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Senate Republicans introduce bill to abolish the EPA

By Joe Romm on May 6, 2011 at 8:59 pm

Decades of bipartisan advances on clean air and water at risk

U.S. Senator Richard Burr (R-North Carolina) introduced a bill that would consolidate the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency into a single, new agency called the Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE). The bill would provide cost savings by combining duplicative functions while improving the administration of energy and environmental policies by ensuring a coordinated approach.

This move by Burr — with 15 GOP climate zombie cosponsors — is aimed at undermining science-based standards that protect our clean air and clean water.  His press release quoted above is doubletalk.

I worked at the DOE for 5 years in the mid-1990s.  I lived through the efforts of the Gingrich Congress to try to shut down the Department, and especially its clean energy programs.  I also worked closely with EPA at that time.  In fact DOE ended up hiring some EPA folks who wanted to work on pollution prevention and clean energy.

So I can state with a great deal of confidence that DOE and EPA are utterly different agencies that have no meaningful duplicative functions.  Yes, they both have a General Counsel’s office, for instance — but DOEE would still need the lawyers from both EPA and DOE since they do completely different things and require completely different sets of expertise.  What this would allow the GOP to do is to cut the combined operations budget and staffing, thereby crippling both agencies, all in the name of “streamlining.”

Equally important, this would remove a voice from the Cabinet meetings– either a Lisa Jackson or Steven Chu.  These meetings are already dominated by economic agencies or those who don’t have either an environmental or clean energy expertise.

Also, combining a regulatory agency with an agency that advocates for and serves the need of those regulated industries is widely seen as a disastrously bad idea.  Indeed, that mistake helped lead to the BP oil disaster.  As the NY Times reported one year ago in its piece, “Interior Unveils Plan to Split MMS Into 3 Agencies“:

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Politics

Supreme Court Denies Justice To Texas Cheerleader Who Refused To Cheer Her Alleged Rapist

By Marie Diamond on May 6, 2011 at 8:00 pm

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court declined to review the case of a recent Texas high school student who was kicked off her school’s cheerleading squad after she refused to chant the name of a basketball player who had allegedly raped her. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative courts in the country, ruled last November that the victim — who is known only as H.S. — had no right to refuse to applaud her attacker because as a cheerleader in uniform, she was an agent of the school. To add insult to injury, the Fifth Circuit dismissed her case as “frivolous” and sanctioned the girl, forcing her family to pay the school district’s $45,000 legal fees.

According to court documents, H.S. was 16 when she was raped at a house party by one of her school’s star athletes, Rakheem Bolton. Bolton was arrested, but by pleading guilty to misdemeanor assault, he received a reduced sentence of probation and community service. Bolton was allowed to return to school and resume his place on the basketball team. Four months later, H.S. was cheering with her squad at a game when Bolton lined up to take a free throw. The squad wanted to do a cheer that included his name, but H.S. refused, choosing instead to stand silently with her arms folded.

“I didn’t want to have to say his name and I didn’t want to cheer for him,” she later told reporters. “I just didn’t want to encourage anything he was doing.”

Several school officials of the “sports obsessed” small town took issue with H.S.’s silence, and ordered her to cheer for Bolton. When H.S. refused again, she was expelled from the cheerleading squad. Her family decided to sue school officials and the district. Their lawyer argued that H.S.’s right to exercise free expression had been violated and that students shouldn’t be punished for not complying with “insensitive and unreasonable directions.”

Leading legal scholars have pointed out that this case is about more than justice for one purported rape victim — it’s a civil rights issue that goes to the heart of students’ right of free speech under the First Amendment. Though it might seem obvious to most people that H.S. had every right to sit out that cheer, the lower court insisted that as a cheerleader, she was speaking for the school and as such had no right to stay silent when coaches told her to applaud her alleged rapist. The court explained in its decision:

As a cheerleader, HS served as a mouthpiece through which [the school district] could disseminate speech – namely, support for its athletic teams…This act constituted substantial interference with the work of the school because, as a cheerleader, HS was at the basketball game for the purpose of cheering, a position she undertook voluntarily.

It’s unclear to many court watchers how H.S.’s silence was disruptive, or how the school’s right to “disseminate speech” through cheerleading outweighed the needs of a sexual assault victim.

The Firth Circuit has repeatedly illustrated its hostility to first amendment rights and victims seeking compensation claims. Texas too has a bad track record when it comes to high-profile rape cases. A recent case involving the gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl by at least 18 men, including several student athletes, caused national outrage after many in the community tried to blame the victim. For years Texas has forced women to pay for their own rape kits. Two months ago, the Texas House approved a bill that would require victims of rape who became pregnant to get an ultrasound and hear a description of the fetus before getting an abortion.

