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The Obama-Republican Party Deficit Deal: Hope and Cave?

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From all accounts forthcoming from Washington, D.C.  late this afternoon, the media is reporting, with very little differentiation that a political resolution to the Republicans’ manufactured deficit ceiling crisis has been successfully negotiated between President Barack Obama and Senator Mitch O’Connell, the Senate Minority Leader, and with Majority Leader Harry Reid’s apparent consent. According to politicos in the know, this deal, if supported, will resolve the nation’s unprecedented budgetary crisis through 2013, after the elections, and should put the country on a fiscal footing that could avoid a downgrade in the U.S. credit rating.

But Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Leader in the House is not rushing to embrace the plan sight unseen. As reported by Talking Points Memo this evening: “We all may not be able to support it,” she said. “And maybe none of us will be able to support it.”

Not all Americans are checked out and a very harsh verdict by Obama supporters, principally Democrats, is ricocheting around the Internet on Twitter: “#hopeandcave” has emerged from Obama’s base that is sizzling hot in its indictment of Obama’s apparent propensity to go more than half-way to meet Republican recalcitrant demands.

Adding more heat to an Internet that is burning up is the Califorina Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus is calling for a primary challenge to Obama, which is sesmic–an earthquake sound shouted from the West Coast, reported by our colleagues at LGBT POV.

This is nothing to sneeze at.  A front page story on the New York Times today titled “Rightward Tilt Leaves Obama With Party Rift” reports:

Entering a campaign that is shaping up as an epic clash over the parties’ divergent views on the size and role of the federal government, Republicans have changed the terms of the national debate. Mr. Obama, seeking to appeal to the broad swath of independent voters, has adopted the Republicans’ language and in some cases their policies, while signaling a willingness to break with liberals on some issues.

That has some progressive members of Congress and liberal groups arguing that by not fighting for more stimulus spending, Mr. Obama could be left with an economy still producing so few jobs by Election Day that his re-election could be threatened. Besides turning off independents, Mr. Obama risks alienating Democratic voters already disappointed by his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, end the Bush-era tax cuts and enact a government-run health insurance system.

 The New York Times’ conclusions are backed up by Salon.com’s Glen Greenwald in “Democratic Politics in a Nutshell,” who quotes Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), a member of the “Out of Poverty” caucus, who said this past week:

“We’ve got to educate the American people at the same time we educate the President of the United States.  The Republicans, Speaker Boehner or Majority Leader Cantor did not call for Social Security cuts in the budget deal. The President of the United States called for that,” Conyers, who has served in the House since 1965, said. “My response to him is to mass thousands of people in front of the White House to protest this,” Conyers said strongly.

The Senate voted this afternoon to stop debate and move to final passage. Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid’s compromise intended to resolve the deficit ceiling budget crisis, but it failed to reach the magical 60 votes necessary. Reid has announced he will call a vote this evening after McConnell and the Republicans extracted more Democratic flesh in further cuts to entitlements, including Social Security and Medicare.

Greg Sargent from the Washington Post is reporting that the Republicans have gotten about 98 percent of what they have so obdurately pursued in lock-step–bottom line, no new taxes seems to have carried the day and about $2.4 trillion in undetermined cuts. Sargent explains:

By all accounts, it looks like a deal is about to be announced in which the debt ceiling is hiked in exchange for the promise of major spending cuts, including to entitlements, totalling at least $2.4 trillion.

Anything can happen, but it appears the GOP is on the verge of pulling off a political victory that may be unprecedented in American history. Republicans may succeed in using the threat of a potential outcome that they themselves acknowledged would lead to national catastrophe as leverage to extract enormous concessions from Democrats, without giving up anything of any significance in return.

Not only that, but Republicans — in perhaps the most remarkable example of political up-is-downism in recent memory — cast their willingness to dangle the threat of national crisis as a brave and heroic effort they’d undertaken on behalf of the national interest. Only the threat of national crisis could force the immediate spending cuts supposedly necessary to prevent a far more epic crisis later.

