Wisconsin’s Recall Madness Begins

AUTHOR

John Avlon

Nearly a third of Wisconsin’s state senators are facing recall elections with opponents funded by heavily armed national activist groups. John Avlon on how the resort to constant recalls undermines democracy—and why Wisconsin is only the opening act in a post–"Citizens United" world.

Jul 13, 2011 8:06 AM EDT



The first elections of 2012 started yesterday as the Wisconsin recalls got underway.

Tip O’Neil’s time-honored admonition that “all politics is local” has been turned on its head. Out-of-state activist groups now flood local elections with cash in an attempt to frame a national narrative. Welcome to the post-Citizens United world.

Yesterday’s Wisconsin elections were just preamble—Democratic primaries to determine which candidates would be sent to square off against a handful of Republican state senators. August is the main event, the general-election cheese-state rumble.

Both teams, Democrats and Republicans, have found reason to indulge in this unwise step into perpetual elections. Democrats need only three more seats to gain control of the state Senate and stop Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s agenda.

Republicans now think that two can play that game and have targeted a few vulnerable Democrat state senators for dereliction of duty—in this case, fleeing the state for two weeks while trying to block a vote on the budget and public-sector-union reform.

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The fact that recall elections are now a reflexive recourse says more about how our national politics have changed than how Wisconsin has changed.
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Wisconsin residents went to the polls Tuesday for primary races ahead of recall elections next month., Dinesh Ramde / AP Photo

Conservative and liberal activist groups all see Wisconsin as a winnable fight that can frame future elections, determining who has momentum going into 2012.

In total, nine state Senate seats are being contested in Wisconsin’s recall election—six Republicans and three Democrats—out of 33 total.

Adding to the drama is the fact that “dirty tricks” were alleged in this round, courtesy of Republicans running in the Democratic primaries. It was a legal but ethically dodgy exploitation of Wisconsin’s open-primary laws, which not only allow all voters to participate in partisan primaries, but allow any voter to run in the partisan primaries. While no doubt weaselly, the plot ended up failing completely. All six of the candidates backed by the Democratic Party won their primary easily on Tuesday night, as expected.
But make no mistake: this is a still-unfolding national race. Flash back to this past winter, when the Wisconsin state capital was inundated by protesters wielding union placards and clustered in drum circles, while conservative groups marshaled their forces by sending funds trying to shore up their support with counterprotests.

Now, national activist groups are flooding these obscure off-cycle elections with special-interest cash to push their ideological agenda. Local representation is almost an afterthought. The worst is still ahead.

Democracy for America, a Vermont progressive organization, has announced that it will pour in an unprecedented $1.5 million into these recall races, which normally have cumulative budgets of a few hundred thousand dollars. For unions like the AFL-CIO, this is far from their first rodeo. According to the MacIver Institute, the AFL-CIO has sent more than $3.8 million to the “We Are Wisconsin” super PAC since May, including more than $750,000 since the start of July. In the last two months, the public-sector-union collective AFSCME has sent more than $1.8 million in the last two months, including $800,000 on July 7 alone.

On the other side of the aisle, the six registered Republican candidates running in Tuesday’s primary raised more than $2 million in direct donations, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. But—and this is a big “but”—independent expenditures such as for television ads had not yet been calculated, and the biggest expenditures were unlikely to be registered before the August recalls. The total cash tributaries will no doubt get more murky and torrential.

Add to this anticipation the fact that as much as 90 percent of the money raised for these local campaigns will come from out of state. Taken together, you’ve got something rotten in Racine.

Keep in mind there is no great Wisconsin tradition of the recall. The most recent echo was a successful effort to yank a state senator who reversed his pledge to vote against a tax to fund the new Milwaukee Brewers stadium. The fact that it is now a reflexive recourse says more about how our national politics have changed than how Wisconsin has changed. All politics is now national.

The recall’s most recent resurgence surfaced in the early 2011 attempt to kick Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser off the bench. It was widely touted in liberal circles as a referendum on Walker’s policies, which would have enjoyed the corollary effect of stopping his agenda in the courts.

After a brief election-night liberal victory lap on MSNBC and elsewhere, it turned out that the conservative justice had squeaked out a narrow reelection. But whatever “side” you identify with in this fight, the whole spectacle gave reason for sobriety. Our third branch of government is becoming poisoned by partisan politics—judges considered ideological proxy votes, automatic extensions of state legislative politics instead of independent thinkers making up their own minds on the merits.

