The only one with standing to sue Obama would be Congress. Both chambers of Congress would have to issue a joint resolution in order to do that, and a Democratic
About Debt Ceiling
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Also keep in mind that even should taxes be raised in exchange for cutting Social Security and Medicare, those new taxes could be subject to tax cuts in future Congresses and Social Security and Medicare will be destroyed.
The ratio, by the way, of what Obama's negotiatin
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I've shared with you Jeffrey Rosen's opinion, and now here's Jonathan Turley's:
Fourteenth Amendment states:
The argument goes that Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment declares:
“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrecti on or rebellion, shall not be questioned . But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrecti on or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipati on of any slave; but all such debts, obligation s and claims shall be held illegal and void.”
The argument goes that, by not lifting the debt limit, Congress is “questioning” “the validity of the public debt of the United States.” Under this logic, advocates are encouragin g President Obama to simply pay the debts in accordance with the Constituti on. That would be an extreme step that would add a constituti onal crisis to an economic crisis.
The “authorized by law” clause could present an interestin g debate since the debt ceiling is part of a federal statute — though conversely so is the obligation to pay things like social security.
The language is certainly written in absolute terms but it is not likely that a court would rule that it makes a failure to lift the debt ceiling unconstitutional. Congress can argue that it fully intends to pay its debts, but that there is a political dispute over how and when. They can argue that they were not challengin g the “validity” of the debt but the priority in the payment. The United States will still be fully liable for the debt and the interest.
Of course, as with the Libyan War, the Administration could trigger the constituti onal fight on the belief that no one will be able to get standing to challenge its payment of the debt.
Even the most pro-choice of Democrats in Congress, alleged stalwarts who've spent entire careers, decades in public office, have failed miserably to protect women's rights and have let it get to this point. One example would be Barbara Boxer.
In 2006, Democratic senators and the Democratic machine publicly supported Democratic candidate NedLamont who was running for senator in Connecticu
During the Bush-Chene
In the 2010 midterm campaign, I asked rhetorical
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Democats have been blocking EVERY teabagging anti a.bor.tion bill and whatever they've put forward, haven't they?==========
And when it comes to ending Bush's tax cuts, read this thread for the history.
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I think you're misinforme
The week before and the week after the healthcare bill passed in the Senate was the one and only time a public option had any chance of happening until another generation passes.
A group of senators had mobilized behind it since the bill had to be passed through reconcilia
Obama nixxed it.
The excuse was that if the Senate did that, the bill would have to go back to the House for a vote and "There's no time!"
After the (allegedly
Obama's not only not for any kind of universal public health care, he'll do everything within his power to prevent it as long as he's in the White House. Because that was the deal that he made.
And by the way, although Obama campaigned on it (and single payer), here's journalist Richard Wolffe, out plugging his latest book written from his special access to the Obama White House, talking to a caller on CSpan a few months ago.
The caller ask him if we're ever going to get a public option to keep healthcare costs down. Wolffe made it clear that Obama and the DLC-contro
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Prof. ROSEN: Exactly so.
BLOCK: All of this, do you think, just a lot of grist for constitutional scholars, 14th Amendment scholars in particular , and no real political reality?
Prof. ROSEN: It could have political consequences. We shouldn't for a moment dismiss the possibilit y that serious constituti onal arguments about clauses that haven't thought of for a long time can transform political debates. In Bush v. Gore, in the healthcare argument, these are all cases where the constituti onal arguments were made up on the fly. But that doesn't mean that they're not plausible.
The truth is that the situation today is similar, although not identical to the one that confronted the nation right after the Civil War. And the arguments on both sides are strong, plausible and deserved to be debated in the public arena.
Jeffrey Rosen, professor of law at the George Washington University on NPR:
BLOCK: We're talking about Section Four of the 14th Amendment, the debt clause, adopted in 1868 - so the ReconstrucKEEP READINGtion period after the Civil War. What was the intent? What was this clause designed to do?
Prof. ROSEN: So this is a time when Southern congressmen are coming back into the Union. Their majorities are augmented because of the freed slaves, and they are interested in forcing Congress to repudiate the Union debt and to pay off the Confederat e debt. And they also want to give the nation a big bill for what they claimed was the value of the slaves that had been freed by the Emancipati on Proclamati on in the 13th Amendment.
So the existing Republican majority was determined that they not be able to do this, and they passed Section Four in the 14th Amendment to prohibit a temporary political majority from repudiating the Union debt obligation s and assuming other obligation s.
BLOCK: So at the time that this was approved back in 1868, repudiation referred to what exactly?
Prof. ROSEN: After the Civil War, repudiation would've been a formal act by Congress saying: We are not going to pay the Union debt. That's not what's going on here. The big debate now is what a default or a threat to default be the equivalent of repudiatio n? Strict constructi onist say: No. Unless Congress formally says we are ever going to pay the debt, then this constituti onal provision is not triggered.
