GOP determined to cut the safety net

Kansas Could Turn Blue as Democrat Leads Republican Gov. Sam Brownback by 4 Points

By: Jason Easley/politicususa

The Republican Party is so damaged that even in deep red state Kansas, Republican Governor Sam Brownback is trailing Democrat Paul Davis 43%-39%.

According to a new SurveryUSA poll, Davis leads Brownback 43%-39%. Only 59% of Republicans support Gov. Brownback. The governor gets the support of 62% of conservatives, but trails Davis with moderates, 58%-28%. There are several things happening in Kansas that mirror the problems of the national Republican Party.

Brownback is at the center of a Republican civil war in Kansas. The governor helped to oust moderate Republicans from the state senate in 2012. He also alienated moderates by signing a tax reform bill that both liberal and conservative experts consider to be the worst piece of tax reform legislation passed in the entire country.

Gov. Brownback’s tax cut was a Republican dream come true.It reduced income taxes on the top two brackets, slashed corporate taxes, and made LLC pass through income non-taxable. The Republicans paid for this gift to the wealthy by raising taxes on working people, the poor, and senior citizens. Of course, this scheme blew a giant hole in the state’s budget which Brownback tried to fix by slashing hundreds of millions of dollars in education spending, laying off public sector workers, and cutting transportation funding.

National Review published a lengthy profile of Brownback where they enthusiastically paint Kansas as a model for the country and suggest that Brownback is a potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, while the voters back home are seriously contemplating throwing him out of office.

Brownback is trailing a Democrat in a state where Republicans hold every statewide office, and the entire congressional delegation. Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state 46% to 25%. Democrat Paul Davis has a chance to win because Brownback has taken the state too far to the right for many in Kansas. Moderates, which in Kansas mostly means moderate Republicans, are supporting Davis because the ALEC/tea party/Koch agenda is unpopular with them.

National Republicans and their media are so out of touch with reality that they are touting the presidential future of a governor whose policies are so unpopular that he might not get a second term.

If Davis won, he would be a conservative Democratic governor, but a Brownback defeat would be a supreme humiliation for far right Republicans and their agenda.

The Republican Party may have finally become too extreme for even deep red state Kansas to tolerate.

Maddow: Republicans are their own worst enemy on this minority outreach thing

By David Ferguson/Raw Story

On “The Rachel Maddow Show” on Thursday, host Rachel Maddow pointed out that the main thing that seems to be getting in the way of the ongoing Republican effort to reach out to women and minority voters has been Republicans themselves. Whatever cosmetic changes they may apply to their external rhetoric, party members can’t help but express their disdain for nonwhites, the poor and anyone who isn’t like themselves.

The host began by showing clips from “The Daily Show,” in which North Carolina Republican Party official Don Yelton, who came right out and announced that the Republicans intend to win in that state through vote suppression. He said that the state’s new voter ID laws are designed to keep students and “a bunch of lazy blacks” from voting.

Yelton has since been fired, but the fact that he felt comfortable talking that way says a lot about the current state of the Republican Party.

“The North Carolina Republican Party, everybody,” Maddow said. “Can I get an ‘Amen!’”

Unfortunately, this week is also the week when the Republican Party has chosen to kick off itsAfrican-American outreach program. In the wake of the shellacking the Republican Party received in the 2012 elections, the partydid a bit of soul searching and decided it needs to make an effort to attract people outside of its traditionally white, rural constituency.

“They wanted to admit to what was wrong,” Maddow said, “and try to fix it.”

That plan has met a few snags, as embodied by men like Yelton. Or the time Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) read a love poem by Pablo Neruda to a group of Latino business owners. Or the Republicans’ ongoing attempts to block comprehensive immigration reform.

“The Republican Party’s own plan for what they need to do to stop losing elections,” Maddow said, “says they should work on immigration reform. Also says they should maybe stop calling black people ‘lazy’ and trying to block them from voting.”

We’ll see, she said, if the party can manage either of those two things.

