John McCain Lets Loose on Trump and Do Nothing Congress

Perhaps his cancer diagnosis has prompted to think about his own mortality and the need to get things accomplished.  Or perhaps he has belated reverted back to the John McCain of old - prior to his sellout to the far right and his selection of the idiot of Wasilla as his running mate.  Whatever the cause, in a Washington Post op-ed John McCain has vented his frustration with what the GOP has become and Congress' failure to fulfill its constitutional duties and to put the well being of the nation and all citizens ahead of partisan posturing and small mindedness.  It reminds me of why I once supported McCain in his 2000 presidential primary bid.  Here are op-ed highlights:

Americans recoiled from the repugnant spectacle of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville to promote their un-American “blood and soil” ideology. There is nothing in their hate-driven racism that can match the strength of a nation conceived in liberty and comprising 323 million souls of different origins and opinions who are equal under the law.

Most of us share Heather Heyer’s values, not the depravity of the man who took her life. We are the country that led the free world to victory over fascism and dispatched communism to the ash heap of history. We are the superpower that organized not an empire, but an international order of free, independent nations that has liberated more people from poverty and tyranny than anyone thought possible in the age of colonies and autocracies.

Our shared values define us more than our differences. And acknowledging those shared values can see us through our challenges today if we have the wisdom to trust in them again.

Congress will return from recess next week facing continued gridlock as we lurch from one self-created crisis to another. We are proving inadequate not only to our most difficult problems but also to routine duties. Our national political campaigns never stop. We seem convinced that majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important.

That’s not how we were meant to govern. Our entire system of government — with its checks and balances, its bicameral Congress, its protections of the rights of the minority — was designed for compromise.

That has never been truer than today, when Congress must govern with a president who has no experience of public office, is often poorly informed and can be impulsive in his speech and conduct.

We must respect his authority and constitutional responsibilities. We must, where we can, cooperate with him. But we are not his subordinates. We don’t answer to him. We answer to the American people. We must be diligent in discharging our responsibility to serve as a check on his power. And we should value our identity as members of Congress more than our partisan affiliation.

I argued during the health-care debate for a return to regular order, letting committees of jurisdiction do the principal work of crafting legislation and letting the full Senate debate and amend their efforts. . . .  We might not like the compromises regular order requires, but we can and must live with them if we are to find real and lasting solutions. And all of us in Congress have the duty, in this sharply polarized atmosphere, to defend the necessity of compromise before the American public.

Let’s try that approach on a budget that realistically meets the nation’s critical needs.  . . . A compromise that raises spending caps for both sides’ priorities is better than the abject failure that has been our achievement to date.

Let’s also try that approach on immigration. The president has promised greater border security. We can agree to that. A literal wall might not be the most effective means to that end, but we can provide the resources necessary to secure the border with smart and affordable measures. Let’s make it part of a comprehensive bill that members of both parties can get behind — one that values our security as well as the humanity of immigrants and their contributions to our economy and culture.

Let’s try it on tax reform and infrastructure improvement and all the other urgent priorities confronting us. These are all opportunities to show that ordinary, decent, free people can govern competently, respectfully and humbly, and to prove the value of the United States Congress to the great nation we serve.

Now if only other members of Congress would do what McCain asks.

Is The GOP Break From Trump Starting?

Driving home this evening I was listening to Steele and Ungar on the Sirius XM POTUS channel. The topic was whether or not Donald Trump was an aberration and whether the GOP would revert back to its historical positions.  At the time, I refrained from calling in, but if I had called in, my remarks would have been that the GOP will never revert back to it's historical self until the Christofascists and white supremacists are exiled from the party.  In my view,  it was the rise of these two groups within the GOP that set the stage for the rise of Trump and the appeal of his calls to racism and religious extremism under the guise of "make America great again" which to these groups translated to "make America white evangelical Christian again." That said, Congressional Republicans are showing signs that they neither fear Trump nor see him as a positive influence on their agenda.  Indeed, between the veto proof legislation on Russian sanctions and now bipartisan talk about health care reform, perhaps Republican members of Congress have realized that they need to proceed on their own without deference to the insane tweets emanating from the White House.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this possibility.  Here are highlights:

Congressional Republicans broke dramatically with the White House on Tuesday over the future of health care reform, with lawmakers entertaining bipartisan talks as the president scrambled for a way to salvage Obamacare repeal and replace efforts.

