History > 2011 > USA > Politics > House of Representatives (I)

The House Backs Down

December 22, 2011
The New York Times

For a full year, House Republicans have replaced governing with confrontations that they allow to reach the brink of crisis, only then making extreme demands in exchange for a resolution. On Thursday, that strategy crumbled. Battered by public opinion and undermined by more reasonable Senate Republicans, the House’s leaders backed down and signed off on a deal to continue the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance for two months.

The House Republicans’ stubborn opposition to the extension “may not have been politically the smartest thing in the world,” Speaker John Boehner said, in the understatement of the week. He still called it “a good fight.”

If the deal goes through on Friday — and even one angry lawmaker could stall it — the paychecks of 160 million workers will not shrink for at least eight weeks and three million jobless workers will keep their benefits. That will be paid for largely by mortgage fees, and negotiations will resume on paying for the remaining 10 months.

A Republican demand that President Obama make a decision on the Keystone XL oil pipeline will remain in the measure, as negotiated by the Senate last week. Republicans also won some minor adjustments to prevent small businesses from being harmed by the extension.

The struggle to reach an agreement, which was a clear victory for President Obama, exposed voters in the starkest way to the real temperament of the House that Americans elected a year ago. If the president wants it, they’re against it. If it might assist the middle class, as opposed to the rich, they will concoct an economic argument to oppose it. (“The payroll tax cut isn’t really that effective.”) And if it absolutely has to pass, they will throw in stray ideas — an oil pipeline, air pollution regulations — to win some part of their agenda, or kill the bill trying.

The Republican wounds this time were entirely self-inflicted. The crisis over the two-month extension wasn’t really about the payroll tax at all; it was about the hurt feelings of bumptious House members having to accede to a deal driven by the Senate and the White House. The real confrontation, over paying for the tax cut, is yet to come.

The only reason the Senate approved a two-month extension is that the two parties could not agree on how to pay for a full year. Before the House’s tantrum, Democrats had proposed an income-tax surcharge on millionaires, which would have been an eminently fair trade to help the middle class and the economy, but Republicans rejected it. The Republicans wanted to cut social spending more than the deal reached earlier this year, and make health insurance exchanges more expensive to undermine health care reform. Democrats were right to balk at that.

When the next battle comes, Democrats will presumably be facing a more cohesive group of Republican negotiators. Having already given in on the millionaires’ tax and the pipeline, they will have to push hard to prevent further damage to the economy. Still, this narrow victory showed the limits to Republican brinksmanship. Popular opinion was clearly on the side of the Democrats, as members heard from their constituents, and that momentum may produce a better long-term agreement.

    The House Backs Down, NYT, 22.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/opinion/the-house-backs-down-on-the-payroll-tax-cut.html

Hobbling the Fight Against Terrorism

December 7, 2011
The New York Times

Lawmakers from the House and Senate are working on provisions in the military budget bill that would take the most experienced and successful antiterrorism agencies — the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors — out of the business of interrogating, charging and trying most terrorism cases, and turn the job over to the military.

These new rules would harm the justice system and national security. They would hinder intelligence-gathering, make it harder to track down terrorists and make other countries less likely to cooperate.

Those are not our conclusions, although we strongly agree. They are the views of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence; Robert Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Lisa Monaco, the assistant attorney general for national security. The defense secretary, Leon Panetta, who used to run the intelligence services, has said that the military doesn’t want this responsibility. Lawmakers are ignoring them.

At issue are a series of amendments added by the House and the Senate to the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual military budget bill. They mandate military detention for most terrorism suspects (although they focus especially on Muslims). The House version would bar trying these prisoners in federal court, while the Senate version would make that very unlikely.

This means civilian law enforcement agencies with greater experience would be cut out and intelligence-gathering would be hobbled. Countries would be less likely to turn over prisoners to American authorities if they would land in military detention. Both versions of the bill would make the detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a permanent symbol of injustice and cruelty around the world. Both leave open the possibility of subjecting American citizens to military detention without charge or trial.

These measures are not just bad policy, they are entirely unnecessary.

Federal authorities have jailed terrorists by the score since Sept. 11, 2001. The military tribunals created by President George W. Bush and modified by President Obama have not managed to try any of the major figures behind the 9/11 attacks, who remain in Guantánamo. Existing law covers capture and detention of prisoners in battle. The military does not want new powers to interrogate and investigate terrorist suspects, especially those arrested in the United States.

President Obama, who has more than shown his mettle in combating terrorism, has allowed conservatives from both parties to entirely dominate the issue of military detention and trial. Now he has finally spoken up and threatened to veto the military budget bill if it ends up looking like it does now.

We hope the House and Senate conferees will strip out the military detention and trial provisions, but we are pessimistic. Government and Congressional officials told us on Tuesday that members of Congress are not taking the veto threat seriously.

Vetoing the military budget would pose political risks for Mr. Obama. Signing provisions like the ones in the House and Senate versions into law would do lasting harm to the country.

    Hobbling the Fight Against Terrorism, NYT, 7.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/opinion/hobbling-the-fight-against-terrorism.html

The Supercommittee Collapses

November 21, 2011
The New York Times

The smoke from the smoldering failure known as the deficit “supercommittee” spread heavily across Capitol Hill on Monday, allowing Republicans to obscure the simple truth about the failure to reach an agreement. The only reason the committee failed was because Republicans refused to raise taxes on the rich, and, in fact, wanted to cut them even below their current bargain-basement level.

Republicans in Washington claimed Democrats refused to budge on entitlements. John Boehner, the House speaker, and Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, as if by rote, issued statements saying it was all President Obama’s fault. But, had a single Republican on the panel endorsed even a modest increase in upper-income tax rates, Republicans could have won trillions in cuts from entitlements and discretionary spending. (Certainly far beyond anything we would endorse.)

None would take that courageous step, and now it seems foolish to have expected that they would. In July, they rejected a “grand bargain” from President Obama that would have cut $1 trillion in domestic and defense spending, and $650 billion from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, all because it would have raised tax revenues by $1.2 trillion. They dismissed Mr. Obama’s second offer in September, which would have cut $3.6 trillion from the deficit, 60 percent from spending cuts.

And, naturally, they rejected the proposal from supercommittee Democrats to cut at least $3 trillion from the deficit, because a third of it would have come from higher taxes on the rich. When you hear Republicans claim that Democrats refused to touch their sacred cows of spending, remember that the Democratic offer would have cut $475 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over 10 years, nearly half of which would have come directly from beneficiaries. That’s more than the Bowles-Simpson deficit plan proposed, and eight times the level of Medicare cuts offered by President Obama in September.

These plans actually tipped too far in the direction of spending cuts. By comparison, the Republican offers were risible. One pretended to raise revenue by $300 billion, while actually calling for the Bush tax cuts to be permanent and even reducing the top bracket to 28 percent from 35 percent. The consequences of this failure are serious.

FORCED SPENDING CUTS The most immediate result will be an automatic cut in federal spending of $1.2 trillion, which will disproportionately affect defense programs. That cut, though, doesn’t take effect until 2013, which means that Congress will spend the next year trying to reconfigure it or come up with a real deficit plan.

Expect to hear a huge wailing from the good friends of military contractors in Congress, mostly Republicans, who will try to use every budgetary choke point to undo the defense sequester, possibly starting as soon as next month, when the current continuing resolution financing the government runs out.

Cutting one-tenth of the military budget is hardly a real threat to national security, and it is fitting that the sequester hits defense particularly hard because the first $900 billion in cuts in the law creating the supercommittee came out of nondefense domestic spending. An across-the-board cut of $55 billion a year is a terrible way to achieve cuts in the Pentagon’s budget. But the president and Democrats in Congress should hold firm to their pledge not to undo this sequester until Republicans give in on their pledge never to raise taxes on the rich.

Any lawmaker who fears devastating cuts to the armed forces should explain why they consider it more important to keep upper-bracket taxes historically low.

THE RISK TO RECOVERY The supercommittee drew the focus away from the more important task of creating jobs. But that need is coming right up with the renewal of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance, both of which expire at the end of the year. Without them, the economy could lose up to 2 percentage points of its potential growth in 2012. A deal by the panel probably could have included both measures, but now Republicans are talking about trying to extort a deal, possibly involving the Bush tax cuts, which expire at the end of 2012.

•

The formation of the deficit panel was an acknowledgment that the regular budget process had also failed, largely because of the 60-vote rule in the Senate, which Republicans have made routine. With the panel’s collapse, the process now returns to the usual open-air infighting, which is an alarming thought, but at least will make it clear which side is refusing to cut the payroll tax and extend jobless benefits.

It will also illuminate the Republican fixation on preserving the Bush tax cuts. By refusing the Democrats’ proposals on the panel, Republicans clearly figured that they might win the next election and keep the cuts. But even if they win the White House, getting to the necessary 60 votes in the Senate would still be a long shot.

Until then, Democrats should press their advantage. No matter what happens next November, by the time of the next postelection lame-duck session, Republicans may be so fearful of the military sequester and the expiring cuts that they might agree to a deal that preserves the cuts for the middle class while ending them for the rich.

Americans should know that that was a deal that could have been reached last summer.

    The Supercommittee Collapses, NYT, 21.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/opinion/the-deficit-supercommittee-collapses.html

Something to Shoot For

November 16, 2011
The New York Times
By GAIL COLLINS

You may have noticed that Congress is unpopular.

Really, really unpopular, actually. Only 9 percent of Americans approve of the way Congress has been doing its job, according the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. And you do sort of wonder about that 9 percent. Do you think they misheard and thought they were being asked: “Do you approve of Christmas?”

This week, the House of Representatives took time out of its busy schedule of going home for vacation to remind us, once again, why it has the strong support of about as many people who believe Rick Perry should be the next president of the United States. It approved a bill requiring states with strict gun regulations to honor concealed weapon carry permits issued in states where the gun rules are slightly more lax than the restrictions on who can dispense ice cream cones from a truck.

“This bill is about freedom,” said Representative Chris Gibson, a Republican from upstate New York. In this Congress, it’s hard to find anything that isn’t. Cutting Social Security is about freedom. Killing funds for Planned Parenthood is about freedom. Once again, we are reminded that, as Janis Joplin used to sing, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Here’s an example of the way the House plan would work. California has very strict limits on who can get a permit to carry a concealed weapon, involving extensive background checks by local law enforcement. Utah, on the other hand, is really mellow about the whole thing. You don’t even have to live there to get a Utah permit. Just ask the 215,000 non-Utah folks who’ve gotten one. And, in Florida, “it is so easy that a staffer in one of our offices was able to complete the form in less than 30 minutes,” said Representative Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat.

Under this bill, California’s strict rules on gun permits are now expanded to include anybody who drives into the state waving a Florida or Utah permission slip.

The bill passed 272 to 154. It’s a law-enforcement nightmare for states that take gun regulation seriously. There’s no national database cops can check if they stop someone who’s carrying a gun with an out-of-state permit. Some state records aren’t available at all.

“A common-sense solution to adapt to today’s needs,” said Representative Steve Chabot, an Ohio Republican, cheerfully.

The opponents really did try everything, including the time-honored tactic of proposing that the bill be taken away and amended to say “except for child molesters.”

They also pointed out, in tones of deep irony, that Republicans are supposed to be big fans of states’ rights. But really, a vast majority of members of Congress have always believed that the states have a right to do anything that the member in question happens to like. “It’s tougher when it’s those things you may disagree with that are left to the states,” said Representative Dan Lungren, a Republican of California, who should know since he was one of approximately two gun-rights lawmakers who opposed the bill because of principles of strict constitutional construction.

Anyway, the National Rifle Association will be giving everybody a grade before they run for re-election. Screw around with this bill. and you could be looking at a B-minus.

There is a distinct cultural rift in this country between the people who feel safest when there are as few guns on the street as possible and the ones who believe that they aren’t secure unless they have a loaded gun around to protect themselves against evildoers. “As millions of American families can attest, there is no greater threat to our families than — the ability to protect,” said Representative Renee Ellmers, a Republican of North Carolina, flung into incoherence by the drama of the moment. What she pretty clearly meant to say was there was no greater threat than a crazed, knife-wielding zombie breaking through the doors of an unarmed household and trying to carry off the baby.

“We must protect our families,” she concluded.

Actually, the evidence suggests very strongly that a gun in the house will most likely be used to take out a relative. And guns in the house are not the subject of this bill anyway, since we’re talking about weapons being carted across state lines. So maybe the danger here is a crazed knife-wielding zombie breaking into the station wagon while the family is stopped for gas on the way to Disneyland.

Anyway, God wants everybody to be armed. “Mr. Speaker, rights do not come from the government. We are, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights,” said Representative Marlin Stutzman, an Indiana Republican.

Among these rights are life, liberty and a pistol in the glove compartment.

    Something to Shoot For, 16.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/opinion/collins-something-to-shoot-for.html

Congress Ends 5-Year Standoff

on Trade Deals in Rare Accord

October 12, 2011
The New York Times
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — Congress passed three long-awaited free trade agreements on Wednesday, ending a political standoff that has stretched across two presidencies. The move offered a rare moment of bipartisan accord at a time when Republicans and Democrats are bitterly divided over the role that government ought to play in reviving the sputtering economy.

The approval of the deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama is a victory for President Obama and proponents of the view that foreign trade can drive America’s economic growth in the face of rising protectionist sentiment in both political parties. They are the first trade agreements to pass Congress since Democrats broke a decade of Republican control in 2007.

All three agreements cleared both chambers with overwhelming Republican support just one day after Senate Republicans prevented action on Mr. Obama’s jobs bill.

The passage of the trade deals is important primarily as a political achievement, and for its foreign policy value in solidifying relationships with strategic allies. The economic benefits are projected to be small. A federal agency estimated in 2007 that the impact on employment would be “negligible” and that the deals would increase gross domestic product by about $14.4 billion, or roughly 0.1 percent.

The House voted to pass the Colombia measure, the most controversial of the three deals because of concerns about the treatment of unions in that country, 262 to 167; the Panama measure passed 300 to 129, and the agreement concerning South Korea passed 278 to 151. The votes reflected a clear partisan divide, with many Democrats voting against the president. In the Senate, the Colombia measure passed 66 to 33, the Panama bill succeeded 77 to 22 and the South Korea measure passed 83 to 15. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, voted against all three measures.

The House also passed a measure to expand a benefits program for workers who lose jobs to foreign competition by a vote of 307 to 122. The benefits program, a must-have for labor unions, passed with strong Democratic support. The Senate previously approved the measure.

Proponents of the trade deals, including Mr. Obama, Republican leaders and centrist Democrats, predict that they will reduce prices for American consumers and increase foreign sales of American goods and services, providing a much-needed jolt to the sluggish economy.

“At long last, we are going to do something important for the country on a bipartisan basis,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.

However, Mr. Obama’s support for the measures has angered important parts of his political base, including trade unions, which fear job losses to foreign competition. Many Democrats took to the House floor Wednesday to speak in opposition to the deals.

“What I am seeing firsthand is devastation that these free trade agreements can do to our communities,” said Representative Mike Michaud, a Maine Democrat who once worked in a paper mill.

Both chambers raced to approve the deals before a joint Congressional session Thursday with the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak.

The revival of support for the deals, originally negotiated by the Bush administration five years ago, comes at a paradoxical political moment, when both conservative Republicans and the Occupy Wall Street protesters have taken antitrade positions, albeit for different reasons. In a debate among Republican presidential candidates Tuesday night, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, accused China of manipulating the value of its currency to flood the United states with cheap goods, while populist sentiment on the left opposes the trade agreements because of the potential for American job losses.

Mr. Obama cited similar concerns in criticizing the agreements during the 2008 presidential campaign, but he later embraced the deals as a key part of his agenda to revive the economy. To win Democratic support, the White House reopened negotiations with the three countries to make changes demanded by industry groups and unions, and insisted that the expansion of benefits for displaced workers be tied to passage of the trade agreements.

The benefits program was expanded in 2009 to include workers in service industries as well as manufacturing. The compromise negotiated this summer between the White House, House Republicans and Senate Democrats preserves most of the funding for the program.

Increased protections for American automakers in the South Korea deal won the support of traditional opponents of trade deals, including some Midwestern Democrats and the United Automobile Workers union. But scores of Democrats opposed the deal with Colombia, because they said it did not do enough to address the murders of dozens of union organizers in that country.

“Trade agreements should not be measured solely on how many tons of goods move across the border,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat.

Economists generally predict that free trade agreements, which eliminate tariffs and other policies aimed at protecting domestic manufacturers, benefit all participating nations by creating a larger common market, increasing sales and reducing prices. But such deals also create clear losers, as workers lose well-paid jobs to foreign competition.

The White House and Republican leaders said that the three agreements would provide a big boost to the lagging American economy and put people back to work.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton hailed the deals Wednesday as an important victory for American foreign policy. And she said she expected that the South Korea pact alone would create 70,000 American jobs. “By opening new markets to American exports and attracting new investments to American communities, our economic statecraft is creating jobs and spurring growth here at home,” Ms. Clinton said at a Washington event.

But the United States International Trade Commission, a federal agency that analyzed the deals in 2007, reported that that economic impact would be minimal because the three countries combined represent a relatively small market for American goods and services.

The modest projected increase in demand will come mostly from South Korea, the world’s 14th-largest economy, which will join a short list of developed nations that have free trade pacts with the United States, alongside Australia, Canada, Israel and Singapore.

The commission predicted that American farmers would benefit most, because of increased demand for dairy products and beef, pork and poultry. Conversely, it predicted that the pacts would eliminate some manufacturing jobs, particularly in the textile industry.

Opponents, including textile companies, said that the deals would harm the economy by undermining the nation’s industrial base. They argued that South Korean companies would benefit much more than American companies because they were gaining access to a much larger market.

These are the first deals to pass Congress since the approval of an agreement with Peru in 2007. The Bush administration had won approval for trade agreements with 14 countries before the Democrats regained Congress in 2008, but it was then unable to gain traction.

“It’s been five years in the making, but we are finally here,” said Representative Lynn Jenkins, a Kansas Republican, in a speech urging passage of the agreements.

    Congress Ends 5-Year Standoff on Trade Deals in Rare Accord, NYT, 12.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/business/trade-bills-near-final-chapter.html

House Rebukes G.O.P. Leaders Over Spending

September 21, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders suffered a surprising setback on Wednesday when the House rejected their version of a stopgap spending bill, leaving unclear how Congress will provide money to keep the government open after Sept. 30 and aid victims of a string of costly recent natural disasters.

The 230-to-195 vote came after fiscally conservative Republicans joined an overwhelming majority of Democrats in opposing the legislation. As it became clear that the bill was going down, a number of Republicans changed their votes from yes to no.

The unexpected outcome illustrated how the intense fiscal fights of recent months had transformed the politics of disaster relief, which in the past has typically been rushed out of Congress with strong backing from both parties. Democrats remained nearly united against the measure because they saw the amount of disaster assistance — $3.65 billion — as inadequate, and they objected to the Republicans’ insistence on offsetting some of the cost with cuts elsewhere.

The vote also showed the Republican leadership’s continuing struggle to corral the most conservative members of the caucus, as more than 40 Republicans rejected the measure because they did not believe it cut spending enough.

The setback on a bill that only a week ago seemed headed for easy passage came just hours after Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and majority leader, joined other top Republicans in predicting that the House would pass it.

The result could give new power to Senate Democrats to shape the legislation, which would finance government operations from the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1 until Nov. 18. The Senate last week passed — with support from 10 Republicans — a bill that would provide nearly twice as much money as the House for assistance to victims of floods, hurricanes, wildfires and tornadoes.

What was also clear is that a mild charm offensive, led for two weeks by House Republican leaders eager to tamp down rancor on Capitol Hill, was no match for the deep philosophical differences between the parties.

The House vote sent Republicans scrambling for another approach to passing a bill to keep the government open. House and Senate leaders hope to settle the matter this week since Congress is not scheduled to be in session next week.

With so many conservatives balking at the House bill, Republican leaders said they needed support from Democrats to pass it. But few Democrats were willing to assist the Republican leadership after this summer’s standoff over raising the federal debt limit.

In the end, 6 Democrats joined 189 Republicans in voting for the bill, while 48 Republicans crossed the aisle to vote against the bill, which was also opposed by 182 Democrats.

Democrats objected to a provision that would finance disaster aid by taking money from a loan program that encourages production of energy-efficient cars. Democrats said this program had helped create 40,000 jobs and could yield many more.

Having failed to pass any of the 12 regular annual spending bills, Congress needs to approve some type of temporary legislation to continue government operations beyond Oct. 1. Congress is considering whether to pass a giant omnibus spending bill to finance federal agencies for the remainder of the fiscal year after Nov. 18.

Both parties said they were determined to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1. But it is unclear how they will resolve their differences.

Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, said after the vote that House Republicans should take up and pass the Senate’s disaster relief bill, providing more money with no offsets. “The only thing left for them to do is to treat the disaster victims fairly,” he said.

The message from the more conservative wing of the House is that there should be more spending cuts in the bill than offered. But to cut more could violate the spending agreement with Democrats devised as part of the recent debt-ceiling agreement, and the Senate would be unlikely to vote for a new bill with more cuts, setting the stage for an impasse.

If House Republican leaders try to pick up Republican votes with deeper cuts in spending, Mr. Schumer said, “it will not get anywhere, and they will risk shutting the government down.”

The House bill would have provided $3.65 billion for disaster assistance and would have offset $1 billion of the cost by cutting the auto technology program. The Senate-passed bill would provide $6.9 billion, none of it offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget.

Senate Democratic leaders said that the House sum was wholly inadequate, and that Congress should not have to offset the costs.

“We are not going to cave in on this, because it’s a matter of principle,” said the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada.

Democrats and Republicans agree that such assistance is one of the government’s main responsibilities, but disagree over how much of the cost can be anticipated and how much, if any, should be offset.

Mr. Cantor said Congress would eventually provide all the money that was needed. But, he said, Republicans are determined to be “prudent shepherds of taxpayer dollars.”

Representative Rob Woodall, Republican of Georgia, said Democrats were trying to blow past spending limits set in the debt-ceiling law signed last month by President Obama.

Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, denounced the Republicans’ determination to offset some of the cost of disaster relief.

“This is an absolute disgrace,” Mr. Pascrell said. “We are all Americans. We need to help our brothers and sisters who are hurting right now.”

The House and Senate bills would replenish the disaster relief fund of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is running out of money.

Representative John B. Larson of Connecticut, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said, “Storm victims are being held hostage to the conservative ideology” of Republican lawmakers.

Representative Robert B. Aderholt, Republican of Alabama and an architect of the House bill, said, “While Congress has an undeniable obligation to thoroughly address our nation’s disaster relief needs, we can no longer afford to simply throw money at calamities and then ask the hard questions later.”

The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, said it was rather late to start insisting on offsets to pay for disaster relief. “We never paid for tax cuts for the rich,” Ms. Pelosi said. “We never paid for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

But the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said that offsets to pay for emergency spending were nothing new. They have been used in half of 30 emergency spending bills passed in the last 10 years, he said.

    House Rebukes G.O.P. Leaders Over Spending, NYT, 21.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/us/politics/
    house-defeats-stopgap spending-bill-with-disaster-relief-hanging-in-the-balance.html

Packing Heat Everywhere

September 18, 2011
The New York Times

Some bad ideas refuse to die. Include in that category an extreme proposal percolating in the House to strip states of their authority to decide who may carry a concealed loaded firearm. This gift to the gun lobby, the subject of a hearing last week by a House Judiciary subcommittee, is nearly identical to a provision the Senate defeated by a narrow margin two years ago.

Every state but Illinois makes some allowance for concealed weapons. The eligibility rules vary widely and each state decides whether to honor another state’s permits. For example, 38 states prohibit people convicted of certain violent crimes like assault or sex crimes from carrying concealed guns. At least 36 states set a minimum age of 21; 35 states require gun safety training.

The proposed National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2011 would shred those standards and the public safety judgments behind them, creating a locked-and-loaded race to the bottom in which states with strict requirements, like New York, would be forced to allow people with permits from states with lax screening to carry hidden loaded guns.

This trashing of state and local prerogatives is not only unwise but unnecessary. In its wrongheaded 2008 decision recognizing an individual’s Second Amendment right to keep guns in the home for self-defense, the Supreme Court still left room for reasonable gun limits, including restrictions on toting concealed weapons. Since then, several federal courts have upheld state concealed-carry permitting rules, including a decision this month by a federal district judge that upheld New York’s concealed-carry law.

Philadelphia’s police commissioner, Charles Ramsey, said at the House panel hearing that the measure would interfere with law enforcement and could put officers at greater risk in making traffic stops. He pointed to the bill’s failure to establish a national database or other enforcement mechanism to allow officers to verify the validity of an unfamiliar out-of-state concealed-carry permit shown by a person with a loaded gun.

Others contend that the bill’s nationalization of lenient concealed-carry rules would increase gun violence and hinder efforts to combat illegal gun trafficking.

On Capitol Hill, unfortunately, such concerns matter less than election-year politics and the demands of the National Rifle Association. The bill, introduced by Representatives Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican, and Heath Shuler, a North Carolina Democrat, already has more than 240 co-sponsors, all but guaranteeing House passage.

Two years ago, Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, both Democrats, led the successful fight to defeat it in the Senate. They and others in the Senate have to stand up again for gun sanity. For his part, President Obama should be threatening to veto this outrageous measure.

    Packing Heat Everywhere, NYT, 18.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/opinion/packing-heat-everywhere.html

Despite Talk of Taming Partisanship,

a Show of It for President’s Remarks

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — It was, for a moment, Bizzaro World, with Republicans giving the president of the United States a standing ovation, while Democrats, in large part, remained firmly fixed in their seats as he expressed his desire for new trade agreements.

And it was a brief respite for Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and majority leader. He had spent much of the day talking about the need for conciliation, but had, for the previous 20 minutes, become more and more agitated as the speech went on, furiously taking notes as President Obama ticked off a list of tax cuts and programs he claimed that Republicans had supported.

For all the talk about the need to tame partisanship, both chambers of Congress put on a relatively full display of it Thursday night, with Democrats hooting and clapping at Mr. Obama’s remarks about taxes, entitlement programs and teachers, and Republicans leading the charge when the talk turned to veterans and regulations.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was first into the chamber, wearing a lavender tie, tan and bright white smile. He was followed by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who was immediately set upon by a freshman Democrat, followed by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, who stood with his hands folded in front of him, pensive, speaking to few.

Unlike the State of the Union, when Democrats and Republicans sat together to show good will and cheer, members sat largely by party this time, as the room braced with anticipation for the speech. Oddly, former Representative David Wu of Oregon, a Democratic who resigned under the cloud of scandal before the August recess, sat with a young girl toward the back of the chamber, as others more or less avoided him.

Republicans were divided between those who criticized the president before he had uttered a word and those who reached with tentative hands toward an olive branch, citing the exhaustion of the American public with perpetual partisanship.

After the speech, Mr. Cantor said he liked some of the president’s proposals, including one to provide tax relief to small businesses, and would try to “peel off” such elements and pass them separately.

However, Mr. Cantor criticized Mr. Obama for not specifying how he would pay for the new initiatives. He also complained that the president had offered his proposals on a “take it or leave it” basis, presumably referring to Mr. Obama’s pledge to take his case “to every corner of this country,” beginning with Mr. Cantor’s hometown, Richmond, on Friday.

Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, hailed that part of the speech, saying it would “energize the base” of the Democratic Party and enhance the president’s prospects for re-election.

Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, also had election plans in mind on Thursday, but with a different twist. Mr. Sessions sent a plan to all Republican House candidates, declaring the start of the 2012 campaign season and encouraging them to criticize the president often.

A handful of House and Senate Republicans decided the president’s speech did not merit their attendance at all, even though Speaker John A. Boehner discouraged boycotts.

“I have encouraged my colleagues to come tonight and to listen to the president,” Mr. Boehner told reporters. “He is the president of the United States and I believe that all members ought to be here to do this. Doesn’t mean they’re going to.”

There were some notable guests on hand though, many of them corporate chief executives — the presumed creators of jobs.

Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, invited Henry Juszkiewicz, the chief executive of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, to highlight the fact that two Gibson work sites had been raided by federal agents apparently in search of illegal, partly finished, wooden guitar fingerboard blanks from India. Since the visit, Mr. Juszkiewicz has become a walking, breathing, Republican talking point against excessive regulation.

The first lady, Michelle Obama, invited her own business people including Kenneth I. Chenault, the chairman of American Express.

The Republicans presented no official response to the president’s speech, with Mr. Boehner suggesting that his party did not want to get in the way of the desire of many Americans to watch the first game of the N.F.L season rather than be “forced to watch some politician they don’t want to listen to.”

Mr. Reid had scheduled a post-speech vote on a Republican resolution to disapprove the increase to the debt limit. It failed on its first procedural vote, with 52 Democrats opposed. The inconvenient vote had an icing-on-the-cake quality for Mr. Reid, as it forced Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, to stay in Washington rather than flee to his home state to watch the Saints-Packers N.F.L. season opener, as he had said he would.

 

Robert Pear contributed reporting.

    Despite Talk of Taming Partisanship, a Show of It for President’s Remarks, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09scene.html

For Obama,

a ‘Moment’ Speech at a Time of Great Obstacles to Change

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Enshrined in the mythology of the American presidency, there is something called a moment speech, an address to the nation so forceful and eloquent that it changes the way the country feels about its leadership and even itself.

Long before Barack Obama took office, many of his supporters and even a few of his critics thought he would be the kind of president who could give those kinds of speeches. Ever since he took office there have been many wondering why these kinds of speeches have not been coming, and whether the president’s hallmark reliance on calm, rational explanation needs more fire to galvanize the nation and persuade his adversaries. Thursday night’s address to Congress on job creation, coming as the prospect of a double-dip recession looms, seemed to be another chance for an address that would do those things.

But a moment speech is less about the speech than it is about the moment. And as interviews with political historians and citizens around the country on Thursday made clear, Mr. Obama was approaching the lectern in a moment that offered more obstacles than opportunities for bringing about real change.

Even in the strictest sense, the timing of the speech was inauspicious. After a partisan standoff over scheduling with the House speaker, Representative John A. Boehner, who asked the president to move his address from Wednesday night, the speech took place in a pre-prime-time slot shoved up against the start of the N.F.L. season.

But in more momentous ways, the president was facing serious disadvantages, some of his own making.

Speeches, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, are about context. Some of the most memorable and praised speeches — by Mr. Obama after the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, for example, or by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks — were delivered in moments of pronounced national grief or anxiety, when the country longed for a voice of reassurance.

Thursday’s jobs speech, on the other hand, comes after a season of nasty partisanship, a time where the country’s biggest threat seemed not to come from outside enemies or natural disasters but the inability of its own political leadership to get basic things done. The economy that the president is addressing is in crisis, but a crisis that has been excruciatingly prolonged, beaten out in a tiresome tempo of starts and stalls.

“The economy is a mess,” said Becky Wallard, 71, a retired teacher in Atlanta. “There’s no speech that can hide that.”

Even Mr. Obama’s defenders acknowledge that the political reality in Washington, with the committed opposition of a Republican Congress, makes the likelihood of bold action on the president’s part very slim.

“At this point, his speeches haven’t really been earth-shattering or made a major difference,” said Lily Wolk, 59, who was sitting at a Starbucks in Los Angeles and who said she was hopeful nonetheless. “I think that he’s got his hands tied.”

Some political historians and polling experts suggested that this was not a problem particular to Mr. Obama and that anyone maintaining that the president has lost some special magic, or was choosing not to use it, is simply misreading history.

Despite the insta-polls insta-punditry that usually follow on a big speech, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that addresses like this do not have a major impact on public opinion over the short or long term. There has been little major polling movement after other speeches in Mr. Obama’s presidency, including the State of the Union addresses and his speech on health care, and few think a speech on the economy would be an exception.

“It’s just illusory to think that presidents can provide a narrative that can make unemployment sound acceptable,” said George C. Edwards, a professor of political science at Texas A & M University and author of “On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit.”

Professor Edwards pointed out further that the kind of people who have not made up their minds about the president or his policies are the kind of people who are least likely to watch speeches like this. These voters would be moved almost exclusively by tangible results.

In this sense, Mr. Obama’s reputation as an orator could backfire among those who believe that his word-action ratio was askew, or that his famed professorial approach was unsuited to the dire times at hand.

“Supposedly the best way to convince Obama of anything is to say it’s the consensus of experts,” said David Morrell, 62, a library custodian in Atlanta who described himself as a dispirited Democrat, and who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008. “Everything that has been disastrous in this country has had a ton of experts behind it.”

Mr. Morrell added, “It doesn’t seem to be in his nature to bring up anything other than superficialities.”

Jean Garber, 75, a retiree in Denver put it more succinctly: “Too many speeches. Every time you turn around!”

Still, there are others, mainly supporters of the president, who believed that a strong voice of reassurance was more important than the policy details and that Mr. Obama was capable of delivering that reassurance.

“I think he recognizes that the country is so worried right now,” said Jonathan Lee, a physician from Norwood, Mass. “It’s more a matter of saying, ‘I recognize there is immense trouble.’ ”

Dr. Lee said the would not change his opinion: he was a committed backer of the president. Anyway, he added, he was probably going to watch the Red Sox game instead.

 

Reporting was contributed by Abby Goodnough, Ian Lovett, Dan Frosch, Robbie Brown, Emily S. Williams and Adrienne Hilbert.

    For Obama, a ‘Moment’ Speech at a Time of Great Obstacles to Change, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09voters.html

Plan’s Focus

on Social Security Taxes Reflects Its Modest Ambitions

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

WASHINGTON — The centerpiece of President Obama’s job-creation plan, a proposal to further reduce Social Security taxes, is emblematic of a package of modest measures that some economists describe as helpful but not sufficient to lift the economy from its malaise.

In his speech on Thursday night, Mr. Obama asked Congress to cut the amount that workers must contribute toward Social Security benefits, extending an existing measure, and to reduce, for the first time, the matching payments that employers are required to make.

The cuts, which would deprive the government of about $240 billion in revenues next year, are the largest items in the president’s $447 billion job-creation plan, which includes payments to unemployed workers, incentives for companies that hire workers and increased federal spending on infrastructure. All of the measures will require the support of Congressional Republicans.

Cutting taxes is a time-honored strategy for stimulating growth. The formula is simple: Workers will spend more money when their paychecks grow, and companies will respond to that increased demand by hiring more workers, creating a cycle that increases the pace of growth.

Preliminary analyses of the White House plan estimate that the tax cuts could create more than 50,000 jobs a month, a significant boost considering that employment climbed by 35,000 jobs, on average, in each of the last three months. But even if Congress immediately agreed to pass the president’s entire plan, the economy is likely to continue to struggle. Companies must increase payrolls by about 100,000 people every month to keep pace with population growth.

Still, Joel Prakken, senior managing director at Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm, said that the benefits of creating more than half a million jobs next year should not be minimized. “It’s going to make the unemployment rate lower than it otherwise would be,” he said.

The other elements of Mr. Obama’s plan, however, highlight the challenges of doing more. Economists regard benefits for unemployed workers as among the most effective means of increasing growth because people without jobs tend to spend the money quickly. But Republicans generally oppose increased spending on social programs.

Infrastructure spending, by contrast, enjoys bipartisan support, but breaking ground on new projects can take a long time, delaying the impact on the economy.

The administration’s focus on payroll tax cuts, which became more ambitious in the days leading up to the speech, is an exercise in the art of the possible. While economists regard other kinds of measures as potentially more effective, the cuts would put money directly in the hands of consumers, and Republican leaders have indicated they are willing to consider the proposal.

Seeking to exploit that potential opening, the White House decided to considerably expand the scope of the cuts in the latter stages of planning.

The Social Security tax is paid in equal shares by workers and their employers. Both pay 6.2 percent of a worker’s annual income up to $106,800. The president’s plan would reduce the amount that workers pay by half, a savings of $1,500 for an employee who makes $50,000.

The current tax cut, set to expire in December, has reduced the tax to a rate of 4.2 percent. The new proposal would further reduce it to 3.1 percent in 2012.

In the present climate, however, there are significant reasons to doubt that consumers are honoring the predictions of economic models by taking that money and racing out to spend it.

Families are devoting a larger share of income to paying debts, which is important for the economy’s long-term health but does nothing to stimulate growth. Concern about future earnings also is weighing on many households, reducing their willingness to spend. A recent study found that 62 percent of households expect their income to stay the same or decline over the next year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the lowest level of confidence in 30 years.

“One striking aspect of the recovery is the unusual weakness in household spending,” the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Thursday in Minneapolis.

There is also broad disagreement among economists about the president’s companion proposal to give companies a tax break, too.

The plan is divided in two parts. The amount employers must pay also would be reduced by half on payrolls up to $5 million, a condition that the White House said would focus the benefits on small businesses. And the plan would waive all payroll taxes on increased spending on salaries — either for new hires or raises — up to the first $50 million in increased wages.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that a tax cut for employers would have a greater impact than a tax cut for workers. The nonpartisan office reported that every dollar in reduced taxes on employers would generate up to $1.20 in economic activity, while every dollar in reduced taxes on workers would generate up to 90 cents because workers tend to save a portion of their additional income.

Some independent economists, however, doubt that the tax cut will persuade companies to make significant hires because the primary issue remains a lack of demand. If a company cannot sell more sofas, it does not need more workers to make them, whether the cost of each new worker is $106,200, including employer payroll taxes, or only $100,000, if the tax cut is enacted. As a result, they argue, companies are even more likely than consumers to refrain from spending the money.

Mark Thoma, a University of Oregon economist, said that company tax cuts should be tied to hiring: “If they don’t spend the money on employees, you don’t get a demand-side effect.”

Studies of similar tax cuts in other countries suggest the truth lies in between. A 2008 study by the Government Institute for Economic Research in Finland, for example, found that companies shared about half the money from a payroll tax cut with workers in the form of higher wages.

The study also found, however, that there were “no significant effects on employment.”

Cutting payroll taxes does not affect the government’s obligation to pay benefits to older Americans. Indeed, the White House plan specifies that amounts not paid by workers and companies must be paid to Social Security from other sources of government revenue.

But some advocates, noting that temporary tax cuts have a history of becoming permanent, worry that reducing direct Social Security revenues could undermine political support for the program by making it seem more like a form of welfare.

The Social Security tax “creates a stake for every American working person in the system,” said Nancy Altman, co-director of the Social Security Works coalition. “If you start meddling with that you start to pull apart the political contract.”

    Plan’s Focus on Social Security Taxes Reflects Its Modest Ambitions, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09tax.html

The Jobs Speech

September 8, 2011
The New York Times

With more than 14 million people out of work and all Americans fearing a double-dip recession, President Obama stood face to face Thursday night with a Congress that has perversely resisted lifting a finger to help. Some Republicans refused to even sit and listen. But those Americans who did heard him unveil an ambitious proposal — more robust and far-reaching than expected — that may be the first crucial step in reigniting the economy.

Perhaps as important, they heard a president who was lately passive but now newly energized, who passionately contrasted his vision of a government that plays its part in tough times with the Republicans’ vision of a government starved of the means to do so.

The president’s program was only a start, and it was vague on several important elements, notably a direct path to mortgage relief for troubled borrowers. And some of the tax cuts for employers may prove ineffective. Nonetheless, at $447 billion, the plan is large enough to potentially lower the unemployment rate and broad enough to be a significant stimulus.

As Mr. Obama pointed out, virtually every proposal on his agenda has been accepted over the years by Democrats and an earlier generation of Republicans that was not reflexively opposed to a recession-fighting fiscal policy. This generation is different, and the president’s challenge to purely partisan resistance was forceful and clear.

“The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy,” he said.

Though he went on too long, he was authoritative in demanding that Congress pass his plan quickly and in laying out its benefits for average Americans. He directly, even mockingly, challenged the increasingly nihilistic Republican view that government’s very presence is noxious. Just as Lincoln helped start the transcontinental railroad and land-grant colleges, he said, the two parties must together push the country past its economic crisis. Waiting for the next election will waste valuable time, he said.

“The people who sent us here — the people who hired us to work for them — they don’t have the luxury of waiting 14 months,” he said. “Some of them are living week to week, paycheck to paycheck, even day to day. They need help, and they need it now.”

At the core of his plan are two cuts in the payroll tax — one for employers and one for employees — that have long been embraced by Republicans. The employee cut would reduce the tax to 3.1 percent of income instead of the 4.2 percent negotiated last year. (It was 6.2 percent originally.) Although it could have been better targeted to low- and middle-income families, it will put money in people’s pockets quickly and increase consumer demand.

For employers, the plan would halve the payroll tax for most small and medium-size businesses and would provide an incentive for hiring by temporarily removing the tax for new employees (and on raises for existing ones). Companies would also get a $4,000 tax credit for hiring anyone out of work for more than six months. Unemployment insurance would be extended for five million people. Though Mr. Obama said more Americans would be able to refinance their homes at low interest rates, he did not say how.

The plan would provide $35 billion in state aid to prevent up to 280,000 teacher layoffs while hiring tens of thousands more, along with additional police officers and firefighters. It would create jobs to modernize 35,000 schools across the country. And it would accelerate $50 billion in improvements for highways, railroads, transit and aviation.

Though the plan would be paid for by more deficit reduction, he left those vital details until later. It was gratifying to hear him call for higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, but his warning of cuts to Medicare and Medicaid — lifelines to the most vulnerable — raised concerns about trading one important program for another.

We hope Mr. Obama keeps his promise to take his proposals all over the country. The need to act is urgent.

    The Jobs Speech, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/opinion/president-obamas-jobs-speech.html

Obama Challenges Congress on Job Plan

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Mixing politically moderate proposals with a punchy tone, President Obama challenged lawmakers on Thursday to “pass this jobs bill” — a blunt call on Congress to enact his $447 billion package of tax cuts and new government spending, designed to revive a stalling economy and his own political standing.

Speaking to a joint session of Congress, Mr. Obama ticked off a list of measures that he emphasized had been supported by both Republicans and Democrats in the past. To keep the proposals from adding to the swelling federal deficit, Mr. Obama also said he would encourage a more ambitious target for long-term reduction of the deficit.

“You should pass this jobs plan right away,” the president declared over and over in his 32-minute speech, in which he eschewed his trademark soaring oratory in favor of a plainspoken appeal for action, stiffened by a few sarcastic political jabs.

With Republicans listening politely but with stone-faced expressions, Mr. Obama said, “The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy.”

Though Mr. Obama’s proposals — including an expansion of a cut in payroll taxes and new spending on public works — were widely expected, the package was substantially larger than predicted, and much of the money would flow into the economic bloodstream in 2012. The pace would be similar to that of the $787 billion stimulus package passed in 2009, which was spread over more than two years. Analysts said that, if passed, the package would likely lift growth somewhat.

While Republicans did not often applaud Mr. Obama,, party leaders greeted his proposals with uncharacteristic conciliation. Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and other Republicans signaled a willingness to consider at least some of the measures, reflecting what some have described as anger in their home districts over the political dysfunction in Washington.

“The proposals the president outlined tonight merit consideration,” Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement. “We hope he gives serious consideration to our ideas as well.”

Still, analysts said it was unlikely that the White House would win Congressional approval for many elements of the package.

For Mr. Obama, burdened by the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, the address crystallized the multiple challenges he faces, among them reviving a torpid economy with a Republican House that, however receptive some of its leaders appeared Thursday, has staked out a relentlessly confrontational course with the White House. The president must also shake off a perception, after so many speeches on the economy, that he has not delivered on the promise of his oratory.

After weeks on the defensive, however, Mr. Obama seemed to get off his back foot. He framed the debate over the economy as a tug-of-war between mainstream American values and a radical, antigovernment orthodoxy that holds that “the only thing we can do restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everyone’s money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own.”

With a difficult re-election bid looming, Mr. Obama declared that his vision would appeal to more voters. “These are real choices we have to make,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure I know what most Americans would choose. It’s not even close.”

