Senate

How do we fix Social Security/Medicare and the lack of Health Care for the general public?

jtbutler — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:35:52 -0400

September 12th, 2009

Everyone wants to fix the Social Security system, the Medicare system and provide Health Care for the general public. Hello, everyone is going at these issues from the wrong angle. What needs to be introduces is:

1. A law that stops the Senate and House of Reps from drawing such large salaries from the taxes us common folk pay. Yes they should be paid, but come one everyone, Social Security folk will not be getting their normal Cost of Living Increase for the next 2 or so years because the system is failing. But yet members of the Senate and House of Reps will still draw their huge salaries.

2. A law that says that once a Senator or House of Rep retires, the gravy train is done. Right now these people collect their pay for the rest of their lives with not exception. This is not right when we have millions of people that are living in poverty because there are no jobs. This is an issue of no money because the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer.

3. A law that says Senators and House of Reps has to pay into the Social Security System and collect the same amount as the rest of us common folk. After all right now they draw their full salary after leaving the job and never were made to pay into the system... How freaking backwards is this?

Well gee wiz, if Senators and House of Reps were forced to pay into the Social Security System and collect from it after they leave their jobs I would think that the Social Security System would be fixed in no time.

As far as Health Care for the General Public goes. I think the major issue is that when you pay for insurance you are covered for your health care. The insurance companies only pay a portion of the bill that is incurred. If you are an uninsured person you pay 100% of the cost of your health care. So dollar for dollar the poor person is getting hit with a full bill. I think that people that are paying cash/from their pocket should be getting the same deal that insurance companies make with Health Care Providers and Doctors. Then at least the poorer folk that are paying 100% would me more able to pay for their health care because they do not have to pay 100% of the bill.

My opinion is that if Elected Officials had to pay into the Social Security System like everyone else (and not be allowed to vote themselves a raise whenever they feel like it) and collect from it for their retirement instead of getting their full salary without ever paying into the system, the Social Security System would be fixed really quickly. Also, if uninsured people were given the same break that Insurance Companies get they would be able to afford Medical Care.

One other point I would like to make. We have lent millions upon millions of dollars to many countries that have never even attempted to pay us back. Why are we still helping these countries and giving to them when they already owe us? If I over borrow from the bank they will not allow me to borrow anymore until I pay it off... So why are we giving money to people whom on the most part do not even like the American People???

Thank you for reading my statements, it would be nice if the American people woke up and started telling the Government what to do instead of them doing whatever they feel like and totally ignoring the issues that face the general population of our great country.

Sincerely,

Joseph Butler

San Antonio, Tx

Thune Deserves A Challenger

kkrahel — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:38:02 -0400

In 2010, John Thune will face his first re-election campaign since unseating Tom Daschle in 2004. His seat is considered one of the safest of all incumbent Republicans. This is helped along by the fact that he has no challenger in sight.

The most competitive Democrat in South Dakota, Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, has decided to run for re-election to the At-Large House seat. State Senate Minority Leader Scott Heidepriem is another well-known Democrat (who ran for the House of Representatives as a Republican in 1986), but with Rep. Herseth Sandlin's pass on the 2010 Governor's race, he is a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination there. And forget about any resurrection of Tom Daschle.

That leaves us without a clear challenger for Senator Thune. There is hope(TM): a rising South Dakota Democrat named Ben Nesselhuf from Vermillion. At only 34, Ben Nesselhuf is already serving a third term in the State Senate (after having served twice in the state House of Representatives) and is the Senate Democratic Caucus Chairman. He recently led the fights that defeated a bill that would have let guns onto state college campuses and another that would have changed the South Dakota constitution to prevent any language other than English to be used by the state or any local governments (South Dakota has the third highest proportion of American Indians in the country). You can check him out on Facebook here.

Another prospective challenger for Senator Thune is Nancy Turbak Berry. Turbak Berry is serving her second term in the South Dakota State Senate, where she is one of only seven female Senators. She graduated cum laude from Harvard and has her law degree from Berkeley. Like myself, she is one of six kids and shares one of the most valuable lessons of that kind of upbringing, "In a big family, you learn that everyone can get along, even if they don’t all share the same opinion." She is also on Facebook.

It is important we get a progressive to challenge Senator Thune. He is moving up fast in the national GOP, having just succeeded mama's boy John Ensign as chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee making him the fourth-ranking Republican in the Senate. He is quickly becoming one of the top contenders for the GOP nomination for President in 2012. He was recently feted with a $500-a-head fundraiser by Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Every 2 out of every 3 dollars he has raised has been from out of state. Senator Thune is also celebrating more than a decade in Washington, arriving there as a Representative back in the 1990s and working as a lobbyist from 2003-2004.

