Month: May 2017

“O  Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum, how lovely are thy branches”

A Christmas tree is legislation loaded with ornaments, each designed to win votes.  Obamacare passed in the Senate because of two such ornaments, the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase, included to satisfy Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.  In order to win passage in the Senate, you must often purchase the votes of individual Senators with such ornaments.

Being the smart cookie that he is, Ted Cruz understands the Senate rules on reconciliation, which are used to avoid the filibuster.  According to Susan Ferrechio of the WaEx, he says it’s the only way to get Obamacare repeal and replacement through the Senate.  He’s right, of course, and when people understand that passage of this essential legislation hinges on the interpretation of the mere rules of the Senate, I think they’ll support the Cruz position.

I’ll be surprised if this Obamacare R & R bill is ready before September, and then I think it will be rolled into one gigantic Monster Reconciliation, along with a debt ceiling increase, a budget for fiscal 2018, tax reduction and reform, and infrastructure spending.  This will  be the most magnificent Christmas tree in the history of the federal government.  It could be the only major bill that Trump can get passed this year.  One and done.

Writing in The Hill, former Senate parliamentarian Richard Arenberg is appalled at Cruz’s plans.  All Cruz needs to do is get Vice President Pence to overrule the current Senate parliamentarian, and certify that the Monster Reconciliation Bill of 2017 fits within the reconciliation rule.  Pence would need 50 votes to endorse his ruling.

I don’t think he gets the Guardian of the Senate, John McCain.  Lindsey Graham will go along with his hero and vote no as well.  So what will Sens. Collins of Maine and Murkowski of Alaska do?  I don’t know about Collins, but Murkowski can be bought.  Include a provision in the Monster that opens up ANWR (as was done in 1995) and she has to vote for it.  Politically, she will have no choice.

Other Senators may need their own ornaments added to the tree.  Senators are, by and large, reasonable.  Give them some goodies to take home to their state, and they’ll give you their vote.  It happens all the time, and is the indispensable grease that allows the Senate to function at all.

Call it the art of the deal.

This will all cost a great deal of money.  Senators don’t come cheap.  So the one area the Monster won’t deal with is deficit spending.  I think we’ll wind up adding to the debt between half a trillion and a trillion.  This problem will have to be addressed in 2018, with passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment through the use of Article V.

Our Phoenix Convention of States starts on September 12th, just as the circus in Congress over the Monster Reconciliation is getting hot.

Our timing couldn’t be better.

The Byrd rule says items that are extraneous to the budget can not be included in a reconciliation bill, and thus avoid a Senate filibuster.

What is the definition of “extraneous”?  That’s up to a majority of the Senate.  If 50 Senators and the Vice President say something is extraneous, it is.  It’s a matter of political interpretation.  Whatever the Senate says is extraneous, is extraneous.  No court will intervene, since all the Senate is doing is interpreting its own rules.

So, come September, when we reach “The fiscal cliff to end all fiscal cliffs” , per Politico, it will boil down to this:  we run out of money because the debt ceiling isn’t raised, and the government shuts down, because a few Republican Senators insist on their, literal, interpretation of the word “extraneous”.

We want a very broad interpretation, one that accommodates the Monster Budget Reconciliation Bill of 2017, which will contain fixes for everything, and tax reduction and reform to boot.

That’s what you do with a log jam.  You blow it up.

Even though the election was five months away, Bill Clinton figured his wife and he would finally be getting back into the White House.  He’d done what he could to make Trump the nominee, knowing he was the one man Hillary could beat, no matter what.  And, against all odds, Trump it was.

She wasn’t much of a candidate, and really didn’t have any particular rationale for her campaign, but that didn’t matter.  She’d just carry on with the Clinton and Obama program, and that was good enough, running against Trump.  He smiled every time he thought about the Access Hollywood tape that NBC had.  It would come out around two weeks before the election, and it would dominate the news leading up to the voting.  A killer, if he ever saw one.

The fly in the ointment was the email scandal.  It had to be killed, now.  It hung over everything, and it needed to be gone.  The Attorney General, Loretta Lynch need to kill it, and kill it now.

Seventeen years ago he’d given her the big break, appointing her United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.  She owed him, and she knew it.  She had to move, and get it done.

It was a message that had to be delivered personally and privately.  No one would even know about it.  He’d just show up on the tarmac, avoid the press, get aboard for a quick one on one.  Easy.

Oops.

I’ll bet the lamps are flying in Chappaqua tonight.

There’s a defector from North Korea who is leading a large campaign to launch balloons in the south with anti-Kim messages attached, and release them for the wind to carry north.   For his efforts he has been subject to attempted murder, but nonetheless carries on.  Now the Norks are sending their own balloons south, bearing communist propaganda.  In the 21st century, a war of balloons.