One reporter summed up the miscarriage of justice this way: “The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case is a devastating rejection of students’ rights to speak out against school officials, and a disturbing affirmation of a culture that punishes rape victims instead of perpetrators.”

Security

Obama’s Decision To Focus On Al Qaeda Matters

By Matt Duss on May 6, 2011 at 8:00 pm

In probably the most predictable piece yet written on the subject, Charles Krauthammer declares the death of Osama bin Laden a huge victory and vindication of George W. Bush and the War on Terror. Getting bin Laden, writes Krauthammer, “was made possible precisely by the vast, warlike infrastructure that the Bush administration created post-9/11, a fierce regime of capture and interrogation, of dropped bombs and commando strikes. That regime, of course, followed the more conventional war that brought down the Taliban, scattered and decimated al-Qaeda and made bin Laden a fugitive.”

“Without all of this,” Krauthammer insists, “the bin Laden operation could never have happened.” Amid this shaking of pom-poms, Krauthammer even manages to slip in the singularly most unconvincing defense of the Iraq war in existence:

After its rout from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda chose the troubled waters of Iraq as the central front in its war on America — and suffered a stunning defeat, made particularly humiliating when its fellow Sunni Arabs rose up to join the infidel Americans in subduing it.

The truth, of course, is that the Bush administration, not Al Qaeda, chose to make Iraq a front in the war on terror. It turned out to be huge, debilitating distraction in the war against Al Qaeda. (And sorry Chuck, but the fact that the Bush administration’s incompetence in Iraq created an opportunity for Al Qaeda to alienate Muslims by murdering hundreds of them does not count as a point in Bush’s favor. Suggesting that it does is morally perverse.)

Taking a completely opposing view from Krauthammer, Michael Hirsch writes, “Behind Obama’s takedown of the Qaida leader this week lies a profound discontinuity between administrations — a major strategic shift in how to deal with terrorists”:

From his first great public moment when, as a state senator, he called Iraq a “dumb war,” Obama indicated that he thought that George W. Bush had badly misconceived the challenge of 9/11. And very quickly upon taking office as president, Obama reoriented the war back to where, in the view of many experts, it always belonged. He discarded the idea of a “global war on terror” that conflated all terror threats from al-Qaida to Hamas to Hezbollah. Obama replaced it with a covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaida and its spawn.

This reorientation was part of Obama’s reset of America’s relations with the world. Bush, having gradually expanded his definition of the war to include all Islamic “extremists,” had condemned the United States to a kind of permanent war, one that Americans had to fight all but alone because no one else agreed on such a broadly defined enemy. (Hez­bollah and Hamas, for example, arguably had legitimate political aims that al-Qaida did not, which is one reason they distanced themselves from bin Laden.) In Obama’s view, only by focusing narrowly on true transnational terrorism, and winning back all of the natural allies that the United States had lost over the previous decade, could he achieve America’s goal of uniting the world around the goal of extinguishing al-Qaida.

Obama’s decision to abandon the conceit of an undifferentiated Islamofascist enemy (a delusion that still animates most of his neocon critics) and zero in on Al Qaeda is hugely important. By casting Osama bin Laden and his ideology as an existential threat to the United States, one requiring the invasion and occupation of various countries in the Middle East, Bush’s approach elevated the status of Al Qaeda, whereas Obama’s treatment of the group as bunch of delusional, if still dangerous, goons has diminished it. By treating Al Qaeda as just one head on the Islamofascist hydra, Bush needlessly complexified the challenge the group represents. By refusing to treat all Islamist trends and movements as part of some terrorist monolith, Obama has clarified it.

Having said that, I think Hirsch understates the continuities between the administration, which clearly exist, and are troubling. I don’t endorse everything Josh Foust writes here (crediting Bush for the Iraq withdrawal is somewhat misleading, considering Bush was dragged into signing a withdrawal agreement Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki referenced to Obama; I’d also argue that a greatly strengthened international consensus on the Iranian nuclear issue is an important success), but I think he raises some important questions about the administration’s failure to articulate a coherent set of principles under which its foreign policy is operating. Hopefully the passing of Osama bin Laden, and the political space it has provided the Obama administration, creates an opportunity to do that.

Health

The F-Word In The Medicaid Debate

By Igor Volsky on May 6, 2011 at 7:15 pm

Jonathan Cohn suggests that Republicans who are now fleeing House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Medicare plan may soon give a real push to his Medicaid reforms, which are no better. Ryan would transform the program’s matching rate financing structure — under which the federal government pays 50 to 75 percent of each state’s Medicaid costs and requires states to maintain certain eligibility and benefit standards — into a block grant system. States would receive a set “block” of money to do with it as they wished (within certain constraints) and could theoretically use that “flexibility” to design programs that go further in reducing health care costs. But Cohn isn’t buying it:

I don’t think the case for flexibility is particularly strong, in part because the states already have some of it. But make no mistake. The Republican proposal isn’t exclusively or even mostly about flexibility. It’s about money–and the desire by Republicans and their supporters to spend less of it on the health care safety net.

