Mediaboss Marketing

Republicans were trying to tamp down a conservative rebellion Wednesday and keep a stopgap spending bill on track ahead of a major vote Thursday, hoping to prove their party could govern and in the process trap Democrats in a shutdown showdown.

The bill includes government funding through mid-February, extends the popular Childrens Health Insurance Program and delays a series of unpopular Obamacare taxes, though it doesnt include any action on immigration something Democrats had demanded.

Top Democrats and Republicans did manage Wednesday to restart negotiations over a solution for illegal immigrant Dreamers by holding their first meeting in a week. In what passes as progress on Capitol Hill, they agreed to meet again Thursday to talk about how to continue meeting moving forward toward a bill that meets President Trumps four goals.

What we are trying to do is just get a schedule of meetings, said Sen. Thom Tillis, North Carolina Republican. That was the goal [to] get in a room.

Given the time crunch, its unlikely any immigration deal could be added to the spending bill, which Republican leaders have scheduled for a vote on the House floor Thursday.

Republicans had hoped for easy passage in the House, where their numbers control the process, and send the bill to the Senate, where Democrats would have to decide whether to either accept the deal or filibuster, sending the government into a partial shutdown.

Republican leaders saw a chance to flip the script that for more than two decades has given them the blame for shutdown showdowns.

But conservatives were undermining those plans, threatening to defeat the spending bill unless it catered to their own demands for more military money and a promise to vote on a strict immigration crackdown bill in the future.

Rep. Mark Meadows, North Carolina Republican and leader of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, said enough of his members were ready to vote against the stopgap bill to prevent it from passing without Democratic votes.

I think that the Freedom Caucus has always been willing to take the hard votes when they believe that theyre speaking for millions of Americans who feel like Washington, D.C., has forgotten them, Mr. Meadows said.

But White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said in a Fox News interview Wednesday evening that it looked like leaders would be able to avert a shutdown.

It would seem that they have the votes to continue funding the military, take care of the child health care issue and prep some other things, he said. So as I understand it, they have the votes and theyre fairly confident.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said Wednesday morning that Republican leaders hadnt taken the temperature of their members, but he was hoping both parties would support the stopgap bill.

To block funding for our military with a Friday deadline over unrelated issues just makes no sense to me. Its wrong, Mr. Ryan said.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Mr. Trump doesnt like short-term spending bills but thinks this one is necessary.

The president certainly doesnt want a shutdown. And if one happens, I think you only have one place to look, and thats to the Democrats, who are holding our military and our national security hostage by trying to push through other policies that have nothing to do with the budget, she said.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said its Republicans who would suffer.

Theyre in charge, Mr. Schumer said. Donald Trump has repeatedly said on tape, over and over again, what the country needs is a good shutdown.

Although Republicans could pass the bill without Democratic support in the House, they would need Democrats to vote with them to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. The chamber has just 51 Republicans, and one of them, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, indicated he would vote against the bill.

Mr. Graham and Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, had been negotiating an immigration plan that they wanted to be part of the spending deal. But Mr. Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, made clear that they wouldnt allow the Graham-Durbin deal to reach the floor since the White House opposed it.

Mr. Trump repeated that opposition in an interview Wednesday with Reuters.

Its the opposite of what I campaigned for, said Mr. Trump, calling the proposal horrible and very, very weak.

The plan included a generous pathway to citizenship to perhaps millions of illegal immigrants but delivered Mr. Trump less than 10 percent of his border wall and no substantive changes to the overall level of chain migration.

Mr. Graham and Mr. Durbin released details of the plan Wednesday evening and said they have a total of seven Republicans supporting them.

Mr. Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, was still going through the motions to back his bill but appeared to be acknowledging it was moribund as he rejoined negotiations with his counterparts: Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, both Republicans, and Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, a Democrat.

Were all highly motivated by the fact that come March the 5th, this program will no longer be available, and all of the work permits that currently exist for the 690,000 DACA recipients will go away, said Mr. Cornyn. And so were all committed to getting to yes, and were going to keep working hard until we get there.

Democrats had argued for a self-imposed deadline of this Friday rather than March 5.

Mr. McConnell seemed to put pressure back on the White House to broker a final immigration deal.

Im looking for something that President Trump supports, and he has not indicated what measure he is willing to sign, Mr. McConnell told reporters, saying the Senate can move to a bill as soon as we figure out what he is for.

House Democrats meeting with Mr. Kelly earlier in the day said they were disappointed that the White House wasnt talking specifics.

There either is a proposal or there isnt a proposal, said Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, Illinois Democrat.

