Boehner On What Spending Cuts The House GOP Plans To Enact: ‘You’re Asking Me?’

By Tanya Somanader

During their sure-footed campaign to achieve a Republican majority this year, Republicanscontinually floundered over their promise to cut government spending. A remarkable numberweren’t able to list even one cut they’d makefrom the federal budget.

But now the House Republicans have Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) at the helm, a politician who promises “to take a new approach that hasn’t been tried in Washington before.” Boehner claims “it’s not rocket science” to cut government spending. And yet, like his party brethren, Boehner’s “new approach” falls flat on specifics. When pushed to name one program he’d cut earlier this month, he was equally ignorant: “I don’t think I have one off the top of my head.”

The Speaker’s continued lack of substance is leaving his flock without direction as theystruggle to construct a resolution on their campaign pledge to “roll back domestic spending to the 2008 appropriations levels” for next Tuesday. Set to hit the floor hours before the State of the Union, Republican lawmakers still couldn’t name specifics during their committee meeting on the resolution. But rather than offer any reassuring message of leadership, Boehner opted for an incredulous ignorance of the entire process: “You’re asking me?”:

Neither House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), nor House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) even attended a House Rules Committee hearing on the resolutionWednesday. Democrats pounced in what became a freewheeling, sometimes comical proceeding. And while Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is very much driving the train, he has kept himself divorced from the details of what represents an average 18 percent cut from 2010 spending levels.

“You’re asking me?” Boehner laughed, when asked by POLITICO how he thought the cuts would be first implemented in a stopgap spending bill next month. “I know how to delegate.”

By “delegating” out his job, Boehner can now hide behind the flanks of his subordinates without really reaping the backlash. With their leader in the rear, GOP lawmakers are out in front with a $2.5 trillion hatchet job on the federal budget. Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (OH) unveiled the “Spending Reduction Act” today, a bill that “proposes the elimination or drastic reduction of more than 50 government programs,” including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and 15 percent of federal jobs. Perhaps to overcompensate for the other broken promises, Jordan is pushing the GOP pledge to cut back to 2008 levels even further back to 2006 spending levels.

While House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) merely “applauds” the “effort,” Boehner, of course, is “seeking to minimize exposure to attacks from the opposition,” and thus is “unlikely” to push these cuts hard. Whether he’ll ever offer any clear plan of his own, however,

VIDEO: When Pressed, Republicans Can’t Name Any Spending They Want To Cut

By Alex Seitz-Wald

For the past year and half, Republicans have done little else but urgently demand that the federal government drastically cut spending to reduce the deficit. However, like much of the rest of their agenda, Republicans have been remarkably vague on what they would actually cut.

In interview after interview, journalists have pushed, and even begged, GOP leaders for specifics, always to no avail. When pressed, they hem and haw, often appearing uncomfortable — and in the case of Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), visibly angry — but can offer nothing more than cop-out answers like repealing unsent stimulus money or an “across the board” cut on all spending. ThinkProgress has compiled some of the more embarrassing of these moments:

The video features, respectively, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ), California GOP Senate nominee Carly Fiorina, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Rep. John Boozman (R-AR), Gregg, and Sen. John Cornyn (R-AZ). This represents a large portion of the GOP leadership, but there are countless other examples as well.

Fiscal conservatives and tea party activists had been hoping that the House GOP’s recently released “Pledge to America” would finally offer specifics on major government cuts — they were almost universally disappointed. After racking up huge deficits under President Bush, Republicans still have no idea — or perhaps desire — to get spending under control.

M.C.L Comment: These bastards know what they wanna cut, but they don't want sane people to know because sane people unlike the mindless fools that's plan to vote republican this fall don't think cutting education and vital medical research is a good idea.

GOP congressman can’t or won’t say how ‘Pledge’ will pay for tax cuts

By David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Even before the Republican Party's "Pledge to America" was officially released on Thursday, Democrats were painting it as a return to the failed policies of the Bush years.

"The Republicans running for Congress, they want the next two years to look like the eight years before I took office," President Obama charged at a Wednesday fundraiser. "The chair of one of their campaign committees already told us their intentions. He said that if the other party takes control of Congress, they plan to pursue -- and I’m quoting here -- the 'exact same agenda' as they did during the last administration."

"You heard the president," ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Rep. Paul Ryan (R- Shemp Howard look a like) on Thursday morning. "How is it different?"

Ryan, who is the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, responded that "cutting spending, creating jobs, putting the policies of economic growth in place, and cleaning up the way Congress works ... stands in sharp contrast to the way Republicans conducted ourselves a decade ago. ... We spent too much money. We lost our way."

Although Ryan spoke of cutting spending, however, his ideas for reviving the economy appeared to revolve around extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, along with repealing a few programs, like health care reform and the stimulus, that are particularly unpopular with Republicans.

"The two central items on the agenda," Stephanopoulos noted, "are extending the tax cuts passed under President Bush, repealing the health care passed under President Obama. Those are going to cost at least four trillion dollars over the next ten years, and your pledge doesn't spell out anything close to paying for that four trillion dollars."

