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Senate Action on Health Law Moves to Brink of Shutdown

September 29, 2013 by

Angering Republicans who lead the House, Mr. Reid kept the Senate shuttered on Sunday, in a calculated move to stall action on the House measure until Monday afternoon, just hours before the government’s spending authority runs out at midnight.

Without a complete capitulation by House Republicans, large sections of the government would close, hundreds of thousands of workers would be furloughed without pay, and millions more would be asked to work for no pay.

Polls show that the public is already deeply unhappy with its leaders in Congress, and the prospect of the first government shutdown in 17 years would be the latest dispiriting development. With a temporary shutdown appearing inevitable without a last-ditch compromise, the battle on Sunday became as much about blaming the other side as searching for a solution.

House Republicans, who insisted that they had passed a compromise over the weekend that would avoid a shutdown if only the Senate would act, blamed Mr. Reid for purposely running out the clock.

“Unlock those doors, I say to Harry Reid,” said Representative Ann Wagner, a Missouri Republican who stood on the steps of the empty Senate on Sunday with a dozen of her House colleagues. “Come out and do your job.”

But Mr. Reid sees little incentive or political advantage in bowing to those demands. He has held his 54-member caucus together so far. And because of support from some Senate Republicans who have called it a mistake for House Republicans to try to force changes to the health care law in an unrelated fight over the budget, Mr. Reid’s hand has been strengthened.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine became the latest Republican to criticize her House colleagues, saying on Sunday that an effort to link the health care amendments to the budget was “a strategy that cannot possibly work.”

Mr. Reid’s plan, which exploits the bypasses and delays available to him in Senate procedure, leaves little time for the House to act before the Tuesday deadline. The Senate on Monday is expected to send back to the House a plain budget bill, stripped of its provisions to delay the full effect of the health care law, repeal a tax on medical devices and allow businesses to opt out of contraception coverage for their employees.

All Mr. Reid needs are 51 Democrats to vote with him — not the usual 60-vote threshold required for most Senate business — and the spending bill will go back to the House in a matter of minutes. Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, said that he had been canvassing Senate Democrats from Republican states and that the party remained unified.

Senate Democrats plan to emphasize a message that the blame for any shutdown rests squarely with Republicans. “They can decide at that point whether they’ll shut down the government or not,” Mr. Durbin said.

Republicans would then face a difficult choice. Speaker John A. Boehner could risk the ire of his more conservative members and put the Senate bill on the floor for a straight up or down vote, a route that his more moderate members have begun urging him to take.

Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania, said on Sunday that he was actively courting Republicans and Democrats to get behind a temporary spending bill to avert a shutdown, even if it contained none of the additional measures the House passed over the weekend.

“I’m prepared to vote for a clean resolution tomorrow,” Mr. Dent said. “It’s time to govern. I don’t intend to support a fool’s errand at this point.”

Republican lawmakers said on Sunday that the House leadership had one more card to play, but that it was extremely delicate. They can tell Mr. Reid he must accept a face-saving measure, like the repeal of the tax on medical devices, which many Democrats support, or they will send back a new amendment that would force members of Congress and their staffs, and the White House staff, to buy their medical insurance on the new health law’s insurance exchanges, without any subsidies from the government to offset the cost.

Republicans expressed certainty that for all the discomfort a shutdown would inflict on Capitol Hill, Democrats would not risk it to protect their own benefits.

Brian Knowlton contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/us/politics/time-short-but-gop-leaders-say-shutdown-can-be-avoided.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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House Votes to Give Creditors Priority if Debt Ceiling Is Breached

May 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The legislation, which passed 221 to 207, would allow limited borrowing to make payments to federal bondholders, then Social Security recipients, even if the Treasury is prohibited from borrowing to finance the rest of the government. No Democrats voted for it. Eight Republicans were opposed.

Republicans said the measure effectively took the threat of a government default off the table if the debt ceiling was breached. But opponents, who included Democrats and some Republicans, said the bill was unworkable and would do nothing to stave off a messy default and economic chaos once the Treasury exhausted its payment options early this fall. The bill is unlikely to get a hearing in the Senate, and President Obama has promised a veto.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, called it “so shallow” that it would fail an eighth-grade model government class.

Instead, House Republicans used it to signal that for the third time since taking control in 2011, they would try to extract major concessions on fiscal policy from the president before they were willing to raise the government’s borrowing authority.

“We’re not in any different position than we were two years ago. We continue to spend more money than we bring in,” Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio told reporters Thursday. “You can’t continue to do this.”

