Mediaboss Marketing

Republicans in Kansasbroke ranks with the state's conservative governor Tuesday night, voting to raise tax rates and put an end to a series of cuts.

TheGOPrevolt isa defeat for Gov. Sam Brownback, who overhauled the state's tax system beginning in 2012,part of whatcalled a "real-live experiment" in conservative governance. Yet the economic boom Brownback promised has not materialized, leavingthe state government perennially short on money and forcedto reduce basic services.

Kansas's legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, but moderate GOP lawmakers joined with Democratsto override Brownback's veto of the bill to increase taxes. Eighteen of the state's 31 GOP senators and 49 of the 85 Republican members of the House voted against the governor.

Tuesday's vote was a rebuke not only for Brownback, but also for Republicansin Washington who have advocated similar cuts in taxes at the national level -- includingPresident Trump. Although Republicans in Kansas are giving up on the experiment, Trump and his alliesare hoping totry again.

The principles Trump endorsed during the campaignand in the early stages of his presidency arebroadly similar to those enacted in Kansas.As Brownback did, Trump has proposed bringing down marginal rates, getting rid of brackets andgiving a new break to small businesses.

That is no coincidence, since Brownbackis well connected to the Republican policymaking establishment in Washington.Trump and Brownback have shared economic advisers, andwhen Brownback was a U.S. senator, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), now the speaker of the House,served as his legislative director.

The victory for Brownback's opponents resulted in part from their gains in last year's election. Voters -- frustrated that public schools were closing early and the state's highways were in visible disrepair -- rejected Brownback's allies in favor of more moderate Republicans or Democrats.

"It was a hard vote for a lot of people to make last night," said Rep. Melissa Rooker, a moderate Republican who represents a suburb of Kansas City. "Kansas has had a turn to the far right, and we seem to be centering ourselves."

The legislationundoes the essentialcomponents of Brownback's reforms. The governor had reduced the number ofbrackets for the state's marginalrates on income from three to two. The legislature will restore the third bracket, increasing taxes on the state's wealthiest residents from 4.6 percent to 5.2 percentthis year and 5.7 percent next year.

Marginal rates on less affluent Kansanhouseholds will increase as well, from 4.6 percent to 5.25 percent by next year for married taxpayers makingbetween $30,000 and $60,000 a year and from 2.7 percent to 3.1 percent for those earning less than that.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) spoke at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 23, and pushed for less government regulations. "When have we added more government anywhere that's taken more taxes and you end up with a product that's more efficient that costs you less?" he asked. "What's your example?" (The Washington Post)

The legislationalso scraps a plan to bring those rates down even more in future years,one of Brownback's promises to conservative supporters.

Finally, the legislatureeliminated a cut Brownback had put in place to help small businesses. Analysts said thatthe provision had becomea loophole, as many Kansans were able to avoid paying taxes entirely by pretending to be small businesses.

Initially, the state forecast thatabout 200,000 small businesseswould take advantage of the break. As it turned out, about 330,000entities would useKansas's new rule. Thatdiscrepancysuggests that tens of thousands ofworkers claimed that their incomes were from businesses they owned rather than from salaries.

State budget analysts project the tax increase will raise an additional $600 million annually.

"What we were able to do in the last 24 hours can allow us to start down that road, to begin repairing all the damage done after living with Gov. Brownback's failed tax experiment for five years," said Annie McKay, who is the president of Kansas Action for Children, anadvocacy group in Topeka.

The Trump administration unveiled their proposal to overhaul the tax code on April 26, outlining sharply lower tax rates but fewer tax breaks. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Proponents argued that reducing taxes would stimulate the state's economy. "We have worked hard in Kansas to move our tax policy to a pro-growth orientation," Brownback said in a statement on vetoing the legislation. "This bill undoes much of that progress. It will substantially damage job creation and leave our citizens poorer in the future."

Since 2012, however, the pace of economic expansion in Kansas has consistently lagged behind that of the rest of the country.

Last year,Kansas's gross domestic product increased just 0.2 percent, federal data show, compared to 1.6 percent nationally. That was an improvementfor Kansas, though:At the end of2015, the state was in what many economists would describe as a recession, with the economycontracting two quarters in a row.

