Tomasky talk: How the US Senate finance committee and its chairman, Max Baucus, factor into healthcare reform
Posts Tagged ‘US Congress’
Congress delays Obama’s healthcare reforms
July 24th, 2009 |
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President says he is sanguine about missed deadline but fears about $1tn plan continue to dog him
The US Congress will not meet next month’s deadline to pass sweeping healthcare reform as concerns about how to pay for the $1tn (£609m) plan continue to dog one of Barack Obama’s leading commitments.
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said there will be no vote before Congress goes into recess in August as some senators complained that the speed of the reforms would produce flawed legislation.
Obama was sanguine, saying that he was not concerned so long as legislation on his plan for the government to provide health insurance was passed before the end of the year. “That’s OK. I just want people to keep on working. Just keep on working,” the president said.
But the delay is a blow because Democratic leaders had used the 7 August deadline to try to limit opposition within the party as various bills made their way through Congress.
The Republicans and sceptics will have the month-long recess to pick away at Obama’s plan by playing on voter concerns over cost and fears that the government will ration or restrict healthcare.
Obama was delivered a blow last week when the Congressional budget office director, Doug Elmendorf, said that the proposed plans could add up to $239bn to the deficit over the next 10 years.
That rang alarm bells among conservative Democrats who fear the reforms will result in higher taxes, which would anger voters.
A slew of adverts has hit US television screens from special interest groups attempting to portray Obama’s plan as likely to mean rationing of treatment and the authorities choosing people’s doctors.
Rick Scott, of Conservatives for Patients Rights, which has run adverts using the shortcomings of Britain’s NHS to campaign against the reforms, recently wrote a memo to supporters saying that delay would kill Obama’s plan.
“I am very confident, after meetings on (Capitol) Hill this week, that if Congress does not pass a healthcare bill with the public option before Labour Day [7 September], the public option is dead,” he wrote.
One of Obama’s problems is that without a detailed bill, it is difficult for him to persuade sceptical voters that they are not going to end up paying more or receiving less.
The president plans to meet Reid today and the Senate finance committee chairman, Max Baucus, in an effort to keep the legislation on track.
But the delay is clearly annoying the president. “It gets on my nerves. It frustrates me that we’d even be suggesting the status quo is the best we can do,” he said at a public meeting yesterday.
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Obama goes on healthcare reform offensive
July 22nd, 2009 |
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US president goes on the offensive following attacks from Republicans who’ve criticised cost of overhaul
President Barack Obama has launched a vigorous campaign to force an overhaul of healthcare through Congress within weeks, and extend affordable medical insurance to all Americans, as the centrepiece of his domestic agenda is threatened by Republicans exploiting divisions in the president’s party and rising public anxiety over the cost of reform.
Obama has accused his opponents of playing the politics of “delay and defeat” as he urges Congress to pass legislation before it goes into recess next month out of concern that if the process drags on late into the year public and congressional support will further erode. The Republicans are now openly attempting to stall the reforms and have said that they see an opportunity to deliver Obama a damaging political defeat.
The president has gone on the offensive by lobbying members of Congress and by appealing directly to the voters in warning that the existing system “works for the insurance and drug companies” while ordinary people face escalating insurance premiums.
“The need for reform is urgent and it is indisputable,” Obama said. “We’ve talked this problem to death, year after year.”
Several bills working their way through Congress would expand health insurance through a new government scheme that would ensure 97% of the population is covered. An estimated 47 million Americans, one in six of the population, is without health coverage. The legislation would subsidise premiums for those on low incomes.
Under a bill before the House of Representatives, the new scheme would in part be paid for with a tax surcharge of between 1% and 5% on high earners. Employers will also be required to provide health benefits to workers or pay the government to do so.
But the process is running in to problems. Six senators, three of them Democrats, have written to Obama urging him to slow passage of the legislation and win the agreement of both parties. One of the senators, Joe Lieberman, described the reforms as “enormous and complicated” and said they shouldn’t be rushed.
Even in the House of Representatives there are signs that doubts are beginning to set in over warnings about cost.
