2015 American Politics Thread: The 114th Congress Is in the House!

The House member for my district is going to pass away one of these days or weeks, btw. He's at home under hospice care now. Brain tumor + stroke + another brain tumor is no way to go.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/01/mississippi-rep-alan-nunnelee-diagnosed-with-inoperable-brain-tumor/

x-post. Obama's proposals to increase defense spending and domestic spending above sequestration will get rejected by the republicans and the White House knows that. But his indication of approval for more defense spending (for a country that already spends more than the next ten countries together) will just be taken as a sign of approval by Republicans to try to cut domestic spending, while increasing defense spending. So how is this good?

I guess the point is that it is good for Republican defense hawks and fiscal types to fight it out, but Obama encouraging the defense types does not seem that helpful to me.

According to the Washington Post:

. Although members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have warned of problems sustaining readiness, the military budget after adjusting for inflation is still in line with what it was in 2007, when the United States had much larger troop commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq.

nothing's getting done until 2017. i think he's trolling them, setting the terms for 2016. so now you want to increase defense spending and defense spending only, after having a fit about the deficit/debt? let's see you argue that it's good to do that but bad to increase domestic spending. rubio/walker/paul/christie/bush will flub that debate question every bit as much as they'll screw up gay marriage, abortion, and immigration

xp that does suggest that they wouldn't push for that anyway, which they would.

I hope nothing gets done. There are a few Republicans talking "entitlement" reform and tax reform, which makes me nervous because of Obama's previous endorsement of chained cpi and a grand bargain.

so far my reaction to the last few weeks has been, "What new majority?"

Nothing significant is going to pass. Obama's recent actions have clearly proven that he's a) going to accomplish as much as he can by exec order and b) setting the stage for the Dems for 2016. No big compromises that would hand the GOP poltical capital are going to happen.

When is the Supreme Court gonna hear that next Obamacare case? I see some political bloggers doing lots of 'what if' writing in regards to that.

Ah, yes. The Obamacare case where, in order to buy the plaintiff's interpretation of the law's intent the justices must find that Congress knowingly sabotaged the entire rationale for the law, rather than that it committed a minor oversight in writing a bill that ran to many hundreds of pages.

somehow it's not wasteful government spending for congress to keep hope alive about repealing nationalized romneycare, but foodstamps for starving children we cannot afford

support the troops!

http://www.stripes.com/report-pay-and-benefits-panel-to-recommend-killing-20-year-retirement-1.326293

let's pay for the oil wars with the money of those we sent to fight it rather than the people that got rich from it!

When is the Supreme Court gonna hear that next Obamacare case? I see some political bloggers doing lots of 'what if' writing in regards to that.

― curmudgeon

What else can they write about?

gettin congress working again!

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7553521/republican-dhs-shutdown

This is funny from the NY Times article on the Senate vote on the House DHS bill:

Republicans blamed Democrats for using a procedural maneuver to block the bill from coming to the Senate floor. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, warned that the president had executed a partisan “power grab” on immigration.

Let's see, McConnell is not in favor of partisanship. No, that can't be right. He must not be in favor of grabbing at power to accomplish one's ends or to prevent the opposition from accomplishing theirs. Um, no, it couldn't be that. Ah, now I got it! McConnell is spouting crap out his ass.

I'm not sure blobfish actually have enough muscles to spout anything

is there an """"explainer"""" of how the congressional GOP is actually managing to seem less capable of governing now that they have control of the Senate? Is it just that O.'s executive actions are emboldened b/c he's free from the burden of campaign optics and congress is doing the same amount of nothing as it was in recent sessions?

significant portion of GOP members have totally unachievable goals and no incentive to compromise, I'd say that's a large part of their problem

new display name here I come

This might more properly go in the "seems like it's from the Onion" thread:

http://host.madison.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/walker-strikes-truth-human-condition-from-wisconsin-idea-adds-workforce/article_a4ca4220-7211-5fc8-b2b9-0ab5313c6937.html

Shit. I guess it just wouldn't do for those college kids to be getting any big ideas now, would it?

Only if "the workforce" needs them.

aka "die Arbeitskräfte"

most current GOP members of Congress are there to raise their speaking fees, score book deals, and live in talk radio land. They're not there to legislate, but no one can say so.

so it's just continuing resolutions from here till the end of time I guess, could be worse.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_02/judis_recalibrates053978.php#

excerpt from analysis

But you can forgive John Judis for wanting to make it clear he thinks any Democratic advantage is gone, since he was the co-author, with Ruy Teixeira, of the 2002 book, the Emerging Democratic Majority, that first explained many of the demographic trends that became fully manifest in the 2008 presidential election—including, most surprisingly, the Democratic comeback in states like Virginia and North Carolina with the right balance of minority, professional, transplant and “knowledge worker” voters.

So as his first article at his new venue, National Journal (he was one of the New Republican veterans who resigned recently), Judis has written a piece with the careful if evocative headline, “The Emerging Republican Advantage.”

Its most interesting feature is the suggestion that Democratic weakness among white-working class voters is beginning to be matched or even exceeded in importance with a new weakness among voters—especially but not exclusively white voters—with a college but no postgraduate education, and with middle incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 a year. This is a big problem for Democrats, says Judis, not just because these “middle-class Americans” are a growing percentage of the population (unlike the non-college educated white working class), but because they are at best lukewarm to the populist messages Democrats are beginning to deploy to stem the Republican tide among the white working class.

