Tag Archives: Mitt Romney

Speaker Boehner’s Do-Nothing Congress

It’s simply an objective fact that this Congress is on track to be the least productive in modern history, owing largely to the inability or unwillingness of Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to move almost even the most basic legislation through the House of Representatives. That’s right, the Senate is a font of bipartisan comity and productivity compared to the do-nothing House.

Asked about this yesterday on Face the Nation, Speaker Boehner offered up this thoroughly ridiculous defense of Congress’ historically unproductive session:

We should not be judged on how many new laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal. We’ve got more laws than the administration could ever enforce.

Even by Boehner’s own bizarre standard, Congress has still been spectacularly ineffective. House Republicans have not successfully repealed Obamacare or Wall Street reform, but they have wasted millions of dollars and weeks of time trying — and failing — to do so. As MSNBC’s Steve Benen noted, “In other words, by Boehner’s own standards for evaluating Congress on the merits, he’s failing.”

All that said, we’ll take the Speaker at his word. With that in mind, here’s some things we’d love for him to get to repealing as soon as possible:

The Defense of Marriage Act: While the Supreme Court threw out the part of DOMA that prohibited the federal government from recognizing legally valid same-sex marriages, the part that allows states to refuse to do so is still on the books. Congress should get rid of that part too.
Giveaways to Big Oil: Oil prices are once again creeping up, which is a good reminder that oil companies don’t need billions of dollars a year in giveaways from taxpayers. Some of these giveaways have been on the books for a century, so they definitely seem ripe for repeal at a time of sky-high oil prices and Big Oil profits to go along with them.
Restrictions on Abortion in the District of Columbia: Unable to impose their will on the nation, Republicans have used Congress’ enduring control over the affairs of the District of Columbia’s more than 600,000 disenfranchised residents to advance various pet causes. One of them has been to forbid the District from using funds generated by the taxpayers of the District themselves (i.e local, not federal funds) to pay for abortions for low-income women.
Giveaways to Hedge Fund and Private Equity Managers: The so-called “carried interest” loophole is the one that allows hedge fund and private equity managers — and hedge fund and private equity managers alone — to avoid paying their fair share in taxes on billions in income by erroneously classifying ordinary income as investment income. It has no economic justification and allows people like Mitt Romney to get away with paying a lower tax rate than many middle class workers.
Restrictions on Commonsense Gun Violence Prevention Measures: Similar to the aforementioned restrictions on abortion in Washington, D.C., Congress has also seen fit to put numerous restrictions on the ability of the federal government to take commonsense steps to reduce gun violence. These NRA-backed “riders” in annual appropriations bills, including those preventing even basic public health research on gun violence and measures meant to reduce gun trafficking, should be repealed instead of being extended for yet another year.

We could go on. In fact, there’s nearly $1 TRILLION in wasteful and unnecessary giveaways in the tax code alone that Congress could repeal today. Boehner also said yesterday that his top priority is repairing the nation’s finances. If reducing the deficit and repealing things are his top priorities, these giveaways would seem to be a good place for Boehner to start.

BOTTOM LINE: Any way you slice it, Congress is historically unproductive and historically unpopular. Instead of finding up-is-down, black-is-white excuses, Speaker Boehner should start allowing the House of Representatives — the whole House, not just the Republican caucus — to work its will and accomplish something for the American people. If Speaker Boehner is unable or unwilling to lead on issues like immigration reform with a pathway to earned citizenship, he can at least get out of the way.

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Juan Sepulveda, Democrats.org

06/10/2013 Nativegrl77

Almost every single Republican member of Congress voted to make 800,000 young people who came to the United States through no fault of their own vulnerable to deportation.

That’s a position even further to the right than the one held by the man they nominated for president last year, Mitt Romney — who advocated for self-deportation.

Share this graphic with your friends, and let them know what happened this morning:Last year, President Obama announced that these young people — sometimes called DREAMers — who contribute to our country by serving in the military or going to college, can request relief and apply for work visas. But now Republicans in Congress are trying to take that away.

President Obama can’t create a permanent solution for these young people by himself — only Congress can do that. Today’s vote was a major step back in the fight for common-sense immigration reform, and we need to hold the House Republicans who voted to put the DREAMers at risk for deportation accountable.

The key question moving forward is whether the GOP-led House moves in the direction of common-sense immigration reform that fixes our broken system and creates a path to earned citizenship, or whether it goes backwards and targets young people that are here through no fault of their own and who are contributing to our communities every day.

Share the above graphic with your friends and family, and encourage them to join us here:

http://my.democrats.org/Dream

Thanks,

Juan

Juan Sepulveda
Senior Advisor for Hispanic Affairs
Democratic National Committee

P.S. — President Obama will not give up on this issue — and neither will the Democrats fighting for it.

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What the American People Didn’t Choose

03/12/2013 Nativegrl77

ThinkProgress War Room

6 Things Americans Did Not Vote for in 2012

Tomorrow, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will release the latest version of his infamous Republican budget plan — you know, the one that ends Medicare as we know it. As we await this plan, it’s worth considering a few things that voters did not choose in the 2012 election.

