Congress owes America better start for 2012, and not to repeat the way it ended 2011.

Even if the Senate is hopelessly dysfunctional, the House could do better.  The final House session of 2011 was a prime example of how to lose public confidence.  The body was gaveled into session on short notice Friday morning, December 23^rd, and a mere ten members approved legislation for the entire 435-member House.  The others had left for the holidays, so instead of a roll call vote on a controversial two-month lowering of the “payroll tax,” the bill passed by “unanimous consent” of the handful who were there.

House leaders had given Members insufficient time to return to Washington.  Representatives who had scattered for the holidays were informed at 5 pm that Thursday of a key vote at 10 am Friday.  This unusual procedure for a major vote was possible only because the House a few days before had voted for a “martial law” procedure that removed the normal requirement for greater advance notice.

That is why only ten House Members were present for the vote according to the Washington Times—four Republicans and six Democrats.

The rush was purely political.  Had Members been told to return for a vote after Christmas, no deadline would have been missed and the public would have the accountability of a regular roll call vote.  Many Republicans had publicly opposed the two-month extension, but we will never know how they would have voted.

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Forty-four of 46 Republican Senators vowed they would not approve “any consumer financial bureau director unless the agency was put under a five-member outside board, had its work checked periodically by bank examiners and had its budget approved by Congress rather than the Federal Reserve.”

So when Republicans refused to confirm the President’s nominee, Richard Cordray, to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, America’s number one duffer shouldn’t have been surprised.

Senate Republicans maintained that voting down the nomination of Cordray had everything to do with the Dodd-Frank financial reform agency lacking oversight, and nothing to do with the candidate Obama chose to head it up. In other words, Republicans wanted to take consumer protection a step further than the President was willing to go, vowing that they’d agree to confirm a director, but not before additional consumer safeguards and supervision are put in place.

As for Obama’s nominee Richard Cordray, besides being the former Attorney General of the state of Ohio and acting as chief enforcement officer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for the last year, Cordray is a five-time undefeated Jeopardy champion. Which may be why, when chiding Republicans for blocking his appointment, the President kept mentioning game playing.

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WASHINGTON (AP) – Capping a full retreat by House GOP leaders, Congress will convene Friday in hopes of approving a stopgap measure renewing payroll tax cuts for every worker and unemployment benefits for millions—despite serious opposition among some tea party Republicans.

Friday’s unusual session, if all goes according to plan, will send a bill to President Barack Obama to become law for two months and put off until January a fight over how to pay for the 2 percentage point tax cut, extend jobless benefits averaging around $300 a week and prevent doctors from absorbing a big cut in Medicare payments through 2012.

(more…)

WASHINGTON (AP) – House Speaker John Boehner said Sunday that he opposes a Senate-approved bill that extends a payroll tax cut and jobless benefits for just two months and said congressional bargainers need to write a new version that would last an entire year.

As if to suggest other changes he would like in the legislation, the Ohio Republican mentioned a provision that would block Obama administration anti-pollution rules and “reasonable reductions in spending” that were in a House-passed version of the payroll tax bill that the Senate ignored.

Boehner’s comments came a day after House Republicans used a conference call to complain bitterly about the Senate bill, putting House passage in serious jeopardy.

House Republicans dislike the Senate bill for many reasons, including its lack of what they consider real spending cuts and its removal of restrictions on Obama administration rules. Others are unhappy about extending unemployment benefits or oppose cutting the payroll tax, which is used to finance the Social Security system.

“It’s pretty clear I and our members oppose the Senate bill,” Boehner said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. He added, “I believe two months is just kicking the can down the road.”

House leaders have scheduled a vote on the bill for Monday.

The bill would force President Barack Obama to make a decision in the next two months on whether to build the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The president had initially said he would postpone a decision on the 1,700-mile-long pipeline until after next year’s elections and threatened to kill the payroll tax bill if it included the pipeline provision. But he backed off this week as the Senate payroll compromise took shape.

Republicans strongly support the pipeline, which is supposed to pump oil from Alberta, Canada, to Texas, for the thousands of jobs it is expected to create. Unions favor the plan but environmentalists oppose it, forcing Obama to choose between two Democratic constituencies.

The Senate bill says Obama can reject the pipeline only if he decides building it would not be in the national interest.

Read more here.

On July 17th, while debt ceiling talks were at their height, I had a post on Big Government in which I wrote:

Look folks, we literally have Obama right where we want him. Not only is he beatable, he has actually already beaten himself by spending this country into the ground. Now is no time to do him a favor by raising the debt ceiling and letting him off the hook.

