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Sunday, December 18, 2011

Boehner: House Opposes Senate Payroll Tax Bill

SUNDAY SHOWS

Updated: December 18, 2011 | 1:56 p.m.
December 18, 2011 | 10:48 a.m.
Chet Susslin
House Speaker John Boehner
The Senate’s two-month payroll tax extension is dead on arrival in the House. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, made that perfectly clear Sunday morning as he said that Congress will have to negotiate a deal closer to the House-passed one-year extension  before members leave for the holidays.
“Well, it’s pretty clear that I and our members oppose the Senate bill – it’s only for two months,” Boehner said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “If you talk to employers, they talk about the uncertainty. How can you do tax policy for two months?”
The remarks came a day after a conference call among House members in which even seasoned moderate Republicans joined the roster of tea party-inspired freshman in vehemently opposing the bill. Or, as one senior House GOP aide put it, "If you're a fan of the Senate bill, the situation is not good. That will never pass and almost no one in the conference wants it."
Unsurprisingly, Boehner’s comments don’t sit well with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The two-month extension he negotiated last week with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. – after Boehner left the talks mid-week, challenging the Senate to come up with a plan – sailed through the Senate 89 to 10 on Saturday.
By seeking to reopen the Senate compromise, Boehner is essentially trying to force Reid and Senate Democrats to negotiate twice.
“When we met last week, Speaker Boehner requested that Senator McConnell and I work out a compromise. Neither side got everything they wanted, but we forged a middle ground that passed the Senate by an overwhelming bipartisan majority," Reid said in a statement Sunday.
Reid's statement did not suggest any openness to a conference committee to iron out the two chambers' differences. McConnell, meanwhile, is publicly supporting Boehner's call for a conference committee.
"The House and Senate have both passed bipartisan bills to require the President to finally make a decision on the Keystone XL jobs, and to extend additional unemployment insurance, the temporary payroll tax cut and seniors’ access to medical care," McConnell spokesman Don Stewart said. "The House and the President both want a full-year extension. The best way to resolve the difference between the two-month extension and the full-year bill, and provide certainty for job creators, employees and the long-term unemployed, is through regular order, as the Speaker suggested."
The widespread House GOP loathing for the bill is driven by both legislative and political concerns.  
Republicans believe as a matter of policy that a two-month extension creates the very kind of economic uncertainty they have railed against for nearly three years; they have no interest in keeping taxpayers and Medicare-participating doctors on edge, wondering if the policy will be extended in two months.
House GOP members also know the bill wouldn’t play out well for them politically, House GOP sources said. They see themselves getting crushed by a short-term outcome now and continued finger-wagging later from President Obama on extending the payroll tax cut, which would allow Democrats to appear more aggressive on tax cuts than Republicans.
And it’s no secret the American Medical Association opposes the two-month "doc fix" to protect doctors from a scheduled 27 percent cut in reimbursements for Medicare beneficiaries – a scenario that would create intense lobbying pressure until February, something House Republicans want to avoid.
And while it is frequently asserted the House GOP problem is between Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., a more insidious tug-of-war appears to be the culprit in this case. Boehner and McConnell – usually closely aligned, as in the case of the debt-ceiling debacle this summer – are apparently at odds over the end-of-year package. Boehner never signaled to McConnell in their private talks last week that he would accept the two-month deal being negotiated with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, aides said.
Boehner is now confronting a very real sense among rank-and-file House Republicans that McConnell either rolled Boehner or treated the House bill so dismissively in the end-game negotiations that the House GOP must rebel to assert its legislative power and preferences.
Rather than pass the Senate bill – which President Obama embraced Saturday – Congress should assemble a formal joint House-Senate conference to hash out a deal in regular order, Boehner said Sunday.
“We’ve got two weeks to get this done,” Boehner said. “Let’s do it the right way.”
Senate Democrats, however, emphasized that they cut their two-month agreement with McConnell with the understanding the Senate Republican leader was negotiating on Boehner's behalf. Speaking Friday, Boehner did not object to a two-month deal as long as it included Keystone language.
"Last week, Speaker Boehner sat in a meeting with Leader Reid and Leader McConnell and he gave Leader McConnell his proxy to negotiate a bipartisan compromise," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a Sunday statement. "He made public comments promising to live by whatever agreement the Senate reached. He said, 'If the Senate acts, I’m committed to bringing the House back—we can do it within 24 hours—to deal with whatever the Senate does.' The Senate came to a deal, and now Speaker Boehner must keep his word."
"The Speaker needs to put the Senate's bipartisan compromise on the floor and let House Democrats and the remaining sane members of the House Republican caucus vote for it," Schumer said. "Otherwise, taxes will rise on the middle class, and the House Republicans alone will be to blame. If House Republicans let taxes go up on the middle class on January 1, it could very well cost them the majority in the House next year. And they will deserve it."
House Democrats were also quick to lambaste Boehner for his remarks.
“It is time for Speaker Boehner to demonstrate real leadership and bring [the Senate bill] up for a vote tomorrow,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md in a statement. “We are witnessing a pattern of Speaker Boehner walking away from bipartisan compromises to kow-tow to his extreme tea party wing of his caucus.”
Going into any negotiations, House Republicans are determined not to forfeit what they see as a huge concession from Senate Democrats: the decision to drop the millionaire surtax as the means of financing the payroll tax cut extension. They don't want to give that up now after having remained unified and winning it, despite intense and at times unnerving political heat.
A senior House GOP aide familiar with the emerging strategy and ever-rising rank-and-file antipathy to the Senate bill summarized the situation:
"We have to get out of the cul-de-sac of the Senate only being able to produce the lowest common denominator and then trying to force a terrible product on the House," the aide said. "Our members are fed up with that and are ready to have a fight if that's what it takes to get a good product."
Boehner on Sunday suggested that compromise shouldn’t be difficult to reach, the record of this Congress notwithstanding.
“I think if you look at the House-passed bill, we did everything the president asked for,” Boehner said. “We paid for this, offset it with reasonable reductions in spending. Ninety percent of those reductions, frankly, the president agrees with.”
Asked if they could reach a compromise on the extension package by Christmas, the Speaker responded, “How about tomorrow?”
Daniel Friedman and Shane Goldmacher contributed.