Judis’ biggest fear is that in retrospect the Democratic renaissance he and Teixeira wrote about in 2002 may been seen as an aberration in a long Republican tenure driven by the American middle class’ mistrust of government and anger at “incompetence” and “redistribution.”

I'm a little skeptical of that "redistribution" conclusion ... otherwise I don't consider "mistrust of government and anger at incompetence" to be partisan positions

All I ever see or hear from Republicans is mistrust of the federal government. Not just from politicians but from folks on Facebook and others irl.

that's only temporary

remember how much they mistrusted the gov't during the Bush years? oh right

It's been going on since Reagan. As long as Bush was using the federal government to deregulate and cut taxes (that is shrinking the federal government in certain areas) Republicans thought that was a step in the correct direction in reducing the footprint of the federal government they mistrust. The "mistrust" is never logical-- its why Senator Ernst can bash the federal government (on things she does not like) while her family received farm aid. The initial problems with the rollout of healthcare did not help though.

it's been going on since way before Reagan!

nah I'll give'em this: the GOP had many more sane members before 1980.

it gets tricky to chart because of how the parties' have historically switched places (Democrats originally the party of the south + farmers/rural communities, GOP the party of Lincoln + northeast + industrialists) but the right wing (ie the south + rural communities) has always conveniently excoriated the federal gov't ("states' rights!", "the New Deal is socialism!", anti-desegregation)... when they weren't in charge of it. the left has excoriated the federal gov't when they weren't in charge as well, although typically for things like being too laissez-faire and in the pocket of corporate capitalists or for lashing out militarily/acting like a police state

xp

well, farmers + rural communities have not always historically been 'right-wing.'

but "mistrust of the federal government" is really vague as a term. Does it mean mistrust of the EPA? Or mistrust of the President ordering drone strikes against American citizens? cuz those are very different things that bother very different people for different reasons, and the constituency that's bothered by both is pretty narrow and fringe.

xp

"rural communities + farmers" = Populists.

farmers + rural communities have not always historically been 'right-wing.'

yeah I was specifically referring to the Dems origins as the party of Jefferson there (agrarian and pro-slavery, and typically skeptical of federal power), which ... I dunno it's kinda meaningless to ascribe contemporary political affiliations to people living in that era, but those attitudes and demographics have evolved/been passed down to the modern day along lines that we have come to call right-wing in contemporary parlance.

xp

@ZaidJilani
6 House Democrats say they wont attend #Netanyahu's speech; 4 say they will attend. Most undecided #SkipTheSpeech

CHEERS USA GOOD LUCK

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2015/02/05/infrastructure-improvement-obama-tax-overseas-roads-bridges

quick question: remember the 2010 GSA scandal where they were caught having a big expensive extravagant 4-day conference/party in Las Vegas? and does the general public really remember that?

i just ask because there's a WashPo article on the ramifications of that scandal today. the consequences of GSA's party are well-known to federal workers - congress made it excruciatingly annoying, tedious, and difficult to do anything related to travel, training and conferences - but I didn't think that the general public, beyond a few tea partiers, cared or remembered.

Haven't read the whole article to see if there's a chance for a slghtly less stringent standard. Also, is keeping most conferences out of Vegas really making things that difficult for conference planners?

Maybe Hillary can put a workgroup together to address it, like this one:

With advice from more than 200 policy experts, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to answer what has emerged as a central question of her early presidential campaign strategy: how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/us/politics/economic-plan-is-a-quandary-for-hillary-clintons-campaign.html?_r=0

. Also, is keeping most conferences out of Vegas really making things that difficult for conference planners?

heh, they're definitely keeping them out of vegas, but it's more than that. it's all the little things that are agonizing.

for example, let's say you're planning a mandatory training session, in-house. it's not a conference - it's just a 2-hour session that could have been set up with a simple meeting invite once upon a time. but there's an employee from another city that's going to be coming. and some consultant is going to come in to lead the training. it's not a conference.

managers get involved. "...is this a conference?" - no it's not a conference "is there travel involved?" well yes an employee is traveling from a different city but he does that all of the - "We need to let the deputy know. this is going to need approval if it's a conference" - it's not a conf- "it doesn't matter if it's a conference, if it appears that it could be a conference we're going to have to jump through the hoops" - you know we could just do a webinar since it's not really important that- "we're going to need you to fill out Conference Request form 2321-rev2" - but it's not a conference - "and in the review chain make sure to note that it's not a conference, we just have to verify that it is in fact NOT a conference even though it has the appearance of-" it doesn't even have the appearance of a conference, it's - "Request form 2321 is being revised again, apparently, we better just make sure that upper management is aware of this situation, we can let them know when we brief them next Thursday" (time passes) "Oh, I'm sorry, we forgot to mention this important conference issue..." - it's not a conference - "...during the briefing, we'll have to draft up a quick memo to let them know that we're requesting to have a conf- IT'S NOT A GODDAMN CONFERENCE! LET'S JUST MAKE IT A GODDAMN WEBINAR. SHIT! SHIIIIIIIIT! *runs down the hall and crashes through the window*

and for god's sake, PLEASE refrain from bringing in coffee or bagels to this training session because that definitely sounds conference-y and you know we don't need to deal with that right now

not only must you avoid conference, you must avoid even the appearance of a conference

lol @ "inclusive capitalism"

xxxp

if only the fucking shell game was sophisticated enough to be Orwellian, instead of Idiocracian.

Mitch McConnell is upset about filibuster abuse.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/mitch-mcconnell-shutdown-conundrum-obama