Last year's election substantially weakened Brownback's support in the legislature. In November, Democrats picked upa seat in the Senate, which has 40 members, and 12 seats in the House, which has 125. In primary elections in August, Republican voters had forced out 14incumbent alliesof the governor, replacing them with more moderate candidates.

OtherGOP lawmakers who supported Brownback retired last year, and moderate Republicans won a few of those seats as well. Rooker, the GOP legislator, said her former colleagues werenot eager to confront frustrated voters in another campaign, or to deal with the fiscalheadaches Brownback's policies had created if they did win reelection.

The legislature began this year's session with the government in a deficit of $350 million.

"People expect us to take care of business efficiently and appropriately," Rooker said. "I just think it was the pressure building. Something had to be done."

"The elections reflected a mood in Kansas that possibly Kansas politics had shifted too far to the right," said Rep. Don Hineman, a moderate Republican who represents a rural district in western Kansas. "It was time to return to a more centrist position, which is where Kansas has traditionally been governed from."

For the past several years, legislative sessions have been protracted as lawmakers have struggled to find solutions to the state's fiscal woes. That pattern continued this year, and Hineman hopes that with the tax increase enacted, lawmakers can finally leave Topeka this weekend.

On Saturday, he hopes to head back to hisfamily's farm, which his son operates. This week, they are putting in grain sorghum. "Im anxious to get back home, and my son is anxious for me to be home, because he would like to have me on the tractor," Hineman said.

See the original post here:
Kansas Republicans raise taxes, ending their GOP governor's 'real live experiment' in conservative policy - Washington Post

President Trump meeting with Republican leaders. Photo: Olivier Douliery - Pool/Getty Images

Since the beginning of Donald Trumps presidency, or even before, Democrats have been waiting for the moment when the Republican Partys indulgence would snap. In every incremental advance of the Russia story, many hear the ticking hands of an impeachment clock. But there is no clock, and there will probably be no impeachment, at least not based on the field of Trumpian misdeeds currently at play. To imagine Republicans might turn on Trump over the Russia scandal to the point of deposing him from office is to misunderstand how they have been thinking about Trump and the presidency all along.

The metaphor of the ticking impeachment clock presupposes some relationship between the evidence that comes to light and the behavior of Congress. There is little evidence that the two are linked. Or, at least, the link is so weak that there is hardly enough room for additional evidence to produce the necessary response in Congress. One a scale of zero to ten, with ten being a videotape of Trump speaking in Russian to his handlers from the Kremlin, like Kevin Costner in the last scene in No Way Out, were currently at about 7.5. Trump repeatedly demanded loyalty from the FBI director, asked that he halt his investigation into the Russia scandal, instructed other intelligence officials to pressure him to end the investigation the precise action that forced Richard Nixon to resign and then fired Comey for refusing to do so. Many of his associates have been caught lying about their meetings and financial ties with Russia and what they said at those meetings. His son-in-law and close adviser tried to establish a secret line of communication to Russia. All of this took place after Trump appeared on camera during the campaign asking Russia to hack his opponents emails. (This is not even to mention the ongoing profiteering from his office that, in a normal presidency, would be an all-consuming mega-scandal in its own right.)

Watch: All of the times Donald Trump has shown hes his own worst enemy.

The vast majority of the Republican Party has absorbed these developments, a numbing procession of leaks and shocking news developments, with no diminished confidence in Trump whatsoever. I travel in this state every single day top to bottom, east to west, big cities and small towns, and I have yet had anybody come up to me and say theyre worried about Russia messing with our elections, says Republican senator Luther Strange of Alabama. I have no doubt that Russia tried to meddle in our election. Theyre going to continue trying to just like they have my entire lifetime. Others have shifted the focus to nefarious deep state bureaucrats who have found the incriminating evidence. Both these arguments are ways of saying that any actions by Trump and his staff are benign by definition, and any evidence of crimes he has committed is actually evidence of crimes committed against him.

