Budget Deal Passes
Senate passes Murray-Ryan budget deal. [Salon] "Congress has sent President Barack Obama bipartisan legislation scaling back across-the-board spending cuts on programs ranging from the Pentagon to the national park system. The final vote on the measure was 64-36 in the Senate. The House approved the bill last week. The legislation is designed to prevent the kind of budget brinkmanship that has prevailed over the past three years of divided government and that led to this October’s partial government shutdown. The White House supports the bill, and Obama’s signature is assured."
Ezra Klein explains how Sen. Patty Murray sold Democrats on the budget deal. "The difficulties Rep. Paul Ryan has had selling the Murray-Ryan budget deal to congressional Republicans has gotten a lot of attention. There's been, perhaps predictably, less coverage of the ease with which Sen. Patty Murray persuaded her fellow Democrats to vote for the deal. But Wonkblog obtained the document Murray has been circulating among Senate Democrats, and it's an interesting read. In short, the case she makes is that Democrats got a bit and gave up very little. In particular, she argues that Democrats preserved their fundamental negotiating positions: no changes to entitlements absent tax increases, no changes to sequestration without revenues, no restoration of defense spending without unwinding an equal restoration of domestic spending."
Spending Fights Loom
Senate passes budget deal, focus shifts to spending. [Reuters] "Wednesday's vote fired the starting gun on a mad dash by the House and Senate Appropriations committees to assemble a massive spending bill that implements the deal and carves up the funding pie among thousands of government programs from national parks to the military. Without the new spending authority, the federal government on January 15 could partially shut down, as it did for 16 days last October. Not surprisingly, one of fights ahead involves funding of 'Obamacare,' the president's signature healthcare law, according to Republican and Democratic aides in the House and Senate."
Mother Jones' Patrick Caldwell says the new budget still leaves a lot to deal with. "Hooray! Our dysfunctional, divided Congress managed to accomplish something. On Wednesday, the Senate approved a budget deal hammered out by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) by a 64-36 vote. ... The truth? It's a tad more complicated. It's unlikely there will be another shutdown when funding expires on January 15: Republican support for the budget deal is a clear sign that they've learned their lesson about closing the government after their October debacle. But fights over federal spending have hardly been settled. The Ryan-Murray budget offers a broad framework for the budget numbers, but the details still need to be worked out. And there are a host of difficult decisions awaiting."
Military Cuts and Toilet Paper
Budget deal cuts benefits to some vets: Heartless or painless? [Christian Science Monitor] "On Wednesday, as expected, the Senate passed the bipartisan budget deal unveiled last week, 64 to 36. But the past two days have been anything but hand-holding and back slaps on the Senate floor. Instead, several lawmakers nearly resorted to pistols drawn at 20 paces over a provision in the bipartisan budget deal that reduces military retirement benefits by $6 billion over 10 years. To the lawmakers who crafted the deal, Rep. Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin and Sen. Patty Murray (D) of Washington, it seemed like a fairly painless cut. ... The budget deal, passed overwhelmingly by the House last week, reduces cost-of-living adjustments for these younger retirees by 1 percent. But that 1 percent figure touched a trip wire in the Senate."
Patty Murray backs off military pension cut. [Politico] "Sen. Patty Murray is distancing herself from a cut in military pensions in the budget deal she brokered with Rep. Paul Ryan. Her unease about a key element of her own deal, which passed the Senate on Wednesday and is now headed to President Barack Obama, comes amid a backlash from veterans groups and Senate defense hawks that has put her and her colleagues in a tough spot going into an election year. Murray’s response: The pension cut isn’t final. 'We wrote this bill in a way that will allow two years before this change is implemented so that Democrats and Republicans can keep working to either improve this provision or find smarter savings elsewhere,' she said on the Senate floor this week."
David Gilson unravels the military's toilet paper budget — and finds the Koch brothers. "The prospect of running out of government-issued TP has become a talking point against trimming defense spending. ... According to contracting data, the Pentagon bought an average of $2 million worth of "toiletry paper products" annually between 2000 and 2010. Yet that figure jumped to $130 million in 2012. A closer look at the numbers reveals about $58 million of paper products you might conceivably wipe with, plus a ton of padding—including $2.7 million of light bulbs and $9.6 million of canning supplies. Let's just chalk up those to the Pentagon's infamously sloppy accounting system. So who is getting flush on the military's bathroom budget? In 2012, the Pentagon's—and the government's—biggest vendor of toilet paper products was Georgia-Pacific, a.k.a. Koch Industries."