Watch the video, embedded below via MSNBC:

A TEApublican Actually Tells the Truth About House GOP! ‘We Elected Them to Block Obama’

by: Barbara Friedland/Americans Against the Tea Party"

Is there truth serum in the water? Have Republicans and right wing hate mongers started saying what they really believe? 
Recently on her radio show, Laura Ingraham told a listener that the GOP was elected to become a bloc to block the black President. Okay, she didn’t say black. But her words still were astonishing. Forget the large and salient issues facing the country today. Real problems that many citizens are struggling to overcome. 

Also, disregard traditional Republican fetishes: demonizing women and minorities and finding ways to restrict their rights. As Mitch McConnell (R- You Could Lose the Primary or General Election) stated, on the record, after the election of 2008 that his main goal was to Keep Barack Obama from being reelected. Come on guys. These are the kind of things folks say in private, behind closed doors. Well the Congress, especially the crazy caucus, cannot totally impede progress. No matter how much the hate speech was ratcheted up, President Obama was re-elected. And his signature legislation, the Affordable Health Care Act, was signed into law. Now, when a splinter Republican group shuts down the government, the people, in large numbers, get angry. The plan to obstruct President Obama just isn’t working. Listen to Ingraham here: 

Under Bush, Republicans Vigorously Defended Health Care Reform Despite Serious Glitches

BY IGOR VOLSKY/Think Progress

Millions of Americans try to enroll in health care benefits during the first days of a new government health care program. They rely on indispensable government website that had been “pitched as a high-tech way” to sort through available coverage options. They’re encountering countless glitches and technical errors: the website freezes, displays incorrect plan information and sends insurers erroneous reports.

Administration officials — clearly caught off guard by the surge of technical difficulties — respond to “tens of thousands of complaints” from angry beneficiaries and promise to “fix every problem as quickly possible.”

This sounds like the familiar story of the last few days of the Obama administration’s rollout of the exchanges. But, actually, those quotes, and that scenario, are taken from the Bush administration’s efforts to implement the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2005 and 2006.

Not only was Bush’s rollout “anything but smooth,” but administration officials had “some trouble getting the [online] tool up and running” and had to delay its debut for weeks. What’s more, computer glitches caused low-income beneficiaries to go without needed medications and sent pharmacies the wrong drug information. Before it was all resolved, Dr. Mark McClellan, Bush’s head of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), appeared at hearings before the House Committee On Energy And Commerce, laying out the flaws in the law’s implementation and detailing how the administration would address them.

As the House Energy and Commerce Committee holds its first hearing on the implementation of the the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, it’s worth noting that some of the very same Republicans who are lashing out against Obamacare, arguing that the botched rollout is proof that the government cannot implement effectively and should repeal the law entirely, gave the Bush administration a pass and urged Americans not to pre-judge such a complicated process. At least four of the Republicans still on the committee had argued that early implementation hurdles should not taint the entirety of reform:

REP. JOE BARTON (R-TX): “This is a huge undertaking and there are going to be glitches. My goal is the same as yours: Get rid of the glitches. The committee will work closely with yourself and Dr. Mark McClellan at CMS to get problems noticed and solved.” [Barton Statement via Archive.org, 2/15/2006]

REP. TIM MURPHY (R-PA): “Any time something is new, there is going to be some glitches. All of us, when our children were new, well, we knew as parents we didn’t exactly know everything we were doing and we had a foul-up or two, but we persevered and our children turned out well. No matter what one does in life, when it is something new in learning the ropes of it, it is going to take a little adjustment.” [Murphy Floor Speech via Congressional Record, 4/6/2006]

REP. MICHAEL BURGESS (R-TX): “We can’t undo the past, but certainly they can make the argument that we are having this hearing a month late and perhaps we are, but the reality is the prescription drug benefit is 40 years late and seniors who signed up for Medicare those first days back in 1965 when they were 65 years of age are now 106 years of age waiting for that prescription drug benefit, so I hope it doesn’t take us that long to get this right and I don’t believe that it will. And I do believe that fundamentally it is a good plan.” [“Medicare Part D: Implementation of the New Drug Benefit,” 3/1/2006]

