Grayson Money Bomb

http://actblue.congressmanwithguts.com/branded

Alan Grayson is showing the American public, but particularly the Washington establishment, what a fighting Democrat looks like. He’s outspoken and bold, but he’s also what the Democratic Party needs. Naturally his willingness to speak forcefully about progressive principles has made him a target from Republicans, the press, and moderate Democratic wimps. I just donated $25 to support Grayson, as his voice is a sorely needed one in our party and in this country.

On Senate Cloture Process

Yesterday I wrote a long memo on the process surrounding the health care legislation in the Senate, focusing on cloture votes. It is up on the SEIU blog and is reprinted below.

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The health care debate has been long and hard fought. As we near the time when we expect the Senate to take up a bill and vote on reform, there are a lot of questions about what exactly will be happening from a procedural standpoint. After all, the Senate has a lot of complicated and misunderstood rules. Foremost among them are cloture and the filibuster.

First, filibusters really don’t happen the way they did when Mr. Smith went to Washington. Instead, the word filibuster is commonly used to refer to any time a bloc of 41 or more senators vote against considering a piece of legislation or letting it come to a floor vote. This week Andy Stern wrote in an op-ed on Huffington Post that there is no such thing as a Republican filibuster, because the GOP caucus only has 40 votes. As a result, the only way health care reform can be blocked is if members of the Democratic caucus join the Republicans to oppose moving forward.

Second, the Senate is governed largely by consensus. Things don’t get done without either everyone agreeing to them or there being a vote to see where the members of the Senate stand. One of the tools the Senate uses to keep the wheels turning is cloture. Cloture is simply a vote on whether or not to end consideration of an issue or piece of legislation for the time being. In our one hundred member Senate, there must be sixty votes in favor of cloture for a cloture motion to pass and the Senate to move forward. The Congressional Research Service has a great, detailed report on filibusters and cloture (PDF link), but I’m going to try to distill some of it here to explain what we expect to come during the health care debate.

To understand the procedure on cloture votes and filibusters on health care, it’s important to look at the general process. After the Senate HELP Committee and Senate Finance Committee bills have been merged, the final bill will need to be brought to the Senate floor. Because the health care reform bill deals with funding, the Senate will need to use a bill from the House Ways and Means Committee in order to introduce the legislation – the Senate health care reform bill will be offered as a substitute amendment to that House bill. Offering a new bill as a substitute to a bill from the House is common Senate procedure and the House bill in question doesn’t even have to relate to health care.

There are likely going to be three big points in the Senate debate of health care reform legislation that will almost certainly be subject to cloture votes. Each one of these votes will require sixty senators in favor of moving forward, yet none of them will be on the actual health care reform bill itself!

1.Cloture Motion on Motion to Proceed to Measure’s Consideration: This will be the first step, where the Senate will ask itself: Do enough of us want to start debating specific health care reform legislation on the floor? Assuming that 60 senators do, the process will continue;

If Cloture on the Motion to Proceed is “invoked” (a fancy senate term for saying 60 Senators voted yes) then the Motion to Proceed will be adopted by a majority vote and the Senate will start debating the House bill that I mentioned above. Next the very first thing that will happen is that the “merged” Finance/HELP Committee bill will be offered as a complete substitute to the House bill. Then the fun really begins. Senators offer dozens of amendments, the Majority and Minority Leaders try to work out Unanimous Consent agreements, which I will explain below, to get lots of the amendments votes and sometimes Senators even filibuster each other’s amendments. But sooner or later the Majority Leader says that is enough. That’s when…

2.Cloture Motion on Manager’s Amendment (Substitute Amendment): After considerable debate and amendment to the substitute, the Majority Leader will file Cloture on the Substitute. If there are 60 votes here, the Merged reform bill/Substitute as amended will get an up or down vote after 30 hours of post cloture consideration. Then…

3. Cloture Motion Filed on Measure (Final Passage): After the Substitute Amendment is adopted, the Senate still needs to bring debate on the entire bill to a close, so in oder to get to final passage of the health reform bill in the Senate, there will be one more cloture vote — on the final bill (or to get super technical, on that old house bill as amended by the Substitute). Assuming 60 senators support getting to a final vote on the bill they’ve just spent days and weeks amending and debating (not to mention months doing the same in Committee), then there will be an opportunity for the health care reform bill to receive a straight up-or-down vote.

