Barack Obama campaigned heavily on his opposition to the Iraq War and vowed to end it. But just two years after pulling out U.S. forces, Iraq is once again in turmoil due to the rise of ISIS. The Capitol Steps bring Obama and George W. Bush together to discuss their challenges in Iraq.
Congress is desperately searching for money to replenish the Highway Trust Fund, but National Taxpayers Union President Pete Sepp is urging key Republicans to back away from a hike in the federal gas tax to provide the needed revenue.
In an unusual twist, it is Republicans publicly toying with the idea of higher taxes, while Democrats are mostly opposed to it. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) say they are open to gas tax increases and further state that Americans shouldn’t view such a move as a tax hike but more like a “user fee.”
The federal gasoline excise tax is 18.4 cents per gallon, while the rate for diesel is 24.4 cents per gallon. The last gas tax increase came as part of the Clinton administration increases in 1993 and it is not indexed to inflation. The notion of raising the federal rate is gaining some traction as a result of plummeting gasoline prices in the U.S. over recent months.
Both Inhofe and Hatch insist all options are on the table to supply money for the Highway Trust Fund and they are not demanding a tax increase. Sepp says recent reports are probably just testing the public reaction to the idea of higher taxes.
“I think that this is largely, so far, a trial balloon, an attempt by Republican lawmakers to see just how far they may be able to push the tax increase envelope,” said Sepp.
What is behind the parties’ role reversals on this issue? Sepp says Republicans may see the gas tax differently than other rates Americans must pay.
“Perhaps they believe that because the gasoline tax and diesel fuel tax is a levy on the consumption of a good or service, that’s better than doing something like an income tax increase. Well, from an economic standpoint, a consumption tax would probably cause less economic damage than an income tax increase. But the damage would still be there,” said Sepp.
Sepp contends that logic is flawed on multiple levels. First, he says officials in Washington warm up to ideas like higher gas taxes based on deeply flawed assumptions, like all of the money will go to the right place.
“The only problem is throwing more money at some of these projects by the federal government doesn’t necessarily translate into reduced congestion or fewer potholes. There are a mound of port barrel projects that often get funded in highway bills. We also have a severely inefficient distribution of the funding,” he said.
In addition, he says higher gas taxes would definitely be a blow to consumers.
“Although it’s buried in the price of a gallon of gas, it’s still something that many people will feel almost immediately when they fill up at the pump every week,” said Sepp, noting that the financial toll doesn’t end when you leave the gas station.
“If diesel fuel taxes increase, there will be a ripple effect in other kinds of goods and services and their prices. So many of the things that we buy, whether it’s toys or food or pizza delivery for that matter are provided through vehicles that run on gasoline or diesel fuel,” said Sepp.
There’s also the concern about fuel prices rising again. Sepp says the U.S. is enjoying the fruits of an energy revolution, but if Congress decides to raise taxes on oil companies or the Environmental Protection Agency applies additional regulations on energy exploration, prices could reverse course. He says some responsible work by Congress would do a lot of good.
“We can’t necessarily count on good, low energy prices until we get a stable energy policy out of our federal, state and local governments, who recognize the value of good, abundant, affordable energy,” said Sepp.
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer’s latest opinion piece calls for increasing the federal gasoline tax by a dollar per gallon but offsetting is with cuts in FICA taxes. He theorizes such a move would provide plenty of transportation funding for the government while taxpayers break even and maybe even save more money if they make conserving fuel a priority.
Sepp says the biggest problem with that idea is Washington’s penchant for going forward with the tax increase while the tax cut somehow gets left on the side of the road. He says there would have to be strict assurances that all parts of the deal would be honored.
But even then Sepp says lawmakers are missing out on better, free market ways to improve our national infrastructure. He endorses tolls on more roads and considers that a more accurate consumption tax than raising the gas tax. Sepp says another simple adjustment that could preserve infrastructure and improve traffic flow would be passing the Safe and Efficient Transportation Act.
