Meeting
To All Amherst County Democrats:
Dear Friends,
The Committee will meet at the CVCC Amherst Center (address below), tomorrow, Tuesday 12th, at 7PM. Everyone is welcome.
It's important that Precinct Reps attend.
Your participation is crucial to our success. There are leadership positions open in most precincts. We encourage you to get involved as much, or as little, as you feel comfortable with. Or just come by and watch the process. We'll be done by 8PM.
It's actually kind of fun - and a great opportunity to meet fellow Democrats from around the county.
Remember - meeting is Tuesday the 12th, 7PM, at the CVCC Amherst Center. Hope to see you there.
On behalf of your Democratic Party in Amherst,
David Burford
CVCC AMHERST CENTER:
Mountainview Plaza
(Food Lion shopping near the circle)
200 Richmond Highway
Amherst, VA 24521
Tea Party to Speaker John Boehner, "You Sold Us Out and we will run a candidate against you in the primary".
Michele "I'm Running for President" Bachmann
The tea party is irate that the government was not shut down and will be tacking down the names of Republicans who vote for the compromise budget so thay can oppose them in the next primary. Boehner said President Obama was a nice man and very pleasant to deal with and he thanked the president for letting them use the White House to meet in. Choking back tears Boehner was unable to speak futher.
John "Harry and Barack were so nice to me." Boehner
"We have agreed to an historic amount of cuts for the remainder of this fiscal year, as well as a short-term bridge that will give us time to avoid a shutdown while we get that agreement through both houses and to the President. We will cut $78.5 billion below the President's 2011 budget proposal, and we have reached an agreement on the policy riders. In the meantime, we will pass a short-term resolution to keep the government running through Thursday. That short-term bridge will cut the first $2 billion of the total savings," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner said in a joint statement issued after the agreement.
President Obama
Seriously Obama needs to learn how to negotiate. Before the session starts he gives Republicans half of what they want and then he negotiates from there. In this instance the Republicans got 78.5% of what they wanted and Obama was left to triangulate his position like Clinton used to do. The Democrats are getting tired of carrying Obama since its a one way street. Obama never returns the favor by standing up for the Democrats. Obama thinks he is a ref and has no interest in how things turn out. He positions himself slightly to the right of a blue dog Democrat.
President Obama commended Democrats and Republicans on working together to reach a solution.
"The government will be open for business," Obama said. "That's because today, Americans of different beliefs came together again."
"In the final hours before our government would have been forced to shut down, leaders in both parties reached an agreement that will allow our small businesses to get the loans they need, our families to get the mortgages they applied for, and hundreds of thousands of Americans to show up at work and take home their paychecks on time."
Perilously close to a government shutdown, President Barack Obama and congressional leaders forged agreement late Friday night on a deal to cut about $38 billion in federal spending and avert the first closure in 15 years.
Obama hailed the deal, a bit more than an hour before a midnight deadline, as "the biggest annual spending cut in history," and House Speaker John Boehner said that over the next decade it would cut government spending by $500 billion.
Harry "I'm So Happy" Reid
"This is historic, what we've done," said the third man in the talks, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
They announced the agreement less than an hour before government funding was due to run out. The shutdown would have closed national parks, tax-season help lines and other popular services, though the military would have stayed on duty and other essential efforts such as air traffic control would have continued in effect.
On side issues - "riders," the negotiators called them - the Democrats and the White House rebuffed numerous Republican attempts to curtail the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency and sidetracked their demand to deny federal funds to Planned Parenthood.
Mike "Whatever The Tea Party Wants" Pence
Anti-abortion lawmakers did succeed in winning a provision to ban the use of federal or local government funds to pay for abortions in the District of Columbia.
Racing to beat the deadline, lawmakers worked to pass an interim measure to prevent a shutdown, however brief, and keep the federal machinery running for the next several days.
The Senate acted within minutes, and House members were called into session to follow suit as midnight neared.
Rand "Aqua Budda Said Vote NO" Paul
The deal came together after six grueling weeks and an outbreak of budget brinksmanship over the past few days as the two sides sought to squeeze every drop of advantage in private talks.
President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner have reached a deal on the budget to prevent a government shutdown. But that doesn't mean that Boehner can get the entire Republican conference on board.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, told reporters that he's a no vote on the final package.
"We really wanted more advancement on the life issue than was in the final package," Jordan told a small group of reporters after the vote. "I think there's a significant number of no votes."
Jordan was referring to the anti-abortion provisions that were stripped in the deal. But other Republicans left their caucus meeting in the basement of the Capitol building with a more positive perspective.
"I go back to what Ronald Reagan used to say, if you get 80 percent of what you're shooting for, that's a victory, you go back and get the 20 percent later," Rep. Tim Griffin (R-AR) told me, adding he hadn't seen all the details of the plan yet but understood that the Senate would hold a separate vote on defunding Planned Parenthood.
"I think it is as good a deal we could have gotten," Griffin said. "The troops are going to be paid, the military will be funded until the end of the year, so that will be done, and there will be significant spending reductions."
For Speaker John Boehner, the announcement of a deal funding the government caps one of the most dangerous period of his tenure as leader of his party, a long negotiation that tested his control of his members and his reputation with a general public that has yet to form a clear opinion on his leadership.
While he avoided a potentially disastrous shutdown, only time will tell whether he kept his hold on his party. Already some conservative Republicans are expressing their dismay at the deal.
"I think a lot of us are quite disappointed at the level," Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) said.
"We really wanted more advancement on the life issue than was in the final package," Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) told reporters after the deal was announced. "I think there's a significant number of no votes."