REP. PHIL GINGREY (R-GA): “I delivered 5,200 babies, but this may be the best delivery that I have ever been a part of, Mr. Speaker, and that is delivering, as I say, on a promise made by former Congresses and other Presidents over the 45-year history of the Medicare program, which was introduced in 1965 with no prescription drug benefit. And what we have done here is add part D, the ‘D’ for ‘drug’ or, if you want, the ‘delivery’ that we have finally provided to our American seniors.” [Gingrey Floor Speech via Congressional Record, 4/6/06]

Ultimately, the Bush administration fixed the law’s technical glitches, but more than half of the beneficiaries who ended up signing up for insurance didn’t do so until after the first of the year. Significantly, they signed up for coverage despite the Bush administration’s well-publicized initial glitches in extending coverage to low-income beneficiaries. Whereas only 21 percent of seniors had a favorable impression of the law and 66 percent didn’t know what was in it in April of 2005, by November of 2006, “half of the seniors polled said the program was working well or that just minor changes were needed.”

CBS News Is Very Concerned About Too Many Poor People Signing Up For Obamacare

BY IGOR VOLSKY/Think Progress

A new report for CBS News’ Jan Crawford warns that an influx of sick low income Americans applying for health care coverage could “threaten the entire structure of Obamacare.” The story argues that a rush of new Medicaid enrollees applying for the expanded program “at no cost to them” would mean that there “won’t be enough healthy people buying insurance for the system to work”:

CBS News has confirmed that in Washington, more than 35,000 people are newly enrolled. 87% signed up for Medicaid. In Kentucky, out of 26,000 new enrollments, 82% are on Medicaid. And in New York, of 37,000 enrollments, Medicaid accounts for 64%….[B]ut a former director says the numbers are causing concerns in the industry which needs healthy adults to buy insurance in order for this to work….industry sources say if we don’t see real turnaround soon, there could be big problems for the entire system.

Watch it:

While Medicaid is responsible for thousands and of new enrollments and appears more successful in enrolling uninsured Americans than private insurers operating in the exchange, its success does not spell doom for reform. Medicaid expansion — which serves individuals below 133 percent of the federal poverty line — and private insurers attract different enrollees and operate in completely different risk pools. Individuals qualify for tax credits in the new marketplaces if they have incomes below 400 percent of the federal poverty line. “People eligible for Medicaid are not eligible for tax credits to help low and middle income pay their premiums in health insurance exchanges,” Lary Levitt, of the Kaiser Family Foundation, said, “so they were never expected to be part of the individual insurance market risk pool.”

It’s also not a surprise that so many Americans are enrolling in the public insurance program this month. Back in May, the Congressional Budget Officepredicted that over half of the new Obamacare enrollees would consist of people signing up for Medicaid under the expansion of the program.

Several Medicaid experts ThinkProgress spoke to explained that the program, which was first signed into law in 1965, has years of experience in connecting low-income beneficiaries to health care benefits and has streamlined and simplified those processes. It is not dependent on the error-ridden federal exchange system and several states, including Arkansas, Illinois, West Virginia, and Oregon are auto-enrolling eligible individuals who are already receiving state benefits. Arkansas, for instance, sent letters to over 100,000 food stamp recipients, inviting them to apply for Medicaid coverage, along with a a stamped envelope and has enrolled 60,000 people. That program, incidentally runs through a “private option” waiver in which enrollees who would have been eligible for Medicaid are actually enrolling the very private exchange plans that Crawford claims are going under.

And as for those poor sick beneficiaries Crawford was describing, a studypublished in the Annals of Family Medicine, “found that newly eligible people are more likely to have an overall better health status than current beneficiaries, with 75 percent in ‘very good’ or ‘good’ health compared with 65 percent of current Medicaid recipients having ‘very good’ or ‘good’ health.”

If anything, the private exchange system can learn a lot from Medicaid’s high enrollment numbers — simplification, streamlining, and auto enrollment can help attract a lot of beneficiaries. That’s something that will help health care reform, not “disrupt it.”

