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Republicans relished criticizing congressional Democrats when they fumbled or flat-out didnt try to approve a budget.

They took particular joy in upbraiding former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, when he didnt shepherd a budget through the Senate, piously preaching the virtues of congressional budgeting.

Certainly the struggle to OK a budget doesnt look good for Republicans, who now control the House and Senate.

There was a plan a few weeks ago to advance a budget through the House Budget Committee. But that effort crumbled when Republicans fought over defense spending. Republicans fractured again when they fought over slashing some $50 billion in entitlement spending.

The law says the House is supposed to adopt a budget in April.

But the Houses collapse when it comes to budgeting threatens to imperil the most holy of Republican agenda items: diminishing federal spending and tax reform.

Lets go subterranean for a moment.

Congress doesnt approve money annually for costly federal entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Those dollars just fly out the door automatically. Its known as mandatory spending.

Now, Congress doesnt have to spend it. Lawmakers voted decades ago against deciding each year how much money to allocate to those programs. The federal Treasury directs about 70 percent of all federal spending to that trio of entitlements. An increasingly large chunk of mandatory spending is interest on the debt.

The rest of the money -- about 30 percent -- constitutes discretionary spending.

Congress wields discretion over spending everything else. How much goes to the National Park Service. How much to run the Federal Reserve. How much to operate the State Department. How much it allocates to itself.

By the way, the chunk of change devoted to the legislative branch is on the rise after the shooting at the Republican congressional baseball practice. A few million more dollars are in the pipeline for security improvements and to hire additional U.S. Capitol Police officers.

So, if you truly wanted to harness federal spending and the nations $21 trillion debt, from which side of the ledger would you cut? From mandatory spending or discretionary spending?

You cannot address long-term debt without looking at the mandatory side of the budget, said White House budget Director Mick Mulvaney. You would be hard pressed to be able to balance the budget without looking at mandatory spending.

But thats where the problem lies for House Budget Committee Chairwoman Diane Black, R-Tenn.

True budget savings would come from slashing entitlement spending.

Black and other GOPers would like to reduce $200 billion in entitlement (mandatory) spending. But a coalition of 20 moderate Republicans pushed back. They argue that Blacks plan isnt practical and that they are reticent to vote for such a deep cut. Losing those 20 Republicans doesnt quite kill the vote count for the budget. But its close.

President Trump wants to spend more on defense in this budget. Defense hawks demanded somewhere north of $640 billion for the Pentagon. Of late, the defense target has fallen between $617 and $623 billion.

Technically, defense spending isnt supposed to exceed $549 billion. Thats the ceiling imposed by sequestration, the mandatory set of spending cuts created by the 2011 Budget Control Act, which raised the debt limit.

One senior Republican close to the discussions suggested they should have started with a defense number around $603 billion and negotiated up to lure defense-minded Republicans.

Keep in mind that Republicans would first have to engineer a budget that wouldnt collapse in committee to say nothing of getting nuked by GOPers on the floor.

So, theres a stalemate.

Failing to adopt a budget would certainly be a blow to Republicans -- especially former House Budget Committee Chairman and now House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

The House didnt advance a budget last year on Ryans watch, either. No budget means theres no way to mine the federal coffers for major cuts essential to contracting the deficit.

But a bigger problem lurks for Republicans.

No budget could imperil the GOP plan to approve tax reform.

Ryan insists Republicans will approve tax reform.

Tax reform is happening, not next year or next Congress, he said recently. It is happening now, in 2017.

Heres the issue: Republicans would face a filibuster in the Senate from Democrats and probably some Republicans on tax reform.

The GOP leadership in both bodies wants to use a special process called budget reconciliation for tax reform to avoid a filibuster. This is the same parliamentary scheme Republicans are now using to deal with ObamaCare.

Otherwise, the sides must round up 60 votes just to break the filibuster to start debate on the tax bill and 60 votes a second time to wrap things up.

However, theres a reason the process is called budget reconciliation. The House must first adopt a budget to give the Senate something with which to work.

No budget, and any effort at tax reform could be in trouble.

Certainly the House could approve a skeleton budget, designed expressly as a shell for the Senate to use when handling tax reform.