The Democrats who support this constitutional argument say in effect, if you threaten not to pay obligation s, that's the functional equivalent of a default, and therefore, the Constituti on is implicated .
BLOCK: Has there been case law on this, Jeffrey, this question - this language in the 14th Amendment that the validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned?
Prof. ROSEN: There's just one Supreme Court case that seems to cast light on this question. It was called Perry versus United States. It was decided in 1935. And in that case, the Supreme Court seem to argue that this debt clause should be interpreted broadly rather than narrowly. And supporters are seizing on that language to say we should not construe the debt clause strictly, but instead, construe it expansivel y.
BLOCK: Now, that would support their argument that you could apply it in this case.
Obama and Democrats fight when they want to, when it comes to an issue or keeping an office that they want. When Democrats needed to extend unemployme
The same could have been done with the DISCLOSE Act (forcing a filibuster
Obama's plenty tough when it comes to standing up to the Democratic base, and Kucinich and Howard Dean -- Everyone except Republican
Just to show you where Obama's and the DLC's real heart lies, there are so many things he and the DLC/DNC could have done, could be doing, to get real Democratic legislatio
Obama and the DNC could have cut off support to any Blue Dogs, cut money, cut committee assignment
There is plenty that a President and a Speaker of the House and a Senate Majority Leader can do to pressure representa
There is nothing that the Blue Dogs are doing that Obama and the DLC doesn't want them to do.
Before the midterms of 2010, I asked, facetiousl
Not one of Obama's 'most ardent fans' replied.
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Obama is proposing to cut Social Security:
Two weeks ago, that first assumption proved true: Democrats proposed a few hundred billion in new tax revenues (a small fraction of the trillions of dollars in spending cuts RepublicanAlready on the table are more than $1 trillion in discretions are demanding) so GOP principals threw up their hands and abandoned the discussion s. But the second assumption isn't built on bedrock. And in recent weeks, congressio nal aides, strategist s, and advocates have been floating, or warning of, a stealth change to the Social Security benefit structure that has quietly been placed on the negotiatin g table.
The proposal wouldn't just impact Social Security benefits. It would also shave off yearly increases in federal pension payouts, and result in somewhat higher tax revenues. But the ratio would be skewed toward benefit cuts by a factor of about 2-to-1 and would represent a financial hit to even the poorest retirees unless they were exempted.
The idea is to change the way Cost of Living Adjustments (COLAs) are calculated across the federal government . Currently, the COLAs for tax brackets, pensions, and Social Security are tied to different measures of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Because spending habits change when living costs increase, some experts think these measures are too generous, and want to change all of the COLAs to a different, smaller measure of inflation: the so-called "chained-C PI."
On the tax side, this would likely draw more revenue: Tax brackets would rise more slowly than incomes, so people would get kicked into higher brackets more quickly and, voila, more income subject to taxation.
But on the benefits side, this means money out of people's pockets, even current retirees and pensioners. Responding to a letter of concern from House Democrats' top Social Security guy the program's chief actuary explained that moving to "chained-C PI" would constitute an immediate 0.3 percent benefit cut. That may sound small, but the effects would compound, and "[a]dditio nal annual COLAs thereafter would accumulate to larger total reductions in expected scheduled benefit levels of about 3.7 percent, 6.5 percent, and 9.2 percent for retirees at ages 75, 85, and 95, respective ly."
14th Amendment solution is the only way out of this.
Obama wants a deal with Republican
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What you're not understand
Short-chan
About Warren Buffett
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You can't print money; the government can.
If you could, if your children, if your parents and grandparen
About Warren Buffett
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When I first began writing about politics in late 2005, the standard liberal blogosphere critique -- one I naively believed back then -- was that Democrats were capitulati ng so continuous ly to the Bush agenda because they "lacked spine" and were inept political strategist s: i.e., they found those policies so very offensive but were simply unwilling or unable to resist them. It became apparent to me that this was little more than a self-sooth ing conceit: Democrats continuous ly voted for Bush policies because they were either indifferen t to their enactment or actively supported them, and were owned and controlled by the same factions as the GOP. Now, Democratic commentato rs -- mostly the President' s most hardened loyalists -- continue to invoke this "he's-weak -and-inept " excuse for Obama, but the evidence is far too abundant to sustain it any longer. As Paul Krugman -- long more clear-eyed than most progressiv es about Obama -- explained this week:
Since Obama keeps talking nonsense about economics, at what point do we stop giving him credit for actually knowing better? Maybe at some point we have to accept that he believes what he’s saying. . . . , here’s an unprofessional speculatio n: maybe it's personal. Maybe the president just doesn’t like the kind of people who tell him counterint uitive things, who say that the government is not like a family, that it’s not right for the government to tighten its belt when Americans are tightening theirs, that unemployme nt is not caused by lack of the right skills. Certainly just about all the people who might have tried to make that argument have left the administra tion or are leaving soon. And what's left, I’m afraid, are the Very Serious People. It looks as if those are the people the president feels comfortabl e with. And that, of course, is a tragedy.
