Greg Corombos of Radio America and Charlie Cooke of National Review enjoy seeing political experts suggest 10-11 Senate seats held by Democrats could be in play. They also rip New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for saying pro-life, pro-gun and pro-traditional marriage activists have no place in New York. And they discuss Texas abortion hero Wendy Davis getting caught in some major lies as her campaign for governor gets started.
The House and Senate both overwhelmingly approved a nearly $1.1 trillion spending to fund the government through the fiscal year, but the conservative Club for Growth says the plan is a loser because it lifts the spending restraints Congress placed on itself less than three years ago.
“It’s basically Congress breaking their pledge from 2011. In that year, they raised the debt ceiling in exchange for a lot of spending cuts. In those intervening years between 2011-2014, those spending cuts apparently were too unbearable for a lot of members of Congress,” said Club for Growth Vice President of Government Affairs Andy Roth.
“This deal is the product of the Ryan-Murray deal that occurred in December, where they decided to get rid of part of those spending cuts so that they could increase spending immediately, and that’s what this budget is,” he said.
By a lopsided 359-67 vote in the House and a 72-26 margin in the Senate, lawmakers easily approved the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014. Many Republicans who backed the bill said they were concerned about the lifting of spending restraints but that the bill did contain cuts in funding for the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, Obamacare and the new health law’s Independent Payment Advisory Board. They say it also bring discretionary spending back towards spending levels seen in the George W. Bush administration and that the overall tenor of the bill is in the right direction for fiscal conservatives.
“It’s not in the right direction because had we stuck to the spending cuts that we promised voters in 2011, that bill that just passed would have been even smaller and it would have reduced the deficit even more,” said Roth. “It is true that it is small relative to previous years but that means it’s because we’ve been successful at keeping the belt tight. What they’re doing now is unwinding that belt.
“It may seem like just a small little increase in spending now but this is all set up so that they can spend even more money in the year after next and the year after that,” he said.
So how does he explain the large number of Republicans who backed the omnibus?
“We take kind of a cynical view of the politicians in Washington. I suspect at the end of the day there probably only are 67 , if we’re luck maybe 80 or 100 who are true, committed fiscal conservatives. I think the other Republicans that don’t fall in that category vote with us from time to time but they’re certainly not reliable day to day,” said Roth, who says House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan is a brilliant man but not as conservative as many people think.
“Paul Ryan’s rhetoric doesn’t necessarily match his voting,” said Roth, who notes Ryan scored a 71 with the Club for Growth and holds a lifetime rating of 86.
“Eighty-six percent isn’t bad but it’s not good either. He voted for a lot of the big spending bills during the Bush years. He voted for TARP with the Wall Street bailout. He’s voted for a lot of pro-union bills and he just orchestrated the Ryan-Murray deal which unwound a lot of the spending cuts we had already agreed to. So, there are, unfortunately, far more blemishes on his record than I think people are aware of,” said Roth.
In addition to spending cuts in key areas, Republicans who backed the omnibus point to the realities of the current power structure in Washington, with the GOP controlling the House and the Democrats in charge of the Senate and the White House. They say winning more elections will improve the content of these bills even further.
Roth does admit the GOP has some limitations. He says there was plenty of interest in reconfiguring sequestration to allow spending levels to shift without changing the overall numbers but Democrats had no interest in that. He also suggests his earlier comments about the reliable fiscal conservatives brings into question whether the Republicans really control the House.
All that aside, Roth says he hates to see GOP members use the power breakdown as an excuse because it fosters a defeatist attitude.
“That’s kind of like surrendering before a fight. The House is the only chamber that has the power of the purse because they’re the ones that start the ball rolling on all these appropriations bills. They have leverage. Now, they don’t have an enormous amount of leverage but they do have leverage and one of it is just to let the current law continue,” said Roth.
In addition to the spending increases that he fears will materialize in the next few years, Roth says the GOP also surrendered the high ground for the upcoming debt ceiling debate.
“Yes, the Republicans have lost a lot of leverage, both with their own base and with the general public when it comes to cutting spending or at least tightening the fiscal belt in Washington. I don’t think that they’re as believable as they once were,” said Roth.
The founder of the most prominent organization seeking to tie conservatism to the gay rights agenda announced this week he is leaving the Republican Party because it embraces big government and continues to tolerate “bigotry” within the party towards homosexuals, the latter of which he says will prevent the GOP from ever winning another national election.
Jimmy LaSalvia says he founded GOProud with the intention of proving that gays were welcome in the Republican Party. He is no longer affiliated with the group but says he now believes the future of that cause and the party in general is hopeless.