Other Republicans have expressed unease with the president. This group appears on the surface to present a greater danger, and has attracted wide attention for their occasional scoldings of Trump. But the only Republicans who have criticized Trump for his corruption and abuse of power are the ones who have opposed him from the beginning mostly intellectuals and pundits who do not work in Republican politics or conservative media. When more loyal Republicans have criticized the president, they have aimed more indirectly at his communication style and disorganization.

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial created a sensation for scolding Trump, after having largely carried water on his behalf. It seemed on the surface to indicate a fissure between the party Establishment and the president. But the actual substance of the complaint focused narrowly on Trumps self-defeating communications strategy. Mr. Trump popping off, complains the Journal, is undermin[ing] his own lawyers. For instance, the editorial notes, The White House spent days explaining that the President fired James Comey on the counsel of Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, only for Mr. Trump to tell an interviewer that he planned to dismiss the FBI director in any case.

The Journals editors do not mention that they too gamely toed the initial, obviously absurd Trump party line that the administration only fired Comey at Rod Rosensteins behest. While they obviously feel humiliated, the Journals editors arent complaining about Trump firing the FBI director for investigating him, or even that he Trump lied about it. The complaint is that he stopped lying about it and made the people who endorsed his lie look silly.

While it may seem puzzling to liberals, this kind of behavior is consistent with the method of the conservative movement. The conservative movement takeover of the Republican Party began in the 1960s and took decades to complete. Conservatives still have not lost their sense of being an insurgent movement that might at any moment be betrayed by the party Establishment. Conservatives think of their role as quasi-independent, but they also imagine it as focusing exclusively on enforcing fealty to their doctrine by politicians who might otherwise be inclined to wander. The scenario they are built to fight against is the Republican president who colludes with Democrats, not one who colludes with foreign dictators. If the president is fighting against the opposition party, they assume he is acting correctly. Conservative organs like National Review originally viewed Richard Nixon with hostility, and perverse as it may sound came to his defense because of Watergate.

Many conservatives opposed Trump during the primaries because they suspected, with good reason, that his conservatism was shallow or insincere. They worried that, once elected, Trump would abandon their priorities and pursue the most expedient course.

But Trump has not done that at all. The policies or talking points Trump has abandoned are the centrist ones: He would protect Medicaid from cuts, give everybody terrific coverage, hammer the big banks, spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure, and cut deals with both parties. This week, Trump formally abandoned the last possible area of ideological compromise in infrastructure, clarifying that his plan relies on private industry, states, or cities ponying up the money. Trumps budget actually cuts federal investments in infrastructure. He has positioned himself to the right of even House Republicans on domestic spending, and continues to push for their grossly unpopular plan to cut a trillion dollars from Obamacare. The Never Trump conservative argument that Trump is not a conservative one that I, too, made repeatedly during the Republican primaries is not only no longer relevant, it is no longer true, points out the popular conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager.

Trump is faithfully supporting the conservative agenda, so most conservatives faithfully support him. Their concerns are pragmatic ones about his effectiveness on behalf of their common agenda, rather than moral objections to the legitimacy and propriety of his actions. Trump may have committed impeachable offenses, but the impeachment clock has not even begun to move.

Regardless of what the president said to the FBI director, his insistence on inappropriate direct meetings amplifies his lack of respect for the law.

A majority of voters say Trump is dishonest and a bad leader, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.

Senator Richard Burr cut in while she was questioning Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

The former FBI director just confirmed that Trump repeatedly tried to compromise the independence of federal law enforcement.

In the nations most expensive House race, Jon Ossoffs opponent stepped in it.

In a low-turnout contest in a dark-blue L.A. district, state legislator Jimmy Gomez exploited his many advantages to win.

ISIS has taken credit for attacks that killed 12, but Iran has used that to accuse Saudi Arabia of involvement, heating up a regional crisis.

The more attacks happen, the more his overheated talk seems warranted. And the more he talks, the less safe we become.

Trump did not tell them to influence the investigation, they said, but they refused to say if he asked.

A Labour-led coalition government is shockingly possible.

It is, of course, a dumb idea.