At times, he edged into sarcasm. Promoting the extension in the payroll tax cut to Republicans, Mr. Obama said: “I know some of you have sworn oaths never to raise any taxes on anyone for as long as you live. Now is not the time to carve out an exception and raise middle-class taxes, which is why you should pass this bill right away.”

The centerpiece of the bill, known as the American Jobs Act, is an extension and expansion of the cut in payroll taxes, worth $240 billion, under which the tax paid by employees would be cut in half through 2012. Smaller businesses would also get a cut in their payroll taxes, as well as a tax holiday for hiring new employees. The plan also provides $140 billion for modernizing schools and repairing roads and bridges — spending that Mr. Obama portrayed as critical to maintaining America’s competitiveness.

The president insisted that everything in the package would be paid for by raising the target for long-term spending cuts to be negotiated by a special Congressional committee. He did not go through the arithmetic, but said he would send a detailed proposal to Congress in a week. Senior White House officials said the amount of increased spending cuts would hinge on how much of the plan gets through Congress.

Mr. Obama said most of his proposals had support from both parties, a contention that Republican leaders rejected. “There should be nothing controversial about this piece of legislation,” he said. “Everything in here is the kind of proposal that’s been supported by Democrats and Republicans.”

After a summer consumed by bitter debate over how to reduce the debt and deficit, Mr. Obama kept his focus squarely on the need to create jobs. He acknowledged that the government’s role in fixing the problem was limited, but rejected the Republican argument that Washington’s major contribution would be to eliminate regulations.

“Ultimately, our recovery will be driven not by Washington, but by our businesses and our workers,” he said. “But we can help. We can make a difference. There are steps we can take right now to improve people’s lives.”

Still, even if every one of the proposals were passed by Congress — something that is extremely unlikely to happen — the measures would not solve the economy’s problems, forecasters say, though they would likely spur some growth.

And that encapsulates the quandary for Mr. Obama: so long as there is no evidence of improvement in the job market, his economic call to arms — backed by a familiar list of proposed remedies — may not resonate with an American public grown weary of stagnation and an unemployment rate stuck at 9.1 percent.

Even the scheduling of the speech set off a tempest when Mr. Boehner rejected Mr. Obama’s request to address Congress on Wednesday, the night of a Republican presidential debate. At Mr. Boehner’s request, the White House agreed to move the date to Thursday, which meant Mr. Obama had to wrap up his remarks before the New Orleans Saints and the Green Bay Packers kicked off the N.F.L. season. As Mr. Obama was entering the chamber, microphones caught him assuring a lawmaker that his speech would not interfere with the game.

In setting out his program, Mr. Obama was, in effect, daring Republicans not to pass measures that enjoy support among independent voters and business leaders. If the Republicans refuse to embrace at least some of the measures, administration officials said, Mr. Obama will take them directly to the American public, portraying Congress as do-nothing and obstructionist.

“Maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box,” Mr. Obama told the lawmakers. “But know this: the next election is fourteen months away. And the people who sent us here — the people who hired us to work for them — they don’t have the luxury of waiting fourteen months.”

    Obama Challenges Congress on Job Plan, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09payroll.html

Transcript: Obama’s Speech to Congress on Jobs

September 8, 2011
The New York Times


The following is a transcript of President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress about jobs and the economy, as provided by the White House.

MR. OBAMA: Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, and fellow Americans:

Tonight we meet at an urgent time for our country. We continue to face an economic crisis that has left millions of our neighbors jobless, and a political crisis that’s made things worse.

This past week, reporters have been asking, “What will this speech mean for the President? What will it mean for Congress? How will it affect their polls, and the next election?”

But the millions of Americans who are watching right now, they don’t care about politics. They have real-life concerns. Many have spent months looking for work. Others are doing their best just to scrape by -- giving up nights out with the family to save on gas or make the mortgage; postponing retirement to send a kid to college.

These men and women grew up with faith in an America where hard work and responsibility paid off. They believed in a country where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share -- where if you stepped up, did your job, and were loyal to your company, that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits; maybe a raise once in a while. If you did the right thing, you could make it. Anybody could make it in America.

For decades now, Americans have watched that compact erode. They have seen the decks too often stacked against them. And they know that Washington has not always put their interests first.

The people of this country work hard to meet their responsibilities. The question tonight is whether we’ll meet ours. The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy. (Applause.) The question is -- the question is whether we can restore some of the fairness and security that has defined this nation since our beginning.

Those of us here tonight can’t solve all our nation’s woes. Ultimately, our recovery will be driven not by Washington, but by our businesses and our workers. But we can help. We can make a difference. There are steps we can take right now to improve people’s lives.

I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away. It’s called the American Jobs Act. There should be nothing controversial about this piece of legislation. Everything in here is the kind of proposal that’s been supported by both Democrats and Republicans -- including many who sit here tonight. And everything in this bill will be paid for. Everything. (Applause.)

The purpose of the American Jobs Act is simple: to put more people back to work and more money in the pockets of those who are working. It will create more jobs for construction workers, more jobs for teachers, more jobs for veterans, and more jobs for long-term unemployed. (Applause.) It will provide -- it will provide a tax break for companies who hire new workers, and it will cut payroll taxes in half for every working American and every small business. (Applause.) It will provide a jolt to an economy that has stalled, and give companies confidence that if they invest and if they hire, there will be customers for their products and services. You should pass this jobs plan right away. (Applause.)

Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin. And you know that while corporate profits have come roaring back, smaller companies haven’t. So for everyone who speaks so passionately about making life easier for “job creators,” this plan is for you. (Applause.)

Pass this jobs bill -- pass this jobs bill, and starting tomorrow, small businesses will get a tax cut if they hire new workers or if they raise workers’ wages. Pass this jobs bill, and all small business owners will also see their payroll taxes cut in half next year. (Applause.) If you have 50 employees -- if you have 50 employees making an average salary, that’s an $80,000 tax cut. And all businesses will be able to continue writing off the investments they make in 2012.

It’s not just Democrats who have supported this kind of proposal. Fifty House Republicans have proposed the same payroll tax cut that’s in this plan. You should pass it right away. (Applause.)

Pass this jobs bill, and we can put people to work rebuilding America. Everyone here knows we have badly decaying roads and bridges all over the country. Our highways are clogged with traffic. Our skies are the most congested in the world. It’s an outrage.

Building a world-class transportation system is part of what made us a economic superpower. And now we’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads? At a time when millions of unemployed construction workers could build them right here in America? (Applause.)

There are private construction companies all across America just waiting to get to work. There’s a bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that’s on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America. A public transit project in Houston that will help clear up one of the worst areas of traffic in the country. And there are schools throughout this country that desperately need renovating. How can we expect our kids to do their best in places that are literally falling apart? This is America. Every child deserves a great school -- and we can give it to them, if we act now. (Applause.)

The American Jobs Act will repair and modernize at least 35,000 schools. It will put people to work right now fixing roofs and windows, installing science labs and high-speed Internet in classrooms all across this country. It will rehabilitate homes and businesses in communities hit hardest by foreclosures. It will jumpstart thousands of transportation projects all across the country. And to make sure the money is properly spent, we’re building on reforms we’ve already put in place. No more earmarks. No more boondoggles. No more bridges to nowhere. We’re cutting the red tape that prevents some of these projects from getting started as quickly as possible. And we’ll set up an independent fund to attract private dollars and issue loans based on two criteria: how badly a construction project is needed and how much good it will do for the economy. (Applause.)

This idea came from a bill written by a Texas Republican and a Massachusetts Democrat. The idea for a big boost in construction is supported by America’s largest business organization and America’s largest labor organization. It’s the kind of proposal that’s been supported in the past by Democrats and Republicans alike. You should pass it right away. (Applause.)

Pass this jobs bill, and thousands of teachers in every state will go back to work. These are the men and women charged with preparing our children for a world where the competition has never been tougher. But while they’re adding teachers in places like South Korea, we’re laying them off in droves. It’s unfair to our kids. It undermines their future and ours. And it has to stop. Pass this bill, and put our teachers back in the classroom where they belong. (Applause.)

Pass this jobs bill, and companies will get extra tax credits if they hire America’s veterans. We ask these men and women to leave their careers, leave their families, risk their lives to fight for our country. The last thing they should have to do is fight for a job when they come home. (Applause.)

Pass this bill, and hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged young people will have the hope and the dignity of a summer job next year. And their parents -- (applause) -- their parents, low-income Americans who desperately want to work, will have more ladders out of poverty.

Pass this jobs bill, and companies will get a $4,000 tax credit if they hire anyone who has spent more than six months looking for a job. (Applause.) We have to do more to help the long-term unemployed in their search for work. This jobs plan builds on a program in Georgia that several Republican leaders have highlighted, where people who collect unemployment insurance participate in temporary work as a way to build their skills while they look for a permanent job. The plan also extends unemployment insurance for another year. (Applause.) If the millions of unemployed Americans stopped getting this insurance, and stopped using that money for basic necessities, it would be a devastating blow to this economy. Democrats and Republicans in this chamber have supported unemployment insurance plenty of times in the past. And in this time of prolonged hardship, you should pass it again -- right away. (Applause.)

Pass this jobs bill, and the typical working family will get a $1,500 tax cut next year. Fifteen hundred dollars that would have been taken out of your pocket will go into your pocket. This expands on the tax cut that Democrats and Republicans already passed for this year. If we allow that tax cut to expire -- if we refuse to act -- middle-class families will get hit with a tax increase at the worst possible time. We can’t let that happen. I know that some of you have sworn oaths to never raise any taxes on anyone for as long as you live. Now is not the time to carve out an exception and raise middle-class taxes, which is why you should pass this bill right away. (Applause.)

This is the American Jobs Act. It will lead to new jobs for construction workers, for teachers, for veterans, for first responders, young people and the long-term unemployed. It will provide tax credits to companies that hire new workers, tax relief to small business owners, and tax cuts for the middle class. And here’s the other thing I want the American people to know: The American Jobs Act will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for. And here’s how. (Applause.)

The agreement we passed in July will cut government spending by about $1 trillion over the next 10 years. It also charges this Congress to come up with an additional $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Tonight, I am asking you to increase that amount so that it covers the full cost of the American Jobs Act. And a week from Monday, I’ll be releasing a more ambitious deficit plan -- a plan that will not only cover the cost of this jobs bill, but stabilize our debt in the long run. (Applause.)

This approach is basically the one I’ve been advocating for months. In addition to the trillion dollars of spending cuts I’ve already signed into law, it’s a balanced plan that would reduce the deficit by making additional spending cuts, by making modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and by reforming our tax code in a way that asks the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share. (Applause.) What’s more, the spending cuts wouldn’t happen so abruptly that they’d be a drag on our economy, or prevent us from helping small businesses and middle-class families get back on their feet right away.

Now, I realize there are some in my party who don’t think we should make any changes at all to Medicare and Medicaid, and I understand their concerns. But here’s the truth: Millions of Americans rely on Medicare in their retirement. And millions more will do so in the future. They pay for this benefit during their working years. They earn it. But with an aging population and rising health care costs, we are spending too fast to sustain the program. And if we don’t gradually reform the system while protecting current beneficiaries, it won’t be there when future retirees need it. We have to reform Medicare to strengthen it. (Applause.)

I am also -- I’m also well aware that there are many Republicans who don’t believe we should raise taxes on those who are most fortunate and can best afford it. But here is what every American knows: While most people in this country struggle to make ends meet, a few of the most affluent citizens and most profitable corporations enjoy tax breaks and loopholes that nobody else gets. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary -- an outrage he has asked us to fix. (Laughter.) We need a tax code where everyone gets a fair shake and where everybody pays their fair share. (Applause.) And by the way, I believe the vast majority of wealthy Americans and CEOs are willing to do just that if it helps the economy grow and gets our fiscal house in order.

I’ll also offer ideas to reform a corporate tax code that stands as a monument to special interest influence in Washington. By eliminating pages of loopholes and deductions, we can lower one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. (Applause.) Our tax code should not give an advantage to companies that can afford the best-connected lobbyists. It should give an advantage to companies that invest and create jobs right here in the United States of America. (Applause.)

So we can reduce this deficit, pay down our debt, and pay for this jobs plan in the process. But in order to do this, we have to decide what our priorities are. We have to ask ourselves, “What’s the best way to grow the economy and create jobs?”

Should we keep tax loopholes for oil companies? Or should we use that money to give small business owners a tax credit when they hire new workers? Because we can’t afford to do both. Should we keep tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires? Or should we put teachers back to work so our kids can graduate ready for college and good jobs? (Applause.) Right now, we can’t afford to do both.

This isn’t political grandstanding. This isn’t class warfare. This is simple math. (Laughter.) This is simple math. These are real choices. These are real choices that we’ve got to make. And I’m pretty sure I know what most Americans would choose. It’s not even close. And it’s time for us to do what’s right for our future. (Applause.)

Now, the American Jobs Act answers the urgent need to create jobs right away. But we can’t stop there. As I’ve argued since I ran for this office, we have to look beyond the immediate crisis and start building an economy that lasts into the future -- an economy that creates good, middle-class jobs that pay well and offer security. We now live in a world where technology has made it possible for companies to take their business anywhere. If we want them to start here and stay here and hire here, we have to be able to out-build and out-educate and out-innovate every other country on Earth. (Applause.)

And this task of making America more competitive for the long haul, that’s a job for all of us. For government and for private companies. For states and for local communities -- and for every American citizen. All of us will have to up our game. All of us will have to change the way we do business.

My administration can and will take some steps to improve our competitiveness on our own. For example, if you’re a small business owner who has a contract with the federal government, we’re going to make sure you get paid a lot faster than you do right now. (Applause.) We’re also planning to cut away the red tape that prevents too many rapidly growing startup companies from raising capital and going public. And to help responsible homeowners, we’re going to work with federal housing agencies to help more people refinance their mortgages at interest rates that are now near 4 percent. That’s a step -- (applause) -- I know you guys must be for this, because that’s a step that can put more than $2,000 a year in a family’s pocket, and give a lift to an economy still burdened by the drop in housing prices.

So, some things we can do on our own. Other steps will require congressional action. Today you passed reform that will speed up the outdated patent process, so that entrepreneurs can turn a new idea into a new business as quickly as possible. That’s the kind of action we need. Now it’s time to clear the way for a series of trade agreements that would make it easier for American companies to sell their products in Panama and Colombia and South Korea -– while also helping the workers whose jobs have been affected by global competition. (Applause.) If Americans can buy Kias and Hyundais, I want to see folks in South Korea driving Fords and Chevys and Chryslers. (Applause.) I want to see more products sold around the world stamped with the three proud words: “Made in America.” That’s what we need to get done. (Applause.)

And on all of our efforts to strengthen competitiveness, we need to look for ways to work side by side with America’s businesses. That’s why I’ve brought together a Jobs Council of leaders from different industries who are developing a wide range of new ideas to help companies grow and create jobs.

Already, we’ve mobilized business leaders to train 10,000 American engineers a year, by providing company internships and training. Other businesses are covering tuition for workers who learn new skills at community colleges. And we’re going to make sure the next generation of manufacturing takes root not in China or Europe, but right here, in the United States of America. (Applause) If we provide the right incentives, the right support -- and if we make sure our trading partners play by the rules -- we can be the ones to build everything from fuel-efficient cars to advanced biofuels to semiconductors that we sell all around the world. That’s how America can be number one again. And that’s how America will be number one again. (Applause.)

Now, I realize that some of you have a different theory on how to grow the economy. Some of you sincerely believe that the only solution to our economic challenges is to simply cut most government spending and eliminate most government regulations. (Applause.)

Well, I agree that we can’t afford wasteful spending, and I’ll work with you, with Congress, to root it out. And I agree that there are some rules and regulations that do put an unnecessary burden on businesses at a time when they can least afford it. (Applause.) That’s why I ordered a review of all government regulations. So far, we’ve identified over 500 reforms, which will save billions of dollars over the next few years. (Applause.) We should have no more regulation than the health, safety and security of the American people require. Every rule should meet that common-sense test. (Applause.)

But what we can’t do -- what I will not do -- is let this economic crisis be used as an excuse to wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades. (Applause.) I reject the idea that we need to ask people to choose between their jobs and their safety. I reject the argument that says for the economy to grow, we have to roll back protections that ban hidden fees by credit card companies, or rules that keep our kids from being exposed to mercury, or laws that prevent the health insurance industry from shortchanging patients. I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy. (Applause.) We shouldn’t be in a race to the bottom, where we try to offer the cheapest labor and the worst pollution standards. America should be in a race to the top. And I believe we can win that race. (Applause.)

In fact, this larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own -- that’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.

Yes, we are rugged individualists. Yes, we are strong and self-reliant. And it has been the drive and initiative of our workers and entrepreneurs that has made this economy the engine and the envy of the world.

But there’s always been another thread running throughout our history -- a belief that we’re all connected, and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party. But in the middle of a civil war, he was also a leader who looked to the future -- a Republican President who mobilized government to build the Transcontinental Railroad -- (applause) -- launch the National Academy of Sciences, set up the first land grant colleges. (Applause.) And leaders of both parties have followed the example he set.

Ask yourselves -- where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways, not to build our bridges, our dams, our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the G.I. Bill. Where would we be if they hadn’t had that chance? (Applause.)

How many jobs would it have cost us if past Congresses decided not to support the basic research that led to the Internet and the computer chip? What kind of country would this be if this chamber had voted down Social Security or Medicare just because it violated some rigid idea about what government could or could not do? (Applause.) How many Americans would have suffered as a result?

No single individual built America on their own. We built it together. We have been, and always will be, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all; a nation with responsibilities to ourselves and with responsibilities to one another. And members of Congress, it is time for us to meet our responsibilities. (Applause.)

Every proposal I’ve laid out tonight is the kind that’s been supported by Democrats and Republicans in the past. Every proposal I’ve laid out tonight will be paid for. And every proposal is designed to meet the urgent needs of our people and our communities.

Now, I know there’s been a lot of skepticism about whether the politics of the moment will allow us to pass this jobs plan -- or any jobs plan. Already, we’re seeing the same old press releases and tweets flying back and forth. Already, the media has proclaimed that it’s impossible to bridge our differences. And maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box.

But know this: The next election is 14 months away. And the people who sent us here -- the people who hired us to work for them -- they don’t have the luxury of waiting 14 months. (Applause.) Some of them are living week to week, paycheck to paycheck, even day to day. They need help, and they need it now.

I don’t pretend that this plan will solve all our problems. It should not be, nor will it be, the last plan of action we propose. What’s guided us from the start of this crisis hasn’t been the search for a silver bullet. It’s been a commitment to stay at it -- to be persistent -- to keep trying every new idea that works, and listen to every good proposal, no matter which party comes up with it.

Regardless of the arguments we’ve had in the past, regardless of the arguments we will have in the future, this plan is the right thing to do right now. You should pass it. (Applause.) And I intend to take that message to every corner of this country. (Applause.) And I ask -- I ask every American who agrees to lift your voice: Tell the people who are gathered here tonight that you want action now. Tell Washington that doing nothing is not an option. Remind us that if we act as one nation and one people, we have it within our power to meet this challenge.

President Kennedy once said, “Our problems are man-made –- therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants.”

These are difficult years for our country. But we are Americans. We are tougher than the times we live in, and we are bigger than our politics have been. So let’s meet the moment. Let’s get to work, and let’s show the world once again why the United States of America remains the greatest nation on Earth. (Applause.)

Thank you very much. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

    Transcript: Obama’s Speech to Congress on Jobs, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09text-obama-jobs-speech.html

G.O.P.-Led House Votes to Cut Trillions Over 10 Years

April 15, 2011
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Friday muscled through a budget plan that pares federal spending by an estimated $5.8 trillion over the next decade while reshaping Medicare in a proposal that immediately touched off a fierce clash with Democrats.

Just one day after Congress concluded its fight over this year’s spending, the House voted 235 to 193 to approve the fiscal blueprint for 2012 drafted by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the Budget Committee. Besides reconfiguring the Medicare program that now serves those 65 and older, the proposal would cut the top corporate and personal income tax rates while also overhauling the Medicaid health program for the poor.

The vote represents the most ambitious effort yet by the new Republican majority in the House to demonstrate that it intends to aggressively rein in spending and shrink government. It doubles as a challenge to President Obama over which party is more determined to force a sharp shift in the handling of federal dollars.

“The spending spree is over,” Mr. Ryan said. “We cannot keep spending money we don’t have.”

Almost as soon as the budget was approved, Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the majority leader, vowed that the plan would never pass the Senate, setting up another tense showdown with House Republicans over spending as well as over an administration request to raise the federal debt limit.

Not a single Democrat voted for the proposal, which will effectively serve as the House Republican bargaining position in talks with the White House and the Democratic Senate over how to reduce annual federal deficits and the accumulated national debt. Four Republicans also voted against it.

Within minutes of the vote, Democrats began attacking Republican lawmakers for supporting the plan.

“Unbelievable! Dean Heller Votes to End Medicare,” the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee headlined an e-mail broadside against Representative Dean Heller, a Republican running for an open Senate seat in Nevada.

On the House floor, Democrats ridiculed the notion that Mr. Ryan’s $3.5 trillion plan for next year was somehow bold for zeroing in on health programs despite political risks. They accused Republicans of promoting a morally skewed vision of America by taking savings out of medical care for older Americans and the poor while supporting tax breaks for corporate America and the affluent. The budget proposal would maintain the tax rates enacted during George W. Bush’s presidency and extended last year.

“It is not courageous to provide additional tax breaks for millionaires while ending the Medicare guarantee for seniors and sticking seniors with the cost of rising health care,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee.

Congressional Republicans were eager to take up the budget after Thursday’s approval of legislation that financed the government through Sept. 30. The legislation imposed $38 billion in spending cuts, well short of the $61 billion sought by House Republicans. And the immediate impact of those reductions on the deficit was modest, leading 59 Republicans to oppose the deal struck by Speaker John A. Boehner.

In contrast, the Ryan budget would significantly scale back federal domestic programs and impose the kind of sweeping budget cuts that members of the Republican majority say they came to Washington to pursue.

“Yesterday we cut billions,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the No. 3 House Republican, who called Friday’s budget vote historic. “Today we cut trillions.”

