The ongoing fight over $50 billion in economic relief to states to allow them to avoid teacher layoffs and to pay for Medicaid took a surprising twist yesterday. House Appropriations Chair David Obey said he would stall a supplemental bill to fund the war in Afghanistan (a bill which has already passed the Senate) until the issue over grants to states is resolved
"I want to wait until the extenders bill is resolved," Obey told POLITICO of the separate war funding measure. "All I can do is sit and wait until reality strikes home, and then maybe we'll get somewhere."
The "tax extenders" bill to which Obey refers is a $113 economic relief bill that passed the House on May 28th. The Senate version of that bill, which has not yet passed, has expanded to $140 billion. This is mainly due to the addition of a $24 billion grant to states to fund Medicaid. Along with $55 billion in other domestic spending, that $24 billion grant was stripped out of the House bill in a self-asphyxiating "victory" by the Blue Dogs.
Obey is waiting to see the fate of that $24 billion before moving ahead on the war funding bill. This is both to put pressure on the White House to assist in the passage of the $24 billion, and also because Obey would add the $24 billion to the war funding bill in the event that it was stripped from the "tax extenders" bill in the Senate.
Obey is also looking to add $10 billion in grants to states to help avert teacher layoffs, down from an earlier goal of a $23 billion grant. Further, the $10 billion grant will not be new spending, but instead redirected stimulus spending. That move is also probably intended to put pressure on the administration to help pass these bills with the additional spending attached.
Overall, Obey is clearly willing to play more hardball with the administration now than he was in the past. This is perhaps because Obey is retiring, and thus he has nothing to lose in defense of more robust stimulus spending. No matter the cause, it is a welcome development. Thank you, Chairman Obey.
In what has to be the nail in the coffin for any form of second stimulus, House Appropriations chair David Obey is now looking to pay for a grant to state and local government prevent to teacher layoffs by taking money appropriated for other tasks in the original stimulus. The size of the grant has also been reduced from $23 billion to $10 billion:
Crossing a line they had hoped to avoid, Democrats are actively discussing cuts from White House priorities in last year's Recovery Act in order to come up with $10 billion to avert threatened layoffs of public school teachers next fall.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.) outlined the options in a memo to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday, and while no details were released, President Barack Obama's long-term investment agenda would almost certainly be affected.(...)
At the same time, he has also scaled back his appetites. For example, his draft bill last month included $23 billion to help state and local education boards cope with budget cuts driven by the economic downturn. That has now been cut in half to about $10 billion.
Obey has been a stimulus champion from the start of this process, so his turn away from new appropriations to re-directing appropriations is significant. It also signals pretty much the complete victory of the Blue Dogs, even if that "victory" is a form of self-asphyxiation.
The last remaining shred of second stimulus that might get passed would the the economic relief bill (variously called the tax extenders and unemployment extension bill). The version that passed the house cost $113 billion, while the version currently being considered by the Senate is larger, at $140 billion (see here for details). Not too long ago, something in the neighborhood of $250 billion was a possibility, but once again conservatives seeem to have decided that wars are free, but health care for the poor, the unemployed, and the elderly is the greatest threat the nation faces.
Congressman David Obey
2314 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515-4907
(202) 225-3365
Dear Congressman Obey,
In recent years you've expressed your opposition to war spending. I'd like to encourage you to cap off your congressional career by actually refusing to provide the funding for the current escalation in Afghanistan, and by simultaneously introducing a bill to spend $33 billion on green energy jobs, including for former soldiers.
Congressman David Obey (D., Wis.) is the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He's in charge of spending our money. For years he spent it on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without any resistance. Until last October, Obey maintained that spending hundreds of billions of our dollars on wars was something he just had no choice about.
Three years ago, 180,000 people watched this Youtube video, which was also shown on tv news shows, of Obey screaming at a military mother and denouncing "idiot liberals" for suggesting that Congress use the power of the purse to end wars. Liberals debated other liberals on the question of whether we really were idiots. Now Obey has taken several steps in the direction of joining us.
Congressman David Obey (D., Wis.) is the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He's in charge of spending our money. And until this week, he has always maintained that spending hundreds of billions of our dollars on wars was something he just had no choice about. Two years ago, 183,000 people watched this Youtube video, which was also shown on tv news shows, of Obey screaming at a military mother and denouncing "idiot liberals" for suggesting that Congress use the power of the purse to end wars. Liberals debated other liberals on the question of whether we really were idiots. Now Obey has taken a step in the direction of joining us.
