The 114th Congress was sworn in on Tuesday, opening the flood
gates to legislation that will potentially damage the economy, hurt the
middle class and the poor, and leave the retired Americans in the worst
financial shape they've been in for years. After six years as a sleeper
cell, the repugican cabal is gunning for the American people -- the one thing they
hate more than facts.
In last week's piece, "The 2015 repugican cabal Clown Car: Bigger, Meaner, and More Dangerous Than Ever," I ended my post with:
"It's
a new year though and the clown car about to be sworn in next week is
bigger than ever with a majority in both the Senate and the House. A car
full of gun loving, poor hating, veteran screwing, climate change
denying, Wall Street deregulating, health care repealing, and wealthy
old white man loving clowns."
I
speculated that the repugican cabal's plans for the coming year would include
further repeals of Dodd-Frank, cutting and privatizing social security,
cutting pensions, defunding Obamacare, eliminating food stamps, and more
gifts and giveaways to the super-rich and corporations. I also joked
about potential exhumations of Benghazi, IRS, and impeachment hearings.
That
post got a lot of comments from wingnutters. Most of them
insulting me and the article, with not one comment refuting the content
of the article. Some even found the time to track down my personal email
and write to me. One woman, apparently a 'christian', wrote, "First off, I
really hope someone comes and shoots or rapes you in your defenseless
home and you live (sic), so you can learn a valuable life lesson."
I
also wrote that, "As of Tuesday, they'll have the numbers to do what
they want and by this time next year we could be having a completely
different conversation in a completely different country."
As it
happens, the repugican cabal has wasted no time pushing forward a very dangerous and
cruel agenda. It turns out that when it comes to destroying things that
are good for people and society, they're highly motivated.
On Tuesday, the same day the new Congress was sworn in, it was announced that the
Select Committee on Benghazi will continue into 2015,
after House repugicans pushed through language to reauthorize the
panel -- without budget restrictions or time limits. That's right, they
are reopening the Benghazi hearings that dragged on at considerable cost
to the taxpayers and turned up absolutely
nothing in the final declassified report.
The
five Democrats on the 12-member panel issued the following statement,
saying that since the re-authorization language was included in the
"must-pass" bill setting up the rules for the new Congress, it prevented
any debate on whether the panel would continue:
We
are disappointed that the Speaker incorporated the re-authorization of
the Select Committee on Benghazi into the must-pass rules package, which
sets no limit on the Committee's budget or time frame," the five
Democrats said in the statement. "After eight months and more than a
million taxpayer dollars spent, it remains unclear what new questions
the Select Committee seeks to answer. Since our members were denied the
ability to meaningfully debate or amend the resolution, we now look to
the Committee to quickly adopt rules that ensure that our Democratic
members are able to participate fully in the investigation.
Then on Wednesday, the repugican cabal now apparently in full steamroller momentum,
started hammering away at Social Security
and paving the path to privatization. The repugican cabal has wanted to privatize
Social Security for a while now, meaning that the entire amount (now
$1.7 trillion) would be handed over to Wall Street to "invest." We've
seen how well 401(k)s and pensions have done under that model.
As
Nancy Altman, founding co-director of Social Security Works, and Eric
Kingson, a professor of Social Work at Syracuse University, write:
The repugican
opponents of Social Security have not wasted even a single day in their
plan to dismantle Social Security brick by brick. What should be a dry,
mundane exercise -- the adoption of new rules by the newly convening
House of Representatives -- has turned into a stealth attack on
America's working families.
The
House repugicans, as one of their first orders of business, approved a
rule preventing the reallocation of Social Security funds to men,
women, and children who receive disability insurance,
unless they are offset by benefit cuts or tax increases.
Since repugicans will never agree to an increase in taxes,
particularly on the wealthy, this sets the stage for the repugicans to cut the
benefits to 11 million people in the next two years. All under the ruse
that Social Security is going bankrupt, which it's not.
According to the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
reallocating taxes between retirement and disability trust funds has
always been noncontroversial -- it's been done 11 times since 1968 and
it's a normal part of administering Social Security funds. This
reallocation would keep both the retirement and disability fund solvent
until 2033. The repugican cabal has been trying to gut Social Security for years,
calling it a hand out and now they're blocking something as simple as
transferring money from a savings account to a checking account. As the
LA Times reports:
Social
Security advocates are almost universally aghast at the change. "It is
hard to believe that there is any purpose to this unprecedented change
to House rules," wrote Max Richtman, president of the committee, in an
open letter Tuesday, "other than to cut benefits for Americans who have
worked hard all their lives, paid into Social Security and rely on their
Social Security benefits, including Disability Insurance, in order to
survive." The rule change reflects the burgeoning demonization of
disability recipients, a trend we've reported on in the past. It's been
fomented by wingnut repugicans and abetted by sloppy reporting by
institutions such as NPR and "60 Minutes."
Senator
Elizabeth Warren expressed her outrage on Facebook and Twitter on
Wednesday, saying that the move on the part of House repugicans was
inventing a Social Security crisis:
It's
ridiculous - but not surprising - that on the very first day of the new
Congress, repugicans are manufacturing a Social Security crisis to
threaten benefits for millions of disabled Americans - including 233,260
in Massachusetts alone. We can't turn our backs on the promises we've
made to our families, friends, and neighbors who need our help the most.
House repugicans should stop playing political games to put America's
most vulnerable at risk.