GOP Official Resigns After Saying Purpose Of Voter ID Is To Suppress Votes Of Democrats, ‘Lazy Blacks’

BY IAN MILLHISER/Think Progress

Until Thursday, Don Yelton was a precinct chair in the Buncombe County, North Carolina Republican Party. That ended after a Daily Show interview riddled with racism and candid admissions about the purpose of a voter suppression bill enacted by Republican lawmakers in his state. Over the course of the interview Yelton admitted that he supports requiring voters to show ID, in addition to the other, many voter suppression provisions included in the North Carolina law, because “the law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.” He also denied that the law is racist during the course of an interview where he both used a particular racial slur that begins with the letter “n” and claimed that he is not racist because he “one my best friends is black.” Watch it:

Yelton also offered several other reasons why he supports the voter suppression law. Among them, “[i]f it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get up off their bohunkus [sic] and get a photo ID, so be it,” and “if it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything, so be it.”

In the wake of Yelton’s confession that a Republican voter suppression law will suppress Democratic votes, the Buncombe County Republican Party asked him to resign his position within the party, and the country GOP chair says Yelton did so. The party also claims that Yelton was “recently reprimanded and removed from his position as a precinct chair in Buncombe County for a period of time in 2012 through 2013,” though he was reelected at a very sparsely attended party convention.

CNN Anchor Challenges Congresswoman To Substantiate Obamacare Criticism, Hilarity Ensues

BY IGOR VOLSKY/Think Progress

On Friday morning, CNN anchor Carol Costello challenged Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) to substantiate her claim that HealthCare.gov will endanger Americans’ medical privacy. The host pushed the Congresswoman to specify which medical details enrollees would have to turn over to the federal government, causing Blackburn to become visibly uncomfortable and unsure as she strung together various buzzwords about privacy.

The exchange originated from a question Blackburn herself leveled at the primary contractors responsible for HealthCare.gov during a House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing on Thursday. Blackburn asked the witnesses why some of their employees had access to “the database servers storing the enrolling information” and suggested that they were in violation of The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the law that guarantees “federal protections for individually identifiable health information held by covered entities and their business associates and gives patients an array of rights with respect to that information.”

Asked to explain how requiring enrollees to enter their biographical enrollment information violates a law that only applies to medical data between medical entities, Blackburn demurred:

COSTELLO: So what specifically were you referring to on the website that violates, that could possibly violate HIPAA?

BLACKBURN: We are concerned about privacy overall. Data security privacy and of course applying and complying with the HIPAA laws, and…

COSTELLO: But what question specifically asks that would concern you about HIPAA, what medical question does it ask?

BLACKBURN: Carol, HIPAA requires you to — it’s the way you structure your website and the way you transit the information, the transfer rights that are there, and when you look at privacy on these websites, what you have to do is keep all of the application information in one server [...]

COSTELLO: I’m trying to understand what kind of information you’re talking about. What kind of information are you talking about? What specifically does the website ask that I might be afraid might shared with whomever? Specifically. What information?

BLACKBURN: You should be very concerned not only as you navigate the website but as you make a purchase, and then as your information is handled, what we want to make certain is that an individual’s medical information their financial information is all going to be kept in a private manner. What we do not want is a peeping Tom who is going to look through their PII, their personal identifying information. they want to make certain the federal government has standards and are applying and abiding by the privacy laws that are on the books and by the HIPAA regulations that every hospital and every doctor abide by. so this is a serious investigation, looking at the entire roll-out and launch of this website, how this data is being used.

Watch it:

As Washington & Lee Law Professor Timothy S. Jost explained to ThinkProgress in an email, “HIPAA only applies to health care providers, clearinghouses (and this is a narrowly defined term) health plans, and their business associates.” “Even so, access is available to data without consent for health care operations, which this would be.” Deven McGraw, of the Health Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, agreed, adding, “It does not violate HIPAA – it’s not even covered by HIPAA.”

