Tag: Congress

Boeing lobbies for renewal of the Export-Import Bank

9:37 am

Boeing on Monday told its satellite workers that it will eventually lay off hundreds because of lost contracts due to the failure of Congress to renew the Export-Import Bank.

Boeing Co (BA.N) on Monday told its workers that it expected to cut as many as “several hundred” jobs in its satellite business through the end of 2015 due to a downturn in U.S. military spending and delays in commercial satellite orders. Multiple commercial orders were being delayed by recent failures of launch vehicles and uncertainties about the future availability of financing from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, whose government charter lapsed on June 30, the company told key managers in an internal communication.

Boeing spokesman Tim Neale confirmed the reductions and said the total number of people affected would be finalized in coming months. Some could find work in other parts of Boeing, he said. [emphasis mine]

This announcement is pure lobbying, no more. They might have to lay off workers, but they haven’t done it yet, and when they do the numbers are likely to be far less than they are implying. And even so, the layoffs will probably be good for the company, making it more lean and efficient.

The reason they have made this public now is to generate support for a renewal of the Export-Import Bank, which Congress allowed to expire last month. Boeing wants it back, because the company uses the low interest loans it provides (using government money) to get contracts abroad. However, they really don’t need it to do that. They could trim costs, work more efficiently, and get loans in the private sector, as every other private company is expected to do.

This announcement is really no different than the doom that was predicted prior to the arrival of sequestration. Those budget cuts were going to cause the destruction of the defense industry and the American military, while causing the airline industry to collapse because the TSA and the FAA wouldn’t have the staff to keep the planes in the air. Twas all a lie. Nothing happened, and by some miracle the government still had plenty of cash to keep things running smoothly. Similarly, Boeing can compete without the help of the government. They just have to stop whining and do it.

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Republican leaders find support for Boehner’s speakership very weak in House

10:57 pm

Whoa! The Republican leadership tried prior to the August recess to squelch an effort to oust Speaker John Boehner and discovered they did not have the votes.

House Speaker Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) had been planning to call up on the House floor last week a measure from Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) that would have removed him as Speaker of the House if it succeeded—intending to embarrass Meadows—but abandoned the plan after his entire leadership structure learned that they did not have the votes to re-elect him as Speaker before the August recess.

Though a lot of the information in the article is about complicated House rules issues, what some call “inside baseball” and quite boring, it is very much worth reading because it indicates strongly that John Boehner’s position as Speaker is very exposed. He could very well be ousted when Congress reconvenes in September.

There are 25 members who voted for a Republican alternative at the beginning of this Congress, and now there are plenty more who are disaffected with the tactics of Boehner and his allies in leadership. More members, those who want to replace Boehner suspect, will, over the course of the month of August, come out publicly against Boehner at town hall events and in interviews with media. Unless Democrats bail Boehner out in September or October, if and when such a vote for the speakership would occur, by that point there would be enough members opposed to Boehner’s re-election for him to lose his position.

Even if Boehner survives, the dynamics here suggest that the conservatives have the stronger hand, and are going to try to force him to cater to their desires — something he has not been interested in doing — or face removal.

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Cruz calls McConnell a liar in the Senate

9:47 am

Most interesting: Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today called Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) a liar in a speech on the Senate floor.

“We had a Senate Republican lunch where I stood up and I asked the majority leader very directly, what was the deal that was just cut on [trade legislation], and was there a deal for the Export-Import Bank? It was a direct question. I asked the majority leader in front of all the Republican senators. The majority leader was visibly angry with me that I would ask such a question, and the majority leader looked at me and said, “There is no deal, there is no deal, there is no deal.”

“Like Saint Peter, he repeated it three times,” Cruz added.

[Cruz also said,] “What we just saw today was an absolute demonstration that not only what he told every Republican senator, but what he told the press over and over and over again, was a simple lie,” Cruz said Friday morning. “We know now that when the majority leader looks us in the eyes and makes an explicit commitment, that he is willing to say things that he knows are false. That has consequences for how this body operates.”

I have embedded video of this speech below the fold.

The increasing public anger expressed by Cruz here against the Republican leadership is a sign of a growing power struggle within that party. About 20% to 30% of the Republican Party feels more loyalty to the Democrats and the Washington power structure than they do to the conservative voters that have supported that party. Unfortunately, it appears that this small minority in the Republican party is presently in charge.