Paul Ryan: In selecting Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney put Ryan and his ideas front-and-center in the election. Voters said thanks but no thanks to Ryan and his radical ideas. Ryan even lost his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin.
A Republican House of Representatives: President Obama was easily re-elected and Democrats expanded their majority in the Senate, so why are we stuck with a GOP-controlled House of Representatives? Gerrymandering. Democratic House candidates won more than a million more votes than Republican candidates, but districts drawn by Republicans for Republicans allowed the GOP to hold on to their majority. This isn’t even disputed by the Republicans. In fact, they brag about it.
The Middle Class Footing the Bill: The centerpiece of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s economic proposal was a tax plan that raised taxes on the poor and middle class in order to slash taxes for the wealthy. By contrast, President Obama proposed raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. The GOP budget’s tax proposals is nearly identical to the Romney-Ryan plan rejected by voters in November.
Ending Medicare: Mitt Romney not only chose Paul Ryan, he wholeheartedly embraced Ryan’s controversial plan to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with a voucher system that stands to double seniors’ out-of-pocket health care costs. Romney and Ryan lost key states with senior-heavy populations, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and New Hampshire.
Repealing Obamacare: Not only did voters not vote for the team that wanted to repeal Obamacare, Mitt Romney says that the president won because of Obamacare. Nevertheless, the GOP budget plan to be unveiled tomorrow will once again call for repealing Obamacare — except for its $716 BILLION in savings from Medicare. Despite demonizing the president for the cuts throughout the campaign, Ryan’s plan keeps those cuts in order to to pay for new tax breaks for the wealthy and special interests like Big Oil and Wall Street banks.
European-Style Austerity: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan proposed unrealistic draconian spending cuts, while the president proposed investments that will create jobs now and grow the middle class and our economy over the long run. The American people rejected the former and gave an Electoral College landslide to the latter. Nevertheless, the GOP budget plan will feature the kind of unrealistic draconian spending cuts that will make it impossible to make investments in the middle class.The GOP plan will slow down the economy and kill hundreds of thousands of jobs. It’s the same kind of austerity that has led to shrinking economies and record-high unemployment in Europe. Austerity isn’t working there and it won’t work here.

BOTTOM LINE: Paul Ryan and his policies were soundly rejected by voters last November. Instead of doubling down on extreme and unpopular ideas like ending Medicare as we know it and raising taxes on the middle class in order to slash taxes on the wealthy, Republicans should come back to the table and agree to deal with our fiscal challenges in a responsible, balanced manner.

Evening Brief: Important Stories That You Might’ve Missed

Key senators reach agreement on path to earned citizenship.

After watering down Wall Street reform, former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) becomes bank lobbyist.

GOP senator takes credit for anti-rape law he voted against.

Awash in profits, corporations shift even more money to tax havens.

The ridiculously biased and incorrect text books approved under Bobby Jindal’s education reform.

GOP hypocrisy on including Obama policies in their budget exposed.

Top GOP strategist: GOP “doesn’t give equal opportunity to women.”

What Paul Ryan really means when he says “pro-growth tax reform.”

The good news about human nature: most people aren’t jerks.

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Grand Theft Election II: Keystone State Stories

02/26/2013 Nativegrl77

By ThinkProgress War Room

GOP Plan to the Steal the White House is Back

Earlier this year, Republicans in several swing states unveiled sore loser plans to allocate their electoral college votes by congressional district or in some other proportional manner rather than the current winner-take-all system in place in 48 states. This would result in votes that would likely go to the Democratic nominee being pushed over into the GOP column. Tellingly, the GOP is not proposing to split the electoral votes of red states.

Had such a plan been in place in every swing state last year, Mitt Romney would most likely be president right now despite having lost the popular vote by nearly 5 MILLION votes.

Fortunately, massive outcry quickly killed this plan in Virginia, Florida, and other states where it reared its head.

Unfortunately, this GOP plan to steal the White House is now back in two key swing states:

Pennsylvania: 13 GOP state senators, including the senate majority leader, have formally introduced their electoral college rigging bill. Republicans need a total of 26 votes to pass the bill. They currently control the chamber and hold 27 seats total. As they also control the state house in Pennsylvania, the GOP could theoretically ram the bill through in as little as 4 days as soon as they have the votes to pass it.Pennsylvania has been at the forefront of recent efforts to rig the electoral college, with Republicans from Gov. Tom Corbett on down first considering this scheme way back in 2011.
Michigan: On Saturday, Republicans gathered for their state convention voted overwhelmingly (1370-132) to back a scheme to divide their state’s electoral votes by congressional district. For his part, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) has opposed the scheme, saying it’s not the “appropriate time” to consider it. This, however, is cold comfort, as Snyder once said the exact same thing about an anti-union bill that he later signed after it was rammed through the legislature with little debate.

BOTTOM LINE: If the GOP wants to win elections the old fashioned way — by winning more votes — then they should change their unpopular policies instead of trying to change the rules in the middle of the game.