-
Obama Offshore Oil Drilling Plan Nothing New
Tweet Share on Facebook March 31, 2010 Comment (18)By Peter Roff, the Thomas Jefferson Street blog
President Barack Obama is announced today that the United States is getting back into the offshore energy exploration business. But before everyone gets excited about it, there appears to be a lot less to Obama's announcement than meets the eye.
According to energy policy analyst James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners LLC, Obama's announcement is not only in line with expectations, it is the same announcement that everyone was expecting Interior Secretary Ken Salazar--who has not been friendly to the idea of energy exploration off the American coastline--to make when the president didn't need to moderate the radical environmental image his support for the "cap-and-trade" energy tax process created.
"In a macro sense, the president's announcements do not reflect new policy. Expanded leasing of offshore acreage proceeds naturally," Lucier says, "from the Congressional decision to end the offshore leasing moratorium in 2008." That decision, it is worth pointing out, was prompted by a spike in domestic energy costs that pushed the price of gasoline north of $4 per gallon. The ban on offshore energy exploration, which had been introduced in a frenzy of environmental activity decades earlier, had simply become too expensive to be allowed to remain in force, something even the Democrats recognized.
-
After Healthcare, an Easier Road Ahead for President Obama
Tweet Share on Facebook March 29, 2010 Comment (15)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Rather than a victory lap on healthcare, the White House is signaling that President Barack Obama will immediately plunge back into they fray. A surprise trip a la George W. Bush to Afghanistan to visit the troops and an arms reduction agreement having burnished his national security credentials, he is now ready, his closest advisers say, to turn his attention to the rest of his domestic policy agenda.
"An emboldened President Barack Obama will take a stronger hand with Congress in coming weeks, planning to push lawmakers to pass new regulations for Wall Street by September, the second anniversary of the meltdown," veteran Washington reporter Mike Allen wrote Sunday in Politico.
"The spring offensive, if successful, would allow Obama to claim concrete progress on all of his domestic priorities, despite a 'lost year' between the passage of a stimulus package in February 2009 and the signing of health reform last week," Allen wrote--and he's right.
-
Statistics Show Stimulus Package Results Have Gone From Bad to Worse
Tweet Share on Facebook March 27, 2010 Comment (22)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
All the attention being paid to the healthcare debate has sort of pushed the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act--also known as the stimulus--off the front page.
It's a shame really, because the latest employment figures--real unemployment figures--show it is still failing to deliver as promised. According to a table put together last December by the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, payroll employment declined everywhere except for North Dakota and the District of Columbia in the nine months since the stimulus had been signed into law.
As I wrote at the time, "It is not just that the $789 billion package has not had the effect the White House promised it would; it's that it may actually have been counterproductive, actually lengthening the recession by effectively taking money out of the private economy, where it could have been used to create jobs and for investment purposes."
-
Boehner to GOP: Focus on Jobs, Even When Talking About Healthcare
Tweet Share on Facebook March 26, 2010 Comment (12)By Peter Roff , Thomas Jefferson Street blog
House Minority Leader John Boehner is urging his Republican colleagues to keep their focus on the need to create jobs--even as they talk about the just-passed healthcare law while meeting with constituents over the Easter break. In a memo, Boehner--who says President Barack Obama "abandoned our founding principle that government governs best when it governs closest to the people"--outlines a program for job creation that he says members of the GOP should talk up as they attempt to establish a meaningful contrast with the Democratic majority in Congress.
If they regain the majority as the result of the next election, Boehner says, the Republicans will fight to:
-
Win Healthcare Fight With Elections, Not Threats and Violence
Tweet Share on Facebook March 25, 2010 Comment (30)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is warning his Democratic colleagues that their vote in favor of healthcare reform might make them targets of violent protest when they go home for the Easter break.
Calling on the Republicans to denounce violence as a means of protest against the bill, Hoyer told reporters, “I would hope that we would join together jointly and make it very clear that none of us condone this kind of activity.”
According to Politico, the FBI, the Capitol Police, and the Office of the House Sergeant at Arms have all briefed members about violent incidents that have already occurred, including bricks that were thrown through the windows of the district office of New York Democrat Louise Slaughter and several of members who backed the Obamacare bill that is now law.