The bill, called the “Pay China First Act” by Democratic opponents, signaled an end to a truce in Washington’s budget wars that ensued after Republicans and Democrats agreed in January to allow taxes to rise mainly on affluent households, then let $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts take effect in March. Amid those steps, Congress had temporarily set aside the government’s borrowing limit, but the statutory $16.4 trillion debt ceiling comes back into force May 19, at which time the government’s debt will actually already exceed that number.

Because of higher-than-expected tax receipts and large payments from the federally controlled housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Treasury officials believe they can shuffle money within accounts to avoid any more borrowing until the fall.

That schedule sets up what lawmakers in both parties see as another conflagration approaching on Sept. 30, when the government would run out of money to operate and the Treasury would near exhaustion of its borrowing options.

House and Senate appropriations committees have begun work on 12 annual spending bills, but House Republicans will set total spending in those bills at $967 billion, expecting the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration to continue. Senate Democrats are expected to use the spending cap established in the first debt ceiling fight of 2011, $1.058 trillion. House Republican aides concede that a majority of the House might not be able to accept the cuts to domestic programs that would be needed to stay within the limit.

The brewing standoff could be resolved with a comprehensive deficit reduction agreement, but so far, House and Senate Republican leaders have refused to even convene a formal negotiating conference to resolve the vast differences between the budget blueprints passed by the Senate and the House.

“We should be talking about the budget in general and how we can get to conference and what we need to do to compromise,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Senate Budget Committee. “They’re over there debating how we’re going to create the next crisis that this country is going to have to face down.”

With little real negotiations going on, Democrats accused House Republicans of preparing for disaster. Representative Dan Maffei, Democrat of New York, said the House “prioritization” bill “maps out not if but when the United States defaults for the first time in the nation’s history.”

Some Republicans were no more charitable.

Even if the Treasury could pull off the difficult task of managing incoming taxes and outgoing payments on a daily basis, about 25 percent of the government would have to shut down for lack of money. And Tony Fratto, a Treasury and White House spokesman in the Bush administration, said it could not be done.

Daily tax receipts are “lumpy,” he said. They do not arrive in any steady or predictable way. At the same time, government payments are “spiky” and fluctuate in ways that do not mesh with income tax receipts. The bill also hands Democrats the talking point that Republicans are willing to make foreign creditors like China the first priority for tax receipts over veterans and the military.

Mr. Fratto called the bill “technically impossible and politically disastrous.”

But Republicans said they were merely being prudent and signaling to world financial markets that they would not let the United States government miss debt payments when they come due.

“This legislation credibly and permanently removes the threat of default on a U.S. debt payment and ensures that Social Security benefit payments are paid in full and on time,” said Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/us/politics/house-votes-to-give-creditors-priority-if-debt-ceiling-is-breached.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Senate Leaders Set to Work on a Last-Minute Tax Agreement

December 29, 2012 by Leave a Comment

After weeks of fruitless negotiations between the president and Speaker John A. Boehner, Mr. Obama turned to Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader — two men who have been fighting for dominance of the Senate for years — to find a solution. The speaker, once seen as the linchpin for any agreement, essentially ceded final control to the Senate and said the House would act on whatever the Senate could produce.

“The hour for immediate action is here. It is now,” Mr. Obama said in the White House briefing room after an hourlong meeting with the two Senate leaders, Mr. Boehner and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader. He added, “The American people are not going to have any patience for a politically self-inflicted wound to our economy, not right now.”

Senate Democrats want Mr. McConnell to propose an alternative to Mr. Obama’s final offer and present it to them in time for a compromise bill to reach the Senate floor on Monday and be sent to the House. Absent a bipartisan deal, Mr. Reid said Friday night that he would accede to the president’s request to put to a vote on Monday Mr. Obama’s plan to extend tax cuts for all income below $250,000 a year and to renew expiring unemployment compensation for as many as two million people, essentially daring Republicans to block it and allow taxes to rise for most Americans.

Bipartisan agreement still hinged on the Senate leaders finding an income level above which taxes will rise on Jan. 1, most likely higher than Mr. Obama’s level of $250,000. Quiet negotiations between Senate and White House officials were already drifting up toward around $400,000 before Friday’s White House meeting. The two sides were also apart on where to set taxes on inherited estates.

But senators broke from a long huddle on the Senate floor with Mr. McConnell on Friday night to say they were more optimistic that a deal was within reach. Mr. McConnell, White House aides and Mr. Reid were to continue talks on Saturday, aiming for a breakthrough as soon as Sunday.

“We’re working with the White House, and hopefully we’ll come up with something we can recommend to our respective caucuses,” said Mr. McConnell, who has played a central role in cutting similar bipartisan deals in the past.