The most politically charged element of the budget plan is a proposal to convert Medicare from a program where the federal government serves as the health insurer for Americans 65 and older to one where older Americans join private health plans that are subsidized by the government.

Republicans defended their proposal as the best way to guarantee the future of a program headed toward insolvency and noted that Americans who are now 55 and older would still be able to participate in the current Medicare program. They accused Democrats of distorting the Medicare proposal while employing scare tactics to stir anti-Republican sentiment among older voters. Mr. Ryan said such political machinations had in the past prevented Congress from taking the difficult steps needed to get the deficit under control.

“We have too many people worried about the next election and not worried about the next generation,” he said.

Acknowledging the political hazards of proposing fundamental changes in a program so popular with the crucial senior voting bloc, Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and majority leader, said Republicans saw no choice but to move forward.

“We cannot afford to ignore this coming fiscal train wreck any longer,” Mr. Cantor said. “Complacency is not an option.”

Republicans also said that giving future retirees access to private health plans would provide them with more choices. A Congressional Budget Office review of the Ryan proposal predicted that retirees would pay more for their health care under it than they would under traditional Medicare. The agency also said the Ryan plan to convert federal Medicaid spending into block grants for states would most likely end up reducing benefits for those enrolled in the program.

Democrats promised to press Republicans hard on the budget vote, starting in the two-week Congressional recess that began Friday and continuing through the 2012 elections.

“This is a defining moment, and we will go district by district to hold Republicans accountable for ending Medicare,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Some Republican House members said they had already been contacted by alarmed constituents, and the party leadership urged lawmakers to be prepared to explain their votes over the spring break.

“I think it’s important for our members to go home and talk about the crisis that we face,” Mr. Boehner said. “These are important programs for tens of millions of Americans. And transforming them so they’ll be around for our kids and grandkids is as important as anything that we can do around here.”

Other Republicans said they believed the public was ready for a serious attempt to cut spending — a mood that could blunt the political impact of the House budget.

“The majority of Americans believe the country is headed down the wrong track,” said Representative Cynthia M. Lummis, Republican of Wyoming. “They understand the consequences Washington’s irresponsible culture of spending has for our country’s future.”

But Democrats said that Republicans had committed a political and policy blunder.

“The Republicans have made a major mistake in turning a debate over the budget into a debate over whether to keep or eliminate Medicare,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat. “The House Republicans have let Tea Party zeal get the better of them, and this vote will reverberate for a long time.”

    G.O.P.-Led House Votes to Cut Trillions Over 10 Years, RNYT, 15.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/us/politics/16congress.html

Deal at Last Minute Averts Shutdown;

$38 Billion in Cuts to Spending This Year

April 8, 2011
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders and President Obama headed off a shutdown of the government with less than two hours to spare Friday night under a tentative budget deal that would cut $38 billion from federal spending this year.

After days of tense negotiations and partisan quarrelling, House Republicans came to preliminary terms with the White House and Senate Democrats over financing the government for the next six months, resolving a stubborn impasse that had threatened to disrupt federal operations across the country and around the globe.

Speaker John A. Boehner, who had pressed Democrats for cuts sought by members of the conservative new House majority, presented the package of widespread spending reductions and policy provisions and won a positive response from his rank and file shortly before 11 p.m.

Both Democrats and Republicans proclaimed they had reached a deal and would begin the necessary steps to pass the bill and send it to Mr. Obama next week.

Democrats said that under the agreement, the budget measure would not include provisions sought by Republicans to limit environmental regulations and to restrict financing for Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortions. But Mr. Boehner said in a statement that the agreement included a restriction on abortion financing in Washington.

“This has been a lot of discussion and a long fight,” Mr. Boehner said as he left the party meeting. “But we fought to keep government spending down because it really will in fact help create a better environment for job creators in our country.”

Speaking from the White House after the Republican meeting ended, Mr. Obama said that both sides gave ground in reaching the bargain and that some of the cuts accepted by Democrats “will be painful.”

“Programs people rely on will be cut back,” said Mr. Obama, who said Americans had to begin to live within their means. “Needed infrastructure projects will be delayed.”

The announcements capped a day of drama as lawmakers and members of the federal work force waited anxiously to see whether money for government agencies would run out at midnight.

“We didn’t do it at this late hour for drama,” Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, said. “We did it because it has been hard to arrive at this point.”

In the closed-door Republican session, according to people present in the room, Mr. Boehner described the plan as the best deal he could wring from Democrats and said the cuts — an estimated $38 billion in reductions — represented the “largest real dollar spending cut in American history.”

Although both sides compromised, Republicans were able to force significant spending concessions from Democrats in exchange for putting to rest some of the vexing social policy fights that had held up the agreement.

Because of the need to put the compromise into legislative form, Congressional leaders said the House and Senate would vote overnight to pass a stopgap measure financing the government through Thursday to prevent any break in the flow of federal dollars. The actual budget compromise would be considered sometime next week.

The Senate approved the stopgap measure by 11:20 p.m. and the House approved it after midnight. The Office of Management and Budget issued a memo saying normal government operations were back on track.

The developments came after Republicans and Democrats spent the day blaming each other for what could have been the first lapse in government services brought on by Congress in 15 years.

As the midnight deadline approached, efforts to finish a deal intensified, and Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner spoke by telephone to try to find an agreement.

“Both sides are working hard to reach the kind of resolution Americans desire,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, who had consulted closely with Mr. Boehner on strategy during the fractious talks. “A resolution is actually within reach. The contours of a final agreement are coming into focus.”

Mr. McConnell’s optimism could not disguise the fact that time was steadily slipping away, and testy leaders of the two parties were pushing hard to shape public perceptions of who was responsible for an impasse that threatened to have serious political repercussions — and to presage even more consequential fiscal showdowns in the months ahead. Democrats said Republicans were insisting on overreaching policy provisions; Republicans said it remained about money.

After nightlong negotiations that ended before dawn on Friday yielded no agreement, Senator Reid went on the offensive. He told reporters and said on the Senate floor that Mr. Boehner, the Senate Democrats and Mr. Obama had essentially settled on $38 billion in cuts from current spending, a figure that represented a substantial concession for Democrats.

But he said that Republicans were refusing to abandon a policy provision that would withhold federal financing for family planning and other health services for poor women from Planned Parenthood and other providers.

“This is indefensible, and everyone should be outraged,” Mr. Reid said on the Senate floor. “The Republican House leadership have only a couple of hours to look in the mirror, snap out of it and realize how truly shameful they have been.”

In a terse statement of his own to reporters, Mr. Boehner said there was “only one reason we do not have an agreement yet, and that is spending.” He asked, “When will the White House and when will Senate Democrats get serious about cutting spending?”

As the day went on, aides reported progress in attempts to reach an accommodation on the family planning provision. Even veteran anti-abortion Republicans, like Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, indicated a willingness to compromise, not wanting the party to be accused of shutting down the government over divisive social policy and diluting its new emphasis on cutting spending. Other Republicans, in interviews and statements, indicated that it was time to end the stalemate.

The dueling characterizations of the negotiations added to the frustration, extending far beyond the nation’s capital, among federal employees and the people who rely on their services, as they waited to find out whether serious disruptions were imminent, and how long they might last.

Despite the disagreement over what still divided the two parties, it was clear the dollar difference had been reduced considerably, to about $1 billion or $2 billion. That amount left some lawmakers and their constituents grappling to understand how the federal government could be shut down over such a relatively small sum. Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said he was embarrassed. “People across Virginia cannot understand why we can’t get this done,” he said.

Allies of Mr. Boehner, the veteran lawmaker in his first months as speaker, said he seemed to be pursuing a strategy of pushing the negotiations to the last possible tick of the clock to appease rank-and-file conservatives, who have been very reluctant to give an inch from the $61 billion in cuts approved by the House.

In a private party meeting Friday afternoon, Mr. Boehner told Republican lawmakers that he was fighting for all the cuts he could get, and regaled them with reports of how angry Mr. Obama was with him for the hard line he has taken in the talks — news that elated his membership.

Emerging from the meeting, Mr. Boehner called the negotiations “respectful,” but added: “We’re not going to roll over and sell out the American people like has been done time and time again in Washington.”

In the absence of a deal, Mr. Boehner again urged the Senate to pass a temporary House budget resolution that would finance the military for the balance of the fiscal year, cut $12 billion in spending from the current year’s budget and keep the rest of the government operating for another week, as Republicans in the House had voted to do.

“This is the responsible thing to do,” he told reporters.

Senate Democrats rejected that approach as a gimmick, and Mr. Obama said he would veto the resolution.

Mr. Reid, who at one news conference was surrounded by about three dozen Democratic senators in an unusual tableau, told reporters that the Senate would explore the possibility of a stopgap bill that would keep the government open for another week. But it was unlikely to clear procedural barriers.

It was an unusual Friday on Capitol Hill, a day when corridors are often empty of lawmakers who have left for the weekend. Instead, they milled about, and took the Senate floor to expound, as they nervously awaited news of an agreement or braced for the expiration of government financing. It was frustrating to some because most lawmakers were not privy to the high-level talks.

“I hope that negotiations are continuing by someone somewhere,” Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, said as he spoke about six hours before funding would run out.

Lawmakers said they realized that the outcome of the negotiations would have implications not only for them, but also for the federal work force, the public, the economy and the nation’s image.

“We know the whole world is watching us today,” Mr. Reid said.


Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

    Deal at Last Minute Averts Shutdown; $38 Billion in Cuts to Spending This Year, R, 8.4.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/us/politics/09fiscal.html

G.O.P. Budget Proposal Cuts $5.8 Trillion in Spending

April 5, 2011
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Tuesday unveiled a far-reaching budget proposal that cuts $5.8 trillion from anticipated spending levels over the next decade and is likely to provide the framework for both the fiscal and political fights of the next two years.

The ambitious plan, drafted principally by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the Budget Committee, proposes not only to limit federal spending and reconfigure major federal health programs, but also to rewrite the tax code, cutting the top tax rate for both individuals and corporations to 25 percent from 35 percent, reducing the number of income tax brackets and eliminating what it calls a “burdensome tangle of loopholes.”

“This budget improves incentives for job creators to work, invest and innovate in the United States,” said a summary of the proposal, which Republicans are calling the “Path to Prosperity.”

The introduction to the proposal said the spending blueprint disavowed what it called the “relentless government spending, borrowing and taxing that are leading America, right at this moment, toward a debt-fueled economic crisis and the demise of America’s exceptional promise.”

Republicans say their proposal would reduce the size of the federal government to 20 percent of the overall economy by 2015 and 15 percent by 2050 while President Obama’s plan introduced this year would not hold the size of government below 23 percent of economic output.

Democrats, however, say the emerging proposal amounts to a conservative ideological manifesto showing that Republicans 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. They will be certain to challenge the budget plan and make its bold efforts to reshape Medicare and Medicaid — the health care programs for older Americans and the poor — a theme of their political argument to regain control of the House and hold the White House in 2012.

The budget resolution is not a binding law even if approved by Congress; if adopted, it would direct the relevant Congressional committees to draft spending legislation putting in place its dictates. Because Democrats control the Senate, the proposal is unlikely to be adopted. Even so, it will become the marker for Republican economic policy and Republican lawmakers and candidates are likely to be tested on where they stand on its many components.

Republicans say their driving goal in the budget is to avoid what they see as a coming national debt crisis, which the budget describes in terms that portray rising federal debt as a dire threat to the well-being of the United States. The budget warns that the amount the nation owes will soon be greater than the entire economy.

“This is not the future of a proud and prosperous nation,” the budget says. “It is the future of a nation in decline — its best days come and gone.”

The budget raises the prospect that foreign holders of large amounts of United States debt such as China could begin to extract higher interest rates, ultimately raising costs for all families and leading to sharp cuts in government services and programs.

“The only solutions to a debt crisis would be truly painful,” according to the budget plan. “Massive tax increases, sudden and disruptive cuts to vital programs, runaway inflation, or all three.”

Over all, the plan is aimed at returning federal spending levels to below those of 2008, before the economic stimulus and other programs enacted by the Obama administration when it took over. It does adopt at least one element of the president’s program, noting that the document reflects $178 billion in Pentagon savings identified by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and, like his proposal, would reinvest $100 billion in other military priorities while reserving $78 billion for deficit reduction.

Republicans also say they would eliminate hundreds of duplicative and wasteful government programs and maintain a ban on pet spending projects by members of Congress that is now in place.

In the document, Mr. Ryan and his co-authors spread the blame for the nation’s fiscal problems to both Republicans and Democrats, saying “both parties have squandered the public’s trust.”

“The American people ended a unified Republican majority in 2006, just as they ended a unified Democratic majority last fall,” the budgeted noted. “Americans reject leaders who focus on the pursuit of power at the expense of principle. They reject empty promises from a government that cannot live within its means.”

    G.O.P. Budget Proposal Cuts $5.8 Trillion in Spending, NYT, 5.4.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/us/politics/06budget.html

House intel chief opposes arming Libyan rebels

WASHINGTON | Wed Mar 30, 2011
4:02pm EDT
Reuters
By Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The influential chairman of the House of Representatives' intelligence committee said on Wednesday he opposes supplying arms to the rebels fighting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

"As we publicly debate next steps on Libya, I do not support arming the Libyan rebels at this time," Representative Mike Rogers said in a statement. "We need to understand more about the opposition before I would support passing out guns and advanced weapons to them."

The United States is taking part in a multinational coalition conducting air strikes aimed at protecting civilian from attacks by Gaddafi's forces.

Obama says the objective of the U.S. and allied campaign is to apply steady pressure on the Libyan leader so that he will ultimately step down from power.

Some lawmakers, like Republican Senator John McCain, have called on Washington to arm the Libyan rebels, and Obama has not rejected the option.

"I'm not ruling it in, I'm not ruling it out," he told NBC in an interview on Tuesday.

But Rogers, a Republican whose position means he is briefed on intelligence matters, did rule it out -- for now. He said not enough was known about the rebels, and the wrong decision could "come back to haunt us."

"It's safe to say what the rebels stand against, but we are a long way from an understanding of what they stand for," Rogers said.

On Tuesday, NATO operations commander Admiral James Stavridis said intelligence has shown "flickers" of al Qaeda or Hezbollah presence among the Libyan rebels. Other U.S. officials denied these groups were significantly involved.

"We don't have to look very far back in history to find examples of the unintended consequences of passing out advanced weapons to a group of fighters we didn't know as well as we should have," Rogers said. "Even if you think you know them, you can't guarantee that those weapons won't later fall into the hands of bad actors."

The United States helped arm guerrillas against Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan in the 1980s, only to have some of the fighters later join the Taliban now battling U.S. forces.

'NEXT LOGICAL STEP'

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday that arming the rebels was allowed under the U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the military intervention in Libya.

"Arming the Libyan rebels is a logical next step if the goal is Gaddafi's fall," said Daniel Byman, director of Georgetown University's Security Studies Program.

"However, it increases the political risks, as the Libyan rebels are not a known group (and) it increases coalition 'ownership' of the problem, making it harder to walk away should additional problems emerge," Byman said.

But while Britain appears to be open to the idea of arming the rebels, France is more cautious, analysts say. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe has made clear a new U.N. resolution would be required -- a measure unlikely to get necessary Chinese or Russian support.

That means the issues might threaten to fracture the fragile coalition now acting in Libya.

Debate continues about what arming the rebels might entail. McCain, for one, has said the United States should provide them with intelligence, resources, and training.

"We need to take every responsible measure to help the Libyan opposition change the balance of power on the ground," he said on Tuesday on the Senate floor.

A U.S. military official said the prospect of arming rebels, however notional at this stage, was not front and center at the moment at the Pentagon.

"The thing we're focused on right now is the transition to NATO control" of the Libya campaign, he said on condition of anonymity.

(Additional reporting by Missy Ryan; editing by Doina Chiacu and Mohammad Zargham)

    House intel chief opposes arming Libyan rebels, R, 30.3.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/30/us-libya-usa-arms-idUSTRE72T5KM20110330

House votes to kill main Obama foreclosure aid

WASHINGTON | Wed Mar 30, 2011
9:44am EDT
Reuters
By Corbett B. Daly

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to kill President Barack Obama's signature program to help struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure.

A bill to terminate the program was approved on a 252-170 vote. But the bill is unlikely to clear the Senate.

It was the last in series of four measures brought forward by newly empowered House Republicans to end government assistance for homeowners hurt by the housing crisis.

Republicans argued the foreclosure prevention plan, known as the Home Affordable Modification Program, is ineffective and not worthy of taxpayer support amid soaring budget deficits. The vote broke largely along party lines.

The program, which offers incentives for lenders to modify loans, was launched to great fanfare in the spring of 2009. The Obama administration had hoped it would permanently lower mortgage payments for 3 million to 4 million homeowners.

But fewer than 600,000 borrowers have received permanent loan modifications, and the program has been widely criticized as ineffective from critics on both the left and the right.

"The HAMP program is a failure," said Representative Patrick McHenry, the North Carolina Republican who sponsored the bill. "If we can't eliminate this failed program, what program can we eliminate?"

Analysts see the votes as an effort by Republicans, who last seized control of the House in an election in November with an anti-bailout, anti-spending message, to score points with their political base.

The White House has already threatened to veto the measure. However, it is unlikely to come to that since Democrats, who retained control of the Senate, largely opposed the measure. Both the House and Senate would have to approve the bill for it to reach the president's desk.

About $30 billion has been set aside for the program from the government's $700 billion financial rescue fund, but only about $1 billion of that has been spent so far.

Democrats argued the program should be fixed, not killed.

"The absence of any program leaves people worse off," said Representative Barney Frank, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee.

Even as the Obama administration argues for keeping HAMP in place, it is pressing forward on a separate track that could result in much larger aid for struggling homeowners.

Big U.S. banks are meeting with federal officials and state attorneys general at the Justice Department on Wednesday as they negotiate what could turn into a multi-billion dollar settlement over alleged abuses by the companies that collect mortgage payments.

The banks and authorities are expected to discuss a settlement proposal that the state officials sent out earlier this month, which called on banks to treat borrowers better and to reduce loan balances for some struggling homeowners.

A group of 50 state attorneys general and about a dozen federal agencies are probing bank mortgage practices that came to light last year, including the use of "robo-signers" to sign hundreds of unread foreclosure documents a day.

On March 3, state attorneys general leading the probe sent banks the outline of a proposed settlement endorsed by some federal agencies, including the Justice Department, the Housing and Urban Development Department and Treasury staff setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The banks that received the proposal and that will have representatives at Wednesday's meeting are Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc, Wells Fargo & Co and Ally Financial, according to sources briefed on the meeting.

(Additional reporting by Dave Clarke; Editing by Carol Bishopric)

    House votes to kill main Obama foreclosure aid, R, 30.3.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/30/us-usa-housing-congress-idUSTRE72S7R720110330

Peter King’s Obsession

March 7, 2011
The New York Times

Not much spreads fear and bigotry faster than a public official intent on playing the politics of division. On Thursday, Representative Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is scheduled to open a series of hearings that seem designed to stoke fear against American Muslims. His refusal to tone down the provocation despite widespread opposition suggests that he is far more interested in exploiting ethnic misunderstanding than in trying to heal it.

Mr. King, a Republican whose district is centered in Nassau County on Long Island, says the hearings will examine the supposed radicalization of American Muslims. Al Qaeda is aggressively recruiting Muslims in this country, he says. He wants to investigate the terror group’s methods and what he claims is the eagerness of many young American Muslims to embrace it.

Notice that the hearing is solely about Muslims. It might be perfectly legitimate for the Homeland Security Committee to investigate violent radicalism in America among a wide variety of groups, but that doesn’t seem to be Mr. King’s real interest.

Instead, he is focusing on one group that appears to have obsessed him since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, resulting in slanders and misstatements that might have earned him a rebuke from his colleagues had they been about any other group. More than 80 percent of the mosques in America are run by extremists, he has said, never citing real evidence. Too many American Muslims are sympathetic to radical Islam, he said.

Most pernicious, he has claimed that American Muslims have generally refused to cooperate with law enforcement agencies on terrorism cases. He has cited no evidence for this, either, but a study issued last month by Duke University and the University of North Carolina found just the opposite. The American Muslim community has been the single largest source of tips that have brought terror suspects to the attention of authorities, the study found. (It also found that the number of American Muslims found or suspected to be part of terror operations dropped substantially in 2010.)

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has written to Mr. King pleading with him to postpone or reframe the hearings. It said his single-minded pursuit “will inevitably stoke anti-Muslim sentiment and increase suspicion and fear.” Terrorists should be identified by behavior, not religion or ethnicity, the group said. All of that has been dismissed as political correctness by Mr. King. Fortunately, he has not seemed to gather much enthusiasm from his fellow Republican leaders.

Denis McDonough, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, aimed a speech directly at Mr. King on Sunday when he said at a Virginia mosque that this nation does not practice guilt by association. An unrepentant Mr. King later told The Times that there is no need to investigate any other group.

Mr. King plans to call as witnesses two family members of Muslims linked to terror groups, as well as Zuhdi Jasser, the leader of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a Republican who has echoed Mr. King’s suspicions. Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota who is one of two Muslims in Congress, is also scheduled to testify, though he opposes the hearings.

Democrats on the committee plan to call Leroy Baca, the sheriff of Los Angeles County, who has often said that American Muslims have been crucial in helping terrorism investigations. But that involves empirical facts and expert observation. Nothing could be further from the real purpose of Mr. King’s show trial.

    Peter King’s Obsession, NYT, 7.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08tue1.html

The Budget Fight Continues

February 26, 2011
The New York Times

In defense of their bill to slash federal spending by $61 billion over the next seven months, House Republicans claim they are trying to make the economy grow and create jobs. In truth, such deep and sudden cuts could derail the recovery, without ever addressing the real sources of budget deficits — mainly explosive health care costs and incessant high-end tax cuts.

The question is whether the Obama administration and the Senate can prevail against the false rhetoric. Facts, analysis and the moral high ground all favor opponents of the measure. The aim is not to avoid difficult budget decisions, but to block the Republicans’ heedless effort while starting a reasoned budget debate.

