiate.

As far as taking more 'time' because it's better to 'get it right than just get something done' (lofty sounding words often spoken by Republican members of Congress) a bit of history is useful here. As President Obama mentioned in his speech last week, this effort to reform the U.S. health care system and give everyone coverage began under Theodore Roosevelt. That means that there is nobody alive today who was even an adult when this started. We know that's what happened in 1993-1994 also. Republicans asked for more 'time' to be spent on the legislation but even while they were asking for time they were attacking the whole concept of reform from every angle in a (successful) bid to kill it. Then, if the GOP was really interested in 'reform' they had six years when they had control of the House, Senate and White House when they could have done something if they wanted to. So the cry that we need to take more 'time' is disingenuous at best. Senator Jim DeMint made it clear that the GOP wants to make this "Obama's Waterloo." He could give them all the time in the world and they would use it to make sure he lost, not that anything meaningful got passed.

It does seem likely that we will have a bill passed by using reconciliation (probably meaning a more liberal bill; it will be much easier to pass a bill with the public option and be able to lose up to eight Democrats than it would be to pass a bill without the public option at this point since zero Republicans will vote for it either way.) If the use of the reconciliation process is unfortunate, then so is the fact that there does not seem to be any other path forward.

And the GOP has made it that way by blocking every other path.

Baucus plan may fail in committee; reconciliation more likely

The last Republican who was working with Max Baucus on his vain attempt at producing a bipartisan bill in his Senate Finance committee, Olympia Snowe of Maine, has apparently given up on supporting Baucus' plan.

As I pointed out the other day, the Baucus plan is a bad one, featuring mandates that would drive up the cost of health care for poor people (and not enough offsetting tax credits, even for those who could afford to pay insurance premiums upfront in exchange for a tax credit next year.)

Snowe cited that objection (making her more reasonable on that point than Max Baucus) and also how the plan to tax expensive health plans would probably cost many of her constituents in Maine where insurance is already among the most expensive in the nation.

The Baucus plan also has no government option, which caused one of the committee's liberals, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to say he won't support it. If the rest of the liberal Democrats on the committee follow Rockefeller's lead then Baucus may suffer the embarrassment of having delayed work on health care reform for months while chasing a compromise only to see it fail in his own committee, done in by a coalition of Republicans and liberal Democrats.

The truth is that Baucus' vision of a bipartisan bill was an illusion from the beginning. That became clear during the recess, when the other two Republicans that Baucus had been negotiating with, Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Mike Enzi (R-WY) both made it clear that they were against reform, including the bill that Baucus was supposedly working with them on. In contrast to Grassley and Enzi, who I believe simply strung things out as part of a GOP grand strategy to delay, deflate and defeat any significant health care reform bill (which we know very well they've been angling for all along, as Jim DeMint made clear a couple of months ago,) I think that Snowe was probably sincere, but she can't support the Baucus bill for the same reason I don't support it. If you're going to force people to buy health insurance then you have to help people who can't afford it pay for it up front, period.

What this does mean is that whatever goes to the floor of the Senate will probably much more resemble the bill that came out of the Health, Education and Labor Committee several weeks ago. That bill does include a Government option.

Because it does a handful of Democrats (Baucus, Kent Conrad, the two Nelsons, Evan Bayh, Mary Landreau and possibly independent Joe Lieberman) have expressed some doubts about whether they will support such a bill. Because the death of Ted Kennedy leaves Democrats with one less vote than needed to break a filibuster even if they do get all their members to sign on to something, it seems likely that Harry Reid will resort to reconciliation. Reconciliation is a parliamentary tactic that will mean that only 51 Senators will be needed to pass a bill, and a clause in a bill passed earlier this year gives Reid the option to use it after October 15 to pass a health reform bill. Republicans did the same thing in 2001 in order to push through the Bush tax cuts without having to break a filibuster.

And really, there is no reason anymore not to use reconciliation. GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell says it would amount to a 'declaration of war,' and that the Senate GOP would do everything they could to block health care and the rest of the Obama agenda. And if McConnell and his caucus had done anything less than that since the President has taken office that threat might have to be taken seriously. But whether it is declared or not, McConnell and the rest of the Republicans in Congress have already been marching in lockstep against the Obama agenda, they have already bottled up virtually all of Obama's judicial appointments and many other appointments and they have already signaled their intent do everything they can to delay, disrupt and obstruct the President's agenda. Health care reform was supposed to be 'Waterloo,' remember? So the Republicans have already been fighting a scorched earth, take no prisoners kind of war against the Democratic agenda. So WHY NOT use reconciliation? Max Baucus is learning the hard way that there can be no compromise with this crew, so if he's smart he'll realize that the only way forward is to reconnect with his fellow Democrats.

If nothing else though, the apparent failure of the Baucus attempt should make it clear to everyone that any appeal to bipartisanship is folly, and it will take a long time to revive it. Four committees (three in the house, one in the Senate) got a bill out of committee before the August recess with party line Democratic votes. In contrast to that in the Finance Committee, the Democratic leadership (Baucus and Conrad) led a serious attempt at bipartisanship, and it's taken much longer and now they may not even get any bill out at all.

Just write that down and pull it out next time some Republican complains about 'cramming something down their throats.' Because using the muscle of the majority to cram stuff down the GOP's throat is about the only thing that works anymore.

Bipartisan Senate vote kills the F-22

In this age of party-line votes, a very interesting vote came about in the Senate today.

