In a letter to Congress, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned that the country was about to run out of money in a matter of days.
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has sent a letter to Congress warning that the U.S. was yet again about to run out of money and imploring lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling or risk a default.
The debt ceiling was most recently raised to $17.2 trillion in February 2014, and a year-long deal to suspend it expires on March 15. Starting March 16, the country will have borrowed as much as it is allowed, and the Treasury won’t be able to make all the payments it owes.
Raising the debt limit, as Lew reminded law makers in his letter, does not permit additional spending, but rather allows the government to meet obligations on commitments Congress has already approved.
“Absent an increase in the debt limit, the Treasury Department will have to take extraordinary measures to continue to finance the government on a temporary basis,” Lew wrote in a letter dated Friday.
In order to avoid a default, Treasury will stretch the money it has by stopping sales of certain securities and halting payments into select funds.
The debt ceiling, the amount of money the U.S. federal government is allowed to borrow to pay its debts, has been set by Congress since 1939. In the ensuing 75 years, it has voted to raise the debt ceiling more than 100 times, often with little fanfare.
But in the past few decades, with the emergence of small-government conservatives as a driving force, the increase has now become an opportunity for those lawmakers advocating to cut spending to make a point.
“It is occasion for great mischief. Especially since, in a way it’s redundant, since Congress has already voted for the spending,” says Ron Haskin, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Haskin served as an economic advisor to President George W. Bush and as Republican staff on the House Ways and Means Committee.
“Why would you take a chance on not increasing the ceiling and having an impact on the nation’s credit rating?” he says.
Fights over the size of the federal budget and debt led to government shutdowns in 1995 and 2013, and nearly another in 2011. Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time in the country’s history after the 2011 fight, and Dagong Global did so after the 2013 shutdown.
Opinion polls show Americans have overwhelmingly blamed Republicans for those shutdowns, a lesson the current leadership seems to have taken to heart.
“I made it very clear after the November election that we're certainly not going to shut down the government or default on the national debt,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday.
The Kentucky Republican left open the possibility a debt ceiling hike would come with “some other important legislation,” an option Democrats and President Barack Obama have repeatedly said is off the table.
It’s a battle they have won on several occasions, blocking Republican efforts to scale back the Affordable Care Act that led to the 2013 shutdown and nearly shuttering the Department of Homeland Security last week over Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Both times, Republicans ultimately relented, allowing the funding while failing in their objectives.
With his letter to Congress, Lew started that clock again, although the extraordinary measures the department is authorized mean the country won’t run out of money next week.
McConnell said he expected the process to “be handled over a period of months” as he attempts to unify his party’s strategy to avoid another embarrassment.
“The world is not going to end March 16,” Haskin says, but this is not something to fool around with.”
Once again the country asks "Can Republicans Govern"? Lets hope past performance is not an indicator of future results.
Tripartisan Politics Trip Up Boehner
Divisions within his own party have once again placed the House speaker in a difficult spot.
John Boehner has a numbers problem. And while it's not a big enough one for him to face losing the speaker's gavel, he's completely beholden to the
two minority groups that occupy either end of the political spectrum in the House.
The lower chamber is no longer operating on a two-party system, with the speaker and his allies controlling the majority. Instead, conservatives in the House are essentially behaving like a separate party altogether, one that is unwilling to compromise and is happy to embarrass party leadership.
On any given issue so far this term, Boehner has found himself abandoned by anywhere from a few dozen Republicans to the 167 of his 247-member caucus who refused to support a clean funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday.
Democrats, with 188 members, are inclined to sit back and watch the Ohio Republican flounder, unless he hands them something they want in return.
And flounder he has, with both minority parties emboldened by the new Republican majority in the Senate. They now behave as if they have nothing left to lose, sitting on their hands and waiting for Boehner to come begging for their help and their votes.
That's left Boehner forced to seek support from one group or the other as he looks to build a coalition with moderate Republicans. With increasing frequency, he has chosen to side with the moderates and rely on Democrats to get legislation passed.
“Every major controversial bill that gets passed has to to pass with that coalition intact,” says Tripp Baird, a conservative strategist and former
director of government affairs at Heritage Action for America. He spent several years as an aide to former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss.
"Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the White House will get everything they want” on all the big fights going forward, Baird says, since Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have dropped any pretense of taking a conservative stand. “You can look down the road on all these fights coming up, and you don’t see any leverage that a Republican-slash-conservative coalition can get now.”
While the DHS fight over the past several weeks has been the most public indication that Boehner has lost control of his caucus, the signs have been
there from the very beginning of the session, when 25 Republicans voted against him for speaker, the most opposition a sitting speaker has faced in
decades.
Following the contentious vote, Boehner issued stern warnings to defiant members, kicking lawmakers off the House Rules Committee and threatening to remove others from committee positions if they continued to cause him headaches.
Several weeks into the session, however, the leadership was forced to cancel a vote on a border security bill, knowing immigration hard-liners opposed it. And last month, that same group of conservatives delivered a surprise defeat to the majority vote-whipping team, when 52 Republicans voted to sink a three-week stopgap measure to keep the lights on at DHS.
The GOP leadership has so far been largely reluctant to violate the so-called Hastert Rule, which demands any measure have the backing of a majority of majority-party members to pass. But with House conservatives and Senate Democrats staking out uncompromising opposite positions, it’s an option Boehner will likely have to turn to more and more.
Boehner has seemingly been at the mercy of conservatives since the 2010 tea party wave ushered in a Republican majority and handed him the speakership, most notably when he oversaw a shutdown of the federal government in October 2013 – a closure largely sparked by tea party hero Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who has interfered in so many of the House’s internal battles that some began referring to him as “Speaker Ted Cruz.”
Boehner eventually allowed the House to vote to raise the debt ceiling, once the Senate refused to pass a version of the bill that would defund the
Affordable Care Act, with just 87 Republicans joining all Democrats.
Part of Boehner’s problem is that he gave up the ability to use earmarks to convince reluctant lawmakers to hew to the party line when he became speaker in 2011. In doing so, he ceded a critical means of leverage, though it was a choice a former aide says the speaker has never regretted – even when it leads to “occasional indignities” and taking heat for choosing the least-bad item “from a menu of lousy options.”
“The House has the power of the purse, but that power is only in effect when the majority can operate in a unified fashion,” says David Schnittger, who left his role as Boehner’s deputy chief of staff in January.
“The House went on record with its position, as it should do – that’s it’s institutional prerogative,” he says. But it is now “coming to terms with
the limitations of being in the majority in the Senate.”
“Those limitations played themselves out vividly over the past few weeks,” he says.
Boehner has laughed off suggestions that he could lose his leadership spot, but rumblings from members of the newly formed Freedom Caucus have kept speculation alive that a revolt is brewing after what they see as a series of Boehner betrayals.
“I’m still optimistic that leadership can herd the cats,” said Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., according to The Washington Times. “But if they can’t, then I
think there will be consideration about whether a new leadership team needs to be put in place.”
In practice, overthrowing a sitting speaker would involve a resolution passed by the entire House – not just Republicans. Not only have Democrats said they would prefer to stick to the devil they know and back Boehner, but even those conservatives musing publicly about unseating the leadership admit privately they don’t have a replacement with enough support in the caucus to win.
And Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, outright dismissed talk of an overthrow on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“No, of course not. That’s not the point,” Jordan said. “The point is to do what we told the voters we were going to do, and to do it in a way that's
consistent with the United States Constitution.”
But a series of upcoming deadlines, raising the specter of yet another fiscal cliff this fall, will provide a uniquely difficult challenge for
beleaguered party leaders. Between now and then, the Highway Trust Fund, the Export-Import Bank, aspects of the Patriot Act, funding for the Federal Aviation Association, and a key provision that will slash Medicare payments to physicians will all need to be renewed or fixed. And Congress again will be faced with the challenge of passing a new appropriations bill for the entire federal government.
McConnell, who made a show of voting four separate times on a House version of the DHS funding bill he knew would not pass, has otherwise demonstrated little patience for the kind of brinkmanship that has become the norm on the other side of the Capitol.
The key, then, will be whether Boehner allows the members of the “hell no” caucus to push him up to the edge of crisis after crisis, or whether he
will look to Democrats to help him govern.