Obama has said he will not sign any healthcare bill that raises the deficit and has argued that reform can be paid for in part by reducing the escalating cost of treatment through the power of the government to negotiate preferential prices with drug companies.
But the president was delivered a significant blow last week when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director, Doug Elmendorf, warned that far from saving money, the proposed reforms would add $239bn to the national debt over ten years.
That has proven to be particularly sensitive in the present economic climate with opinion polls showing that public support for Obama on healthcare reform has slumped to less than 50% in part over concerns at the cost.
The president’s position was not helped when a meeting of governors also raised concerns about being landed with the cost of underwriting insurance for the poor.
Then yesterday a hospital Obama has praised as an example of affordable quality healthcare, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, came out against his plan.
“The proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher-quality, more affordable healthcare for patients. In fact, it will do the opposite,” the hospital said.
The Republicans have pounced on the concerns. The Huffington Post published what it said is a private Republican party memo outlining strategies to defeat Obama’s proposals through delay. These include a publicity campaign that claims the reforms will deepen the national debt, that the president is endangering healthcare and the economy by experimenting with change, and that the government will take over control of patient care and medicines.
Some Republicans sense Obama is on the back foot. Senator Jim DeMint was recorded in a conference call discussion saying that Republicans should block healthcare reform to undermine the president.
“If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him,” he said.
The president responded directly to DeMint by accusing some Republicans of playing with an issue as important as healthcare in order to try and regain control of Congress at the next election.
“Think about that. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics. This is about a healthcare system that is breaking America’s families, breaking America’s businesses and breaking America’s economy. And we can’t afford the politics of delay and defeat when it comes to healthcare, not this time, not now,” he said.
Obama has also come under criticism for not going to Congress with a detailed plan and instead relying on members to shape the legislation, apparently out of a wish to avoid President Bill Clinton’s mistake in trying to impose healthcare reform and watching it fail.
Obama warned that his opponents are attempting to repeat the strategy.
“They explicitly went after the Clintons, said we’re not going to get this done. So it was a pure political play, a show of strength by the Republicans that helped them regain the House. I think there are folks who think that we should try to dust off that old playbook,” he said.
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Carl Pope: The Fierce Urgency of Never
July 20th, 2009 |
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Washington, D.C. — Barack Obama apparently got it wrong. It’s “never” rather than “now” that stirs the human soul. At least it stirs the soul…
Robert Naiman: The Day They Arrested President Roosevelt
July 17th, 2009 |
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Imagine how different America might be today, if FDR had been deposed in a coup. That’s what happened in Honduras, where President Zelaya was deported for proposing a referendum on reforming the constitution.
July 17, 1902: An Invention to Beat the Heat, Humidity
July 17th, 2009 |
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1902: With human comfort the last thing on his mind, a young mechanical engineer completes the schematic drawings for what will be the first successful air-conditioning system.
Willis Haviland Carrier, recently graduated from Cornell University and pulling down 10 bucks a week (about $260 in cold cash today) working for the Buffalo Forge heating company in [...]
Police shoot man near US Capitol
July 15th, 2009 |
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Police in Washington have shot and killed a man who was trying to flee after a traffic incident.
One officer was injured before the man, who had brandished a gun, was shot dead by police.
The incident happened a few blocks from the Capitol building, which houses the US Congress.
Some of the entrances to the Capitol were sealed off, but the shooting is not thought to have any political implications. </p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Cheney ‘hid plans to kill al-Qaida’
July 13th, 2009 |
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• Ex-CIA officials say foreign leaders were also in dark
• Investigation demanded into post-9/11 strategy
Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.
Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.
The CIA apparently did not put the plan in to operation but the US military did, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the programme.
A former intelligence official said the plan was hatched in the cauldron of the September 11 attacks when officials were pushing various forms of unilateral action and some settled on the Israelis as an example.
“One of the most sensitive areas has been what we do in friendly countries that don’t want to co-operate or maybe we don’t have enough confidence to entrust them with information. If you have an al-Qaida guy wandering around certain bits of the world we might decide that we need to deal with that ourselves, directly, without making a lot of noise,” he said. “There was a plan to deal with that. It was much talked about in the CIA and the military had its own operation.”