"I brought a budget to the floor last year that cut $4.8 trillion in spending," Ryan replied.

This was a reference to his "Roadmap for America's Future," released last February, which proposed privatizing Social Security, turning Medicare into a voucher system that would by design not keep pace with actual health care costs, and enacting what Think Progress described as "draconian real cuts in all domestic programs."

"You do concede that you do not have a path to balance the budget and you don't pay for the tax cuts that you're extending," Stephanopoulos remarked, adding that even "the rest of the Republicans aren't signing onto" the "Roadmap."

"We do actually have a plan to get this country back on track," Ryan insisted. "We want to balance the budget by controlling spending."

His chief emphases, however, continued to be on tax cuts. "The problem we have right now is jobs," he stated. "We need job creation. Taxing capital gains, taxing dividends, taxing small businesses will hurt us from creating jobs."

"There's a big uncertainty problem," Ryan concluded. "Businesses aren't hiring because of all this government uncertainty. We want to address that."

This video is from ABC's Good Morning America, broadcast Sept. 23, 2010.

Republicans Want To Cut Federal Spending But Have No Idea What Programs To Cut

By Ben Armbruster

Part of the GOP’s election strategy this year has been to try to claim that it is the Party of fiscal conservatism. As part of that campaign, Republicans regularly repeat the mantra that in order to get the deficit under control, the federal government needs to “cut spending” (despite also calling for $700 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy that aren’t paid for). They argue that if they were in control of government they would do just that. But all too often, when asked what spending cuts they would enact, Republicans don’t have an answer.

Yesterday on ABC’s Top Line, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) offered an example of the GOP’s obfuscation. Calling for extending all the Bush tax cuts, Gregg said, “The issue right now is the profligate spending of this Congress and this Presidency.” But when Gregg was asked for specific cuts, he couldn’t offer any:

HOST: Help us square this then. The increase in the deficit by extending the tax cuts, seems to me there’s not enough spending cuts that can be made to make up for the deficit that we’re continuing to build up.

GREGG: We’re building the deficit because of the spending, that’s where the deficit is coming from…that massive explosion of spending is where the problem is. It’s not on the revenue side, it’s on the spending side. So why put in all this additional spending. Why don’t you just starting cutting spending first because that is where the problem is.

Similarly, CNBC host Larry Kudlow asked GOP U.S. Senate candidate in California Carly Fiornia what she would cut. All she could muster was bringing spending back to 2008 levels. Another CNBC host asked Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) last month what he would cut. “We’ve got spending to cut in the short term what we’ve got is a huge problem in the long term,” said Cantor, who repeatedly couldn’t give an answer on what he would cut when pressed by the host.

And in March, ThinkProgress asked Rep. John Boozman (R-AR) repeatedly what he would cut in order to reduce federal spending and he couldn’t identify any specifics. Watch the video compilation:

Other Republicans have tried to answer this question but have come up a bit short. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said in July that he would “would rescind the unspent stimulus funds,” which at the time, meant that he would do away with $55 billion in middle class tax cuts. Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MI) suggested eliminating the Affordable Care Act, thinking it would save $1 trillion, but it would actually increase the deficit by $143 billion.

M.C.L Comment: I'll give ya hint what the Republicans want to cut it helps the middle class and the working poor.

Cantor Can’t Name A Single GOP ‘Big Idea’ On Job Creation

By Pat Garofalo

Today, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) appeared at the Economist’s World in 2010 conference (attended by ThinkProgress), where he took exception to NBC’s David Gregory characterizing Republicans as “not really a party of ideas, because they don’t want to be.” Cantor claimed that it’s actually the media’s fault that no one hears about Republican ideas, because “it’s not as sexy of a story to cover our ideas right now.” But when the Economist’s Daniel Franklin gave Cantor an opportunity to present his big idea for job creation, Cantor couldn’t come through:

FRANKLIN: What is the big idea? “Jobs” is not an idea.

CANTOR: The big idea is to get, to get, to produce an environment where we can have job creation again. And see, that’s where the Obama administration’s agenda so clearly disadvantages the Democrats in this upcoming election in eleven months and advantages us.

Watch it:

If Cantor’s goal is “to produce an environment where we can have job creation again,” shouldn’t he have supported the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (i.e the economic stimulus), which has boosted GDP growth and lending to small businesses, while cutting taxes for workers, thereby boosting demand? And shouldn’t he be supporting further efforts in Congress to craft a jobs bill that emphasizes infrastructure spending and lending to small businesses?

Instead, Cantor has put forth a “no-cost jobs plan” that Andrew Leonard rightly called a “magic pony jobs plan.” “Cut regulations. Freeze spending. Cut taxes. No new taxes. That’s the plan,” Leonard wrote.

Later in the discussion, Cantor replied to a question about the U.S.’s role at the climate change conference in Copenhagen by saying, “I think from the larger sense the question of climate change comes down to, if there’s been any constant in human history it’s been climate change, and the real question is the severity of that and the involvement of humans in all of that.” Watch it:

Former White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart responded, “I wouldn’t have predicted last year that scientific doubters would still have this strong a voice.”