Tag Archives: Republicans

What Sen. Spector’s Party Switch Tells California Voters

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Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen (“Single-Bullet“) Specter switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party this week.  Rush Limbaugh reacted to this news by welcoming Specter’s departure, and added,
“take McCain with you.”

Specter left because the extremist wing of the Republican Party — the ones who listen to and agree with Rush Limbaugh and will tolerate absolutely no compromise of any kind from the most extreme conservative positions — have taken over and are driving others out.  This rightmost element, who call themselves the only “real Republicans” have a special name for people like Arlen Specter and John McCain.  They call them “RINOs.”  RINO stands for “Republican In Name Only” and refers to Republicans who are not conservative enough to meet approval of the absolutists.  (What is conservative enough?  Half of Texas Republicans want Texas to secede from the United States.)

Arlen Specter is hardly a liberal.  He has a solidly conservative voting record, (after switching parties he voted against President Obama’s budget), but not conservative enough for the hard core purists.  John McCain won the ire of this element for not supporting torture.

The Limbaugh branch of the party have been working to drive moderate-right members like Specter and McCain out, and are increasingly successful.  Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, another target of this element, warned that,
 

“being a Republican moderate sometimes feels like being a cast member
of ‘Survivor’ — you are presented with multiple challenges, and you
often get the
distinct feeling that you’re no longer welcome in the tribe.”

This demonstrates just how far the Republican Party has moved from its roots.  They have drifted so far away from their mission that even their last Presidential candidate is being urged to leave the party!  They have drifted so far from their mission that the “party of Lincoln” has a solid contingent supporting having their states secede from the Union!

This hard-core extremism is also being demonstrated in California, where not a single Repubilcan will vote for a budget — any budget — because their strategy for the state is to “let it go into bankruptcy, let it go off a cliff, we need to prove a point.”  The reason that crazy-sounding line has quotation marks around it is because it is a quote.  It is also the definition of extremism.  And, combined with the 2/3 rule that lets them block budgets, it is the reason California is becoming ungovernable.

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The Budget Agreement

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California finally passed a budget.  It is a bad budget, cutting essential
services, borrowing a tremendous amount, selling our lottery revenues and giving
a huge tax break to big out-of-state companies. 
Each of these came from demands by the very, very few Republicans who agreed
to vote for the budget at all will, of course, just get us through another year
while making it ever more difficult to pass future
budgets.

California’s 2/3 requirement means that a few
corporate-funded extremists can hold the rest of us hostage.  So they had to make a terrible deal to get the
three Republican votes required by the 2/3 rule, or else lay of tens of
thousands and stop paying California’s bills. 
We the People of California were all held hostage to that threat. 

The resulting deal was that if We, the People want schools,
police, firefighters, roads & bridges, courts, all the things our
government does for us, we had to agree
to tax breaks for the big multinational corporations that kick in so much money
to help elect the anti-government extremists. So the big companies – the kind
that come in and crush local California businesses – get a big tax break while
the rest of us have our taxes raised. 
Oh, and the oil companies can continue to take our oil out of the ground
for free and then sell it back to us.

Here are some reactions around the California netroots:

David
Dayen at Calitics,

 “The cuts are going to be really, really bad:
10% across the board for education, huge cuts for public transit operations,
health care, etc.  The new revenues basically fill in the loss of revenue
from massive unemployment.

[. . .] The “single sales
factor apportionment,” which is the massive business tax cut, doesn’t kick
in until FY2011, predictably and conveniently after Gov. Schwarzenegger is out
of office and it will be someone else’s problem to make up the revenue!
 It’s almost like somebody planned it that way!”

Richard
Holober at Consumer Federation of California,

 “The deal reported today does not call on all
California taxpayers to share in the sacrifice. Working Californians will face
billions in higher sales tax and income tax rates. But businesses win about one
billion dollars in new tax breaks.  $700 million in corporate tax cuts
result from a recalculation of how California taxes the profits of big
multinational corporations.   According to the Senate Analysis, the
windfall to multinational corporations, and the revenue loss to California will
eventually grow to $1.5 billion.”

