Archive for the ‘Senate’ Category

Lugar says House freshman Republicans lack parliamentary gifts

Friday, August 12th, 2011

Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) took a whack at freshman GOP members of the House on Thursday, claiming they lack experience and gifts for parliamentary procedure.

“They thought they had come to save Washington, save the country, save lots of things,” said Lugar, according to The Star Press. “Speaker John Boehner faced … a very difficult problem of maintaining some control over a great number of people who were not gifted in parliamentary procedure and really didn’t care to be gifted.”

Lugar also took the opportunity to take a swing at President Obama, whom he accused of abdicating leadership during the intense negotiations leading up to lifting the nation’s borrowing limit.

“Forgive me for sounding a little partisan in this respect, but the president offered absolutely no leadership with regard to all of this [keeping the government funded] except to say it would be unconscionable not to raise the debt ceiling,” said Lugar.

Lugar was speaking at the Muncie-Delaware County Chamber of Commerce at the Horizon Convention Center in Muncie, Ind.

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Lawmakers Trade Blame for FAA Shutdown

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

Congress moved no closer to ending a partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday, with frustrations boiling over from the White House to the Capitol and the majority of lawmakers away on August recess.

The finger-pointing — by Senate Democrats, House Republicans and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood — played out like a bizarre epilogue to a months-long, sometimes vitriolic debate over extending the nation’s debt ceiling. At a news conference Wednesday, Senate Democrats bemoaned being “held hostage” by House Republicans in the standoff over extending the FAA’s authorization, which expired July 22.

The Democrats accused House Republicans of promoting special interests over nearly 4,000 furloughed FAA employees, and the media availability ended awkwardly after a television reporter asked a series of pointed questions as to why the Senate wouldn’t simply pass a bill that has already made its way through the House.

“It’s as if someone puts a gun to your head and says, ‘Give me your money,’ and then you say, ‘Why won’t you give them their money?’ You leave out the whole context that there’s a gun being held to your head, and that is not fair and that is not right. And yet … we keep getting that situation,” Senate Democratic Conference Vice Chairman Charles Schumer (N.Y.) said shortly before all but one lawmaker stormed off stage.

The impasse has resulted in a nearly two-week partial shutdown that has also halted about 70,000 construction jobs across the country. It centers on a House-passed, multiyear reauthorization that would make it harder for airline and railroad workers to unionize, a nonstarter for Senate Democrats. Just two days before the current authorization’s expiration, the House passed another extension that would last only through Sept. 16. It left out the union language, but included $16.5 million in cuts to a rural air service program that would fall heavily on Nevada, the home state of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D).

Republicans say that they’ve sent a reasonable bill to the Senate and that Democrats, who are seeking a “clean” extension, are the ones perpetuating the shutdown.

If no extension is passed until Congress returns in September, the government could lose up to $1 billion in uncollected airline ticket taxes, according to the Transportation Department.

From the White House briefing room Wednesday, LaHood called on Congress to return to work and pass a clean extension. Both the House and Senate will have multiple pro forma sessions during the August recess, meaning they could approve the extension by unanimous consent during the recess, send it to President Barack Obama’s desk and end the standoff.

“Congress needs to come back, resolve their differences, compromise and put our friends and neighbors and colleagues back to work. They should not leave 74,000 people hanging out there without jobs, without a paycheck until September,” said LaHood, who formerly served as a Republican House Member from Illinois. “For Members of Congress to give speeches about jobs and then go on their vacations while construction workers have vacated their jobs rings very hollow.”

Senators have tried multiple times this week to pass an extension by unanimous consent. On Monday, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) blocked an attempt to pass an amended version of the short-term House bill that was supported by Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and ranking member Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas). The next day, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) tried to pass a clean extension of the FAA authorization, but she ran into an objection from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). He then offered his own unanimous consent agreement to pass the unchanged short-term House bill, only to be blocked by Boxer.

Reid had indicated Tuesday that he would be open to accepting the rural air service cuts and passing the short-term bill to tide over the FAA until Congress reconvenes. But by Wednesday afternoon he was insisting that Speaker John Boehner approve a clean short-term extension as soon as possible.

“We must resolve our differences through the normal legislative process. In the meantime, we need a clean, short-term extension to get these people back to work,” Reid wrote in a letter to the Ohio Republican.