The Conservative Media Can't Lose

MATT GERTZ/Media Matters For America:

On the morning of October 14, after two weeks of the GOP's government shutdown had cratered the party's standing in the polls and with the debt ceiling looming, Fox News contributor Erick Erickson sent his daily email to subscribers. "Keep Fighting" was the message from the conservative media mogul, whose strategies are frequently adopted by his party's right wing.

Erickson's daily briefing urged readers to press Senate leaders not to accept a deal that didn't defund or delay Obamacare. He also demanded House leaders pass a debt limit increase while holding firm on refusing to pass a bill to fund the government unless it is tied to defunding health care reform. And crucially, he wrote that he had just donated to two conservative PACs "at the forefront of the fight" and to primary opponents of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and urged his readers to do the same.

The conservative wing of the party has been dictating its strategy since at least mid-August, when vocal minorities in both houses implored congressional leadership not to defund the health care law as the price for passing short-term government funding legislation. To outside observers, it seems clear that the strategy has been an abysmal failure. And yet, prominent right-wing media figures not only want to double down on that strategy, but punish members of the party who seem the least bit hesitant to pursue it.

How to explain these wildly disparate assessments? A large faction of the right-wing media -- Erickson, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity Breitbart News, and a host of others -- has become trapped in the political embodiment of a variant of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

Under that logical fallacy, adherents shift definitions and appeal to purity when confronted with evidence that disproves their beliefs rather than accepting reality. In this case, the right-wing media has become convinced that a central pillar of modern conservatism is that it cannot lose. Any evidence suggesting that a conservative strategy has failed is thus rejected on the grounds that either the strategy didn't really lose, or its implementers weren't true conservatives and thus betrayed the plan by failing to promote it with quite enough fervor. That mindset has locked the right-wing media and through it many activists and lawmakers into a seemingly endless pattern of crisis politics with potentially devastating consequences for the country.

We've seen this same cycle play out over the past few election cycles. Conservatism "did not lose last night"said Limbaugh the day after President Obama defied a years-long assault by the conservative media to win re-election.

The conservative media's explanation for the 2012 defeat was that Mitt Romney wasn't a real conservativeand hadn't run a campaign that sufficiently energized the conservative base. It's the same explanation they gave for John McCain's loss in 2008. It didn't matter that Romney and McCain had each moved to the right to win primary votes in ways that would end up costing them in the general election -- a true conservative would have been victorious.

Meanwhile, the party's post-mortem on the 2012 election warned that the " Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself. We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue." That may be good advice for a national party that needs to win a majority of voters. But the right-wing noise machine that feeds on the attention of the base has much influence and money to make in that "ideological reinforcement to like-minded people," and thus immediately rejected that advice.

Instead, they've doubled down on the type of rhetoric that failed in the last election and targeted the GOP stalwarts who point out that the party is mired in a demographic death spiral. They could not be true conservatives, because they have acknowledged that a strategy has failed for reasons other than insufficient conservatism.

This same rationale is the heart of the strategy that much of the conservative media has been promoting for the past few months. Yes, Obama was re-elected even though his health care law was a major issue during the campaign. But the GOP's failure to win that election only means that true conservatives need to push back against Obamacare with even more fervor. Tie it to funding the government, tie it to raising the debt ceiling, repeal, defund, delay, defeat the law by any means necessary and the votes will come. Only by failing to be true conservatives can the GOP truly lose.

House and Senate Republicans may respond to the last few weeks' devastating poll numbers by turning their backs on the right-wing strategy that brought both their party and their country to the precipice of disaster. But as Erickson's commentary shows, no one should expect the right-wing media to be chastened, or to admit that the strategy that they promoted was at fault. After all, ratings and pageviews are up, donations to right-wing groups are through the roof, and people like Erickson have reinforced their roles as major party players. .

Instead, we'll hear cries that if only their party's congressional leaders had been true conservatives, they would have won. We'll see the willingness to accept government shutdowns and even debt defaults become a major issue in GOP primaries and leadership fights.

It's a vicious cycle that will likely move the country closer and closer to disaster each time it is played out. Because the conservative media does not know how to admit defeat, it does not know how to accept defeats for the hope of future victories. And if it doesn't learn how to lose, sooner or later we all will.