Thune is in a strong position, he has a 57% favorability rating and he already has $4 million in cash on hand. However, Republican voter registration dropped two points in South Dakota from 2006-2008 to 45% and Thune polls worst among young people, which could work against him if the youthful State Senator Ben Nesselhuf challenges him. Furthermore, statewide races tend to be close in South Dakota: the margin between Thune and Sen. Tim Johnson in 2002 was only 500 votes, Thune beat Daschle by less than 5,000 votes, and Rep. Herseth Sandlin got elected with about 3,000 votes.

The Senate race in South Dakota won't be easy. However, if we want to win more competitive races in places like Ohio and New Hampshire, we need to keep the GOP fighting in places like this. No matter what, John Thune deserves a challenger.

Judge Bybee and the Challenge of Removing a Stain on the Legal System

dlindorff — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:54:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In December 2001, an appellate judicial panel in the state of New
York ruled that Yonkers City Court Judge Edmund G. Fitzgerald had to
step down from his bench and leave his position following his
disbarment for allegedly “misusing” $9000 in a client’s account prior
to his election as a judge. In 2007, the North Carolina courts faced
something of a dilemma when state judge James Ethridge, who had been
disbarred the prior October by the North Carolina State Bar for
“swindling an older woman of her house and savings” as an attorney six
years earlier, refused to quit his judicial position. Under state law
in North Carolina, judges are required to be licensed lawyers, so Judge
Ethridge was barred from holding court or signing court orders, but he
continued to collect his salary. Only the state’s Judicial Standards
Commission, or the state legislature, through an impeachment, could
remove him from his job.

Judge Bybee, who sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in
Nevada, could eventually present the federal judicial system with a
similar dilemma. Bybee, prior to his short tenure as an Appellate Judge
which began in 2003, was assistant attorney general in the Department
of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, where he wrote a lengthy memo for
the White House justifying the use of torture techniques such as
waterboarding, sleep deprivation, body slamming and other measures on
captives in the Bush/Cheney so-called “War” on Terror.

It is now being reported that the Justice Department is about to
release a review the department’s ethics unit, the Office of
Professional Responsibility, which will report on that memo, as well as
other memos written by Bybee’s then colleagues in the Office of Legal
Counsel, John Yoo, now a professor of law at Berkeley University’s law
school, and Steven Bradbury, and that the report will recommend
disbarment for the three men. That would put the matter in the hands of
the states where each man is licensed to practice law—in Bybee’s case,
the state of Nevada. According to the New York Times, the 220-page
internal review of Bybee’s, Yoo’s and Bradbury’s actions as counsel to
the White House amounted to “serious lapses of judgment” that could
warrant reprimands or disbarment.

What sets Bybee apart from the other two men is that after his work
in the Bush/Cheney administration, he went on to become a federal judge
with a lifetime appointment. Furthermore, unlike North Carolina, and
many other states, there is no requirement that a federal judge have a
law degree or be a lawyer , much less be a licensed one. While every
judge on the federal bench is, in fact, a lawyer in good standing with
their state bar, technically they do not have to be.

Judges in many state courts can be removed from office by the
judicial conduct committees operated by those states’ supreme courts,
but federal judges can only be “disciplined” by the federal judicial
system’s office of judicial conduct, not removed from office. A
disciplined judge might be prevented from hearing cases or from signing
court orders, but removal from office, under the Constitution, requires
impeachment by a majority of the House of Representatives, and
conviction by a two-thirds vote of the US Senate.

At the same time, it would likely be a huge embarrassment to the
judicial system if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred for ethical lapses
and for what the forthcoming Justice Department investigation is
reportedly calling “serious lapses of judgment,” and then continued to
serve as a judge in one of the second highest courts in the land.

Prof. Deborah Rhode, director of the Center for the Legal
Profession at the Stanford University School of Law, commented, “I
would imaging that anything that would be enough to disbar you would be
enough to remove you from the bench,” when asked what the impact of a
disbarment of a judge would be in the federal courts.

Certainly, if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred by the Nevada court,
there would be mounting calls for his impeachment by Congress. It is
certainly possible too, that if Bybee didn’t simply resign at that
point, the House, heavily Democratic, could initiate impeachment
proceedings and that he would be impeached, since not only would he
have been disbarred and criticized strongly by the Justice Department
Office of Professional Responsibility, but his actual memo, released by
the Obama White House, has him offering legal cover for clear
violations of the US Criminal Code and the Geneva Conventions, to which
the US is a signatory.

