Those Who Live In Glass Houses...

House Republicans recently took time out of their busy, busy schedules to ban funding to renovate the White House bowling alley. The planned renovation, which had already been scrapped, was characterized by Representative Pat Meehan (R-Pa.) as "a want, not a need".

Good work in solving problems that don't actually exist, House Republicans.

There is, however, a bigger dynamic at work here: for all their worry about "wants" and "not...need[s]", Republicans sure seem eager to spend taxpayer money on a frivolous lawsuit against the president.

The irony was not lost on Democrats:

Democrats on the House Rules Committee said that voters had a right to know at least a projection of how many taxpayer dollars would be spent on a lawsuit they dubbed a “political stunt.”

“The American people have endured enough waste from this House Majority and we are demanding an estimate so that Members of Congress and the American public will know the true cost of the House’s petty partisan lawsuit against the president,” Rep. Louise Slaughter (N.Y.), the top Democrat at House Rules Committee, said on Thursday.

Source: http://thehill.com/policy/finance/212615-house-dems-demand-cost-of-obama-lawsuit

It's a fair question. The self-appointed party of "fiscal responsibility" sure seems willing to waste taxpayer money on a lawsuit regarding Obama's delayed implementation of a part of the Affordable Care Act that Boehner doesn't want Obama to implement.

Another example of "penny wise, pound foolish".

Next time Republicans pontificate about "wants vs needs", perhaps they would do well to remember the old adage about those who live in glass houses. This frivolous lawsuit, after all, is "a want, not a need" that is an enormous waste of time and taxpayer money.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish Part Deux

I said a few days that when it comes to governing, Republicans are "penny wise and pound foolish, meaning that preconceived ideas (often set in concrete) about government being "inherently wasteful" often become self-fulfilling prophecies when the GOP gains power.

There are plenty of examples of this conscious and unconscious sabotage of government. One came today in the form of a news story about the numbers of staffers in Congress:

A quick refresher: In 1995, after winning a majority in the House for the first time in forty years, one of the first things the new Republican House leadership did was gut Congress’s workforce. They cut the “professional staff” (the lawyers, economists, and investigators who work for committees rather than individual members) by a third. They reduced the “legislative support staff” (the auditors, analysts, and subject-matter experts at the Government Accountability Office [GAO], the Congressional Research Service [CRS], and so on) by a third, too, and killed off the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) entirely. And they fundamentally dismantled the old committee structure, centralizing power in the House speaker’s office and discouraging members and their staff from performing their own policy research. (The Republicans who took over the Senate in 1995 were less draconian, cutting committee staff by about 16 percent and leaving the committee system largely in place.) Today, the GAO and the CRS, which serve both House and Senate, are each operating at about 80 percent of their 1979 capacity. While Senate committee staffs have rebounded somewhat under Democratic control, every single House standing committee had fewer staffers in 2009 than in 1994. Since 2011, with a Tea Party-radicalized GOP back in control of the House, Congress has cut its budget by a whopping 20 percent, a far higher ratio than any other federal agency, leading, predictably, to staff layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, and drooping morale.

Source: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junejulyaugust_2014/features/the_big_lobotomy050642.php?page=all

Again, this is penny wise and pound foolish. In the short run, the elimination of these staffers may indeed save taxpayer money. But what's the effect in the long run on Congress when it lacks the staff to properly research and draft legislation that could be beneficial to the country?

Tellingly, while professional staff in Congress has been slashed during Republican years, other areas have expanded:

Since Republicans took control of the U.S. House in January 2011, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has led a cost-cutting effort that has trimmed staff for House committees by nearly 20%, saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. But the number of committee staff responsible for press and communications work has increased by nearly 15% over the same period, according to House spending records.
In the first three months of 2010, with Democrats still in control of the chamber, the primary committees of the House reported employing 1,570 staff members, 74 of whom had "press" or "communications" or related terms in their job titles. Over the same period this year, the same committees reported 1,277 total employees, a 19% cut, 85 of whom had communications-related job titles.
Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said the numbers are "completely unsurprising. We promised responsible oversight of the Obama administration, and effective oversight requires communicating with the American people."

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/07/01/house-staff-cuts-communications-press/11425389/

This says a lot about the current state of the GOP. Staffers involved in doing actual work, like research for pending legislation, are out the door. The big focus now is "messaging" - telling the American people what they want to hear without actually acting on it.

As a result, Congress will be hobbled as it tries to solve the many problems currently facing the country. That's OK though, right? All the better for Republicans looking to prove their point about government's wastefulness and uselessness.

"They Say It Is A Capital Offense"

(With apologies to Bob Marley)

Ever since Boehner announced his intention to sue president Obama over "executive overreach", the pending lawsuit has become the talk of the town in Washington, DC. The news set off a feeding frenzy of speculation and criticism towards Boehner for wasting everyone's time with such a frivolous lawsuit.