House Republicans, including Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.), were quick to point out that Rockefeller and Reid have a home-state interest in the authorization standoff, and particularly in the rural air service issue. The Essential Air Service program provides subsidized air travel to rural communities, including in West Virginia and Nevada.

“Powerful Senate Democrats have chosen to protect an airline ticket subsidy program on the backs of thousands of FAA employees and airport construction workers. Now they plan to engage in a personal and political media bludgeoning of folks who disagree with them,” Mica said in a statement Wednesday.

Boehner dug in further.

“The only reason so many jobs are at stake is Senate Democratic leaders chose to play politics rather than pass the House bill,” Boehner said Wednesday. “I respect the fact that Senators have certain objections, but they have had two weeks to respond to the House bill and done nothing, leaving tens of thousands of workers in limbo.”

The Senate and its leaders have been consumed over the past two weeks by negotiations to raise the debt ceiling and reduce the deficit before Tuesday, when the nation was projected to default on its loans. The House passed the final deal Monday evening, then promptly left for recess, with the Senate following suit the next day.

White House press secretary Jay Carney repeatedly expressed the administration’s frustration with Congress — not a particular party — and the impasse that is keeping 74,000 people out of work nationwide. But his cool demeanor stood in stark contrast to LaHood’s angry demand that lawmakers get their acts together and pass something.

“Congress should have passed a clean bill, could have passed a clean bill; I urged them to pass a clean bill,” LaHood said. “They can still do it. Congress can still do it.”

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Giffords in House for first time since shooting

Monday, August 1st, 2011

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Republicans Dress Down Jim Jordan, RSC Aide

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

The GOP rank and file tore into Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (Ohio) on Wednesday for his role in coordinated attacks on Republicans who have backed Speaker John Boehner’s (Ohio) debt limit proposal.

According to participants, during a closed-door Republican Conference meeting Wednesday, Jordan and a top RSC staffer came under fire from their colleagues for their role in the attacks.

The RSC, Heritage Action for America and others have closely coordinated their opposition to Boehner’s debt plan — including circulating a public pressure hit list of Republicans prepared by the RSC.

Significantly, several of the Members on the list are also members of the RSC and were none too pleased that their dues were being used to gin up attacks against them, according to numerous lawmakers and staff.

The list was circulated to Heritage Action and other members of the Cut, Cap and Balance Coalition and Erick Erickson, an influential conservative blogger who has often waged open warfare against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other Republicans he views as too moderate.

In the email, a RSC junior staffer wrote: “Today is the day to kill the Boehner deal. We need statements coming up to the Hill every hour of the day in mounting opposition to the plan. If we keep this from ever coming to the Floor, we have a greater chance of victory than defeating a vote on the floor.”

In an apparent reference to a previous email from Erickson, the aide continued, “To echo Erick’s email, we need some serious heat up here,” before listing the Republicans whom the activists were to target.

During the meeting, Jordan apologized for the list and promised his colleagues that it would not happen again, participants said. RSC Communications Director Brian Straessle also apologized in a statement, saying, “This action was clearly inappropriate and was not authorized by the Chairman or any other members of the staff. This has never been — and never will be — the way we do business at the RSC.”

Reps. Renee Ellmers (N.C.), Bill Flores (Texas) and others who found themselves on the list gave angry speeches about the incident, and at least one lawmaker demanded Jordan fire the junior staffer for sending out the email.

Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.) also read the text of an email that Paul Teller, the RSC’s top staffer, sent to outside activists. According to a copy of the email, Teller wrote: “Guys — not feeling good. Just got out of Conference, and there was a lot of rally-‘round-the-Speaker sentiment, even while admitting the plan was ‘not perfect.’”

Teller’s email went on to complain about the process outlined in the closed meeting, noting that the “bill text will be available tonight and will likely be on the floor Wednesday morning, in clear violation of the 3-day layover rule. The CCB pledge is nowhere to be found in any of these deliberations.”

Walden, who bluntly told Teller that he was “privileged” to be in the GOP Conference meeting, then lit into the aide, arguing that, “You should not use that privilege to tear down this team for outside organizations.”

Following the meeting, Jordan insisted he had no knowledge of the emails and said he was discussing what to do about the aides internally.