And like it or not, Wisconsin’s influence in national politics ain’t going away. The newly elected head of the RNC with the Harry Potter–esque name, Reince Priebus, hails from Frank Lloyd Wright’s home state as well as the once and future GOP poster boy of fiscal conservatism, Paul Ryan.

In a larger sense, the Wisconsin protests are an unwelcome mirror-image extension of the collective freakout on the far right after the election of Barack Obama—overly emotional reactions that seemed to confuse losing an election with living under tyranny. Politics follows the lines of physics: every action creates an equal and opposite reaction.

Elections have consequences. If Walker misreads the electorate by pursuing an agenda that is too extreme, the opportunity to send him a rejection slip is available in regularly scheduled elections. But by advancing the idea that elections can be undone if people only protest hard enough ends up degrading our democracy. It makes the job of governing—which is hard enough—take a back seat to a cycle of constant threats that makes reasoning together all but impossible.

Because no matter who wins these recall elections, the stability of governing in a democracy is the real loser. It will not be the end. After all, Walker will be eligible for recall after one year in office, so mark your calendars for January 2012.

Left unchecked, the logical extension is that in the future, everyone might govern for 15 minutes.

ALEC Exposed: Sabotaging Healthcare

Wendell Potter

July 12, 2011 

This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series.

Days after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, I arrived at the spring 2010 meeting of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) in Denver, where a fellow consumer representative introduced me to one of the hundreds of industry lobbyists swarming the convention center. “She’s somebody we can work with,” he said, clearly convinced that she would deal with us in good faith, even if we might disagree on certain policy issues. Over the next several months, other consumer reps agreed that she really did seem to want to do what was right for patients, even if the organization that paid her salary often seemed to care more about profits than people.

I was skeptical. I knew from my two decades as an insurance company executive that the industry often conducts duplicitous charm offensives, assuring the public that insurers support consumer-focused reform while executives work surreptitiously to block any reform that might curtail profits. So I was not shocked when I found out that Joan Gardner, executive director of state services for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association’s Office of Policy and Representation, had been keeping something important from us. As a leading member of ALEC’s Health and Human Services Task Force, she’d been helping write legislation designed to ensure that any healthcare reform implemented at the state level would benefit insurance companies far more than their policyholders. She was also leading an effort to recruit more dues-paying members to ALEC.

I learned of Gardner’s clandestine work when a reform advocate alerted me to a story about a resolution her ALEC committee had drafted in 2008 to forbid “government-mandated health care.” Apparently fearful that a bill would reach Obama’s desk that would allow states to establish single-payer systems, ALEC crafted the Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act, which, despite its Orwellian name, was written to deny the citizens of any state that passed it the freedom to set up such a system. By declaring that Congressional attempts to regulate health insurance at the federal level would be unconstitutional, it would effectively ban not only a federal single-payer proposal but also a federally created health insurance exchange and a federally operated public insurance option. ALEC has boasted that some forty-four states have introduced its Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act (which itself would not withstand a constitutional challenge). What it hasn’t acknowledged is that attempts to pass healthcare-nullification bills have failed in at least twenty-five states. Only eight states have passed the act so far.

Reviewing ALEC’s healthcare-related bills and resolutions from the past few years makes it clear that insurers realized early on that the best way to block the profit-threatening provisions of any federal reform would be to attack them at the state level through ALEC. With Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and the White House in 2009, insurers assumed some kind of healthcare reform was inevitable, so they adopted a strategy to shape rather than stop reform. Its top five goals became:

§ Keeping single-payer proposals off the table;

§ Ensuring that the final bill contain a clause requiring all Americans not eligible for an existing federal program to buy coverage from a private insurance company;

§ Preventing the new law from establishing a government-run plan (the “public option”) that would compete with private insurers;

§ Making sure that the reform law is implemented primarily at the state level, to keep the federal government from assuming any significant new oversight of private insurers’ business practices; and

§ Keeping any new regulations and consumer protections to a minimum.