In other words, its a budget in name only. Only the framework. The House essentially followed that path in January to set up the legislative vehicle to repeal and replace ObamaCare.

Meantime, look at the raw dollars. The biggest standoff among congressional Republicans in settling the budget impasse is waged between defense advocates and Republicans who want to fund everything else -- yet cut spending.

This is where things get interesting.

The House Appropriations Committee wrote a defense spending bill totaling $658.1 billion. Thats $68.1 billion more than last year and $18.4 billion more than Trump requested. When the House Armed Services Committee wrote this years defense authorization bill -- which is different from the appropriations legislation -- Republican lawmakers found themselves all over the map.

Washington Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the Armed Services panel, took note.

We do not have $600, $700, $800, $900 billion to spend on defense unless we pretty much completely eliminate all non-defense discretionary spending, which there isnt support for doing, he said. Twenty trillion dollars in debt, a $706 billion deficit, trying to find $50 billion in mandatory savings, and the majority cant even do that, all right?

Smiths remark crystalizes the entire debate about the GOP attempting to complete a budget.

As a result, Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth, the leading Democrat on the House Budget Committee, says that the GOP shell budget is looking more and more likely.

And theres a reason behind that. The faux budget would not be so much to actually alter the nations spending trajectory. But if the House approves a budget, it will serve as a contrivance to help tax reform navigate the U.S. Senate.

The rest is here:
House Republicans stymied in their efforts to adopt a budget - Fox News

Local Democratic officials on Thursday panned the Republican state Senate leaders threat to halt the Long Island Rail Roads third track project.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority resubmitted an amendment to its Capital Program that would fund the $2 billion plan to a state review board last Friday, reportedly because state Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan (R-East Northport) threatened to have it blocked.

Nassau County Democratic Chairman Jay Jacobs, state Sen. John Brooks (D-Seaford) and county Legislator Laura Curran (D-Baldwin) said Flanagans move will only exacerbate commuters transportation woes.

Senate Republicans are stopping a necessary modernization and they should be ashamed of throwing away almost $2 billion for major improvements to the LIRR, Jacobs said in a statement. Our commuters and our economy cannot continue to suffer while they play politics.

The joint statement from Jacobs, Brooks and Curran who is running for Nassau County executive infuses politics into the debate more than before as funding it hinges on political considerations.

The LIRR wants to add a third track to a key 9.8-mile stretch of its Main Line between Floral Park and Hicksville. Project officials say it would take three to four years to build and would improve service by increasing capacity and giving trains a route around delays.

The project would also modernize LIRR signals along the stretch, remove seven street-level railroad crossings and build noise-deflecting walls, among other improvements.

State Sen. Martin Golden (R-Brooklyn), who reportedly takes direction from Flanagan, is one of four members of the Capital Program Review Board, which must approve any amendments to the MTAs 2015-2019 Capital Program. The MTA Board of Directors approved the amendment that would provide $1.95 billion for the third track in May.

The withdrawal and resubmission of the funding plan gave the MTA 30 more days to address lingering questions about the project before another possible veto.

Jacobs, Brooks and Curran argued the project is more desperately needed now, as the MTA is under a state of emergency and LIRR commuters deal with for two months of disruptions due to repairs at Penn Station in Manhattan.

We desperately need to increase our transportation options and modernize the LIRR but unfortunately, once again, Albany politicians are fighting for themselves rather than for whats best for Long Islanders, Curran said in the statement.

But Republican state Sen. Elaine Phillips of Flower Hill said resetting the clock gives MTA officials more time and flexibility to develop a comprehensive solution to the LIRRs systemic service problems.

The decision by the Governor and the MTA to resubmit the amendment and provide more time for the process is the right one, Phillips said in a statement Friday.

Since Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo introduced it in January 2016, local officials, residents and interest groups have argued about the projects possible benefits and the potential damage it could do to affected communities, including Floral Park, New Hyde Park and Mineola.

Phillips and Republican Sen. Kemp Hannon of Garden City have been two of the projects most vocal critics.

Flanagan, Phillips and Hannon have been pushing Cuomo to grant other requests in exchange for approving the funding, such as more money for hospitals and involvement in a dispute between Nassau and New York City over Queens water wells, Newsdays The Point newsletter reported Friday.

