Over at Nancy Pelosi’s blog, The Gavel, someone has posted a list of 15 Republicans who are on the record as actively welcoming the implementation of The Sequester. This list includes Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who may be facing a Tea Party challenge next year as he makes his bid for a sixth term in office. Imagine how fortunate our country would be to have the Human Turtle grace our Senate for 36 uninterrupted years!!
Rep. Cynthis Lummis, Wyoming’s sole member of the House, actually says that she is excited for The Sequester. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma says that he thinks it is what people want. Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas says that it will be “a Home Run” and that people will have tremendous respect for what Congress has accomplished. Serial adulterer, Rep. Scott DesJarlais, says that The Sequester “needs to happen.”
Just so we’re clear on what these people are saying, let’s listen to the president, from his remarks today at the White House with a backdrop of emergency responders:
Now, if Congress allows this meat-cleaver approach to take place, it will jeopardize our military readiness; it will eviscerate job-creating investments in education and energy and medical research. It won’t consider whether we’re cutting some bloated program that has outlived its usefulness, or a vital service that Americans depend on every single day. It doesn’t make those distinctions.
Emergency responders like the ones who are here today — their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded. Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go. Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country. Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off. Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find childcare for their kids. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings.
And already, the threat of these cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf. And as our military leaders have made clear, changes like this — not well thought through, not phased in properly — changes like this affect our ability to respond to threats in unstable parts of the world.
So these cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our economy. They will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls. This is not an abstraction — people will lose their jobs. The unemployment rate might tick up again.
These are all things, none of them good, that Mitch McConnell and his band of fools are saying that they want to see happen. They don’t even care if we’re short one aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.
This is obviously all Crazy Talk. In more candid moments, you can hear something a little saner. Speaker Boehner, for example, said this just six days ago:
The Ohio Republican also reiterated his opposition to letting the sequester take effect, and served up a reality check to members of his caucus who say publicly that they would be willing to let the $85 billion in across-the-board cuts take effect on March 1.
“None of them have ever lived under a sequester. For that matter, neither have I,” Boehner said. “This is going to be a little bleak around here when this actually happens and people actually have to make decisions.”
McConnell is terrified of a primary challenge and Boehner couldn’t lead his party in the Pledge of Allegiance. So, we are not going to stop The Sequester from going into effect. However, contra Rep. Mike Pompeo, the people will not respect this decision or consider it a Home Run. Rather, it will force Republicans to make some rather bleak decisions that could be made right now without doing damage to the economy or our law enforcement or our military posture.
I guess that Rep. Pompeo and his colleagues will have to learn the hard way.
Inconsistency, they name is Republican. Note how these illustrious folks are saying how wonderful the sequester will be. Then look at people like Paul Ryan, who praised the concept when it was first passed, going around saying it is all Obama’s idea to have this happen. So I have to assume that the Turtle and Coburn and the others you quoted all believe that Obama is wonderful.
Boo:
Did you see the Inky today? Given all this, one wonders what a dipshit like David Cohen is thinking. Then again, I never thought he was a Democrat. He was just a suck-up interested in power. Even in that sense, it doesn’t make much sense to publicly support criminal Corbett right now. It’s the height of arrogance and stupidity.
Well, yeah. The Republicans in general have been trying to get away with being both for and against the sequester at the same time. This becomes especially clear when you consider that the only “alternatives” they’ve proposed so far are even yet still more cuts.
This isn’t entirely true.
The Republican party (and a small spattering of their “leadership” as it exists) may sound like they want to have it both ways, but it’s more complicated. Many (if not most) of the individual Republicans are fairly consistent. For the neoconservatives the sequester has been universally pissed on, they don’t like it. For the libertarians it’s the spending cuts they have always wanted.
This gives the illusion that they are all trying to have it both ways. But what’s going on is the different wings of the Republican party don’t agree on it, and the “leadership” is unable to force them to agree.
A little off subject, but Kansas has a tax and spend Republican Gov. Sam Brownback. For several months Gov. Brownback lied to the Kansans saying the last Gov. a Democrat spent 16 Billion when the truth was it was a 14 Billion a year Budget. And Gov. Brownback is spending more than the previous Democratic Gov.
http://www.kansas.com/2013/02/18/2681098/state-budget-director-apologizes.html
For several months Gov. Brownback lied to the Kansans saying the last Gov. a Democrat spent 16 Billion when the truth was it was a 14 Billion a year Budget.
You do know who that former “Democratic” governor is, right? She’s now the HHS Secretary. And how is he spending more when he’s slashing spending left and right?
He’s slashing to pay for income tax relief for the top tier individuals. However, he is still spending more than the previous Democratic Governors, in essence he is still spending more than 14.00 billion a year.
I found the President’s speech today just a little disingenuous because the executive has some discretion as to what programs are hit and what aren’t. Letting criminals go? Really? Reducing hours of first responders? Depending on which ones you are talking about, state and local governments have a great deal of latitude in offsetting this if they would wake up to reality. Delay yet another aircraft carrier going to the already stuffed chock-a-block Persian Gulf?
Who wrote this lame speech?
