I say yes, you say no, OR People are Strange
Comments
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C4C, that's why I keep saying that the future of the Republic is in jeopardy. Our system of government works because people agree to work within its parameters. The lunatics (really, I don't know another word for them at this point) who are attempting to overturn a settled, enacted, promulgated law through extra-legislative jiggery-pokey are suborning the Constitution and destroying the framework of cooperation we have depended on to make democracy in this country work.
They are breaking the Constitution. They are breaking our representative form of government (they were not elected by the majority - they are a minority of terrorists and are attempting to destroy our system of government). They are breaking the economy of the United States and playing chicken with breaking the world economy.
Really, they are skating perilously close to irreparably damaging our experiment with democracy. -
I'm so curious what the Republicans talk about in their caucuses. How do they let 40 Teahadists influence their whole Party's vote?? Is the Hastert Rule as powerful as the Grover Norquist rule? Do these people cut their fingers and swear blood on these things? Maybe those "sane" GOP members are just hiding behind the Teahadist's skirts? Afterall, the majority of the majority only has one dissenting vote, that I've seen, on all of these junked up CR bills they've been passing.
No, they can't get subsidies, even if they make less than $48k. They are specifically prohibited from getting subsidies in the original ACA.
The staffers can't get subsidies? That makes no sense. For everyone else, the subsidy is available. Including millionaires, as assets have no bearing on the subsidy, just income. Was this part of the original ACA - Congress and their staff?
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Found the answer to my question - posted within last 1/2 hour.
Republicans working to line up votes on their own plan
Posted byCNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Dana Bash
Moderate House Republicans who want to fund the government with no strings attached are working to line up votes against a House GOP plan to renew federal coffers while chipping away at Obamacare, multiple GOP sources involved in the effort tell CNN.
Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pennsylvania, Rep. Peter King, R-New York, and others are feverishly making calls to stage what would effectively be a revolt.
They say they are hoping there are enough GOP members like them who are fed up with the tactics of the leadership that they can find enough votes to defeat the first procedural measure, known as the rule.That would prevent the House GOP leadership from even bringing their plan up at all.
Given the makeup of the GOP caucus, these House Republican moderates would need in the ballpark of 20 Republicans to agree to defy their leadership, and be willing to face what will undoubtedly be the wrath of the conservative grassroots.
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Kam...I bet the answer is in the old saying...."follow the money".
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The Republican implosion continues....
Devin Nunes Calls GOP Colleagues 'Lemmings With Suicide Vests' As Shutdown Looms
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sharply criticized his fellow House Republicans on Monday, saying it's "moronic" for them to let the government shut down over their opposition to Obamacare and calling them "lemmings with suicide vests."
“They have to be more than just a lemming," he said. "Because jumping to your death is not enough."
Nunes slammed his colleagues for their divisive approach, accusing House Republicans of creating an "us versus them" mentality.
“You have this group saying somehow if you’re not with them, you’re with Obamacare. If you’re not with their plan — exactly what they want to do -- you’re with Obamacare. It’s getting a little old,” he said.
Nunes supports House Republicans' latest offer, which aims to avert a government shutdown while delaying the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate for a year.
When asked earlier on Monday whether the House would pass a "clean" funding bill before the midnight deadline, averting a government shutdown without incorporating any Obamacare provisions, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said, "That's not going to happen."
Then why did Mr Nunes vote with the Teahadists? What am I missing? -
Because apparently Nunes is still drinking the psychedelic, toxic tea and thinks that a one-year delay of A LAW THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN ENACTED is an OK thing to demand. Because he seems to be as delusional as the rest.
Kam, I don't think you're missing anything. You are trying to apply logic to a situation which defies logic.
You know, the Hastert Rule is made up. They just make up crap. Boehner can bring a clean bill to the House floor at any time. He just doesn't want to because he fears being deposed by the tealiban in Congress. He wants to keep his job as Speaker (which gets him all kinds of nifty perks like a higher salary, a bigger office, more staff, home-to-work chauffering and 24-hour security). He is too afraid to actually lead because he is afraid the thugs will depose him.
A gang of bullies led by a coward.
smh
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/09/30/administration-moves-to-limit-but-not-end-health-insurance-subsidy-for-congress/
Administration moves to limit, but not end, health insurance subsidy for Congress
By Eric Yoder, Published: September 30 at 6:07 pm
Members of Congress and their staff who will have to get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act would continue to receive a government contribution toward premiums next year but only if they enroll in a specific ACA plan, under a revised Obama administration policy unveiled Monday.