But the RSC Member list is not the first time conservatives have stepped out of traditional bounds during the debt fight.

On Tuesday, former Rep. Ernest Istook (R-Okla.) took to the House floor to lobby his former colleagues to vote against Boehner’s plan, raising questions about the propriety of such actions.

Istook is a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

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Local Government lobbing in Washington

Monday, July 25th, 2011

Americans pay members of Congress $174,000 a year — more than $93 million in all — to represent them in Washington. But some taxpayers have been paying lobbyists well over $100 million more a year to promote the interests of their city, water district or public college before those same members of Congress.

Such double representation “really flies in the face of good government,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “Lawmakers are supposed to watch out for the interests of their district.”

Public lobbying increased during past decade, with more than 2,300 government and public educational institutions spending over $1.2 billion to press their causes with the national government. Institutions with lobbyists make up only about 2 percent of all state and local governments and public colleges.

Those figures come from a review by Scripps Howard News Service in partnership with the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The center and its Website, OpenSecrets.org, are the nation’s most comprehensive resources for federal campaign finance and lobbying.

“That’s an absolutely outrageous amount that’s been taken right out of the pockets of students and state and local taxpayers,’’ said Leslie Paige, spokeswoman for the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste in Washington, D.C.

“The dirty little secret in Washington is that some of the biggest supplicants for pork and money are governments and school systems,’’ Paige added.

Spending on public-sector lobbying peaked at $135 million in 2008 and 2009, when officials scrambled to tap into the nearly $800 billion stimulus package to fund public works projects and academic programs. Spending dipped slightly to $134.3 million last year.

Effectiveness of lobbyists versus elected officials is hard to calculate. Lobbying reports identify only how much a lobbyist spends and broad topics addressed. Reports to Congress never reveal exactly who was contacted or the result..

Lobbying overall is a major industry in Washington, with some 13,000 registered lobbyists spending a record $3.5 billion last year for public and private clients.

Public officials defend the return on investment for lobbying, saying consultants collaborate with local congressional delegations to get grants and rule changes worth more than lobbyists’ fees.

For instance, Abilene, Texas (population 100,000), has paid $740,000 for a lobbyist in Washington since 2000. Over time, he has brought in more money in grants and favorable rule changes than he has been paid, local officials said. Last year alone, Abilene got $675,000 toward flood control, public transit and an industrial park, while paying its lobbyist $74,000.

“It’s often very valuable to have that in-person discussion as opposed to emails and telephone calls,” city manager Larry Gilley said.

“Lobbying is a cost-effective investment. The clients get more money back than they put into it,” said Bill Allison, a spokesman for the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit organization dedicated to improving government transparency.

Some lobbyists argue they can better serve as the federal relations office for local officials because hometown lawmakers can’t follow all the issues that affect a city or college.

Federal lawmakers “have all kinds of stuff coming at them all the time, and they’re not really prepared to do the things for local governments that people who criticize lobbying think they should,’’ said William Ferguson Jr., CEO of The Ferguson Group, a Washington lobbying firm that represents more than 200 government and related clients.

James Thurber, a professor of government at American University, dismisses the notion that lawmakers are too busy to track all hometown interests. “I don’t buy that. They want to get re-elected, so they’ll be responsive to local political leaders who seek their help.”

Some jurisdictions have decided that lobbyists are not the best investment for their depleted local treasuries.

Many worry support from Washington is drying up. Last year, lawmakers tucked nearly 9,500 earmarks — special projects worth $15.9 billion — into a $3.8 trillion budget that left intact most programs supporting local governments.

But Congress has put a moratorium on earmarks this year and next, responding to criticism that they favored special interests. With that and deficit-reduction goals, heavy cuts are expected in federal allocations for many domestic programs.

So most jurisdictions with lobbyists are trying to keep them to help preserve grants and subsidies.

“We are trying to hold on to what’s left and have a fighting chance to pursue federal dollars through competitive grants,’’ said Mike Legg, city manager of Kannapolis, N.C.

The city of 43,000, northeast of Charlotte, has paid $80,000 a year for lobbying since 2005. It got more than $1.5 million in appropriations last year..

Lobbying by public colleges and universities has been particularly robust, growing from $10 million in 1998 to more than $44 million last year. Many larger schools have their own offices and staff in Washington plus outside lobbyists.