“In 2014, demonizing gay people and opposition to homosexuality is just not OK. We’ve determined that that’s not OK in society, but it’s OK in one place in America and that’s ultimately what’s going to bring them down,” said LaSalvia, who says he did not arrive at this decision lightly.
“Over the past several years, I have come to the conclusion that the Republican Party just doesn’t represent my principles and values. I’m a limited government conservative and they’re big government people. They like government as long as they’re in charge of it. And I don’t tolerate bigotry of any kind and they do. It’s that cultural problem, that they seem to be out of touch with life in America today that’s led me to the conclusion that the Republican Party will never again win a national election,” said LaSalvia.
LaSalvia says the reason the debate over homosexuality will permanently scar the GOP is because the attitude of Republicans is off-putting to countless families, who will then tune out the party on other issues.
“Every American has a gay family member or friend who they know and love and they know that the people who demonize gay people are wrong. And they know that they’re talking about their family and friends. The reason this is so damaging to the Republican Party is because it crosses all demographic lines because everyone has a gay person in their life,” said LaSalvia. “So when they don’t stand up to the people who demonize gays, they’re essentially saying, ‘We’re not going to stand up for your family, your friends,’ so why would anyone listen to anything else they have to say.”
GOProud made news in November, when co-founder Chris Barron publicly announced he was voting for Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race because he found GOP nominee Ken Cuccinelli, a traditional social conservative, too extreme. LaSalvia does not live in Virginia, but says he fully understands Barron’s decision.
“The fact that Ken Cuccinelli was an acceptable candidate for Republicans astonished me. Let me be clear, it’s not about positions on issues. It’s not. If that were the case, I would have left the Republican Party decades ago,” said LaSalvia. “It’s about what Ken Cuccinelli thinks about people who aren’t like him that made him an unacceptable candidate to me. And that’s why, ultimately, the voters in Virginia chose a crook for governor rather than someone like KenCuccinelli. And honestly, that’s why Barack Obama, a failed president, was re-elected in 2012 instead of a Republican.”
Some on the right were surprised at the timing of LaSalvia’s decision, since the party seems to be edging in his direction. Over the past decade, the GOP has gone from championing a traditional marriage amendment to the Constitution to nominating gay candidates for national office, issuing a post-election report urging more inclusive language on gay issues and the vast majority of Republican figures remaining mute in connection with last year’s Supreme Court decisions on the definition of marriage.
LaSalvia isn’t impressed.
“There’s no question that all Americans are thinking differently about how issues affect gay people, and they’re coming to the conclusion that everybody is coming to the conclusion of. The problem is there’s a very loud faction of the Republican Party that will never change on that issue and they’re tolerated,” said LaSalvia, who also dismissed the RNC’s 2012 report.
“Frankly, the autopsy report is putting lipstick on a pig. I’ve likened it to taking a cancer patient to get a makeover. She feels good, she looks great, but at the end of the day the cancer’s gonna kill her unless you cut it out of her,” he said.
The other reaction among conservatives to LaSalvia’s accusations of bigotry is to say their beliefs are based on God’s word and faith traditions that have stood for centuries, and LaSalvia is actually the one engaging in religious bigotry.
He rejects that assertion, once again being careful to separate policy positions from what he perceives as “demonization” of gays from social conservatives. He also the debate should be over because the nation has already decided whether homosexuality is right or wrong.
“I do not believe that opposition to same-sex marriage, in and of itself, is bigotry. But there are some people who just don’t like gay people, and that’s not OK. In America in 2014, the vast majority of Americans and even the vast majority of Republicans have concluded that those people are wrong, but the Republican Party continues to tolerate their demonization of gay people,” said LaSalvia.
LaSalvia says he is now an independent conservative. He says 42 percent of Americans now consider themselves independents, with more and more people continuing to abandon both national parties and he will be working to build consensus with those disaffected Americans.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer CNBC’s Rick Santelli for pointing out Europe has tried endless unemployment benefits and wealth redistribution and failed. They’re very disappointed that Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn will retire with two years left in his term. And they poke fun at the notion that bipartisan seating at the State of the Union Address will somehow lead to more consensus on policy.
A New Mexico judge says residents have the right to “aid in dying” through lethal prescriptions from doctors, despite a long-standing state law banning assisted suicide.
This week, Second District Court Judge Nan G. Nash sided with plaintiffs from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Mexico and Compassion and Choices, who argued that terminally ill patients have the right to receive deadly drug doses so long as they consent. Nash ruled that such prescriptions constitute nothing more than another type of medical treatment.
Jennifer Popik of the National Right to Life Committee’s Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics says this nothing more than torturing the English language to get around the law.