The policy was issued as House Republican leaders floated a plan, as part of the maneuvering over the budgetary deadlock, to end that contribution for Congress and certain employees who will be forced out of their current health program.
The administration’s policy would keep the subsidy in place only for members of Congress and affected staff who enroll in a Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) plan to become available in the District of Columbia. Such plans most commonly will be aimed at employees of businesses with fewer than 50 workers.
Members of Congress and Capitol Hill workers, like almost all other federal employees, currently are eligible for the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, in which the government pays about 70 percent of the total premium cost on average. However, under the ACA, House and Senate members and certain personal staff — although not other Hill employees — instead will have to get their insurance through the ACA’s marketplace effective with the 2014 calendar year.
That provision was put in the law because of pressures to have Congress experience the same health coverage under the ACA as what’s to be available to the general public. However, it caused uncertainty over which congressional staffers will be affected and the status of the employer contribution. Those questions resulted in a hold being placed for a short time on the nominee to head the Office of Personnel Management, a position that has been vacant since April.
Proposed rules issued in August by OPM said that each member of Congress would decide annually who are employees of their “official offices” as described by the law; some Capitol Hill employees are paid partly from office funds and partly from committee funds, for example.
Those rules also said that the government-paid share of premiums could continue for those forced out of the FEHBP program, reasoning that the ACA did not repeal the separate authority covering the FEHBP premium formula. OPM further decided to apply the same cost-sharing formula as for an FEHBP plan, meaning an employer share of up to 75 percent.
In final rules set for publication Wednesday, OPM says that “numerous” commenters on the proposed rules “asserted that Members of Congress and congressional staff should be subject to the same requirements as citizens purchasing insurance on the Exchanges, including individual responsibility for premiums and income restrictions for premium assistance.”
Some members of Congress have raised similar arguments since even before the draft rules were issued, leading to a series of proposals to end the subsidy, at least for themselves.
The final rules state that while the administration has not changed its view that the ACA provision did not override the FEHBP premium-sharing authority, “SHOPs are designed to provide employer-sponsored group health benefits and are, therefore, the appropriate environment in which to provide an employer contribution to Members of Congress and congressional staff. Further, this ensures that Members of Congress and congressional staff do not have additional choices in the individual Exchanges with a Government contribution that other individuals lack.”
To receive the government contribution, members of Congress and affected staff would have to enroll in the DC Health Link Small Business Market. Specifically, their choice for 2014 must be made from among that plan’s “gold”-level options, according to separate guidance.
They could purchase other coverage through the exchanges on the same basis as other eligible persons without an employer share, the rules add: “Nothing in this rule or the law prevents a Member of Congress or designated congressional staff from declining a Government contribution for himself or herself by choosing a different option for his/her health insurance coverage.”
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RL - thanks for that article.
Hmm, where has Paul Ryan been in all of this?
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Suspiciously quiet, eh? Contemplating his 2016 Presidential run and staying out of the line of fire? Not getting his hands dirty in public?
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Here is a comprehensive article from Ezra Klein's Wonkblog about the Affordable Care Act. It is long, so I don't want to take up the space here, but if anyone (lurking) has any questions, here is a good place to start. It also has links to other good places to look for info:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/30/%3Fp%3D63297/?hpid=z4
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Kam - your link from 2 hours ago = finding I am on the same side as Peter King R-NY. THIS IS A WEIRD WEIRD WORLD.
What RL said about our Democracy. That a few teahadists would care more about their personal egos, jobs, than the future of the USA. Can't fathom it....
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Bully terrorists at work still. Kam....yes and Rubio has been rather quiet too. I think for the most part ( excepting for Clownmaster Cruz ) all are staying quiet and not stirring the pot. I would be amazed ( though with the idiocy of the TP'ers it is sure possible ) that any of the above would be put forward. A lot of their not so good intent has oozed out with their shenanigans in the last election and sequestration. The party of horribly stupid is not going to get that smart that quick, if ever.
Jackie
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Sunny - yeah - Peter King a moderate Republican, who knew? Jackie - on Rubio -well he is in the Senate. Not sure what he thought of Carnival Cruz. Do you know?