“What this would do is allow states to have heavier trucks on their roads, not bigger trucks but heavier trucks with a fifth axle to distribute the weight and minimize pavement damage. What you do by allowing heavier trucks is you allow more efficient loads to be put on them. When that happens, you have fewer trucks on the road. In the end you get less congestion and less repair needs on many roads around the country,” said Sepp.
And what will happen with the “trial balloon” testing the viability of a gas tax increase? Sepp that’s up to the taxpayers.
“Hopefully, the American people will push back and say, ‘Look, we want to do something about our infrastructure problems too. Why don’t you take a look at the spending first, as well as alternatives to taxation,'” said Sepp.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are glad to see the Nebraska Supreme Court remove the last major hurdle to approving the Keystone XL Pipeline, although they assume President Obama will still find some reason to reject it. They’re disappointed as key Senate Republicans say they are open to raising gasoline taxes. And they sigh as the Ames Republican Straw Poll survives another cycle.
House Speaker John Boehner easily fended off an eleventh hour effort by conservatives to deny him another term, but longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie says the Republican majorities in Congress need to take concrete steps to prove they are taking the nation down a more responsible path or members can expect some bruising primaries in 2016.
Viguerie has been an active conservative for more than 50 years. He pioneered the use of direct mail in political campaigns. Viguerie is now chairman of conservativehq.com and is author, most recently of “Takeover: The 100-Year War for the Soul of the GOPand How Conservatives Can Finally Win It.” He says the conservative insurgents failed on Tuesday but also delivered a clear message.
“I think this sends a strong signal to the leadership that there’s unrest at the grassroots,” said Viguerie, noting the next intraparty battle could unfold next year if GOP leaders don’t chart a solidly conservative course during the 114th Congress.
“The most important thing for conservatives to be focused on between now and Election 2016 is the primaries. I say, ‘It’s the primaries, stupid,'” said Viguerie.
“We’re going to be collecting a list of people who are supportive of big government by things like (the vote for speaker), those that voted for the cromnibus bill which increased government spending and there’ll be many other votes that we can take a look at. I think you’re going to see a record number of Republican House members that are going to be challenged in the primaries in 2016,” he said.
Viguerie says there’s an easy way for incumbent Republicans to avoid such a headache, by pursuing a solid agenda over the next two years. One area of progress, he says, would be for the GOP to “get off of defense” when it comes to spending and get serious about fiscal responsibility.
“Compromise, for as long as I can remember in Washington, has meant we grow government. (Republicans) don’t grow it as much as the Democrats would like but we grow government at some level. Let’s put a marker out there that we want to reduce the power, the scope, the reach of the federal government and compromise with the Democrats that we’re going to reduce it maybe not as much as we want , but we’re going to reduce it,” said Viguerie.
Another major focus for the GOP majorities, according to Viguerie, is to obey the demands of voters expressed in last year’s elections.
“I think they need to communicate to the American people that they did hear the message that people want less government. The 2010 election was about the tea party, about limited government, constitutional government. The 2014 election was about stopping Obama. Whatever it is that Obama is doing, the voters want him to stop, whether it’s Obamacare, spending, leading from behind in national security. There’s just a long list of things,” he said.
Viguerie is not impressed by the GOP leadership in either the House or Senate, but he says grassroots activists can still make a big difference in what kind of legislation comes out of Congress.
“Conservatives are not going to let to the political promised land, quite frankly, until we get new leaders,” said Viguerie. “We need to keep that pressure on and we’ll win more than perhaps we’ll lose.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently told the Washington Post that one of the main goals for the GOP over the next two years is to give voters good reason to elect a Republican president to go along with a responsibly-led Congress.
“I don’t want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome. I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority, McConnell told The Washington Post.
Viguerie sees that as flawed logic for two reasons. First, he says voters expect decisive conservative leadership now.
“They’re looking for people who have bold vision. American voters like the message they heard in 2010 and 2014. They don’t like this go along to get along attitude of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner,” he said.