 

The closer the Republicans get to the 216 votes they need to pass Obamacare repeal and replace, the more expensive it gets.  Today Trump bought Rep. Upton and two others with $8 billion over five years.  That’s $8 billion divided by five, divided by three, meaning the price tag for these three was a little over half a billion apiece.  Chump change, to Trump.  He may have to spend more to get the last votes he needs.  Washington is an expensive place to do business.

 

Marijuana legalization is a Republican issue.  Check out the comments section in this American Thinker article.  The author pooh poohs the medical benefits of cannabis, and he gets completely buried in the comments by hundreds and hundreds of people sharing their stories of the benefits they have received from this drug.  For some cancer survivors, it’s all they have to deal with chronic, extremely severe pain.  For them, it is a life saving drug.

American Thinker is as conservative as a web site gets.  No progressives are welcome.  The fights are always between reasonable conservatives and the Alt Right.  But on marijuana, there was no real disagreement.

Republican politicians, are you listening?

I was reading a story about Amgen in Drain the Swamp, and how it used its 74 lobbyists in Washington to get a provision in the 2013 emergency spending bill that essentially gave this company a price increase on a class of its drugs.

Did you know that drug companies employ 74 lobbyists apiece?  No wonder marijuana remains classified as a dangerous drug by the federal government.  It’s a safe, effective, cheap drug  — in other words, competition to Big Pharma.

Swamp doesn’t cover it.

 

In his book, linked to above, Rep. Ken Buck doesn’t actually endorse the BBA Task Force (as I’d been told), with our single subject amendment, and 28 states.  He endorses a rival proposal, the CoS Project, which has 10 states, and no possible political path to 34.

Why would he endorse CoSP, instead of us?  Because he’s never heard of us.  That must be corrected.

It also explains why Jim DeMint in the preface, and Mike Lee, Erick Erickson and Ted Cruz in the blurbs, do not endorse what Buck proposes in his book.  The CoS proposal is a bridge too far for a lot of people.  Mainly, it feeds into the runaway convention myth.

In allowing any amendment that reduces the power and scope of the federal government, the CoS proposal would allow just about any kind of an amendment you can dream up.  Are you pro-life?  How about an amendment stripping the federal courts of jurisdiction in abortion cases?  At a CoSP convention, you could offer it.

To some of these CoSP people, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.  But they’re wrong.  It’s a bug, and it’s fatal.

Senator Cruz understands this.  He’s endorsed our proposal, but not the CoSP.  We need to explain all this to Rep. Buck.

Since this occasion is piled high with difficulty, we must think and act anew.  Dogmas of the quiet past, such as the rules of the Senate, are inadequate for these times, and we must disenthrall ourselves if we are to save our country.

So if the filibuster can’t be eliminated, it must not be allowed to block the passage of tax reform,  Obamacare reform, and budget reform.  As I argued over a month ago,  you roll it all into one reconciliation package, make a determination that the filibuster requirement can be waived, and pass it with 51 votes.

Either that, or Schumer wins again, as he did in the latest budget bill.  Trump is embarrassed, and he should be.  He’s tweeting that we may need a good government shutdown in September in order to shake things up.  His guts are right on this one.  I don’t think he has any choice.

His base is sticking with him, for now.   But they don’t like seeing Chuck Schumer knocking him around, and they want him to fight back.  Speaker Newt Gingrich was beating President Clinton up pretty good in 1995, and then Clinton fought back, vetoing the budget, shutting down the government, and blaming the Republicans.  Trump could do something similar.

A reconciliation bill is anything you want to call it.  What can go in, and what can’t, are totally up to the Senate.  If the Republicans want to put something in a bill, and say that  it fits the requirements, then it does.  But some, like McCain, will object, and it only takes three members of the Senate majority to prevent such a ruling.

I say, let them go ahead and do it.  Then pass some mealy mouthed budget with some good and some bad, the product of bipartisan compromise with Chuck Schumer, and send it to President Trump.

At that point, Trump vetoes the budget, and shuts down the government.  And the pressure will be on McCain.  If he removes his objection on the filibuster waiver, the big package of legislation in the Omnibus Reconciliation Bill of 2017 can pass with 51 votes, and the government reopens.

It will all be on McCain.

He caused the shut down, in order to preserve an anti-democratic rule that the Senate club is attached to, and not for sentimental value.  The filibuster empowers every Senator.  It make every Senate vote more valuable to its owner.  In today’s world of hyper-partisanship, it doesn’t work.  There’s no middle ground.

The press will be with McCain, but Trump can deal with that.  That’s something he’s pretty good at.