This is interesting:
- Today at 11:59 AM
The House GOP’s Legislative Strike
In January, demoralized House Republicans retreated to Williamsburg, Virginia, to plot out their legislative strategy for President Obama’s second term. Conservatives were angry that their leaders had been unable to stop the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on high incomes, and sought assurances from their leaders that no further compromises would be forthcoming. The agreement that followed, which Republicans called “The Williamsburg Accord,” received obsessive coverage in the conservative media but scant attention in the mainstream press. (The phrase “Williamsburg Accord” has appeared once in the Washington Post and not at all in the New York Times.)
But the decision House Republicans made in January has set the party on the course it has followed since. If you want to grasp why Republicans are careening toward a potential federal government shutdown, and possibly toward provoking a sovereign debt crisis after that, you need to understand that this is the inevitable product of a conscious party strategy. Just as Republicans responded to their 2008 defeat by moving farther right, they responded to the 2012 defeat by moving right yet again. Since they had begun from a position of total opposition to the entire Obama agenda, the newer rightward lurch took the form of trying to wrest concessions from Obama by provoking a series of crises.
The first element of the strategy is a kind of legislative strike. Initially, House Republicans decided to boycott all direct negotiations with President Obama, and then subsequently extended that boycott to negotiations with the Democratic Senate. (Senate Democrats have spent months pleading with House Republicans to negotiate with them, to no avail.) This kind of refusal to even enter negotiations is highly unusual. The way to make sense of it is that Republicans have planned since January to force Obama to accede to large chunks of the Republican agenda, without Republicans having to offer any policy concessions of their own.
Republicans have thrashed this way and that throughout the year. Republicans have fallen out, often sharply, over which hostages to ransom, with the most conservative ones favoring a government shutdown threat and the more pragmatic wing, oddly, endorsing a debt default threat. They have also struggled to define the terms of their ransom. The Williamsburg Accord initially envisioned forcing Obama to sign spending cuts, or some form of the Paul Ryan budget. During the summer, Republicans flirted with making Obama lock in lower marginal tax rates. Recently, Republicans settled on pressuring him to kill his health-care law. But the general contours of the legislative strike, and the plan of obtaining policy victories without offering any policy concessions, has enjoyed general agreement within the party.
The history is important because much of the news coverage and centrist commentary has leaned heavily on the idea that the crises in Washington have come about because of some nebulous failure of bipartisanship. TheWashington Post editorial page implores both sides to compromise, without explaining why only one party should have to offer policy concessions to keep the government running. Mark Halperin neatly implies that the two sides share the blame in equal measure:
The analytic error here is the assumption by professional pox-on-both-housers that they can take an advocacy position on the government shutdown without siding with one of the parties. If you want to land on the conclusion that both sides are to blame, you need to equivocate on the underlying moral question of whether a shutdown is really a bad thing. If, on the other hand, you want to take a stance against crisis governance, you need to be honest about the fact that one party is pursuing this as a conscious strategy. -
From Ringside Seat:
Daily Meme: Countdown to Shutdown
So, it looks like we're headed for a government shutdown, if Speaker John Boehner's red baseball cap (and his onerous caucus) proves destiny.
But turn that frown upside down! All this doom and gloom does nothing but good for political campaign coffers ... even if the Washington region could bleed over $200 million a day and see 700,000 jobs affected.
And, conservatives aren't sure this is all that big of a deal. As The Wall Street Journal points out, "Many Americans will be inconvenienced, but tens of millions may come to realize how easily they can do without most of the vast federal Leviathan."
And, truth be told, this is an odd battle for the Tea Party to bet all their chips on. As Edward Luce puts it, "Tea Party Republicans have chosen a highly idiosyncratic piece of turf to re-enact Custer’s last stand. Only on psychological grounds can their recklessness be fully understood."
And the fact that over half of American health care is already run by the federal government fails to take account of the fact the the evil socialist overlord Barack Obama presides over it all.
In the end, however, could this be the stubborn stick that breaks the far reaches of the right's back? Matt Yglesias writes, "A little government shutdown isn’t the worst thing in the world, and it’s much better to have this fight now rather than entertain months of herky-jerky crisis."
Mainstream Republicans are hoping they can shut down their less than reasonable relatives.
Noam Scheiber taunts, "So go ahead, Tea Partiers. Shut down the government. But when you do, just keep in mind that 1996 is the favorable scenario. The throttling you’re now courting is likely to be a whole lot worse."
Heck, Joshua Green is crossing his fingers for a government shutdown!