In a recent report, economists at Goldman Sachs estimated that the House cuts would reduce economic growth by 1.5 percentage points to 2 percentage points in the second and third quarters of 2011. That would devastate employment. As a rule of thumb, each percentage point drop in growth means a loss of 1.2 million jobs.

The cuts also would be off point. All of them come from discretionary spending, a sliver of the budget that excludes the government’s biggest and fastest-growing outlays, chiefly Medicare and Medicaid. Over the past decade, Pentagon spending has accounted for almost all of the increase in discretionary outlays, with much of the rest going to homeland security, veterans benefits and the No Child Left Behind education initiative. Aside from defense, there is not a lot to cut prudently.

Which leads to the strongest argument of all against the House Republican bill — most of the cuts would be counterproductive. Annual spending on education through high school is cut by 12 percent, or nearly $6 billion (since the cuts would be squeezed into the rest of the current budget year, they are even deeper on an annualized basis).

Those cuts include reductions to Head Start that would remove 218,000 children from the program and cuts to elementary education that would hit 2,400 schools and nearly one million students. Pell Grants for college would also be cut by nearly $6 billion. Transportation investments would be cut by 9 percent, or $8.1 billion, including $2.7 billion from rail, $1 billion from highway spending and $675 million from public transit. Americorps and other community-service programs would be eliminated, although their benefit to society surely exceeds their $1.2 billion cost. Since national service programs are matched by $800 million from foundations and other sources, that would be lost, too.

The list goes on. Small businesses would be hit by a 9 percent cut, or $84 million, to the Small Business Administration. Homeowners facing foreclosure and other Americans with legal problems would be hurt by a $70 million cut to legal aid. Financial regulators would endure deep cuts that would cripple their ability to carry out the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. That’s asking for another financial crisis.

Given the need to placate House Republicans, some cuts are inevitable. Senators can turn to President Obama’s budget for 2012 as a template for cutting while preserving priorities. It’s time for leadership.

•

In coming days, at the bottom of this page, we will further explore individual penny-and-pound-foolish cuts the House Republicans want to impose, their lack of impact on the deficit and their real-world impact, often on the most vulnerable Americans.

    The Budget Fight Continues, NYT, 26.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/opinion/27sun1.html

The War on Women

February 25, 2011
The New York Times

Republicans in the House of Representatives are mounting an assault on women’s health and freedom that would deny millions of women access to affordable contraception and life-saving cancer screenings and cut nutritional support for millions of newborn babies in struggling families. And this is just the beginning.

The budget bill pushed through the House last Saturday included the defunding of Planned Parenthood and myriad other cuts detrimental to women. It’s not likely to pass unchanged, but the urge to compromise may take a toll on these programs. And once the current skirmishing is over, House Republicans are likely to use any legislative vehicle at hand to continue the attack.

The egregious cuts in the House resolution include the elimination of support for Title X, the federal family planning program for low-income women that provides birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. In the absence of Title X’s preventive care, some women would die. The Guttmacher Institute, a leading authority on reproductive health, says a rise in unintended pregnancies would result in some 400,000 more abortions a year.

An amendment offered by Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, would bar any financing of Planned Parenthood. A recent sting operation by an anti-abortion group uncovered an errant employee, who was promptly fired. That hardly warrants taking aim at an irreplaceable network of clinics, which uses no federal dollars in providing needed abortion care. It serves one in five American women at some point in her lifetime.

The House resolution would slash support for international family planning and reproductive health care. And it would reimpose the odious global “gag” rule, which forbids giving federal money to any group that even talks about abortions. That rule badly hampered family planning groups working abroad to prevent infant and maternal deaths before President Obama lifted it.

(Mr. Obama has tried to act responsibly. He has rescinded President George W. Bush’s wildly overreaching decision to grant new protections to health providers who not only will not perform abortions, but also will not offer emergency contraception to rape victims or fill routine prescriptions for contraceptives.)

In negotiations over the health care bill last year, Democrats agreed to a scheme intended to stop insurance companies from offering plans that cover abortions. Two bills in the Republican House would go even further in denying coverage to the 30 percent or so of women who have an abortion during child-bearing years.

One of the bills, offered by Representative Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, has a provision that would allow hospitals receiving federal funds to refuse to terminate a pregnancy even when necessary to save a woman’s life.

Beyond the familiar terrain of abortion or even contraception, House Republicans would inflict harm on low-income women trying to have children or who are already mothers.

Their continuing resolution would cut by 10 percent the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers, and infants each month, and has been linked in studies to higher birth weight and lower infant mortality.

The G.O.P. bill also slices $50 million from the block grant supporting programs providing prenatal health care to 2.5 million low-income women and health care to 31 million children annually. President Obama’s budget plan for next year calls for a much more modest cut.

These are treacherous times for women’s reproductive rights and access to essential health care. House Republicans mistakenly believe they have a mandate to drastically scale back both even as abortion warfare is accelerating in the states. To stop them, President Obama’s firm leadership will be crucial. So will the rising voices of alarmed Americans.

    The War on Women, NYT, 25.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/opinion/26sat1.html

Court Weighs the Power of Congress

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court heard arguments on Tuesday in a case that touched on the most pressing constitutional question of the day: just how much power does Congress have to regulate matters ordinarily left up to the states? The fate of President Obama’s health care law will turn on how that question is answered.

But based on the justices’ comments, the lurid facts of the case and the odd posture in which it reached the court, the eventual decision will probably offer only limited guidance on the health care law’s prospects.

The case heard Tuesday, Bond v. United States, No. 09-1227, arose from a domestic dispute. Carol A. Bond, a Pennsylvania woman, did not take it well when she learned that her husband was the father of her best friend’s child. She promised to make her former friend’s life “a living hell,” and she drew on her skills as a microbiologist to do so.

Ms. Bond spread harmful chemicals on her friend’s car, mailbox and doorknob. The friend suffered only a minor injury.

Such matters are usually handled by the local police and prosecutors. In Ms. Bond’s case, though, federal prosecutors charged her with using unconventional weapons in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, a treaty concerned with terrorists and rogue states.

At the argument, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. suggested that Congress had gone too far. Suppose, he said, that Ms. Bond had “decided to retaliate against her former friend by pouring a bottle of vinegar in the friend’s goldfish bowl.”

“As I read this statute, Justice Alito said, “that would be a violation of this statute, potentially punishable by life imprisonment.”

Ms. Bond’s lawyer, Paul D. Clement, said that a chemical used by his client was not much more exotic than vinegar. “There is something sort of odd about the government’s theory that says that I can buy a chemical weapon at Amazon.com,” he said.

In her appeal to the federal appeals court in Philadelphia, Ms. Bond argued that Congress did not have the constitutional power to use a chemical weapons treaty to address a matter of a sort routinely handled by state authorities. She cited the 10th Amendment, which says that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

The appeals court ruled that Ms. Bond did not have standing to raise a 10th Amendment defense. Only states, it said, can invoke the amendment.

Federal prosecutors initially embraced that line of argument, but the Justice Department abandoned it in the Supreme Court, now saying that Ms. Bond was free to try to mount a defense based on the amendment.

Since Ms. Bond and her nominal adversary agreed on the central issue in the case, the court appointed a lawyer, Stephen R. McAllister, to argue for the position the government had disowned.

The outcome of the case on the standing point did not seem in much doubt on Tuesday.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., for instance, said it would be “pretty harsh” to forbid Ms. Bond from challenging her conviction on the ground that the law under which she was convicted exceeded Congressional authority.

But the justices struggled with two other distinctions. One was how to disentangle claims that Congress had exceeded its enumerated powers in Article I of the Constitution from ones based on the 10th Amendment. The other was whether there were at least some 10th Amendment claims that could be pressed only by states.

Justice Elena Kagan suggested that the case could be decided simply on the ground that Congress had exceeded the powers listed in Article I of the Constitution.

“Are there any peculiarly 10th Amendment claims that you’re making?” she asked Mr. Clement. He replied that Ms. Bond relied “principally” on the argument that Congress had exceeded its powers but that it was possible the 10th Amendment played a role as well.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy added that individuals had a role to play in cases that at first blush seem to implicate only a clash between federal and state sovereignty.

“Your underlying premise,” Justice Kennedy told Mr. McAllister, “is that the individual has no interest in whether or not the state has surrendered its powers to the federal government, and I just don’t think the Constitution was framed on that theory.”

    Court Weighs the Power of Congress, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/us/politics/23scotus.html

House Votes to Cut $60 Billion, Setting Up Budget Clash

February 19, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — The House early Saturday approved a huge package of spending cuts, slashing more than $60 billion from domestic programs, foreign aid, and even some military projects, as the new Republican majority made good on its pledge to turn the grassroots fervor of the November elections into legislative action to shrink the size and scope of government.

The vote, of 235 to 189, was a victory for the large, boisterous class of fiscally conservative Republican freshmen that is fiercely determined to change the ways of Washington and that forced party leaders to pursue far bigger cuts than originally planned. It set the stage for a standoff with Senate Democrats and the White House that each side has warned could lead to a shutdown of the federal government early next month.

And it marked the opening salvo in what is likely to be a long, bitter clash of philosophical ideas about fiscal policy, as Republicans repudiate the liberal, Keynesian strategies that the Obama administration has relied on to navigate through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

In Washington, the fight in the weeks ahead will focus on budget policy and the looming need to raise the federal debt ceiling. But the push by Republicans for spending cuts and new austerity is already shaking state capitals, including Madison, Wis., and Columbus, Ohio, where labor unions have begun protesting efforts to reduce benefits and weaken their collective bargaining rights.

The House approved its spending measure in the predawn darkness on Saturday after four days and nights of free-wheeling floor debate — a veritable ultra-marathon of legislating in which hundreds of amendments were put forward. Republican leaders lost votes on some of those amendments, in what they said was a testament to their commitment to allow a more open legislative process than their recent predecessors.

Republicans only seemed to grow more excited as the final vote neared shortly after 4:30 a.m.

“We have a mandate from the American people to cut spending,” declared Representative Judy Biggert, Republican of Illinois.

Immediately after the vote, the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, said in a statement, “This week, for the first time in many years, the People’s House was allowed to work its will — and the result was one of the largest spending cuts in American history.” Mr. Boehner added, “We will not stop here in our efforts to cut spending, not when we’re broke and Washington’s spending binge is making it harder to create jobs.”

Just three Republicans opposed the bill, while 186 Democrats voted unanimously against it.

The Republicans’ plan would quickly impose sharp spending reductions in nearly every area of government through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. But Republicans will not have long to bask in the glory of their win, and their bill has little or no chance of becoming law in its current form.

President Obama and Senate Democrats say the cuts would harm the fragile economic recovery, and the White House had threatened to veto the bill even before it was approved. The Democrats say Mr. Obama’s budget proposal, which calls for a five-year freeze in many spending areas, is a more reasonable approach. But Republicans have rejected it as insufficient.

Time is short. The stopgap measure now financing the government expires on March 4. And with Congress in recess next week, party leaders concede there is not enough time to forge a deal, and that a short-term extension will be needed to avert a shutdown of the government.

But with the rhetoric in the House only growing more strident over the four days of debate, and politically-charged amendments dominating the action on Friday, lawmakers and Washington at large have begun to face the possibility that even a temporary accord will be difficult to achieve.

Mr. Boehner has said he would not agree to a short-term extension without added cuts from spending, which is now being held generally at 2010 levels. Democrats, meanwhile, have not shown any willingness to give ground, apparently betting that Republicans will be held responsible for a shutdown as they were in 1995 during a standoff with the Clinton administration.

The House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, late Friday night put forward a temporary extension of the stopgap measure that would maintain expenditures as they are now, generally at 2010 levels, and avert a shutdown through March 31. But Republicans quickly dismissed it.

Democrats, for weeks, have warned that Republicans were risking a shutdown by showing no flexibility in the spending debate.

“The last thing the American people need is for Congressional Republicans or Democrats to draw a line in the sand that hinders keeping the government open,” Ms. Pelosi said at a news conference earlier on Friday. “Closing our government would mean our men and women in uniform wouldn’t receive their paychecks and veterans would lose critical benefits. Seniors wouldn’t receive their Social Security checks and essential functions from food safety inspection to airport security could come to a halt.”

Aides to the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, sought to play down the possibility of a stalemate that would shutter the government but accused Democrats of rooting for that outcome.

“Instead of cheering for a shutdown, Senate Democrats should join their Republican colleagues in doing the hard work of cutting spending,” a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, Don Stewart, said on Friday.

But Mr. McConnell showed no willingness to consider Ms. Pelosi’s proposed temporary extension. “Freezing in place the current unsustainable spending levels is simply unacceptable,” he said in a statement.

Even without a government shutdown, there were warnings that the Republican cuts could cripple federal agencies. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, charged with carrying out a sweeping new financial regulation law, will end up with $25 million less than last year, which was before the law was adopted.

In a letter to employees on Thursday, the Social Security Administration warned of potential furloughs “given the potential of reduced Congressional appropriations for the remainder of the fiscal year.”

The cuts even hit some programs that had support among Republican leaders, including an alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The House voted to cancel the engine, achieving $450 million in short-term savings.

The Republicans who opposed the spending package were Representatives John Campbell of California and Jeff Flake of Arizona, both of whom had advocated for even bigger reductions, and Representative Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, who often disagrees with his party.

Democrats on Friday suggested that even if Republican leaders want to avoid a shutdown, Mr. Boehner might not be able to control his rank and file, particularly the conservative freshmen who successfully led the charge for even bigger spending reductions than Republican leaders initially proposed.

Up to the very end, the Republican Study Committee, a conservative bloc, continued to push for even bigger cuts, putting forward an amendment on Friday to slice $22 billion more. That amendment was defeated, as senior Republicans, including the majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, and veteran members of the Appropriations Committee, teamed up with Democrats to hit the brakes.

But flush with enthusiasm on the fourth long day of debate, House Republicans on Friday easily approved amendments to the spending package that would deny government financing for Planned Parenthood, block money for the Democrats’ big health care overhaul and bar new regulation of certain greenhouse gases.

The amendment to deny government funds to Planned Parenthood was put forward by Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana. It was approved by a vote of 240 to 185.

Ms. Pelosi, who is a supporter of abortion rights, angrily denounced the vote as a camouflaged effort by Republicans to prevent Americans from engaging in family planning, which she said would actually undermine the Republicans’ larger goal by leading to an increase in elective abortions.

“Perhaps we have to have a lesson in the birds and the bees around here for them to understand that,” Ms. Pelosi said at a news conference. Mr. Pence, in a statement, proclaimed a victory for opponents of abortion. “This afternoon’s vote was a victory for taxpayers and a victory for life,” he said.

There were at least six different amendments approved to block federal agencies from implementing the health care law or crucial components of the law.

For Republican freshmen, however, there was a potentially sobering lesson about American democracy to be learned from the health care law that they hate so much: after countless hours of drafting and floor debate, the health care bill that Mr. Obama signed last year was the one written and approved by the Senate.

In much the same way, the spending measure being debated so feverishly on the House floor has virtually no chance of being enacted into law, no matter how big a victory celebration Republicans hold.

Just as the Senate ultimately controlled the health care debate, so too will it control crucial negotiations in the current spending fight. Senate Republicans have said they support the overall goals of their House counterparts but have not committed to making identical cuts, and Democrats have a majority in the chamber.

In an understated reminder of his chamber’s role in the process, Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, issued a statement expressing a desire for compromise.

“It is my sincere hope that all the parties will remain reasonable as we seek to fund the federal government for the remainder of the fiscal year,” he said. “Neither house of Congress is in a position to dictate terms to the other, so I remain hopeful that we will come to a sensible accommodation.”

    House Votes to Cut $60 Billion, Setting Up Budget Clash, NYT, 19.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20congress.html

A Patriot Act Surprise

February 12, 2011
The New York Times

Republicans have a long history of favoring small government except when it comes to surveillance and security, at which point civil liberties take a back seat. Last week, however, 26 Republicans in the House demonstrated a remarkable consistency by joining 122 Democrats to prevent the extension of three questionable provisions of the Patriot Act, the post-9/11 law created during the Bush administration.

The vote splashed some cold water on the House Republican leadership, which had been so confident that it raised the extension under fast-track rules that require a two-thirds majority. The leadership is planning to bring it back this week under the normal rules. It is almost certain to pass and be sent to the Senate.

Nonetheless, the concerns that briefly brought together liberals, Tea Party members and longtime centrists from both parties should send a message to the White House and the Senate. The provisions of the Patriot Act should be carefully re-examined before being hastily reauthorized year after year. The Tea Party-backed congressman Justin Amash of Michigan was right to say that some raise serious concerns about violating the ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

Three provisions in the act are set to expire on Feb. 28, and would be renewed under the House bill, supported by the Obama administration, through December.

One would allow a roving wiretap on a terror suspect to monitor his conversations as he moves from phone to phone. That can be a useful tool, but the authorization is so broad that the government does not even have to specify the suspect’s name to get a warrant. The failure to provide a more narrow identification of the suspect is too lax and could lead to abuse.

Another expiring provision has long raised serious civil liberties concerns, allowing the government to examine library and bookstore records of suspects, along with hard drives, tax documents and gun records. Investigators are not required to show probable cause that the material is related to a terrorist investigation.

The third provision, allowing surveillance of “lone wolf” suspects who may not be tied to recognized terror organizations, is also overly broad but has never been used. Rather than renew it without debate, the government should explain whether it is really necessary.

The extensions will probably pass the House this week — though leaders do not plan to give anyone a chance to amend them — and go to the Senate, which should provide another opportunity for reconsideration. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee chairman, has introduced a bill that would add several safeguards to the act, most notably the phasing out of “national security letters,” which the F.B.I. has used to obtain evidence without a court order. These letters have been subject to widespread misuse and have never received proper oversight.

Unfortunately, the same bill that would bring the letters under control would extend the three expiring provisions in the Patriot Act through 2013. It is a much better measure, however, than a bill by Senator Dianne Feinstein that would extend the provisions for three more years without the new safeguards, or one by Senator Mitch McConnell that would make the three provisions permanent. Congress should not miss an opportunity to wield some oversight on this issue and determine whether the government could achieve its goals with less sweeping surveillance powers.

    A Patriot Act Surprise, NYT, 12.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/opinion/13sun1.html

Muslims to Be Congressional Hearings’ Main Focus

February 7, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

WASHINGTON — The new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said Monday that he planned to call mostly Muslim and Arab witnesses to testify in hearings next month on the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism.

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, said he would rely on Muslims to make his case that American Muslim leaders have failed to cooperate with law enforcement officials in the effort to disrupt terrorist plots — a claim that was rebutted in recent reports by counterterrorism experts and in a forum on Capitol Hill on Monday.

“I believe it will have more of an impact on the American people if they see people who are of the Muslim faith and Arab descent testifying,” Mr. King said.

The hearings, which Mr. King said would start the week of March 7, have provoked an uproar from both the left and the right. The left has accused Mr. King of embarking on a witch hunt. The right has accused him of capitulation for calling Muslims like Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, to testify while denying a platform to popular critics of Islamic extremism like Steven Emerson, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer.

As the hearings approach, the reaction from Muslim groups — initially outraged — has evolved into efforts to get Mr. King to enlarge the scope of the hearings beyond Muslims. They want to use the forum to reinforce the notion that the potential for terrorist violence among American Muslims is very marginal and very isolated.

“Our heads aren’t in the sand,” Alejandro J. Beutel, the government and policy analyst for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a national advocacy group, said at a forum his group sponsored on Monday on Capitol Hill. “The threat clearly exists, but I also want to put it in perspective. The threat exists, but it is not a pandemic.”

Fifty-one Muslim, civil rights and interfaith groups sent a letter last week to Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, and the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, protesting Mr. King’s hearings as modern-day McCarthyism. They said that if Congress was going to investigate violent extremism, it should investigate extremists of all kinds and not just Muslims.

“Singling out a group of Americans for government scrutiny based on their faith is divisive and wrong,” said the letter, which was led by Muslim Advocates, a legal and policy organization in San Francisco, and was signed by non-Muslim groups including Amnesty International USA, the Interfaith Alliance and the Japanese American Citizens League.

Mr. Ellison said that while he would participate, “I’m going to make it clear that I challenge the premise of the hearings.

“If you put every single Muslim in the U.S. in jail, it wouldn’t have stopped Jared Loughner,” Mr. Ellison said, referring to the man accused of opening fire on an Arizona congresswoman and her constituents. “It wouldn’t have stopped the young man who killed his classmates at Virginia Tech. It wouldn’t have stopped the bombing in Oklahoma City or the man who killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington.”

But Mr. King dismissed this line of criticism, saying: “I totally reject that. That, to me, is political correctness at its worst. If we included these other violent events in the hearings, we’d be sending the false signal that we think there’s a security threat equivalency between Al Qaeda and the neo-Nazi movement, or Al Qaeda and gun groups. There is none.”

Mr. King added, “I’m not going to dilute the hearings by including other extremists.”

In fact, he said he planned to hold three or four more hearings this year on topics like the radicalization of Muslims in prisons and Saudi financing for American mosques.

He said the only witness he had settled on for certain of the three he would call in the first hearing was Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a doctor from Arizona and an American military veteran who has little following among Muslims but has become a favorite of conservatives for his portrayal of American Muslim leaders as radical Islamists.

Mr. King said he had changed his mind about summoning as a witness Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born feminist critic of Islam who became a member of Parliament in the Netherlands and then fled because of threats on her life.

The hearings, Mr. King said, would be organized into panels of witnesses, one of them to include members of Congress. He said Mr. Ellison would serve as a witness on that panel. He said he did not expect to call any of the local law enforcement or counterintelligence experts who he said had told him repeatedly that noncooperation by American Muslims is a “significant issue.” He says they will say these things privately, but not in public.

Some law enforcement experts have challenged Mr. King’s portrayal of widespread noncooperation. At the forum Monday, Sheriff Leroy Baca of Los Angeles County said he had cultivated extensive relationships with Muslim leaders throughout his county. He said that as a member of the Major City Chiefs Association, the Major County Sheriffs Association and the National Sheriffs Association, he had not heard complaints about noncooperation from Muslims.

