GOP Failure Watch Part IV (the Majority in Congress edition)

Will be reported as having been at the meeting? Will have been reported as being at the meeting? Will be at the meeting, as has been reported?

 

I don't think there's a right way to phrase that sentence.

So I'm going to decree that mine, and your second one, are the only acceptable ones.

Mods, make the appropriate changes to the codex.

 

Lil Paulie Ryan & Mitch to Republicans:

"Go home, enjoy the recess. When y'all get back we'll work on something in our wheelhouse...tax cuts for millionaires & billionaires" (big cheer from Republicans) "we're just not good at helping the vast majority of Americans" (everyone nods in agreement).

 

We have a debt ceiling battle and a budget/continuing resolution battle for the second half of the year. I expect a self-inflicted government shut-down around October/November. Why? Well, just read this:

http://theweek.com/articles/711503/why-gop-congress-most-unproductive-164-years

Just six months ago, it looked like the Republican Party was about to go on a legislative blitzkrieg, shredding law after law passed by the Obama administration. ObamaCare would be vaporized and replaced with a nickel rattling inside an empty Mountain Dew can. Dodd-Frank was sure to be tossed aside for a transparent giveaway to Wall Street. And Republicans would pass their regressive tax reform, their perplexing border-adjustment tax, and so much more. The GOP hadn't held total power in American politics since 2006, and the party had become much more conservative in the interim. And instead of George W. Bush, a man who recognized at least some theoretical limits on free market fundamentalism, the new Congress would work with a sub-literate tabula rasa named Donald Trump, a man who could probably be persuaded to inject himself with experimental medication if an important-seeming person whispered "do it" in his ear.

But a funny thing happened on the way to libertarian utopia. Indeed, it turns out that the GOP-controlled Congress can't seem to pass any meaningful laws at all. Either they have forgotten how, or the divisions in their own increasingly radicalized caucus are proving too difficult to surmount. Whatever the explanation, thus far these GOP legislators are on track to be the least productive group since at least the Civil War.

Now, okay, technically the Ryan-McConnell 115th Congress is so far actually a bit more active than recent Congresses, if you measure by the 43 laws that President Trump has adorned with his garish signature. Obama was at 40 at this point in 2009. George W. Bush had signed even fewer midway through 2001. But sheer number is not the best way to think about how much is being achieved. As The Washington Post's Philip Bump pointed out, a majority of the bills signed by Trump thus far have been one page long, meaning many are just symbolic or ceremonial.

Some of this very brief legislation has also been passed under the Congressional Review Act, a previously obscure statute that allows Congress to nullify recently enacted federal regulations. The CRA had been used just once before Trump took office, and yet 14 of the 43 bills signed into law by the president have been CRAs. Most of them roll back Obama-era protections against various kinds of transparent evildoing, like preventing coal mining within 100 feet of streams. They're not meaningless, but the Voting Rights Act they are not.
​

And the highlighted parts are as good analogy for the "Trump doctrine" as you will read.

 

Skip to 1:20

 

Here's an argument against voting for "moderate" Senators of the other party. Cory Gardner has voted in line with Trump's position 95% of the time in this term, Dean Heller 93%, Jeff Flake 95%. Susan Collins at 86% and Rand Paul at 88% are the only GOP Senators under 90%.

The Dems. interestingly, are more spread out. (Not what I would have thought.) Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp are above 50%. while Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren are in single digits.

This courtesy of 538.

 

The_God_King [score hidden] an hour ago

"Oh my god, I am a huge failure! Even with both houses of congress, the white house, and a stolen seat on the Supreme Court, I can't still can't kick enough poor people off their health to give tax breaks to the wealthy! It's just like that gypsy woman said!"

-McConnell, probably.

 

The fail is strong with this congress...

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/18/house-republicans-spending-plan-240673

House GOP leaders are resorting to Plan B on their spending strategy after falling woefully short of the support needed to pass a massive government funding package without Democratic votes.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced Tuesday night that the House will vote next week on a measure that includes just four of the 12 bills needed to fund the federal government. That decision comes after GOP leaders failed to get enough Republican support to pass the full dozen without the help of their minority-party counterparts.

Story Continued Below

The so-called “minibus” or “security-bus” will include measures that would fund the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the Legislative Branch, the Energy Department and water projects.

After launching a whipping operation Monday night to gauge interest in voting on the full spate of spending bills, GOP leaders walked away with a tally of dozens of Republican lawmakers who said they couldn’t commit — as well as several hard “no’s” — to voting for the partisan bundle of 12 bills, according to Republican lawmakers and aides.

/quote

 

A lot of this is over food stamps in the farm bill, I've heard. The failure of the farm bill could destroy agriculture in the country.

 

You mean, subsidies for big agro? Yeah, I understand that we need to make sure that our food is protected and cheap, but small family farms have gone the way of small family business (mostly extinct), and now we have huge agri-businesses controlling most of the food production.

http://www.denverpost.com/2013/07/19/farm-bill-should-end-subsidies-for-agribusiness-giants/

Current agricultural subsidy policy is now a bloated relic of its original purpose as a safety net for small farms. Since 1995, taxpayers have shelled out $277 billion in agricultural subsidies. Of that, 74 percent has gone to just 4 percent of farms. That means billion-dollar companies like Cargill and Monsanto slurp up most of the dollars, while small farms that could actually use the help get almost nothing. In fact, only 38 percent of farms collect any subsidy payments at all.