For his part, Obama and company are reportedly thrilled about the lawsuit, eager to use it to make clear distinctions between a do-nothing Congress and a president who is being sued for trying to do his job:

[H]ere is something that shouldn’t be ignored: The White House LOVES the lawsuit. For one thing, it gives meaning to the White House’s various executive actions. Earlier this year during the State of the Union, many of us proclaimed [the president and his team are] simply playing “small ball.” But given this lawsuit, Republicans certainly don’t see them being small.

 

In addition, the lawsuit only emphasizes the contrast that one branch of government is doing SOMETHING while the other branch is doing NOTHING. Bottom line: The White House sees a political opportunity here – an opportunity that Republicans might not have seen coming.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/why-immigration-reform-died-congress-n145276

But now we can set aside some of the speculation, as the National Republican Senatorial Committee has finally come up with the bullshit charges they've decided to include in their lawsuit:

1) The time President Obama waived Obamacare for Unions, but not for you.

 

2) The time The Obama Administration spied on journalists and wouldn’t say why.

 

3) The time President Obama decided to attend the Senate Democrats retreat but not campaign with any of them.

 

4) The time President Obama restricted journalists from taking video and photos of him. Instead forcing them to use media provided by the White House.

 

5) The time President Obama delayed the KeystoneXL pipeline for more than 5 years, costing tens of thousands of jobs.

 

6) The time President Obama told you, you could keep your health plan even though he knew you couldn’t.

Source: http://www.nrsc.org/blog/6-times-the-president-did-whatever-he-wanted

This is it? These are the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that Republicans find egregious enough that they're suing the president - whining about the Keystone XL pipeline and attending a retreat for Senate Democrats?

In a previous blog post, I expressed a lot of anger over this obvious election year stunt. Today I can't help but shake my head over how pathetic this has become.

There have been many scandals of various sizes over this nation's two hundred twenty-odd year history: credit mobilier, tea pot dome, Watergate, Iran-Contra....

Now in 2014, Republicans are seriously arguing that Obama attending a retreat for Senate Democrats and then not campaigning with them is an example of an "imperial presidency" that must be shut down with a lawsuit.

Let's hope that Democrats add to their numbers in Congress this November so that there are actually adults working in Congress.

The Wally Party

Today's Congressional Republicans remind me of Wally from Dilbert: they spend more time and effort trying to avoid doing real work than it would take just to do their jobs.

Take John Boehner. He's decided that Obama has created such a "constitutional crisis" with his executive orders that he's going to sue the president over it.

Asked to clarify by reporters today, Boehner had this to say:

“I believe the president is not faithfully executing the laws of our country, and on behalf of the institution and our Constitution, standing up and fighting for this is in the best long-term interest of the Congress,” Boehner told reporters.

Source: http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/boehner-lawsuit-obama

I must admit that this stupid bullshit has taken me from mildly disliking Boehner to thinking that he's a clown. This junk lawsuit - and make no mistake: it is frivolous - is a monumentally stupid waste of everyone's time.

Let's review the topic of executive orders. Compared to his predecessor, Obama has issued fewer executive orders - 168 over two terms in office as opposed to 291 from Dubya (source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/orders.php). That's far less than the multiple hundreds of XOs our sainted elected officials would like you to think have been issued by an order of magnitude or more.

Furthermore, when you look at the average number of executive orders issued per day while in office, Obama is well below  both the average for Democrats and the average issued by Dubya. The Brookings Institute helpfully illustrated this in a chart that I suspect will be seen a lot in the coming weeks:

But even ignoring all of these statistics, the fact of the matter is that none of this would be happening if Boehner and his colleagues in Congress were doing their job! There is a reason Obama has decided to bypass Congress: because Republicans have decided that they're finished doing anything constructive - even projects like funding infrastructure that would arguably help the country - because they would prefer to act like pouty spoiled brats over losing the last two general elections.

This is why Rachel Maddow has long said that Republicans are in a post-policy phase: we elect these people in office to sit around and do nothing in office that will either help the country or the people that elected them in the first place.

Obama is sick of being blamed for Congress' intransigence, and who can blame him? He has a legacy to consider, and I'm sure he'd rather have a long line of successes equal to that of "Obamacare" after his name than endless bickering with Congress over doing the basics such as funding the government.

Boehner - and anyone else who actually advocates this junk lawsuit and/or impeachment, is a moron. As long as we keep clowns like this in office, the longer we're going to see the country burn as Congress - at least the Republican delegation - fiddles. How long are we going to continue putting up with this nihilism?

Excuses, Escuses

Boehner has an excuse for why he and his caucus are dragging their feet on immigration reform:

House Speaker John Boehner blames President Barack Obama for Congress’s inability to pass an immigration reform bill, saying that it’s a lack of trust in the president that keeps members of the GOP from getting it done.