These are cuts; there is no revenue. It will hurt the economy in the aggregate. But the President has a lot of discretion as to what gets cut–and if Congress wants to raise the 1970s impoundment act to criticize his choices I think he’ll have a strong case to argue about their irresponsibility.
But the message again and again has to be that he’s done negotiating; Congress must act.
What would your speech say to try to get whatever desired result you’re looking to happen? How would you take your case to the American people?
I’m not sure what the desired result is for this speech other than “Congress must act.”
I would talk about how federal money for education goes to the states and that these cuts put more financial pressure on already strapped states and local school districts. And that means in aggregate that thousands more teachers will be laid off.
Reductions of budgets for the FAA mean that there might be fewer air traffic controllers on the job leading to flight delays or rescheduling.
It’s not exactly construction season; although transportation aid to the states is a large amount of money it doesn’t come online until the weather improves. So that topic is not strong.
It’s not farm program time either. Nor tourist time for the national parks.
It will curtail contracts that some businesses (and thus employers) are counting on.
It will delay research at NIH and other laboratories.
The problem with making this kind of an argument is that most folks don’t have any idea what’s in the federal budget to begin with and certainly are not familiar with all the line items and what their implications are.
The second problem is that it is doubtful that public pressure can move Congress, but pressure from lobbyists can and those guys are trying to avoid closing tax loopholes. It is almost as if the public has to once again experience it (as in 1995-96) in order to grasp the issue.
The third problem is that I cannot think of how cutting $55 billion from the Pentagon, holding military payrolls harmless, can be anything but helpful.
Because civilian workers will be furloughed every Friday for 22 weeks until the new fiscal year (from April until October).
And if the GOP fever isn’t broken, laid off in October…
I do understand the material issues involved. I just don’t think that the public understands what is at stake and will not until they see the effects.
If the sequester goes into effect and it lasts beyond 4 weeks, we are in more serious problems in this country than I would have believed. That would mean that no one can reach the GOP nitwits — not the public and not the business community.
My point is that I don’t think Obama’s examples of what would happen are very persuasive to folks who just catch that section of his speech.
What latitude? The whole point is to apply $55 billion across the board to every project in DoD, and $55 billion to each and every other department and organization in non-discretionary. That’s the point: it’s across the board. How does the president have latitutde in this situation?
yeah, I have no idea what Tarheel is talking about.
Does the legislation require it to be across the board or does it just set the totals like the previous sequester? I can’t find the legislative language on the current sequester.
The sequester from the Supercommittee allowed enough latitude that President Obama during the campaign released a plan in which he, the President, specified across=the-board cuts with certain carve-outs for military pay and some other items. Did the deal at the end of the year change the legislative language to mandate across-the-board cuts?
Even with across-the-board cuts to budget line items, the executive does have the latitude in how and when to implement those cuts.
Threatening first responders and national security, especially the extra aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, came off as hokey. Especially the carrier bit. How many carriers do we need in the Persian Gulf? And the idea that the President would stand by and not find some way to deal with issues of first responders and the important parts of national security is not terribly credible.
Depends on how soon we are planning to invade someone. (Iran? Syria? Both? Iraq just for nostalgia? Israel?)
The Persian Gulf is a very dangerous place for a carrier. You don’t put them there without a (militarily) good reason. Perhaps the planned deployment is to replace another carrier on rotation. In that case, the carrier that is not returning is running dangerously low on provisions.
“…and Boehner couldn’t lead his party in the Pledge of Allegiance”
Heh heh. That’s funny.
The perfect analogy. Bravo Booman!
In this case, it works on more than one level.
The coming Repub sequester will make managing the gub’mint in a sane, routine and efficient manner all but impossible. It will engender chaos, frictions, failures and difficulties for all the agencies. It will make gub’mint appear incompetent. Sacrifices and irritations when dealing with gub’mint will abound.
For this reason, the “conservative” movement and Tea Partiers are quite enthusiastic about their handiwork and can’t wait for the many executive branch failures which they have legislated. Whether Obama and the Dems can win the messaging war on this is an open question. Usually, they can’t.
On the other hand, the remaining old style militarist Repubs are not too keen on having substantial cuts to the military occur. They’d perhaps be open to compromise or even repeal.
So this leaves us with the comic figure of the Drunken Boner as national savior. His comments on the matter are, as usual, incoherent. He appears not to have a plan or even have contemplated one, despite the fact that the sequester represents another golden opportunity to break the Hastert Rule and smear the TeaTurds’ noses in their braindead sewage again.
Once again, the reality is that our national gub’mint is completely paralyzed and wholly unable to function. We come back to this basic fact day after day, week after week. There’s no way around it. Good luck, equity markets….
If your core belief is that any and all government are incompetent and inefficient all the time then you see no change in government except that the incompetence will cost less.
Of course this core belief has to also trump any factual evidence that some things are best done by the government and the government can and. Does do some things very well.
This is the single reason why people who like government at least some of the time in some cases should run the government.
“So these cuts are not smart. They are not fair.”
“There is a smarter way to do this.”
How many times in one speech can the President point out that he is trying to reason with Thelma and Louise?
God help me, I actually feel some sympathy for Boehner.