But others expressed relief at the saga being over: "I think that you're going to see overwhelming support for this," Rep. Tim Griffin (R-AR) told ACVDN.
The dueling quotes reflect long-simmering tensions between veteran Republican legislators like Boehner and an emergent conservative grassroots that helped deliver a strong majority in 2010 only two years after landslide defeat. Balancing their needs against each other and the responsibilities of governing have proven an all-consuming task for the Speaker that has defined his tenure as leader of the House GOP.
The battle lines were first drawn in the wake of Obama's election as a resurgent conservative movement helped pull the party dramatically to the right. Heading into the 2010 election, many Tea Party activists and candidates made clear that lip service to small government conservatism without serious cuts would splinter the movement. For some the benchmark was impossibly high -- Freshman Senator Rand Paul warned he would not vote for any legislation that fails to balance the budget entirely and prominent Tea Party activists echoed his demands.
Republicans looked to excite their base with a "Pledge to America" that included a return to pre-stimulus spending, but the document drew a lukewarm reception from many activists even as they helped power the GOP to huge gains in the election. These lingering tensions became evident almost immediately after the GOP took office, when Republican leaders sparked a revolt in the caucus by proposing only $32 billion in cuts current spending levels. After a meeting with angry freshmen, many of whom rode Tea Party support to victory, Boehner relented and eventually upped the package to $61 billion.
That early uprising proved instructive as the same Establishment vs. Tea Party dynamic followed Boehner into the debate over a continuing resolution funding the government through September. As the negotiations dragged on, increasing numbers of Republicans bucked the GOP leadership and demanded a harder line. The split reached its peak on March 15, when 54 GOP representatives broke with the party to oppose a resolution temporarily funding the government, leaving Boehner to rely on Democratic votes in order to avoid a shutdown. With a bloc of conservative Republicans having made clear they had little appetite for any compromise at all, Boehner appeared to have no good options -- either cut a deal with Democrats and face the wrath of his own party members or hold out and face a politically difficult shutdown. His rhetoric shifted towards preparing the party for a deal.
"Let me remind you that Republicans control one-half of one-third of our government and it's never been lost on me that because we only control the House there are a lot of other players that we need to work with in order to come to any agreement to keep the government open."
Negotiations with the Senate and the White House intensified over the next two weeks and Democratic officials sounded confident that they were close to an agreement that would cut spending around $30 billion. But in late March, talks abruptly took a turn for the worse and Boehner's public rhetoric returned to previous GOP talking points slamming Democrats for not passing their own plan in the Senate. Democrats, in turn, launched an all-out effort to paint Boehner as at the mercy of Tea Party, blaming conservative activists for scaring him off of a deal at the last minute.
"For the sake of our economy, it's time for mainstream Republicans to stand up to the Tea Party and rejoin Democrats at the table to negotiate a responsible solution that cuts spending while protecting jobs," Reid said in a March 26 statement after the GOP rejected the White House's final offer.
Eric "I am Number 2" Cantor
His hold on the party thrown into question, observers began speculating whether his rivals were waiting in the wings to take over in the event of a conservative coup. In a testy exchange with Politico's David Rogers, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the no. 2 Republican in the House, distanced himself from negotiations with President Obama, disavowing any knowledge of their latest offer. Rep. Mike Pence, who recently turned down a presidential run, became a vocal proponent of a shutdown even as Republican talking points avoided such rhetoric at all costs.
The final days heading into a looming shutdown fell into a dizzying pattern as both sides expressed renewed optimism at times only to quickly deteriorate into finger pointing when no deal materialized. All the while, Boehner repeatedly denied he was close to an agreement and emphatically downplayed any conflict between him and conservative members, who in turn rallied behind him and reportedly cheered when he instructed them to prepare for a shutdown. They weren't alone as polls showed Republicans -- and only Republicans -- enthusiastic about such an outcome.
"Listen, there's no daylight between the Tea Party and me," Boehner told ABC's George Stephanopoulos on April 6. "None."
What they want is they want us to cut spending. They want us to deal with this crushing debt that's going to crush the future for our kids and grandkids. "There's no daylight there."
It appeared that nothing could break the impasse. But in the final days, Democrats regrouped around a new message that sought to drive a new wedge within the party -- this time between fiscal and social conservatives. Blaming Republican intransigence on a handful of policy riders concerning women's health and abortion for causing the standoff, they managed to put Boehner on the defensive as few in the party were willing to debate social issues given the overwhelming importance of the economy to voters.
As the GOP struggled to regroup, key conservative Republicans began to signal they were ready to make a deal, offering Boehner the crucial protection on his right flank that he had up to that point lacked. On the Senate side, Tom Coburn and Pat Toomey, two pro-life conservatives, called on Boehner to drop the policy riders. Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler offered a similar take. Bigger names, all with rock-solid social conservative credentials, began chiming in as well.
Michele "The Tea Party Taught Me To Do Makeup" Bachmann
In a jarring interview, possible presidential candidate Mike Huckabee told CNN that a shutdown was unwinnable for Republicans and that he would give up on defunding Planned Parenthood. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a potential 2012 presidential candidate as well and one of the most dangerous and unpredictable members on Boehner's right, authored a post on RedState strongly suggesting the GOP would be better off holding its fire for later fights on the debt limit and on the 2012 budget. With Paul Ryan's ambitious budget proposal, which would effectively end Medicare and make trillions in cuts, exciting the conservative base, the argument that the continuing resolution fight was relatively small potatoes carried extra resonance.
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