Records show the State University of New York, with 64 campuses, spent $1.5 million – the most of any public university in 2010 — to lobby with seven staff members out of its Washington office, plus another $400,000 to pay for nine outside lobbyists.

Criticism of the spending plus austerity measures this year have left SUNY’s Washington office with just one staff member, plus a vice chancellor for federal relations in New York City. University officials did not respond to requests for comment about lobbying.

First-quarter reports filed with Congress show many public colleges continuing to pay for lobbying at a pace similar to last year’s, while others are cutting back.

The Texas Tech system, which reported spending $560,000 on lobbying last year, spent just $80,000 for representation in the first three months of 2011. Said Joseph Rallo, president of the system’s Angelo State University: “Sometimes you need someone to make your case.”

The Sunlight Foundation’s Allison said many lobbyists have told him there still will be ways to steer special projects or grants to local and state clients and they’re hustling to find them.

“Everybody’s trying to figure out what this new system is and make it work for their clients.”

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The Road Not Taken

Monday, July 18th, 2011

Over the past months, Republicans enjoyed enormous advantages. Opinion polls showed that voters are eager to reduce the federal debt, and they want to do it mostly but not entirely through spending cuts.

There was a Democratic president eager to move to the center. He floated certain ideas that would be normally unheard of from a Democrat. According to widespread reports, White House officials talked about raising the Medicare eligibility age, cutting Social Security by changing the inflation index, freezing domestic discretionary spending and offering to pre-empt the end of the Bush tax cuts in exchange for a broad tax-reform process.

The Democratic offers were slippery, and President Obama didn’t put them in writing. But John Boehner, the House speaker, thought they were serious. The liberal activists thought they were alarmingly serious. I can tell you from my reporting that White House officials took them seriously.

The combined effect would have been to reduce the size of government by $3 trillion over a decade. That’s a number roughly three times larger than the cost of the Obama health care law. It also would have brutally fractured the Democratic Party.

But the Republican Party decided not to pursue this deal, or even seriously consider it. Instead what happened was this: Conservatives told themselves how steadfast they were being for a few weeks. Then morale crumbled.

This week, Republicans will probably pass a balanced budget Constitutional amendment that has zero chance of becoming law. Then they may end up clinging to a no más Senate compromise. This proposal would pocket cuts that have already been agreed on, and it would eliminate leverage for future cuts and make them less likely.

It could be that this has been a glorious moment in Republican history. It could be that having persuaded independents that they are a prudent party, Republicans will sweep the next election. Controlling the White House and Congress, perhaps they will have the guts to cut Medicare unilaterally, reform the welfare state and herald in an era of conservative greatness.

But it’s much more likely that Republicans will come to regret this missed opportunity. So let us pause to identify the people who decided not to seize the chance to usher in the largest cut in the size of government in American history. They fall into a few categories:

The Beltway Bandits. American conservatism now has a rich network of Washington interest groups adept at arousing elderly donors and attracting rich lobbying contracts. For example, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform has been instrumental in every recent G.O.P. setback. He was a Newt Gingrich strategist in the 1990s, a major Jack Abramoff companion in the 2000s and he enforced the no-compromise orthodoxy that binds the party today.

Norquist is the Zelig of Republican catastrophe. His method is always the same. He enforces rigid ultimatums that make governance, or even thinking, impossible.

The Big Government Blowhards. The talk-radio jocks are not in the business of promoting conservative governance. They are in the business of building an audience by stroking the pleasure centers of their listeners.

They mostly give pseudo Crispin’s Day speeches to battalions of the like-minded from the safety of the conservative ghetto. To keep audience share, they need to portray politics as a cataclysmic, Manichaean struggle. A series of compromises that steadily advance conservative aims would muddy their story lines and be death to their ratings.

The Show Horses. Republicans now have a group of political celebrities who are marvelously uninterested in actually producing results. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann produce tweets, not laws. They have created a climate in which purity is prized over practicality.

The Permanent Campaigners. For many legislators, the purpose of being in Congress is not to pass laws. It’s to create clear contrasts you can take into the next election campaign. It’s not to take responsibility for the state of the country and make it better. It’s to pass responsibility onto the other party and force them to take as many difficult votes as possible.