Robert
Cruickshank at the Courage Campaign blog,

“The only way out, and the first
reform that we must undertake – the tree blocking the tracks, the door that
opens the path to all other reforms – is eliminating the 2/3 rule that
gives conservatives veto power over the state and turns the majority Democrats
into a minority party on fiscal matters. It’s been talked about frequently on
Calitics and in what remains of the media’s coverage of state politics. So it
seemed time for an in-depth discussion of the issue and the prospects for
restoring majority rule to California.

David
M. Greenwald at California Progress Report,

“Many Democrats and political
observers fear that Maldonado strong-arming the legislature may set a bad
precedent for future attempts at getting a budget on time.”

So here we are.  Our
structural problems have enabled extremists to increase … our structural
problems.  We are one more step down the
road to intentional ungovernability.

Over the next several months, we who love this state must act to fix this.  We must get rid of this 2/3 budget-vote requirement that allows extremists to hold us hostage.  An initiative changing the 2/3 vote requirement is long-overdue but we’ll need the support of every forward-thinking voter to make it happen.  Let’s work together to ensure that it does.

CA’s Budget Problem Is Paragraph 10

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Today’s San Jose Mercury News front page story is about California’s budget problem: that they are still one vote short.  But Californians reading the story are not told why one more vote is required, not are they told who it is required from — until the 10th paragraph.  The 10th paragraph reads,

The votes were there in the
Assembly. But in the Senate, only two Republican senators were prepared
to buck party orthodoxy and vote to raise taxes. Three were needed.

Even in this 10th paragraph readers are not informed that every Democrat is voting for the budget. 

Before this paragraph, readers are told that “lawmakers” cannot agree and that “the deal still was held hostage by the thinnest of margins.” But there is nothing telling them who or why. 

The reason this is such a problem is that the people of California need this information, to help them play their part in the functioning of our state government.  The voters need to know who to hold accountable or they will not make their wishes known through calls to their Assemblymember’s or Senator’s office.  And they can’t make informed decisions at election time. 

This is typical of stories about the budget impasse — across the state the major newspapers, radio and TV stations are not giving the voters the information they need in order to participate in their government.  The result is that the state is becoming ungovernable — and going broke.

So let’s be clear about what is happening here.  California’s elected Republicans have all signed a “no-new-taxes” pledge with Grover Norquist’s organization.  (He’s the guy who says the plan is to make government small enough to “drown in a bathtub.”)  So now they see the budget crisis as an opportunity to force mass layoffs of state employees and reductions in support for people who need things like state-supplied oxygen tanks.  They call that “reducing government.”  And even with all the budget cuts that the Democrats have all voted for, they still will not vote to pass a budget.  They want more, and then more, and then they want the state government to go away.

This is ideology. They repeat an ideological mantra that will ruin the state.  And they say this is their goal — to get rid of government.  They say government is bad.  They say government spending is bad.  They say taxes are bad.  They say corporations are good.  Ideology.

California can not continue to fund our schools, universities, roads, public safety, firefighters, health services, services to
the poor, blind and elderly, provide funding for local government, etc.
without additional revenues.  Do the Math (George Skelton, LA Times):

It’s Republican dogma in the Capitol that to vote for a tax increase is
“career-ending.” Even if true — and there’s evidence both ways — so
what?

These are folks, after all, who sermonize against making politics
a career, publicly pretend to worship term limits and preach the
virtues of private enterprise. You’d think they’d be eager to return to
the private sector. Yet, they’re afraid to risk losing out on their
next political job.

Another item not reported is that the Republicans demanded a huge tax cut for large corporations — the very kind that are killing off California’s smaller independent, job-creating businesses.
And they still won’t vote for the budget.  And the public still doesn’t have a chance to learn what is going on here.

The Press Is Fogging The Reason For The Budget Stalemate

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Friday morning’s San Francisco Chronicle story, Legislature’s approval rating at a record low, illustrates why California’s budget impasse continues. From the article,

“Democrats and the minority Republicans have hunkered down, with neither side willing to make the compromises needed to put together a budget plan that can garner the required two-thirds support.”

The budget problem is that reporting like this keeps the public from understanding what is happening in Sacramento.
Here is what is happening with the budget:

  • The Democrats have offered plan after plan, accepting deep budget cuts, some borrowing and offering various ways to raise revenue.
  • The Governor has offered a plan, with deep budget cuts, borrowing, and a temporarysales tax increase.
  • The Republicans have refused to compromise, refusing any budget that raises any revenue at all, not even asking the extremely wealthy to pay the same sales taxes that the rest of us have to pay.