At issue was $1.75 billion to build seven more F-22 fighters. We now have 87 of them and the Pentagon agrees with the administration that we don't need any more. The plane has not been used on a single sortie in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it has become the epitome of the modern-military industrial complex-- a hugely expensive piece of military hardware that we are practically bursting at the gills with now and which even the military wants more of about as much as they want more saddles for horse-mounted cavalry units. The Obama administration felt so strongly about this program and how useless the F-22 is that the President issued his first veto threat if this were to remain in the defense authorization bill.

In fact, the only reason the F-22 has lasted this long is that it is produced by Lockheed-Martin which employs production workers in most states.

The debate today focused largely on economics-- the economics of laying people off during a recession.

I can certainly understand that argument but my response would be why Senators who protested loudly about jobs (like Georgia's Saxby Chambliss, in whose state the largest number of workers are located) didn't feel that way back when we were talking about the stimulus. Ironically, a co-sponsor of the measure to delete the funding for the F-22's, Carl Levin of Michigan (along with John McCain, who considers the F-22 to be a waste of money and a detriment to the military) is from a state where thousands of auto workers only have a job today because of massive Government intervention in GM and Chrysler, jobs that Chambliss wanted to see disappear.

However, while one can make a case for saving jobs at automobile factories that make a product that people will use, it is hard to make a similar case for saving jobs at a factory producing an aircraft that few people will ever fly and which has so many problems that it has never actually been flown in a war zone.

The vote in the Senate reflects the confused politics of the F-22. The roll call vote was 58-40 to kill the plane. Democrats voted 42-14 to kill it. Republicans voted to keep making the plane, but by 25-15. The Senate's two independents were also split, with Bernard Sanders wanting to ax the F-22 program and Joe Lieberman in favor of continuing to build it.

Ultimately killing the program was the right thing to do. It is hard to get action sometimes in a body where so many competing interests are at work but I commend the Senate for this vote. And it is a reminder that every now and then a bipartisan coalition will form to do the right thing.

RINOs are still elephants at the end of the day.

President Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to reach out to Republicans.

He's also put actions behind those words. He kept George Bush's Defense Secretary, Bill Gates, on the job. He named Republican representative Ray LaHood as Transportation Secretary (George Bush had a Democrat, Norman Mineta as Transportation Secretary, but Mineta was the only Democrat in the Bush cabinet, while with Gates, LaHood was Obama's second Republican.) He appointed another Republican, retired General James Jones, as his National Security Advisor.

Obama made the trek back to Capitol Hill to hold several meetings with only Republicans (something previous Presidents had not done, insisting that members of the opposition party, especially when they were in the minority, come to the White House instead for consultations and then accompanied by members of the majority party.)

He included billions of dollars worth of tax cuts in the stimulus proposal, despite angering some members of his own party.

He asked Republican Senator Judd Gregg to become the third Republican in his cabinet, as Commerce Secretary. After a bit more than a week as the presumptive appointee, Gregg withdrew his name.

Now, I don't blame a lot of Republicans for voting against the stimulus bill. If someone fundamentally disagrees with something for ideological reasons then they absolutely should vote against it. I understand that and I can respect that.

Rather, what has bothered me is a report on today not only saying that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell was disappointed with three RINOs who agreed to support a watered-down stimulus bill, but that apparently there was a plan afoot to vote as a bloc against the bill specifically and for the singular purpose of sticking Obama with a defeat.

What this says is that the GOP in Washington, rather than agreeing with the President that the voters expect everyone to work together to solve problems, are still playing partisan games. The only bullet they have left is a 41-Senator solid bloc sticking behind a filibuster, but instead of using it once or twice when it might prevail, the GOP leadership intends to force the issue more often, even if it is difficult to get all the rinos to hold the line with them.

As Democrats we should be careful though. First, let's get this straight-- a Rino is still a Republican, and is even less a friend of ours than, say, Joe Lieberman. They may be pursuadable on specific issues but if we had 60 Democrats in the Senate the whole question of how far to cut the stimulus would be moot, and we'd have gotten a better bill.

Second, Rinos are notoriously erratic and unpredictable. For example, the prototypical Rino, John McCain, was squarely against the stimulus bill. He might be pursuadable on issues like torture or immigration, on the other hand. But I don't like being in the position of having to depend on a John McCain or an Arlen Spectre or a Susan Collins to be the tie-breaking vote.

Third, as we saw on the stimulus bill, there is a price for support from Rinos. Maybe it is such an emergency that this price was necessary but it still may not achieve a big enough jolt to the economy, thanks to RINO's cutting things out of the bill and diluting it with more tax cuts.

In 2008, Nancy Pelosi's House, though increasing the Democratic margin by a modest number, crossed a key benchmark when the size of the majority outnumbered the number of 'Blue Dog' Democrats. That meant that the conservative caucus no longer can pull the entire House to the right by defining the center.

That doesn't mean that the congressional leadership should ignore the blue dogs, but they also no longer have to bend over for them, and they shouldn't. Listen, let them be involved, incorporate any good ideas they have. But don't let them hold the Democratic Congress hostage. Somewhat similarly, looking especially at the Senate, it would be good if we were able to ignore RINO's. Right now there is little choice-- even if Al Franken pulls out a win in Minnesota, Democrats will still need a vote from a Republican whenever Senator McConnell decides to try and filibuster (which seems to be on most votes.) Rinos may be the most likely ones to crossover, but if it's not such an emergency I hope our leadership remembers that in this election and last, it was Republican ideas that the American people rejected, not Democratic ones.