This is where the #hopeandcave sentiments begin with Democratic Progressives. Another sentiment also emerging is that more and more calls to #primaryObama from the left in the past few weeks, initially recommended by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), which have been echoed on the pages of the Wall Street Journal by Peter du Pont, who has called for Hillary Clinton to challenge Obama, not surprisingly. Many Clinton supporters are waiting in the wings and have drafted a petition drive to draft her, praying that Hillary will tip her hand, resign her office and take a leap of audacity by challenging Obama, a sitting president, to a redux of a bitter fight in 2008.

Nonetheless, Democratic pundits have dismissed disgruntled liberals, essentially saying they have no other place to go, but as the details emerge on where the cuts will fall, don’t be so sure, that people who are really hurting in this abysmal economy  just might stay home in 2012. And if all else fails in the next two days, don’t count on Obama invoking the 14th Amendment to protect the country’s fiscal sovereignty. He and many members of his Administration have dismissed that course of action as not feasible.

Tanya L. Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, who teaches about human rights in Eurasia and is a Harriman Institute affiliated faculty member. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi worked internationally for more than a decade on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights, gender issues, sex trafficking, and media freedom.

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News

Liz Cheney Predicts Many Republicans Will Secretly Vote For Kamala Harris

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Former Republican Representative Liz Cheney predicted Sunday many Republicans will actually end up voting for Vice President Kamala Harris.

The former Wyoming representative appeared on ABC’s This Week to urge her fellow Republicans to dump former President Donald Trump and endorse Harris as she has.

“Given the closeness of this election, particularly if you’re going to find yourself voting in a swing state, you’ve got to take the extra step if you really do recognize the threat that Donald Trump poses. Then it’s not enough to simply say, ‘I’m not going to vote for him,’” she said.

READ MORE: Liz Cheney Stomps Mitch McConnell for ‘Political Calculation’ to Ignore Trump’s Election Crimes

But she also said that even if many Republicans don’t follow her lead and denounce the former president, they’ll take advantage of the privacy of the polls to secretly support the Democratic candidate.

“It’s a secret ballot,” Cheney said. “At the end of the day, you just have to wrestle with your own conscience when you’re there in the voting booth. And I would expect that you will see far more Republicans and independents, you know, when the time comes, and they’ve got to make that decision, make the right decision.”

This would be the opposite of what some believe happened in 2016. Polls at the time generally showed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the lead over Trump. But when the election happened, though Clinton won the popular vote, it wasn’t enough to tip the Electoral College in her favor.

Over 70% of Republican insiders felt the polls underestimated Trump’s support, according to a Politico article from October 2016.

“I personally know many Republicans that won’t admit that they are voting for Trump. I don’t like admitting it myself. It won’t matter if Hillary is up more than 5 points, but we might be in for a surprise if Hillary’s lead is less than 5 points on Election Day,” an unnamed Virginia Republican told the outlet at the time.

In a 2016 interview conducted before the election, Trump’s then-campaign manager Kellyanne Conway pointed out that Trump polled better in anonymous online polls than in more traditional polling, according to WJLA.

“It’s become socially desirable, especially if you’re a college-educated person in the United States of America, to say that you’re against Donald Trump,” she said.

A 2019 study found that this was indeed the case. The study found that 54% of those polled voted for Trump but kept their preference a secret publicly. When broken out by gender, 57% of men and 50% of women polled kept their Trump vote a secret.

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News

Trump Calls for Government Shutdown: ‘CLOSE IT DOWN!!!’

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Former President Donald Trump urged House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to cause a government shutdown unless the House passes the SAVE Act.

“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN – CLOSE IT DOWN!!!” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social Tuesday.

Johnson has paired the continuing resolution, which would fund the government for another six months, with the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship in order to become a registered voter. The SAVE Act was originally introduced by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and passed in the House on its own in July. Every Republican voted for the SAVE Act, along with five Democrats.

READ MORE: GOP Congressman Admits ‘Most of What We Do Is Bad’ as McCarthy’s Republicans Push for Federal Government Shutdown

The standalone version of the SAVE act is stalled in the Democrat-controlled Senate. It is unlikely to pass, and has yet to be brought to a vote in that chamber. President Joe Biden has promised to veto it should the bill make it out of the Senate.