“New Mexico has made it a crime since the late 1950s to assist in a suicide. Assisting suicide is a fourth degree felony in the state of New Mexico,” said Popik. “What they got this judge to do was not to find there’s an inherent right to assisted suicide but somehow that this aid in dying at the end of life does not fit the definition of what the legislature intended.”
So what’s the supposed difference between assisted suicide and “aid in dying”? Popik says that’s very unclear.
“What everybody talks about and what this judge talks about is the provision of a lethal prescription to a terminally ill, competent patient. The problem is, in this ruling, that things aren’t defined in any sort of meaningful way,” said Popik, who says the diagnosis of someone being terminally ill is far more broad than most people realize.
“In legislature after legislature, it’s a difficult term to enforce so people typically think of it as having six months to live or something like that. But nowhere in this decision is any guidance given,” said Popik. “A terminal condition, typically when defined in state statutes, and New Mexico is like this also, means that anybody who doesn’t get treatment that might die within six months. Taken to its logical conclusion, that could be an insulin-dependent diabetic. If there is somebody who does not take medication and does not seek treatment within six months, they could die.
“So this definition of terminally ill patients is going to incorporate a huge group of people,” said Popik.
The case for allowing patients to seek a premature end to their lives is often rooted in the Libertarian argument that an American of sound mind should have the power to make their own decisions, including the choice to end their lives. Popik says that’s flawed logic.
“We don’t solve problems by killing the patient to whom the problem exists for. It’s often couched as an argument of autonomy. This is a person’s freely chosen right. But we have so much evidence out there that people that are seeking suicide typically suffer from some diagnosable depression or other mental illness. These are people that are facing a tough diagnosis. They’re probably and very understandably suffering from some kind of depression related to it.
“We don’t help this group of people just because they’re sick? I think anyone would look at an eighteen or a twenty-two-year-old who had just been through a break-up or a young mother who might be suffering from post-partum depression. They might be saying, ‘I want to kill myself.’ That’s not what we would recognize as a freely chosen decision. At National Right to Life, we think it’s a problem that just because somebody is sick or has a low quality of life as the rest of us would perceive it, we don’t look at that person and see that ask for suicide as the cry for help that it might be,” she said.
The states of Oregon, Washington and Vermont have affirmatively legalized assisted suicide. Montana is in a bit of legal limbo on the issue and New Mexico’s case will undoubtedly be heard on appeal. Popik says groups like Compassion and Choices are regularly pushing for states to move towards assisted suicide but she does not see a national wave of momentum for that cause.
She remains optimistic that Judge Nash’s decision will be overturned as a result of the strained logic in getting around a long-standing law.
“It’s pretty clear that when the legislature in New Mexico…makes assisting suicide legal that this is precisely what they contemplated. They contemplated this sort of where a doctor with no real guidelines and nobody looking at the situation, nobody seeing if the person is competent, nobody seeing if the person is suffering from dementia, nobody seeing if it’s someone pushing someone who might be suicidal,” said Popik.
“The notion is we do not want people assisting in suicides. The New Mexico legislature has decided this and considered it on multiple other occasions. There’s been bills over the years in New Mexico to try to loosen up this law and the legislature considered it and they said no,” she said.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Charlie Cooke of National Review get a kick out of President Obama lauding Democratic North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan after it appears she went to great lengths not to appear beside him at the speech. They also react to Obama once again vowing not to wait for Congress on key issues and promising to act on his own. And they discuss Obama’s evolution on surveillance policies as he prepares to unveil NSA reforms.
Texas Rep. Randy Weber is ripping Attorney General Eric Holder for recognizing same-sex marriages in Utah and is introducing legislation to strengthen federal laws allowing states to determine their own definitions of the institution.
In December, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby ruled Utah’s definition of marriage as only the union of one man and one woman was unconstitutional. He also refused to stay his decision to allow the appeals process to play out. Until the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the ruling, roughly 1,000 same-sex couples were legally married in Utah.
State officials quickly announced those marriages would not be recognized by the state but Attorney General Holder countered by saying the federal government would consider them valid.
Rep. Weber is appalled by the actions of both Shelby and Holder.
“Well, obviously activist judges, as a Republican and a conservative we know that they get it wrong. They get it wrong so often. I was encouraged on the other side of that coin, that the Supreme Court issued a stay until they get to fully weigh in on this court decision,” said Weber.