While many in New Hyde Park and Floral Park still strongly oppose the project, the villages mayors signed memoranda of understanding with the LIRR last week that they say will give their communities extra benefits and protection during the construction period.

Those agreements should remain in place regardless of whether the Capital Program amendment proceeds in its current form, Phillips said Friday.

New Hyde Park Mayor Lawrence Montreuil said he thinks it could be good for officials to consider whether the money is better spent on more immediate infrastructure needs.

If there is that question in peoples minds I think maybe a 30-day delay is not the end of the world, Monetruil said.

Nassau County Comptroller George Maragos, another Democrat running for county executive, agreed that the third track is critical, but said Democrats and Republicans should work together to get the needed funding to fix the LIRRs problems.

E. OBrien Murray, a spokesman for Jack Martins, Phillips state Senate predecessor and the Republican county executive, praised Cuomo the MTA for resubmitting the amendment. But he condemned the Nassau Democrats for making empty political statements.

Instead of being truthful about the Third Track project, which does nothing to solve the immediate commuter crisis but is a long term capital project, Jacobs, Curran and Brooks are dishonestly attempting to confuse these two important issues, Murray said in a statement.

Read more from the original source:
Local Dems slam state Republicans on 3rd track funding - The Island Now

Many progressive votersquestion whetherDemocratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California wouldrepresent them if she campaignedagainst President Donald Trump in 2020, according to report released Friday.

Despiteher rising popularity on the national stage, progressive voters are unsure just how the freshman senator wouldrepresent them if she were to run for the White House.

Shes not on our radar, RoseAnn DeMuro, a supporter of former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, told the New York Times about Harris potential White House run. Shes one of the people the Democratic Party is putting up. In terms of where the progressives live, I dont think theres any there there. DeMuro heads National Nurses United, as well as the California Nurses Association.

Veteran Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein also appeared to distance herself from supporting the rising senator.

She just got here, Feinstein said. What she should do is concentrate on being a good, and possibly a great, United States senator. The rest will either happen or not happen.

Harris made a namefor herself during her questioning of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and AttorneyGeneral Jeff Sessions during a June Senate hearing. She was interrupted by Sens. Richard Burr and John McCain for her not letting the witnesses fully answer the question.

Since then, shes traveledthe country raising money for other Democrats, a pretty sure sign that shes interested in playing a national role moving forward. Shes raised more than $600,000 so far this year on behalf of a Democratic Senate fund, according to the report.

Harris hasalso shied away from far-left positions, mentioning several times that Democratic senators cant afford to be purists to gain an edge in the Senate in the 2018 midterms.

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'She's Not On Our Radar': Progressives May Not Support Kamala Harris In 2020 - The Daily Caller

Bill Knight / Opinion columnist

Conservatives occasionally concede that organized labor has been a reason for rising standards of living and making the middle class, and The Atlantic magazine shows that unions provide common ground for progressives and conservatives alike.

Historically, conservative pundits and politicians have praised unions. Columnist George Will in 1977 said, I think American labor unions get a large share of the credit for making us a middle-class country.

In 1991, Republican economist George Schultz (Secretary of Labor under Richard Nixon and Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan) said a healthy workplace [needs] some system of checks and balances and unions provided an effective system of industrial jurisprudence, a check on corporations focus on profits.

In The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch recalls a 2016 brunch with conservative Eli Lehrer, who runs Washingtons Republican-leaning R Street Institute, and Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union.

Lehrer believes the time has come for the American Right to reconsider its decades-long war on unions, Rauch says. Their collapse, he says, has fueled the growth of government and of the welfare state, which has stepped in to regulate workplaces and provide job security as unions have died out.

Stern thinks unions cannot survive unless they innovate and change, but laws intended to protect and preserve them get in the way, Rauch adds.

The journal National Affairs this summer published Lehrer and Sterns essay about the need for change. In How to Modernize Labor Law, the two write, The fundamental federal rules governing employer-worker relations were written for a different era.

That era was the Great Depression. It resulted in 1935s National Labor Relations Act, but it hasnt substantially changed except for court rulings and sometimes-partisan National Labor Relations Board decisions since 1947s anti-union Taft-Hartley Act.

