Related: Congre$$ Now Cooperating
The military has been spared the effects of sequestration.
"House overwhelmingly passes budget plan; Defense proposal advances; bill for farms languishes" by Jonathan Weisman and Jeremy W. Peters | New York Times, December 13, 2013
WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday approved a bipartisan budget accord and a Pentagon policy bill that would strengthen protections for victims of sexual assault. But as it wrapped up business for the year, it left unfinished a major piece of domestic policy — the farm bill — making it likely the law would lapse at year’s end.
Meaning food stamps for the hungry will cease. Happy Holidays!
Republicans and Democrats hope the budget pact, which passed 332 to 94, will act as a truce in the spending battles that have paralyzed Congress for three years, and leaders in both parties sought to marginalize hard-line conservatives opposed to any compromise.
The defense measure would, in addition to strengthening protections for military victims of sexual assault, leave open the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, over President Obama’s objections.
The provisions to stem the growing number of sexual assault cases are the most expansive of their kind in years. They would include rules that would prevent commanding officers from overturning verdicts.
But an agreement on the farm bill — the subject of ongoing disagreements between Republicans and Democrats over funding for food stamps, expanding crop insurance, and other issues — remained elusive. All the House could pass Thursday was a one-month extension of the law, which Senate Democrats oppose because they want an entire new bill.
Earlier, with bipartisan support in hand, House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio declared open warfare on the outside conservative groups that tried to scuttle the budget deal.
Oh, it's a WAR NOW?!
For the second day in a row, he accused such groups as Club for Growth, Heritage Action, and Americans for Prosperity of reflexively opposing a reasonable plan in an effort to raise their profiles and improve their fund-raising.
He said the groups had devised the strategy of linking further government funding to the repeal of Obama’s health care law, then pressing their members and House Republicans to go along, even though they knew it would shut down the government and ultimately fail.
“Are you kidding me?” the speaker shouted, denouncing opposition to the budget accord. “There comes a point where some people step over the line. When you criticize something and you have no idea what you’re criticizing, it undermines your credibility.”
And you just stepped over it, Mr. Speaker.
Yet when the Senate takes up the bill, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, is likely to vote against it, along with virtually all of the Republican senators who are contending with Tea Party challenges next year or are wooing conservatives for a potential presidential bid.
Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, declared his opposition.
“Much of the spending increase in this deal has been justified by increased fees and new revenue,” Sessions said. “In other words, it’s a fee increase to fuel a spending increase — rather than reducing deficits.”
That's what I said the other day.
By most analyses, the deal, struck by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, and Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, is a modest plan to mitigate the impact of across-the-board spending cuts, known as sequestration, that went into effect in March and to slightly lower the projected growth of the budget deficit over the next decade.
It totally mitigated them for the military while increasing cuts in Medicare.
The legislation would also extend current Medicare payment rates for three months, staving off a cut of more than 20 percent to health care providers. That would allow lawmakers to try to come up with a more permanent “doctors’ fix” to overwrite a deficit-reduction measure that neither party has been able to stomach for more than a decade.
All nine members of Massachusetts’ House delegation, including Katherine Clark of Melrose, voted for the budget. It was Clark’s first day as a representative after she handily won the seat formerly held by Edward Markey in a special election earlier this week.
The budget fight has turned into a donnybrook between congressional leaders and Tea Party-aligned groups and lawmakers. It pits the House Republican leadership against the Tea Party wing and one potential Republican presidential candidate, Ryan, against two others who oppose his deal, Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
“It is clear that the conservative movement has come under attack on Capitol Hill,” 50 conservative activists wrote to congressional Republicans.
Democratic leaders took heart in what they saw as a turning point in their battle with uncompromising conservatives.
“The benefits of this agreement will go far beyond the actual agreement itself,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York. “What we have seen in the Senate over the last several months, and now in the House, led by the courage of Congressman Ryan, is mainstream conservatives standing up to the hard right and saying: ‘This is no good for America. This is no good for the Republican Party. We’re not going to follow the Tea Party, like Thelma and Louise, over a cliff.’ ”
He would go if it were Democratic iced tea.
You tired of the shit-fooley political shiow yet?
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"Budget deal is uninspiring — but very welcome, nonetheless, December 14, 2013
The budget accord comes as a relief for another reason: It marks an assertion of power by mainstream Republicans against Tea Party extremists. Speaker John Boehner and the rest of the Republican Party leadership finally concluded that they can no longer afford to let the party’s most uncompromising wing, and interest groups like Heritage Action and Club for Growth, dictate the GOP agenda.
See: Sunday Globe Special: Broken City Fixed
That's all it took?
Those groups have come out against the Ryan-Murray deal, but unlike in previous showdowns, the Republican leadership in the House has swatted them down, with Boehner himself publicly chastising them. In the final House vote, Republicans supported the measure by 169-62, and Democrats by 163-32. The bill goes on to the Senate, which is likely to pass it, despite the opposition of many conservatives.
Like all compromises, the legislation is imperfect. Some Democrats, and also some Republicans, have grumbled about the failure to include an extension of unemployment benefits, but that can be done separately. The bill also does not raise the debt ceiling, which leaves open the possibility of another showdown. Hopefully, though, the sobering experience of October, when the last debt-ceiling fight nearly triggered a calamitous government default, has convinced Republican hard-liners not to resort to that tactic again....