The emerging path to a possible resolution, at least on Friday, appeared to mirror the end of the protracted stalemate over the payroll tax last year. In that conflict, House Republicans refused to go along with a short-term extension of the cut, but Mr. McConnell reached an agreement that permitted such a measure to get through the Senate, and the House speaker essentially forced members to accept it from afar, after they had left forChristmas recess.

This time, the consequences are more significant, with more than a half-trillion dollars in tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts just days from going into force, an event most economists warn would send the economy back into recession if not quickly mitigated. With the House set to return to the Capitol on Sunday night, Mr. Boehner has said he would place any Senate bill before his chamber and let the vote proceed and the chips fall. The House could also change the legislation and return it to the Senate.

If the Senate is able to produce a bill that is largely bipartisan, there is a strong belief among House Republicans that the same measure would easily pass the House, with a large number of Republicans. While Mr. Boehner was unable to muster enough votes for his alternative bill that would have protected tax cuts for income under $1 million, that was because the measure lacked Democratic support, and was roughly a few dozen votes shy of passage with Republicans alone.

Helene Cooper and Ron Nixon contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/us/politics/key-meeting-looms-as-scaled-back-fiscal-deal-is-explored.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Obama and Leaders Reach Debt Deal

August 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

With the health of the fragile economy hanging in the balance and financial markets watching closely, the leaders said they would present the compromise to their caucuses on Monday morning in hopes of enacting it before a Tuesday deadline to avert default.

Even as the president was speaking from the White House on Sunday night, Speaker John A. Boehner was on a conference call with House Republicans, trying to sell them on the proposal he had signed off on only minutes before.

Since he is likely to lose the most conservative elements of the caucus, Mr. Boehner faces the task of framing the pact as friendly enough to Republican principles to win over a significant group of his rank-and-file without alienating Democrats he will need to push it over the top.

President Obama, in a hastily called appearance with reporters that ended a day of uncertainty, said that the compromise would “allow us to avoid default and end the crisis that Washington imposed on the rest of America.”

“It ensures also that we will not face this same kind of crisis again in six months, or eight months, or 12 months,” he said. “And it will begin to lift the cloud of debt and the cloud of uncertainty that hangs over our economy.”

Just before Mr. Obama spoke on television, the two Senate leaders, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, took the floor to endorse the pact as well.

“I am relieved to say that leaders from both parties have come together for the sake of our economy to reach a historic, bipartisan compromise that ends this dangerous standoff,” said Mr. Reid, the majority leader.

The tentative agreement calls for at least $2.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, a new Congressional committee to recommend a deficit-reduction proposal by Thanksgiving, and a two-step increase in the debt ceiling.

The announcement concluded a tumultuous 24 hours that saw hopes rise Saturday night over the prospects of a deal that might have concluded the budget stalemate. By Sunday, worry set in again as lawmakers and White House officials struggled to hammer out the fine points of an agreement that must clear a Senate controlled by Democrats as well as by the Republican House.

If the deal clears Congress, with its new special joint committee to explore deficit reduction, it will ensure that the size and scope of the federal government and the tension between spending and taxes will remain front and center in the Washington debate headed into the 2012 election.

Markets reacted favorably to the announcement. Asian markets jumped on news of the deal. The Nikkei was up 1.7 percent in early trading; the dollar rose about 1.4 percent against the Japanese yen.

The agreement came after a day of wrangling over Pentagon cuts, and it still must win majority support in the Senate and the House, with the House providing a particular challenge.

On the conference call, Mr. Boehner sought to portray the new agreement as one heavily tilted toward the Republican call for no new revenue, and he said it met the goal of instituting cuts greater than the amount of the debt limit increase. In a presentation, he said the pact would prevent a “job-killing default” — a warning to lawmakers that failure to raise the limit could add to the bleak employment picture.

“Our framework is now on the table that will end this crisis in a manner that meets our principles of smaller government,” said Mr. Boehner, who said he hoped to get the legislation onto the House floor as quickly as possible.

As conversations flowed between the White House and Capitol Hill, Mr. Reid earlier Sunday publicly embraced the compromise that would tie deep spending cuts to a debt ceiling increase, though his plan to bring it to a vote as early as Sunday was put off, as was a tentative meeting of Senate Democrats to review it.

According to Congressional and administration officials, the delay was attributable to efforts by Mr. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, to limit immediate reductions in the Pentagon budget and better protect it from future cuts in order to cement votes from defense hawks. He needs those votes to win approval of the plan in the House.

