Politics

GOP Focus for Congress; Cut Deficit, Don’t Stumble

Published

10 years ago

January 3, 2015

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio strides to the House chamber on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, July 30, 2014, as lawmakers prepare to move on legislation authorizing an election-year lawsuit against President Barack Obama that accuses him of exceeding his powers in enforcing his health care law. Democrats have branded the effort a political charade aimed at stirring up Republican voters for the fall congressional elections. They say it's also an effort by top Republicans to mollify conservatives who want Obama to be impeached something Boehner said Tuesday he has no plans to do. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio strides to the House chamber on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Alan Fram, ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the first Republican-dominated Congress to confront President Barack Obama, GOP leaders will focus on bolstering the economy and cutting the budget — and oh yes, avoiding self-inflicted calamities that make voters wonder if the party can govern competently.

When the new Congress raises the curtain Tuesday, Republicans will run both the House and Senate for the first time in eight years. GOP leaders want to showcase their legislative priorities, mixing accomplishments with showdowns with Obama but shunning government shutdowns and other chaotic standoffs.

Another priority is minimizing distractions like the recent admission by No. 3 House leader Steve Scalise, R-La., that he addressed a white supremacist group in 2002.

“Serious adults are in charge here and we intend to make progress,” incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told The Associated Press recently.

McConnell says the Senate’s first bill would force construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which Republicans call a job creator but Obama and many Democrats say threatens the environment.

The House leads off with legislation letting small companies sidestep some requirements of Obama’s prized health care overhaul by hiring veterans, followed by other measures weakening that law and pushing the Keystone pipeline.

Other bills likely early would block Obama’s executive actions on immigration and ease environmental and business regulations that the GOP contends stifles job growth. Additional bills would cut spending, squeeze Medicare and other benefit programs, revamp tax laws, finance highway construction and speed congressional approval of trade treaties.

“We’re focused on job creation,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and running “a more efficient, effective, accountable government.”

Democrats say the GOP’s goal is cutting taxes on the rich while crippling Obama’s accomplishments, including expanded health coverage and restrictions on financial institutions.

“In the minority, your role is to play defense and stop the worst from happening,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat.

Republicans captured Senate control in November’s midterm elections, adding nine seats for a 54-46 advantage that includes two Democratic-leaning independents. A 13-seat gain swelled their House majority to a commanding 246-188 with one vacancy, the result of New York Republican Michael Grimm’s planned resignation following his guilty plea on a tax evasion charge.

With McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, jointly mapping an agenda and scheduling long congressional work periods, goals and potential pitfalls include:

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DISTRACTIONS AND THE CALENDAR

GOP leaders still face tea party lawmakers. Their recalcitrance helped produce stalemates with Obama that excited conservative Republican voters but appalled others, causing GOP approval to plummet. Top Republicans want to ensure that Scalise’s 2002 speech, for which he has apologized, doesn’t hurt their efforts to appeal to more diverse voters.

Another complication: By autumn 2015, the developing presidential race could distract voters from congressional Republicans’ messaging.

“We want things arriving at the president’s desk, and a lot of those things happening sooner rather than later,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. “It’s not helpful to us if we drag into spring or summer and the stories are, ‘It’s a do-nothing Congress’ or a confrontation.”

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ENOUGH REPUBLICANS?

McConnell will often need at least six Democrats for the 60 Senate votes required to overcome filibusters, procedural delays aimed at scuttling bills. Republicans will need two-thirds majorities in each chamber, impossible without Democratic support, to override Obama vetoes that await bills threatening his health care law and his actions easing immigration rules.

McConnell says at an upcoming House-Senate Republican retreat, he will warn, “Don’t get your expectations so high that you’re inevitably going to be disappointed.”

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IMMIGRATION

Funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which enforces immigration laws, runs through late February.

House Republicans plan to quickly vote to finance that agency through September but are still discussing how to use that bill to block Obama’s executive actions deferring deportation for millions of immigrants in the United States illegally. That measure’s Senate fate and GOP strategy for an Obama veto remain unclear.

Republicans rule out a sweeping immigration overhaul like the Senate-passed, bipartisan 2013 measure. They plan narrower bills that could attract Democrats, bolstering border security and easing immigration restrictions on highly skilled and farm workers.

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HEALTH CARE

Republicans are itching to vote to repeal Obama’s 2010 health care law, knowing that would never get his signature.

They’re preparing measures repealing the medical device tax and ending the requirement that people buy medical coverage. They would also exempt companies from providing coverage to employees who work under 40 hours weekly, up from the current 30 hours.

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BUDGET AND TAXES

The new House Budget Committee chairman, Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., expects his chamber to approve a budget similar to blueprints written by former chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., ending deficits in a decade, trimming spending and overhauling benefits like Medicare. Senate Republicans want belt-tightening, but McConnell didn’t promise a balanced budget in 10 years.

Republicans want to rewrite tax laws but progress is uncertain. They want to lower rates for corporations and for businesses whose owners pay individual taxes, with lost revenue recovered by eliminating unspecified tax breaks. Democrats want the exercise to raise fresh revenue, partly to boost dwindling highway funds.

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ALSO PLANNED

Price wants to use legislation preventing a federal default, around summer, to pressure Obama to cut spending, calling such bills “pinch points to get good policy.” McConnell said with GOP congressional control, a default showdown is unneeded because of other opportunities, such as must-pass spending bills, that the GOP can use to constrain agencies.

Republicans want to send Obama measures that the GOP-led House passed the past two years but died in the Democratic-run Senate. These include bills blocking Environmental Protection Agency curbs on pollution and easing business regulations. The GOP calls these measures job creators; Democrats call them favors for special interests.

Republicans also want to consider legislation blocking Obama’s normalized relations with Cuba, penalizing Iran and authorizing force against Islamic State militants.

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U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

10 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

10 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.