What should you expect when you see a cloture motion? Lots of debate and delay. After cloture is filed, it takes one day and an hour to ripen. So if a cloture motion is filed on Monday, it cannot be voted on until Wednesday. After the motion for cloture is voted on, there is then 30 hours of debate for post-cloture consideration. This time period includes debate, roll call votes, and quorum calls. Basically each of these three big procedural steps prior to a cloture motion and vote on cloture will add a number of days before the next soonest step can be reached. This is why we expect the entire Senate floor debate of health care reform to be a process that could last, at minimum, a couple of weeks.

Now I haven’t talked at all about amendments…and we should expect to see dozens or hundreds filed. The reality is that anything that is debatable is subject to cloture, so that includes amendments to the bill that is brought to the floor. While it’s possible that the entire floor debate and amendment process is filled with cloture votes (making it a very long and drawn-out process), it’s more likely that the Senate will agree to a Unanimous Consent Agreement to govern debate and amendments. The UC Agreement sets out exactly how much time every amendment will be given for debate, how much time Republicans and Democrats will get to speak, and how many votes it will take to pass that amendment. Expect more controversial amendments to require 60 votes to pass, while less controversial ones will take a simple majority.

How does all of this process relate to the goal of passing meaningful health care reform legislation? The opponents of health care reform in the Senate will be given at least three major opportunities to stop this bill from getting a simple up-or-down vote. In each case, they will use procedure to try to stop legislation that the American public overwhelmingly supports. Health care reform is so important that it must receive an up-or-down vote to determine its outcome. Anything less is unacceptable.

Between now and the first Motion to Proceed to health care reform, there will be many twists and turns in the fight. The substance of the bill will change. The number of people that it helps will hopefully grow larger. But at the end of the day, this is vital legislation that deserves a straight up-or-down vote from the Senate. Even those members who are opposed to the underlying bill itself should not hide behind procedural hurdles to prevent it from receiving an up-or-down vote. If they oppose reform, that can best be expressed through debate of the bill, through the amendment process, and on final passage. The issue of health care reform is simply too important to be defeated by a minority of the Senate, hiding behind procedure.

We’ll have more updates on Senate and House procedure as the legislative fight progresses. Stay tuned for updates!

Change

obama-dover

This might actually be one of the biggest differences between President Obama and President Bush.  The AP notes:

Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, visited the families of hundreds of fallen soldiers but did not attend any military funerals or go to Dover to receive the coffins.

Seeing the human consequences of a war are critical to any leader understanding it, as far as I’m concerned. Obama is doing the right thing here.

Bringing Lobbyists Along

Sheryl Gay Stolberg really missed the point here:

The story of these two lobbyists — a Republican who found favor with a Democratic White House and a Democrat on the outs — illustrates the complexities Mr. Obama faces in the health care endgame. The president had some early success in bringing industry on board. But as the experiences of Mr. Tauzin and Ms. Ignagni suggest, keeping it there will be easier said than done.

There’s really no other way to say it than Stolberg doesn’t get the players in health care reform.  Billy Tauzin represents the pharmaceutical industry. Karen Ignagni represents the health insurance industry. That is, the two of them represent industries whose constituents have overcharged the American public through sky-high pricing, unfair rate increases, rescission, and stranglehold patents that are responsible for the fundamental problems in health care in America. Their clients are petrified of reform and have hired them – admittedly two very competent lobbyists – to stop reform from cutting into their bottom lines (or ideally, growing their profits).

Ignagni and Tauzin brought AHIP and PhRMA “on board” with the Obama administration’s reform efforts because they believed that being at the table would allow them to slow any changes that would affect their clients, reduce the impact of reform, and ensure that the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries maintained their sky-high profits. While there is obviously value in the Obama administration keeping these two moneyed lobbies  on the sidelines during the ad war, in the end both have become huge roadblocks in the path of reform…just as anyone with half a brain would have predicted.