Another former senior intelligence official responsible for dealing with al-Qaida said that assassination plans were reined in after similar covert operations by the military were botched and proved to be embarrassing, particularly the killing in Kenya. He did not give details of the operation.
The official said he believes from conversations with serving members of the CIA that the area of real concern in Congress is that the planned operations may also have involved the covert surveillance of American citizens.
There appears to be common agreement among knowledgeable former intelligence officials that the controversy goes beyond the immediate question of assassination and capture of al-Qaida operatives as there have been numerous killings and detentions since the 9/11 attacks.
One former official said that the Bush administration discussed assassinations in the context of a ban introduced in the 1970s that responded to several failed CIA attempts to murder Fidel Castro, and concluded that as the US had declared itself at war with al-Qaida and the Taliban, this ban did not apply.
Peter Bergen, a senior security analyst at the New America Foundation, said that the secret operation must have gone further than that to have created such a backlash in Congress: “If it’s an assassination programme of al-Qaida leaders that is hardly surprising. Clinton had an assassination programme against bin Laden. There have been 27 drone missile strikes against al-Qaida alone this year.”
The CIA has declined to comment and members of Congress who were finally briefed about the issue by the CIA director, Leon Panetta, last month are bound by confidentiality.
Some former intelligence officials and Republicans have attempted to portray the programme as barely getting out of the planning stages but others in the intelligence community have said it is highly unlikely that the CIA would have kept such an operation going for eight years without advancing it.
The evident anger in Congress is fuelling demands for a full blown investigation in to the CIA’s failure to disclose the programme and Cheney’s role in the cover up. The Senate majority whip, Dick Durbin, said the programme could have been illegal: “The executive branch of government should not create programs like these programs and keep Congress in the dark. To have a massive program that was concealed from the leaders in Congress is not only inappropriate, it could be illegal.”
Anna Eshoo, a senior Democrat on the House of Representatives intelligence committee, is also calling for a probe. “We, by no means, have the full story. We don’t know who gave the order. We don’t know where the money came from. We don’t know all the people who were involved,” she told Politico. “We need a full investigation. My preference is that we hire an attorney to come in and run this, someone that is known for their prosecutorial knowledge as well as their knowledge of this particular area of the law.”
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Sotomayor faces Senate hearings
July 13th, 2009 |
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First Hispanic woman nominated to US supreme court appears before Senate for what may be a gruelling session
Sonia Sotomayor, a New York judge who beat a path from a childhood in a housing estate to become America’s first Hispanic supreme court nominee, today began a gruelling run of confirmation hearings in the US Senate.
A New York federal judge, Sotomayor, 55, is the first high court justice nominated by a Democrat in 15 years. She is President Barack Obama’s first opportunity to put his stamp on the court, although she would replace another liberal jurist and is thus not expected dramatically to alter the court’s political direction. She is widely expected to win confirmation and would be only the third woman to sit on the supreme court.
Sotomayor’s stellar academic credentials, years on the federal bench and status as a groundbreaking minority woman give Republican opponents little space to attack her qualifications or preparedness. Republicans instead questioned her impartiality, warning she would let personal biases and ethnic prejudices colour her opinions and that she would rule based on her personal values rather than the law.
“From what she has said, she appears to believe that her role is not constrained to objectively decide who wins based on the weight of the law but who, in her opinion, should win,” Arizona senator Jon Kyl said as Sotomayor sat stone-faced at the witness table. Senator Lindsey Graham, a senior Republican, said Sotomayor would be confirmed barring a “meltdown”.
But conservatives hope to weaken Obama politically by disparaging his first judicial nominee, with some outside the Republican party stoking vague fears of a Washington takeover by minorities with a dim view of whites.
Sotomayor today had her first opportunity to publicly rebut months allegations of judicial bias that followed her appointment in May.