Furthermore, he cautions conservatives against assuming they will experience political nirvana if the GOP controls Congress and the White House.
“We has that in most of the Bush years. We had , for years, Republican White House, House and Senate and government grew at a massive level, so we need to make sure that we have the right type of leaders and right now we do not have them,” said Viguerie.
He says choosing a rock solid conservative is essential for the party in 2016.
“The nomination fight coming up is so important that (the GOP must nominate) somebody that’s not going to maintain the status quo but actually ratchet down, ratchet back the growth of government and reduce the size of government,” said Viguerie.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Eliana Johnson of National Review discuss Bill Maher ripping his fellow liberals for giving radical Muslims a pass. They also react to several media outlets self-censoring the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. And they slam an MSNBC guest for comparing the murder of cartoonists by Muslim radicals to Jerry Falwell suing Larry Flynt decades ago.
Masked Islamic terrorists killed 12 people in Paris on Wednesday in a brazen attack that terrorist expert Dr. Walid Phares believes amounts to war, and he says those trying to distance the killers from any connection to Islam are doing the world a great disservice.
On Wednesday, heavily-armed and masked gunmen stormed into the offices of the satirical French magazine “Charlie Hedbo, asked for victims by name and murdered ten of them while wounding many others. The terrorists also killed two police officers on the street outside the magazine’s offices.
Phares, who is also an adviser to the U.S. Congress on the Middle East and terrorism, says the details of this attack chill him even more than the hostage crisis that played out in Australia last month.
“The more worrisome kind of act that we saw today, which is the crossing of a benchmark or a red line, is a military-style attack. This is a team of four. They acted two-by-two according to reports and they executed a military mission, using for the first time not just machine guns but also RPG. This is Paris. This is not Baghdad or Mosul and things have changed,” said Phares, who urges the west to understand how the radicals view this fight.
“What we saw today is war. This is not people who are offended by an issue anymore. This is a cold-blooded operation that killed many top French artists. This is an intimidation. This is a unilateral action taken not in reaction, because those cartoons were published a long time ago. The majority of those who protested, protested on the street. So people need to make a distinction between what is terrorism and what is a protest,” said Phares.
The Paris terrorist attacks come less than a month after the Sydney hostage standoff and the terrorist massacre of scores of students at a school in Pakistan. Phares says we will likely see many more of these targeted attacks that are harder for intelligence efforts to detect.
“We have been seeing and will unfortunately be seeing more widespread jihadi attacks of various kinds,” he said.
Phares is also denouncing the response by some media outlets to suggest the staff of “Charlie Hebdo” should have expected such a response following the publication of Mohammed cartoons years ago and he is also critical of outlets scrubbing their archives of images that may be offensive to Muslims or adherents of any other religion. He sees history proves that self-censorship in the hopes of appeasing enemies does not work.
“These are the absolute wrong moves. We’ve seen in the late ’20s and ’30s how concession after concession, the National Socialists, the Fascists – and the Bolsheviks in the ’50s – would demand concession after concession, that this would be hurtful to German nationalism or Italian nationalism. This is how they built their totalitarian web,” said Phares.
Political and media figures also fueled controversy on Wednesday by refusing to attach a motive to the attacks, even as they reported that the terrorists were shouting “Allahu Akbar” and that they had avenged Mohammed. Again, Phares says denying obvious connections only pushes us further away from addressing the root cause of these sorts of attacks.
“I fully understand that we need to make a distinction between a religion, members of that religion and this ideological group, but this immediate rush towards making that distinction and saying Islam has to do or nothing to do with it. This is a theological debate. It has noting to do with the debate about this movement. I feel that by rushing to the other direction, we forget to identify and condemn and isolate an ideology,” said Phares.
As the western world stands in shock at the brutal murder of magazine employees and police officers by radical Muslims in Paris, the new World Watch List suggests Islamic violence throughout the world is spawning the most significant increase in the persecution of Christians on record and that likely means more intense repression of all kinds is not far behind.