Republicans had the world by the tail for a brief moment and, but lacking the courage to do it, they could have stood their ground and guaranteed Obama was going to be a one term president.

Instead, Speaker Boehner—with the encouragement of that great conservative stalwart John McCain—entered into an asinine agreement to allow a Super Committee to form and make decisions in lieu of Congress’s unwillingness to do so. As a result, Obama not only got a bit of breathing room but actually received a reprieve yesterday, when the Super Committee failed to reach an agreement on spending cuts. Now Obama can stand back and fault the Republicans for the committee’s failure, thereby shifting the blame for our faltering economy from his horrid policies to their unwillingness to meet the Democrats half-way.

Thus, as soon as the Super Committee’s gridlock was announced, Obama pounced on the chance to paint Republicans as inside-the-beltway politicians who are out of touch with what the people need: “There are still too many Republicans in Congress who have refused to listen to the voices of reason and compromise that are coming from outside of Washington.”

As a result of the Super Committee’s failure—which is really Obama’s success—our military will face a $600 billion cut in funding. So now McCain is all worked up and issuing press releases that describe these cuts as a “threat to the national security interests of the United States” and vowing that they must not “be allowed to occur.”

Earth to John McCain: We told you this back in July when we, as conservatives, opposed Boehner’s attempts to reach across the aisle and throw Obama a life preserver. You, however, responded to our concern by describing Tea Partiers as “hobbits” given to “crack political thinking.”

(more…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the October unemployment report, the high jobless rate among young adults, and a piece that says the left and the right are both wrong on how to fix the economy.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Boehner on supercommittee: Tax increases are out, revenues could be in
Economy Wobbles to 80,000 New Jobs, Rate Slips to 9%
October Unemployment Report
U.S. Stock Futures Fall as Europe Funding Concern Offsets Jobless Rate
Tight Budgets, Loose Money: Why Both Liberals and Conservatives Are Wrong About How to Fix the Economy

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The hosts and guests of Coffee and Markets speak only for ourselves, not any clients or employers.

Just the facts:

On May 3, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and the House Oversight Committee for questioning on Fast and Furious.

During questioning, Issa asked: “When did you first know about the program…called ‘Fast and Furious?”

Holder responded: “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks”

As I’ve written elsewhere, at the very moment Holder gave this answer, it was a safe bet he was being less than completely honest with the Congressional committee. But now the evidence, having become insurmountable in just the past 48 hours, makes it crystal clear that Holder lied to Issa and the House Oversight Committee.

Proof:

Reports CBS NEWS: “[Holder] was sent briefings back as far as 2010.” Briefings on Fast and Furious that is, beginning at least as early as July 2010. (In other words, Holder began receiving briefings on Fast and Furious “ten months before his May 3^rd Congressional testimony.”)

And on October 18, 2010, documents show that Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer sent communiqués to Holder warning that indictments for Fast and Furious could come soon.

In response to this growing mound of evidence against him, Holder is now saying he “misunderstood that question from Congress [on May 3^rd], that he did know about Fast and Furious, just not the details”

This is the same tired defense others under Holder have been making – that they knew about Fast and Furious but not about “the details,” i.e. about the guns being walked into Mexico. However, this just won’t fly. It’s an insult to common sense and runs counter to the facts available to the public at large.

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The Barack Obama “Re-elect me because I offered a jobs bill that even my own party hates” tour continued today with a trip to the Brent Spence Bridge. No the POTUS wasn’t threatening to jump because the public doesn’t like his class warfare-inspired tax provisions, nor was he threatening to jump because voters trust the GOP more than Democrats regarding the economy. He wasn’t even threatening to kill himself rather than be subjected to Nancy Grace in a low-cut dress on Dancing With The Stars ever again. Thank Goodness he wasn’t even threatening to kill himself at all (although the Nancy Grace thing was pretty compelling).

This President visited the bridge because he was trying to make a point, partially to the voters but mostly to  the Republican leadership.  The Trent Spence Bridge rises above the Ohio River and spans John Boehner’s home state of  Ohio and Mitch McConnel’s home state of Kentucky. Obama was trying to tell these Republicans that he could go over their heads and directly to their constituents at any time and through the power of the Presidential “Bully Pulpit” he can make their lives very difficult.

What Obama doesn’t understand is that he has used the “Bully Pulpit” so many times that, just like the Trent Spence Bridge,  it is functionally obsolete. In the two states, his trip was seen as just another staged re-election event and a bit of a parody of itself.