“The task of a judge is not to make the law, it is to apply the law,” she said. “And it is clear, I believe, that my record in two courts reflects my rigorous commitment to interpreting the Constitution according to its terms … In each case I have heard, I have applied the law to the facts at hand.”
Obama’s Democratic allies, meanwhile, are playing up Sotomayor’s humble upbringing in the Bronx borough of New York, her studies at Princeton and Yale and her 17 years of experience on the federal bench – more than any sitting supreme court justice. “Hers is a success story in which all – all – Americans can take pride,” Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said today. “Let’s be fair to her and to the American people by not misrepresenting her views.”
In the coming days, Republicans are expected to grill Sotomayor about her views on abortion, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, the role of international law in American jurisprudence, and racial issues. They have signalled they will focus on speeches and public remarks in which she has expressed pride in her ethnic background and statements they say portend she will pursue a personal liberal agenda from the bench.
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John Marshall: U.S. Begins Search for Something Good to Say About Dick Cheney
July 13th, 2009 |
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Say say say / What you want / But don’t play games / With my surveillance WASHINGTON – The United States has begun a…
Obama climate change agenda hits snag
July 9th, 2009 |
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• Barbara Boxer tries to balance regional interests
• EPA head likens environment issue to space race
Barack Obama hit a snag in his ambitious climate change agenda today when Senate Democrats pushed back their deadline to product a draft bill until September.
Barbara Boxer, the chair of the environment and public works committee who is spearheading the Obama environment agenda, said she had scaled back plans of writing a first draft of a climate change bill before Congress goes on its August recess.
“We will do it as soon as we get back,” she told reporters.
She insisted that the delay would not jeopardise chances of getting climate change legislation through Congress this year. But the move comes amid signs of rising opposition to the bill in the Senate from moderate Democrats as well as Republicans.
Boxer would not guarantee that Congress would be able to pass legislation before December, when Obama is due to attend an international summit on climate change at Copenhagen.
“I want to take this as far as we can take it,” she said. “The more we can do the better.”
The downshifting in the Democrats’ agenda comes a day after a meeting of Obama’s energy and climate change team at the White House, and marks an acknowledgement by the Administration of the daunting challenge of getting enough votes for the bill in the delicately balanced Senate. Boxer tried and failed a year ago to pass a climate change bill.
Only 48 hours ago, the Obama administration initially had appeared confident it could get a bill through the Senate, and at high speed. The Democratic leadership in the Senate envisaged all committees signing off on a draft by mid-September.
On Tuesday, Obama despatched a quartet of officials to the Senate to drum up support for the move to a clean energy economy.
Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, likened the decades ahead to the space race of the mid-20th century, saying America risked being left behind if it did not jump to develop clean energy technologies.
The high profile start was seen as an attempt to build on a narrow vote for a sprawing climate change bill in the house of representatives late last month.
But as Boxer moved to capitalise on that momentum and try to pass a version of the 1,400-page bill there were growing signs of dissent from fellow Democrats, further jeopardising the chances of getting enough votes to pass the bill.
Democrats from oil and coal producing states demanded that the bill cushion consumers against future rises in electricity costs; those from rural areas called for protections for farmers.
“I hope we can fix cap and trade so it doesn’t unfairly punish businesses and families in coal dependent states like Missouri,” tweeted Missouri’s senator Claire McCaskill.
Meanwhile, other Democrats in leadership positions in the Senate complained they were being put under pressure to rush through complicated legislation on two major topics: energy and healthcare.
Today’s delay could buy time for Boxer to try to balancing the powerful constituencies who control the fate of the bill: coastal urban areas vs rural heartland and industrial states, western states which have wind and solar resources vs coal-dependent south-east.
However, Republicans who are almost uniformly opposed to climate change legislation immediately claimed the delay as a sign that Obama’s agenda was foundering.
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Al Franken finally wins Minnesota seat
June 30th, 2009 |
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The eight-month saga over a contested US Senate seat today appeared to be coming to an end when the Minnesota supreme court ruled in favour of the Democrat and former comic Al Franken.
The court unanimously declared that Franken, after repeated recounts since the November election, had beaten the Republican incumbent Norm Coleman.