The talks aren’t expected to yield a quick legislative fix to Obamacare. Instead, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said his committee would simply be hold hearings on possible actions Congress could take to stabilize the health insurance markets.

But the fact that talks were happening at all was a remarkable break from the message that the president and his team were hoping to send. While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) spoke in the past tense during a press conference on Tuesday to discuss his party’s efforts to pass Obamacare repeal—“our problem on health care was not the Democrats; we didn't have 50 Republicans”—the administration was continuing to press Republicans to keep at it.

“There are not the votes in the Senate, as I’ve said repeatedly to the president and to all of you, to change the rules of the Senate. There’s not enough even to require 50 or 51 Republicans to agree to do that. The votes are simply not there,” McConnell told reporters.

Trump held talks on Monday with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, ostensibly to convince him to get his home state senator, John McCain, to drop opposition to the last Senate bill. . . . . But the likelihood of that happening is next to nil. Not only is McCain unlikely to return to Washington D.C. as he undergoes treatment for recently-diagnosed brain cancer; but lawmakers are already plotting negotiations for when they get back after Labor Day.

Alexander’s hearings will take place in September, during which the committee plans to hear from state insurance chiefs, governors, health care experts, and representatives from the insurance industry. In the interim, the senator has asked Trump to authorize a short-term stabilization measure known as cost-sharing-reduction (CRS) payments in order to buy Congress time to come up with a bipartisan solution.

[Alexander]  was joined by several other high-ranking Republicans too. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) also encouraged Trump to make the CSR payments, as did Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Bob Corker (R-TN).

“There would be a lot of poor people that would, obviously, be negatively affected. And when you’re president, you’re president of the whole country. And while you might be dissatisfied with what you inherited, typically it’s best to try to figure out a way to move ahead in a manner that doesn’t harm folks,” Corker told The Daily Beast.

The fissure on health care between Senate Republicans and the White House presented Democrats with a rare political opening, but not one without its own set of complications.

Several Democratic aides told The Daily Beast that the party is eager to craft a modest deal with Republicans both as a means of stabilizing the individual insurance marketplace and removing the possibility that the GOP returns to a broader repeal-and-replace push—since the case or one would be weakened by the modest deal they struck.

Trump is expected to decide as soon as this week on whether to extend the CSR payments, which help offset costs for insurers and poorer Americans. If the president axes those payments, experts and lawmakers have warned that premiums could skyrocket and even more insurers could leave or threaten to leave the exchanges.

For Democrats, a prerequisite to crafting bipartisan reform is for the administration to alleviate that uncertainty.

“The idea that we’re doing this to just help insurance companies is hogwash. We would help the treasury, and frankly, we would be helping a lot of the people who are getting coverage in the exchanges,” Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), a former governor who has helmed talks with Republicans for weeks, told The Daily Beast. Carped added that he hopes new White House Chief of Staff John Kelly “will talk some sense” into Trump.

If Trump sabotages the existing law, Carper said, Obamacare’s success or failure will rest on his shoulders.

“We have an old saying in Delaware: if you break it, you own it,” said Carper. “And if he breaks it, he will own it. And ironically and cruelly, some of the people who will suffer the most are the people who live in those red states that voted for him, including West Virginia and Kentucky and places like that.”

Has Hillary Clinton Signaled a 2016 Campaign Theme?

Certainly as most Virginians are aware, Bill and Hillary Clinton have become involved in the 2013 Virginia elections as they have barnstormed for gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the Democrat statewide ticket.  Pundits and prognosticators have tried to read other motivations into the Clintons' support for McAuliffe and the Democrats which have ranged from seeking to make Virginia a friendly state in 2016 to signalling possible campaign themes for Hillary's 2016 run.  Here are excerpts from a piece in the Washington Post that looks at the later aspect of the phenomenon:

NORFOLK — In recent stump speeches and policy remarks, Bill and Hillary Clinton have offered sharp criticisms of the partisan gridlock paralyzing Washington, signaling a potential 2016 campaign theme if Hillary Clinton chooses to run for president.

The Clintons’ critiques in recent days have been explicitly aimed at congressional Republicans, who helped spur a 16-day government shutdown and potential debt default in October. But their remarks also seem to contain an implicit rebuke of President Obama’s failure to change Washington as he pledged when first running for the White House.