Joining him in agreement is House Minority Leader John Boehner, who said separately, “I know many Americans are angry over this healthcare bill, and that Washington Democrats just aren’t listening,” the Ohio Republican said. “But, as I’ve said, violence and threats are unacceptable. That’s not the American way. We need to take that anger and channel it into positive change. Call your congressman, go out and register people to vote, go volunteer on a political campaign, make your voice heard--but let’s do it the right way.”
-
The Next Healthcare Reform Fight: Make the Abortion Executive Order Law
Tweet Share on Facebook March 24, 2010 Comment (12)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Despite the fact that the new nationalized healthcare law is less than a week old, groups on both sides of the issue are already plotting how to expand or curtail its provisions.
One issue that remains especially difficult to resolve is the way the new law deals with the use of federal funds to pay for abortions and abortion-related services. For many months, the Democrats, led by the White House, have maintained that the language included in the Senate version of the bill, which ultimately became the law, should have been sufficient to satisfy any concerns the anti-abortion-rights community might have had. Opponents of federally funded abortion, however, were unconvinced, demanding that tougher language be inserted into the bill before the House passed it or, failing that, into the package of reconciliation fixes currently being debated.
Under a compromise brokered by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, who forced the insertion of tougher--some called them "ironclad"--restrictions into the version of the healthcare bill that passed the House last November, the anti-abortion-rights holdouts agreed to vote for the version of the bill that eventually became law in exchange for a presidential executive order dealing with abortion funding in the new healthcare system.
-
Will Stupak’s Healthcare Deal Be Worth Its Socialist Price?
Tweet Share on Facebook March 22, 2010 Comment (32)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
After a yearlong, rancorous debate--and over the objections of the American people--the House of Representatives voted to establish a socialized healthcare system in the United States, something that has been a dream of progressives and Democrats for at least the last 60 years.
The new program, which by most measures is the largest single new entitlement program to be enacted since the New Deal, is a giant leap down the road toward making the United States a European-style social democracy in which the government, organized labor, and big business work together to reach welfare state objectives at the expense of economic growth and considerable personal liberty in the marketplace.
-
Democrats: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell on Healthcare Reform
Tweet Share on Facebook March 18, 2010 Comment (33)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
When the Democrats promised earlier this year to make changes to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, few people believed they were talking about themselves. Yet today, the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives applied a version of that very policy to itself--at least as far as healthcare is concerned. By a vote of 222 to 203, the House voted to block a GOP resolution that would force a stand-alone, up-or-down vote on the healthcare bill that passed the Senate last Christmas. As a result, the Democrats can go ahead with their plans to use parliamentary gamesmanship to get the bill to the president's desk without members having to have voted on it directly.
-
Problems With the CBO Healthcare Reform Scoring
Tweet Share on Facebook March 18, 2010 Comment (32)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
There are still a few hurdles to be overcome before the Democrats can declare victory in the battle over the national healthcare bill. Most of the reliable vote counts circulating on Capitol Hill show Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a few votes short of what she needs to win--and that about 20 Democrats are still on the fence.
The release today of a preliminary estimate of the direct spending and revenue effects of "an amendment in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 4872, the Reconciliation Act of 2010" by the Congressional Budget Office shows the healthcare proposal will produce a net reduction in the federal deficit--which may help satisfy the concerns of the few remaining holdouts who cite the potential cost of the bill as their principal concern. But even that is sketchy.
-
The Perils of Pelosi's 'Deem and Pass' Healthcare Strategy
Tweet Share on Facebook March 17, 2010 Comment (15)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
After almost 18 months of phony deadlines, it appears the congressional debate over healthcare may finally be coming to an end. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her allies have spent much of the week trying to win the votes they need in order to get the bill out of the House and to President Barack Obama's desk. Though the various whip counts vary, most observers believe that Pelosi is still anywhere from five to a couple of dozen votes short for what she wants to do, which is to slip the bill through the House without calling it up for a recorded vote.
To understand what is going on requires some knowledge of how things work in the House, something Pelosi and her allies are no doubt counting on to disguise what really is going on.