Meanwhile, regular working people are worried about pay but also anxious, if not angry, about how theyre treated. Last years campaign showed that many workers feel voiceless and powerless, that unhappy workers are angry voters, and that angry voters can lash out against trade, immigration, and even democracy.

Private-sector unions are close to extinct, Rauch writes. In the 1950s, more than one in three private-sector workers belonged to a union; today, unionization is down to 6 percent of the private-sector workforce, lower than it was a century ago before the modern labor movement took off.

The decline of unions is one of the countrys most pressing problems and at least as much a social and political problem as an economic one, he continues. Old-style, mid-20th-century industrial unions had their flaws. But when unions work as they should, they serve important social functions. They can smooth the jagged edges of globalization by giving workers bargaining power. They are associated with lower income inequality. Perhaps most important, they offer workers a way to be heard.

Other models exist for workers organizing, from Europes works councils, which give workers a voice in company affairs, to Germanys permitting unions to organize sectors rather than employers, offering incentives to workers and companies to cooperate for better competitiveness.

Unfortunately, in America in 2017, we dont know how a truly modern union would look, writes Rauch, because it is mostly illegal to find out.

Efforts to legislate reforms have fizzled (most recently, during President Obamas first term, when Democrats had more power), and the GOP-dominated Capitol makes change doubtful. But Stern and Lehrer suggest a workaround like giving states authority to grant labor-law waivers permitting experimentation. For example, if employers and unions had an interesting model that met certain guidelines, they could try it.

The Stern-Lehrer waiver idea is a no-brainer if we want to address the deeper causes of the malaise and distemper afflicting Americas lower-middle class, Rauch writes. Although income stagnation is certainly one culprit, another is the decline of the civic organizations and social institutions that help people feel connected. Service fraternities, volunteer clubs, youth groups, churches, political parties, widespread military service, unions and the rest in their prime all fostered social interaction a sense of social cohesion even when times were much tougher. None matters more than unions.

GOP President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s seem to know this, but also saw the relationship as unchanging.

Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice, Ike said. I have no use for those regardless of their political party who hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.

Contact Bill at Bill.Knight@hotmail.com.

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Knight: Unions offer balance to conservatives, progressives - Washington Times-Reporter

Toward the end of the 20th centurythe term liberal went from being a source of pride for mostDemocrats,whofondly recalledthe New Deal era and thepresidency of Franklin Roosevelt the most beloved president of the century to being a cause of embarrassment for many Democratic politicians, who were suddenly being beratedfor their liberalism.While the term liberal had been generally associated with FDR and his popular New Deal policies throughout the mid-20th century, it had come to mean something quite different as the century progressed.

This shift was partly due to the evolving social and moral values held by many Northern liberals and the subsequent cultural backlash that followed in much of the country. But liberal only turned into a snarl word after decades of right-wing rhetoric that painted Democratic politicians and liberal thinkers (i.e., college professors and journalists) as out-of-touch cultural elitists who knew nothing and cared little about real America.

Of course, the rights effort to turn liberal into a dirty word was aided by many of the so-called liberal politicians of the late 20th century, who, rather than pushing back against the rights rhetoric, hopelessly ran away from the label (just as one might expect of a spineless liberal elite).

And today, decades after becoming a pejorative that implies elitist snobbery, the term liberal is still used to great effect by the right. Indeed, Donald Trump seems to have perfected the liberal-bashing rhetoric that was introduced in the 1980s, and offensive portmanteaus like libtard have gained popularity in the Trump era. But its not only right-wingers who use liberal as a slur these days. In 2017, liberal is almost as much of an insult on the left as it is on the right a theme that was recently broached by writer Nikil Saval in anessayfor the the New York Times Magazine. Among leftists, Saval notes, the liberal is seen as a weak-minded, market-friendly centrist, wonky and technocratic and condescending to the working class pious about diversity but ready to abandon any belief at the slightest drop in poll numbers.

At first it may seem that conservatives and leftists are criticizing liberals for opposite reasons: Right-wingers think that liberals are far-left ideologues, while actual leftists think that liberals lack core beliefs and are practically conservative. But the two critiques arent completely divergent; as Saval explains:

When it comes to diagnosing liberalism, both left and right focus on this same set of debilitating traits: arrogance, hypocrisy, pusillanimity, the insulated superiority of what, in 1969, a New York mayoral candidate called the limousine liberal. In other words, the features they use to distinguish liberals arent policies so much as attitudes.