Should the conservative majority ever unify to dump their liberal leadership, there is the risk that many of these Republican leaders will then abandon the party and join the Democrats. The Democrats will then likely regain control of Congress, but if so, they will at least be then fighting an opponent that is unified in support of conservative principles, rather than a party run by two-faced leaders who campaign as conservatives and, having won their elections, immediately team up with the Democrats to block any conservative reform.

It is also possible that these fake conservatives, once kicked out of the leadership, will meekly join the conservative majority, knowing that to join the Democrats will likely get most of them tossed from office at the next election.

Either way, the heavens are beginning to align in favor of a major power shift within the Republican Party. Stay tuned.
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Iran’s parliament questioning Iran nuclear deal

11:24 am

Democracy in action! Iran’s parliament is likely to demand changes to Iran deal before voting for its approval.

The ironies here are tragic. While their parliament stands up for its constitutional rights, our Congress, run by Republicans, has ceded its power to the President, with the Senate giving up its constitutional right to only approve treaties with a two-third majority. Instead, they got down on their knees and handed Obama the power to make this very bad treaty without their full consent. What idiots.

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New poll finds hostility to the federal government growing

9:08 am

A new poll has found that the public’s hostility to the federal government, including the Supreme Court, has grown in recent years and jumped significantly in the past six months.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 33% of Likely U.S. Voters now believe that states should have the right to ignore federal court rulings if their elected officials agree with them. That’s up nine points from 24% when we first asked this question in February. Just over half (52%) disagree, down from 58% in the earlier survey. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided. …

Support for ignoring the federal courts is up among most demographic groups, however. Most voters have long believed that the Supreme Court justices have their own political agenda, and they still tend to feel that that agenda is more liberal than conservative.

That’s just the public’s changing attitude to the Supreme Court. Overall trust in the federal government is down as well:

A plurality (47%) of voters continues to believe the federal government has too much influence over state governments, and 54% think states should have the right to opt out of federal government programs that they don’t agree with. Even more (61%) think states should have the right to opt out of federally mandated programs if the federal government doesn’t help pay for them.

The Declaration of Independence, the foundational document that Americans honor on the Fourth of July, says that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, but just 25% believe that to be true of the federal government today. Only 20% now consider the federal government a protector of individual liberty. Sixty percent (60%) see the government as a threat to individual liberty instead.

The more power the federal government grabs, the more the public will resist. Eventually, the federal government, and all of society, will break under this strain. The sooner the public reins in the federal government, by voting for legislators who will do that reining, the better chance we will have of avoiding that collapse.

From what I can see right now, however, I must sadly say that I am not hopeful. Since 2010 the voters have clearly made their position clear: They want the government reined in. Our society’s intellectual class, including the Republican leadership in Congress working with the congressional Democratic minority, doesn’t seem to want to listen to that message unfortunately.

Then again, this update on the growing power of the Freedom Caucus in the House suggests that the voters might finally get their way if the next election puts more conservatives in office.

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Cruz proposes requiring judges to face voters periodically

6:45 pm

In response to this week’s decisions by the Supreme Court, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today proposed several laws and constitutional amendments, one of which would require judges to face the voters periodically and be removed if rejected.

Cruz’s analysis here is interesting in that he recognizes the right of Congress to impeach and remove judges, but also recognizes that this Congress, under this Republican leadership, just won’t do it. As he notes,

A Senate that cannot muster 51 votes to block an attorney-general nominee openly committed to continue an unprecedented course of executive-branch lawlessness can hardly be expected to muster the 67 votes needed to impeach an Anthony Kennedy.

He also correctly notes that if something isn’t done, the movement to amendment the Constitution using Article V convention of the states will likely gain momentum, something that we all know carries its own risks, including changing the Constitution in ways that are not beneficial.

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House leadership reinstates conservative lawmaker

10:05 am

Only days after stripping him of his chairmanship, the moderate House leadership has reinstated the lawmaker who is a member of the House Freedom Caucus and who had voted against the leadership during the fast track trade debate.

It appears the pressure coming from the conservatives in the Freedom Caucus forced the leadership to back down. Good! More pressure should be brought to bear, as the voters elected these guys to pass conservative legislation, not negotiate with the Democrats to get the liberal agenda passed.