Ignagni and Tauzin are lobbyist hacks who are working for a paycheck. They have access and they have been given even more. But they are corruptly fighting against the needs of the American people. Fighting these interests is certainly a complex process, but not in the way that Stolberg casts it above. Once you recognize that Ignagni and Tauzin exist to stop reform, the complexity becomes how do you out-maneuver them and their massive corporate war chests? The Obama administration does not have to bring AHIP and PhRMA along. It does not need their approval to pass reform. This is not a fascist government. This is a democracy and whatever is passed by Congress and signed by the President will have the force of law, regardless of how it affects the bottom line of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Ignagni and Tauzin may be doing their best to protect their clients, but to say they are anything other than K Street profiteers who are benefiting from the exploitation, pain, and suffering of the American public is to ignore the realities of who they work for and what legislative agenda they are advocating.

Benen on Milbank

Steve Benen is pretty spot-on in his spanking of Dana Milbank’s idiotic column attacking Harry Reid for caving to the left on the public option. Benen writes:

Obviously, Milbank is entitled to his opinion. If he thinks Reid agreed to a public option compromise — a public plan with a state opt-out — primarily to make MoveOn.org happy, Milbank is welcome to the make the case.

But it’s not exactly a persuasive pitch, and Milbank doesn’t bolster his assertions with much of anything.

Reid had to reconcile two committee bills — one with a public option, one without. To merge the two, the Majority Leader went with a compromise that enjoys the backing of most of his caucus and most of the country.

Milbank sees Reid as caving to liberal groups who don’t care that, as he sees it, the measure doesn’t have 60 votes. I see a Majority Leader going with a proposal that Reid, the White House, most congressional Democrats, and most Americans have already embraced. And incidentally, it happens to be “good public policy.”

In fairness, I believe progressive activists definitely played a role in getting the Senate’s reform bill to where it is. Indeed, I don’t think there’s anything especially wrong with Democratic leaders shaping a public policy plan in a way that meets the expectations of the voters who elected them.

But Milbank makes it sound as if the Majority Leader yelled “How high?” because “liberal interest groups” told him to jump. And that’s just not what’s happened.

Liberal interest groups, labor unions, progressive bloggers, and Democratic voters have all spent a lot of energy convincing the Senate Democrats of the importance of including the public option in the underlying Senate bill. But frankly, I think the number one reason it’s there now is because it’s damned good policy that is easy to explain to the public. It would be great if groups like MoveOn, DFA, SEIU or AFL-CIO could dictate the actions of Harry Reid and the Senate Democratic caucus. But anyone who has spent more than a passing minute watching political dynamics between the left and elected officials in Washington know that this simply is not the case.

Holy Crap

I really don’t know what the New York Times’ editors are doing with Ross Douthat. Publicly pushing for a religious war between the Anglican-Catholic church and Islam is just nonsensical. It’s offensive. It’s stupid. And it’s clear that Douthat has absolutely no conception of the meaning of the words he puts to page. Calling for an escalation in the war between European Christian power bases and Islam could have real human consequences.  The Times should be embarrassed.

Cutting Pay, Wall St. vs Main St.

Joe Nocera of the New York Times has an article today on Obama administration pay czar Kenneth Feinberg’s efforts to rein in top executive pay at banks bailed out by the American taxpayer. You know, a story on the novel subject of accountability and transparency in American business, something that cuts as close to fiction as possible for the journalists tasked with covering Wall Street. Nocera’s piece is a column, not a straight piece of reporting. But in either case, I don’t think this paragraph would be differently written:

And the American International Group is contractually obliged to make bonus payments of nearly $200 million in March 2010. The company has promised to try to reduce that amount by 30 percent. But once again, there is nothing Mr. Feinberg can do because those bonuses were already written into contracts — and there is a high likelihood that the bonuses will create another furor in Congress, just as they did earlier this year. [Emphasis added]

It’s really remarkable how inviolable contracts with Wall Street executive are. Contracts, when written between big banks and investment firms, cannot be broken. To break these contracts would undermine the basic foundations of America and would likely immediately turn the US into a communist country. Or something.

Contrast this with the contracts between automakers and members of the United Auto Workers. Let’s look back and see what Nocera was saying when GM was looking at bankruptcy a year ago.