Fed Tapers, Market Responds
Fed cuts bond buying in first step away from historic stimulus. [Reuters] "The Federal Reserve on Wednesday embarked on the risky task of winding down the era of easy money, saying the U.S. economy was finally strong enough for it to start scaling down its massive bond-buying stimulus. The central bank modestly trimmed the pace of its monthly asset purchases, by $10 billion to $75 billion, and sought to temper the long-awaited move by suggesting its key interest rate would stay at rock bottom even longer than previously promised. At his last scheduled news conference as Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke said the purchases would likely be cut at a 'measured' pace through much of next year if job gains continued as expected, with the program fully shuttered by late-2014."
After Fed tapers, stocks hit new record. [Christian Science Monitor] "The stock market had a swift and clear reaction to the Federal Reserve's decision to trim its stimulus efforts: This wasn't so bad after all. Stocks surged Wednesday, lifting the Dow Jones industrial average nearly 300 points, after the Fed decided it was time to start modestly scaling back its program to boost America's growth and stock market. The central bank cited a stronger jobs market and improving economy. Stock investors had long anticipated the Fed would pull back at some point, but did not think it would happen until next year. Despite the surprise, investors took the central bank's decision Wednesday as a sign that the stock market was strong enough to keep soaring, even with a less rocket fuel from the Fed."
Obamacare Update
Study: Routine costs, not law, lead to most new increases. [USA Today] "Routine costs, not requirements of the Affordable Care Act, contributed to the majority of health insurance rate increases in the last year, a new study released Thursday shows. 'It wasn't driven by utilization of the services, but the unit costs,' said Mike McCue, lead author of the study by The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit group devoted to improving health services for Americans. 'That will continue to be a major driver moving forward — trying to control those medical expenses — if they want to remain profitable.' The report also found that just 1 percentage point of insurers' increases was due to the first fully implemented changes from the Affordable Care Act: women's preventive care and contraceptive services, which began in August 2012."
Obamas rally moms to boost Obamacare. Will that work? [Christian Science Monitor] "President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are targeting a particular group of powerful Americans in their effort to boost enrollment in the Affordable Care Act: moms. That’s right, moms. The White House figures no one is better able to cajole the so-called “young invincibles” into getting health care than their mothers, who have cared for them so long, and cleaned up after them, and packed them lunches, and did they ask for any thanks? Your happiness is thanks enough, that’s what they said. Sorry, we got carried away for a second. So the Obamas are meeting today in the Oval Office with a group of mothers. Several of their visitors are heading outreach efforts designed to let friends, neighbors, and kids take advantage of their new health insurance options, according to the White House."
Obama's Second Term Blues?
Echoes of George W. Bush blues in Barack Obama's 2nd term. [Politico] "As Barack Obama heads into his sixth year in the White House, his aides says they are all too familiar with the notion that his predicament looks similar to George W. Bush’s eight years ago. They’re two presidents dogged by crises largely of their own making, whose welcome with Americans has worn thin after two marathon elections. ... But Obama advisers, who lived and breathed Bush’s second term as Obama ran for president, insist that there are important differences that make the current White House prospects less dire. One senior White House aide said that, yes, neither Obama nor Bush succeeded in winning approval of the first domestic priority they pursued after their reelection. Still, the aide said, Obama made greater strides with immigration in Congress than Bush did on his plan to restructure Social Security."
Michael Tomasky says it's too early to write Barack Obama's political obituary. "Predicting a politician’s standing a year out is a mug’s game, so I won’t do that. But I’ll comfortably make the claim that nothing that has happened to Obama in 2013 rules out a rebound. Far be it from me to question The Washington Post’s poll numbers, but Bush was in far worse shape at this point. Obama’s second term will not likely match the list of accomplishments of his first. But even if the second term is nothing more than the successful implementation of Obamacare for 30 million or 40 million Americans, that’s plenty. Public opinion will catch up."
More Skirmishes in GOP Civil War
Conservative Group Endorses Kansas Challenger. [ABC News] "A hard-right conservative group led by former Kansas Rep. Jim Ryun is endorsing a Republican who is trying to oust three-term GOP Sen. Pat Roberts. The Madison Project said Thursday that it was backing Dr. Milton Wolf over Roberts, the blunt-spoken conservative who was elected to the Senate in 1996 after eight terms in the House and has never gotten less than 60 percent of the vote in his heartland state. The organization, which has backed challengers to Republican incumbents in Kentucky and Mississippi, said Wolf will provide the necessary leadership. ... Wolf, a distant cousin of President Barack Obama, is a physician and tea party-backed candidate who has been outspoken in his opposition to the health care law."
E.J. Dionne writes that the Republicans have only just begun to fight ... amongst themselves. "The Republican civil war, like all civil wars, is even messier than it looks. It’s a battle between two different conservative establishments complicated by philosophical struggles across many other fronts. Its resolution will determine whether we are a governable country. Because the GOP fight is so important, it’s a mistake to dismiss the passage of a real, honest-to-goodness budget through both houses of Congress as a minor event. The deal negotiated by Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan may be small, but it represents a major recalibration of forces inside the Republican Party."