Insurers achieved their first four goals, with ALEC playing a key role in a well-coordinated effort to keep the most progressive proposals from being enacted at the state or federal level. Where it fell short was in blocking provisions of the law that will impose more rigorous oversight of insurance companies’ business practices. After Obama signed the bill into law, the industry turned its attention to influencing how the new regulations would be written (by the NAIC and federal bureaucrats) and how the law would be implemented in the states.

As its archive reveals, ALEC has been at work for more than a decade on what amounts to a comprehensive wish list for insurers: from turning over the Medicare and Medicaid programs to them—assuring them a vast new stream of revenue—to letting insurers continue marketing substandard yet highly profitable policies while giving them protection from litigation. Republican lawmakers continue to promote model bills from the 1990s. Some of the most far-reaching and industry-favorable measures adopted by ALEC over the years:

§ The Resolution Urging Congress to Create Private Financing of the Medicare Program, initially adopted in 1998, calls on Congress to privatize Medicare by permitting the creation of Individual Medical Accounts, similar to Health Savings Accounts that accompany high-deductible health plans and that have become attractive tax shelters for well-to-do Americans. Individual Medical Accounts, along with vouchers, are a feature of Representative Paul Ryan’s federal proposal to privatize Medicare.

§ The Resolution on Medicaid Funding Through a Federal Block Grant, adopted in 2008, urges Congress to replace the current financing mechanism for Medicaid with block grants, as Ryan proposes. In another proposal to privatize the program, the Access to Medicaid Act, beneficiaries would receive vouchers to buy insurance policies in the private market.

§ The Health Care Choice Act for States, adopted in 2007, would permit the sale of individual health insurance policies across state lines, which would not be subject to the mandated benefits required by in-state policies. The effect would be to make comprehensive policies significantly more expensive than they already are. (Wyoming was the first state to enact this model bill, in 2010, followed by Georgia and Maine this year.)

§ The Non-Economic Damage Awards Act, adopted in 2002, would limit medical malpractice awards for damages like pain and suffering to $250,000, making such lawsuits infeasible. (Few lawyers would be willing to represent patients if the total award were limited to that amount because they probably would not be able to cover their costs.) Insurers and the American Medical Association have joined forces in lobbying for such tort reform.

In sum, ALEC’s model legislation would not only undermine the consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act; it would shred the social safety net for the most vulnerable among us: older, disabled and poorer Americans, and those who become victims of a system that is supposed to heal, not harm.

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Vatican Reverses Stance On Gay Marriage After Meeting Tony And Craig

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VATICAN CITY—In a stunning and unexpected reversal of long-standing doctrine, Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed the Roman Catholic Church's unequivocal support for gay marriage Tuesday, just hours after meeting Stonington, CT couple Tony Ruggiero and Craig Housinger.

Enlarge ImageTony and Craig, whom Vatican officials called "a truly great match."

The papal decree—which authorizes priests to administer the sacrament of holy matrimony to same-sex partners and explicitly states that "homosexual relations between two consenting adults is not, and never has been, a sin"—was reportedly a direct result of the pope sharing an afternoon of engaging conversation and hearty laughter with the gay couple.

"Not only are Tony and Craig complete sweethearts, but anyone who spends more than two minutes with them can see they're clearly perfect for each other," said Benedict, who in the past has described homosexual behavior as a grave disease that threatens all of humanity. "They're fun, gracious, and simply wonderful company. And you can tell they have something special just by the way they look at each other."

"They're soulmates, really," added the pope, smiling. "Allowing them to formalize their union in the Church is the least we could do for them."

Vatican officials said the vacationing couple and the Supreme Pontiff met during a routine papal audience at St. Peter's Basilica, and "really hit it off" after discovering shared interests in photography, the piano, and Spanish cuisine.

Enlarge ImagePope Benedict XVI claims that any law respecting the wishes of Tony and Craig is "a law I support wholeheartedly."

Though sources said the 84-year-old Benedict, a lifelong scholar of antigay ecclesiastical law, initially appeared skeptical upon meeting the pair, he was reportedly put at ease after Housinger spoke a few humorous lines to the pope in his native German and Ruggiero effusively complimented his gold cuff links, touching off a friendly conversation that effectively upended 2,000 years of Roman Catholic teachings.

"They were witty and cultured, but also very friendly—I really don't meet too many people like that," the pope said of the couple, who excitedly suggested to him several off-the-beaten-path sights and "to die for" restaurants after he mentioned an upcoming trip to Buenos Aires. "Craig has a great passion for Italian painting, and I learned a lot from him about the Church's collection of Caravaggios. He's a real Renaissance man."

