Motley Moose – Archive

Obama Invites Hill Leaders To Talk Debt Limit

President Barack Obama invited Congressional leaders to the White House to discuss raising the federal debt limit on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported. The meeting will take place at 5:30pm ET.

The Treasury Department announced Tuesday it was executing final emergency measures before it must raise the debt ceiling on Oct. 17. House Republicans are considering merging negotiations on the debt limit with a continuing resolution to re-open the shuttered government.

Here is what America’s Leaders look like:



People of color. Check. Women. Check. Token (ha!) old white guys. Check.

Yesterday, Eric Cantor tweeted that he was ready to negotiate and had his team in place. This is what Republican Leaders look like:



Old white guys in $4,000 suits. Check.

President Obama wants a clean debt limit increase and a clean Continuing Resolution. The only thing we know for sure is that the Affordable Care Act is not a bargaining chip.

Beyond The Shutdown, There’s A Bigger Battle Brewing

Congress has to raise the limit on the amount of money the federal government is allowed to borrow by Oct. 17. If the debt ceiling is not raised on time, President Obama warns that Washington won’t be able to keep paying its bills.

“It’d be far more dangerous than a government shutdown, as bad as a shutdown is,” Obama said Tuesday. “It would be an economic shutdown.”

No one is exactly sure what would happen if the government suddenly had to make do without a credit card. But experts agree that the fallout could be scary and far-reaching.

While government shutdowns are messy and disruptive, the country has lived through them before. The U.S. government, on the other hand, has never had to go cold turkey on borrowed money.

The much ballyhooed “GOP civil war” turned out to be 6 guys with rusted flintlocks as the Republican House terrorists voted to send the Continuing Resolution bill to keep the government funded back to the Senate with more Obamacare hostage-taking amendments. The Senate rejected that bill, demanding a clean CR.

House “leadership” met to hatch a plan to send the amendment festooned CR to conference:

UPDATE September 30, 10:53 p.m. ET:

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy’s office issued the following whip alert announcing a late-night vote on the above plan:

   The House will follow regular order and consider a rule that adopts a motion insisting on our last amendment and requesting a conference with the Senate. This will send the CR, our amendment, and our request for a conference back to the Senate.

WaPo – update 11:20 p.m. ET:

The House Rules Committee just voted to approve House GOP leaders’ plan for a conference committee, but it did so without Democratic support.

The vote was 7-4 along party lines, according to committee chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas).

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) refused to entertain the conference committee plan:

“We will not go to conference with a gun to our head,” Reid said late Monday night on the Senate floor. “The first thing the House has to do is pass a clean six-week C.R. They have that before them they can do that right now.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), Senate Budget Committee Chair, via TPM:

After blocking Senate Democrats’ attempts to start a budget conference 18 times over the past six months, Republicans are now scrambling to start a conference committee with mere minutes to go before a government shutdown. This is just the latest absurd and desperate attempt by Speaker Boehner to delay the inevitable–bringing a clean continuing resolution to the floor for Democrats and Republicans to vote on–and to continue pushing the country toward a completely unnecessary government shutdown. If Republicans were truly serious about avoiding a crisis they would pass the Senate’s short-term funding bill to remove the threat of a government shutdown immediately. We won’t negotiate while Republicans are threatening families and the economy with a crisis.

The Senate will be adjourned until 9:30am Tuesday.

  Make sure you let your peeps

  know where to find you!  

Republican House of Representatives pulls the pin.

GOP House Passes Bill To Delay Obamacare As Gov’t Shutdown Nears

Saturday [September 28] around midnight, the GOP-led House voted to pass three amendments to the continuing resolution which would repeal Obamacare’s medical device tax (248-174), delay the law by one year (231-192) and make sure U.S. troops are paid (423-0). The stopgap bill would keep the government funded through Dec. 15.

At the last minute, party leaders decided to add a special “conscience clause” delaying for one year an Obamacare rule that non-church employer health plans cover contraception without co-pays for female employees.

A senior Senate Democratic aide said it was “highly unlikely” that the Senate would return on Sunday. The White House also issued a statement on Saturday saying that the president would veto the the GOP’s bill. House Democrats were furious with their Republican colleagues.