The arguments suggest a way that Hillary Clinton could attempt to run in 2016 as an agent of change — potentially putting her at odds with the two-term Democrat she would be seeking to replace.
At campaign rallies and other recent appearances, both Clintons have called for soothing partisan tensions and have espoused a vision of governing by compromise. Barnstorming Virginia this week with longtime friend and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, Bill Clinton repeatedly assailed ideological politics on both sides of the aisle.


“When people sneeringly say, ‘McAuliffe is a dealmaker,’ I say, ‘Oh, if we only had one in Washington during that shutdown,’ ” the former president said at a rally here in Norfolk on Monday. “It’s exhausting seeing politicians waste time with all these arguments. It is exhausting. People deserve somebody who will get this show on the road.”

Such themes of change and comity are particularly ironic for the Clintons considering that one or the other has held public office in Washington for the past two decades. Bill Clinton’s tenure in office was also marked by fierce partisan battles that roiled the nation, including an impeachment fight and two government shutdowns.

In the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton dismissed Obama’s message of post-partisanship as woefully naive. But since stepping down as Obama’s secretary of state earlier this year, she has adopted a similar theme, repeatedly berating lawmakers for choosing “scorched earth over common ground.”

The Clintons have been careful to distinguish between promoting bipartisanship and ceding ground on core values. Hillary Clinton, for example, has been busy advocating for traditionally liberal issues such as minority voting rights, gay marriage equality and women’s rights.

This appears to be an effort by Clinton, following a four-year hiatus from domestic politics, to cement ties to the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. If she runs, Clinton would want to avoid a repeat of the 2008 campaign, when Obama built support among liberal activists by running to her left on the Iraq war.

The Clintons’ message is one that Democrats across the country could carry into the 2014 midterm elections, where the battle for control of the Senate could come down to a handful of hotly contested races in states that lean Republican.

“This economic thing, it’s terrible,” Clinton said in Hampton. “Median family income — after you adjust for inflation, is lower than it was the day I left office. That was a long time ago. And we need somebody who wants to do something about it.”  Many voters attending the rallies said they longed for a return to the Clinton era.

This is the sentiment that both Clintons have been channeling. At his Virginia stops, Bill Clinton repeatedly said the Founding Fathers wanted elected officials to be practical above all else, designing a system of governing that would force them to negotiate with each other.  “Read the Constitution of the United States of America,” Clinton said Sunday in Richmond. “It might as well have been subtitled, ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’ ”

Virginian Pilot Endorse Tim Kaine for U. S. Senate

I haven't hidden my belief that George Allen is unfit to be returned to the U. S. Senate.  I've known Allen since 1974, so I have a long range perspective both on his personality and his policies while Governor of Virginia and during his one term in the U. S. Senate before being defeated by Jim Webb six years ago.  Neither Virginia nor the nation as a whole need another term of George Allen in office at any level.  Thankfully, the Virginian Pilot recognizes this reality and has endorsed Tim Kaine (pictured at left) for U. S. Senate.  Among the reasons cited are Allen's own role in rubber stamping the George W. Bush policies that led the nation to a financial melt down in 2008 and the bloated deficit that now saddles the nation.  Here are highlights from the endorsement:

The candidate chosen to succeed Democratic Sen. Jim Webb will need to work closely with other senators and the president - whoever that may be. He must collaborate on solutions that protect the national interest without sacrificing Virginia's.

That leaves the following as the most instructive question voters can ask before casting a ballot on Nov. 6: Which candidate would work effectively in Congress with Republicans and Democrats, with President Barack Obama or with a President Mitt Romney?  Without a doubt, the answer is Tim Kaine.

Deficit reduction is his priority, and he has advocated a compromise that includes discretionary spending reductions and a return to pre-2001 tax rates for those making $500,000 or more a year. He supports a common-sense solution to permit the federal government to negotiate prices for prescription drugs covered by Medicare, as it does for those covered by Tricare.

He supports overhauling No Child Left Behind to promote excellence instead of proficiency, and he promises to push for more comprehensive job-training programs that help reintegrate returning military veterans into civilian society.

Kaine is willing and able, unlike his opponent, to discuss in detail his plans on those matters and others critical to people here and across the country.

Many of the fiscal challenges that marked Kaine's tenure as governor - including budget cuts and state employee layoffs - stemmed from irresponsible actions taken by lawmakers in Washington. Then-Sen. George Allen was caught up in all of it.  .  .  .  . 