All of these groups share the same mentality. They do not see politics as the art of the possible. They do not believe in seizing opportunities to make steady, messy progress toward conservative goals. They believe that politics is a cataclysmic struggle. They believe that if they can remain pure in their faith then someday their party will win a total and permanent victory over its foes. They believe they are Gods of the New Dawn.

Fortunately, there are still practical conservatives in the G.O.P., who believe in results, who believe in intelligent compromise. If people someday decide the events of the past weeks have been a debacle, then practical conservatives may regain control.

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Want to avoid another Depression? Try understanding the first one.

Sunday, July 10th, 2011

“I have seen the future, and it works,” journalist Lincoln Steffens famously said of his 1919 visit to Bolshevik Russia. Guided by his economic faith, Steffens saw the future as he wanted it to be, not as it would be.

What excuse do we have when we follow people who, guided by a different economic faith, see the past as they want it to have been, not as it was? Today, under the influence of leaders blinded to facts by certain faith, we are careening toward a repetition of mistakes that led to catastrophe.

A CNN poll conducted in June found that almost half of Americans now think that another Great Depression is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to occur within the next 12months.

One sensible response is to point out that it is also “very likely” that most of those who stated this view have little conception of what the Great Depression actually was. “Depression” has come to be a term that gets thrown around whenever anyone wants to assert that things are really bad.

And yet, there is a genuine danger that the already weak economy could turn into a second coming of the hard times of the 1930s. The focus of many politicians today on cutting spending and avoiding tax increases on the wealthy is based on a misunderstanding of what led to and extended the Great Depression — and it is setting us up for a new collapse.

Most people realize that a failure to raise the debt ceiling could be catastrophic. But the drastic cuts in federal spending that some Republicans are demanding in exchange for an increase in the debt ceiling would be a repeat of the mistakes that prevented a full recovery in the 1930s and then caused a secondary collapse in 1937. Enacting these cuts is the most likely scenario in which the current recession could become a new depression.

With the economy in a precarious position, slashing spending, concentrating ever more wealth and income at the top, and blocking effective regulation is a prescription for disaster.

In fact, the first part of this prescription is very similar to one written by Dr. New Deal himself. Fearful of massive budget deficits, President Franklin D. Roosevelt cut back on spending as soon as his 1936 reelection was secured, plunging the economy into a renewed free fall that introduced the word “recession” into our lexicon so as to avoid calling the collapse a renewed depression.

Yet that is the course upon which a unified Republican Party is insisting we embark again this summer. For their part, President Obama and many Democrats have ceded the battlefield and are just trying to reduce the number of casualties. In a meeting on Thursday, for instance, the president placed cuts in Medicare and Social Security on the negotiating table.

Conservatives appear to be united behind a set of beliefs that are dangerously wrong. Theirs is a faith-based economics that contrasts with fact-based economics; their god is named the Market. Their economics is as immune to facts as its opposite, Marxism. Call it Marketism. A devout Marketist believes that the Market is always right and any government intervention is, well, sinful.

For more than two generations, the Great Depression discredited this religion that worships an omnipotent and beneficent Market. But beginning around 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, the Marketists staged a revival.

One of my students brilliantly, if accidentally, captured the essence of this economic fundamentalism in a journal entry a few years ago: “During his presidency, Reagan implemented sloppy-side economics.”

It is that sloppy-side economics that conservatives have been pushing ever since, and the more it fails, the harder they push it.

During the Great Depression, Roosevelt called for “bold, persistent experimentation” and said: “It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

But the position of faithful Marketists, then and now, is this: Take the method (as they see it, there is only one) and try it. If it fails, deny its failure and try it again, and again, and again. But above all, keep trying the same thing.

The difference boils down to bold, persistent experimentation vs. bold persistence. That is exactly what Republican policy is: persistent support for the ideas that produced the Great Depression and the Great Recession.

Since the beginning of the Obama administration, Republicans have been working unstintingly to misread the history of the Depression and implement policies similar to those that led to the collapses of 1929 and 2008. “One of the good things about reading history is you learn a good deal,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared early in 2009. “And we know for sure that the big spending programs of the New Deal did not work. In 1940, unemployment was still 15 percent. And it’s widely agreed among economists that what got us out of the doldrums that we were in during the Depression was the beginning of World War II.”