On Wednesday, Open Doors USA, one of the leading organizations serving the persecuted Christian church released the 24th World Watch List, which lists the 50 nations most fiercely persecuting Christians.
“The 2015 Watch List documents the most dramatic increase in violence and persecution of Christians in the modern era. So it’s really dramatic,” said Open Doors President and CEO Dr. David Curry.
Curry unveiled the World Watch List in Washington but he is very concerned that leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere in the western world fail to grasp the significance of this dramatic rise in the targeting of Christians and what it means for believers and non-believers down the road.
“I really feel like the world just doesn’t get it. They don’t understand that the persecution of Christians is a major story, is a major issue. It’s growing and it’s a lead indicator of where oppression is coming for everyone else. Everywhere you look where there’s a major outbreak in the world today, first it was Christians. That’s what happened in Iraq. For ten years, they pushed Christians out (even before the rise of the Islamic State),” said Curry.
“Mark my words, if the world doesn’t wake up to this, it’s going to come their direction,” he said.
Several African nations witnessed the most dramatic increases in Christian persecution over the past year. Kenya soared from 43 to 19 on the list. Djibouti rose from 46 to 24. Nigeria is now in the top 10 and Sudan jumped from 11 to 6. Curry says the reasons are pretty simple.
“The Islamic extremists that have been residing within Africa are learning the lessons of the Islamic State. They’re taking the tactics, the strategies of the Islamic State and seeing the success that they’ve had with this leadership vacuum in the Middle East from western governments. Now they’re implementing it in Africa,” said Curry, who says we were reminded again that no part of the world is truly safe.
“We’re not safe in the west from radical ideologies. Unfortunately, I believe in times to come, we’re going to see attacks on churches in the west. We are seeing attacks in the west already. We saw one today in France,” said Curry.
As horrifying as Wednesday’s massacre was inside and outside the offices of “Charlie Hebdo” in Paris, Curry says that is a daily occurrence for believers in many countries.
“Just to put it in a little bit of perspective, we’re mourning today the loss of 12 lives in France at the satirical magazine. Boko Haram kills 10 Christians every single day. If you average it out last year, every day Boko Haram executed 10 Christians,” he said.
Other noteworthy items on the list includes a drop from six to 12 for Saudi Arabia, but Curry says that’s no reason to be encouraged about religious freedom there.
“There’s no freedom for Christians. There’s no churches allowed for Christians. There’s no distribution on Bibles or freedom for people to convert to Christianity if they so choose. People can’t think for themselves and decide for themselves whether they’re going to have faith or no faith and what that faith will be. It’s a sad state of affairs in Saudi Arabia. They did drop, only because other nations were even more violent and even more oppressive than Saudi Arabia this year,” said Curry.
North Korea tops the list for the thirteenth straight year, while Somalia comes in second. Curry says North Korea is far and away the worst persecutor of Christians and the conditions are actually much worse than the World Watch List suggests.
“Frankly, we have a difficult time documenting all the violence. We only report in the World Watch List what we can absolutely document. So when we say the number of Christians executed for their faith has doubled in the last year, many of the people who we believe were killed in North Korea are not even included in that number,” said Curry.
Two nations in the western hemisphere made the list. Colombia dropped from 25 to 35, but Mexico joined the list at number 38. Curry says the rampant violence aimed at priests and pastors by drug cartels is the main reason why.
Even as persecution reaches undocumented heights, Curry says the positive and peaceful mindset of oppressed believers is truly inspiring.
“What’s so heartwarming is the human side of it. I was just talking with a widow today. She was widowed because Boko Haram attacked her husband, a Christian who was a lay minister in the church. They stabbed him to death and her response was so loving. It was just to forgive in the name of Jesus,” said Curry.