These subsidies are emptying our wallets, but they’re also hurting our health. Most U.S. agriculture subsidies support just 10 specific crops, with corn and soy getting the bulk of them. Only 1 percent of the corn we grow is the familiar sweet corn you can find in groceries or farmers’ markets. Much of it ends up feeding livestock and producing fuel, but an enormous quantity ends up getting processed into unhealthy additives like high fructose corn syrup. In fact, of the $277 billion spent on agricultural subsidies since 1995, CoPIRG recently found that $18 billion went to various forms of junk food ingredients, ranging from corn syrup to vegetable oils and shortening.​

 

In other words, 93% of the money went to good ingredients ... I can live with that.

Speaking of which, for the life of me I can't convince the office Republican -- not a Trumpster, just a rank-and-file Republican -- that the Clinton Foundation wasn't terrible and didn't skim every penny. He flat-out does not believe me, even when I show him independent charity ratings.

The need to HATE HILLARY is so very strong with anybody who is not a registered Democrat. Independents are similar in that regard. If bad things didn't exist about Hillary, they would need to invent them. And, they often do.

OK off topic, but since we're talking numbers and quality scores and such ...

 

Mark Meadows wants to cut funding to the CBO and replace it with an amalgamation of scoring from Heritage, the AEI, Brookings, and the Urban Institute.

 

Another front in the War On Truth.

 

No, no. It's called Alternative Scoring, Chuck.

 

Bump.

Sure enough, the GOP can't possibly make its "tax reform" bill revenue neutral, and so instead it is proposing a budget-deficit ballooning series of tax cuts, without spending cuts. Fiscal candy.

The GOP-leaning posters who criticized Obama for raising the budget deficit have pretty much been banned from this forum, as they should have been, because they never did care about the deficit and were instead merely trolls. But let's extend that principle further. All Republicans are trolls. I will die and go to my grave with the GOP committing fiscal irresponsibility, all the while piously claiming that no it's the other guys who do that, and the GOP cares about our children's future.

Uh-huh.

 

Can we extend your tirade to those who vote for candidates that won't be elected under the premise that the two main parties are the same? I mean, Gore was clearly the same as W, Clinton would be just as bad as Trump, amirite?

 

If they claim that the size of the budget deficit is an important issue, then yes we can. And a lot of them (although not all) do.

 

This is unbelievable.

The House is launching two new investigations, one into DOJ’s handling of the Hillary email probe, and the other into that uranium sale.

 

Is it? I think it might be the opposite of unbelievable.

 

The House is irredeemable trash. The Senate will soon be joining it.

 

What's weird is that they're doing exactly what they would be doing had Clinton won the election. Only starting it 8 months later.

 

They didn't want to govern when they ran in 2010. They didn't want to govern when they won in 2010. And they don't want to govern now.

We need to stop letting them hold power until they are ready to govern again.

 

They do want to serve their constituents though. Witness that banking bill that slithered through the senate last night.

 

https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...lican-party-retirement-profile-feature-215741

Politico interviewed Boehner. It's very long. I've excerpted the highlights. It's much better than you'd expect considering it's Politico.

"Breaking the ice, I mention some news of the day—that Trey Gowdy appears likely to become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The previous chairman, Jason Chaffetz, had abruptly announced his resignation from Congress; House conservatives had hoped that Jim Jordan, a senior member on the committee, might pursue the chairmanship. Boehner grins. “Gowdy—that’s my guy, even though he doesn’t know how to dress,” he says. Then Boehner leans back in his chair. “******** Jordan. ******** Chaffetz. They’re both assholes.”

"“He could practically never deliver his votes,” Pelosi tells me. When I ask Boehner about this, during a rain delay at Wetherington, he smirks. “It’s hard to negotiate when you’re standing there naked,” he says. “It’s hard to negotiate with no dick.”"

"When I ask Boehner whether the Republican Party can survive this, he cuts me off. “There is no Rep—.” He stops himself. “You were about to say, ‘There is no Republican Party,” I tell him. He shrugs. “There is. But what does it even mean? Donald Trump’s not a Republican. He’s not a Democrat. He’s a populist. He doesn’t have an ideological bone in his body.” So who, I ask, is the leader of the party? “There is nobody,” he says.

I ask Boehner what he thinks historians will make of his speakership. “They’ll be talking about the end of the two-party system,” he replies."

"Boehner worries about the deepening fissures in American society. But he sees Trump as more of a symptom than the cause of what is a longer arc of social and ideological alienation, fueled by talk radio and Fox News on the right and MSNBC and social media on the left. “People thought in ’09, ’10, ’11, that the country couldn’t be divided more. And you go back to Obama’s campaign in 2008, you know, he was talking about the divide and healing the country and all of that. And some would argue on the right that he did more to divide the country than to unite it. I kind of reject that notion.” Why is that? “Because it wasn’t him!” Boehner replies. “It was modern-day media, and social media, that kept pushing people further right and further left. People started to figure out … they could choose where to get their news. And so what do people do? They choose places they agree with, reinforcing the divide.”"