Good afternoon, Daily Kos readers. This is your afternoon open thread to discuss all things Hill-related. Use this thread to praise or bash Congresscritters, share a juicy tip, ask questions, offer critiques and suggestions, or post manifestos.
As always, this is a crosspost from Congress Matters and you can also check it out on Progressive Electorate, where some great things are going on.
Ye gods it's been a strange day in Congress. Here are some of my own thoughts.
This afternoon, the Republican Party just lost forever any claims that they are not just trying to obstruct health care reform. At the hour of this writing, the Senate clerk was reading an amendment offered by Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Take a really wild guess who pulled this stunt. Hint: He's an kind of a dickish Senator from Oklahoma:
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) objected to a request to dispense with the reading of the amendment, a courtesy that is almost always granted to fellow senators.
~snip
Conservatives such as radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh last week questioned the Republican leadership's floor tactics but GOP aides say that McConnell does not share his strategy in advance.
"All the pieces of the strategy have been in place for a long time," said a GOP aide, who disputed the notion that conservative pressure spurred McConnell to take the unusual action of forcing the nearly 800-page measure to be read.
After Coburn forced the bill to be read, he left the Floor. The Sanders amendment would open Medicare to everyone, effectively opening an existing single payer system to all Americans. And remember everyone: Coburn has his MD.
The reading started around noon and ended sometime around 3 p.m. Then Bernie got a chance to go off for a while.
Clarification: Sanders withdrew his amendment to stop what amounted to a filibuster and would have created problems for the subsequent vote on the Defense Appropriations Bill.
One could almost say the Senate is dithering.
• "When it comes to a jobs bill, the Senate seems more interested in dithering," says first-year Rep. Tom Perriello, a Virginia Democrat whohas taken heat back home for tough votes on climate change and health care — two issues that remain bottled up in slow-moving Senate deliberations.
• "If you just take a look at the number of bills we’ve sent to the Senate and what they’ve done, I don’t know what they’re doing with their time honestly," says Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Cal.).
• "I think the majority leader sometimes has to have the leadership to resolve these things," says Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak, a Democrat challenging Sen. Arlen Specter, in a direct attack on Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). "I understand it’s politically challenging, but we have the votes — and we should be doing much better than we are. I think this place needs a change, quite frankly."
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And there is plenty more on health care reform today.
The White House argues that HCR in its present form is not a huge give away to the health insurance companies.
It’s also important to remember that, while none of us are shedding any tears for the insurance industry, the primary goal of health insurance reform isn’t to punish insurers – it’s to give every American the ability to find affordable coverage while controlling the unsustainable cost growth in our current health care system that is crushing families and businesses. On that front, this bill is hugely successful. This bill will bring stability and security to people who have insurance and provide affordable options to those who don’t. It will protect against arbitrary insurance company rules and will lower premiums for American families and businesses. And it will take a big chunk out of the national deficit.
Sorry, guys. Any bill that includes a mandate but no public option is a give away to the insurance companies.
Do you want some other perspectives on HRC? Should the Dems just scrap the Senate bill? This post offers opinions of the guy who founded CraigsList, the president of the John Birch Society, and a policy fellow at the Cato Institute.
Thanks, but I think we can figure it out ourselves.
It's all good, though, kids. Now that the bill is pretty much fully emasculated, the centrists might vote for it and the Senate liberals are gritting their teeth and getting on board.
In addition to not fully cementing the centrist bloc, Reid’s shift toward the political middle agitated liberals.
"They’re not happy. I’m not happy," Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said. "I don’t like the way this has progressed."
But Durbin predicted leadership would not lose the support of liberals. "I don’t believe we will. Not at this point," he said.
Also, raise your hand if you are surprised at this headline: Hospital, physician lobbyists fought Medicare buy-in plan
And then there was the teabagger asshattery legitimate protest in the Senate office buildings yesterday. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones reports that it was a bucketful of meh.
Meckler politely indicated that he would wait, and the three Tea Partiers settled into leather sofas to watch C-Span. Eventually, Boxer's press secretary came out and offered them literature on the senator's health care positions. Unsurprisingly, that failed to mollify them. Meckler said he'd keep waiting, noting, "It's comfortable here." If anyone was on the verge of keeling over, they were concealing their symptoms pretty well.
Finally, the SEIU is backing off supporting the stinker of a bill that the Senate is going to produce.
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In climate change news, the United States is doing something pretty simple to reduce carbon in the air and it is something that we should have been doing for decades.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak announced Wednesday the United States would provide $1 billion over the next three years to preserve tropical forests overseas.
At the same time, leaders of the African Union and the European Union announced they are close to reaching agreement on how much rich countries should provide poor ones in a long-term finance package to cope with climate change.
Meanwhile, John Kerry wavered on whether the Senate would accept cap and trade:
Sen. John Kerry wavered Wednesday on whether Congress will accept a cap-and-trade system for controlling carbon emissions.