Whether House prosecutors could convince all Senate Democrats, plus
independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and seven Republicans to reach
the required 67 votes needed to convict (assuming no abstentions), is
an open question.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson Law School in
San Diego, who is head of the National Lawyers Guild, notes that while
the Constitution says judges may only be removed from office by the
process of impeachment, it also says: “The Judges, both of the supreme
and inferior courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior.”

Bybee in his 2002 memo (actually largely written by his subordinate
at the time, John Yoo, but approved and signed by Bybee), tries to
argue that what the Geneva Conventions and the US Criminal Code define
as torture—namely “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,”—actually is
only “torture” if it is “equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment
of bodily function, or even death,” a patently absurd interpretation
since it would be impossible to imaging “degrading treatment” rising to
that level of pain. Bybee’s memo went on to say that even if US
personnel did actually torture a captive, it would not be a violation
of the law or the conventions if the torturer didn’t have a “specific
intent” to cause pain. Going even further, he wrote that even if the
torturer had a specific intent to cause pain, “a showing that an
individual acted with a good faith belief that his conduct would not
produce a result that the law prohibits negates specific intent.”

As I wrote in an article on April 20 on my website ThisCantBeHappening.net,
Judge Bybee himself, in an opinion written in 2006, mercilessly mocked
this kind of legal sophism, saying: “The only thing we have to enforce
our judgments is the power of our words. When these words lose their
ordinary meaning—when they become so elastic that they may mean the
opposite of what they appear to mean—we cede our own right to be taken
seriously.” (Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1309 v. Laidlaw Transit Services, Inc.)

It seems clear that acting as a “mob attorney” for the White House,
artfully misinterpreting a criminal statute (Sections 2340-2340A of
title 18 of the United States Code implements the provisions of the
Geneva Conventions, making them an integral part of US law) outlawing
any form of torture in order to provide legal cover for criminal
behavior by American forces and the CIA towards captives in the “War”
on Terror would meet the definition “Bad Behavior,” warranting
impeachment.

Whether Democrats in Congress, who in recent years have
demonstrated an astonishing lack of courage and respect for the
Constitution, will rise to the occasion is another matter, especially
with a new Democratic president who has made it clear he is loath to
hold the prior administration to account for any of its crimes or
clearly unconstitutional behavior.
____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

3.5 Trillion budget has now passed BOTH houses of congres!!!

seawolf1957 — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 01:29:33 -0400

HOUSE and SENATE have now BOTH passed the BUDGET...

FLASH

WASHINGTON POST

just off the press

Amending the Feingold Amendment

Bob Fertik — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:21:43 -0500

As promised, Sen. Russ Feingold introduced a Constitutional Amendment requiring special elections to fill Senate vacancies.

SECTION 1. No person shall be a Senator from a State unless such person has been elected by the people thereof. When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies.

Of course serious consideration of Constitutional Amendments occurs rarely. So if this "train" is really moving, this would be an excellent time to add some "cars." Here are some ideas:

* Direct election of Presidents; abolish the Electoral College. This has been proposed at various times in our history, most recently by President Jimmy Carter. And it fits perfectly with Feingold's language. We just need a section like this:

No person shall be a ~~Senator from a State~~ President unless such person has been elected by the people ~~thereof~~.

This section would also require language that guarantees American citizens the right to vote for President. Right now, that right is exclusively in the hands of state legislatures through the Electoral College. And this is not a technical distinction; during the 2000 recount in Florida, the Republican majority in the State Legislature actually voted to reject the results of a recount if Gore came out ahead, and to appoint 25 Electors for Bush no matter what.

* Paper ballots with definitive manual recounts for Federal Elections. After the 2000 punchcard debacle, many states made voting worse by switching to blackbox touchscreen voting. We all know how touchscreens can be rigged. By contrast, the infinite superiority of paper ballots was beautifully demonstrated in the 2008 Minnesota Senate recount between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. Thanks to paper ballots, election officials were able to carefully recount all questionable ballots and apply consistent counting rules as required by Bush v. Gore. This manual recount would not have been possible on touchscreens.

* Automatic voter registration for all citizens. County governments waste a fortune maintaining voter files, which are grossly inaccurate and subject to fraud. (Of course Republicans like to scream about voter registration fraud by groups like ACORN, even though no Mickey Mouse votes were cast. )We could save a ton of money and ensure voter integrity by automatically registering every citizen. In 2005, I proposed a simple plan to use the Social Security file (without exposing Social Security numbers).

* Free TV time for Federal Candidates. The reason Congress works for The Corporations instead of The People (see Bailouts) is because candidates need vast sums of money for TV, and the easiest way to raise that money is to sell their souls to The Corporations (via PACs and bundling). If FCC licensing rules required broadcasters to give a minimum amount of free TV time to Congressional candidates, they wouldn't have to sell their souls to The Corporations.