Mr. Gutierrez also said Mr. Kelly called Mr. Trumps campaign vision for a border wall paid for by Mexico not fully informed.

Kelly took credit for educating the president on the wall and that a concrete barrier from sea to shining sea was no longer the conception of border security barriers supported today by the White House, Mr. Gutierrez said.

Stephen Dinan contributed to this report.

Read more from the original source:
Republicans aim to avert rebellion, shutdown

Story highlights

Now, with Republicans in control of the House, the Senate and the White House, the party is being forced to confront its deep divisions over immigration, which threaten to compromise its capacity to provide coherent governance.

The debate is matching various party factions against one other and testing the willingness of the Republican base to accept a necessary compromise with Democrats that is certain to be portrayed by some as a moment of political betrayal.

"Everybody has their own franchise ... but somebody has to put forward a document, somebody has to put forward a bill," Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake said Wednesday. "I don't see any other game in town."

For Trump, the immigration policy debate marks a watershed moment. It is one of the first times that he has been required to show genuine political courage, to take steps likely to alienate his loyal voters, who have stuck with him through everything.

All presidents reach such a moment sooner or later, when the national interest, the requirements of governance and even their own legacies require them to expunge political capital they have spent years building.

Trump's improvised and shifting positions over the past few days on what he wants to see in the bill suggest that he has not yet reached the moment when hesitation solidifies into resolution and trust in political fate.

Yet Republicans on Capitol Hill say that only an unequivocal statement by Trump about the bill he wants to see, and a sincere effort to offer cover to conservative lawmakers, will allow a compromise to get to his desk.

Closing the deal

Given the central role played by immigration in his presidential campaign, Trump may be the only personality in Washington who can close the deal.

But the President's comment Tuesday at a bipartisan meeting at the White House that his position would be "what the people in this room come up with" struck many of his allies in Congress as an abdication of leadership, and well short of the level of commitment needed to bring the party together.

That has left the fate of the immigration bill, despite multiple efforts by different groups in Congress to find a solution, in limbo.

"In terms of how we get to the finish line, I'm not sure I see that yet," one Republican senator told CNN on Wednesday on condition of anonymity. "Everyone seems to think there's the outlines of a deal, but like I said, I'll believe it when I see it."

For Republican lawmakers, the showdown marks a moment when the responsibilities of power clash with their pursuit of ideological purity.

The party is split between comparative moderates who want to solve the issue, understand the political and humanitarian weight posed by the plight of those affected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and believe that the GOP must ease its position on immigration to ensure future viability. They include South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Flake, who have fought for years to enact immigration reform and are part of the 'Gang of Six' GOP and Democratic senators seeking a deal.

The chasm that the party must traverse is huge. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Wednesday he could not countenance voting for the kind of bill he understands would be put forward by the gang of six.

"It would be inconsistent with the promises made to the working men and women of this country that we would put them first, so I very much hope Congress doesn't do so," he said.

Potent Issue

No one in the Republican Party doubts the potency of immigration. Key figures in the conservative media have warned it is the one issue that could tear the party apart and even threaten Trump's hold on his dedicated base voters.

In fact, immigration is an issue that changed the face of American politics, since it was used deliberately by Trump to build an insurgent power base that eviscerated the Republican primary field in the 2016 campaign.

The current debate is also forcing Democrats into a searing process of political self-examination -- since the fate of DACA recipients is as important to their grass roots as the wall is to Trump's. Failing to fight their corner could have consequences for the party's support among Hispanic voters, who are vital to the party's hopes of winning back power on Capitol Hill this year and the White House in 2020.

But since it is in power, the price for the Republican Party has never been so acute if it fails to find a resolution for DACA recipients. Overwhelming majorities of Americans support shielding people who were brought to the US illegally as children through no fault of their own, and the specter of mass deportations could be hugely damaging to the GOP in already tough midterm elections.

Even lawmakers who oppose granting a path to citizenship for DACA recipients understand the need to avert that nightmare scenario.

"Right now, I think the best way to do this is not to offer any kind of long-term citizenship, but legalization instead," said Rep. Mark Walker, the leader of the conservative Republican Study Committee.

As well as the national political consequences of acting, or not acting, the DACA imbroglio is forcing the GOP to question longtime and fundamental positions on the details of immigration as never before.

That journey into the party's soul includes finally coming up with a definition of what exactly Trump means -- and will accept -- when it comes to funding the border wall that he placed at the center of this campaign.