The 50-year-old, 830-foot bridge is well past its prime and Obama supposedly used it as a way to showcase why Congress should back his “tax and spend” $450 billion dollar job plan which includes infrastructure spending.

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From The Associated Press:

President Barack Obama on Friday scrapped his administration’s controversial plans to tighten smog rules, bowing to the demands of congressional Republicans and some business leaders.

Obama overruled the Environmental Protection Agency—and the unanimous opinion of its independent panel of scientific advisers—and directed administrator Lisa Jackson to withdraw the proposed regulation to reduce concentrations of ground-level ozone, smog’s main ingredient. The decision rests in part on reducing regulatory burdens and uncertainty for businesses at a time of rampant uncertainty about an unsteady economy.

The announcement came shortly after a new government report on private sector employment showed that businesses essentially added no new jobs last month—and that the jobless rate remained stuck at a historically high 9.1 percent.

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The American left and its handmaidens in the Old Media spent 24 hours desperately trying to spin Obama’s attempt to schedule a joint session of Congress on the same day as the GOP debate as an example of how the GOP is refusing to work with him. These leftists categorically deny that Obama was simply engaging in political brinkmanship, using his selection of Sept. 7 as a political ploy. But the very night that Obama was shot down by Speaker Boehner on the date he chose for his jobs address, Obama’s campaign sent out a fundraising letter that pretty much proves that Obama intended the whole episode to be the very political ploy his pals in the Old Media tried to deny was happening.

On Aug 31, President Obama announced as if it were set the date of Sept. 7 for his jobs speech to a joint session of Congress. Of course, he and his staff knew that Sept. 7 was the date scheduled months ago for the next GOP presidential debate. It was clearly an attempt by Obama to overshadow the debate, the first one that Texas Gov. Rick Perry would be a part.

One problem here is that the protocol of scheduling a joint session of Congress was not observed by this White House. The fact is a president cannot schedule a joint session of Congress on his own hook. He simply does not have that power Constitutionally. He must ask the Senate majority leader and the speaker of the House of Representatives if the date he is requesting will work. Such a date has to be agreed upon by Congress before announcements are made. Obama did not do this. He simply tried to decree on what date the speech would be held and announced that date as if it were settled.

This was an unprecedented move.

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It appears the Boehner/Reid debt fix, which was really no fix at all, did what most legislation does nowadays: it extended the power of the government while doing very little to solve the problems for which it was designed. Thus, while Obama was doing “victory laps” around the White House following the bill’s passage in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid and the rest of his comrades were trying to figure out how to load the new “Super Congress” in their favor.

What is the “Super Congress” you ask? It’s a creation of the Boehner/Reid plan: a Congress-within-a-Congress which the Senate cannot filibuster nor the Speaker of the House control.

In other words, by design it is superior to either legislative body set forth in the Constitution (which means it is but one loony Democrat away from being a rogue congress, bent on usurping every right Americans have enjoyed since our Founding).

If you think I’m engaging in hyperbole here, consider this – once the debt bill had passed and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was trying to calm conservative nerves about the limited scope of the newly created congress, Reid was standing at a microphone saying: “[On the ‘Super Congress’] there are no constraints….They can look at any program we have in government, any program. … It has the ability to look at everything.”

Did you catch that folks? The “Super Congress” can look at any program and “at everything.”

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After weeks of hard negotiation a compromise deal is has been drafted and will be voted on by both houses before the end of the day tomorrow. This deal does give a political victory for some of the players and more importantly can even lead to a victory for the country provided that GOP leadership of both houses consider this as a starting point, and make certain steps to keep the pressure coming. The bill will not forestall a ratings download, but honestly I don’t believe that anything could as even a bill that cut $4 trillion doesn’t cut the deficit but merely slows down its growth.

As we issue this week’s essay, the leadership of both parties and the White House have announced agreement to end the debt ceiling crisis.  The deal, which still requires congressional approval, will increase the nation’s debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion while, over the next ten years, cutting an equivalent amount in government spending. It is a complex and convoluted deal that will make few people happy, but it will end the default nightmare…at least for two years.  The process attested to Otto Von Bismarck’s famous lament over a hundred years ago, “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”

The spectacle, leading up to the agreement, of leaders from both houses of congress taking turns bloviating before the TV cameras about the stubbornness of the other side did not, in our opinion, inure to the credit of anyone or of either party.  It became an exercise of “pathetic” condemning “more pathetic.”