“The attorney general, man, in my opinion this guy is incorrigible. They’ve gone around Congress on so many issues, with Fast and Furious and there’s just a whole bunch of refusing to defend (the Defense of Marriage Act) and now coming in even though the Supreme Court has issued a stay. This guy goes around the Supreme Court and says, ‘Well, we’ll recognize it.’ Where does he get that power to say we’ll go around the Supreme Court. This guy needs to be impeached and out of office,” said Weber.
A similar scenario played out Tuesday in Oklahoma, where a federal judge ruled that state’s marriage laws were also unconstitutional but stayed enforcement of the decision pending appeal.
In response to what he considers judicial activism, Weber is sponsoring the “State Marriage Defense Act of 2014”. He says the bill not only strengthens the remnants of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) but is based on the logic expressed in last year’s Supreme Court decision on marriage.
“The Supreme Court basically said in their U.S. v. Windsor case that Congress didn’t have the right to define marriage. It’s up to the states. OK. Well, now there’s confusion because the different agencies are wanting to give federal same-sex benefits and they don’t know whether to choose the law of the state of domicile or the laws of the state of celebration. My bill says you must act on the laws of domicile. This clarifies. This takes the ambiguity out of the Supreme Court’s ruling,” said Weber.
In addition to clearing up the uncertainty following the Supreme Court decision, Weber says it is very important to respect the right of states to define institutions as they see fit.
“What it does is it upholds states’ rights. If the people of Massachusetts want to decide that gay people have right to marry in Massachusetts, that’s up to Massachusetts. If the people in Texas decide, and we’ve got it in our constitution, that we define marriage and we don’t recognize gay marriage, by golly that’s up to the people of Texas,” said Weber.
“Texas won’t tell Massachusetts that you must recognize marriage based on Texas laws and we don’t expect Massachusetts to tell Texas that we must recognize marriage based on their laws. That’s an individual states’ rights issue. People in Texas uphold that traditional family unit of marriage between a man and a woman, and if Massachusetts chooses to do it between whatever, that’s up to Massachusetts,” said Weber.
For Weber the federal encroachment on issues of state sovereignty go well beyond the marriage debate, particularly in the Obama administration.
“You can see him going around Congress and just having a blatant disregard for the Constitution in a whole myriad of issues, whether it’s Benghazi and being truthful…on the immigration issue he has recognized some of the children when Congress is not through having that debate yet on those who are here without documentation,” said Weber.
“He has abdicated what I would call his supposed upholding of the Constitution. He has trampled on the states doing that. Obamacare is an example, instead of states having the right to define insurance markets in their own states and to regulate them. You can go into Obamacare with all of the navigators. In the State of Texas, we have the Department of Insurance, who license insurance agents. Here you come in with navigators who have a whopping 20 hours worth of training,” he said.
“They have not been thoroughly vetted or background checked. Are they felons? Are they criminals? Are they child molesters or spouse abusers? I mean he has just gone around the states on a whole myriad of issues. In my opinion, we have a constitutional crisis because of this guy,” said Weber.
Less than a week after first introducing the bill, Weber has already received support from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, National Organization for Marriage and Concerned Women for America among others.
Getting it through Congress is a taller order, however. Most congressional Democrats are now on the record supporting same-sex marriage. Weber does have the support of a group of black pastors and one House Democrat, and he believes his focus on preserving power for the states could draw even more because the bill is just “common sense”.
Weber also believes the Supreme Court will have a lot to say about this issue, surmising the court would not have stayed Shelby’s decision if it didn’t plan to hear the case. He’s less sure which way the justices would rule on a state’s right to define marriage for itself, but he’s confident about what the Constitution has to say about it.
“I would argue as a conservative and as an advocate for the Constitution, the Supreme Court doesn’t have to decide states have the right. We’ve got the right. All you have to do is look to the Tenth Amendment. So if they struck down the third section of DOMA and said Congress doesn’t have that right, then read your Constitution. Read the Tenth Amendment. The only other people that have that right are the citizens and the states respectively,” said Weber.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are cheered to see the retirement announcement of Virginia Rep. Jim Moran, who is known more for his deplorable words and conduct than his work in Congress. They also discuss the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi and the major blame it places for the government failing to provide better security there despite growing concerns of violence. And they react to the Israeli defense minister referring to Secretary of State John Kerry as “obsessive” and “messianic” and hopes Kerry will win a Nobel Peace Prize and leave Israel alone.
Joint Economic Committee Chairman Kevin Brady is slamming President Obama and other Democrats for trying to advance an agenda to confront “income inequality” and efforts to extend emergency unemployment benefits in what he calls a misguided appeal for compassion.
The Texas Republican is also speaking out on the dismal jobs reports and what Congress can do to spur job creation and why he’s generally supportive of the bipartisan spending bill that emerged this week.