It is just that simple. The Republicans have been blocking the budget and they are getting away with it because the press refuses to report that the Republicans are blocking the budget. If the press reported this simple fact public pressure would build and the Republicans would have to yield.
Update – A comment on the possible budget “compromise”: It just kicks the can down the road by delaying dealing with our problems. It doesn’t fix anything, and cuts essential services from the people who need government most. In fact it just makes it much, much harder to solve the problem in the next budget because it steals revenue from next year.

California’s Conservatives Want To Get What They DON’T Pay For

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California’s elected Republicans continue to block any and all efforts to pass a budget, because any honest budget must ask the wealthy and big corporations to pay their fair share. Even the Governor’s extremely modest one cent sales tax increase was too much for them.
So let’s talk about paying a fair share. David Sirota has a good column today at the Campaign for America’s Future blog, The Aristocrats, Part II – Starring George Will. In the column Sirota writes about wealthy Republicans who complain when regular people get decent pay for performing services that benefit … guess who … wealthy Republicans. Sirota writes,

In a column about underfinanced municipal pension systems today, Will expresses deep anger that veteran police, firefighters and municipal workers eventually get paid well for their services. In one California town on San Francisco Bay, Will tells us that – gasp! – “after just five years, all police and firefighters are guaranteed lifetime health benefits.” The horror.
Such salaries and benefits, of course, are part of a bargain: Enticing people to turn down the high-paying private-sector job and instead run into burning buildings (firefighters), do the dangerous work of apprehending criminals (police), disposing of sewage (garbage collectors) and administrating all the other services that conservatives pretend aren’t necessary (municipal workers) requires, well, an enticement – namely, the promise that making such a public-minded choice will result in decent and stable pay and benefits.
When you accept a public sector job, that’s the bargain: In exchange for being willing to do a tough job and accepting that you won’t have the chance to make hundreds of millions dollars like a corporate CEO, you are rewarded with the chance – if you play by the rules – to make a pretty good living.

Yes, there is a BARGAIN at work here. We, the People have built a system that has been working pretty darn well for the rich. We built a system of roads, schools, courts, police departments and firefighters. We built up a system of laws. We work in the factories and offices.

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FINALLY! The Republican Budget Proposal

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Last week, after months of blocking every single budget and budget compromise the Republicans revealed a budget proposal of their own. This was months later than it should have been, and does little good at this point. Of course it was widely panned and was voted down.
So what was in their budget? They offer a few new cuts — beyond the Governor’s already proposed cuts — in the “big government” they complain about. They refuse to raise revenues from any source.
Mostly, what the Republicans want to do is borrow. This is the big, responsible solution they offer: more and more borrowing. They want to borrow $2 billion from future lottery revenue. This, of course, means that $2 billion won’t be there when needed because they have been borrowed and spent it now.
It costs money to borrow. We have to pay interest. We also have to pay back the borrowed money. This adds up.
Remember, much of the current budget shortfall is because we are already paying interest on previous borrowing. All those bonds that Schwarzenegger floated to meet previous shortfalls without raising revenue were certainly not free.
But there are also other costs. The Republicans offer cuts in health care, assistance to the disabled (including housecleaning and home care) and of course help for the poor. Those cuts mean layoffs and income cuts and these will ripple out through the ecosystem that depends on the purchases these funds would have meant. This at a time of pending recession.
This is all instead of asking rich yacht and private jet buys to pay the same sales taxes the rest of us pay on everything we buy.
This is all instead of asking big oil companies to pay a fee to drill oil in our state to sell back to us for huge profits.
This is all instead of asking huge corporations to pay a reasonable commercial property tax.
This is all instead of asking vastly wealthy individuals to pay their fair share in return for the wealth they gained from the infrastructure that all of us built.
Shame on them. A small minority has been able to block California from passing a budget. They use money from these vastly wealthy individuals and corporations to run deceitful ads to keep just enough of them in office to block the things that will help the people of California restore our infrastructure and economy, just so a few wealthy interests can have a few extra bucks.