* Full public funding for Federal Candidates. If we can slash campaign costs through free TV, we can easily cover the remaining costs through public financing. Without TV costs, a first-class House race can be run for $1 million. Take 435 races with 2 candidates and the total cost is $870 million. If we gave Senate candidates the same amount (based on the number of CD's in their state), each Senate cycle would cost $870/3= $225 million, since only 1/3 of Senate seats are up for election every 2 years. That brings the total cost to roughly $1 trillion, which is a tiny price for a clean Congress.

These are some friendly amendments I would add to the Feingold Amendment. How about you?

Update 1: Feingold's co-sponsors are John McCain, his McCain-Feingold campaign finance buddy, and freshman Mark Begich of Alaska. Begich probably signed on because Alaska's senior Senator, Lisa Murkowski, was appointed by her father Frank when he moved from the Senate to the Governor's office. That act of raw nepotism was so unpopular that Alaskan Republicans replaced Frank Murkowski with the former mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin. Palin cited this primary victory as "Exhibit A" that she was a reformer who was willing to "take on her own party."

Four More Reasons to Abolish the Senate

Bob Fertik — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:13:10 -0500

As the swearing-in day for Congress approaches, we have an unusual number of vacancies in the Senate that require gubernatorial appointments:

IL: President-elect Obama's open seat is supposed to be filled by Gov. Blagojevich, but U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald overheard some explosive phone conversations while listening for other crimes
DE: Vice President-elect Biden's open seat is being filled by a 2-year placeholder until Biden's son Beau completes a tour of duty in Iraq
NY: Secretary of State-nominee Clinton's open seat is coveted by America's semi-official princess, Caroline Kennedy
CO: Secretary of Interior-nominee Salazar's open seat was just filled by Gov. Bill Ritter, who appointed Michael Bennet

In their own way, each of these vacancies presents another reason why the Senate should be abolished.

IL has turned into a fiasco. Blagojevich refuses to go down without a fight and picked a black man so his ally Bobby Rush could dare the Senate to reject him and antagonize black voters.
DE is treating its Senate seat as the personal property of the Biden family. That's how Aristocracies work, not Democracies.
NY is treating its Senate seat as the personal property of the Kennedy family. Ditto.
CO looks like Aristocracy as well, according to David Sirota:

In terms of politics (ie. ability to get reelected in 2010, ability to lift the statewide ticket in 2010, etc.), Bennet makes no sense for reasons that are undeniable: He's A) never run for any office in his life B) never run for - or even held by appointment - a statewide office in Colorado and C) lived in the state of Colorado for barely a decade...

the only thing that rationally explains his appointment is the emboldened power of political aristocracy (and, by extension, money) that is sweeping the country. By aristocracy, I mean all of the factors of aristocracy implied in its dictionary definition's focus on priviledge. That means not just familial lineage - but also money, inside connections and academic/economic advantage.

Why exactly are Democrats making the Senate more aristocratic?

I think it's because Democratic leaders have no core set of principles or beliefs, so it's easier to appoint scions of respected families than choose the "best" Democrat on policy grounds.

Why don't Democrats have core beliefs? Because every Democrat is elected as an individual entrepreneur, rather than someone who has worked his way up the party structure through accomplishments.

The Republican Party, which claims to be pro-entrepreneurial, is a top-down corporate party - all the power and money comes down from the top. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is completely entrepreneurial - anyone can launch a campaign and compete. That's exactly how a little-known Senator named Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee for President.

But when Democratic Senate seats are vacant, entrepreneurs need not apply - only Aristocrats.

Update 1: dday wants a Constitutional Amendment requiring special elections for Senate vacancies, and Chris Bowers agrees. But if we're going to go through the trouble of a Constitutional Amendment, let's just abolish the Senate instead.

More Reasons to Abolish the Senate

Bob Fertik — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:22:55 -0500

On 11/19/08 I proposed abolishing the United States Senate since it is hopelessly useless.

Discussing Ted Stevens' lobbyist cronies, Christy offers another reason for abolition:

When I was doing all of my coverage on McCain's cronies, I kept running across the same names on the same money forms for Sen. McCain. I wondered: does each powerful Senator spawn a cottage industry of greedy sycophants and well-heeled, intimately connected lobbying cronies playing a sort of match game with moneyed industry interests and social-climbing elites jockeying for a seat at the power table each election cycle?