Furthering the speculation and theory that repugicans are manufacturing a problem and setting up for a long game to
gut or privatize Social Security, Sherrod Brown (D-OH),
said, "...detractors working to privatize Social Security will do
anything to manufacture a crisis out of a routine administrative
function."
As for the assault on Dodd-Frank, the repugican cabal not wanting
to look like they're slacking off with all this new found power, took an
axe to the Volcker rule. The Volcker Rule was adopted after the 2008
Wall Street meltdown and it bans banks from gambling with taxpayer
money. The repugican cabal is proposing
legislation
that would grant banks another two years to unload their toxic holdings
in the form of Collateralized Loan Obligations -- complex contracts
similar to the mortgage-backed securities that caused the meltdown in
2008.
Bank watchdog groups are
cringing at the legislation:
"It's
all about the bonus pool," said Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of
Better Markets, a financial reform nonprofit. "The attack on the Volcker
Rule has been nonstop, because proprietary trading is about big-time
bets that result in big-time bonuses. Wall Street has been fighting it
from day one, and they're not going to stop."
"It's absurd," said
Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform.
"It's getting on five years after the passage of the Volcker Rule, and
the banks have still not actually been required to stop doing anything
that they want to be doing. And anytime we get close to the point where
they could, somebody comes in with an extension."
Next on the agenda? Health care. After
trying 50 times to repeal Obamacare, the repugican cabal has decided to take a more tempered approach. Much like they did with
Glass-Steagall
during the ramp-up to the financial crisis. After picking it apart
piece by piece until it looked like Swiss cheese, the legislation was so
useless, repeal was easy. The repugican cabal is making a concerted effort to make
it difficult for Americans to receive coverage. This time, by
reintroducing the 40-hour work week stipulation. The bill (H.R.30) would
go after the mandate that requires a company with 50 or more employees
to provide health insurance to 95 percent of its full-time employees.
The law defines employees who work 30 hours or more as full time. The repugican cabal wants to change that definition to 40 hours per week, making it
easier for employers to avoid offering health care.
As pointed out in
Mother Jones,
"I call this the 'send people home a half hour early on Friday and deny
them health insurance' bill," says Tim Jost, a health care law scholar
at the Washington and Lee University School of Law who has consulted
with the Obama administration on implementation of the Affordable Care
Act.
The 30-hour threshold was intended to discourage
companies from cutting workers' hours. Nearly half of Americans work 40
hours a week or more--meaning that, under current law, employers would
have to cut those workers' hours by more than 25 percent to avoid buying
them health insurance. But if the threshold were 40 hours, as the GOP
envisions, many employers would only have to cut workweeks a tiny bit to
avoid buying health insurance for their employees. "Raising the
threshold to 40 hours would place more than five times as many workers
at risk of having their hours reduced," Paul van de Water, a senior
fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, wrote
in 2013.
This
move could deprive 1.5 million people currently receiving health
insurance as a result of the mandate. To add insult to injury, the
change in the law would also add another
$53 billion to the deficit the repugicans are always screeching about. According to Mitch McConnell,
the 30-hour threshold should be ditched, regardless of costs to the
deficit. In McConnell's view, adding billions to the deficit is a small
price to pay in acceptable collateral damage if it means denying health
care to millions.
In just a couple of days, the repugican cabal, rather than
work in the best interest of the American people, has laid the
groundwork to dismantle nearly everything that has been accomplished and
go after the things that people in this country rely on and benefit
from.
In addition to trying to change the way the way the Congressional Budget Office calculates costs through "
dynamic scoring," one of the more laughable claims and subsequent responses, came from Mitch McConnell who apparently received queues from
Grover Norquist suggesting that wingnuts take credit for the improving the economy.
HuffPost reported:
Norquist,
known for demanding fealty to his pledge never to raise taxes, has yet
to move many repugicans on this specific debate. Few in the party have
been willing to talk up good economic news, even if only to credit it to wingnut-leaning legislation. The preference has instead been to
bemoan the president for ignoring longterm deficits and debt, and for
pushing "job-killing" regulations.
McConnell, like a scene out of
A Christmas Story,
rose to the occasion as if he were on the playground being triple dog
dared to stick his tongue to a frozen metal flag pole. On Wednesday, the
second day of the new repugican cabal majority in Congress,
McConnell made this delusional statement:
After
so many years of sluggish growth, we're finally starting to see some
economic data that can provide a glimmer of hope; the uptick appears to
coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama administration's
long tenure in Washington: the expectation of a new repugican congress. So this is precisely the right time to advance a positive,
pro-growth agenda.
In possibly the best response one could muster to such a claim, DNC Communications Director
Mo Elleithee wrote:
Hahahahahahahahahahaha.
That Mitch McConnell is one funny guy. He likes to remind people all
the time that he's not a scientist. Now we know he's not a mathematician
or an economist either. The fact is, under President Obama we've had 57
straight months of private sector job growth leading to nearly 11
million jobs added. All repugicans have given us is a government
shutdown that cost the economy $24 billion. I get why he wants to take
credit for the economic recovery. But maybe he should first do something
to help contribute to it.
It's
unfortunate, based on the first two days of the new Congress, that the
responses to upcoming repugican cabal policies won't be so humorous. This first week
back from vacation paints a pretty grim picture of coming attractions
and the American people are the ones who will suffer.
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