This isnt entirely fair to critics on the left, who tend to focus more on policy differences and believe that the Democratic Party is far too centrist and technocratic (or, as many leftists would put it, neoliberal). One of the greatest disputes, for example, has been over health care, where progressives advocate single-payer universal coverage while liberals offer a sheepish defense of the patchwork system enacted under Obamacare.

Still, Saval makes a valid point in that both leftists and right-wingers are highly critical of the condescending and superior tone that many liberals exude, and thus share some affinities in their critiques. This was evident during the 2016 election campaign, when leftists criticized liberals for what writer Emmet Rensin called the smug style in anessayfor Vox,which wonsome praise from conservatives.Since the election, leftists and conservatives have also seen eye to eye when it comes to denouncing liberals like Markos Moulitsas, the founder of liberal website Daily Kos, who gleefully cheeredwhen it was reported earlier this year that people in red states would be disproportionately hurt by Trumpcare.Be Happy for Coal Miners Losing Their Health Insurance, declared Moulitsas on his blog. Theyre Getting Exactly What They Voted For. In another instance, the liberal blogger earned bipartisan condemnation (so to speak) when hetweetedin response to the Trump administration denying North Carolina hurricane aid: Theres your reward for voting Republican, North Carolina.

Liberals like Moulitsas have almost become caricatures of the smug and unsympathetic liberal elite that right-wingers have long depicted; its as if liberals have gradually come to adopt the ridiculous qualities that Republicans have assigned to them over the years. Which brings us to an important point: Leftists havent suddenly jumped on the liberal-bashing bandwagon because its the hip thing to do in the age of Trump, but because many self-described liberals have become the obnoxious and out-of-touch liberal elite that conservatives have long claimed them to be, while simultaneously shifting toward the right on various economic issues. (To be fair, obviously the right doesnt see it this way.) Saval touches on this in his Times Magazine essay, observing that to call someone a liberal today is often to denounce him or her as having abandoned liberalism.

American liberalism was once associated with something far more robust, with immoderate presidents and spectacular waves of legislation, notes Saval. Todays liberals stand accused of forsaking the clarity and ambition of even that flawed legacy.

This is obviously where left- and right-wing critiques of liberalism part ways. Indeed, right-wingers tend to focus almost exclusively on cultural and social factors in their criticisms, for the very reason that their economic policies are even more favorable to the elite than the policies of the liberal elite they disparage, who at least pay lip service to addressing problems like inequality and inadequate health care.

Left-wingers, on the other hand, see the cultural elitism of liberals as themanifestationof a larger problem namely, the abandonment of class politics and radical thinking. To appreciate the difference between modern liberals and old-school liberals, one simply has to considerthe sharp contrast in tone. In hisfamousMadison Square Gardenspeech,for example, FDR boldly declared:

We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred.

One would be hard-pressed to find any liberal today other than someone like Bernie Sanders, who isnteven considered a liberal in the contemporary sense gallantly welcoming the hatred of organized money (after all, most Democratic politicians depend on big donors from the financial sector to fund their campaigns).

In response to the left-wing calls for class politics, liberals have frequently argued that leftists have an unhealthy obsession with economic issues, and that they disregard social issues like LGBTQ rights or womens reproductive rights. Some liberals have even implied absurdly that left-wingers are closet cultural reactionaries. It was sometimes claimed during the 2016 primary campaign thatprogressives who favored Sanders didnt like Hillary Clinton because of her gender, rather than herpolitics. But this kind of deflection simply reinforces the leftist critique of liberals, who, as Saval puts it (in summarizing the lefts perspective), shroud an ambiguous, even reactionary agenda under a superficial commitment to social justice and moderate, incremental change.

At the end of the day, liberals and leftists agree on a lot more than they disagree, and thus one might look atthisinternalstrife as unhelpful and even destructive especially when Donald Trump is in the White House and Republicans control both houses of Congress. But left-wing critiques of liberalism have only grown more urgent and necessaryin the age ofTrump, as it is the failures of liberalism that led us here in the first place.

Continue reading here:
Why we need the left-wing critique of liberalism: Because liberals got us where we are today - Salon