"I know what scripture says about homosexuals, but when I stop to think about it, I can't get past the fact that the Bible is just a book, and Tony and Craig are real people," Benedict added. "Love is love. Man-woman, man-man, woman-woman—who cares? The Catholic Church recognizes it's not the Stone Age anymore."

Invited on a personal tour of the Vatican, Housinger and Ruggiero were said to have charmed the College of Cardinals with amusing anecdotes from their seven-year relationship, displaying a playful yet tender affection for each other that deeply moved the clergy.

High-ranking officials within the Holy See said they were pleased to learn both partners were practicing Catholics who attend mass regularly, and were surprised to discover Housinger was employed as a general contractor, a profession none of them considered gay at all.

According to reports, the highlight of the afternoon came when the couple shared photographs of their adopted 14-month-old Cambodian daughter, Lorraine, whom the swooning clergy universally described as "angelic."

"Even if you just meet Tony and Craig for a few minutes, it's easy to see how supportive and patient they are," said the Most Rev. Francesco Coccopalmerio, the Vatican's top expert on canon law, who noted the two partners have a stronger bond than some of the married couples he knows. "You can tell they've created a perfect household for a child to grow up in. I just wish everybody could be raised by parents as devoted and caring as them."

Following a warm farewell in which Ruggiero hugged Benedict—an incident the Holy Father described as "not even weird or anything"—Vatican leaders are said to have unanimously agreed that it was "completely hypocritical" for anyone, especially those who have taken a vow of celibacy, to tell people whom they can or cannot share their lives with.

"If Tony and Craig want to exchange vows before God and their friends and family, where's the harm in that?" Benedict said. "It's not as if they're offending the sanctity of life, like those wicked birth control users who will toil for all eternity in hellfire."

Obama Raises a Whopping $86M, But Not As Grassroots as They Want You To Think

Micah L. Sifry | July 13, 2011 - 9:28am | Email This!

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina has announced that Obama 2012 has raised a whopping $86 million in the second quarter of this year, shattering George W. Bush's prior record of $50 million in a quarter, and way ahead of Obama's fundraising pace four years ago. The official report will be filed with the FEC this Friday, but Messina continued the campaign's tradition of reporting "first" to its grassroots email list via YouTube video. The numbers are impressive, but there's a catch.

Messina emphasizes the grass-roots base of Obama 2012 in the video, rattling off statistic after statistic: 31,000 face-to-face meetings conducted by organizers; 290,000 conversations; 650 local organizing meetings; 60 field offices set up across the country. These are impressive numbers, and further indication of how the Obama team tracks field data.

But when it comes to the hard numbers of campaign finance, Messina tries to pull a fast one on his supposedly grassroots audience when it comes to describing, as he puts it, "who we raised it from." He proudly touts the campaign's 552,462 individual donors who gave more than 680,000 contributions in the second quarter. If you had any doubt that we are living in an age of mass participation in national politics, enabled by the internet's ease of communication, here's more proof. Ninety-eight percent of all those contributions, he notes, were in amounts of $250 or less, with an average donation size of just $69, proof of Obama's roots "small dollar, ordinary people" kind of politics.

There's just one problem with this claim: The $86 million raised by the Obama campaign in this quarter didn't come with an average donation size of $69. That's because, as Messina notes near the video's end, $38 million of that whopping total went to the Democratic National Committee, via the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that Obama controls. At OVF fundraisers, a donor can give up to $5,000 to the presidential campaign committee and another $30,800 to the DNC. (Here's an invitation to one that happened recently in Chicago, starring Rahm Emanuel.)

"We can bet," says Michael Malbin of the Campaign Finance Institute, which is working on analyzing the details buried in the campaign's forthcoming 15,000 page report to the FEC, "that most of the party money came from people who maxed out. " He added in an email to me, "Interestingly, by going to people for 30K this calendar year, he can go back again next year for another 30K. It's one of the perqs of incumbency." An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics of DNC fundraising between January and May 2011 found that the committee raised $11 million from donors contributing more than $30,000 compared with just $3 million raised in that category by the Republican National Committee. Big checks of $10,000 and up were 38% of that haul, compared to just 18% in that category for Republicans.