Who's calling the Shots Here?

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GOP shutdown bill falls apart

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Million Vet March Distances Themselves From Cruz And Palin

From Talk Radio News Service

The organization behind the Million Vet March appear to be frustrated with political tone that accompanied Sunday’s rally at the World War II Memorial.

“We feel disheartened that some would seek to hijack the narrative for political gain,” a statement on the Million Vet March’s website reads. “The core principle was and remains about all Americans honoring Veterans in a peaceful and apolitical manner.”

The statement goes on to specifically site Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, both of whom spoke at the rally.

“Mr. Cruz, Ms. Palin and some attendees, including political parties may have no been aware of the goals of the marches which took place in over 60+ rallies across the nation,” the statement reads.

In rally guidelines released before the event, attendees are advised to avoid “political rhetoric veering away from our core message.”

Rogers and Upton join Walberg, Bentivolio, and Benishek among those in trouble

by Neon Vincent/Daily Kos

At my blog, I excerpted from my Examiner.com article Walberg losing to generic Democrat by nine percent: poll.

This morning, MoveOn.org released the results of a poll it commissioned, one that contains bad news for U.S. Representative Tim Walberg, who represents rural northern, western, and southern Washtenaw County in the U.S. House of Representatives as part of the Seventh District.  The poll, conducted by Public Policy Polling, showed that Walberg would lose an election held today to a generic Democratic challenger by nine percentage points, 51% to 42%, after poll respondents were told he supported the federal government shutdown.

In addition to Walberg, both Dan Benishek (MI-01) and Kerry Bentivolio (MI-11) were the other two Michigan Representatives among the twenty-one whose seats were at risk of being lost next year.

Yesterday morning, MoveOn and PPP posted More Republican House Seats in Jeopardy on Scribd, which showed that two more Michigan Representatives, Fred Upton (MI-06) and Mike Rogers (MI-08) could lose their seats next year.  Follow over the jump for the details.

Bolding mine.

Twelve new surveys conducted this week in GOP-held House districts indicate that an even greater number of Republican incumbents are in danger of being voted out of office next year thanks to the government shutdown.

Public Policy Polling has now surveyed a total of 36 House districts in two weeks, and the results show Republican incumbents are in serious danger in 29 out of the 36.
...
The districts surveyed this week in which a generic Democratic challenger leads prior to any information being provided about the shutdown are:

CA-25, FL-27, MI-06, PA-06, WA-08

The additional districts in which a generic Democratic challenger leads after voters are told the Republican incumbent supported a shutdown are:

MI-08, NJ-03, VA-10

The districts in which the incumbent Republican leads throughout the survey are:

NJ-02, NY-02, WA-03, WI-01

MoveOn has a map showing all of the Republican representatives who could lose next yearhere.

Fred Upton was losing 51% to 38% to a Generic Democrat even before the poll respondents were told he supported the shutdown.  After they were told of his support, he was losing 56% to 36%.  That puts him in Bentivolio territory.  Bad Santa* was losing 53% to 37% before people were told of his support of the shutdown, 54% to 39% after.

As for Mike Rogers, he was ahead 46% to 43% before the residents of his district were told of his support, but fell behind 47% to 44%.

I had no idea Upton was in such trouble, bad enough that the shutdown didn't matter much.  As for Rogers, the shutdown could make all the difference between his keeping his seat and losing it next election.  So much for him as Pac-Man!

attribution: None Specified

*Speaking of whom, here is the segment about him on All In with Chris Hayes: Rep. Kerry Bentivolio, running the country.
Chris Hayes takes a closer look at Rep. Kerry Bentivolio, R-Mich. A former Santa-for-hire, Bentivolio is now one of the tea partiers running the country.

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Rep. Slaughter grills GOP official over rule change ‘atrocity’ that rigged shutdown

By David Edwards/Raw Story

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) recently revealed that House Republicans had changed a rule effectively allowing only Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) to end a looming government shutdown — but two weeks ago, it was Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) who had the foresight to grill the Rules Committee chairman for what she called an “atrocity.”