For most Democrats, election night of 2006 was a happy experience. You saw your candidate win, you saw Democrats take over the reigns of power, and you were proud of the work you did to make this happen. I spent election night in Connecticut, with Tim Tagaris, David Sirota, and the rest of the Lamont crew hoping that the early returns which showed us getting crushed were statistic anomalies. They weren't. We were crushed. And if you read my analysis of the Lamont race throughout 2006, I spent time making the argument that the fight was really between two political forces - the new machine driven by internet progressive whites, African-American progressives, and labor dissidents, and the old machine of Beltway lobbyists, Republican and Democratic elites, Broderite media creatures, 'liberal' single issue groups and old labor leaders. And of course, Lamont lost. Now you could make the argument that Lamont was a flawed candidate, but there is no such thing as a perfect candidate. We just couldn't persuade enough voters that Lieberman did not deserve the job of Senator from Connecticut.
This was not a rational choice, but a choice borne of insufficient information and organizing. I remember spending time with one woman, a strong antiwar liberal who was volunteering at the polls for Lieberman. I offered her some cake, and she demurred, citing diabetes. And then she said 'Besides, I have donuts in the car'. That fundamental unwillingness to look yourself in the race and recognize your own error, as she was unwilling to do (and as I was unwilling to do in 2002 when I supported the war in Iraq), strikes me as an apt metaphor for where we are now.
So while others might have been happy about the Democratic takeover, and while I was really jazzed when Speaker Pelosi became the first woman Speaker of the House, I did not feel a sense of victory that night. I felt angry and alienated, bitter about the betrayal that was coming. I had been through the draft Clark movement, and there was a similar moment the night he declared for President on October 19th. The crowd around me was happy and jubilant, celebrating a successful draft effort. I knew, but couldn't and wouldn't communicate to these joyful people, that the DC insiders were already crushing the campaign.
Many of us have been through similar experiences over the years. Betrayal of activists by Democratic leaders is a consistent theme of Democratic politics, and it has created enormous bad will that we saw explicitly in the Moveon condemnation in the House and Senate. This is just how things work. And since election night, I've been in a sort of angry and cynical mood, embittered at the institutional power structures that took our money and our volunteering and turned around and laughed at us.
About two weeks ago, I pulled out of it. A wonderful mentor of mine, Roger Kennedy, helped me realize that assuming bad faith on everyone's part is cowardly and lazy, and that good and bad things will happen in every administration. Right now, there's a crisis of confidence among progressive insiders and operatives that I know. They feel immensely upset and frustrated that they can't deliver on ending the war, and feel misunderstood by the grassroots that apparently hates and insults them. At the same time, the smartest and best operatives I know, the ones who came into politics in 2004, are not working for a Presidential campaign, but are working to build independent institutions, or in some cases, leaving politics.
Unfortunately, the Democracy Alliance and new funding channels just don't work, and Howard Dean's tenure at the DNC has been a complete failure to date at encouraging any political entrepreneurship. Dean is supposed to be our champion, and he has been giving great speeches, but he really has done almost nothing to empower progressives. He's never even written a diary on Dailykos. At the same time, the blogosphere chugs onward, with Media Matters, TPM, Dailykos, etc, creating a constant progressive din. Moveon has stepped up and gotten smacked in the face, and Color of Change and Ella Baker have become the face of progressive African-American internet leadership. There's consolidation in the progressive space, and USA Action and True Majority merge, heralding future mergers.
There's not a lot of great news on the horizon. Hillary Clinton's Presidency will not be a good one for progressives, though she will investigate the right and there will be bright spots (hopefully Wes Clark as Secretary of Defense). Still, Bush's awful morbid fog of death over our political system, a fog that prevents all thought of governing, will be lifted, and that will open tremendous new possibilities.
Little illustrates where we are than the utter chaos in the House. Speaker Pelosi is just not in control of the agenda, with Hoyer consistently undercutting her along with the Bush dogs to enable Bush to remain in Iraq. She cannot prevent bad legislation from passing, and she cannot force good legislation to move. I hope she starts to be upfront with her lack of a progressive majority, and begins to ask for help through surrogates like Ed Markey, Hilda Solis, and George Miller. I'm reminded of the statement from Rahm Emanuel after the blank check bill, when he pretended that the funding for the war with no restrictions was the first step in holding Bush accountable. That central lie caused a breach of trust between activist progressives and Democratic leaders that has never healed, because Democratic leaders have never bothered to recognize we don't like being lied to.