Kerry (D-Mass.) told reporters at the climate change summit in Copenhagen that he isn’t sure what system Congress will endorse for setting the prices companies will pay for carbon emissions.
Kerry and other advocates of greenhouse gas curbs say it is vital to create a system that makes industries pay for carbon emissions in order to reduce them and spur the development of green energies.
That's fine. If any one in the Senate had a spine and fewer ties to the coal mining and oil and gas lobbies 51 60 Senators would support a carbon tax and really do something about air pollution and global warming.
And if you don't quite understand why Cap and Trade is not a great idea, this nine minute video explains why cap and trade might end up being a bigger give away than health care reform.
Meanwhile in at the climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark:
Police officers used pepper spray and wielded batons on Wednesday to beat back hundreds of demonstrators outside the global climate meeting here, as a police spokesman said 250 people had been arrested.
The police tried to disperse the chanting, drum-beating protesters who had marched from a train station about a mile away to try to make their way to the Bella Center, where representatives from nearly 200 countries are meeting to try to reach an accord on climate change. A group of 50 to 100 delegates emerged from the convention center, seeking to meet with the protesters, but they, too, were driven back by the police.
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Remember when Ron Paul raised all that scratch online during the presidential campaign? Well, his kid is doing just as well.
Less than 12 hours into Rand Paul’s one-day Tea Party "money bomb" fundraising event, the Kentucky Senate candidate had already surpassed the $100,000 mark, according to the real-time donation counter on Paul’s Web page.
That total puts Paul, the son of libertarian champion, congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-Texas) at more than $400,000 raised during the fourth quarter.
And this is why we need to keep up our efforts on ActBlue and directly to progressive candidates.
The silver lining is that Richard Burr is in trouble in North Carolina and we might have a chance to pick up a Senate seat there.
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When is 30,000 soldiers not 30,000 soldiers? When you send a bunch of contractors with them.
The surge of 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan could be accompanied by a surge of up to 56,000 contractors, vastly expanding the presence of personnel from the U.S. private sector in a war zone, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service.
CRS, which provides background information to members of Congress on a bipartisan basis, said it expects an additional 26,000 to 56,000 contractors to be sent to Afghanistan. That would bring the number of contractors in the country to anywhere from 130,000 to 160,000.
In related news, the House passed a $636 billion defense bill today.
The defense bill includes $128 billion for the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan but leaves for later budgeting for the troop surge in Afghanistan recently ordered by President Barack Obama.
The legislation includes short-term extensions, mainly for two months, of a number of programs that expire at the end of the year and Congress was unable to reauthorize.
Among those were several controversial provisions of the anti-terror USA Patriot Act; an act that shields doctors from a steep cut in Medicare payments; unemployment benefits and health care subsidies for the jobless and the federal highway and transit program.
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They're gonna let people with teh gay get hitched here in the District.
The legislation would allow gay couples from anywhere in the country to marry in the city. Those couples who live in the District would be entitled to all rights afforded to heterosexual married couples under District laws.
Although a final signature on the bill by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) could come by the end of the week, same-sex marriage opponents vowed to step up their effort to get Congress or a court to block the initiative during the 30-day congressional review period.
~snip
The analysis, created in the weeks leading up to Tuesday's historic council vote, estimates that 2,000 gay couples who live in the District will marry shortly after the law takes effect. But the bulk of the weddings, which could pump millions of dollars into the regional economy, would probably be out-of-state couples unable to marry in their own states, according to the analysis, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. It concludes that at least $5 million, and perhaps as much as $22 million, would be generated by same-sex weddings in the District over the next three years.
Come to the city. We'll take your money celebrate your happiness with you. :-)
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The Federal Reserve Board says that they will keep interest rates low for the foreseeable future.
The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that it was still wary of raising interest rates anytime soon because it believed the economy, though improving, remained tenuous.
In a statement released after two days of Federal Open Market Committee meetings, the central bank said its benchmark overnight interest rate would remain at virtually zero, its level for the last year. The statement repeated a pledge to keep the rate "exceptionally low" for "an extended period."
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Some creepy bastard in Arizona has been using a GOP donor database to stalk a female grad student.
The executive director of the Arizona GOP used a Republican voter database to stalk a female grad student, the woman has alleged in a criminal complaint.
The complaint, filed last month with the local sheriff's office and reported by the Huffington Post, alleges that Brett Mecum "is using Voter Vault to stalk." That's the sophisticated voter-targeting program that the GOP uses to turn its supporters out to the polls.
Classy
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Finally, in The Most Important News of the Day™, Republican Governor Mark Sanford will not be impeached for using a state-owned plane and spending tax money to have a roll in the hay with his mistress in Argentina and lying about it by claiming he was hiking.
What a relief. It's not like the Republicans would ever dream of impeaching Democratic executives for personal moral failures.