Medicaid, as you may recall, is a joint federal-state enterprise, with Washington picking up about two-thirds of the total cost. The House Republican budget would dramatically reduce the federal government’s contribution. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if the House Republican budget were to become reality, Medicaid spending in 2022 would be 35 percent lower and spending in 2030 would be 49 percent lower.

Yes, you read that right: If the House Republican budget were to become reality, federal spending on Medicaid would shrink to half of its projected value within two decades.

States would receive an annual federal appropriation that would be less than current projected growth of the program and would have to to make up the difference by increasing spending or (more realistically) capping enrollment, cutting eligibility, limiting mandatory benefits and lowering provider reimbursements.

That would endanger the coverage of the millions of elderly and disabled beneficiaries — two-thirds of Medicaid’s costs are spent on seniors and people with disabilities — who rely on the program today. In 2011, more than 69.5 million Americans will benefit from Medicaid, and according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 59 percent of the American people said the program was either “very important” to them or their families or “somewhat important.” Which means that should the Ryan Medicaid proposal become law — and it’s doubtful that it will — that f-word will come to have a whole different meaning for Americans in the Medicaid debate.

Politics

Rep. Allen West Falsely Claims China Controls The Panama Canal, Calls It A ‘Serious Threat’ To U.S.

By Scott Keyes on May 6, 2011 at 7:00 pm

During a Fort Lauderdale town hall last week, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) warned his constituents about “serious threats to our country,” including Iran and Hezbollah. However, one of the examples West used repeatedly, was not just overblown; it was demonstrably untrue.

Warning the crowd about the economic and national security dangers that China poses to the United States, West declared – twice – that “China is in control of the Panama Canal”:

WEST: I had the opportunity to go down to the United States southern command which is headquartered in Miami, Florida. There is a huge threat coming up out of South America through Central America, through Mexico, and into the United States. Iran is in South America. Hezbollah is in South America. I already talked about how China is in control of the Panama Canal. And even about 50 miles away from here in the Bahamas, building a port there. You know, there is some serious threats to our country.

Watch it:

The notion that China controls the Panama Canal is patently false. The United States handed control of the canal over to Panama on December 31, 1999 and it has remained in Panamanian hands ever since. This false claim was even debunked by the conservative news outlet Newsmax back in 2006. In fact, rather than owning the Panama Canal, China is currently proposing a rival railroad in Colombia that would allow goods to bypass the canal.

West is certainly no stranger to outlandish statements. He made a name for himself over the past year with comments like endorsing the censorship of news agencies that “enabled” Wikileaks, arguing that nobody is getting laid off in Washington D.C., saying that liberal women are “neutering American men,” and calling President Obama a “low level Socialist agitator.”

Economy

Senate Republicans Who Voted To Create CFPB Now Refuse To Confirm Its Director Without Changes

By Pat Garofalo on May 6, 2011 at 6:30 pm

House Republicans this week passed a trio of bills aimed at reducing the independence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that was created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. These changes — including replacing the Bureau’s Director with a five-person commission — would strike at the heart of the Bureau’s independence.

Not to be outdone, Senate Republicans sent a letter to President Obama this week saying that they will not vote to confirm a Director for the Bureau — who is supposed to be in place by July 21 — unless several changes are made to the Bureau’s structure:

As presently organized, far too much power will be vested in the CFPB director without any effective checks and balances. Accordingly, we will not support the consideration of any nominee, regardless of party affiliation, to be the CFPB director until the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is reformed.

For starters, the notion that the CFPB has some unprecedented amount of power is absurd. Plenty of agencies are run by a single director, and the CFPB’s rules can already be vetoed by a two-thirds vote of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is tasked with policing systemic risk in the financial system.

Interestingly enough, two of the letter’s signatories — Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — voted for the Dodd-Frank law, complete with the CFPB in its current form. In fact, during the Dodd-Frank debate, Snowe helped Democrats defeat a Republican proposal that would have scrapped the CFPB in favor of a consumer protection council.

Both Snowe and Collins have been running to their right recently, with Snowe in particular tacking that way in anticipation of a 2012 primary challenger. Yesterday, in fact, Snowe blocked a small business bill that she authored, throwing a fit over not receiving a vote on an amendment she authored with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) that would block federal agencies from implementing regulations. She had previously called for a “clean” version of the small business bill to be passed.

