Why shouldn’t same sex couples have equal rights? According to Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), it’s because equality is just too expensive.
“Repealing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) would actually result in an expansion of federal benefits and spending at a time when we know that federal spending is way out of control and our entitlement programs are unsustainable,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday.
“Repealing the Defense of Marriage Act would actually increase the cost of Social Security that is already insolvent,” he added. “No one has paid into the Social Security system expecting benefits to be paid to same sex partners.”
Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) later explained that same sex couples, like everyone else, deserved the benefits of the system they had been paying into.
“If you have a same sex couple, both of whom have paid into Social Security, both of whom have fulfilled all the things required, that somehow it would be wrong if they got the same benefits as an opposite sex couple would,” he said. “Fair is fair. They paid. They should be allowed. … I think if you’re paying the taxes, you’re fulfilling the obligations, you ought to get the same benefits as anybody else.”
Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) added that a 2004 Congressional Budget Office report found that legalizing same sex marriage would actually slightly decrease the Social Security burden.
In the end, the committee voted 10-8 along party lines for the bill to repeal DOMA. It is not expected to pass the full Senate even if it does comes up for a vote.
Watch this video from the U.S. Senate, broadcast Nov. 10, 2011.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) couldn't find a straight answer to give Sunday when he was asked how Republican fiscal policies today differ from their policies during the Bush era.
"What does distinguish the Republican Party of today from the Republican Party under President Bush’s rule with regards to spending, which is where it got out of control -- under Republican rule," asked host David Gregory on NBC's Meet The Press.
"Let’s look at a few facts — thank you for the opportunity, because I want to respond to what Chris said. The last year that President Bush was in office, 2008, the deficit was 3.2 percent of the gross domestic product. Today it’s ten percent. We just hit the $13 trillion cap on national debt," Cornyn said.
"Where did some of that debt come from?" Gregory asked. "The President of the United States was George Bush when they passed a huge TARP, which was to bail out the banks. I mean that’s what ran up a lot of debt as well. Are you saying a Republican was somehow different?"
"You’re ignoring the stimulus that ... failed according to the president’s own standards," Cornyn replied. "He said he was supposed to keep unemployment to eight percent.
But Gregory persisted in his original question. "So my question is still: What is the distinction of the Republican Party of today versus the Bush record that you’re defending?"
"Well, I think what people are looking for, David, are checks and balances," Cornyn said. "They’ve had single-party government and it’s scaring the living daylights out of them, and it’s keeping job creators on the sidelines rather than investing and creating jobs. That’s why the private sector isn’t creating jobs."
"In other words," comments the AlterPolitics blog, which posted the Cornyn interview online, "they intend to resume Bush’s policies of increasing the national debt to pay for deeper tax cuts for the rich, to bail out Wall Street fat cats, and to wage more endless and unnecessary wars."
Cornyn's lack of detail will give ammunition to critics of Republican policies who argue the party is determined to roll ahead with the same policies that some economists now blame for the economic meltdown -- things such as the Bush tax cuts, which some argue contributed to the federal government's debt burden and resulted in a greater share of wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few.
Many critics point to the GOP's campaign to extend the Bush tax cuts as proof of this. Last week, Arizona Republican Sen. John Kyl came in for heavy criticism when he argued that the extension of the Bush tax cuts -- unlike health care reform and jobless benefits -- shouldn't be offset by spending cuts. It's estimated that extending the tax cuts, which expire at the end of this year, would cost the US $2.2 trillion. Extending only the part applying to people earning over $250,000 would cost $678 billion.
On Saturday, President Barack Obama took an aggressive stance against Republican tactics and policies, saying the party was harming the unemployed to look fiscally responsible.
"They say we shouldn’t provide unemployment insurance because it costs money," Obama said during his weekly radio address. "So after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, they’ve finally decided to make their stand on the backs of the unemployed."
The following video was broadcast on NBC's Meet The Press Sunday July 18, 2010, and uploaded to YouTube by DemRapidResponse.
By Matt Corley
Yesterday, ThinkProgress highlighted a divide among Republicans about whether try to repeal part of the health care reform legislation or “the whole thing.” Hard right conservatives like Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-TN), Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) and Zach Wamp (R-TN) who say they’re “going to repeal the whole thing” and Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) who told CNN he “does not want” to repeal everything in the bill. In an interview with Huffington Post’s Sam Stein yesterday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, appeared to side with Gingrey in favor of only seeking partial repeal:
In a brief chat with the Huffington Post on Tuesday, National Republican Senatorial Committee chair John Cornyn (R-Tex.) implicitly acknowledged that Republicans are content with allowing some elements of Obama’s reform into law. And they’d generally ignore those elements when taking the fight to their Democrat opponents as November approaches.
“There is non-controversial stuff here like the preexisting conditions exclusion and those sorts of things,” the Texas Republican said. “Now we are not interested in repealing that. And that is frankly a distraction.”
What the GOP will work to repeal, Cornyn explained, are provisions that result in “tax increases on middle class families,” language that forced “an increase in the premium costs for people who have insurance now” and the “cuts to Medicare” included in the legislation.
Cornyn’s comments were called a “folly” by National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, who said that “without perhaps realizing it, Cornyn has come out for tinkering at the edges of Obamacare.” Cornyn was also criticized on RedState. In response, Cornyn released a statement attempting to placate the full repealers:
Some media outlets have misrepresented my position on repealing and replacing the President’s $2.6 trillion health care bill. Make no mistake about it: I fully support repealing this Washington takeover of health care and replacing it with a bipartisan bill that lowers the cost of health care.
Republicans have long pointed out that there are areas of health care reform where there is bipartisan agreement. Yet, instead of working with Republicans to solve issues of bipartisan concern such as pre-existing condition exclusions, Democrats insisted on a purely partisan bill that included massive tax hikes, trillions of dollars in new taxpayer spending, and cuts to Medicare, while failing to address rising health care costs.
Cornyn’s statement hasn’t satisfied RedState’s Erick Erickson, who wrote that Cornyn had been “forced into renouncing his own words in favor of some mendacious messaging about bipartisan cooperation.” In another post, Erickson called on his readers to “send an army of conservatives to the Senate who will push back against John Cornyn.”
M.C.L Comment: I love this the Republicans are stuck between sane people and the nut jobs they been inciting for a year.. The Republicans have paint themselves in tough spot they spent up their energy fighting a bill citing a poll without citing the entirely of that poll, now since support is turning in this bill favor the Republicans find themselves in the roll of saying "Hell no granny can't have cheaper prescription drugs, or we want to keep pre-existing conditions and you can't keep your kids under 26 on your health insurance policy."
So you see the Republicans are trying to tap dance around this, between appealing to the mouth breathing knuckle draggers that currently make up their voting base and rational people that might like the benefits the bill has.
