MORNING MESSAGE: The GOP Strategy of Barely Functioning Government
OurFuture.org's Bill Scher: "Congressional Republicans may not be replicating the disastrous shutdown strategy of their Newt Gingrich-led predecessors from two decades ago, but they are slyly executing the next worst thing: forcing our government to lurch from one near-crisis to the next ... These are the same Republicans that cried 'Uncertainty!' every time that the last Democratic Congress tried to solve a tough problem that weighed down our economy, like rising health care costs or reckless banker behavior. Yet now they actively try to sow uncertainty whether our government will be able to pay its debt obligations or keep its doors open."
Compromise Does Little To Restore Confidence In Divided Government
NYT examines the impact of continual "short-term fixes" by Congress: "Short-term spending bills and expiring tax provisions have existed almost as long as government, but the sheer volume of such measures has been increasing every year, and with them, fiscal policy experts say, government uncertainty and the related partisan imbroglios that are contributing to America’s ever dimmer view of Congress."
NYT edit board laments the next crises Republicans will manufacture: "The next one will be on Nov. 18, when the temporary spending bill approved by the Senate on Monday night (and expected to be approved by the House) runs out ... Congress could have passed a full year’s bill and still allowed the various appropriations committees to argue over individual agency spending levels without the threat of a shutdown. But that’s not operating procedure for the current House, dominated by Tea Party members and furious spending hawks. They want that threat to recur, as often as possible, so that they can extort their political goals ..."
November fight may be harder to resolve. Time's Alex Altman: "Instead of sniping over a comparatively small slice of cash, Congress will be hammering out line items for the 2012 fiscal year, debating controversial riders and putting each other’s priorities on the chopping block, just as the deficit-reduction 'supercommittee' is wrapping up its work in the run-up to a Nov. 23 deadline–and just as the GOP presidential primary is shifting into a higher gear. The timing will intensify what would already be a heated ideological debate."
China Currency Crackdown Bill Ahead Of American Jobs Act
President focuses on help for teachers in American Jobs Act. W. Post: "...Obama wrapped up a three-day, three-state western swing by rallying students and teachers at Abraham Lincoln High School in Denver, his latest method of highlighting the education proposals and putting public pressure on congressional Republicans ... 'The job losses that we’ve seen this year have been in the public sector, and those cuts have been teachers,' [WH Press Sec Jay] Carney said. 'If [Republicans] are saying it’s not a problem that states are shedding teachers from our payrolls . . . then they should say so.'"
Senate will take up China currency bill before American Jobs Act. W. Post: "Work on the Chinese trade manipulation measure has been on the back burner for months, and it has strong bipartisan support in the Senate, where leaders see it as a jobs protection bill that has a good chance of passage ... Consideration of the president’s jobs plan, on the other hand, will probably be blocked by Senate Republicans. Once the whole package is put aside, Congress may move to consider separate pieces of the package — such as a payroll tax cut, as Republicans have urged."
Sen. Maj. Leader Reid squeezing WH, House GOP with China bill. The Hill: "Many Republican freshmen made taking a tough stand on China a prominent theme in their 2010 campaigns. However, it’s unlikely to hit the House floor any time soon. That would give Reid and Schumer an opportunity to bash Boehner for refusing to act on a bipartisan jobs bill ... [Reid] has promised to proceed with Obama’s legislative wish list, but only after the Senate considers the China bill, deftly using the Senate calendar to keep any possible opposition from the administration at bay ... One Senate Democratic aide said the Obama administration would be wise not to take potshots at the [China] legislation, knowing it will depend on Reid to pass the jobs package and the trade bills."
Economists tell Bloomberg American Jobs Act would prevent double-dip recession: "President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News ... Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimated the plan would add 1.5 percent to the economy, while Macroeconomic Advisers LLC said 1.3 percent and UniCredit Research, up to 2 percent."
Postal workers rally to save post offices, jobs. W. Post: "...workers angrily targeted Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who is co-sponsoring a bill that would set up a financial control board to overhaul USPS finances — and possibly force layoffs ... postal unions are supporting a bill sponsored by Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) that would refund billions of dollars USPS has paid into federal retirement accounts and allow the mail agency to recalculate its payments ... Postal unions have long argued that the billions in annual payments — and not the declining mail volume — are responsible for USPS’s losses."
Health Insurance Costs Rise Before Reform Fully Implemented
Health insurers jack up costs again. NYT: "How much the new federal health care legislation pushed by President Obama is affecting rates remains a point of debate, with some consumer advocates and others suggesting that insurers have raised prices in anticipation of new rules that would, in 2012, require them to justify any increase of more than 10 percent. Kaiser pointed out that the increase this year could be an anomaly, after several years of 3 percent to 5 percent increases during the recession. Kaiser estimates that one to two percentage points of the increase this year is related to provisions of the law already in effect, like coverage for children up to 26 years old and for prevention services like mammograms ... If the health care law survives legal challenges and goes into full effect in 2014, increased competition will make it tougher for companies to charge those customers more, the administration says ... Consumer advocates contend that the latest requests exceed any documented rise in costs, with some companies enjoying three years of record profits..."
"ObamaCare" should lower costs once it is fully implemented, argues TNR's Jonathan Cohn: "Remember, the Affordable Care Act calls for a combination of reforms – some of which will raise the cost of coverage (like requiring all plans to make preventative services free) and some of which will reduce the cost of coverage (like offering incentives for use of electronic medical records). The hope is that the latter are big enough to offset and, ideally, overwhelm the effect of the former. Whether it all works out that way depends on a lot of variables, among them our political willingness to sustain the law's cost-cutting experiments and then strengthen the ones that work best."
Supreme Court precedents back "ObamaCare," says retired Justice Stevens. Bloomberg: "The 2005 marijuana ruling will be a pivotal precedent when the justices consider the health-care law. In his opinion for the court then, Stevens pointed to a constitutional provision letting Congress enact laws 'necessary and proper' for carrying out powers specifically mentioned in the Constitution. The majority included Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, both of whom had voted to restrict Congress’s commerce-clause power in earlier cases. Scalia didn’t adopt Stevens’s reasoning, instead providing his own analysis in a concurring opinion.
Stevens suggested Scalia might be willing to uphold the health-care law even if he disagrees with its substance."
Breakfast Sides
Super Committee meeting behind closed doors. Politico: "The panel met for roughly 6½ hours in the Capitol, and when its members left, they wouldn’t answer basic, innocuous questions about the policies they were discussing nor specify when the next meeting would take place ... Sources on Tuesday gave some clues as to what was going on inside the room. There’s some chatter about committees proposing spending cuts. Medicare waste, fraud and abuse are said to be on the menu as are alterations to Medicaid. But as for the details on those proposals? Nobody’s saying..."
GOP Rep. Don Young proposes eliminating all regulations issued in the last 20 years. Anchorage Daily News: "Alaska Rep. Don Young suggested Tuesday he plans to introduce a bill to repeal every regulation that's been put into effect in the last 20 years, an idea that could have huge implications for everything from aviation safety to oil drilling if it actually happened ... At least some members of the Rotary crowd appeared taken aback by the breadth of what Young appeared to be saying, given all of the passenger jet safety, pesticide, food safety, banking and other regulations that have come into place since 1991."