To which Molly Ball replies, uh, I think not. "The majority of House Republicans already want to prevent a shutdown and a default. But there's a small group that insists on defunding Obamacare as an ultimatum, and they are not likely to be placated by a little government shutdown. Many believe that the government shutdown of 1995 either didn't hurt Republicans politically or only hurt Republicans because they gave in rather than standing firm."
As David Frum notes, the party has no idea how to govern itself anymore. "It can't think strategically. Even when pressed to do something overwhelmingly likely to end in disaster, as this shutdown looks likely to do for Republicans, the party has no way to stop itself. It stumbles into fights it cannot win, gets mad, and then in its anger lurches into yet another fight that ends in yet another loss." It stands to reason that another loss will prompt the same response it has for the past few years—another sashay into the crazy moors of the far right.
In short, buckle up. This probably won't be pretty.
No Kam.....I don't know what Cruz may have thought -- only thinking back to Rubio being 'tested' early on with the counter to Pres. Obama's State on the Union adress. Of course, with the illogical logic of the TP'ers there is something of a list and what name gets pulled from the hat later may be quite interesting.
Jackie
Spell checker is gone.....sorry.
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Just listening to a smidgeon of a segment on RM with a guy name Wasserman? from Cook Research. Apparently, these Teahadist districts are so gerrymandered, that the average % Obama lost these districts was 23%! All of these districts were won by the Teahadist by atleast 10%. They have no worries about Moderate Republicans being disgruntled with their current hostage taking. They are uber secure with their twisted electorate.
The real question is why the "more moderate" Republicans, including Boehner, aren't just getting a vote for a clean CR. They, along with the Dems, have the votes. Essentially, this 30-40 in number of Teahadists have some weird power over Boehner.
It has been said that Wall Street (huh, not the people?) is the only institution that can pull strings on these wackos, including whatever trance they have over the rest of their Party. Ok, we've known it all along, the GOP is controlled by Wall Street. I wonder if it will be reported this way....ofcourse, how would we know how that relationship works. We just know that Wall Street is their first constituency.
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Ok, so the teahadists have decided to burn the place down...what is their friggin end game? When will this govt shutdown end?
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Hi Donna - Til they blow up the government? Seems as logical an answer as any.
Watching the Rules Committee work on this now - thought it might be pass the hot potato for a solution leading to a clean CR, but looking more like a way to prevent "good" Republicans from bringing a motion to the floor for a clean CR.
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Jon Stewart tonight: "If the President can do a successful negotiation with one of the most intransigent governments (Iran) in the world, but not with the GOP, maybe HE'S not the PROBLEM".
ETA: That was Jon's answer (snark) to all the idjuts who think the President should be negotiating over an already-passed LAW.
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I'd love to see Stewart and OReilly have a debate show.
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Chick -- They did! Tonight, in fact. Jon made several good points, and O'Reilly tried to refute them all, natch....
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"Peter King: I Did My Best to Fight the Cruz Crazies"
"Peter King attempted to lead a moderate coup against the Republican leadership. He tells Michael Daly why he could no longer stand by and watch the crazies in his party damage the country."
"......It goes against the whole spirit of the Constitution,” King says of the effort to undo Obamacare.....
.....He spoke passionately against the course the crazies had now set them on. “It’s going nowhere, there’s no endgame,” he recalls saying. “It’s bad for the Congress. It's bad for the government, bad for the country.”
For him, it was not a matter of politics, but of conscience. He could not facilitate what he had termed “government terrorism” on the part of the crazies.
“I can’t be party to this anymore,” he told the crowd in HC-5....."
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Seems to me this shut down shows that maybe the US really is exceptional.
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Belinda - love your last post.
Lassie - definitely true, we now know the USA can breed terrorists with every other country.
Teahadists. "We will be martyrs for nothing."
Obamacares starts today. YES YES YES
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Indeed, Lassie. Exceptional in that a small group of lunatics can hold the entire country hostage and shut down the government because they don't like the results of the last election. People should be very afraid in this country ... It is only a small step from shutting down the government because you didn't like the results of the election and you don't like a law that was duly and legally passed, signed into law, adjudicated constitutional by the Supreme Court, promulgated and enacted to conspiring to overthrow a duly elected president and installing your own dictator.
Welcome to the United States of Tealiban, where we don't need no stinkin' laws - we make up our own.
*sigh*
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