With Obama and other Democrats trumpeting the need to combat income inequality through proposed minimum wage increases and extending emergency unemployment benefits, Brady says the whole campaign on the left is badly misguided.
“I just reject the whole premise. I think it is not the government’s role to equalize everyone’s income. I think it’s our role to provide as unfettered of an opportunity as you can for individuals to climb up that economic ladder,” said Brady. “I don’t trust the government to equalize income, but I do trust the free market system to give us opportunities that allow us to move up that ladder. That’s where I think the focus ought to be.”
Brady says the American system is a shining example of how the poor and underprivileged can elevate their condition by taking advantage of opportunities and making wise decisions.
“If you’re born into a family with very low skills and among the poorest in the country, you have a better chance of moving up the economic ladder into the middle class than the wealthy do staying at their station. In America, individual decisions on education, on work, on marriage, on family, all the factors that help you move up the economic ladder, are available,” said Brady.
While he dismisses the ideology behind the income equality movement, Brady acknowledges it will be a major issue in this year’s campaigns and Republicans need to be ready with a rebuttal and better solutions.
“It’s going to be focused on equal opportunity, the opportunity to pull yourself up that economic ladder through hard work, through education, through opportunities. It is America’s strength. Government is not so good at that and all they have to do is look at this new health care law to realize they do not have the answers for families,” said Brady.
The latest major salvo in the income inequality movement centers on President Obama’s call to extend emergency unemployment benefits that expired in December and were not part of the bipartisan budget deal that passed earlier in the month. Republicans now seem willing to approve short-term extensions if they are paid for with spending cuts in other areas. Brady disagrees with both of those approaches.
“I don’t think we ought to extend the emergency benefits and that’s what this is. These are emergency benefits beyond what state gives of half a year, beyond extra unemployment benefits if the unemployment rate is high in your state. These are emergency benefits designed for the unemployed when (the jobless rate) is high and going higher. The president tells us unemployment is lower in all 50 states. The emergency is over,” said Brady, who fiercely rejects the contention that opposition to the extension is rooted in a lack of compassion for those out of work.
“The measure of America’s compassion for those who don’t have a job is not how long you keep them on unemployment. It’s how soon you get them into a good paying job,” said Brady. “These folks are crying out for a job and I think extending it three months or some short period doesn’t help them get back to work.”
As chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, Brady goes over the jobless numbers with great scrutiny. He says there was great hope for a healthy jobs report given some of the recent economic indicators, but the December report shows the economy is struggling mightily.
In December, the nation added just 74,000 jobs and saw the jobless rate dip to 6.7 percent but that’s only because 347,000 people gave up searching for work. Brady says there’s little mystery as to why the economy is so stubbornly weak when he speaks with business owners in his Houston-area district.
“What our local businesses tell us about the new taxes that landed on top of them. The health care law is having a real impact on hiring. There’s the worry about red tape that they’re all experiencing. And now, we have these recommendations that you force local companies to pay $5,000 more a worker through the minimum wage,” said Brady.
While Brady believes getting the government out of the way is the best avenue to encourage job creation, he says scores of bills passed by the House and languishing in the Senate could provide at least some relief. He pointed to two in particular: approving construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline and making the employer mandate optional in the new health care law.
This week, the House is expected to approve a bipartisan spending bill totaling $1.1 trillion. Multiple House Republican and Senate Democratic leaders committee chairs are urging their members to hold their nose on some items and approve the bill for the larger good.
Veterans benefits are still a bone of contention. Most were cut in the December spending bill and, while both parties promised to restore them, only benefits for disabled vets seem to be getting restored while other veterans will see cost of living reductions and other cuts.
Brady says there are items in the bill he doesn’t like but he says given Democratic control of the Senate and the White House, this is about as well as the GOP can do until they win more elections. He also says there are some very bright spots in the plan as well.
“There’s some things to like in this. To take this part of the budget basically back to the Bush years I think is rolling back all of the president’s spending since then. It not only freezes Obamacare funding, it actually cuts dollars out of that and cuts funding out of the Independent Payment Advisory Board. It cuts the IRS and EPA back, the EPA funding by almost 20 percent. More importantly, it restores defense by keeping the funding at the current level. That really helps with readiness,” said Brady.
The House is expected to vote on the omnibus spending bill on Wednesday.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are glad Virginia Sen. Mark Warner will face a pretty stiff challenge from former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie. They also cringe as the latest Obamacare enrollment numbers suggest massive health insurance premium increases and medical care costs are on the way. And they discuss the less than stellar Democrats hoping to claim a U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina.