Last US soldiers leave Iraq, ending long military presence

Progressive think tank draws on government, nonpartisan sources for its statistics         





By Brad Knickerbocker Staff writer updated 12/17/2011 11:16:20 PM ET 

Reckoning the costs of war in Iraq will take years, especially the impact on US prestige and power in the world. Historians, political scientists, and economists will write doctoral dissertations on the subject, and some will devote careers to calculating and analyzing the data and each others’ conclusions — as continues to be the case with the Vietnam War. More world news from the Christian Science Monitor Analysts Matthew Duss and Peter Juul of the Center for American Progress have taken a first cut at calculating the costs of the American war in Iraq. The center is a progressive, nonprofit think tank and advocacy organization in Washington, founded in 2003 by former Clinton administration chief of staff John Podesta. The organization's inclinations are clearly left-of-center, but the figures in its “Iraq War Ledger” are taken from nonpartisan sources, including the Congressional Research Service, icasualties.org, the Defense Department, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the Centers for Disease Control, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 

Here are some of the main points:

Human costs 

Coalition deaths totaled 4,803, of which 4,484 (93 percent) were American.

The number of Americans wounded was 32,200. At least 463 non-Iraqi contractors were killed.

Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated to total between 103,674 and 113,265.
 The UNHCR says the war resulted in 1.24 million internally displaced persons and more than 1.6 million refugees.

 Financial costs 

The Congressional Research Service puts the dollar cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom at $806 billion.

 In their book “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimate the projected total cost of veterans’ health care and disability payments to be between $422 billion and $717 billion. 


Veterans 

More than 2 million US service members have served in Iraq or Afghanistan (many in both wars). The total number of Iraq/Afghanistan veterans eligible for Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care is 1,250,663, half of whom (625,384) have used VA health care since 2002. The number of Iraq/Afghanistan veterans diagnosed with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is at least 168,854 — more than a quarter of those who have used VA health care. The suicide rate for Iraq/Afghanistan veterans using VA health care in FY 2008 was 38 suicides per 100,000 veterans — more than three times the national suicide rate for the previous year.

 Iraq reconstruction 

Total funding: $182.27 billion.

 Iraqi government funds (including Coalition Provisional Authority funding): $107.41 billion.

 International funds: $13.03 billion.

 US funds (2003-2011): $61.83 billion.

As a basis for comparison, the US after World War II spent $34.3 billion in Germany and $17.6 billion in Japan on post-war reconstruction. (All figures in 2011 dollars.)

 The cost of war is more than numbers, of course. Losing a family member or a lifetime of disability are incalculable.

 “The end of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a considerable global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic partnered with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future,” Duss and Juul of the Center for American Progress write. “But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy.”

 That’s a political and historical judgment that no doubt will be debated for years.