Two other experts at the forum, Peter Bergen, director of the National Security Studies Program at the New America Foundation, and Roger Cressey, former director for transnational threats at the National Security Council, said the really sophisticated terrorists stop traveling and stop communicating in order to avoid detection. When that happens, they said, law enforcement must rely almost entirely on tips from the Muslim community to catch them.

A report issued last week by an independent research group on national security found that 48 of the 120 Muslims suspected of plotting domestic terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, were turned in by fellow Muslims, including parents, mosque members and even a Facebook friend. The report was issued by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, which is affiliated with Duke and the University of North Carolina.

The report said, “In some communities, Muslim-Americans have been so concerned about extremists in their midst that they have turned in people who turned out to be undercover informants.”

    Muslims to Be Congressional Hearings’ Main Focus, NYT, 7.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/us/politics/08muslim.html

Debt Limit Follies

January 31, 2011
The New York Times

At a recent gathering of House Republicans, lawmakers made it clear that they intend to hold an increase in the nation’s debt limit hostage to major spending cuts.

Clearly, the Republican aim is to demonstrate their fiscal prudence, as well as their new political power in the Republican-controlled House. Don’t be fooled. When it comes to debating the debt limit the facts matter little. It’s all about posturing.

The debt limit is a cap set by Congress on the amount the nation can legally borrow. The current limit, $14.3 trillion, will be hit sometime this spring. Unless Congress raises it before then, the government will have to resort to temporary tactics, like freeing up money to pay current bills by delaying payments to federal retirement funds. The longer a standoff endures, the worse the choices are. For instance, the government might defer other payments, like tax refunds, as it husbands resources to avoid a default on the public debt.

All that would surely be disruptive and could be disastrous if the nation’s creditors began to doubt America’s reliability.

The debt limit is a political tool, not a fiscal one. First enacted in 1917, it was intended to make lawmakers think twice before voting for tax cuts and spending increases that run up the debt. Unfortunately, it has never worked that way. Federal debt is high despite the limit because lawmakers repeatedly enter into expensive and recurring obligations without a plan to pay for them — in recent years that includes two wars, the George W. Bush-era tax cuts and the Medicare drug benefit.

As the costs pile up, the debt limit must be increased — not to make room for new spending, but to raise money to pay for past commitments.

It is, of course, utterly disingenuous to vote for policies that drive up the debt and then rail against raising the debt limit when the bills come due. It is akin to piling up purchases on credit and then threatening to bounce the payment check. But that is what Republicans are saying they will do unless they win deep cuts in future spending in exchange for a debt-limit increase today. So much for fiscal prudence.

A better approach would be to pay for legislation when it is enacted, generally by raising taxes or cutting other spending. The new House leadership has rejected that approach when it comes to their No. 1 priority: cutting taxes.

They have passed new budget rules that allow taxes to be cut without offsets to replace the lost revenue. The new rules also forbid raising taxes to pay for major new spending, like Medicare expansions, requiring instead that any such spending be offset by cutting other programs. That is a recipe for fiscal irresponsibility.

House Republican leaders have not said which spending cuts they will demand for a debt-limit increase. They know that voters don’t want to hear about losing college aid, environmental safeguards or investor protections. They may try to call for overall spending caps that would let them take credit for spending reductions without explaining or defending particular cuts.

What is known is that deep immediate spending cuts would be unwise at a time when the economy and so many Americans are still struggling. President Obama and Congressional Democrats need to push back by challenging House Republicans on the hypocrisy of their new budget rules and by making it clear that playing games with the debt limit is irresponsible.

    Debt Limit Follies, NYT, 31.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/opinion/01tue1.html

Is a Bigger House a Better House?

January 30, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

In “Build a Bigger House” (Op-Ed, Jan. 24), Dalton Conley and Jacqueline Stevens are right to call for an increase in the size of the House of Representatives, though they are overly optimistic in their assessment of the effect it would have on representation and campaigns.

There is nothing magic about 435 House seats, and every reason to consider an increase when the average population of districts has tripled since 1910, leaving Montana with only a single House member for nearly a million people.

Representative Alcee L. Hastings has for years introduced legislation to study House size, and analyze another potential statutory change: proportional voting in House elections. Given the increasingly bright partisan lines dividing the House because of winner-take-all voting rules, Mr. Hastings’s proposals are all the more timely.

Rob Richie
Executive Director, FairVote
Takoma Park, Md., Jan. 24, 2011

•

To the Editor:

Increasing the size of the House is unlikely to solve the problems Dalton Conley and Jacqueline Stevens identify.

Special-interest groups would be able to spend less per race and could, in fact, increase their influence if they were able to build strategic voting blocs among the candidates they supported. There would not necessarily be more citizen-legislators in the House, since in plenty of state and municipal offices the same representatives are elected over and over again for decades.

As the writers note, the House would have to seat “5,000 if we match the ratio the founders awarded themselves.” A House of this size — or the 1,500 they seem to suggest — would make it all but impossible for legislators to get to know one another, especially across party lines. The result would be a House even more dependent on seniority, party affiliation and special-interest groups.

Chris DesBarres
Winston-Salem, N.C., Jan. 24, 2011

•

To the Editor:

Perhaps we need more representatives, but there are better ways to reform the House. It’s absurd to inflict national elections on Americans every two years.

It’s unfair to politicians, too. As soon as they’re elected, they’re running for re-election — that is, raising money. They don’t have time to establish a meaningful track record of legislative activity. And when they do legislate, most simply parrot whatever is prevailing public opinion at the time because they are soon to face election.

We might as well have a government of professional pollsters. But that’s not leadership.

If we’re going to fix what ails America, we can’t afford short-term politicians with short-term ideas. True leaders tell us what we should be thinking, rather than simply aping today’s popular view, and that requires a House term of at least four years.

Michael Northmore
Staten Island, Jan. 24, 2011

•

To the Editor:

We simply cannot afford the salaries of extra members, staff, pensions and Cadillac health care coverage. Not to mention the longer committee sessions to accommodate the increase in pontificating questions and not necessarily better testimony.

Murem Sharpe
Savannah, Ga., Jan. 24, 2011

The writer was on the staff of Senator John V. Tunney, Democrat of California, in 1971-72.

    Is a Bigger House a Better House?, NYT, 30.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/opinion/l31house.html

House Ethics Committee Clears 3 of Conflict of Interest

January 26, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — The House ethics committee, in one of its first official acts since the start of the new Congress, dismissed cases involving three members accused of creating an appearance of a conflict by holding fund-raising events with financial industry executives and lobbyists in the days before major votes on legislation revamping the nation’s financial regulations.

The decision came as a relief to lawmakers. If the ethics committee had found violations, ground rules for fund-raising would have radically changed in Washington, where popular restaurants and bars around Capitol Hill sometimes host two or three events each night.

The Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent investigative unit that serves as a prosecutor’s office, had assembled what it believed was compelling proof that the overlapping votes and financial industry fund-raising parties created the appearance of a conflict of interest, even if no deals were made to change votes as a result of the donations.

But the ethics committee, now led by Representative Jo Bonner, Republican of Alabama, endorsed a report by its own staff that concluded that these dinners and cocktail parties were just routine events, organized by professional fund-raising consultants who work independently from the lawmakers’ House policy staff. “The overall record demonstrated that there were no appearances of impropriety,” the report concluded.

The three members whose activities were looked at — Representatives Joseph Crowley, Democrat of New York; Tom Price, Republican of Georgia; and John Campbell, Republican of California — issued statements welcoming the dismissal. They said it confirmed their assertions that they did nothing improper.

“Congressman Price has always complied with both the letter and spirit of the law,” said Ryan Murphy, a spokesman for Mr. Price, who is chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. “He is pleased that this matter has been completely resolved and is now closed.”

Several ethics watchdog groups say the decision represented a missed opportunity for the new ethics committee to send a message to lawmakers.

“You are raising money from the same parties who will be enormously affected by policy decision you are about to make,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a campaign finance expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “You don’t have to be a math genius to add 2 and 2. The message here is that anything goes as long as it is not a direct, specific violation of the rules.”

The Office of Congressional Ethics began the investigation after a December 2009 House vote on an early draft of the financial legislation that became law last year. Investigators collected hundreds of pages of e-mails and other documents offering a rare inside look at how fund-raising consultants solicit contributions from industry lobbyists, politely pressing them to write thousands of dollars in checks to support lawmakers’ re-election efforts.

Mr. Crowley’s fund-raising consultant, for example, invited executives or lobbyists from General Electric, UBS, Morgan Stanley, New York Life, American Express, Ernst & Young, Hartford Associates and Zurich — all companies registered to lobby on the financial regulation bill — for two fund-raising events that took place on the same night that the House would vote on key amendments to the bill. Representatives from several of these companies ended up attending.

The complaints against the three lawmakers repeatedly referred to a 2004 ruling by the ethics committee involving former Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, who was admonished after he attended a fund-raising event around the time of important House action on a related bill.

“A decent interval of time should be allowed to lapse so that neither party will feel that there is a close connection between the two acts,” the 2004 ruling by the ethics committee said, as quoted in the cases filed against the three House members.

But lawyers for the House members argued that the Office of Congressional Ethics was overreaching, dismissing the idea of parallels between the 2004 case and the more recent fund-raising events. Consultants for the three House members, they argued, had scheduled their 2009 fund-raising events long before they knew when the vote would be taken on the financial legislation.

They also noted that fund-raising consultants had sent out the invitations to these events, not House staff members. And there is no evidence that the House members discussed the substance of the legislation at these fund-raising events.

“You had overlap, but you did not have crossing of the wires,” said Stanley Brand, a lawyer who represented Mr. Crowley. “And coincidence or temporal proximity is not enough to establish wrongdoing. There has to be a real connection.”

These were all arguments backed by the House ethics committee, whose staff noted in the report dismissing the cases that a “ ‘reasonable, thoughtful’ person, who is well informed of all relevant facts and standards, would not conclude that there were any appearances of impropriety.”

    House Ethics Committee Clears 3 of Conflict of Interest, NYT, 26.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/us/politics/27ethics.html

New Seating Chart, but Same Divides

January 25, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — It was a new day in Congress. Or at least a new night. In a powerful break with tradition, lawmakers crossed party lines to sit Republican and Democrat, side by side, as the president addressed them.

Row by row, many women in bright red, the men in their traditional dark suits, Republicans and Democrats filed onto the House floor and slipped into unfamiliar territory on Tuesday night. There was Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, sitting on the Democratic side of the House aisle between Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Senator Tom Udall, of New Mexico. (Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, was kept close at hand, on an aisle seat.) Senator Mary L. Landrieu, a Democrat of Louisiana, buddied up to Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine on the Republican side.

Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, took no part in the bipartisan ritual, and sat in an aisle seat next to fellow Republican leaders, including Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Representative Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican and Tea Party hero who would later deliver a rebuttal to the president’s remarks, was sitting solo and made no move toward the aisle as President Obama entered the chamber. But after he reached out to her, they shared a brief handshake.

The new seating chart clearly caused some confusion among members as to how to behave. When Mr. Obama would say something that normally would have spurred Democrats to stand, some did, others refrained, and Republicans sometimes followed their lead. For some, the idea of sitting together meant standing — two Texas representatives, Michael McCaul, a Republican, and Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, spent the entire speech on their feet in the middle of an aisle.

The signs of partisanship clearly did not fade with the light of Tuesday’s sun — when the president mentioned cutting subsidies to oil companies, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, formed a one-man standing ovation, while one Republican heckled mildly from the back of the room.

The assembled lawmakers seemed less inclined to join in the usual stream of sustained, loud clapping that have marked past addresses given in the chamber. While that helped to speed Mr. Obama’s remarks along (still, they ran more than an hour), the unorganized applause also created some asymmetry throughout the chamber, with members popping up separately from their silent seatmates.

The biggest bipartisan beloved line of the night was Mr. Obama’s exhortation to eliminate paperwork for small-business owners, which caused even Ms. Bachmann, who sat largely silent and frowning through out the evening, to rise.

The idea of having Democrats and Republicans sit together at the State of the Union — proposed by the centrist group Third Way to transcend partisanship — gathered frantic steam in the hours leading up to the speech. As evening approached and the Capitol was bathed in klieg and moonlight, members madly tweeted about who they would sit with, looked for a last-minute date, and, in at least one case, blew off a suitor.

Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia and the House majority leader, made a last-ditch invite to Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and the former speaker, to sit with him. She replied via Twitter: “I thank @GOPLeader for his #SOTU offer, but I invited my friend Rep. Bartlett from MD yesterday & am pleased he accepted.” Mr. Cantor, whose proposal to Ms. Pelosi, seemed as much dare as courtesy, ended up with his colleague from Richmond, Representative Bobby Scott.

In the category of perhaps they have already spent enough time together, Representative Ron Paul, the Texas Republican, said he would not be sitting with his son, Rand Paul, the new Republican senator from Kentucky. “We haven’t made it a big issue,” said the senior Mr. Paul, who was the Libertarian candidate for president in 2008.

He said the speech was not all that relevant to him regardless of who was nearby. “I want to cut the government by 60 or 70 percent,” he said. “We are not talking the same language.”

The mood in the chamber seemed less charged than last year, with less partisan furor and less pomp. When the president congratulated John A. Boehner, the House Speaker, at the beginning of his speech, nearly every member stood, as they did seconds later when the president mentioned Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Democrat who was critically injured in a shooting Jan. 8 in Tucson. Ms. Giffords’s chair was left empty between two members — one Republican, one Democrat — among the Arizona delegation.

Virtually every member Congress displayed black-and-white ribbons in honor of the six who died and 13 injured in the Tucson shooting.

Sitting up in the gallery with the first lady, Michelle Obama, was Daniel Hernandez, an intern to Ms. Giffords whose administering of first aid is credited with helping to save her life; members of the family of the youngest victim, 9-year-old Christina- Taylor Green; and Dr. Peter Rhee, the director of the trauma center at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, where Ms. Giffords and others were treated.

Mindful that every important member of government was under one dome, nothing was left to chance. Security was tight; bomb-sniffing dogs roamed the Capitol and hazmat suits and stretchers were piled up.

Every branch of government was largely represented; Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. led five other members of the Supreme Court into the chamber, even after last year’s scolding by Mr. Obama over a court decision on campaign-finance issues. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas did not attend. Mr. Roberts cracked several smiles; Ruth Bader Ginsberg appeared frail.

And then, it was over, with just House pages left to clean up the desks.

    New Seating Chart, but Same Divides, NYT, 25.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/politics/26scene.html

Build a Bigger House

January 23, 2011
The New York Times
By DALTON CONLEY and JACQUELINE STEVENS

WITH the Senate preparing to debate filibuster reform, now is a good time to consider a similarly daunting challenge to democratic representation in the House: its size. It’s been far too long since the House expanded to keep up with population growth and, as a result, it has lost touch with the public and been overtaken by special interests.

Indeed, the lower chamber of Congress has had the same number of members for so long that many Americans assume that its 435 seats are constitutionally mandated.

But that’s wrong: while the founders wanted to limit the size of the Senate, they intended the House to expand based on population growth. Instead of setting an absolute number, the Constitution merely limits the ratio of members to population. “The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every 30,000,” the founders wrote. They were concerned, in other words, about having too many representatives, not too few.

When the House met in 1787 it had 65 members, one for every 60,000 inhabitants (including slaves as three-fifths of a person). For well over a century, after each census Congress would pass a law increasing the size of the House.

But after the 1910 census, when the House grew from 391 members to 433 (two more were added later when Arizona and New Mexico became states), the growth stopped. That’s because the 1920 census indicated that the majority of Americans were concentrating in cities, and nativists, worried about of the power of “foreigners,” blocked efforts to give them more representatives.

By the time the next decade rolled around, members found themselves reluctant to dilute their votes, and the issue was never seriously considered again.

The result is that Americans today are numerically the worst-represented group of citizens in the country’s history. The average House member speaks for about 700,000 Americans. In contrast, in 1913 he represented roughly 200,000, a ratio that today would mean a House with 1,500 members — or 5,000 if we match the ratio the founders awarded themselves.

This disparity increases the influence of lobbyists and special interests: the more constituents one has, the easier it is for money to outshine individual voices. And it means that representatives have a harder time connecting with the people back in their districts.

What’s needed, then, is a significant increase in the size of the House by expanding the number, and shrinking the size, of districts. Doing so would make campaigns cheaper, the political value of donations lower and the importance of local mobilizing much greater.

Smaller districts would also end the two-party deadlock. Orange County, Calif., might elect a Libertarian, while Cambridge, Mass., might pick a candidate from the Green Party.

Moreover, with additional House members we’d likely see more citizen-legislators and fewer lifers. In places like New York or Chicago, we would cross at least one Congressional district just walking a few blocks to the grocery store. Our representatives would be our neighbors, people who better understood the lives and concerns of average Americans.

More districts would likewise mean more precision in distributing them equitably, especially in low-population states. Today the lone Wyoming representative covers about 500,000 people, while her lone counterpart in Delaware reports to 900,000.

The increase would also mean more elected officials working on the country’s business, reducing the reliance on unaccountable staffers. Most of the House’s work is through committees, overseeing and checking government agencies.

With more people in Congress, House committee members could see to this critical business themselves — and therefore be more influential, since a phone call from an actual member is a lot more effective than a request from the committee staff.

True, more members means more agendas, legislation and debates. But Internet technology already provides effective low-cost management solutions, from Google Documents to streaming interactive video to online voting.

The biggest obstacle is Congress itself. Such a change would require the noble act — routine before World War I but unheard of since — of representatives voting to diminish their own relative power.

So if such reform is to happen, it will have to be driven by grassroots movements. Luckily, we are living in just such a moment: the one thing Move On and the Tea Party can agree on is that the Washington status quo needs to change. So far this year, that has meant shrinking government. But in this case, the best solution might just be to make government — or at least the House of Representatives — bigger.

Dalton Conley is a professor of sociology, medicine and public policy at New York University and the author of “Elsewhere, U.S.A.” Jacqueline Stevens is a professor of political science at Northwestern and the author of “States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals.”

    Build a Bigger House, NYT, 23.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/opinion/24conley.html

House Votes for Repeal of Health Law in Symbolic Act

January 19, 2011
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — The House voted Wednesday to repeal the Democrats’ landmark health care overhaul, marking what the new Republican majority in the chamber hailed as the fulfillment of a campaign promise and the start of an all-out effort to dismantle President Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement.

The vote was 245 to 189, with 3 Democrats joining all 242 Republicans in support of the repeal.

Leaders of the Democratic-controlled Senate have said that they will not act on the repeal measure, effectively scuttling it.

While conceding that reality, House Republicans said they would press ahead with their “repeal and replace” strategy. But the next steps will be much more difficult, as they try to forge consensus on alternatives emphasizing “free market solutions” to control health costs and expand coverage.

Even as four House committees begin drafting legislation, Republicans said they would seek other ways to stop the overhaul, by choking off money needed to carry it out and by pursuing legislation to undo specific provisions, like a requirement for most Americans to carry health insurance or face penalties. The law is also under challenge in the federal courts, with the individual coverage requirements fueling a constitutional battle likely to be decided by the Supreme Court.

The House vote was the first stage of a Republican plan to use the party’s momentum coming out of the midterm elections to keep the White House on the defensive, and will be followed by a push to scale back federal spending. In response, the administration struck a more aggressive posture than it had during the campaign to sell the health care law to the public. With many House Democrats from swing districts having lost their seats in November, the remaining Democrats held overwhelmingly together in opposition to the repeal.

On the House floor, the resulting debate was a striking reprise of the one that engulfed Capitol Hill from the spring of 2009 until March 2010, when Mr. Obama signed the health care law.

And while the tone was slightly subdued in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, the debate showed that the divisions over the law remained as deep as ever.

The three Democrats who crossed the aisle to support the repeal were Representatives Dan Boren of Oklahoma, Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, and Mike Ross of Arkansas, all of whom opposed the law last year.

Ms. Giffords, who had supported the law, remains hospitalized in Arizona and was the only House member who did not vote.

Republicans denounced the law as an intrusion by the government that would prompt employers to eliminate jobs, create an unsustainable entitlement program, saddle states and the federal government with unmanageable costs, and interfere with the doctor-patient relationship. Republicans also said the law would exacerbate the steep rise in the cost of medical services.

“Repeal means paving the way for better solutions that will lower the cost without destroying jobs or bankrupting our government,” the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, said. “Repeal means keeping a promise. This is what we said we would do.”

Democrats, eager for a second chance to sell the law, trumpeted the benefits that have already taken effect. These include protections for people who would otherwise be denied insurance coverage based on a pre-existing medical condition, the ability for children to stay on their parents’ policy until age 26, and new tax breaks for small businesses that provide health coverage to their workers.

Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, said, “It is unbelievable that with so many people out of work and millions of people uninsured, the first act of this new Congress is to take health care away from people who just got coverage.”

The health care law, which Congress approved last year without a single Republican in favor, seeks to extend insurance to more than 30 million people by expanding Medicaid and providing federal subsidies to help lower and middle-income Americans buy private coverage.

Republican leaders said they had not set any timetable for the four committees drafting alternatives to the law. “I don’t know that we need artificial deadlines for the committees to act,” Mr. Boehner said. “We expect them to act in an efficient way.”

Republicans said their package would probably include proposals to allow sales of health insurance across state lines; to help small businesses band together and buy insurance; to limit damages in medical malpractice suits; and to promote the use of health savings accounts, in combination with high-deductible insurance policies.

Republicans also want to help states expand insurance pools for people with serious illnesses. The new law includes such pools, as an interim step until broader insurance coverage provisions take effect in 2014, but enrollment has fallen short of expectations.

Representative Paul Broun, Republican of Georgia, said that allowing people to buy insurance across state lines would “expand choice and competition.” And he said businesses could negotiate better insurance rates if they could join together in “association health plans,” sponsored by trade and professional groups.

But state insurance officials have resisted such proposals, on the ground that they would weaken state authority to regulate insurance and to enforce consumer protections -- a concern shared by Congressional Democrats.

Some Republicans seemed sensitive to accusations that repeal would strip away new patient protections and leave millions of Americans without insurance.