Multiply 680,000 by $69 and you get about $46.9 million. Messina's appears to want things both ways--a record-breaking money haul AND the appearance of being a campaign "owned" by ordinary people. That may be the case to the extent that you think maxing-out donors from Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood are "ordinary people."

Here's Messina's video:

14 Year Rule? Not So Much

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2011

Jonathan Rauch has been asking for it this week over at Sullivan's place, so he's gonna get. But not on the subject of blogging: on the subject of presidential elections. Rauch is pushing his idea that "you can't be elected president in America if it takes you longer than 14 years to make it from governor or senator to president or vice president." Sorry, but it's bunk.

Here's the original piece Rauch wrote, way back in 2003. At that point, he could argue that every president but one elected beginning with Teddy Roosevelt fit, and 12 of 18 losing major-party nominees from 1904 through 2000. Since then, he's one-for-one with newly elected presidents, but 0-for-2 on losing nominees: John Kerry has been in the Senate since 1985, and John McCain since 1987, so neither passing his test -- meaning that only 12 of 20 losing nominees fit.

As Rauch admitted in 2003, one can in fact come up with all sorts of patterns, although he later claims that it's hard to find one that works for a century. I disagree! Let's see if I can do it...we're talking 19 people, and he's giving himself one mulligan. Here's a list by date of birth -- guess what? None of the 19 were born in the three months from February 7 through May 7. That's a quarter of the year, and no presidents! Or: only one president was born from the 16th through the 26th day of the month. That's 11 days, over a third of all possible days -- and yet only a single exception defied the 16-26 rule. In fact, McKinley qualifies under both of those rules, so make it 19 or 20 out of 20. I'm too lazy to look up which day of the week they were born, but odds are that there's a day missing...try some stuff about the alphabet, name length, shoe size, whatever -- it's very, very easy to find that kind of thing. And while I'd be pressed to come up with a theory explaining the 16-26 thing (c'mon, creative commenters, I know you can do it), I'm sure I could think of some plausible-sounding reason that modern presidents aren't born in late winter/early spring.

OK, I should get to the real point here, which is that we know a whole lot about who wins presidential elections, and we can almost certainly eliminate any major proposed factor that is candidate-based and large. There just isn't enough unexplained variation, once you account for party and familiar "fundamentals" such as the economy and war, for it to be possible that there's a large candidate (or campaign factor). Some, yes. Two points, three, maybe. That's important, and well worth learning more about -- and if you're running a campaign, well worth working hard to exploit, if it's possible to exploit it. But if you think that the candidates' height, or hair color, or handedness, or whatever, matters, it just really can't, very much.

In the general election.

For the nomination, we actually know very little about what factors produce nominees, and we certainly can't rule out anything that makes some sense without testing it first. If you told me that the best looking candidate has a large advantage in nomination contests, I'd be open to the possibility that it's true. If you tell me that about the general election, and you're saying that large is more than a couple of points, then I'm going to tell you that it just isn't plausible. From that it's easy to conclude that if any candidate or campaign based effect "works" for the general election but not for nominations, it's almost certainly bunk. Which is exactly where I'll file Rauch's 14 year rule.

U.S.’s Aaa Debt Rating Placed on Review for Possible Downgrade by Moody’s

By Greg Chang - Jul 13, 2011 5:02 PM ET  

The U.S. had its Aaa bond rating placed on review for possible downgrade by Moody’s Investors Service, which cited the “rising possibility” that the debt limit won’t be raised on a timely basis.

“There is a small but rising risk of a short-lived default,” Moody’s said.

Moody’s Places U.S. on Review for Downgrade As Debt Talks Stall 

By John Detrixhe - Jul 13, 2011 6:01 PM ET

 

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July 13 (Bloomberg) -- Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Capital, talks about the outlook for Federal Reserve policy and the U.S. economy. He speaks with Carol Massar and Matt Miller on Bloomberg Television's "Street Smart." (Source: Bloomberg)

 

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July 13 (Bloomberg) -- Steven Blitz, a senior economist at ITG Investment Research, and Joseph McAlinden, chief investment officer at Catalpa Capital LLC, talk about negotiations between lawmakers over raising the U.S. debt ceiling. Moody’s Investors Service put the U.S. under review for a credit rating downgrade as talks to raise the government’s $14.3 trillion debt limit stall. Blitz and McAlinden also discuss the outlook for Federal Reserve monetary policy. They speak with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Television's "Taking Stock." (Source: Bloomberg)

Young Americans for Liberty club member Tony Burke, center, asks UC Irvine students to sign a petition to congress protesting the national debt on April 5, 2011 in Irvine, Calif. Photographer: Jebb Harris/Orange County Register/AP

Moody’s Investors Service put the U.S. under review for a credit rating downgrade as talks to raise the government’s $14.3 trillion debt limit stall, adding to concern that political gridlock will lead to a default.