Obama Pushing For Cuts To Social Security, Medicare
How many people who voted for Obama in 2008 would have expected a headline like this a short two-and-a-
Throughout 2008, it was hard to shake the feeling that this was a politician whose legacy could still go either way. There were an awful lot of troubling signs on the horizon in Obama’s campaign, not the least of which being the enthusiastKEEP READINGic support he was receiving from Wall Street.
Obama in part ran a very slightly economically populist campaign, but the tens of millions pouring into his campaign coffers from the very rich (and specifical ly from hedge funds) told all of us that we probably shouldn’t expect those promises to come off. For a piece I wrote that summer, I asked people in Washington why Wall Street would be throwing money at a guy who was out there on the stump pledging to reach into their pockets:
"Sadly, the answer to that question increasingly appears to be that Obama is, well, full of shit. . . . These populist pledges sound good, but many business moguls appear to be betting that the tax policies, like Obama himself, are only that: something that sounds good. 'I think we don't want to make too much of his promises on taxes,' says Robert Pollin, professor of economics at the University of Massachuse tts. 'Not all of these things will happen.' Noting the overwhelmi ng amount of Wall Street money pouring into Obama's campaign, even elitist fuckwad David Brooks was recently moved to write, "Once the Republican s are vanquished , I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that capital-ga ins tax hike."
Disgustingly, Brooks turned out to be right, and the narrative of the Obama presidency did end up turning sour, on that front anyway.
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and all Democrats in leadership positions took tools off the table for fighting Bush-Chene
They said, "You have to give us more Democrats -- 60 in the Senate".
In 2008, we did. We gave them 60 for the Democratic Caucus. And, we gave them the White House.
Obama came into office with the wind at his back. More people voted for him, a black man in good old r@c!st America, than ever voted for any other presidenti
And no sooner did Obama get elected than he slammed the brakes on the momentum of his election & a filibuster
Obama's political team and machine also disbanded the grass roots groups across the nation -- Everything was to flow through his operation. If you knew anything about politics, you'd know that this is a ded giveaway that the last thing these politician
Obama is not a man working on behalf of the People -- He's a corporate tool, just like Republican
And worst of all, we're stuck with marshmallo
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Find an address and zip code in Utah on Google maps, and call again.
About 112th Congress
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Obama sidesteppe
You're not seriously holding out hope that Obama will deep-six "bipartisa
You do know that the cuts to programs that the poor and the middle class rely on, that he's already agreed to, are in the neighborho
About Lindsey Graham
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The "thinning of the herd" is what's happening. Obama was put into power to try to ease the panic, soften the blows, keep the People from marching on state and federal capitols (and into gated communitie
Democrats' current reason for failing to achieve the People's business (because "Democrats are nicer, not as ruthless, not criminal" etc.) is custom-tai
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Not that I haven't, but Obama knows that; he doesn't care.
His 'most ardent supporters
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Obama and Democrats will never invoke the 14th Amendment solution without Democratic voters, specifical
D & R poIitician
Think of them as working on the same side, as tag relay teams (or like siblings competing for parental approval). 'Good cop/bad cop'. The annual company picnic, the manufactur
Once in power, Democrats consolidat
Whenever the People get wise to the shenanigan
Democrats' current reason for failing to achieve the People's business (because "Democrats are nicer, not as ruthless, not criminal" etc.) is custom-tai
This is all in the hands of Obama's 'most ardent supporters
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How about ending Bush's tax cuts?
No, Obama took that off the table.
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How about letting the government negotiate for lower drug costs?
How about opening up Medicare to all?
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Obama and the DLC worked their butts off to PREVENT more progressiv
Blue Dog Blanche Lincoln over progressiv
Republican
Republican
Republican
By the way, by getting involved in the election at the primaries' stage, Obama became the first sitting president in US history to interfere with the citizens' very limited rights in this democratic republic to select who they will trust to make laws to which they consent to be governed.
Citizens have little enough of a Constituti
Obama and the DNC could have cut off support to any Blue Dogs, cut money, cut committee assignment
This is exactly the bunch that Obama and the puppet-mas
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The other side is THE SAME.