The House adjourned until Monday at 10am. No Sunday sessions are planned for either house of Congress.

Today’s vote by House Republicans is pointless. The American people will not be extorted by Tea Party anarchists. #GOPshutdown

— Senator Harry Reid (@SenatorReid) September 28, 2013

Al Qaeda: "Our plan to destroy America hasn't worked. So we are endorsing the Republican Party instead"

— The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) September 28, 2013

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From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, President Obama says that on October 1st, a big part of the Affordable Care Act will go live and give uninsured Americans the chance to buy the same quality, affordable health care as everyone else. It is also the day when some Republicans in Congress might shut down the government just because they don’t like the law. The President urged Congress to both pass a budget by Monday and raise the nation’s debt ceiling so that we can keep growing the economy. He also said that those without health insurance and those who buy it on the individual market should visit HealthCare.gov to find out how to get covered on Tuesday.

  Make sure you let your peeps

  know where to find you!  

When President Obama speaks to friendly crowds, especially crowds of students, there is usually one point in the speech where someone in the crowd shouts out “I love you!”. The president answers with “I love you back!”.

Yesterday he was speaking to a crowd at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Maryland and the speech started with that exchange. His main topic was the Affordable Care Act, gearing up for the next phase on January 1, 2014 where millions of Americans will be covered under new insurance policies purchased on exchanges. The sign-up period for the new coverage starts next Tuesday, October 1 and runs through March 31, 2014. The Health Insurance Marketplace will be open for business here: Healthcare.gov.

The president’s speech (51 minutes and 32 seconds … and worth every second):

The president said to expect glitches. Lots of people say to expect glitches … it is a big program, it is a new program, and it is, unfortunately one that the administration has had to tweak on its own since the Republican House of Representatives has been unwilling to make any improvements to it. From Bloomberg News: Don’t be alarmed by Obamacare failures:

If things don’t run smoothly from the get-go, it won’t mean that this piece of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has failed. Three months will remain before coverage from insurance plans sold on the exchanges even kicks in. And there will be many months and years beyond that to smooth the wrinkles. Obamacare supporters often point to how much ironing out Medicare Part D, the prescription drug program, needed when it came into effect in 2006. Even Medicare and Medicaid have been tweaked more than 20 times since they were enacted in 1965.

President Obama made a point of mentioning that the “Republicans’ biggest fear at this point is not that the Affordable Care Act will fail. What they’re worried about is it’s going to succeed“. Indeed.

Here’s what the president said we can expect:

… Medicare and Social Security faced the same kind of criticism.  Before Medicare came into law, one Republican warned that “one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”  That was Ronald Reagan.  And eventually, Ronald Reagan came around to Medicare and thought it was pretty good, and actually helped make it better.

So that’s what’s going to happen with the Affordable Care Act.  And once it’s working really well, I guarantee you they will not call it Obamacare. (Laughter and applause.)

Here is a prediction for you:  A few years from now, when people are using this to get coverage and everybody is feeling pretty good about all the choices and competition that they’ve got, there are going to be a whole bunch of folks who say, yes, I always thought this provision was excellent.  I voted for that thing.  You watch.  

Oh, and we can also expect this … from President Obama: “I love you back”. The Affordable Care Act, dedicated to his mother who died while fighting insurance companies and worrying about paying the bills, is about caring … and it is one of the things he does best.

~

(Links to the White House Web Site on the Affordable Care Act are below the fold.)

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There is an old saying, attributed to George Washington, that “the Senate is the saucer that cools the hot tea of the House”:

[Thomas] Jefferson disagreed with Gen. George Washington over the need for a bicameral legislature, and [this was] Washington’s response:

  “You, yourself,” said the General, “have proved the excellence of two houses this very moment.”

  “I,” said Jefferson. “How is that, General?”

  “You have,” replied the heroic sage, “turned your hot tea from the cup into the saucer, to get it cool. It is the same thing we desire of the two houses.”

In 2013, the Senate is setting itself up to be the saucer that holds the Mad Hatter’s teacup.