Well, yes . . . but that fact demonstrates just the opposite of what Marketist fundamentalists argue.

It is plain that the reason the New Deal failed to end the Depression is not that Roosevelt and Congress overspent, but that they underspent. The New Deal was not too reckless in its spending; it was too cautious. The war ended the Depression precisely because it obliged Roosevelt and Congress to spend greater and greater amounts without worrying about where the money was coming from.

The basic reason that the Obama administration has not yet ended the economic disaster it inherited — as reflected in Friday’s dismal jobs report — is the same reason that prevented the New Deal from ending the Depression FDR inherited: It hasn’t spent enough. The 2009 stimulus staved off a second Great Depression, but it should have been much larger to produce a genuine recovery. Subsequently, even with majorities in both houses, the Democrats let the GOP define the argument and failed to force through needed programs to get the economy back on its feet.

It has been the alleged “socialism” of the New Deal that has prevented another Depression for seven decades. While a market-based economy is clearly the best system, it carries serious risks. Government intervention minimizes those risks for businesses and for people — just a spoonful of “socialism” helps the capitalism go up.

The goal of Republicans today, though, is to use the claim that we cannot afford social programs as an excuse to repeal the New Deal and go back to the halcyon days of Calvin Coolidge.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” Mark Twain is said to have remarked. To the extent that our current history sounds like the 1930s, it is because of the lack of sense on the part of politicians. We know better than to slash spending and allow the rich to become even richer in a weak economy, but we’re set on doing it anyway.

If there is a new Great Depression, it won’t be without rhyme, but it will be without reason.

Robert S. McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsaps College, is the author of “The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941.” He is at work on a new book about the 1960s.

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The Mother of All No-Brainers

Monday, July 4th, 2011

The Republicans have changed American politics since they took control of the House of Representatives. They have put spending restraint and debt reduction at the top of the national agenda. They have sparked a discussion on entitlement reform. They have turned a bill to raise the debt limit into an opportunity to put the U.S. on a stable fiscal course.

Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators. They have been tough and inflexible and forced the Democrats to come to them. The Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill. They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.

Moreover, many important Democrats are open to a truly large budget deal. President Obama has a strong incentive to reach a deal so he can campaign in 2012 as a moderate. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, has talked about supporting a debt reduction measure of $3 trillion or even $4 trillion if the Republicans meet him part way. There are Democrats in the White House and elsewhere who would be willing to accept Medicare cuts if the Republicans would be willing to increase revenues.

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases.

A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without putting any real crimp in economic growth.

The party is not being asked to raise marginal tax rates in a way that might pervert incentives. On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.

The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.

But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures. Manufacturing employment is cratering even as output rises, but members of this movement somehow believe such problems can be addressed so long as they continue to worship their idol.

Over the past week, Democrats have stopped making concessions. They are coming to the conclusion that if the Republicans are fanatics then they better be fanatics, too.

The struggles of the next few weeks are about what sort of party the G.O.P. is — a normal conservative party or an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evidence and the ancient habits of our nation.

If the debt ceiling talks fail, independent voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

And they will be right.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 5, 2011

An earlier version of this column misstated the amount of revenue increases needed in exchange for spending cuts. It is a few hundred billion, not a few hundred million.

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Senate panelists debate independence of proposed board to sell property

Friday, June 10th, 2011

“You have dead-stopped every federal property movement in the past 13 years,” Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told advocate for the homeless Maria Foscarinis during a Senate hearing Thursday. “We have a bureaucracy that says we can’t get rid of real property.”

The charge, that Title 5 of the 1987 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act is a roadblock to the growing bipartisan effort to unload surplus federal property, was rejected by Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. “Title 5 requires that the homeless be protected and it is not the cause of inefficiencies or delays” in disposing of underused property, she told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services and International Security. With the rate of homelessness having risen 9 percent in 2010, “protecting the rights of the homeless is not only morally the right thing, it is the most cost-effective,” she argued.

An easing of Title 5 requirements — which give organizations that help the homeless first refusal rights when federal property is being disposed of — is part of the plan advanced by the Obama administration this spring to save an estimated $3 billion by accelerating the sale of 14,000 properties. It would do so primarily through creation of a politically powerful board resembling the Defense Department’s Base Realignment and Closure Commission. The Office of Management and Budget plan cites “competing stakeholders” as one reason for the difficulty in selling federal properties.

