House Overwhelmingly Approves Spending Measure That Rolls Back Sequester
Feds will keep spending more than they collect in revenue
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a multi-year budgetary framework negotiated earlier this month by House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.). The measure rolls back some of the reductions in spending increases known as "sequester" that kicked in under the terms of the Budget Control Act, which Congress passed and President Obama signed in the summer of 2011. The Budget Control Act sought to slow the growth of federal spending as the US debt was reaching its statutory limit of $14.3 trillion. The sequester kicked in because legislators could not agree on cuts, as required by the act. The US debt now stands at more than $17 trillion.
The bill passed today limits federal spending to just more than $1 trillion on defense and domestic programs for 2014 and 2015, and does not touch spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. It does not balance the budget in the foreseeable future and the federal government will continue to spend more than it brings in in revenue.
169 Republicans joined 163 Democrats in voting in favor of the bill. Nancy Pelosi had previously urged Democrats to embrace the suck and support the bill, while John Boehner claimed conservative groups that opposed the spending measure had "lost all credibility." Nevertheless, 62 Republicans opposed the spending bill, including libertarian-leaning Republicans like Justin Amash and Thomas Massie as well as Republicans sometimes identified as "Tea Party." Thirty-two Democrats also voted against the spending bill, mostly because they wanted to see spending at even higher levels.
You can see how your member of Congress, and the other 425*, voted here.
*7 didn't vote.
More Reason on the budget and on the sequester.
Related: The Special Inspector General for the Afghanistan Reconstruction is investigating why the military spent nearly half a billion dollars on refurbishing aircraft for the Afghan air force before abandoning the project. Top Obama Afghanistan experts, meanwhile, were stumped at a Congressional hearing when asked just how much the US has spent in Afghanistan this year.
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Pathetic. But unsurprising.
Nobody has said it yet? I guess I’ll do the honors then:
No, fuck you. CUT SPENDING!
Congress is still trying to figure out how to write the legislation everyone wants, which is “Cut spending on other people’s benefits.”
The Sequester was law, how can it be repealed? You can’t repeal a law, no matter how unpopular. This is a slippery slope.
Not all laws are equal. Some laws constrain liberty while others constrain power. This law constrained power. So it’s OK to repeal it. Laws that constrain liberty (and increase power) are the ones that cannot be repealed.
-The Sequester was law
Of the land. And settled, from what I heard.
Of course law can be repealed. A Constitutional Amendment can be.
The Democrats wailed and gnashed their teeth during the ‘shut down debate’ about how the ACA was ‘the law of the land’ and ‘settled law’ and so should not be the subject of ‘taking the government hostage.’ The point here is that the sequester was also ‘the law of the land’ and ‘settled’ but they brokered a deal repealing it.
It’s the law of the land, as in stop being delusional and start figuring out how to heal–since it’s not going to be repealed any time soon. The sequester was passed on the assumption of its own undesirability. Totally perverse way of legislating sure, but it turns out Republicans do have some incentive to undo it. I mean, only totally insane people would think that arbitrary across-the-board spending cuts is good policy because all cuts are always good.
Tony|12.12.13 @ 8:05PM|#
“It’s the law of the land, as in stop being delusional and start figuring out how to heal–since it’s not going to be repealed any time soon”
Fuck you, Tony. No one outside of a D is going to help that shitpile one bit.
It is going to hang around Obo’s neck until he hates the smell of it.
And I hope around the neck of every other D
Unrepealable-just like Jim Crow.
I hope you enjoy being hated by millions of people Tony, because that’s what you and all your progressive ilk are in for. And you deserve it.
They had to pass the sekwester to find out what was in it!
OK, fair point. Hypocrites are plentiful in DC.
Thanks Cara…finally someone made the connection.
Of course law can be repealed. A Constitutional Amendment can be.
Why the fuck would you repeal an amendment when you’ve got the commerce clause?
Why would you stretch the CC when you can call it a tax?
OK wow man, lets hit it dude. For sure.
http://www.Privacy-Planet.com
OH, now you’re just phoning it in.
Limit anonbot’s bandwidth with dialup and this is what you get.
…”John Boehner claimed conservative groups that opposed the spending measure had “lost all credibility.””…
That’s rich! Boehner claiming anyone else has ‘lost cred’ takes more chutzpa than anyone should have.
Spending won’t be cut as long as the people want Congress to Get Things Done and since the Dems can portray Republicans as obstructionists then that means that the only way to Get Things Done is to SPEND MOAR!
That and actually electing enough Congressmen in both houses that do want to reduce spending…
Do You Even Have to Guess Who Wrote This?
-The budget deal announced today is a good deal for conservatives and Republicans.