 

“The American people want us to deal with immigration reform,” Boehner said on Fox News’s “Kelly File” on Monday. “I’ve tried to get the House to move on this now for the last 15 or 16 months. But every time the president ignores the law, like the 38 times he has on Obamacare, our members look up and go, ‘Wait a minute: You can’t have immigration reform without strong border security and internal enforcement, how can we trust the president to actually obey the law and enforce the law that we would write?’

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/john-boehner-obama-immigration-105467.html

"Gee...we'd like to do our job, but the president is so untrustworthy that we can't seem to give enough of a damn to do it".

This has to be one of the laziest excuses for slacking off that I've ever seen.

Let's leave aside the fact that the president has not "ignored the law" when it comes to Obamacare. The ACA is settled law. I'm sure Boehner doesn't forget the Supreme Court ruling from last year or the year before that ruled the individual mandate Constitutional?

I also hasten to point out the fact that Obama has been far more severe with deportations than even his predecessor - a fact that has caused the president to receive criticism from those on his side of the aisle.

Whether or not Obama is trustworthy or has followed the law, however, is beside the point. House Republicans bear the onus of passing a comprehensive immigration bill, and whether they end up doing so or not has absolutely nothing to do with Obama whatsoever. Republican failure to reform our immigration laws will be a failure on the Republicans' part - not Obama's.

This is a pattern for Congressional Republicans: a litany of excuses for why they can't or won't do their job, and little if any actual work. If I, as a current college student, did that, I'd have failed out of my classes several semesters ago.

It's time for Republicans to dispense with the excuse-making and start with doing their job.

The Republican Party At Work

Although we're much better off now that we were, say, this time four or five years ago, our country is still facing a number of very important issues both economic and domestic. But never fear - the Republican party has been hard at work trying to fix these problems in Congress!

...Or not.

I've said this before, and I will continue to harp on it: Three years ago, John Boehner couldn't stop talking about "jobs, jobs, jobs" while laying out his party's agenda for the upcoming legislative session:

“This speech is about jobs…because this coming election is about jobs,” Boehner told the welcoming campaign crowd in his home town. “It’s about the jobs that were promised to the American people by the current administration, and never delivered. It’s about the jobs our economy should be creating right now, but isn’t creating, because of the policies coming out of our Congress. It’s about the jobs our children deserve in the future, but may never have because Washington is burying them in a legacy of debt.”

Source: ABC News

Republicans handily won the midterm elections in what was almost universally seen as a "red tide" of opposition against Obama's agenda. Thus, everyone lived happily ever after because the Republicans worked their little butts off to create jobs for unemployed Americans, right?

Nope. Instead we got self-inflicted economic wounds:

Scariest Business Stories of 2011: Debt Ceiling Standoff
Sequestration Impact

Meaningless votes to repeal so-called "Obamacare":
Source: NBC News

Attempts to name bodies of water after Ronald Reagan:
Source: The Hill

Warring against women on several fronts:
Rape
Pay equity
Gender Roles
Abortion 


...as well as endless hearings on what have proven to be non-scandals:
MSNBC

Ladies and gentlemen, the GOP at work. With a record like this, it's a wonder to me why anyone would want to vote Republican.

"Our Number One Priority"

From George Stephanopoulos' recent interview with Speaker of the House Boehner:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, we asked-- our viewers for questions for you. And so many came in on the same exact theme. Where are the jobs? What is this Congress doing for jobs?

BOEHNER: Well, that's interesting, George. Because it really is our number one priority. If you look at-- the last four years, we've had anemic economic growth. There aren't enough jobs. People's wages aren't growing. And frankly, I believe the president's policies are getting in the way of creating more jobs.

Source: ABC News

Really, Boehner? You sure could have fooled us.

How many jobs are being jeopardized by sequestration, which Congressional Republicans refuse to remove despite numerous reports of the sequester hurting the American people?

How many jobs are being created by the anti-abortion legislation that Republicans keep proposing in front of Congress, despite the fact that such legislation will (thankfully) never see the light of day?

How many jobs have been created by the over thirty-five votes to repeal "Obamacare"? Or the innumerable hearings on Benghazi and the IRS "scandals" that have not revealed anything that we didn't already known? Or the union busting that has been happening in the states thanks to Republican majorities there? Or the numerous attempts by Republicans to ensure that less qualified voters are actually voting?

Obama has done more to create jobs for the American people in five years than Republicans in twice that much time. Yet we still hear the leader of the "do nothing" party complain that Obama isn't creating jobs fast enough to suit the same people that made it necessary to create an excess of jobs in the first place!

If this is what focus on a "number one priority" looks like, I'd sure hate to see what would happen if Republicans didn't care about a particular issue.