A Republican version of the plan, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., cleared a House subcommittee last month. The GOP proposal would essentially bypass Title 5 and introduce a new set of procedures for factoring in the interests of the homeless, drawing opposition from Foscarinis. As the Senate begins consideration of the issue, conflicts also remain over whether the proposed civilian board should be overseen by OMB, or whether it should be a more independent commission.

The Obama proposal “holds promise, but needs examining.” said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., chairman of the subcommittee.

“Many citizens believe our decision-making culture is broken,” Carper said in his opening statement, and “we must establish a culture of thrift.” He noted that the federal buildings management program has been on the Government Accountability Office’s high-risk list since 2003. He added that 45,000 properties, or 340 million square feet, are underutilized or wastefully leased. “But agencies should not be waiting for a civilian-style BRAC to begin better managing properties,” he said.

Danny Werfel, OMB controller, said the process the agency hopes to manage would focus on two types of properties. Many of the 14,000 excess properties listed publicly in May could be disposed of by agencies, though not necessarily at a profit. Those proceeds would be “trumped,” he said, by disposal of a select set of “high value” properties for which the federal presence is perhaps obsolete. “Thousands of agency field offices, one in every county in the country, may not be needed in this post-Internet Age” of electronically administered federal benefits, he said. In these cases, he said “inertia” has set in preventing stakeholders from leveraging valuable opportunities for commercial exploitation.

Former Sen. Alan Dixon, D-Ill., a past BRAC chairman, told the panel the civilian version “can be done fairly if the board is prepared to enforce transparency, and citizens are consulted.”

Another BRAC specialist, David Baxa, chief executive officer of VISTA Technology Services, warned, “Don’t view the current situation as a fire sale for short-term gain,” and recommended instead that the civilian board be seen as an opportunity to make long-term changes in federal asset management.

Tim Ford, CEO of the Association of Defense Communities, said the Obama approach “risks making some mistakes BRAC made in the 1980s in not being transparent for communities.” Use of an administration board rather than an independent commission “could impede the process and politicize it,” he said. A commission could be a “positive way to maximize efficiency of the federal footprint” in communities and could look at properties beyond those currently on the list.

Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, said a BRAC approach was too grandiose, given the difference in scale between military installations and real estate properties. “Keep it simple,” he said. “I’m in real estate, and every property has value and can sell.” He recommended an independent board to distance the process from the government.

Baxa countered that a BRAC-type board “puts the emphasis on getting the job done, which is often politically difficult.” A commission “has wider acceptance, is more bipartisan and more credible,” he said. He also recommended the board set up a body similar to the Resolution Trust Corporation used during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. “It allows you to bring in professional real estate developers for bundling of properties, even in different cities, to make them attractive to a business,” he said.

James Sullivan, director of the Office of Asset Enterprise Management at the Veterans Affairs Department, described successes in repurposing agency properties to house homeless veterans in VA’s enhanced use lease process. VA just announced 34 new sites, with 100 buildings for homeless veterans, that will bring total buildings in the program to 5,000, he said.

Robert Peck, commissioner of the Public Buildings Service for the General Services Administration, defended his agency’s ongoing efforts to efficiently dispose of federal properties, noting that the vacancy rate is only 3 percent. “Since 2002, we have disposed of more than 200 GSA properties valued at $467 million and covering more than 9.5 million square feet,” he said in prepared testimony. “These dispositions represent 5.3 percent of GSA’s owned portfolio and eliminate almost $484 million in future anticipated repair needs.”

David Wise, director of physical infrastructure issues for the Government Accountability Office, said he we welcomed OMB’s proposal as “somewhat responsive,” but said it doesn’t sufficiently address the government’s overreliance on leasing.

Another outstanding issue is whether the proceeds from building sales are to go more to deficit reduction or to other agency-determined priorities. “Deficit reduction will shine through as a legitimate objective,” Werfel said. “But other stakeholders such as the homeless and commercial interests will participate and the goal is that all voices are heard and considered.” When the final decisions are made, “not everyone will be fully happy, but we will move forward for good or for bad,” he said.

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