Washington D.C. Mayor, six councilmembers, go to jail after protest to defend abortion rights
D.C. Mayor Vince Gray blocks traffic
I don't think Congress was bargaining for this. The White House probably didn't see it coming either. But their 11th Hour budget agreement to avert a government shutdown had a distinctly partisan stink to it for local government officials in Washington D.C.
The deal included a couple of "riders" -- those little, seemingly insignificant bills attached to great big important ones -- that the Mayor and several city councilmembers were agitated with. They were so pissed off, in fact, that they got themselves arrested over it. And their supporters at a rush-hour rally at the Capitol Monday night, already righteously indignant about Taxation Without Representation, cheered as cops scooped up the mayor, the city council chairman, five other members of the council and 34 others.
Two riders had local government up in arms. One prevents the city from spending its tax dollars on abortions and the other forces D.C. to implement a school voucher program. It's hard to imagine Obama or Democrats pushing to include those conservative bills in the budget agreement. So it's pretty obvious who Mayor Vince Gray was lashing out at.
“All we want to do is spend our own money," Gray said during the rally. "Why should women in the District of Columbia be subjected to a set of rules that no other woman is subjected to? If we want a school voucher program, we should choose it ourselves.”
I am loath to tread in Paul Krugman's footsteps. Especially given that I just watched Peter Beinart lead a Q&A with him on Wednesday. But I choose to write about Congress, and this week the most interesting thing coming out of the legislature is going to continue to be House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's proposal for 2012 and the decade beyond. Ryan, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor are about to embark on what they believe will be an Excellent Adventure in deficit cutting. They're calling it a Path to Prosperity. But I, like Krugman, fear they're going to be leading us all on a Bogus Journey.
Krugman's work in economics won him a Nobel Prize. And my work in economics is a shoo in for a Booby Prize. So when he says Ryan's budget plan is "a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking," there's not a lot I can add to that. But that's never stopped me before.
Like it or not, Republicans -- Ryan and Cantor in particular with their positions of leadership in the House -- are setting the agenda for future budget negotiations. Even as they struggled with President Obama over how much government should spend in the next five months they were laying the groundwork for the next big budget battle, which entails cutting the deficit. And as nasty and protracted as cutting a few dollars here and there was recently, watching a Republican House tangle with the White House over how to reduce the deficit in the long term is going to be nastier and drag out even longer. And however cruel its logic and however wishful its thinking, the Budget Chair's plan represents the opening salvos in what will be a prolonged fight. It's the starting point for the negotiations; and how much, or how little of it remains when the dust has settled remains an open question.
Ryan's Path to Prosperity has no chance of surviving the rumble that's about to go down in one piece for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is that it cuts funding for the Obama's health care reform law. The Budget Committee Chairman knows his proposal will never make it to the president's desk. And if he were under any delusions about it making through the Senate intact, never in Paul Ryan's wildest dreams would Obama sign it as is. And he doesn't care.
"It really doesn't matter to me" if his approach is adopted and signed into law, Ryan said on NBC's Meet the Press. "What matters to me is that we try to fix the problem."
I take that as an explicit admission of the true goals of the Republican Party when it comes to the economy. Reducing the deficit and cutting America's debts would be fine. And if that's your stated preference, other folks are less likely to discover your true position. Because the important thing, what Ryan and the Republicans hope will result from his plan, is a rightward shift in budget policy, which is already pretty far right of the center.
Obama will unveil his plan for cutting the deficit this week, and it goes without saying that we'll wind up with something between what Ryan proposed and what the President plans on suggesting. I recently made an attempt to argue that Obama ought to engage in some issue uptake with respect to Ryan's emphasis on entitlement reform. It was my hope that if he took the lead on that issue he might be remembered as the President who saved Social Security from bankruptcy and from Republicans who wanted to hand it over to their fat cat buddies in private enterprise.
I was apparently unconvincing. So rather than trying to defend the argument that the President should address Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security reform in his deficit cutting plan, I'll simply predict that he will do so. But I'm not yet willing to stick out my neck on whether he'll be successful at saving any of them, either from financial ruin or from the GOP vultures.
But her latest contradiction shows how badly she wants to run
Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's war chest had a great first quarter. Between the $1.7 million raised for her re-election and another half-a-million from a political action committee, the leader of the Tea Party Caucus finished ahead of every presumptive Republican presidential contender in fundraising for the first three months of 2011. And it shouldn't be surprising. She won re-election last year after raising $13.5 million, more than any other candidate for the House last season.
The Daily Mail wants to make out with her
As a quick aside, The Daily Mail ran the Bachmann fundraising story with this headline:
The lede and the first few grafs set up a story about how all other presidential hopefuls, including the President himself, should start preparing to tangle with her in 2012. But the story they deliver is that Obama -- who raised $1.5 million at a single fundraiser last week, has several similar events planned in the next few months, and raised $750 million in his 2008 campaign -- probably won't lose a money fight with Bachmann, if she runs in 2012.
But I digress. Where the Daily Mail failed, The Christian Science Monitor succeeded in explaining what exactly will determine whether she runs and how successful she will be if she does.
On the minus side for Bachmann, she has a fairly thin political resume... She can be polarizing. And she has a tendency to misspeak... Still, she has nothing to lose by running for president, analysts say. She can liven up the debates and carry a torch for the small-government, low-tax tea party movement. And if she falls short of the nomination, she can still run for reelection to the House.“She will be a well-funded candidate; that isn’t her problem,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. “Her problem is that most Republicans are going to understand that if they nominate her, they have a small chance of winning in November.”
Her staunch opposition to President Obama makes her a logical choice to run against him in 2012. Her fundraising abilities make that a possibility. But her chances of actually beating him, even if she puts up a really good fight, seem insurmountably slim -- unless you write headlines for The Daily Mail.
But the real reason I chose to write about Bachmann today is the speech she gave at a Tea Party Express rally a few days ago. It was at the Robert A. Taft Memorial on Capitol Hill. Don't feel ashamed that you don't know who that is. He was the son of President William Howard Taft, but that's not why he got a memorial. Seventy years ago Taft, a Republican Senator from Ohio, was a conservative poster-boy who earned his bona fides by opposing the New Deal. Bonus Trivia: The "A." stands for Alphonso.
But Taft really represented the same kind of conservatism embraced by Bachmann and her Tea Party supporters. So the location was apropos, the audience was friendly and the mood was just right for one of Bachmann's trademark contradictions to get ample applause and the odd whistle. And it also illustrates just how much she wants to run against Obama, or at least "Obamacare."
She promised to vote against any budget proposal that doesn't defund the healthcare reform law, a vote which in effect is a vote in favor of a government shutdown, and then warned the crowd that if government were to grind to a halt over the budget, the Democrats would try to blame the Tea Party for causing it. She's playing "a cynical game," hoping for a shutdown and then blaming the other side, while preemptively accusing the other side of doing the same. And the crowd loved her for it.
"They want to shut the government down and they want to turn you into their scapegoat and say it's the Tea Party's fault for shutting the government down.... They're afraid of you because you're powerful," she said.
The eight minute video of Bachmann's speech is posted below. Most of the good stuff is in the last minute and a half, so I encourage you to listen to at least that much of it.