The decision potentially gives the Democrats a 60-seat majority in the Senate, making legislation immune from Republican filibustering and raising the chances of Barack Obama getting more of his ambitious legislative agenda onto the statute books.
It could help him get through legislation on health reform and climate change, and ensure the success of his supreme court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.
Coleman, who claimed many ballots were wrongfully rejected, could still take the issue to the US supreme court but he has said he would abide by the decision of the Minnesota supreme court. More importantly, the governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, who has the power to certify the election winner, said that after the supreme court ruled, he would abide by its decision.
Republicans could press Coleman to take the fight to the supreme court to deny the Democrats their 60-seat majority for as long as possible, particularly with so many important issues to be decided in the short term.
But there is a question over whether the supreme court would even agree to hear such a case.
The Democrats made advances in both the House and Senate mid-term elections in 2006. The fate of the Minnesota seat has been in the balance ever since. The defection of the Republican senator, Arlen Specter, to the Democrats raised the prospect that the Democrats could achieve the elusive 60 seats in the 100 seat chamber.
Franken, who first achieved fame on Saturday Night Live, particularly for his Mick Jagger impersonation, has waited in frustration for Coleman to finally concede, which now looks close. When he first announced his candidacy, it seemed improbable, but he fought a serious campaign, with clever advertising.
Coleman emerged the winner after the first count but with such a narrow margin that it triggered an automatic recount.
Franken was certified the winner in January by 225 votes following a mandatory hand recount in the state. Coleman said then he would take it to the Minnesota supreme court.
The court ruled by five to zero to uphold the last recount . The court ruling said: “The trial court did not err when it included in the final election tally the election day returns of a precinct in which some ballots were lost before the manual recount.”
“We’ve always said that Norm Coleman deserved his day in court, and he got eight months,” said senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told the Politico website. “Now we expect Governor Pawlenty to do the right thing, follow the law, and sign the election certificate.”
The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said today he was pleased with the outcome.
Coleman is, in Republican terms, relatively liberal. He is best known in Britain for his confrontation at a Senate hearing with the MP George Galloway over Iraq.
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Franken laughs last
The long-running battle for Minnesota’s Senate seat is finally over. Democracy – and Al Franken – won fair and square
In the end, the conspiracy theories became so laughable that the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee (RSCC) quietly removed its own “Minnesota Recount” website, once it became clear that no, the Democratic candidate Al Franken was not “stealing” the US Senate election in Minnesota, as the Republican party had been shamefully declaring, without actual evidence, for weeks following election day back on 4 November 2008.
Nearly eight months on from election day, Franken finally got to celebrate his election as Minnesota’s next US senator after the defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman dropped his quixotic legal challenge, and the state’s Republican governor announced he was going to formally approve Franken’s victory.
Although the victory was sealed today, the Republican claims of “voter fraud” became impossible to support long ago, because hand-marked paper ballots – nearly three million of them – as cast by the voters in the squeaker of an election, were actually being counted, in full view of the media and any interested citizen alike. To a ballot, they were all accounted for, and any disagreement about voter intent on those ballots was adjudicated in an open process by a bipartisan state canvassing board. All but a handful of those votes were determined unanimously by the board to have been cast either for Franken, for Coleman, for a third party candidate or for nobody at all.
The only question remaining after the weeks-long, painstaking, public hand-count was whether a number of uncounted absentee ballots, rejected as per the state’s strict standards for counting, should, in fact, be counted.
A tripartisan, three-judge panel took their time, in yet another fully public process, in reviewing evidence and hearing witness testimony presented by both sides. A few hundred more ballots were deemed to be legitimate and improperly rejected, and those too were then publicly counted – the counting again witnessed by all – and added to the final tally.
Hand-counted paper ballots proved, yet again, to be the gold standard in this election, which the state canvassing board, the three-judge election contest panel and now the state’s supreme court has affirmed as won by Franken, the former radio talkshow host and comedian, by a mere 312 votes.