From the point of view of policy, the deal is a modest achievement?which is all that can be expected, given the unfortunate fact that Barack Obama is president and Democrats control the Senate. The trade-off in the deal of minor mandatory cuts for relatively small domestic discretionary increases is basically a wash. That leaves the defense increase, which, while insufficient, is an important step in the right direction. That alone would make the deal worthwhile.
So the deal will be a small but significant step toward strengthening our national defense, and should help produce a Republican and conservative electoral victory in November. Critics can say that such a result is Mickey Mouse. I could retort that the critics are Goofy. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll just say that if this deal is Mickey Mouse, it’s time to join the Mickey Mouse Fan Club. After all, it’s made for you and me.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/…..70730.html
Fuck Bill Kristol. With an iron rod.
He later ‘doubled down’
-I continue to believe that, as a matter of policy, the defense increase?which at least begins to undo the very considerable damage from a wildly and disproportionately anti-defense sequester?swamps in importance everything else in the deal. Everything else is basically a wash. The defense increase is a real plus.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/…..70796.html
I was going to guess David Brooks but Bill Kristol was my next guess.
Kristol is to defense spending what Democrats are to social spending.
A deal that’s good for conservatives and Republicans isn’t necessarily good for the country.
^This^
It’s not good for conservatives. Only for RINOs. Bill Kristol is just trying to hoodwink the tea party and conservatives into believing the filth coming out of his mouth.
He wants to trick the tea party, whose main goal is to CUT SPENDING, that a deal that raises domestic spending AND defense spending is good, because it raises defense more?
He’s forgetting we want CUTS.
Yes. How will we survive with a defense budget that’s only as high per capita as the one in 1988.
We all remember how little defense spending there was at the end of the Reagan years.
WE WERE PRACTICALLY DEFENCELESS. ALSO,TERROR
But the US wasn’t fighting any kind of great threat back then. Today, its fighting guys with AKs and make-shift bombs!
Winter is coming
You know nothing Jon Snow.
Winter is here.
Boehner just showed why the GOP keeps losing elections.
We will head for a collapse. I have addressed this in fiction and non
fiction as well.This is a basic economic law, a third grader
understands you can’t spend more than you have. We’ve been doing it
excessively since Bush’s reign only to have the bus driven off the cliff
by Obama. And most of Congress is guilty–both parties.
Believing we aren’t going to collapse is like sitting on a beach with a
tidal wave coming from miles away. Just because you like the beach and
its pretty view doesn’t mean it won’t hit the shore. That’s what we
Americans have been doing. Half of us at least. Staring at the pretty beach thinking a country that is only a few centuries old cannot be harmed.
They’ll think differently when the tsunami lands.
Charles Hurst. Author of THE SECOND FALL. An offbeat story of Armageddon. And
creator of THE RUNNINGWOLF EZINE. A true conservative’s weekly.
I’m going to take a wild guess here:
No formal training?
At this point, I might be OK with a post from Hercules Triathlon Savinien.
Now that guy was an [AUTHOR].
Charles Hurst. Author of THE SECOND FALL. An offbeat story of Armageddon. And
creator of THE RUNNINGWOLF EZINE. A true conservative’s weekly.
Does it have hot gypsies in it? If it has a band of hot gypsies, I’ll read it.
Unless it’s a picture book, you can imagine those gypsies however you want.
its been going on since well before Bush.
Paul Ryan, our fiscal saviour, went into the desert and accepted Satan’s offer, namely a low interest ARM loan with no closing costs and a balloon payment in 7 years.
I don’t know why Republican’s ever take these “deals”. Everyone knows that when the next budget battle comes, Democrats will roll out the commercials showing Republican’s pushing granny off a cliff.
This the final act of the massive Republican cave on the deficit that began in 2011.
The sequester was the one significant victory on spending from that entire debacle. They set up a destined-to-fail blue ribbon committee to get a bipartisan budget deal, which got nothing. The sequester kicked into effect. And the Republicans couldn’t handle it, so they rolled back the sequester?
So what net change did we get from 2011? An increase in taxes on people earning more than $250,000 per year. And a marginal reduction in spending for a single year. That’s IT. No entitlement reform. No significant long-term spending reductions.
to get a bipartisan budget deal, which got nothing. The sequester kicked into effect. And the Republicans couldn’t handle it, so they rolled back the sequester?
I know, and NPR couldn’t even find anyone hurt by the sequester by their own on-air admission.
Think about that… NPR… couldn’t find anyone hurt by the sequester. NPR… couldn’t find anyone. Hurt by the sequester.
Betrayed by the sorry-ass worthless establishment republicans again. I know, what the fuck else is new.