Attaching the SAVE Act to the continuing resolution has not made it any more popular outside of the House. In fact, at least five House Republicans said they’re against the pairing, according to Roll Call. Republicans’ majority in the House is slim, meaning that providing no absences and a united front against it from Democrats, five Republicans are all that are needed to sink the resolution.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) said in the House Monday that even if the continuing resolution passes as-is, the Senate would remove the SAVE Act and send it back to the House. Even in the unlikely situation where the Senate lets the SAVE Act part stand, Biden’s reiterated that he would veto it, according to The Hill.

Critics of the SAVE Act point out that it’s irrelevant. Only American citizens are allowed to vote by law, and it’s very rare for noncitizens to try to vote illegally.

“This is a crime where not only are the consequences really high and the payoff really low — you’re not getting millions of dollars, it’s not robbing a bank, you get to cast one ballot,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, told MSNBC. “But what also makes this somewhat unique is that committing this crime actually entails the creation of a government record of your crime.

“It’s very easy to catch, and you will get caught.”

Morales-Doyle said that on the other hand, the SAVE Act would make it more difficult for actual citizens to vote because many do not have passports or access to their birth certificates. There is also a law against requiring proof of citizenship in federal elections, MSNBC reported.

Threatening government shutdowns has become a common ploy from the Republicans, and there have been 10 shutdowns since 1981, according to History.com. All but three of the 10 shutdowns were led by Republicans. One exception was in 1982, when both parties of Congress missed the deadline despite agreeing on terms. In confusion, some agencies sent employees home, but the shutdown only lasted three days, between September 30 and October 2.

The remaining two shutdowns were the result of Democrats protesting Trump’s policies. In January 2018, there was a four-day shutdown over Trump’s plans to phase out the DACA program allowing children of undocumented people to remain in the United States. The end of 2018 saw the longest shutdown in history. The issue was over funding Trump’s planned wall along the border of Mexico. The shutdown lasted over a month, until Republicans backed down.

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CORRUPTION

JD Vance Says in 2020 He Wouldn’t Certify Election: ‘Let the Country Have the Debate’

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Ohio Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, said Monday that if he were in former Vice President Mike Pence’s place, he would not have certified the election on January 6, 2021.

Speaking as part of a panel on the All-In Podcast, Vance told cohost Jason Calacanis the issue wasn’t necessarily Pence deciding not to “overturn the election results,” but rather that “Mike Pence could have done more to sort of surface some problems.”‘

Calacanis replied by asking Vance directly if he would have certified the election.

READ MORE: ‘BadgerPundit’: Top Trump Attorney in Fake Electors Plot Hid Secret Twitter Account

“I happen to think that there were issues back in 2020, particularly in Pennsylvania. Even some of the courts that refused to throw out certified ballots did say that there were ballots that were cast in an illegal way. They just refused to actually decertify the election results in Pennsylvania,” Vance said. “Do I think that we could have had a much more rational conversation about how to ensure that only legal ballots are cast? Yes. And do I think that Mike Pence could have played a better role? Yes.”

Calacanis asked Vance again if he’d have certified the election, and Vance appears to back the plan to send fake electors to cause confusion in the certification process.

“I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we have. That’s what I would have done,” Vance said. “The important part is we would have had a big debate. And it doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different, but we would, at least, have had the debate in Pennsylvania and Georgia about how to better have a rational election system where legal ballots are cast.”

Democrats heavily criticized Vance’s statement.

“Donald Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate because he knows that Vance will do what his last vice president wouldn’t—undermine our democracy and help him try to overturn election results. Now, Vance is making it clear: instead of certifying the 2020 election, Vance ‘would have asked the states’ to send slates of fake electors and throw our election into chaos to help Trump stay in power. Vance is clearly laying out the stakes of this election for our democracy and our basic freedoms, and showing voters that if given the chance, he’ll try to replace the rule of law with the rule of Trump,” Alex Floyd, the rapid response director for the DNC, said in a statement.

Vance’s claims of there being illegal ballots in Pennsylvania appears to be based on a claim from former President Donald Trump in 2022. Trump said that a then-recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that ballots sent in undated envelopes will not be counted in that year’s election meant that the 2020 election was “rigged, but they’ll let that result stand.”

The Associated Press debunked Trump’s claim, reporting that not only did Trump misrepresent the court’s ruling, but even if his claim was accurate, throwing out these ballots would not have mattered in the election.

 

 

 

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