Representative Joe Heck, Republican of Nevada and a physician, said he supported some goals of the new law: “making sure people don’t lose their coverage once they get sick; letting dependent children stay on their parents’ insurance until they turn 26; making sure anyone who wants to buy insurance can purchase a policy, regardless of pre-existing conditions.”

Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, said, “There are some things in the new law that we think are worth keeping,” including a procedure for approval of generic versions of expensive biotechnology drugs.

But Mr. Barton and other Republicans returned to a core objection to the law, which they said extends the reach of government too far.

“We believe that you shouldn’t have the federal government mandate that an individual has to have health insurance, whether he or she wants it,” Mr. Barton said. “We want to repeal today so that we can begin to replace tomorrow.”

Representative Allyson Y. Schwartz, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said she doubted that the Republican alternatives would be effective in expanding coverage or controlling costs.

“Many Republicans want to repeal the law, but are not serious about replacing it,” Ms. Schwartz said.

    House Votes for Repeal of Health Law in Symbolic Act, NYT, 19.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/health/policy/20cong.html

Lawmakers Aiming to Increase Civility

January 16, 2011
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — A leader of the Senate Democrats and one of the Senate’s most conservative Republicans will sit together at the State of the Union speech next week in a gesture of unity.

A House Republican from Pennsylvania and a House Democrat from California said Sunday that they would work together to revisit federal and state laws on mental illness.

And the House speaker, John A. Boehner, used the phrase “job-destroying” instead of “job-killing” in reference to the Democrats’ health care overhaul in a speech to colleagues on Saturday — a subtle but pointed shift in tone, though not in substance.

As the House prepares to resume regular legislative business on Tuesday, the shooting in Arizona that killed six in a failed assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords has shifted the political dynamic in Washington and across the nation, with lawmakers embracing a new civility.

No one is suggesting that the fierce policy disagreements will disappear or that old animosities will not remain just beneath the new, courteous veneer. But lawmakers said they expected a leveling of the discourse on even the most divisive issues, like cutting spending, whether to raise the federal debt limit and the Republican measure to repeal the Democrats’ health care overhaul, which the House is set to vote on this week.

“I think the tenor on anything that happens in the House is going to be a little different,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the No. 3 House Republican, told reporters at a Republican retreat that ended on Saturday in Baltimore.

Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said there was no retreat from a policy standpoint. “I think you’ll see a more civil debate than you would have had otherwise,” Mr. Flake said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “I’m not sure the substance of the debate will change that much.”

Of course, any change in the way lawmakers debate issues or interact with one another on the floor could be as short-lived as a 30-second ad in a primary campaign. And Republicans in the 112th Congress, newly in control of the House and a stronger force in the Senate, said they would still fight to undo much of the legislation that emerged from the 111th, in which Democrats held sway in both chambers.

But in interviews and television appearances over the weekend, lawmakers in both parties voiced clear recognition that the Arizona massacre has put them on notice that it is time to dial down the rhetoric with which they publicly express differences — even as many reiterated a belief that the gunman’s mental illness, not heated political rhetoric, was the core issue in the shooting.

Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat, and Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, a leading conservative, said Sunday that they would sit together at the State of the Union speech. The gesture, expected to be replicated by colleagues, stands to alter the seemingly timeless image of lawmakers on one side of the House chamber standing and applauding a president from their own party, while lawmakers on the other side sit stone-faced, their hands in their laps.

The centrist Democratic group Third Way initially proposed bipartisan seating at the president’s annual address on Jan. 25, and Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, urged members of Congress to embrace the idea, which Mr. Schumer said prompted him to reach out to Mr. Coburn.

“We hope that many others will follow us,” Mr. Schumer said, appearing with Mr. Coburn on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “Now, that’s symbolic, but maybe it just sets a tone and everything gets a little bit more civil.”

Mr. Schumer added: “We believe in discourse in America. We believe in strenuous discourse. We don’t sweep differences under the rug.

“Tom and I have real differences. But we can do it civilly. I will say, to Tom’s credit, we have disagreed on a whole lot of stuff, but he’s always been civil, he’s always been a gentleman. And that’s an example that people should follow — politicians and the media.”

Mr. Coburn said that the news media had focused too much on political rancor and that lawmakers on both sides simply needed to settle down to work. “Some of the problems in our country is we talk past each other, not to each other,” he said. “And Chuck and I have been able to work on multiple bills because we sit down, one on one, and work things out. And what we need to do is have more of that, not less of it.”

Among the potential issues to be addressed are gaps in laws intended to prevent those who are mentally ill or abuse drugs from buying guns.

Mr. Coburn noted that many questions had been raised about the mental state of Jared L. Loughner, the man accused in the Tucson attack, but that Mr. Loughner had never been brought to the attention of mental health authorities who might have prevented him from buying a weapon.

“Let’s fix the real problem,” Mr. Coburn, a strong proponent of gun rights, said, adding, “I’m willing to work with Senator Schumer and anybody else that wants to make sure people who are mentally ill cannot get and use a gun.”

Noting that Mr. Loughner had been rejected from the Army because of excessive drug use, Mr. Schumer said the drug use would have prevented him by law from buying a gun.

“But the law doesn’t require the military to notify the F.B.I. about that, and in this case they didn’t,” he said.

Mr. Schumer said he had written a letter to the Obama administration on Sunday urging that the military be required to notify the F.B.I. when it rejects someone for drug use and that that information be added to the F.B.I. database.

Representative Tim Murphy, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Representative Grace F. Napolitano, Democrat of California, who jointly founded the Congressional Mental Health Caucus, said they hoped to lead colleagues in revisiting state and federal policies related to mental illness.

“I believe this issue has touched the hearts of so many members of Congress, who are constantly stopping me and saying: ‘Is there something else we could have done? Is there something else we can do?’ ” Mr. Murphy said. “And I believe so.”

While Mr. Murphy and Ms. Napolitano are veteran lawmakers, some lawmakers said they saw potential for changing the culture of Congress, given the large number of freshmen — including 87 new Republicans — who do not have hard feelings or grudges from mistreatment during their days in the minority.

“This is a serious group,” said Representative Peter Roskam of Illinois, the chief deputy Republican whip, “and I think they are going to easily rise above some of the past injuries and sharp elbows and come with an expectation that the House of Representatives is going to convene to accomplish something rather than just settle old scores.”

As he adjusts to life in the House, one of those freshman, Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, said he thought the shooting of Ms. Giffords had served to remind House members what they share with those in the other party.

“There will still be passion here,” he said. “But it has kind of humanized us to each other.”

    Lawmakers Aiming to Increase Civility, NYT, 16.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/us/politics/17cong.html

Among Women in Congress, a Bond of Friendship

January 13, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — Two arrived at Capitol Hill together, giddy and singled out as women to watch. Another congresswoman was a welcoming face who showed them the ropes in a place where there was not even a ladies’ room near the floor where they would vote.

Then there was the leader, a mother-hen type who made sure that some of the seats on the Armed Services Committee went to women, including the two new lawmakers. There was political plotting, and vacations by the lake. There was softball. There were double dates with their husbands, most recently with pizza.

The four were reunited in Arizona for a few moments on Wednesday night, as one of the women, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, flicked open an eye as the sound of her friends’ voices filled her hospital room.

“I think it was a combination, perhaps, of the unexpected but familiar that really prompted her to open her eyes and look around,” said Dr. G. Michael Lemole Jr., one of Ms. Giffords’s neurosurgeons, concerning what was apparently her reaction to the voices of her fellow lawmakers, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

While Ms. Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, has always had a good relationship with Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, her true Congressional women friends are Ms. Wasserman Schultz, who openly welcomed her, and Ms. Gillibrand, who was elected in 2006 with Ms. Giffords. When they met for their super-fast lunches and after-work drinks, they were often joined by Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota, who was defeated last year.

“We met on our first day,” said Ms. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, who later went on to the Senate. “Not that many young women who run for Congress get elected, so I gravitated to her right away. She is somebody who is very kind and very smart.”

They talked policy, they talked work days and they also talked about managing their lives.

“Like all working moms, we do our best,” Ms. Gillibrand said, which means avoiding cocktail parties between 5 and 7 p.m. (bath time) or early morning meetings (school drop-off). Their husbands got along, too, which made it easy to have the occasional dinner date when the four were in town together, like the one last week at Matchbox, a popular pizza place in Washington favored by Ms. Giffords’s husband, Mark E. Kelly, who is an astronaut.

“We enjoy being there for each other,” Ms. Gillibrand said, “So when Debbie and I were allowed to visit Gabby, it meant so much to us to encourage her and to tell her how much we love her and how she is inspiring the whole country right now.”

There is not a lot of downtime for members of Congress, but some of theirs is spent playing softball to raise money for young women with breast cancer. Ms. Wasserman Schultz is a co-captain for the House on a Congressional women’s softball team, and Ms. Gillibrand serves as a co-captain for the Senate side.

“I don’t think I’d be talking out of school if I told you Kirsten and I are pretty good, and Gabby, not so much,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz said. “We have to really coax her to participate. Let’s just say she was in the process of skill building.”

Ms. Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, met Ms. Giffords through a legislative fellowship program, before the Arizona lawmaker came to Congress, and she campaigned for her in Tucson, eager to see her join the ranks. Ms. Giffords and Ms. Gillibrand were part of the “red to blue” Democratic Party strategy to get moderate Democrats to take over Republican districts.

Once Ms. Giffords got to Washington, she and Ms. Wasserman Schultz melded their families in leisure time, going to the last shuttle launching or vacationing in Ms. Wasserman Schultz’s home in New Hampshire. “We would go hiking, and our on our boat and cook dinners,” she said. “Mark’s children and my kids played together. It’s just really nice.”

In Congress, party is all, but gender can help. “There is a bond among the women in Congress that goes beyond party,” said Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington, who remembers that women from both parties had a shower for her when her son Cole was born three years ago.

“There are experiences and issues that bond us together, and we understand that we are still deep in the minority in terms of being women,” she said. “We often work together on things that are important to women and children and families, and there is a unique opportunity that we have, being women, to work on these issues together. I think we all recognize it’s still challenging to win a race for Congress, period, and as women, we share a goal of getting more women elected.”

That is not to say that the women were constantly engaged in identity politics.

Ms. Giffords gave Ms. Pelosi, the Democratic leader, a Christmas ornament one year that she has kept. But that did not stop Ms. Giffords from voting against Ms. Pelosi this month when she sought, successfully, to keep her party’s top post.

But the women’s bonds thrive in many ways. Even their softball team is bipartisan, unlike the Congressional men who play against each other by party. “That has given us a nice opportunity to bond across bipartisan lines,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz said. “I think, in general, the women across the aisle are a bit more civil to each other. Maybe we will be the ones that lead by example.”

    Among Women in Congress, a Bond of Friendship, NYT, 13.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/us/14women.html

Not Just for Lawmakers

January 11, 2011
The New York Times

Representative Peter King, a Republican of Long Island, has proposed a bill that would prohibit the carrying of a gun within 1,000 feet of a member of Congress or other high-profile government official. That’s a worthy notion, so far as it goes. But how about going a step further and prohibiting the carrying of a semiautomatic weapon around 9-year-old girls? Or 79-year-old women? Or any of the other victims who were shot down in the Tucson parking lot on Saturday?

Members of Congress are understandably worried about their own safety in the wake of the shooting rampage that was centered around Representative Gabrielle Giffords. It makes sense for the Capitol Police to work more closely with local law enforcement agencies to enhance security at lawmakers’ public events. But some of the ideas being proposed would have the effect of further distancing lawmakers from the people they represent — and elevate their safety above the 100,000 Americans who are shot or killed with a gun every year.

Representative James Clyburn, a Democrat of South Carolina, said that lawmakers should no longer be treated like everyone else at airport security checkpoints, though that inconvenience seems to have nothing to do with the shooting. Representative Robert Brady, a Democrat of Pennsylvania, has proposed making it a federal crime to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening violence against all federal officials, an idea dangerously full of potential First Amendment violations. Representative Dan Burton, a Republican of Indiana, even wants to enclose the public gallery above the House chamber in Plexiglas. These ideas are unlikely to make lawmakers or the public any safer. But if members are concerned that some of the 283 million guns now in the hands of American civilians might one day be turned on them — and they should be — there are many things they can do.

They can follow the advice given on Tuesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, along with 10 other mayors, and begin restoring the nation’s gun control laws to sanity — for the protection of everyone. The most obvious first steps are to ban the extended-round magazines used in the Arizona shooting and tighten a nearly useless system of background checks.

They also can ensure that federal and state financing for outreach to the mentally ill is increased, not cut, in the budget battles to come. Jared Loughner, the man accused of the Arizona shootings, apparently received no mental health treatment, even though officials at his college were very concerned about his mental state.

Instead of hiding, lawmakers must reach out to their constituents and help calm a troubled political environment without fear or self-absorbed overreaction.

    Not Just for Lawmakers, NYT, 11.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/opinion/12wed2.html

Threats to Lawmakers Rarely Lead to Charges

January 11, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — In September 2009, a Veterans Affairs caseworker reported that a man had threatened to kill Senator John Cornyn, a Republican, and Representative Ciro Rodriguez, a Democrat, both of Texas, for failing to help him in a dispute over his retirement benefits.

In June 2009, a man called an aide to Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, and said that if she held a town hall meeting on immigration or nuclear energy — or if he saw her on the street — he would attack her.

And in May 2009, Representative Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, was in a parking lot in his district when a man driving by shouted that the lawmaker had blood on his hands over the Iraq war, had a bulls-eye on his head and was going to die.

The result in all three cases was the same: federal prosecutors declined to charge the men because they apparently had no intention of carrying out the threats, Federal Bureau of Investigation files show.

As the F.B.I. investigates the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, a review of hundreds of cases involving threats to lawmakers from 2000 to 2009 demonstrates just how hard it is to discern the real threats from mere bluster.

So far, no reports have emerged that Ms. Giffords’s assailant ever directly communicated a threat to her or her staff. In fact, studies of assaults on public figures have found that attackers have almost never telegraphed their intentions to their targets or to the authorities ahead of time. That suggests that the threats to lawmakers are likely being made by people other than those they most need to worry about.

“The hunters are those that do not directly threaten,” said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine who consults with the F.B.I.

Law enforcement officials said that the authorities must take threats seriously and make sure there is no real peril. In most instances, lawmakers report incidents to the United States Capitol Police’s threat assessment division, which refers some to the F.B.I. for further investigation.

In a small number of cases, officials have concluded that the threats were serious enough to have the person committed to a mental institution — potentially disrupting later problems — or to pursue lesser charges. But most of the time, investigators have concluded that little actual risk of an attack existed.

A review of the documents shows that some common patterns emerge. Some cases involve mentally or emotionally disturbed people who make threats but appear to lack any intent or capacity to cause harm. Sometimes they had temporarily stopped taking psychiatric medications at the time of the threat, making it hard to establish any criminal intent.

In 2008, for example, an Idaho man sent a letter to William Sali, then a Republican representative, saying that if the congressman did not help stop a city from invoking eminent domain to take a church’s property for use by a hospital, he would “blow the hospital to hell and the city too.”

The man told the F.B.I. he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and had been having “medication issues” when he wrote the letter. He said he had no intention of committing any violent acts. Because he was not believed to be “a viable threat,” the case was closed.

Another common category consists of people who vented in an overheated way.

In February 2008, for example, an Alabama man sent an e-mail to a government agency threatening Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican then campaigning for president. The man, who owned several guns, later admitted sending the e-mail, saying he “was drunk when I wrote that one” and was upset at Mr. McCain for “not campaigning in Alabama as a Republican should be.” He apologized and promised to send no more threats.

And in June 2008, the F.B.I. investigated a man who sent a vulgar fax to Representative Louise M. Slaughter of New York that she viewed as threatening. He told the F.B.I. he had not intended to threaten her — and noted that he has “suffered three strokes, uses a cane to walk, and neither has the ability nor intention of physically harming Congresswoman Slaughter.”

The case was closed without charges. In an interview, Ms. Slaughter said that even if such investigations often did not result in prosecutions, she was relieved that the authorities saw them through — and at times stepped in to provide extra protection.

“There are a lot of people in the United States that have just abject hate for the government,” she said. “And we are part of it. And if we really are going to make a major difference here in addressing this problem, we have to convince citizens of the United States that this government is not their enemy.”

While attackers almost never telegraph their intentions ahead of time, they do often show signs of fixation on public figures against whom they harbor grievances — real or imagined — and often tell a friend or a relative that they might attack them, forensic psychologists say.

Richard A. Falkenrath, former deputy commissioner of counter-terrorism of the New York Police Department, said the files demonstrated the complexity of the authorities face in protecting public officials,.

“It is really hard,” Mr. Falkenrath said. “The vast majority of threats don’t amount to anything other than that — threats. It is that small few that keep you up at night and result in what we had in Arizona.”

    Threats to Lawmakers Rarely Lead to Charges, NYT, 11.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/us/12security.html

When Congress Was Armed And Dangerous

January 11, 2011
The New York Times
By JOANNE B. FREEMAN


New Haven

THE announcement that Representatives Heath Shuler of North Carolina and Jason Chaffetz of Utah are planning to wear guns in their home districts has surprised many, but in fact the United States has had armed congressmen before. In the rough-and-tumble Congress of the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, politicians regularly wore weapons on the House and Senate floors, and sometimes used them.

During one 1836 melee in the House, a witness observed representatives with “pistols in hand.” In a committee hearing that same year, one House member became so enraged at the testimony of a witness that he reached for his gun; when the terrified witness refused to return, he was brought before the House on a charge of contempt.

Perhaps most dramatic of all, during a debate in 1850, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi pulled a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. (Someone eventually took it from his hand.) Foote had decided in advance that if he felt threatened, he would grab his gun and run for the aisle in the hope that stray shots wouldn’t hit bystanders.

Most famously, in 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor so brutally that Sumner had to be virtually carried from the chamber — and did not retake his seat for three years. Clearly, wielded with brute force, a cane could be a potent weapon.

By the 1850s, violence was common in Washington. Not long after Sumner’s caning, a magazine told the story of a Michigan judge who traveled by train to the nation’s capital: “As he entered the main hall of the depot, he saw a man engaged in caning another ferociously, all over the room. ‘When I saw this,’ says the judge, ‘I knew I was in Washington.’”

In Congress, violence was often deployed strategically. Representatives and senators who were willing to back up their words with their weapons had an advantage, particularly in the debate over slavery. Generally speaking, Northerners were least likely to be armed, and thus most likely to back down. Congressional bullies pressed their advantage, using threats and violence to steer debate, silence opposition and influence votes.

In 1842, Representative Thomas Arnold of Tennessee, a member of the Whig Party, learned the hard way that these bullies meant business. After he reprimanded a pro-slavery member of his own party, two Southern Democrats stalked toward him, at least one of whom was armed with a bowie knife — a 6- to 12-inch blade often worn strapped to the back. Calling Arnold a “damned coward,” his angry colleagues threatened to cut his throat “from ear to ear.” But Arnold wasn’t a man to back down. Ten years earlier, he had subdued an armed assassin on the Capitol steps.

As alarming as these outbursts were, until the 1840s, reporters played them down, in part to avoid becoming embroiled in fights themselves. (A good many reporters received beatings from outraged congressmen; one nearly had his finger bitten off.) So Americans knew relatively little of congressional violence.

That changed with the arrival of the telegraph. Congressmen suddenly had to confront the threat — or temptation — of “instant” nationwide publicity. As Senator John Parker Hale of New Hampshire reminded his colleagues within minutes of the Foote-Benton clash, reports were “already traveling with lightning speed over the telegraph wires to the remotest borders of the Republic.” He added, “It is not impossible that even now it may have been rumored in the city of St. Louis that several senators are dead and weltering in their blood on the floor of the Senate.”

Violence was news, and news could spawn violence. Something had to be done, but what? To many, the answer was obvious: watch your words. As one onlooker wrote to the speaker of the House shortly after Sumner’s caning, “gentlemen” who took part in the debate over slavery should “scrupulously avoid the utterance of unnecessarily harsh language.” There was no other way to prevent the “almost murderous feeling” that could lead to “demonstrations upon the floor, which in the present state of excitement, would almost certainly lead to a general melee and perhaps a dozen deaths in the twinkling of an eye.”

Unfortunately, such admonitions had little effect. The violence in Congress continued to build until the outbreak of the Civil War.

Today, in the wake of an episode of violence against a member of Congress, we’re again lamenting the state of political rhetoric, now spread faster than ever via Twitter, Web sites, text messaging and e-mail. Once again, politicians are considering bearing arms — not to use against one another, but potentially against an angry public.

And once again we’re reminded that words matter. Communication is the heart and soul of American democratic governance, but there hasn’t been much fruitful discourse of late — among members of Congress, between the people and their representatives or in the public sphere. We need to get better at communicating not only quickly, but civilly.

Joanne B. Freeman, a professor of history at Yale, is at work on a book about violence in Congress.

    When Congress Was Armed And Dangerous, NYT, 11.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/opinion/12freeman.html

Congress Weighs Enhanced Security Plan

January 10, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON, CHARLIE SAVAGE and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

This article is by Eric Lipton, Charlie Savage and Jennifer Steinhauer.

WASHINGTON — House lawmakers are considering adopting an enhanced security system that would ease the way for members of Congress to get more comprehensive protection at public appearances in their home districts.

Under the bipartisan proposal, the Capitol Police, which is charged with protecting lawmakers, would formalize its relationship with local police and sheriffs’ departments around the United States and jointly develop more standardized plans to deal with varying threat levels for town meetings or other public events, House officials said. Lawmakers could then ask the local police to execute the plans for certain events, a step now taken only on an ad hoc basis.

“The current system is based on reaction to a potential threat,” said Jamie Fleet, the Democratic staff director for the Committee on House Administration, which oversees security matters. “The new system will be more formalized — sitting down and planning a town hall or a ‘Congress in Your Corner’ event, changing the thinking of staff and lawmakers to ‘Am I doing this safely?’ ”

The answer to that question is a delicate one for members of Congress, who say they do not want to insulate themselves from constituents but also increasingly acknowledge anxiety about the volatile political climate. While security at the Capitol has intensified since the Sept. 11 attacks, there has been no comparative effort to increase protection of lawmakers outside Washington, particularly when they are at public events.