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"John Boehner’s rebuke of Tea Party rallies mainstream GOP; Bashes efforts to unseat party’s own incumbents" by Charles Babington | Associated Press, December 14, 2013
WASHINGTON — The Republican establishment’s much-anticipated pushback against the Tea Party wing is underway....
I'm glad I'm a registered independent. I hate the fucking Republican establi$hment.
Hell, maybe I'll even vote Democrat next year.
Some Republican loyalists wonder what took so long. The US Chamber of Commerce recently took steps to help mainstream Republicans in party primaries, but House Speaker John Boehner’s high-profile outburst will move the effort to the GOP’s front burners.
Cheering him on are mainstream Republicans who angrily watched for three years as hard-right groups exercised remarkable clout in the party, Congress, and elections. Tea Party-backed nominees helped Republicans win control of the House in 2010, but they also lost several Senate races viewed as winnable, keeping the Senate in Democrats’ hands.
This past summer, uncompromising House Republicans forced a partial government shutdown that damaged the party’s image, just as Boehner warned it would.
Many Republicans also feel conservative activists pushed presidential nominee Mitt Romney so far to the right on immigration and other issues that it eased President Obama’s path to reelection last year.
‘‘The establishment has no choice at this point,’’ said former Representative Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who criticized the Tea Party’s influence. ‘‘So they’re taking them on.’’
Meaning Tea Party is a threat to the monied order and Zionist control.
‘‘To follow these groups is a downward spiral,’’ Davis said.
Those groups will fight back hard, Davis warned, and it’s not clear which faction will prevail in next year’s midterm elections and beyond.‘‘They’re dug in pretty hard,’’ he said.
For a second straight day, Boehner criticized groups such as Heritage Action, the Club for Growth, and Americans for Prosperity.
These Washington-based organizations vary on priorities and tactics. But all have sharply rebuked Republican leaders on key issues. And they have aided insurgent Republican challengers who vow never to compromise with Democrats, even if it means shutting down the government or defaulting on the US debt.
Extremist, insurgent. I didn't know Tea Party Republicans were setting roadside bombs and killing U.S. troops, or were behaving like U.S.-supported Syrian rebels.
Yeah, I have kind of had it with the insults coming from the propaganda pre$$.
Critics say the groups chiefly want to raise cash by constantly inflaming political activists.
‘‘They’re misleading their followers,’’ Boehner told reporters at the Capitol. ‘‘I just think that they’ve lost all credibility.’’
Then they can join the U.S. government and the whoreporate AmeriKan media.
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Some Republicans fear an all-out struggle between the establishment and the Tea Party wings, saying both factions’ money and energy are crucial to winning elections. But others say Tea Party excesses leave little choice.
Who gives a shit what letter sits in what chair anymore when they both serve the same ma$ter?
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Meanwhile, over in the Senate:
"Wrangling on Capitol Hill turns into endurance test" December 13, 2013
WASHINGTON — If there is a rock bottom in the frayed relationship between Senate Republicans and Democrats, it seemed uncomfortably close this week as the final days of 2013 on Capitol Hill degenerated into something like an endurance contest to see who could be the most spiteful.
As they headed into their second late-night session of confirmation votes Thursday evening, the Democrats’ way of retaliating for Republican delay tactics, senators were chugging Red Bull, sleeping in their offices and angrily assigning blame.
“I think it resembles fourth-graders playing in a sandbox, and I’ll give the majority leader, Harry Reid, 99 percent of the responsibility for it,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, usually one of the more reserved members.
“He’s going to have ‘The End of the Senate’ written on his tombstone,” Alexander said.
Related: Ex-Senate aide faces child porn charges
He was working out of your office, Lamar?
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut, called this week “chaotic and confusing, and a shameful waste of time.”
So is reading a Globe.
“I am loath to cast partisan blame,” he added, before doing just that. “But the plain fact is that there is a faction of the Republican Party that is essentially insisting on burning through all of these time deadlines.”
Republicans, furious that Democrats last month stripped away most of their power to filibuster presidential nominations, are using every procedural barricade available to them in the Senate’s two-century-old rule book, forcing it to run the clock as long as possible while they vote on a series of President Obama’s nominees.
Democrats, hoping to make the situation so unpleasant for their colleagues across the aisle that they eventually break, are scheduling votes at all hours of the day and night. Reid is threatening to refuse to let anyone go home until a backlog of dozens of nominees is gone — even if that means spending Christmas Eve in the Capitol.
Reid has votes planned through Saturday afternoon and will push through another battery of nominations next week, including some that would each require 30 hours of debate, like that of Janet L. Yellen to lead the Federal Reserve.
What members of both parties bemoaned more than anything was not the lack of civility or bipartisan cooperation — which they seem to have given up on long ago — but what they said they see as the irreversible damage inflicted on an institution they claim to revere.
Keep all this hot air in mind.
“If Bob Byrd had been here he would have had a stroke,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican, referring to the late Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the senator whom Republicans and Democrats hold up as the embodiment of senatorial dignity and forbearance.
Some senators expressed concern that this moodier, more intemperate Senate would become the norm now that Democrats have unilaterally changed filibuster rules.
“It’s the beginning of what we were worried about,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, a Democrat from West Virginia, among just three Democrats who did not support the rules change. “It’s just concerning, very much concerning, where it goes from here.”
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Related: Tension in Senate eases for weekend
It was a complete turnaround in tone from just a few hours earlier. “Both sides didn’t want to work over the weekend. . . . We’re doing our utmost to finish our business here a week from today so that we can go home for Christmas.”
Yeah, Merry f***ing Christmas, shit bags.