The House is in obvious chaos. That's not a bad thing. It's what happens in moments of realignment. Out with the old, in with the new, only, the old tend to fight back pretty hard since they are organized and know where the bodies are buried and the new don't have their shit together.
We aren't ready to take power, and won't be ready for another eight years. That doesn't mean we won't affect things and then in eight years a fully formed progressive beast will swoop in from the sky. It simply means our impact will be on the margins, as we build the networks of staffers, intellectuals, labor and business leaders, candidates, and political operatives necessary to govern.
UPDATE: I'm beginning to read about Complexity Economics in Eric Beinhocker's The Origin of Wealth. Complexity economics explains non-market phenomena like the internet by building a new framework for economic analysis that relies more on ecology and cognitive science than stale models of perfect markets. Historically speaking, complexity economics is the intellectual analogue to the Chicago school of economics in the 1960s that gave birth to the now-dominant Law and Economics model of political analysis through which all our legislation must fit. Law and Economics can't explain things like the internet, which is a big problem, and Naomi Klein's The Schock Doctrine is ultimately a devastating indictment of scions of the Chicago school like Milton Friedman, who was both an economic and a neoconservative Machievellian strategist. Klein, who came from the anti-globalization movement, and Beinhocker, who comes from the global business elitist firm McKinsey, are or will be critical movement thinkers with substantial and meaningful impacts, just as Van Jones and James Rucker will be figuring out how to scale what they do.
There are big forces at work that are on our side, intellectual currents and new social networks. Merging these is no small challenge. I suppose this is what bugs me about the Matt Bai-school of narrow thinkers more than anything, their complete failure to see anything outside of their own social worlds. As a result, they don't situate the blogs in a larger historical context, and think that the progressive movement is contained by Moveon and a few rich billionaires.
In addition to the regular defense appropriation request of $463 billion, the President is asking Congress to appropriate an additional supplemental request of almost $200 billion - a blank check to finance U.S. activities in Iraq - and he clearly expects that request to be repeated for years to come.
"I would be more than willing to report out a supplemental meeting the President's request if that request were made in support of a change in policy that would do three things.
1. Establish as a goal the end of U.S. involvement in combat operations by January of 2009.
2. Ensure that troops would have adequate time at home between deployments as outlined in the Murtha and Webb amendments.
3. Demonstrate a determination to engage in an intensive, broad scale diplomatic offensive involving other countries in the region.
"But this policy does not do that. It simply borrows almost $200 billion to give to the Departments of State, Defense, Energy, and Justice with no change in sight.
"As Chairman of the Appropriations Committee I have absolutely no intention of reporting out of Committee anytime in this session of Congress any such request that simply serves to continue the status quo.
"I also have no intention of acquiescing in a policy that will result in draining the treasury so dry that it will result in the systematic disinvestment of America's future.
As long as Obey isn't willing to play along with a blank check, the supplemental simply will not be voted on in the House. This will allow for at least three more months before there is a vote on the floor.
This seems to be a mixed bag. On the one hand, it seems that there is a timeline and troop readiness standards in what Obey is looking for. Also, the extended timeline means that this might be the final supplemental Iraq appropriation fight with Bush in the White House. On the other hand, "a goal" sounds similar to the toothless bills currently being pushed by Bush Dogs and endangered Republicans alike. Also, it isn't clear if "ensure" means binding troop readiness standards, or simply promises from the Pentagon and the White House that are guaranteed to be broken.
I am intrigued and encouraged by this, but more info is needed. I like the idea of the appropriations committee bottling up the supplemental even if the entire House will not. It focuses the campaign more narrowly, for one thing, and puts the leadership in a more powerful position for another thing. Any Democrat on the appropriations committee who breaks with Obey and allows this bill to pass out of committee as a blank check should have his or her seat on the committee revoked by the leadership. Given that no one wants to lose a seat on appropriations, the Bush Dogs on the committee would be faced with a pretty big carrot and stick in order to stay in line.
The Bush Dogs on the appropriations committee are Alan Boyd, Ciro Rodriguez, Chet Edwards, and Ben Chandler. It also features supposedly anti-war Republican Jim Walsh. Without those five members, the partisan balance of the committee is 33-28 Democrat, meaning that there still isn't a conservative majority even if they all side with Republicans. If we can't block a blank check this bill in the appropriations committee, then we can't block it anywhere.
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