Incumbents, Republicans and Democrats (including the President), may, we believe, pay a stiff price when they face the voters next year.  The political jockeying over the debt ceiling crisis may well result in a plague on both houses as voters contemplate the stress to which Washington subjected them.  Most grating to most voters, we believe, is that the crisis didn’t have to be a crisis. Every party to the debate has staked out positions that are politically motivated, unhelpful and laden with risk to ordinary Americans throughout the land.

House Speaker Boehner initially staked out the high ground and than caved on the issue of revenue (even revenue that would be derived from eliminating special interest tax breaks that have long outlived their usefulness or otherwise distort the marketplace).  He had proposed, wisely we think, eliminating almost all tax deductions and then reducing marginal rates as a trade-off even though the revenue derived from that exchange might well exceed current tax revenue.  The elimination of these special interest tax breaks, which we had suggested in an earlier essay, was subsequently pulled off the table. We believe, and have often stated, that taxes, with few exceptions, should be used to raise necessary revenue rather than to influence, or distort, individual or corporate taxpayer behavior. His earlier insistence on a short-term resolution that would have had the country replaying this farce in a few months has been stricken from the deal.

(more…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the McConnell – Obama debt deal, how we got screwed, and the weak GDP report.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

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The Q2 US GDP report – just terrible
Economists React: ‘Recovery? What Recovery?’

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No one in recent memory has faced the left’s vitriol like Sarah Palin (not even George W. Bush). The over-the-top, asinine attacks she’s received have been so ubiquitous they need not even be relisted here. Just suffice it to say there is a genuine hatred of Palin throughout the MSM, the leadership of the Democrat Party, and the Republican Party establishment.

And don’t be fooled folks: they don’t hate her because of her convictions – although they despise her convictions – rather, they hate her because they can’t control her.

Fortunately, the hatred the left holds for Palin is more than overcome by the love conservatives and right-leaning Independents have for her. They see in her a refreshing image that dares cast certain issues in the prism of right and wrong, just and unjust, American and un-American, etc.

Perhaps as a group, the Tea Party has come closest to receiving the kind of vindictive normally reserved for Palin alone. There’s no doubt they’re hated as she is hated, and equally no doubt that the hatred is a result of the fact that the MSM, the leadership of the Democrat Party, and the Republican Party establishment can’t control them.

For example, during the push to get Tea Partiers to “compromise” (which is political speak for check your convictions at the door) and support Boehner 3.0, an angry John McCain took to the Senate floor and referred to Tea Party conservatives in the House as “hobbits,” Senator Lisa Murkowski , whom Alaskans foolishly elected over Joe Miller last year, referred to them as “absolutists,” and John Kerry, the haughty one, described them as a group “of extremists, who don’t understand the implications even of what they’re doing.”

(more…)

Liberals are already licking their wounds from the debt ceiling debate, wondering how it is that Republicans managed to get Democrats to abandon tax increases and shift the terms to spending cuts and entitlement reforms.

Though there are many conservatives who are critical of the bill that House Speaker John Boehner passed, and worried about splits within the Tea Party, the fact is that the left feels it lost the deal as well as the debate.

EPA/Stefan Zaklin

The left did lose–or, more precisely, it lost more than conservatives did–partly because it has failed to confront economic and financial reality.

In April, when Standard & Poor’s first warned of a possible downgrade in the U.S. credit rating, the White House reacted with denial. President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, said that S&P’s warning was a “political judgment” that didn’t deserve “too much weight.” (more…)

From The Associated Press:

First word of an effort to reach a compromise came at mid-afternoon from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner—Obama’s principal Republican antagonist in a contentious new era of divided government. Both GOP leaders said they were in touch with the White House and hopeful of a deal.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid heatedly denied their claims of progress on the Senate floor a short while later, but several hours later said events had changed.

“There are many elements to be finalized…there is still a distance to go,” he said in dramatic late-night remarks. “I’m glad to see this move toward cooperation and compromise,” he added.

(more…)

From The Associated Press:

Riven by partisanship, the Republican-controlled House approved emergency legislation Friday night to prevent a threatened government default and bundled it off to swift and certain defeat in the Senate.

“We are almost out of time” for a compromise, warned President Barack Obama as U.S. financial markets trembled at the prospect of economic chaos next week.

The final outcome—with the White House and Senate Democrats calling anew for compromise while criticizing Republicans as Tuesday’s deadline drew near—was anything but certain.

The House vote was 218-210, almost entirely along party lines.

(more…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the crumbling “Boehner Plan” in the House, how Obama may circumvent it, and who’s to blame for this mess.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

The U.S. Treasury has less cash on hand than Apple Inc.
3 ways Obama could bypass Congress
They’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling

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