The Aaa ratings of financial institutions directly linked to the U.S. government, including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Banks, and the Federal Farm Credit Banks, were also put on review for cuts, Moody’s said in a statement today.

The U.S., rated Aaa since 1917, was put on review for the first time since 1995 on concern the debt limit will not be raised in time to prevent a missed payment of interest or principal on outstanding bonds and notes even though the risk remains low, Moody’s said. The rating would likely be reduced to the Aa range and there is no assurance that Moody’s would return its top rating even if a default is quickly cured.

“It certainly underscores the importance of passing the debt ceiling and not putting us in default status, and making sure there’s a longer term fiscal plan to contain spending and the deficit we’ve been running up over the last few years,” said Anthony Cronin, a Treasury bond trader at Societe General SA in New York, one of the 20 primary dealers that trade with the Federal Reserve. “Maybe it’s the impetus to say we’ll need more of a concession.”

Dollar, Bonds

The dollar weakened and Treasuries were little changed after the Moody’s statement. IntercontinentalExchange Inc.’s Dollar Index, which tracks the greenback against the currencies of six U.S. trading partners, including the euro, yen and pound, slid for a second day, shedding 1.1 percent.

The 10-year note yield was little changed at 2.88 percent at 5:31 p.m. in New York, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader prices, after increasing earlier as much as eight basis points to 2.96 percent. The yield dropped to 2.81 percent yesterday, the lowest since Dec. 1. The price of the 3.125 percent security due in May 2021 declined 1/32, or 31 cents per $1,000 face amount, to 102 2/32.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said he has taken steps to prevent a federal default until Aug. 2, using accounting measures that involve two retirement funds. The U.S. reached its borrowing limit on May 16.

The Moody’s announcement is a “timely reminder” and that Congress must “move quickly” to avoid default, the Treasury said in a statement today.

Debt Talks

“What we’re looking for is a raising of the limit. It doesn’t matter the process that they get there,” Steven Hess, the senior credit officer at Moody’s in New York, said in a telephone interview. “The rating outlook will be determined by the longer-term debt trajectory.”

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell proposed a “last choice option” yesterday that effectively would grant President Barack Obama power to raise the debt limit in installments. McConnell’s plan would let the president raise the limit in three stages unless Congress disapproves by a two-thirds majority, while Obama would also be required to propose offsetting spending cuts. The spending reductions would be advisory, and the debt-ceiling increase would occur regardless of whether lawmakers enact the cuts.

“I think it reflects what we all know -- that this is a serious time and serious discussions and we can’t continue to have people not contribute to solving this problem,” said Senator Patty Murrayof Washington, the No. 4 Democratic leader in the chamber.

Boehner Reaction

“As Speaker Boehner has warned for months, if the White House does not take action soon to address our nation’s debt crisis by reining in spending, the markets may do it for us,” saidMichael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio. “This action by Moody’s today reinforces the Speaker’s warning.”

Standard & Poor’s put the U.S. government on notice on April 18 that it risks losing its AAA credit rating unless policy makers agree on a plan by 2013 to reduce budget deficits and the national debt. The firm said at the time that there’s a one-in-three chance that the rating might be cut within two years and that its “baseline assumption” is that Congress and the Obama administration will come to terms on a plan to reduce record deficits.

S&P would lower its sovereign top-level AAA ranking to D, the last rung on its scale if the U.S. can’t pay its payments because of a failure to raise the debt ceiling, John Chambers, chairman of the company’s sovereign rating committee, said June 30. Moody’s said it would probably assign a position in the Aa range, or within three steps of its highest level.

The U.S. is among 17 countries, from Australia to Canada to Switzerland, rated Aaa by Moody’s. S&P gives 18 countries its top ranking.