Robert Pear and Jackie Calmes contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 31, 2011

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated when the automatic cuts would occur if Congress does not approve a second round in a few months. They would occur at the end of the year 2012, not 2011.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=64814067c7e03ecd09ffd0f4041b4b45

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Digital Domain: Helping Drunken Drivers Avoid Tickets, but Not Wrecks

April 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Last month, Senators Harry Reid, Charles E. Schumer, Frank R. Lautenberg and Tom Udall asked Apple, Google and Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerrys, to remove apps from their online stores that help drunken drivers evade sobriety checkpoints.

On March 23, the day after the letter went out, the group said BlackBerry agreed to pull the apps and thanked the group for bringing them to its attention.

Apple and Google? Nothing.

An Apple spokeswoman said the company would not comment. A Google spokesman said the apps did not violate the company’s content policies.

In supplying the precise locations of sobriety checkpoints, these apps do nothing illegal. They do not supply sexually explicit material, nor do they bully anyone, nor do they embody hate speech. Those are three of the nine categories that Google forbids for Android apps. But it might be time for Google to proscribe a 10th category: enablers of drunken driving.

Sobriety checkpoints — locations where officers stop some drivers and perform breath tests on those suspected of being drunk — are not used primarily to catch impaired drivers and issue tickets: the number of intersections that can be covered is too few for the actual arrests to make much of a dent. The checkpoints are intended to deter drunken driving by simply being out there, vaguely.

J. T. Griffin, vice president for policy at Mothers Against Drunk Driving, says, “There’s a difference between a broad announcement that there will be sobriety checkpoints in a general location versus a specific location that can be downloaded to your smartphone with the intent of allowing a drunk driver to evade a checkpoint.”

In 2009, 10,839 people were killed by alcohol-impaired drivers, which was about a third of total traffic fatalities for the year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“There’s a face on every one of those 10,839,” said James McMahon, chief of staff of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “There’s a mourning family behind every one.”

The total would be significantly greater were it not for the deterring effect of sobriety checkpoints that are permitted to exist as a widely publicized, but geographically indeterminate, presence.

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention convened scientists to review 23 studies that looked at the effectiveness of sobriety checkpoints, the panel concluded that the checkpoints typically reduced alcohol-related crashes by about 20 percent. That was way back in 2002, well before the arrival of smartphone apps like PhantomAlert and Trapster, which warn of the locations of speed traps, red light cameras and other kinds of alerts, in addition to sobriety checkpoints. They can feed GPS navigation devices, too.

PhantomAlert’s iPhone app boasts that the company’s database has 400,000 “enforcement” locations. “See Them Before They See You!” it cheerily advises.

Buzzed, a smartphone app that shows nothing but sobriety checkpoints, is matched with a Web site with a self-explanatory address, EveryCheckpoint.com.

PhantomAlert was one of the apps that Research In Motion pulled from its online store at the request of the senators. R.I.M. did not respond to requests for comment. But Joseph Scott, chief executive of PhantomAlert, defended real-time alerts of sobriety checkpoints as a convenience to law-abiding citizens who do not want to be delayed by a checkpoint. “Assuming someone who gets a D.U.I.-checkpoint alert is going to drink and drive is like assuming anyone who owns a gun is a murderer,” he said.

Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for the Virginia State Police, said that two years ago, PhantomAlert broadcast the existence of sobriety checkpoints in a general area, but without real-time location information. “The original concept was it could deter someone from driving drunk because there might have been a D.U.I. checkpoint on the way home and one didn’t know for sure,” she said. “Today, the way the program is used, it defeats the purpose of deterring illegal behavior.”

Mr. Scott says that he is talking with Research In Motion about positioning his company as a “responsible corporate citizen.” He is offering to suspend real-time reports of sobriety checkpoint locations. In an e-mail he sent me last week, he also said that he wanted to send out a joint news release with Research In Motion, “praising the senators for fighting the epidemic of drinking and driving and for giving us the chance to help them tackle this huge problem.”

Before he was flooded with civic-mindedness, however, he had taken a different tack, complaining to me that it wasn’t fair for the senators to single out him and the online app stores. “People have formed Facebook and Twitter groups to alert people of D.U.I. checkpoints, but no one is going after Facebook or Twitter,” he told me two weeks ago.

Those Facebook and Twitter feeds are not going to be particularly useful to the inebriated driver, however. It’s not the transmission of checkpoint information, in any form, that poses the public health problem. It’s when checkpoint information is transmitted instantly and precisely and is automatically incorporated into navigational software.

SOBRIETY checkpoints are the rare case in which the public interest would best be served with information that is less precise than technology is capable of providing. General alerts are good: they help spread the word and deter drunken driving. But they should blanket the town rather than show up as pushpins on a smartphone’s street map.  

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e697b1dfb3d0d480474747a36953f017

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