Will the President -- and his voters -- settle for an amalgam of walls, fences and electronically monitored border areas broken by areas of impassable topographical features like rivers and mountains, for instance?

Then the GOP must shape its own position on questions that include whether DACA recipients should be allowed to bring their parents or grandparents into the country once they are legalized. The party must arrive at a definition of exactly what it means by border security and balance the demands of its rambunctious base with other Republican constituencies like business and agricultural groups that are alienated by hard-line GOP positions on workplace verification systems like E-Verify.

The politics of the debate are so treacherous that there is no guarantee that any compromise forged by the various interest groups in the GOP caucus will win majority support in the party or in Congress, a dynamic that often played out in the health care and tax reform debates and can make assessing the progress of any reform effort highly uncertain.

"Just because we have two groups negotiating their position, they don't speak for everybody," said Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy.

"I mean they don't speak for me. I'm gonna see what this final product looks like."

Read more:
Republicans, Trump face immigration reckoning - CNNPolitics

Photo Christopher Serrano, 10, winces in pain as a doctor examines his infected ear at Dell Childrens Medical Center in Texas. Christopher and his younger brother stand to lose their health insurance as the CHIP program ends. Credit Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

Children from lower-income families could soon lose access to affordable health care because the Republican leaders in Congress have failed to renew the Childrens Health Insurance Program. This is a travesty.

After passing a lavish tax cut for corporations and wealthy families, Congress hastily left town last month without reauthorizing the federal-state health insurance program, which benefits nearly nine million children. Authorization expired in September, and so far states have kept CHIP going with unspent funds carried over from previous appropriations. Before Christmas, Congress allocated $2.85 billion to the program, saying that the money would take care of the childrens needs until the end of March. But that appears to have been a gross miscalculation, because the Trump administration said on Friday that some states would start running out of money after Friday, Jan. 19.

CHIP was created in 1997 and has helped halve the percentage of children who are uninsured. It has been reauthorized by bipartisan majorities of Congress in the past. But Republican leaders in Congress all but abandoned the program last fall and devoted their time to trying to pass an unpopular tax bill that will increase the federal debt by $1.8 trillion over the next decade, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis released last week. By contrast, CHIP costs the federal government roughly $14.5 billion a year, or $145 billion over 10 years.

Republicans have held childrens insurance hostage to force Democrats to accept cuts to other programs. Last year, House Republicans insisted that they would reauthorize CHIP only if Democrats agreed to offset spending on the program with cuts to Medicare and a public health program created by the Affordable Care Act. Democrats balked at those demands, given that Republicans did not bother to offset the loss of revenue from their boondoggle tax cuts.

A deal between the two sides should theoretically be easier to reach now. Thats because the C.B.O. said last week that reauthorizing CHIP would add just $800 million to the federal deficit over 10 years, much less than the $8.2 billion it had projected earlier. The budget office updated its estimates after the adoption of the tax law. That law will significantly reduce federal spending on health care by eliminating the requirement that people buy insurance, which many people do with the help of government subsidies. The budget office says that provision and a separate change to insurance regulations by the Trump administration will reduce the cost of insuring children.

Originally posted here:
Republicans in Congress Are Failing Americas Children

Three days after California finally began recreational marijuana sales, bringing its $13.5 billion black market industry into the light, Jeff Sessions began rolling back the era of legal state sales by instructing federal prosecutors to ignore the Obama-era memo that directed prosecutors to mostly ignore marijuana-related crimes in states where the drug had been legalized.

By rescinding the Cole memo, Sessions left many legal dispensary owners, marijuana growers, and recreational users in the lurch, wondering how federal prosecutors will deal with their emerging industry going forward as the White House moves in the wrong direction.

Heres a thought: Instead of letting the Department of Justice dictate the countrys drug agenda, what if lawmakers actually, you know, did their jobs and passed a law? Congress could just repeal the Controlled Substances Actparticularly the part that classifies marijuana as a Schedule I substance with no accepted medical use.

Removing marijuanas classification in the CSAand beginning to recognize legitimate medical purpose on a federal levelwould be smart not just as policy, but also because it would remove all such power from Sessions, making his decrepit decision moot.

Somewhere between 54 and 64 percent of Americans now favor legalization or decriminalization. Support for medical marijuana is at nearly 90 percent. Representatives should take the views of the people seriously and recognize the part they must play in ensuring the DOJ doesnt tread all over the will of the people. Nine states and Washington D.C. now have recreational sales, and a majority of states have legalized some form of medical use, with no apocalyptic effects. Some studies even suggest opioid use could go down if weed were readily available as an alternative painkiller.

