will this do?....Speaker John Boehner, Is "carrying the ball"
Maybe Mitch, Is stringing OBahbah along.
Posted on 07/13/2011 9:22:40 AM PDT by yoe
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that his party is united in opposing any effort to raise the debt ceiling, even as he maintained that the country will not default on its debt obligations.
“I bet there won’t be a single Republican vote to raise the debt ceiling at the end of the day,” the Senate’s top Republican said in a radio interview Wednesday morning with conservative commentator Laura Ingraham.
McConnell’s remarks come one day after the Kentucky Republican (sketched out a “back-up plan”) that would shift the political burden of raising the debt ceiling to President Obama and congressional Democrats, allowing for the borrowing limit to be raised without any Republican votes.
McConnell’s “Plan B” would first need to be approved by both chambers and signed into law by Obama in order to take effect – a prospect that was uncertain at best Tuesday evening, as some lawmakers of both parties balked at the idea.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
will this do?....Speaker John Boehner, Is "carrying the ball"
Maybe Mitch, Is stringing OBahbah along.
“Even Limbaugh has gone back to the idea that a RINO was a Democrat politician who ran as a Republican when he could no longer win as a Democrat”
That’s not accurate.
Refusing to use their power? What the hell do you think has stopped Obama dead in his tracks? The Senate? Get real will you.
Hear, Hear! The formula for Social Security benefits is already heavily weighted towards redistributing income from high-income workers to low-income workers.
Means testing Social Security is simply another tax on the successful - and, as any student of macro-ecomnomics knows, that which you tax you get less of (successful savers) and that which you subsidize you get more of (freeloaders).
Yes, that's why it's important to get this debt stuff behind us.
Now, we can talk Ryan plan...budget stuff.
Obama will now be on record for REFUSING cuts and I do believe McConnell/Boehner will be able to use this as leverage for all future talks ahead.
“the bond holders get paid first (14th amendment & all that)”
What would that have to do with the 14th? Ex post facto or obligation of contracts maybe, but probably not.
@1:05 - "There is a good deal of conservative support for what I laid out yesterday beginning with the Wall Street Journal editorial page today."
@1:44 - "Doing the right thing for the country is our first obligation, but we cannot force a result, we need to do the next best thing and that's clarify the differences between the two parties."
@2:14 - "They want to blame the economy on us and the reason default is no better an idea today than it was when Newt Gingrich tried it in 1995, is it destroys your brand, and it gives the president an opportunity to blame Republicans for a bad economy."
@3:03 - Laura: "While it puts the burden, it shifts the burden to the greatest extent to Obama, in effect there is kind of a vote at the beginning to raise the debt ceiling because you are ceding..." McConnell: "No, no. It only authorizes the president to ask for it. There will be no vote to raise the debt ceiling I suspect by any Republican."
Laura: "Isn't that passing the buck, Senator? Isn't that passing the buck of leadership to the White House?"
McConnell: "We've been trying to get this liberal president to sign a deal worth signing. You know it makes a difference when you only control a third of the government. If we were able to run the government out of the House of Representatives we would be able to get a result that we would like."
@4:40 - Laura: "When I see the New York Times on the other hand, praising the deal, Harry Reid seeming to be open to it, and even the White House murmers that it might be something acceptable I get a little nervous, why do you think they are embracing it?"
McConnell: "Because they want to raise the debt ceiling and of course we know that is going to happen. Just like we knew shutting down the government in 1995 was not going to work for us, it helped Bill Clinton get reelected. I refuse to help Barack Obama get reelected."
@5:34 - "If we go into default he [Obama] will say that Republicans are making the economy worse and try to convince the public, maybe with some merit, if people start not getting their Social Security checks, military families start not getting letters saying that service people overseas don't get paid, you know that's an argument he would have a good chance of winning and all of a sudden we are co-ownership, we have co-ownership of a bad economy. That is very bad positioning going into election."
@8:34 - "We had hoped this would present an opportunity to cut spending. It looks as if, it may change, but it looks as if it is only going to be an opportunity for him to try to entice us top raising taxes and as I said when I started I'm not going to be a part of turning the Republicans into tax collectors for the welfare state."
It's only tough if you obey the Constitution - and as the whole Obummacare debacle demonstrated, liberals don't care about the Constitution.
“The end result is ‘they’ are using social security to subsidize the general funds”
That’s not the end result. It was the starting point. Social Security never, ever was anything but a tax on working people to fund a group of people who just so happen to vote a lot (i.e. the elderly). What you put in and what you get back is only connected by accounting formality.
OK, that's a fair point. How about cutting SS benefits across the board by 20% instead??
Actually Pelosi and co. re-instituted pay-go. It had so many exceptions it was toothless. You can tell by looking at the explosion of spending.
A big part of why the country is in the crapper is because congress has formally and informally abrogated much of its constitutional responsibility.
It is their responsibility to vet president elects - they failed that test in 2008.
It is their responsibility to declare war but they gave the president the right to initiate military action for up to 30 days. Now he just ignores their whining that he has exceeded his authority.
Congress is supposed to hold the nation’s purse strings but they let the president run all over the country and the world spending money and signing blank checks.
The Courts throw Congressional legislation out the back door.
The president ignores them except when he wants to set them up as the fall guy.
That all happens in part because of stupid ideas and actions like this proposal.
Obama will be perfectly happy to set a precedent of having the responsibility to raise the debt limit.
The changes required to make Social Security solvent are actually not that big - reining in the COLAs for a few years would have a HUGE effect. But current retirees, who paid peanuts into Social Security, are a huge voting block and so no one ever has the political will to tell them they have to take a little bit less now so the system can survive.
“Social Security never, ever was anything but a tax on working people to fund a group of people who just so happen to vote a lot (i.e. the elderly).”
For clarification’s sake, I was saying the tax is a tax like every other tax and the benefits are benefits like every other benefits. The Social Security “system,” as we incomprehensibly term it, never was seperate from the larger System of the entire federal budget.
If they told us it was like insurance, they lied. If we took it to resemble the way property taxes pay for public education, as I’ve often heard, well, that’s a lie to. Every tax is a way to grab money, and every payout is a way to buy votes and/or improve the commonwealth, depending on how you look at it.
I heard him say last week that nobody in Congress was seriously considering NOT raising the debt ceiling.
Seems to me the only person in Congress showing real leadership on this issue is Bachmann.
Granting Obama that power is a million times worse that voting to increase the debt limit themselves. Obama has too many powers and if you grant that power to him even on a temporary basis, that will set a really really really really bad precedent.
McConnell is worse than a blithering idiot. He is a tool of the socialists. For even considering this fool hardy idea, he needs to be removed as Minority Leader.
See, I think Mitch’s plan wasn’t worth it because the spending cuts were not mandatory.
“It ain’t gonna’ happen no how no way”
I’m not saying it’s probable, but there could be an amendment. Crazier things have been added to the Constitution (mostly by SCOTUS).
“Used to be a Republican idea. Now it’s seen as selling out to the Great Shatan Hissef’.”
Well, yeah. Look who’s president. No doubt libs, regardless of their spending addiction, would be more inclined to support the line-item veto if FDR were president instead of Nixon, Reagan, or Clinton.
I think you’re confusing the issue a bit by focusing on the supposed hypocrisy of RINO-hunters. The issue, to my mind, is that Obama won’t use executive prerogative to cut anything, with or without awesome Nixonian powers. McConnell no doubt knows this. His plan is to lay the blame on Obama when it doesn’t work, which probably won’t work. That’s why the knee-jerk base is going after him.
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