If James Comeys Senate Intelligence Committee testimony boils down to his side of the story versus Trumps, hes bringing some FBI backup.

Monuments that went up to celebrate the white supremacist triumph in successfully setting up Jim Crow should come down now.

Wray is a former assistant attorney general and was Chris Christies attorney during the Bridgegate scandal.

Theres almost literally nothing Trump could do to make Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell remove him from office.

Comey is set to testify on how he went from having Trumps respect to being dismissed as a nut job in less than a year.

Democrat Phil Murphy drowned his primary opponents in money, and begins the general election as the favorite over Christie protg Kim Guadagno.

A report in Forbes suggests Eric Trump paid foundation money to the Trump Organization for expenses he told donors were nonexistent.

Hes totally willing to turn devoted supporters and staffers into scapegoats. Thats going to cause big problems.

Continue reading here:
Trump Can Commit All the High Crimes He Wants. Republicans Aren't Going to Impeach Him. - New York Magazine

But they will pretend to try anyway.

Donald Trump and House Republicans in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 4, 2017. (Reuters / Carlos Barria)

House Republicans will go into work tomorrow and pass a bill designed to strip away virtually everything of value in the last round of President Obamas 2010 financial reforms. And then everyone will get on with their lives, because the bill has no chance whatsoever of becoming law.

House Financial Services Committee Chair Jeb Hensarling, aficionado of industry-paid junkets, knows this. House Speaker Paul Ryan knows this. Not a soul in Congress believes that the CHOICE (Creating Hope and Opportunity for Investors, Consumers and Entrepreneurs) Act, the Houses Dodd-Frank overhaul, will see the light of day. But theyre passing it anyway.

And thats the difference between Republican and Democratic conceptions of legislative power.

Lets start by pointing out that the Choice Act is a bad bill. The acronym of the title suggests banks would have to make a choice: suffer under the allegedly burdensome financial regulations we have today, or maintain a ratio of liquid assets to overall debtknown as a leverage ratioof 10 percent. Higher leverage ratios give banks the ability to absorb losses in case of catastrophe. Theres a germ of an idea here; simple requirements like leverage ratios are easier to enforce than the maddening complexity of much of Dodd-Frank. And if bankers are responsible for their own mistakes with their own money, you could imagine a lighter regulatory touch.

But heres the problem: Theres no penalty for violators of the leverage rules. Under the act, if leverage ratios fell below the threshold for a regulatory exemption, a bank would get a year to rewrite its capital plan. So you could easily envision banks jumping back and forth, reaching compliance with leverage rules and then falling out, facing no sanction for doing so. A rule without enforcement isnt a rule, and the only choice for Wall Street in the Choice Act is to do whatever it wants.

Added to this false choice is a dismantling of Dodd-Franks biggest features. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be gutted, with its jurisdiction constrained and its budget subject to congressional meddling. Tools to unwind banks in a crisis would be repealed. Enhanced supervision of systemically important financial institutions would be eliminated. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registration for hedge funds and private equity firms would be jettisoned. Stress-test methods would be publicly disclosed, allowing banks to prepare for these examinations of their balance-sheet health. The Volcker rule, preventing big banks that take deposits from gambling with customer funds, would be ditched.

House Republicans mainly dont talk about these features, preferring to focus on regulatory relief for community banks and credit unions; the CHOICE Act exempts these institutions from most Dodd-Frank rules and reporting requirements. Thats literally the only thing you hear about from the House GOP, that Dodd-Frank unfairly caused the premature death of Main Street banks (which have been dying for decades amid the same market concentration afflicting the rest of the economy, with Dodd-Frank neither accelerating or decelerating that trend).

Incredibly, Republicans are selling this community bank relief feature as their version of Glass-Steagall. That famous regulation concerned the separation of commercial and investment banking, but in Republican hands, it just means unburdening smaller banks more than the already unburdened mega-banks. They are using the name of one of the historys prominent bank regulations to sell deregulation. There was an outside shot than an actual Glass-Steagall restoration, sponsored by Democrat Marcy Kaptur and Republican Walter Jones, would get a vote along with the CHOICE Act. But Republicans on the House Rules Committee quickly shot that down, and so Thursdays vote will just be on the CHOICE Act.