In a clip that turned up online on Monday, Slaughter takes on Rule Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX) after sensing that something didn’t smell right with the rule change.

The new rule allowed only Cantor or his designee to bring up Senate legislation for a vote if the Senate rejected a motion to work out the two chambers’ differences in conference committee.

A GOP aide told CNN that the rule “basically prevents [Minority] Leader [Nancy] Pelosi from hijacking the floor since the Senate refused to go to conference.”

Session responded to Slaughter by saying that Republican leadership had made the change “to get our people together… We’re trying to actually have a conference.”

He added that under the old rule, “there could be a privileged motion at any time.”

“I think you’ve taken that away,” Slaughter observed.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Sessions agreed. “We took that away.”

“Oh, Mercy,” Slaughter sighed. “It just gets deeper and deeper. I want to tell you the resolve that I think you’ve got. And despite the fact that every one of you said, over and over ad nauseam, that you didn’t want to shut the government down, we spent some time down in my office watching so many of your members — right after they were elected in 2010 — saying how much they would like to shut down the House to great applause.”

“I think it is really shortsighted, I think it is an atrocity to the Rules of the House,” she added. “And I think you’re putting the whole country through this angst and this aggravation that we did not need to go. This one we could have done without.”

“And I must tell you that I’m more and more angry now that I understand what you have done is take away our ability is to really make a motion for that Senate vote.”

As it turned out, Slaughter’s instincts were correct because Republicans shut down the government the next day. And 15 days later, the government remained shut down and the Senate bill had still not been brought up for a vote in the House.

Watch this video from C-SPAN, broadcast Sept. 30, 2013.

MSNBC host grills Blackburn: ‘Do you hate Obamacare more than you love your country?

By David Edwards/Raw Story

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) accused MSNBC host Thomas Roberts of making “inappropriate” comments on Tuesday after he asked if she hated President Barack Obama’s health care reform law “more than you love your country.”

Following the announcement of a House Republican plan that threw a wrench in a bipartisan Senate deal to reopen the government, Roberts pointed out to Blackburn that the House wascontinuing to demand that part of the Affordable Care Act be repealed or delayed even after the president said the law was nonnegotiable.

“Do you hate Obamacare more than you love your country?” Roberts wondered.

“I think that comments like that, that you are making, are just incredibly inappropriate,” Blackburn replied.

“You don’t think it’s incredibly inappropriate to shut down our government and take all the hostages of Americans that you’ve taken?” Roberts pressed. “No, no, no. It’s not inappropriate because you’ve taken the government hostage through a shutdown. And all the American people, you’re now walking them to a cliff, the economy, and you’re going to push them over, one by one, based on the fact that you don’t like the ACA. That’s all it is.”

“Listen to yourself! We didn’t want a government shutdown,” Blackburn insisted. “Just listen to the way you’re sounding. My goodness! We didn’t want a government shutdown. We don’t want a government default.”

Roberts reminded the Tennessee Republican that she had told the Economic Club of Nashville that conservative lawmakers should do “everything we can do” to derail the health care reform law, and then she praised the efforts of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

“You have been planning a shutdown since August!” Roberts charged.

“Not at all!” Blackburn shot back. “What you are doing is so inappropriate. We didn’t want a shutdown. What we want to do is solve problems.”

Watch this video from MSNBC, broadcast Oct. 15, 2013.

After Sparking Outrage In Detroit, Koch Brothers’ Tar Sands Waste Now Piling Up In Chicago

BY KILEY KROH/Think Progress

Petroleum coke, a byproduct of tar sands refining, is building up along Chicago’s Calumet River and alarming residents, reportedMidwest Energy News.

Petroleum coke is a high-carbon, high-sulfur byproduct of Canadian tar sands that are shipped from Alberta to the U.S. to be refined and is rapidly becoming a cause for concern in Chicago. “It’s growing by leaps and bounds,” Southeast Environmental Task Force member Tom Shepherd, told Midwest Energy News. “It’s coming at a breathtaking rate.”