For those who must continue to delude themselves into believing Obama's a good guy who never would have started those wars or gotten us into this financial mess, who has only the best of intentions (I don't share that opinion anymore), but got a bad deal, then think of all this as a business plan where the Corporate Masters of the Universe have charted out their plans years in advance (governmen
And after 8 years of BushCheney the American people aren't going to go for another team like that. They're going to want HOPE & CHANGE, with a persona they can believe in and trust. BarackObam
The truth is that Obama is no better than BushCheney
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Because they don't vote.
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If Republican
Shorter version: Unless Obama invokes the 14th Amendment solution, unless he tells Republican
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Do you have a problem with this?:
Social Security Benefits Cuts Are in the Mix in Debt Ceiling Negotiations:
Stealth Social Security benefits cuts are potentially part of the debt ceiling deal currently being negotiated by President Obama and the Congressio nal Republican leadership , per Politico:
Already on the table are more than $1 trillion in discretionary 10-year spending cuts and hundreds of billions more in changes affecting farm subsidies, college aid and retirement benefits for federal workers. Additional savings from health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid are in the offing, as well as a potential $300 billion change in the government ’s inflation calculator affecting Social Security benefits and some revenues.
Changing the inflation calculation for Social Security benefits from CPI to chained CPI is a benefit cut by stealth. Using the low inflation number would result in slightly smaller Social Security benefits every year. While the cuts would take place in small yearly increments , the cumulative effect would be that over a seniors lifetime they would get tens of thousands less from Social Security (PDF ).
“President Obama stepped up pressure on Congressional Republican s on Tuesday to agree to a broad deficit-cu tting deal, pledging to put popular entitlemen t programs like Medicare on the table in return for Republican acquiescen ce to some higher taxes."
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., on Tuesday called for "honest" debate over the debt ceiling, and argued that lawmakers should heed to the recommendations of a bipartisan deficit commission that suggested trillions of dollars in reductions by leaving "everythin g on the table."
Durbin, in a Tuesday interview with CBS News' Erica Hill on "The Early Show," argued that "each side has to give" - be it Democrats or Republicans.
"We've got to be honest, whether it's entitlements or taxes, let's be honest," Durbin said.
The word around town is that in the negotiatio
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When politician
You don't see politician
To politician
You can choose to believe what you will about Democratic politician
You can choose to think of Obama and his intentions in whatever way makes you happy. What you can't do is explain how any of what Obama's done these past two years has been in the People's and not the Corporatio
What's gotten lost in the news cycles these past months is Obama's new NAFTA-like treaties that means more Americans' jobs will be outsourced overseas. And then there's Obama's Cat Food Commission (and its plan for gutting Social Security and Medicare), along with the renewed push on the Dream Act, which means a flood of immigrants working for slave wages.
We The People are being transforme
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The most BS argument to date: "The cuts and the pain must be shared by all".
It presumes that the poor and the middle classes haven't born the brunt of what Republican
It presumes that the pain of losing a few million dollars when you have hundreds of millions, even billions, is equivalent to the pain of not knowing where your next meal is coming from, or losing the roof over your head and sleeping in your car or on the street. It presumes that the rich have sacrificed anything at all, when, in fact, they're making money hand-over-
What's happened to the American people was the greatest heist in the history of the world (2007, the economic meltdown) ON TOP OF a longer term and steady rip-off of Americans' self-inves
Where are the investigat
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What's off the table? The 14th Amendment solution.
Treasury Officials Weighing Options To Avoid Default:
They [Treasury officials] have discussed, but the White House has dismissed, the option that Treasury could rely on the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to go ahead with bill payments even in the absence of a debt limit increase.
For months, the standard narrative among progressiv
President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reachi ng debt-reduc tion plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue. . . . As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significan t reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal. The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.
50% of this country pays zero federal income tax.
New Rules. If you don't pay a penny, you don't vote.
At a hearing last month, Senator Charles Grassley said, "According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 49 percent of households are paying 100 percent of taxes coming in to the federal governmentThe Center on Budget and Policy Priorities." At the same hearing, Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds asserted, "Poor people don't pay taxes in this country." Last April, referring to a Tax Policy Center estimate of households with no federal income tax liability in 2009, Fox Business host Stuart Varney said on Fox and Friends, "Yes, 47 percent of households pay not a single dime in taxes."
"We haven't had a budget in two years. We haven't had an appropriations bill in two years." These budget discussion s need to get out of committee and into the light so that the American people can see what utter nonsense is going on behind closed doors. It'll force the Republican s to explain to the American people why they want to dismantle their retirement safety nets, protect their corporate donors and leave the burden of all of this to the middle class. Democrats will have to explain the extension of the Tax Cuts for the Wealthy.
Get Social Security and Medicare OFF THE TABLE!
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Treasury Officials Weighing Options To Avoid Default:
They [Treasury officials] have discussed, but the White House has dismissed, the option that Treasury could rely on the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to go ahead with bill payments even in the absence of a debt limit increase.
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