The liberals and all of their cosmotarian dipshit friends are probably dancing in the streets with glee from Broadway to the Beltway tonight.
I can tell you that the “progs” are all worried that Obama will cut SS in the form of Chained-CPI in a future budget compromise.
That is exactly what he should do but they are wailing away about it.
If Congress were serious about deficit reduction they would take of Simpson-Bowles. But they don’t really care.
I don’t know who you think you’re kidding Weigel; we know you’re all overjoyed. You’re probably already out partying it up with Yglesias and the Sudermans right now.
Paul Ryan said something sane on NPR: Demanding that the other side compromise a basic principle means nothing gets done except shouting. This of course translates to Republicans won’t allow any tax hikes and Democrats won’t allow any cuts to the big safety net programs. The practical politics of it all almost brings a tear to my eye.
In policy and in politics, you can always count on Republicans to try all the wrong things before finally… continuing to insist on the wrong things while caving to reality and deploying talking points in a desperate attempt at face-saving.
Republicans won’t allow any tax hikes
They already did that.
In policy and in politics, you can always count on Republicans to try all the wrong things before finally… continuing to insist on the wrong things while caving to reality and deploying talking points in a desperate attempt at face-saving.
Dems OTOH will do the same thing except instead of caving they just mauled in elections ex 2010 dying on hills they have no chance of holding ex gun control, Obamacare
While relying on the Dems to do the wrong thing and brag about it.
Obamacare comes to mind.
And here’s Krugscum to do some gloating. Congratulations Krugscum, you and all the rest of your vile JournoList ilk win again.
I wish so much that you would get run over by a fucking train.
He will, but unfortunately so will the rest of us.
Is that how you get pregnant with twins?
Nah, a doubledecker bus does that!
No tax hikes? Really?
Try harder Tony.
Awful, but an improvement over what would have happened just a few years ago. There would have been like 7 GOP votes against several years ago.
Maybe the Republicans think they have such a great thing going with the failure of Clustercare that they’ve decided not to rock the boat and be seen as obstructionists until after the 2014 elections.
JD|12.12.13 @ 8:16PM|#
“Maybe the Republicans think”
I’m afraid we’ve found the problem.
The bill passed today limits federal spending to just more than $1 trillion on defense and domestic programs for 2014 and 2015
More precisely, this should read: The bill passed today limits federal spending to just more than $1 trillion on defense and domestic programs for 2014 and to just more than $1 trillion on defense and domestic programs for 2015.
We are so screwed.
Why shouldn’t we give the government all of the money when we have such intelligent people running this country?
“We never claimed it was a perfect law!”
#GetCovered You never know who will take offense at innocent banter. pic.twitter.com/g5lMaa1HiU
I like how confident you GOP supporters are 11 months from the midterms. Like it will make a difference on Obamacare due to who wins Congress then.
Like I told John – you’re in for a big disappointment.
As PB’s delusion ramps up, so does his confidence.
I agree. It’s now been scientifically proven that Obama’s biggest support comes from the dumbest voter. The very voter who knows nearly nothing about Obamacare. Basically, it’s pack of retards who don’t recognize they’ve been handed something retarded. I say give Obama a third term. Let them get more Obama, and let them get it good and hard.
Why Christmas music is stuck in the 50s
WHAT ABOUT MARIAH CAREY?!?
Some things shouldn’t be fucked with.
Fun fact: ‘Joy to the World’ actually describes Christ’s Second Coming rather than his birth.
Not a lot of people know that.
Well, I sure didn’t!
Would Christ be called a newborn King the second time around? Is he supposed to come back as an infant? Shows you what I know about the second coming.
I thought it was about a bullfrog.
I see the Boomers are giving us the middle finger again.
Remember when boomers didn’t trust the government? Yeah, I do too.
Question authority bumper stickers are so 1991 dude.
Once upon a time, I had a bumper sticker that said “QUESTION AUTHORITY – don’t ask why, just do it!”
Nice.
Wham!’s Last Christmas is the official Christmas song of Korea. The restaurant my apartment was over played it non-stop for the entire month of December, as did all the shops.
My big problem with Christmas music is that everyone feels the need to remake “classic” Christmas songs in quirky ways and radio stations feel compelled to play them. FUCK THAT. Most of the covers are either awful or unnecessary.
*shakes fist at sky and screams about children getting off my lawn*
Nat King Cole.
I’m probably one of the few people who likes Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime”. And I hate that awful John Lennon Christmas song with the children’s choir.
The best Christmas song is “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues.
