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Rachel Maddow started her MSNBC show last night with a pull quote from this article in The Hill newspaper — “Oh my God, it’s coming”:
When the Obama administration announced this week that the Executive Branch would no longer defend the so-called Defense of Marriage Act at trial, they effectively lobbed the ball into Speaker John Boehner’s court. It will be up to the Legislative Branch, which is to say Boehner and his tea party bosses in Congress, to defend the act in upcoming trials.
It refreshing to see the White House playing hardball with the speaker. In offloading to Boehner the responsibility for defending DOMA — which is unconstitutional on its face — the administration has unilaterally forced Republicans to shift from arguing their case against gay marriage from the court of public opinion, via their in-house media outlets on Fox and AM radio, into the court of law, where their illogical, Bible-based rationales are immaterial as testimony:
The House tea party caucus put its dominance over Speaker John Boehner on display last week when it pushed him and his hapless leadership team to the edge of the political ledge on the issue of budget cuts.
Here’s the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis on Friday of the ramifications of the tea party cuts were they to be enacted:
After the House Appropriations Committee detailed $74 billion in cuts last Wednesday, a number of conservative members demanded $26 billion in additional cuts to make good on the “Pledge to America,” bringing the total level of cuts relative to President Obama’s FY 2011 budget request to $100 billion. A full $100 billion cut to discretionary spending would likely result in job losses on the order of 994,000, using OMB’s GDP projections (CBO’s projections are based on current law) and assuming a fiscal multiplier of 1.5.
The new GOP budget proposes cutting non-security discretionary spending by $81 billion relative to the president’s $478 billion request for 2011. Non-security discretionary cuts of this magnitude would likely result in job losses of just over 800,000. (2/15/2011)
But over the weekend, looking at the bill as passed, the Associated Press reported that it called for $60 billion in cuts, which, if so, would represent a significant defeat for the tea party caucus. Even at that level, the cuts will likely produce direct job losses of 650,000 in government layoffs, which would likely trigger to another 325,000 layoffs, mostly in the retail and service sectors — nearly 1 million jobs altogether — according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.
In the vote, 110 Republicans joined with 123 Democrats to pass an amendment to kill development of a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Jet.
While some are interpreting the vote as a slap at Speaker John Boehner, who represents the 8th congressional district, which includes Butler County, others are pointing to it as another example of the incompetence of the speaker and his House leadership team.
Earlier this month, Boehner and the House GOP Whip Kevin McCarthy of California sent several bills to the floor apparently without knowing in advance whether the votes were there to pass them. A vote to extend sections of the PATRIOT ACT failed when about two dozen Republican members voted with Democrats to kill it. A measure to take back $180 million dollars in United Nations dues also failed because of GOP crossovers. The Boehner team then pulled a third bill that would have extended financial assistance to workers who lost their jobs to competition from imports.
Speakers of the House rarely, if ever, schedule a vote on an issue until they know they have the votes to win. Some have discounted these missteps as “rookie mistakes” — apparently forgetting that Boehner has been in the House for 21 years, and in the GOP leadership since 2007.
The vote to kill the Evendale project came just a day after Boehner took to the cameras to insist that if spending cuts resulted in eliminating hundreds of thousands of federal jobs, then “so be it.”
Remember that one of the Republicans’ favorite “big lies” is that the federal government cannot create jobs. Like Boehner’s “so be it” assertion on Tuesday, the snafu over the jet engine vote also exposes this big lie for what it is: The salaries of the workers in the Edendale plant are all paid in principle, if not in full, out of federal government contracts with GE.
It’s certainly possible that Boehner could save the Evendale plant through backroom deals as the budget bills move forward, but if the program is eliminated, it will likely result in hundreds of the speaker’s constituents and their families abruptly finding themselves on the path to financial ruin — a circumstance that could set off a cascade of business failures in Butler County.
If so, it’s likely the speaker’s nonchalance about the plight of laid off federal workers could come back to haunt him in the 2012 campaign.
So be it.
The recent news out of Kentucky was just awful,
They found the senator unconscious and horizontal.
And since his hospitalization,
There’s been little news about his condition,
But now everybody’s having a 20-minute conversation with Mitch McConnell.