Theres an opening here for Republicans to get on the right side of the issue, and popular opinion. Yes, there are still curmudgeonly conservatives buying into the law and order, reefer madness mentality that has caused us catastrophic harm. But some older conservatives (former Texas Governor Rick Perry, Senator Rand Paul, even Baptist televangelist Pat Robertson) are down with at least medical marijuana, if not some form of decriminalization. Plenty of younger conservatives are prepared to go fartherper Pew, around 63 percent of millennial Republicans were in favor of legalization as of 2015.

I think the Cole memo let members of Congress off the hook, said Bill Piper, senior director of the Drug Policy Alliance. It made the need for statutory change less urgent. Sessions is essentially kicking the ball into their yard, forcing them to deal with it.

They just might. Minutes after Sessions move was made public, a bipartisan group of legislators including Republican Sen. Cory Gardnerwho joined every other Republican senator in voting for his former colleagues nomination as AG, but says he did so after Sessions promised him that he wouldnt rescind the Cole memo, and thus tamper with Colorados thriving pot market, tweeted their frustration.

Meanwhile, back in March, Republican Rep. Thomas A. Garrett introduced the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2017, co-sponsored by Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, Republican Scott Taylor and a dozen others, including Republican Justin Amash. The bill would remove marijuana entirely from the hydra that is the controlled Controlled Substances Acta bold bill that has predictively stagnated since its introduction. Sessions memo could help force it forward.

Letting law enforcement worry about real crimes, and freeing up some of the money used to incarcerate low-level nonviolent offenders would be a boon for fiscal conservativeseven law-and-order types should back it. Conservatives should keep in mind that Americas punitive, rarely-rehabilitative system not only fails at helping people reform their ways, but the drug war has cost more than $1 trillion since Richard Nixon declared it 45 years ago.

Instead of trusting Sessions to sic an army of prosecutors on states, patients, and consumers in various states, Congress should take Gabbard and companys effort to repeal or amend the CSA seriously. Then, and only then, will they actually be representing the constituents they claim to care so much about.

Read the original here:
Republicans: Instead of Whining About Jeff Sessions, Legalize Pot

President Trump and congressional Republicans want Americans to think that their proposed tax legislation is all aboutincreasing economic growth.

Thats their stated goal. But the stealth goal of GOP tax cuts is to start down the path toward gutting the New Deal and the Great Society and if tax cuts pass, they might get away with it.

As I wrote in September for The Washington Post, theres no evidence that a tax cut now would spur growth. Yet leaders such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan still maintain the fantasy that their brew of income and corporate tax cuts will mean faster economic growth and better jobs being created. Its an idea belied by Trumps own tweets, in which he routinely extols the economy:

Hes not wrong. But with near-full employment and a roaring stock market, you dont cut taxes.

When past presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush proposed tax cuts on the order Trump now proposes, it was always when the economy had considerable slack: underutilized resources such as unemployed workers and idle factories. In each case, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, we were either in a recession or just past one. At times of economic slack, there can be a lot of bang-for-the-buck from a well-timed and well-targeted stimulus program. Indeed, when the stimulus takes the form of public works that will pay dividends for decades, it gives the economy a double benefit, putting unemployed workers to work at a time when wages, raw materials and interest rates are low. Its like buying something you need when its on sale.

If anything, by enacting a stimulus now, in the form of a tax cut, when the economy is near full employment, the government risks raising inflation, which would mean the stimulus generates higher prices rather than reduced unemployment when employers cant find additional workers to meet increased demand, they have little choice but to bid up wages, which get incorporated into prices.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said Nov. 14 that he was "optimistic" about adding the individual mandate repeal to the tax bill. (The Washington Post)

So, why do it? Because for decades, conservative intellectuals have pushed for big tax cuts; less to grow the economy and more because they want to starve the beast. They want to force a major overall spending cut that would be a political non-starter without first passing a tax cut that creates a deficit so large, something must be done about it. Spending cuts must be enacted, then, as they would be presented as the only way to pay for the already passed tax cuts lost revenue.

Americans for Tax Reform, for instance, led by starve-the-beast enforcer Grover Norquist, is quite open about its goals. The organizations infamous tax pledge attempts to ensure that budget deficits can never be reduced with higher taxes, only spending cuts. Other fiscal responsibility groups are passive allies. They care about deficits but tend to be far more concerned about slashing entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare than they are about opposing tax cuts. In practice, they ally with starve-the-beast advocates.