And looseheadprop offers another reason in the context of annointing Caroline Kennedy:

So, not showing up for work. Not actually raising the money. Not submitting information for vetting, but Mike thinks Paterson should just go ahead an appoint her to a seat that isn't even vacant yet.

Do you really think United States Senator is a good choice for someone's first "real" job?

Clearly Kennedy's "first real job" wouldn't be an issue if there simply was no Senate.

The Black Hole Option: Abolish the Senate

Bob Fertik — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:14:44 -0500

Unlike other progressive bloggers, I wasn't the least bit surprised when Senate Democrats let Joe Lieberman keep his Homeland Security chair. Why? Because the last eight years of blogging have painfully taught me that all Senate Democrats are worthless. (My only real surprise was that 13 Democratic "mavericks" voted against Joltin' Joe.)

I first learned this lesson on January 6, 2001, when the Senate and House met in joint session to count the Electoral College votes from the 2000 election. Democrats.com worked closely with the Congressional Black Caucus, led by Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida, to challenge Florida's 25 electors as illegitimate because 175,000 votes were never counted due to the Felonious Five on the Supreme Court.

The event was made famous by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 911. Hastings filed his legal challenge as planned. But under the law, he had to be joined by one - just one - Senator. And despite our heroic efforts, not a single Democratic Senator was willing to join the Congressional Black Caucus in their challenge. CBC Members rose in turn to second Hastings' motion, but they were all ruled out of order by outgoing Vice President Al Gore because no Democratic Senator would co-sponsor.

That event made a huge impression on me. And throughout the Bush years, there were many other times when one single Senator could have stopped something terrible from happening, if (s)he had only been willing to put a hold on a bill or lead a serious filibuster. Those include: the U.S.A. Patriot Act in September 2001, the Authorization for the Use of Force Against Iraq in October 2002, the Protect America Act in August 2006, and the $850 bailout in September 2008.

And looking back even further in time, I cannot recall a single moment since I graduated college in 1979 when the Senate did something useful - either stopping something terrible or improving a bill passed by the House.

So why are progressives wasting any of our energy trying to make the Senate marginally useful? There is an alternative: we could pass a Constitutional Amendment to simply abolish the Senate, and give all its powers to the House.

I call it the "Black Hole Option" - simply send the Senate into a black hole. Naturally, that would be far more potent than the "Nuclear Option" that Republicans wanted to use in 2007 to eliminate the Senate's filibuster rule.

How would the "Black Hole Option" work? The Amendment could be quite simple:

The Senate shall be abolished, and all its powers transferred to the House of Representatives.

Could such an amendment pass? If it were up to the voters, I have little doubt that it would. As we know, the approval rating of Congress is abysmal. If we told voters they would get a tax refund for the annual cost of operating the Senate, I'm sure they'd support it completely. As a taxpayer, wouldn't you?

Unfortunately voters don't get to pass Constitutional Amendments directly; they must be approved by Congress (2/3 vote in both chambers) or 3/4 of the States.

Obviously the Senate would never support such an amendment. The challenge is whether 3/4 of State Legislatures would pass such an amendment. At first glance, there's no good reason why they wouldn't. The only real objections would come from the smallest states which get disproportionate clout in Congress from their 2 Senators. Obviously Wyoming would have little clout with only 1 Representative. To buy off the smallest states, the Amendment could change the formula for allocating House seats so that no state had fewer than 2 or 3.

Of course the politics would be challenging. But would it be any harder to abolish the Senate than to transform it into something useful by exhausting ourselves to replace one Joe Lieberman with one Ned Lamont every election or two? Honestly, I don't think so. What do you think?

Update 1: Howie Klein shares my disgust with the Senate as an institution:

The Senate is an intensely conservative body. It was meant to be. They call it the world's most exclusive club. In fact, just a few years ago arch-reactionary Zell Miller (GA), who was appointed to a seat opened up by the death of a Republican, proposed a constitutional amendment repealing the 17th, which gave voters the right to elect senators. Ole Zell believes that was way too progressive and that senators should be chosen by (easily-bribed) state legislatures, not by the unwashed masses (who he referred to as "special interests").

There was never any real chance the Senate was going to discipline Joe Lieberman. In the end only 13 members voted to do it-- far more than the small handful of unabashed reactionaries who actually campaigned for him in Connecticut against the Democratic Party candidate, Ned Lamont. They love Lieberman because he's one of them. Any of them could empathize with his predicament. They all like to think of themselves as independent (at least independent of anyone not giving them direct bribes). What a crappy job Harry Reid has, keeping all these assholes on the same page!

Update 2: The Senate just gave us the best argument for abolishing them, by giving convicted felon Ted Stevens a farewell party - complete with standing ovation.