GOP Senators Probably Broke Law With Iran Letter
The law, however, is likely unconstitutional and never enforced.
The law they probably broke, the Logan Act of 1799, allows for fines and up to three years in prison.
The act bans U.S. citizens from engaging “without authority of the United States” in “correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government ... with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government ... in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States.”
Fortunately for Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and the 46 Senate co-signers of his open letter to Iran, the law is not enforced and is likely unconstitutional.
“They probably were in violation of the act, yes,” says Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the American University Washington College of Law.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, probably broke the law, too, by working with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undermine the nuclear negotiations with Iran, he says.
But Vladeck, co-editor-in-chief of the legal blog Just Security, says senators could argue they were indeed acting with the authority of the United States or more convincingly that the act violates the First Amendment.
“The Logan Act is a vestigial and anachronistic holdover from a bygone era,” he says. “There's never been a successful prosecution under the act, and the last indictment was in 1803.”
Jonathan Turley, a law professor at the George Washington University, says "if the Logan Act was ever enforced you would have to frog march half of Congress out the front doors and into a federal penitentiary."
Turley compares the likelihood of a prosecution under the act to “the chances of being eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex on Capitol Hill.”
Just in Case You See One, this is what it looks like“The Logan Act comes from a rather dark period in which this country imposed the Alien and Sedition Acts,” he says. “The language of the Logan Act is sweeping and in my view facially unconstitutional.”
A spokeswoman for Cotton did not respond to a request for comment. Perhaps Cotton will write you a letter?
Based on population, Democrats actually represent more people than the GOP. Republican senators, while holding enough seats to control the Senate,
represent about 47 percent of the U.S. population, while Democrats represent about 53 percent.
How is this possible? The discrepancy between Senate control and population can’t be blamed on ballot fraud or rigged voting machines. Instead, it’s the way the Senate was devised in 1787, intended to give voters in states with fewer people disproportionate representation in order to get them to agree to join the union. Under the Constitution, every state is awarded two Senate seats, regardless of how many people live there.
The arrangement was a matter of raw politics and horse trading, but like all compromises, it's since gotten a gloss of high-mindedness. Some make the argument that by only submitting one-third of the seats to a vote every two years, the Senate acts as a bulwark against wild swings in public mood. A case in point would be 2010, when a GOP wave swept Democrats out of the House. In that election, Democrats held onto the Senate because two-thirds of the senators were able to avoid the wrath of the electorate simply by not having to run.
To get the population-based representation figures, we assumed each senator represents the entire 2013 population of his or her state.
WalletHub, a finance website, recently calculated the voting power in each state based on the state's population of people over 18. The website
determined that in Senate elections, voters in Wyoming, population 582,658, have the most power, while voters in California come in dead last.
The 2014 midterms posed a problem for Democrats because the Senate seats up for reelection were more likely to be in states that lean Republican and have fewer people. And Democrats are still dealing with Republican dominance in the South following the 2000 election, Patrick J. Egan, an associate professor of politics and public policy at NYU, noted in the Washington Post.
The University of Virginia Center for Politics points out that Republicans only needed six states to take the Senate. And six states where GOP
senators did prevail -- Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia -- make up a mere 3.8 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Center.
So, in short, Democrats upset about losing the Senate should move to Montana or put forth a maximun effort to get the apathetic, non voting democrats off their duffs and to the polls.
This is why the Senate can be in GOP control and yet the White House continues to be difficult for the GOP to recapture. The majority of Americans support the Democrats, but those Americans are more concentrated in fewer states, thereby having fewer Senate seats representing them because of our Constitutional Senate composition. This continues to bode poorly for the GOP with the 2016 White House race, as the overall electoral numbers continue to play to the Democrats, and the increasingly diverse demographics of more and more red states continue to push them closer and closer to the
Democratic blue zone. This 2014 election result isn't great for Democrats, but 2016 looks a LOT brighter--both for the White House and the
Senate...and perhaps even for the House.
Wouldn't that be a delight?
Half of all filibusters that have ever been used were used by republicans in the 112th and 113th senate.
The GOP represent the 400 richest families in America.
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