The Senate has a CHOICE Act too: Its about education scholarships. Thats how much the CHOICE Act is disrespected on the other side of the Capitol, where they have no interest in or ability to pass such an overhaul. Any legislation of this type would need eight Senate Democrats to overcome a filibuster, which is about eight more than this kind of package could attract. The CHOICE Act is purely a framework in theory, and will never exist in practice.

Even the White House, in its statement of support for the CHOICE Act, concluded by writing the Administration looks forward to working with the Senate on arriving at a final piece of legislation, admitting that the bill as it is wont reach the finish line.

So why bother with the CHOICE Act at all? The answer is that Republicans would rather send a message than send a law to the president. In 2009, Democrats tried to pinpoint legislation that could actually pass, and delivered as much as possible. Given the diversity of the Democratic caucus at that time, the results were incremental, but they did actually exist.

Republicans have no interest in bending on principle. The House has spent half a year making the same kinds of messaging votes they did when they knew Barack Obama would veto the finished product. Theres probably a bill out there that would reduce Dodd-Frank rules for community banks (although theres plenty of tailoring in bank supervision already) that could pass Congress; in fact, here is that bill. But Republicans dont want to make the choice of getting that done without freeing the big banks as well. So they pass the CHOICE Act, and it falls into the ether, and they can say to their lobbyist pals that they tried.

This is ultimately why congressional Republicans have full legislative control in Washington but no legislative accomplishments. Its highly unusual for a dominant political party to do nothing with that power. But Republicans in Congress are more interested in making speeches than in making laws. And that cedes the playing field for governing almost entirely to Donald Trump.

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

In the case of financial regulation, the administrations goals align with the intentions of the Choice Act. Trump has continually selected a rogues gallery of bank executives and corporate lawyers to oversee the industries where they used to work. Just this week, he picked Joseph Otting, the former CEO of OneWest Bank, to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. So both OneWest CEOs in the banks ignominious history, Otting and Steve Mnuchin, command top regulatory positions. SEC chair Jay Clayton, former law partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, just hired Steven Peikin, former law partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, to run the agencys enforcement division.

These personnel moves are playing out exactly as youd expect. Enforcement is expected to be light to nonexistent. Rules are expected to exist in name only. Banks are expected to run wild.

But this repeal by neglect is temporary by design. A new administration would carry new priorities. Only statutory law can maintain policy continuity. But Republicans dont want to do the work. Instead they write the Choice Act and other sparkle-pony wishes for industry that have no chance of success, abdicating their lawmaking role. They might as well not exist. And when the current White House occupant has a scattershot relationship to reality, thats downright dangerous.

Read the original:
Republicans Can't Really Repeal Dodd-Frank - The Nation.

New York Times

Cuomo Assails Six New York Congressional Republicans New York Times Such remarks were a departure for a politician generally considered a pragmatic centrist one who often works closely with Republicans in Albany whose experiences as an endorser have been mixed at best. In 2014, for example, during his re-election ... Cuomo Wants to Unseat House Republicans, But Will It Work?Roll Call Democrats launch campaign to oust NY RepublicansRochester Democrat and Chronicle Dems target Collins, other NY Republicans in 2018 House electionsBuffalo News New York Daily News -Auburn Citizen (blog) -The Daily Caller -Governor Andrew M. Cuomo - NY.gov all 69 news articles »

Read more here:
Cuomo Assails Six New York Congressional Republicans - New York Times

New York Times

Without Obama as a Unifier, Republicans Are Fragmented New York Times WASHINGTON A Republican-only attempt in the Senate to repeal the health care law is limping along, hobbled by giant divisions within the party over how to deal with Medicaid, among other issues. President Trump says a tax bill is winding its way ... Republicans on the RunU.S. News & World Report In Trump era, can you be moderate and Republican?Crosscut The Real 'Resistance' to Trump? The GOP Congress.POLITICO Magazine New Republic all 264 news articles »

View post:
Without Obama as a Unifier, Republicans Are Fragmented - New York Times