“When you see the power of the human spirit when people are following the words of Jesus, it’s so inspiring. So there’s hope because God gives hope but these situations are very dire in human terms,” he said.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review see President Obama’s promised veto of the Keystone Pipeline as a good chance to prove to the public that Obama is the real obstructionist in Washington. They also condemn the radical Muslim terrorist attack in Paris and the politically correct efforts by the left to distance the killers from Islam. And they rip the Obama administration for demonstrating it doesn’t really care if Cuba improves its human rights record.
Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) will be Speaker of the House for the next two years, but one of the Republicans who challenged him for the post says it’s only because a number of GOP members failed to come through in their promised opposition to Boehner.
On Tuesday, Boehner secured 216 Republican votes on the first ballot, easily receiving more than half of the votes from House members present for the election despite the insurgent candidacies by fellow Republicans Daniel Webster (R-Florida), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and Ted Yoho (R-Florida). Webster, who announced his candidacy just hours before the vote, received the most GOP votes other than Boehner.
Yoho was the first Republican to announce his challenge to Boehner on Saturday. He says the hastily assembled effort to defeat Boehner couldn’t accomplish its goal.
“Obviously, things didn’t turn out the way we had planned, but we put forth the effort and people spoke up and said what was on their mind. They elected Mr. Boehner as out next speaker. I look forward to working with him for the next two years to make this the best Congress ever,” said Yoho.
While being quick to admit the fight for the direction of the party is over for the moment in the House, he’s disappointed in how we got to the results in Tuesday’s House vote.
“A lot of people talk, but when it’s time to show up, their tune changes and I think that was evident today, but I am very proud of the people that did stand up, the 24 that went in public and stated where they stood on the leadership,” said Yoho, who says an unidentified number of Republicans failed to follow through on their word during the vote.
“I don’t want to talk about any specific members but there are members that said, ‘Well, if you hit 20 votes, we’ll jump on and vote with you but if you don’t have that many we’re not going to.’ When we hit [20 votes], you can’t find them,” he said.
Yoho says Republicans who are frustrated with the present leadership but unwilling to oppose it have little grounds to complain over the next two years.
“A lot of people like to complain, gripe and moan about how bad things are. If you’re going to complain about it, do something about it. So the people that have been complaining and griping about Mr. Boehner and the lack of leadership and all that, they had a chance today to change that. They didn’t. So from this point forward for the next two years, this should be a moot point. nobody should complain. We just need to get down to pass the best legislation we can,” said Yoho.
Despite the disappointment and frustration of Tuesday’s vote, Yoho believes Republicans can get a lot of good legislation passed in the 114th Congress.
“This is a new Congress. We’ve got a speaker in place. We just need to get to work solving problems for the American people. Our goal is to work and bring up that legislation that we can have input on and move forward on that,” he said.
For Yoho, the new legislative calendar starts with major legislative efforts to derail President Obama’s unilateral action on immigration. In December, Yoho sponsored legislation declaring Obama’s actions unconstitutional and non-binding. It passed in the House but was never voted upon in the Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats. The congressman says it will be introduced again in the coming days and Se. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) will lead the effort in the Senate.
“That’s a good bill for America and it reins the president back into the boundaries of the Constitution,” said Yoho. “It’s going to go to the president and the president is going to have to make a decision in front of the American people, ‘I side with the Constitution or I’m going to vote against it.'”
The funding for immigration enforcement and the rest of the Department of Homeland Security must be resolved before the end of February. Yoho says conservatives are ready for that fight too.
“We’re introducing a companion bill that strips all funding from any government agency and we’re going to do what we can to block it from private agencies to process any work permits to people here illegally that come from the president’s November 2oth executive movement that he did. No money from the federal government will be used to process any of those. I feel very sure that you’ll see that pass,” said Yoho.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review rejoice in the dawn of a Republican majority in the House and Senate. They also scratch their heads over the GOP’s lack of a strategy to fight Obama’s amnesty. And they react to New York Rep. Chris Gibson announcing his 2016 retirement before getting sworn in for a new term.