These days, if tax cut hawks nod at all to cutting deficits, its with the false promise that tax cuts bring more growth, even at lower rates, and thus more revenue available for deficit reduction. As Freedom Caucus leader, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), told Politico, What you have to do is you have to mitigate the damage by being as aggressive as you can be on tax rates, which would lessen the damage of our lack of fiscal responsibility over time. Good luck with that, congressman.

The stage is being set for an all-out attack on the welfare state the minute a tax cut is signed into law. Per an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Republican budget already assumes $4 trillion in cuts to mandatory spending over 10 years, a euphemism for Social Security and Medicare. But no action has yet been taken to implement the spending cuts.

Indeed, as The Post reported Tuesday, Republicans just added repeal of Obamacares individual mandate to their tax package to free up more than $300 billion in government funding over the next decade that Republicans could use to finance their proposed tax cuts. As The Post also reported, the Congressional Budget Office has warned that the tax cut would add $1.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade, potentially leading to an automatic cut of $25 billion to Medicare in 2018 because of a law known as paygo (pay-as-you-go) designed to prevent higher deficits.

Republicans might find a way around paygo, but its a safe bet that once the tax cut is out of the way, Trumps Office of Management and Budget will begin issuing warnings about rising deficits, financial collapse and hyperinflation unless immediate action is taken to reign them in.

Which, in turn, may create a bandwagon effect that overwhelms opposition. Thats what happened recently in Kansas, where the GOP hurt revenue by misleading Kansans about tax cuts stimulative impact to get them passed. Right-wing economist and consultant Arthur Laffer, hired by Gov. Sam Brownback, portrayed the effect of tax cuts as if increased revenue from growth would take care of budget shortfalls the same thing that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin predicts from the Trump tax proposal when he claims, The tax plan will pay for itself with economic growth.

In Kansas, when revenue collapsed, Republicans didnt respond by admitting error and restore the taxes that had been cut. They slashed university budgets, canceled highway projects and convinced reluctant lawmakers to go along with a plan to borrow $1 billion to shore up the states public pension fund. Eventually, facing continued shortfalls, Republicans voted to raise the sales tax and a tax on cigarettes which disproportionately hit the pockets of poor and working-class Kansans who had received virtually no tax cut at all. Only when spending had been slashed and regressive taxes raised did Republicans finally restore some of the taxes that had been cut.

By framing their opposition to Trumps tax plan as a worry that it does too little for the middle class, as theyve done so far, congressional Democrats risk playing into the Republican playbook by agreeing in principle to the virtue of tax cuts.

[The GOP tax plan will lead to more offshoring of jobs and a larger trade deficit]

Ive yet to hear a Democrat say that no tax cut is either necessary or justified by current economic conditions. While it is true that the middle class is suffering, its not from high income taxes, which are at a historically low level. According to the Tax Policy Center, a family with the median income pays an income tax rate of just 5.34 percent, less than half what it paid during the Reagan administration, even after the 1981 tax cut.

Trumps top economic adviser, former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn, says the benefits of the tax cut will trickle down to the middle class, an absurd suggestion. The rich arent going to buy second and third yachts just because they got a tax cut. And the idea that a tax cut for big corporations will raise wages is nonsense. Just this week, chief executivesbalked when Cohn tried to get them to agree that theyd invest in hiring if a tax cut passed. Wages fell steadily after the corporate tax rate was cut to 34 percent from 46 percent in 1986. They also fell in Britain when it cut the corporate tax. The tax savings will primarily go to corporate executives and shareholders.

Democrats should oppose any tax cut. And of course they should oppose slashing Social Security and Medicare by making these programs less attractive, it aids in their gradual abolition through privatization, another goal of the GOP. They may not have much leverage in the tax debate, but they should try to force Republicans to put on the table details about the spending cuts that their tax cut is designed to bring about.

If theyre worried about political cover, they shouldnt be: A Quinnipiac Poll released Wednesday shows that by a 2-1 margin, Americans oppose Republicans current plan.

Once we can see the whole picture, Americans will have a clearer idea of the net benefit to them. The rich dont need either Social Security or Medicare its the middle class, which depends on both, that needs to know how tax cuts and spending cuts affect them. If Social Security and Medicare cuts follow tax cuts, on net, even those who would get a tiny tax cut will be much worse off when the spending cuts are factored in. This will give a true, complete picture of the distribution of pain and gain in the GOP program.

Republicans have played this game before luring Americans toward government downsizing with the promise of tax cuts. The best way to avoid getting played again is not to play the game.

Read more from the original source:
First, Republicans want tax cuts. Next, theyll try gutting ...