Beyond parody
Callie seems to be under the impression that there’s some great feminist principle against “policing”, i.e. criticizing, other women. (In a piece where she is critical of pretty much every woman in sight that is not herself.) It is not. The reason that policing sexuality is wrong is that people who do it never actually have a good argument for why consensual sexual activity amongst adults is wrong. They are operating on a “it just is” and “ew, you’re not a lady” to justify themselves.
[break added]
Meanwhile, criticizing people for making idiotic anti-sex arguments is a perfectly defensible position. You can point out that it reduces the amount of happiness in the world and increases the amount of shame for no good reason. Feminism is not and has never been about giving women a free pass from criticism. Perhaps these points could be argued better?I myself am not a fan of how much online feminism is poorly argued, jargon-filled ramblings?but the problem with “policing sexuality” isn’t the policing part, but the hostility to sexuality that leads to policing. Being hostile to prudes, however, is a perfectly defensible position.
I take Callie’s point, I really do, that people fall too easily on “nuh-uh” and “you’re mean” as arguments instead of actually hashing out ideas.
Topical in multiple ways. John and playa manhattan will know what I’m talking about.
I’m confused. Must be the antibiotics and Dogfish Head.
Now I’m confused. Must be the Dutch Treat weed and the decongestants.
Apparently Robert Plant is a big fan of Dread Zep.
“Anti-sex arguments”
Yeah, like all those anti-food arguments such as eat healthy foods and eat in moderation. How can people hate eating that much?
If someone criticizes Miley Daddy-Issues for her “erotic” dancing, that’s just the same as advocating celibacy or saying that people who engage in sex shouldn’t enjoy it!
Yeah, like all those anti-food arguments such as eat healthy foods and eat in moderation. How can people hate eating that much?
Aaaasss youuuuuu wiiiiiiish
+4 extra helpings
Even better:
Where’s our Independents thread?
That show is still on?
Guess not Stossel’s on.
Bumped for Stossel tonight. Back on tomorrow I think.
M, T, W, F?
Yes.
Where, oh where, can I go to see a bunch of people arguing with each other?
So, no more budget, just “budget frameworks”. Won’t be long now, folks.
Man captures 18 pound lobster near Huntington Beach pier
It was around 6 p.m. Monday night when Ali was closing up shop at Zack’s Pier Plaza ? just north of the pier. He looked out, saw the unusually calm water offshore, and decided to try his luck and dive for dinner.
“I’ve been doing this for about seven or eight years, but always out at Dana Point or Long Beach ? never around the pier,” said the 27-year-old, whose father, Mike Ali, owns Zack’s.
With his LED flashlight guiding him, Ali scrounged around the pier pilings, diving to about 16 feet deep when he spotted the “bug.”
Ali said he was going after a smaller lobster when he noticed the super-sized version hiding in the structure left behind by one of the old piers.
After resurfacing to catch his breath, he dove down to the same location, stuck half his body in the hole, and grabbed the lobster from behind.
Quickly, a battle of who was holding onto whom ensued. Ali said the lobster kicked backwards, latching onto his mask and face.
“There was no way my hand could wrap around his back to grab him, but luckily he latched onto me,” Ali said.
With the biggest catch of his life, Ali swam back to shore, weighed the lobster at 17 pounds, three-quarter ounces, and stuck it in the freezer.
Thankfully he boiled it and ate it rather than let it go to waste by releasing it.
California lobster? Pshaw. Get back to me when it’s a Maine lobster.
(goes back to huge pot of steamers with melted butter)
I haven’t had lobster in years. And the thought that succulent delicious lobster is jut a few miles away from me is a very tantalizing thought.
Neither have I, and I especially can’t get steamers here on the West coast. It’s a travesty. Though I do get geoduck. And Dungeness crabs.
Get back to me when it’s a Maine lobster.
You mean the things that it was considered cruel and unusual punishment to feed to prisoners?
Just imagine how prisons prepared lobster back then. Broiled with drawn butter is right out. Boiled for a day is more like it.
Global warming figures into this.
“and stuck it in the freezer.”
WHAT?!
I have a better headline: “REASON COMMENTER A LIAR!”
Postrel would have never put up with this bullshit.
That lobster gets bigger every time I link that story.
Lucy would have gotten the facts correct, too.
With a bunch of typos.
DON’T TALK ABOUT LUCY
Hey, silver lining guy here!
We won’t have to read shreek’s lies about how Obo’s been cutting the deficit!
See? There’s good in everything!
Spineless, gutless wimps!
well what did you expect from Ryan? he was the vile proglodyte Romneytron’s right hand man. every fucking election the oligarchy elitists say the same thing, every damn time, this country has no hope to survive without replacing every one of those that voted in favor of this wad of lies