Allen's record from his single six-year term in the Senate, starting in 2001, is plagued with the kinds of votes that are toxic to any fiscally responsible voter, as well as the candidate Allen now claims to be: authorization for unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, repeated increases in the federal debt ceiling, "yes" votes to raise his own pay, expansion of an unfunded Medicare drug benefit. The list goes on.

Allen has failed to offer meaningful assurances that he can be trusted not to slip into his old Washington ways if voters send him back to the Senate.  Near the outset of this campaign, Allen signed the Americans for Tax Reform pledge, recklessly promising not to raise taxes or any additional revenue if elected.  Politicians without real convictions pander to voters by signing this pledge.

It's no surprise, then, that Allen utterly fails to engage constituents with any level of specificity, or any credibility. He is a candidate who, after losing to Webb in 2006, went into the political wilderness shaken and emerged for this campaign without the swagger or confidence that once characterized his style. When asked substantive questions, Allen reflexively recites canned talking points.

In a debate this month, Allen cast a long-term energy plan - expanding oil and gas drilling offshore and on land, and increasing coal mining - as an immediate solution to the nation's dire fiscal situation and averting the cuts to defense spending set to kick in next year.  It was a response out of touch with reality and economics, and its incoherence was compounded by his oft-repeated declaration that one of his top priorities is forcing another contentious vote to fully repeal the Affordable Care Act.

These are unserious proposals acceptable only through the lens of politics as sport, which is Allen's specialty. Scorching opponents, freezing out dissent, serving a political "team" before fulfilling a duty to the public - those are the products of such an approach.

The only candidate in this race offering an effective, collaborative approach - and realistic solutions - is Tim Kaine.

Stimulus Plan Meets More GOP Resistance

As I have commented before, the GOP seems Hell bent on driving the nation into another Great Depression not being content with the damage done to date by the thankfully finished regime of the Chimperator. The GOP apparently learned nothing from the administration of Herbert Hoover which had a similar mindset - and disastrous results for the country. Rather than contribute anything positive or proposing constructive programs, the GOP seems focused solely on screwing the Democrats with no cares at all as to the damage their games may cause to the country. Once again, it is hard to believe that the GOP once actually had some positive ideas. In my opinion, the Democrats need to forge ahead without GOP support and when the programs prove effective hang the GOP obstructionist tactics around the necks of the GOP members of Congress. The nation wants Obama and the Democrats to deliver change and they need to do so. Here are some highlights from the Washington Post:

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Just days after taking office vowing to end the political era of "petty grievances," President Obama ran into mounting GOP opposition yesterday to an economic stimulus plan that he had hoped would receive broad bipartisan support. Republicans accused Democrats of abandoning the new president's pledge, ignoring his call for bipartisan comity and shutting them out of the process by writing the $850 billion legislation.

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The first drafts of the plan would result in more spending on favored Democratic agenda items, such as federal funding of the arts, they said, but would do little to stimulate the ailing economy.
The GOP's shrunken numbers, particularly in the Senate, will make it difficult for Republicans to stop the stimulus bill, but the growing GOP doubts mean that Obama's first major initiative could be passed on a largely party-line vote -- little different from the past 16 years of partisan sniping in the Clinton and Bush eras.

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As House panels considered the $850 billion legislation this week, no Republicans from the Appropriations or Ways and Means committees supported it. Pelosi said she would bring the bill to the full House by Wednesday, regardless of whether the Cantor group has met with Obama by then.

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Republicans hold 41 Senate seats, requiring total unity to block the stimulus plan by a filibuster. Democrats and Republicans have said that at least a few GOP senators will probably back the economic recovery plan because the financial crisis has become so grave. But some key Democrats are pushing to add pieces that would result in fewer Republican votes.

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Pelosi and Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Democratic leader in the Senate, support including changes to bankruptcy laws that would allow judges to modify loans on primary residences, which they say would help alleviate the housing crisis. Republicans and the banking industry have vehemently opposed this because it might cause mortgage interest rates to rise.
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Obama would not be the first president to promise a bipartisan tone and find a much different attitude on Capitol Hill. Democrats chafed under the iron-fist rule of Republicans for most of 1995 to 2007, during which the toughest tactics were deployed after George W. Bush took office promising to be a "uniter, not a divider."

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Some Democrats said the goal should be passing legislation that deals with the largest financial crisis in 70 years, with or without much Republican support. "If it's passed with 63 votes or 73 votes, history won't remember it," Durbin said.