Even before the Arizona shooting on Saturday, which wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords and left six people dead, reported threats against lawmakers had been on the rise, jumping in the Senate alone to 49 incidents last year from about 30 each in 2008 and 2009, according to the Senate sergeant-at-arms. On Friday, for example, a Colorado man was arrested for threatening to set a fire around the office of Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado.

Increased security measures will be discussed at a Wednesday briefing about the Arizona attack for members of Congress. Law enforcement experts cautioned, though, that identifying threats that could prove difficult and that providing security for lawmakers at thousands of events every year might be impractical.

Some members of Congress said they were not sure if the attack should motivate any major security changes, pointing out that the last comparable event was in 1978, when a House member from California was killed.

“If we put every senator and congressman behind a thick brick wall and make them completely safe, we wouldn’t have the democracy we have today,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat and chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the Capitol Police. “So there has to be a balance.”

Mr. Schumer, who spoke at a senior center in New Rochelle on Monday after police officers did a sweep with a German shepherd and inspected cars in the parking lot, said the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms had been meeting with the chief of the Capitol Police to discuss whether any upgrades to security procedures or levels were necessary. But they have not yet made a proposal, he said.

Representative Dan Lungren, a California Republican who leads the House committee that oversees security, and Mr. Fleet, the Democratic House aide, agreed that the Capitol Police and local law enforcement authorities could never provide complete protection to lawmakers as they travel around the United States. But they said that if there was a more standardized system for requesting security at a district event, lawmakers would be more likely to take advantage of the service.

“You can have some reliance on a document of what they ought to do and members will get over any reluctance they might have,” Mr. Lungren said in an interview.

Currently, lawmakers are invited to contact the Capitol Police or sergeant-at-arms if they have been threatened, and the Capitol Police have a special threat assessment unit that evaluates security measures at a lawmaker’s office and recommends steps to improve it.

The Capitol Police force, which has about 1,600 officers, sometimes sends officers to districts with lawmakers. Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who just left the House, had a federal protective team with him last year after he received threats apparently related to his position on the health care overhaul. One came from a former Army officer, who was charged after saying he would “paint the Mackinac Bridge red” with the congressman’s blood.

Mr. Lungren said he routinely had a uniformed police officer with him at town-hall-style meetings.

But most members do not regularly request such protection. The glass on the front door to Ms. Giffords’s district office was smashed last March after the vote on the health care legislation, either after being hit with an object or some kind of pellet gun. But Ms. Giffords continued to go to public events without security.

“We were never so concerned about security that we ever canceled an event that I can recall in four years,” her spokesman, C.J. Karamargin, said Monday. “She has always prided herself on her openness and accessibility.”

But some lawmakers said the Arizona shooting should change attitudes in Congress.

“I think it needs to be a wake-up call for members who have treated security in a cavalier — their own personal security in a cavalier way,” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, said on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “When I have town hall meetings, which I have regularly, and increasingly even, even very open public meetings, there are always officers present.”

    Congress Weighs Enhanced Security Plan, NYT, 10.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/us/11security.html

Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics

January 8, 2011
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE and KATE ZERNIKE

WASHINGTON — The shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others at a neighborhood meeting in Arizona on Saturday set off what is likely to be a wrenching debate over anger and violence in American politics.

While the exact motivations of the suspect in the shootings remained unclear, an Internet site tied to the man, Jared Lee Loughner, contained antigovernment ramblings. And regardless of what led to the episode, it quickly focused attention on the degree to which inflammatory language, threats and implicit instigations to violence have become a steady undercurrent in the nation’s political culture.

Clarence W. Dupnik, the Pima County sheriff, seemed to capture the mood of the day at an evening news conference when he said it was time for the country to “do a little soul-searching.”

“It’s not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included,” Sheriff Dupnik said. “That’s the sad thing about what’s going on in America: pretty soon we’re not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office.”

In the hours immediately after the shooting of Ms. Giffords, a Democrat, and others in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, members of both parties found rare unity in their sorrow. Top Republicans including Speaker John A. Boehner and Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona quickly condemned the violence.

“An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement. “Acts and threats of violence against public officials have no place in our society.”

President Obama made a brief appearance at the White House, calling the shooting an “unspeakable act” and promising to “get to the bottom of this.”

Not since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 has an event generated as much attention as to whether extremism, antigovernment sentiment and even simple political passion at both ends of the ideological spectrum have created a climate promoting violence. The fallout seemed to hold the potential to upend the effort by Republicans to keep their agenda front and center in the new Congress and to alter the political narrative in other ways.

The House was set to vote Wednesday on the new Republican majority’s proposal to repeal the health care law that had energized their supporters and ignited opposition from the Tea Party movement. Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the new majority leader, said Saturday that the vote and other planned legislative activity would be postponed.

The original health care legislation stirred strong feelings that flared at angry town hall meetings held by many Democratic lawmakers during the summer of 2009. And there has been broader anger and suspicion rising about the government, its finances and its goals, with the discourse partially fueled by talk shows and Web sites.

Tea Party activists also condemned the shooting. Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, noted on his Web site that Ms. Giffords is “a liberal,” but added, “that does not matter now. No one should be a victim of violence because of their political beliefs.”

But others said it was hard to separate what had happened from the heated nature of the debate that has swirled around Mr. Obama and Democratic policies of the past two years.

“It is fair to say — in today’s political climate, and given today’s political rhetoric — that many have contributed to the building levels of vitriol in our political discourse that have surely contributed to the atmosphere in which this event transpired,” said a statement issued by the leaders of the National Jewish Democratic Council. Ms. Giffords is the first Jewish woman elected to the House from her state.

During last spring’s health care votes, the language used against some lawmakers was ratcheted up again, with protesters outside the House hurling insults and slurs. The offices of some Democrats, including Ms. Giffords’s in Tucson, were vandalized.

Ms. Giffords was also among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time.

“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” Ms. Giffords said last March. “But the thing is the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that.”

The image is no longer on the Web site, and Ms. Palin posted a statement saying “my sincere condolences are offered to the family of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today’s tragic shooting in Arizona. On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.” (Late Saturday, the map was still on Ms. Palin’s Facebook page.)

Democrats have also pointed out cases where Republican candidates seemed to raise the prospect of armed revolt if Washington did not change its ways.

But many Republicans have noted that they too are subject to threats and abuse, and during the health care fight some suggested Democrats were trying to cut off responsible opposition and paint themselves as victims.

Sensitive to the issue, Tea Party activists in Arizona said they quickly reviewed their membership lists to check whether the suspect, Mr. Loughner, was associated with them. They said they found no evidence that he was.

Tea Party members in Tucson had disagreed sharply with Ms. Giffords, particularly as the health care debate unfolded, but she ended up backing the measure despite the political risks. They strongly supported her opponent, Jesse Kelly, in the November election, and staged several protests outside her office.

DeAnn Hatch, a co-founder of the Tucson Tea Party, said her group had never staged any rallies against the congresswoman elsewhere, and she did not believe there were any Tea Party protesters at the event Saturday.

“I want to strongly, strongly say we absolutely do not advocate violence,” she said. “This is just a tragedy to no end.”

But others said it would be hard to separate this shooting from the ideological clash.

“At a time like this, it is terrible that we do have to think about politics, but no matter what the shooter’s motivations were, the left is going to blame this on the Tea Party movement,” Mr. Phillips, from Tea Party Nation, said on his Web site.

“While we need to take a moment to extend our sympathies to the families of those who died, we cannot allow the hard left to do what it tried to do in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing,” he wrote. “Within the entire political spectrum, there are extremists, both on the left and the right. Violence of this nature should be decried by everyone and not used for political gain.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 8, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the year when Democratic lawmakers held town hall meetings about the health care legislation. It was 2009, not 2007.

    Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics, NYT, 8.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/us/politics/09capital.html

A Turning Point in the Discourse, but in Which Direction?

January 8, 2011
The New York Times
By MATT BAI

WASHINGTON — Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin’s infamous “cross hairs” map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords’s, with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman’s apparently liberal constituents declared her “dead to me” after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.

Odds are pretty good that neither of these — nor any other isolated bit of imagery — had much to do with the shooting in Tucson. But scrubbing them from the Internet couldn’t erase all evidence of the rhetorical recklessness that permeates our political moment. The question is whether Saturday’s shooting marks the logical end point of such a moment — or rather the beginning of a terrifying new one.

Modern America has endured such moments before. The intense ideological clashes of the 1960s, which centered on Communism and civil rights and Vietnam, were marked by a series of assassinations that changed the course of American history, carried out against a televised backdrop of urban riots and self-immolating war protesters. During the culture wars of the 1990s, fought over issues like gun rights and abortion, right-wing extremists killed 168 people in Oklahoma City and terrorized hundreds of others in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park and at abortion clinics in the South.

What’s different about this moment is the emergence of a political culture — on blogs and Twitter and cable television — that so loudly and readily reinforces the dark visions of political extremists, often for profit or political gain. It wasn’t clear Saturday whether the alleged shooter in Tucson was motivated by any real political philosophy or by voices in his head, or perhaps by both. But it’s hard not to think he was at least partly influenced by a debate that often seems to conflate philosophical disagreement with some kind of political Armageddon.

The problem here doesn’t lie with the activists like most of those who populate the Tea Parties, ordinary citizens who are doing what citizens are supposed to do — engaging in a conversation about the direction of the country. Rather, the problem would seem to rest with the political leaders who pander to the margins of the margins, employing whatever words seem likely to win them contributions or TV time, with little regard for the consequences.

Consider the comments of Sharron Angle, the Tea Party favorite who unsuccessfully ran against Harry Reid for the Senate in Nevada last year. She talked about “domestic enemies” in the Congress and said, “I hope we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies.” Then there’s Rick Barber, a Republican who lost his primary in a Congressional race in Alabama, but not before airing an ad in which someone dressed as George Washington listened to an attack on the Obama agenda and gravely proclaimed, “Gather your armies.”

In fact, much of the message among Republicans last year, as they sought to exploit the Tea Party phenomenon, centered — like the Tea Party moniker itself — on this imagery of armed revolution. Popular spokespeople like Ms. Palin routinely drop words like “tyranny” and “socialism” when describing the president and his allies, as if blind to the idea that Americans legitimately faced with either enemy would almost certainly take up arms.

It’s not that such leaders are necessarily trying to incite violence or hysteria; in fact, they’re not. It’s more that they are so caught up in a culture of hyperbole, so amused with their own verbal flourishes and the ensuing applause, that — like the bloggers and TV hosts to which they cater — they seem to lose their hold on the power of words.

On Saturday, for instance, Michael Steele, the Republican Party chairman, was among the first to issue a statement saying he was “shocked and horrified” by the Arizona shooting, and no doubt he was. But it was Mr. Steele who, last March, said he hoped to send Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the “firing line.”

Mr. Steele didn’t mean this the way it sounded, of course; he was talking about “firing” in the pink slip sense of the word. But his carelessly constructed, made-for-television rhetoric reinforced the dominant imagery of the moment — a portrayal of 21st-century Washington as being like 18th-century Lexington and Concord, an occupied country on the verge of armed rebellion.

Contrast that with one of John McCain’s finer moments as a presidential candidate in 2008, when a woman at a Minnesota town hall meeting asserted that Mr. Obama was a closeted Arab. “No, ma’am, he’s not,” Mr. McCain quickly replied, taking back the microphone. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with.” Mr. McCain was harking back to a different moment in American politics, in which such disagreements could be intense without becoming existential clashes in which the freedom of the country was at stake.

None of this began last year, or even with Mr. Obama or with the Tea Party; there were constant intimations during George W. Bush’s presidency that he was a modern Hitler or the devious designer of an attack on the World Trade Center, a man whose very existence threatened the most cherished American ideals.

The more pressing question, though, is where this all ends — whether we will begin to re-evaluate the piercing pitch of our political debate in the wake of Saturday’s shooting, or whether we are hurtling unstoppably into a frightening period more like the late 1960s.

The country labors still to recover from the memories of Dealey Plaza and the Ambassador Hotel, of Memphis and Birmingham and Watts. Tucson will either be the tragedy that brought us back from the brink, or the first in a series of gruesome memories to come.

    A Turning Point in the Discourse, but in Which Direction?, 8.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/us/politics/09bai.html

A Passionate Politician and a Friend to Colleagues, Bikers and Lost Mayors

January 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — Unusual is a relative term in American political life, but Representative Gabrielle Giffords fits the bill: avid equestrian and motorcycle enthusiast, repository of arcane health care data, successful Democrat elected three times in a Republican Congressional district, French horn player and wife of an astronaut.

Ms. Giffords, who was shot and critically wounded while meeting with constituents in her district in southern Arizona on Saturday, is widely admired and liked in her state and the nation’s capital for more than her political smarts. Friends and associates describe her as the first person to arrange a party for a departing colleague, the one who will walk you across the Capitol complex to make sure you know your way, the person whom even former political opponents call a friend.

Politically, Ms. Giffords, 40, is as passionate as she is independent. She is a longtime proponent of gun rights and tough border security — she once put out a news release ahead of President Obama announcing an increase of troops at the border. She also sided with motorcycle riders who favor state legislation to ride helmet-free, as she does.

But she was equally ardent in her support of the health care overhaul last year, and once told a reporter she was prepared to lose her seat to defend it. A comer in Arizona, where she was born and grew up, Ms. Giffords was widely considered as a strong future candidate for statewide office in a state where Democrats ride uphill.

“We once got into a conversation about the meaning of life,” said Tom Zoellner, a friend of Ms. Giffords’s and volunteer on two of her campaigns. “And she had sort of made an existential decision that life was about helping other people, that life was about public service, and she was going to arrange her life around that idea.”

But it is her personality, more than her politics, that has attracted her many fans.

“When something bad happened to you, she is the first person that would show up and talk to you about it,” said Jonathan Paton, a former Arizona state senator whom Ms. Giffords defeated in 2000. Mr. Paton later won in another district, becoming her colleague.

“We would tease each other all of the time, her being a Democrat and me a Republican,” he said. “I remember when I won my primary the first time, she called to congratulate me. Let’s put it this way: you’ve got to be a pretty kind person if the person you once ran against and beat is as emotionally distraught as I am now.”

The mayor of Phoenix, Phil Gordon, recalled seeing Ms. Giffords on Capitol Hill one day, when he was wandering aimlessly in the snow. “I was lost,” Mr. Gordon said. “She had only been there a year herself, and she grabbed me, despite the fact she was going to her office, and took me across the street to where I needed to go. Taking a lost mayor from another city that isn’t even in your district is not something many people would do.”

Ms. Giffords was born in Tucson, graduated from Cornell University and Scripps College and worked in both economic development and her family’s tire and automotive business before entering politics.

She served in the Arizona Legislature from 2001 through 2005. After serving in the Arizona House of Representatives, she became the youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona State Senate.

Tapped by her party in 2006 to run for the House of Representatives, Ms. Giffords, helped by her connections within her district and a weak Republican opponent, prevailed, becoming the state’s first Jewish congresswoman and the third woman ever to represent Arizona.

“It’s a conservative district, but she is probably one of the few people who could have won it,” said Jim Pederson, the former head of the Arizona Democratic Party. “She is an extremely hard-working person, a very able fund-raiser. Most of all it’s her personality. She is constantly on the phone. I get an average of a call every 10 days from her. Now I supported her and contributed to her campaign, but I do that with a lot of candidates. Not a lot of people who have that kind of loyalty and follow-through.”

Ms. Giffords, who was known around the Hill as Gabby, was far more likely to be found locked in a room with a book on solar energy — another one of her pet issues — than at one of the local watering holes.

Mr. Zoellner said he once left a six-pack of beer in her Washington refrigerator with a note, “Use only in case of emergency,” and found it, unmoved, two years later when he borrowed the place.

In 2007, she married a Navy captain, Mark E. Kelly, making her the only member of Congress with an active-duty spouse.

The two met in China, as young leaders selected by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and have spent much of their relationship apart, due to their respective professional lives. Mr. Kelly has been an astronaut since 1996.

“The longest amount of time we’ve spent together is probably a couple of weeks at a stretch,” Mr. Kelly told The New York Times in an article that talked about their wedding. “We won’t always live this way, but this is how we started. It’s what we’ve always done. It teaches you not to sweat the small stuff.”

    A Passionate Politician and a Friend to Colleagues, Bikers and Lost Mayors, NYT, 8.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/us/politics/09profileweb.html

As Boehner Ascends, His Power Comes With Caveats

January 4, 2011
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio is set to complete a remarkable political revival Wednesday when he becomes the 61st speaker of the House, placing him squarely at the crossroads between the desires of conservative activists to reshape Washington and the reality of delivering in a divided capital.

Driven from his party’s leadership in 1998 and sidelined for nearly a decade, Mr. Boehner, a 61-year-old Ohio native who revels in his big-family, Roman Catholic roots, now faces the challenge of harnessing the Tea Party zeal that propelled him to power without disheartening those who might be expecting too much.

While he will preside over a substantial and energized Republican majority, Mr. Boehner must contend with a Democratic president with whom he has little personal history and a Democratic Senate leader who is disinclined to make Mr. Boehner’s life easier and who failed to consider hundreds of bills passed by the House even when his own party ran it.

“The problem is going to be the grass-roots movement out in the countryside,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican House member and Washington lobbyist who served with Mr. Boehner in the 1990s. “They have no sense of the limits on a party that controls only one of the three seats of power. Managing that relationship is going to be difficult.”

And that is just one of the problems confronting Mr. Boehner, a former small-business man who has been carefully preparing for his new role for months and seems to relish the chance to finally run the often-unmanageable House the way he believes it ought to be run.

“He has worked his way back, and he has thought this through,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia and part of Mr. Boehner’s inner circle from their days together in the House.

“But, gee whiz, it is not going to be easy,” Mr. Chambliss added. “We have a bunch of those House guys who are really on fire.”

Mr. Boehner’s expanded rank-and-file is populated by more than 80 newcomers — some with no elective experience — who do not seem of a mind to make the compromises that can be required when power is shared in Washington. And he sits atop a leadership team full of young and ambitious lawmakers eager to step up should Mr. Boehner falter, as did the last Republican speaker who engineered a House takeover, Newt Gingrich.

Though his job seems daunting, there are substantial opportunities as well. Mr. Boehner’s rise provides his party with a chance to recapture voters who lost faith with Republicans after they, by their own admission, spent too freely and engaged in misconduct when they last held House control. And he can showcase stark Republican policy differences with President Obama and Congressional Democrats in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential elections.

Given his own background, Mr. Boehner may have special credentials for the job of providing a bridge between Tea Party activism and Washington pragmatism.

He arrived in Washington in 1991 as something of a pre-Tea Party rabble rouser, confronting the entrenched Democratic leadership over its iron-fisted control of the House. After losing his leadership post in a Republican shake-up in 1998, he focused on committee work. As a party strategist and later as an effective legislator with close ties to lobbyists, the business community and other party operatives, Mr. Boehner has become a member of the city’s permanent managerial class, with an easygoing capacity to get things done.

At the same time, he was quick to recognize the importance to Republicans of the Tea Party movement and shared many of the fundamental sensibilities of the activists, notably his longtime refusal to accept spending on pet projects through earmarks and his criticism of federal spending.

“John Boehner is a legitimate conservative,” said Dick Armey, who became majority leader when Republicans claimed the House in 1994 and is now a leader of the Tea Party movement. “He was the first guy to raise the flag against earmarks years ago.”

Mr. Boehner and his fellow House Republicans moved quickly this week to demonstrate their commitment to less spending. They scheduled a vote for Thursday on a plan to reduce expenses of the House itself by $35.2 million, imposing reductions in salaries and expenses for leadership offices, committees and individual lawmakers’ office budgets.

“Cutting the cost of Congress is part of bringing to the people’s House the humility and modesty our constituents are expecting from us,” said a statement issued by the office of Mr. Boehner, who has studiously tried to avoid gloating in the wake of the Republican gain of 63 seats in November. He was not available for comment Tuesday.

But another legislative gambit of the new majority — setting a House vote on repeal of the health care law — illustrates the predicament Mr. Boehner is in. He can easily marshal the votes in the House to do so, but the effort is not likely to go anywhere in the Senate and would be vetoed by Mr. Obama should it somehow reach his desk.

And the rush to repeal has opened Republicans to the same attacks they employed so devastatingly on Democrats — that despite promises to run a more open House, Republicans are racing to overturn the health care law without hearings, without allowing floor amendments and without worrying about its impact on the federal deficit.

“They talk about making deficit reduction a priority, yet the first thing out of the gate they’re planning to do is to try to repeal health care reform, which explodes the deficit,” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, said Tuesday. Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the incoming majority leader, dismissed complaints about the health care battle and suggested that it was a special case that was “litigated in this last election.”

Mr. Cantor and other Republicans said the chief responsibility of the Boehner-led House would be to produce legislation, putting pressure on the Senate to take up the measures or face public discontent. “The Senate can serve as a cul-de-sac if that’s what it wants to be,” Mr. Cantor told reporters, “but, again, they will have to answer to the American people.”

As he takes over as a governing partner to Mr. Obama and Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, Mr. Boehner will be working with two members of the opposition with whom he does not have an extensive history, though they have some things in common — he shares a hardscrabble upbringing with Mr. Reid and an appreciation for golf with the president.

Mr. Boehner and Mr. Reid met in Mr. Reid’s office for a little-noted private session on Nov. 17 and, aides say, Mr. Boehner and Mr. Obama have talked by phone several times since the election. Mr. Obama also sent a birthday note to Mr. Boehner.

But Mr. Reid came out swinging against health care repeal, and Mr. Obama said the Republicans were mainly trying to appease the conservative base, comments that showed meetings and personal notes cannot paper over substantial differences. Still, Mr. Boehner, friends say, is enthusiastic about his new role.

“John is as excited as he would be about birdying the last hole and winning money from people,” Mr. Chambliss said. “He is pumped up and ready to go.”

As Boehner Ascends, His Power Comes With Caveats, NYT, 4.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/us/politics/05boehner.html