Posts tagged Rand Paul

One Small Step for Immigrants

8
4 days ago
by dcpetterson in
Can Gold Come From Pieces of Eight?

Can Gold Come From Pieces of Eight?

Some poten­tially good news came out of Wash­ing­ton yes­ter­day. The U.S. Sen­ate voted 82–15 to allow debate on the immi­gra­tion reform bill from the “Gang of Eight”. All fif­teen “no” votes were Repub­li­cans. Though this is cer­tainly an impor­tant vote, it doesn’t guar­an­tee pas­sage of the final bill, and most cer­tainly doesn’t say any­thing about the bill’s pos­si­bil­i­ties in the House.

Not all votes in favor of allow­ing debate will nec­es­sar­ily trans­late into votes in favor of the bill. Sen­ate Minor­ity Leader Mitch McConnell (R-​​KY) insisted the bill as it is con­tains “seri­ous flaws” and wants changes in the areas of bor­der secu­rity, taxes, and gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits. It already denies ben­e­fits to non-​​citizens, col­lects taxes from them, and vastly strengths bor­der secu­rity, but he wants more:

For instance, McConnell said he wasn’t sat­is­fied with just the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity cer­ti­fy­ing that the U.S.-Mexico bor­der was secure – a key require­ment in the 13-​​year path­way to cit­i­zen­ship for cur­rent undoc­u­mented immigrants.

(more…)

This Grand Old Project

35
2 months ago
by Monotreme in
Shooting the messenger.

Shoot­ing the messenger.

In Decem­ber, Repub­li­can Party Chair Reince “and repeat” Priebus embarked on a reëx­am­i­na­tion of the party’s future. He com­mis­sioned an “autopsy” of the party’s elec­toral failings.

The report is for­mally called the Growth and Oppor­tu­nity Project.

(Get it…GOP! Pretty spiffy mar­ket­ing twist there, don’t you think? We hired the same guy who named New Coke and Orca.)

Accord­ing to Politico’s Jonathan Mar­tin and Mag­gie Haber­man, the report has trig­gered the oft-​​avoided civil war the Repub­li­can Party has been fear­ing. (more…)

Return Address

333
4 months ago
by Michael Weiss in

Tonight, Pres­i­dent Obama returns to give the first State of the Union Address of his sec­ond term.

The President’s annual State of the Union address has evolved over time. As we’ve noted before on these pages, the Con­sti­tu­tional man­date only spec­i­fies that the Pres­i­dent must, accord­ing to Arti­cle II, Sec­tion 3:

… from time to time give to the Con­gress Infor­ma­tion on the State of the Union, and rec­om­mend to their Con­sid­er­a­tion such Mea­sures as he shall judge nec­es­sary and expedient …

That is, on occa­sion, he must tell Con­gress how things are going, and what he wants them to pass as leg­is­la­tion. There’s no require­ment of a speech, no require­ment of it being annual, and no require­ment of it being any par­tic­u­lar time of year.

But tra­di­tions form, and the live, tele­vised annual speech before Con­gress has become the stan­dard. Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton turned them into thereto­fore unseen spec­ta­cle, in a man­ner he reprised at last year’s Demo­c­ra­tic National Convention.

And, along the way, the oppo­si­tion party’s responses to the State of the Union Addresses became part of the tra­di­tion as well. Until recently, that meant a sin­gle oppo­si­tion speech. Begin­ning in 2011, though, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Michele Bach­mann (R-​​Stillwater, MN) gave the first Tea Party response, dis­tinct from that of the Repub­li­can Party.  (more…)

That’s What She Said

30
4 months ago
by Monotreme in
Clinton shows Johnson the back of her hand.

Clin­ton shows John­son the back of her hand.

Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton tes­ti­fied today before com­mit­tees of both houses of Con­gress. Video of the Sen­ate and the House hear­ings (over 5 1⁄2 hours in all) are avail­able from CSPAN.

In the morn­ing, she tes­ti­fied before the Sen­ate For­eign Rela­tions Com­mit­tee. The for­mer junior Sen­a­tor from New York would nor­mally have been treated def­er­en­tially by mem­bers of the cham­ber where she served, but two Sen­a­tors who did not serve with her — Ron John­son (R-​​WI) and Rand Paul (R-​​KY) — saw no need for def­er­ence or even respect. John­son went for inap­pro­pri­ately rude, while Paul adopted a scold­ing tone. Both got the back of Clinton’s hand, but with dif­fer­ent amounts of force applied to the ver­bal blows.

We’ve already dis­cussed the Repub­li­can and FOX News alle­ga­tions (not that there is a sliver of day­light between the two) that Clin­ton has failed to tes­tify on Beng­hazi, even though there have been more than 30 State Depart­ment brief­ings on Beng­hazi before Con­gress, includ­ing a closed-​​door ses­sion on Sep­tem­ber 20 by Sec­re­tary Clin­ton her­self. (more…)

Republican Convention: Day 3

362
9 months ago
by dcpetterson in

In an effort to mask their fis­cal irre­spon­si­bil­ity (or per­haps to high­light it), the Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion has, not one, but two “debt clocks” on dis­play. One of them shows the cur­rent national debt, tick­ing ever upward. The other shows the amount of debt incurred since the time the Con­ven­tion was first gavelled to order on Mon­day afternoon.

Of course, nei­ther of these “clocks” are accu­rate (nor are they “clocks”, since they don’t tell time). They don’t show the actual expen­di­ture of dol­lars (i.e., when some agency of the fed­eral gov­ern­ment cuts a check, when the Pen­ta­gon awards a con­tract, when oil com­pa­nies get a kick­back, none of this causes these “clocks” to tick up). They only show a sort of aver­age per-​​second amount cal­cu­lated by tak­ing the year’s pro­jected deficit and divid­ing it by some­thing like 31,536,000 (the num­ber of sec­onds in a 365-​​day year; but this is a leap year, so per­haps they used 31,622,400).

High­light­ing the deficit and the debt is, one might think, a dan­ger­ous thing for Repub­li­cans to do, since the debt is almost entirely due to the actions of Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions. (more…)

The Ideology Gamble

109
1 year ago
by Michael Weiss in

Los­ing with Chris­tine seems like a funny way of winning.

Last year, peo­ple all over the polit­i­cal uni­verse were call­ing Repub­li­cans crazy for reject­ing the more mod­er­ate Mike Cas­tle, Sue Low­den, and Jane Nor­ton for the more extreme Chris­tine O’Donnell, Shar­ron Angle, and Ken Buck. After all, those three Sen­ate seats would have been enough to shift the major­ity from the Democ­rats to the Republicans.

The response from many in the Tea Party wing of the Repub­li­can Party is that it’s bet­ter to lose with a “real” con­ser­v­a­tive than to win with a RINO. Is that posi­tion really all that crazy? It’s worth inves­ti­gat­ing, given that this year’s lead­ing Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, other than Mitt Rom­ney, have all been work­ing dili­gently to find just how far off the right end of the polit­i­cal spec­trum they can go. (more…)

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