Minnesota’s excellent election law, requiring both the secretary of state and the governor to sign the election certification only after all election contests are settled in the state, has assured that the next senator from Minnesota will not serve under a cloud of suspicion. Only the most insane and/or disingenuous could challenge the findings from one of the longest and most transparent election hand-counts in the history of the US.
Coleman, of course, may do exactly that. Though it’s exceedingly unlikely the US supreme court would rule in his favour – or even deem to review the case – Coleman still has the right to decide whether or not he’ll continue his fight, by taking it to the highest authority in the land.
If other states, and even the nation, had a law requiring that all ballots actually be counted, and all contests be fully settled before seating, we might have avoided the clouds of illegitimacy which always shrouded the Bush administration following the disputed election results in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, as well as countless other races – including Iran 2009.
When ballots are counted in secret (or, in many cases, not counted at all), democracy is dangerously imperilled. Lucky for Minnesotans, that wasn’t the case up there, even if it meant some eight months without proper representation in the US Congress. It was worth the wait.
Transparency was no match for the conspiracy theorists, including the RSCC, the head of the Republican party and even the Republican National Lawyers Association, who embarrassingly joined the black helicopter crowd in touting evidence-free claims of Franken’s “efforts to steal a seat in the United States Senate”.
Coleman, of course, was entitled to his contest, though it quickly became a desperate comedy of errors for the ousted Republican. His election contest began with a presentation of doctored evidence and concluded with the revelation of hidden legal notes and witnesses. The more he challenged the election and the counting of previously rejected absentee ballots, the wider Franken’s margin of victory grew.
The hard-fought post-election contest was understandable, of course. It’s a pity that Democrats don’t fight like hell for each and every vote they’re entitled to (yes, I’m speaking to you, John Kerry, and too many of your colleagues, or would-be colleagues.) Franken’s victory will now offer the Democrats a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, following the recent party jump by former Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter.
Minnesota’s law is a good one, but as with any law, there is no guarantee it won’t be abused, as Coleman has done for so many months by filing specious challenges, flipping and flopping on ballots he first fought to keep from being counted, only to change his mind later in hopes of having them counted after all, once it appeared he was on the losing side of the democratic draw.
And what of those infamous claims of Democratic “voter fraud” by all of those Acorn voters? After the most detailed, ballot-by-ballot, voter-by-voter analysis of an election likely in the history of the country, surely the Republicans would be able to show at least one case of fraud committed by their favourite bogey-man community organising, voter-registration group, right? After all, Acorn managed to register more than 42,000 new voters in Minnesota in the last election cycle. With all the claims of voter fraud being committed by the group, surely this election, of all elections, would be where evidence of all that fraud would finally be revealed for all to see, no? Um, no. Apparently not.
Not a single allegation of Acorn-related voter fraud was presented by the Republicans throughout the entire eight-month contest, even in an election in which just a few hundred votes separated winner from loser. The closest anybody came to presenting evidence of such fraud was when Coleman’s own witness admitted that he hadn’t signed his ballot, and that it had been forged by his girlfriend. Coleman fought to have that ballot, and others that were also illegally submitted, accepted in the final tally. So much for the Democratic voter fraud canard. If nothing else, this election once again revealed the Republican claims of voter fraud to be amongst the biggest frauds in modern American elections. Transparency has a way of doing that.
Despite his concession speech this afternoon, Coleman could still try his luck at the US supreme court, and given the wild-card make-up of that body, anything could happen, I suppose. The law has little to do with it, it seems (see 2000′s Bush v Gore). But the story here is that democracy only works when every citizen is allowed to participate both in the casting and – as importantly – in the counting of the ballots.
When democracy is visible to all, it works. When it becomes buried behind secrecy, insider tabulations and computerised black boxes, the very basis of our system of government is put dangerously at stake.
Transparency wins again. Along with the voters of Minnesota. Nice to see the voters win one for a change. Now if Barack Obama puts his money where his mouth is and delivers some of the transparency to the American people that he once promised, we might stand a chance at rebuilding this country. That appears a difficult fight at this time. But the results, if we can get them, just as in Minnesota, will be worth every moment of that fight.