The pet coke is owned by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch whose operations drew similar outrage from residents and elected officials in Detroit earlier this year. In July, a large black cloud of pet coke dust was spotted over the Detroit River and caught on camera by residents across the border in Windsor. Members of the communities in close proximity to the piles were complaining of respiratory problems as the thick, black dust was blowing off the piles and into their apartments.

Rep. Gary Peters (D-Bloomfield Township), whose district includes the Detroit waterfront where the piles were building up, said the tar sands waste “is dirtier than the dirtiest fuel” and demanded a federal study into the impacts of the product on public health and the environment.

In August, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing ordered the removal of the pet coke piles — after which they reportedly became Ohio’s problem.

Detroit’s pet coke piles were produced by Marathon Refinery but owned by Koch Carbon, a subsidiary of Koch Industries. In Chicago they are owned by KCBX, an affiliate of Koch Carbon, which has large parcels of land along the Calumet River and, according to Midwest Energy News, expanded its presence in the area last year. And it’s not just the Koch piles area residents have to worry about; just across the border in Indiana, BP Whiting’s refinery is undergoing a $3.8 billion upgrade which includes construction of the world’s second largest coker.

Not only does petroleum coke pose a serious risk to nearby air and water supplies, but the product can also be used as a cheaper — and even dirtier — alternative to coal. Since most power plants in the U.S. and Canada won’t burn pet coke due to the high level of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants, the companies often ship the waste product to developing countries with looser pollution restrictions.

And as companies look to expand their pipeline network to keep pace with the increased production of tar sands in Alberta, petroleum coke piles could be appearing in more U.S. communities that contain refineries, such as the Midwest and the Gulf Coast.

(HT: Midwest Energy News)

No, House Republicans Can’t Just Skip Town And Stick Obama With A Ransom Note

BY IAN MILLHISER/Think Progress

Tuesday morning, the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru reported that House Republicans “may pass” their proposal to end the shutdown, prevent default and exact certain concessions from Democrats, “and then skip town.” The implicit threat being that President Obama and the Senate could either take what the House Republican caucus is offering, or they can watch the American economy tumble into the chaos of a debt default.

Such a gambit, however, is unlikely to succeed — at least if the House GOP’s goal is to be far away from Washington when the bottom falls out. The Constitution gives President Obama a way to reconvene Congress, and the House rules enable Leader Nancy Pelosi’s caucus to bring Republicans back to the Capitol to do their job.

Under Article II of the Constitution, the President of the United States “may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them.” Thus, even if Speaker John Boehner managed to adjourn the House and hop on a flight to Ohio, President Obama could summon him back to DC.

The Constitution’s text places few, if any, textual constraints on this power to convene Congress, and there is at least some precedent suggesting that the president can choose the specific date when Congress should reconvene. When President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the Congress back into session on March 5, 1933, he required “the Congress of the United States to convene in extra session at the Capitol in the City of Washington on the Ninth day of March, 1933, at twelve o’clock, noon.” If House Republicans closed down shop at 11pm on Tuesday, there’s nothing in the Constitution suggesting President Obama couldn’t order them back to work at 11:01.

Of course, House Republicans are nothing if not prone to defy this President, but the House rules account for the very circumstance where lawmakers try to prevent the lower house of Congress from operating by refusing to show up to work. Under those rules, “[i]n the absence of a quorum, a majority comprising at least 15 Members . . . may compel the attendance of absent members.” Once such a vote takes place, the House Sergeant-at-Arms may send officers “to arrest those Members for whom no sufficient excuse is made and shall secure and retain their attendance.” So if House Republicans try to flee town, they can be kept at work by force of law.

None of this, of course, forces any member of the House to vote on a bill to avert default. The Constitution, unfortunately, is designed to allow a minorty party controlling just once house of Congress to block any legislation they choose, even if that legislation is necessary to avert catastrophe. But if House Republicans decide to drive the American economy over the cliff, they will at least have a front row seat to witness the mess they’ve created.