For instance, it is critical for General Motors to be able to break its contracts with both its unions and its dealers. It needs to dramatically reduce its legacy benefits, perhaps even eliminating health care benefits for union retirees. It needs to close plants. It needs to pay its workers what Toyota workers are paid in the United States — and not a penny more. It needs to reduce the number of brands it sells — which means closing down thousands of dealerships, which is difficult to do because of state laws that protect car dealers. When General Motors shut down Oldsmobile, it cost the company more than $1 billion to buy out the Oldsmobile dealerships across the country. If it slims down its dealerships from 7,000 to a more appropriate 1,500, it will cost many times that amount. [Emphasis added]

Not only was it imperative for Nocera that GM not honor their contract with the union, Nocera was also arguing that GM must find ways to go against laws in states that protect car dealerships. Voiding contracts was not enough, he was arguing for voiding laws!

Another example of a prominent member of the press using two different standards for assessing the sanctity of the contracts of union auto workers and Wall Street executives is Ruth Marcus. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post went to great lengths to defend AIGs bonuses and contracts while simultaneously chiding unions to renegotiate — and if they didn’t like the deal they got, they could just stop coming in to work. The autoworkers were not only required to renegotiate their previously negotiated contracts, but any protestations by their workers or supporters that these contracts be honored was met by disgust by the pro-business press.

The hypocrisy of  how the contracts of Wall Street executives are being treated versus those of union workers is simply stunning. All I want to see in an economic crisis is fairness. If contracts are inviolable, they are inviolable for everyone, regardless of whether they are between blue collar workers in factories, white collar workers in office complexes, or the multi-millionaire executives on Wall Street. If the economic crisis demands that auto workers take a haircut on their pay, benefits, and pensions, Wall Street executives must be held to the same standard. Conversely, if the contracts between big banks and investment firms and their top executives simply cannot be changed, then it’s time to go back and honor the contracts between the auto industry and organized labor. It’s that simple.

Eviscerating Republican Bills of Attainder

Alan “Big D” Grayson’s exchange with Georgia Republican Paul Broun is pretty remarkable. First, Grayson absolutely schools Broun on the unconstitutionality of bills of attainder. Broun is reduced to repeatedly reading off of a talking points memo – on camera – to try to respond to Grayson’s Socratic line of questioning. Second, Grayson has yet again shown what it looks like when a Democrat stands up for his beliefs and defends an ally (ACORN) from unwarranted and in this case unconstitutional attack.

Glenn Greenwald has a great post looking at the legal precedents relating to bills of attainder and why Grayson is so spot-on in his analysis.  Glenn deconstructs the argument made by Broun and other anti-ACORN Republican members of Congress. Here’s where he arrives:

For those who want to ignore the actual law and insist that it’s not “punishment” for Congress to prohibit specific people from receiving discretionary government benefits (such as government contracts), it should be the case that you’d have no Constitutional objection to bills which provide for the following:

* Only registered Democrats, but not registered Republicans, shall be eligible for unemployment benefits.

* Any individual belonging or contributing to the NRA shall be permanently barred from government employment.

* Anyone who has been employed by Blackwater at any time during the past decade — including those who performed contracting services for said corporation — shall not be permitted to participate in the Medicare or Medicaid program.

* Any organization which helps more Republicans than Democrats register to vote shall be barred from holding tax-exempt status.

* Any person or company providing services, or entering into contracts with, Fox News shall be barred from receiving government contracts.

By the reasoning of Rep. Broun and his defenders, such measures cannot be unconstitutional because Congress is not “punishing” anyone here.  Nobody has the “right” to receive unemployment benefits, or be employed by the government, or to have government-provided health care benefits or to receive special tax-exemptions.  Those are purely discretionary benefits which the Congress is free to dole out, or not dole out, as it wishes.  Nobody who is singled out by the Congress can possibly complain that they are being unconstitutionally “punished” merely because Congress has decided to deny them these discretionary benefits.  Is that what anti-ACORN crusaders are prepared to defend?

There are days where it must be truly embarrassing to be a Republican member of Congress. I’m guessing yesterday was one of them.