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House conservatives push back against Boehner

9:57 pm

The conflict between the moderate House leadership under John Boehner and the conservative House Freedom Caucus appears to be heating up.

The opening lines of the article are quite intriguing:

The House Freedom Caucus has a secret it wants to share with Democrats. “If the Democrats were to file a motion to vacate the chair [remove Boehner] and were to vote for that motion unanimously, there probably are 218 votes for it to succeed,” one member of the House Freedom Caucus told CQ Roll Call Tuesday night, as he exited an meeting in the basement of Tortilla Coast.

If that’s true, Democrats could certainly use a vote to remove Speaker John A. Boehner as leverage in any number of upcoming battles: the Export-Import Bank, a highway bill, all sorts of spending measures. But absent any real talk from Democrats, the official response from Boehner’s communications director, Kevin Smith, was simply to dismiss CQ Roll Call’s reporter. “Matt Fuller is a prop for Freedom Caucus propaganda,” Smith wrote via email.

What this suggests is that the Freedom Caucus is looking for ways to pressure the House leadership to pay more attention to their concerns instead of Democratic concerns. And if the data from the article is correct and that the caucus’s membership has swelled to as much as 70 members, then Boehner is in deep trouble.

Then again, this could all be a game to make the caucus look more powerful than it is. If it can work out a deal to depose Boehner, however, even if it is weak, it might still be able to get a true conservative Republican named as House Speaker.

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Republican-led Senate proposes big budget boost for NIH

9:06 am

This is fiscal restraint? The Senate, under the leadership of the Republican party for the first time since 2006, has proposed a $2 billion increase in the 2016 budget for National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The House Republican leadership hasn’t shown much restraint either, proposing $1 billion boost in the 2016 budget. And this in the context of a flat budget for NIH during the period from 2006 to 2014 when Democrats controlled either both or at least one house of Congress.

Since Congress completed a 5-year doubling of the NIH budget in 2003, the agency’s funding level has fallen more than 20% below the 2003 level after taking into account the rising costs of biomedical research.

This is once again evidence to me that the Republican leadership in Congress really has little interest in reining in the out-of-control federal budget. They talk a conservative game during elections, but when it comes time to write the budgets, the Republicans in charge of committees become spendthrifts to support the pork in the government agencies they are assigned to manage, and are almost always centered in their own districts.

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Ted Cruz outlines why he now opposes fast track trade

9:14 am

In an op-ed Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has outlined why he will now vote against giving President Obama fast track trade authority.

Why does Republican Leadership always give in to the Democrats? Why does Leadership always disregard the promises made to the conservative grassroots?

Enough is enough. I cannot vote for TPA unless McConnell and Boehner both commit publicly to allow the Ex-Im Bank to expire—and stay expired. And, Congress must also pass the Cruz-Sessions amendments to TPA to ensure that no trade agreement can try to back-door changes to our immigration laws. Otherwise, I will have no choice but to vote no.

Combine this with the increased public dissatisfaction by House conservatives of their leadership suggests to me that unless the leadership changes its political methods, one of two things could soon happen: Either the Republican Party will oust its leaders in the Senate and House and install people more allied with the party’s conservative base, or the Republican Party will split, with its more moderate members moving to the Democratic Party (which God knows needs some moderation) while the rest form a real conservative party.

Meanwhile, the revised fast track trade bill that the House passed last week was approved today by the Senate 60-37 and will now go to Obama for signature.

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Fast track trade authority passes in House

10:03 am

The House today passed a revised fast track authority bill for any trade bills that President Obama might negotiate.

This bill did not include the job training section that was defeated last week and that the Senate included in its version of fast track. Thus, the Senate must now vote again on fast track, this time on the House-passed version. It is unclear whether the Senate will agree, as Democrats have opposed fast track without the jobs aid.

Overall this whole incident illustrates how misguided our elected leaders are. Right now we have much bigger problems than negotiating a new trade agreement, especially considering the secrecy in which Obama wishes to complete that negotiation.

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The complicated status of Obamatrade in Congress

9:31 am

Link here. To sum up, the fast track trade authority for Obama actually passed, but the companion part of the law, dubbed TAA, failed badly. Since the Senate had passed both, the approved law needs to go back to conference so that both houses pass the same bill, or the House can vote again on the portion that was defeated.

That the House leadership is still fighting for this considering the strong opposition from the voters as well as from their own caucus tells us how little they understand the present political situation.

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