The practical upshot of Senate Republicans refusing to confirm a nominee is that President Obama will have no choice but to make a recess appointment. But not every Senate Republican appears to be on-board with the GOP push to kneecap the CFPB, as both Sens. Scott Brown (R-MA) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) did not sign the letter to Obama.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on May 6, 2011 at 6:22 pm

Bring your friends:

— GOP budget balance plan doesn’t add up without privatizing Medicare.

— Walkability and greener both boost property values.

— If this is supposed to be an affordable housing program then it’s extremely poorly targeted.

— Smart takes on testing and performance pay from a former school administrator.

— The future of Stanford.

— Kaplan Higher Education profits plummeting.

Tori Amos’ “Smells Like Teen Spirit” cover is even better than the Miley Cyrus version.

Politics

After Subprime Schools Fundraised For Chairman Kline, They Gave Him Another $21,200 Before Crucial Vote

By Lee Fang on May 6, 2011 at 5:45 pm

The for-profit higher education industry, known as subprime schools for their rampant abuses and systematic fraud, is fighting back aggressively against proposed regulations from the Department of Education. The rules call for schools to show that a higher percentage of their students actually gain employment after graduation in order for for-profit school companies to qualify for taxpayer money. As we have reported extensively, subprime colleges have hired an army of lobbyists and have declared “war” against reform advocates.

House Education Committee Chairman Rep. John Kline (R-MN) has been the industry’s best friend. Kline repeatedly slipped provisions into House spending bills to restrict the Department of Education from implementing more oversight over subprime schools. Kline pushed the effort, essentially a bailout to a multi-billion dollar industry that receives ninety percent of its money from the government, while industry lobbyists astroturfed support on Capitol Hill.

With the release of first quarter campaign donations, an examination of Federal Elections Commission disclosures by the Wonk Room has found that Kline received nearly $50,000 from for-profit colleges so far this year. Notably, on March 15, 2011, two days before the House passed his amendment against the Department of Education, Kline received $21,200 from the same companies:

Mark Perry, President of San Joaquin Valley College: $2,500 on 03/15/2011.
Rex D Spaulding is President of North American Trade Schools Inc: $1,000 of 03/15/2011.
Alva R Sullivan is President And CEO of Sullivan University: $2,400 on 03/15/2011.
Robert F Herzog is VP at IN Business College: $1,000 on 03/15/2011.
Daniel M Hamburger is CEO at DeVry Inc: $1,000 on 03/15/2011.
Lawrence D Earle is CEO of Carrer Point College: $1,000 on 03/15/2011.
Corinthian Colleges Inc. PAC: $4,000 donation to Kline for Congress on 3/15/2011.
Education Management Corp PAC: $2,500 on 03/15/2011.
NELNET Higher Education Access PAC: $2,400 on 03/15/2011.
Westwood College Fund: $1,000 on 03/15/2011
Duncan M Anderson, CEO of Education Affiliates Inc: $2,400 on 03/15/2011.

Kline, who received another $100,000 from the industry last year, also hosted a brazen fundraiser with subprime college lobbyists on March 8th. That means for two straight weeks, industry lobbyists funneled cash to Kline so he could help them drain more taxpayer money without properly educating their students.

This morning, the Justice Department announced that it is joining a whistle-blower lawsuit against Kline donor Education Management Corporation (EDMC), a for-profit college company owned partially by Goldman Sachs. The company, which owns the Art Institutes and other private colleges, has been accused of defrauding students in several states.

Former ThinkProgress intern Paul Breer contributed valuable research for this post. Cross-posted on Wonk Room.

LGBT

As New York Gears Up For Marriage Equality, Archbishop Likens Same-Sex Marriage To Incest

By Igor Volsky on May 6, 2011 at 5:45 pm

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) has allied with a bipartisan coalition of marriage equality groups to expand marriage to gays and lesbians before the end of the summer. The new umbrella group, called New Yorkers United for Marriage, includes Freedom To Marry, Marriage Equality New York, the Empire State Pride Agenda, and even the Log Cabin Republicans.

Meanwhile, opponents of the effort are launching a ‘Mayday for Marriage‘ bus tour “to inform New Yorkers as to the importance of the sacred institution of marriage,” financing automated calls urging voters to contact undecided lawmakers, and strengthening their ties to national anti-gay organizations. This morning, the New York Times profiled the religious coalition fighting against marriage equality and reported that New York Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, who leads the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, will be taking a more prominent role in the campaign. Here he is comparing same-sex marriage to incest:

Archbishop Dolan addressed the same-sex marriage issue in March during an interview on the CBS program “60 Minutes,” urging policy makers not to tamper with the definition of what he termed “authentic marriage.”

“I love my mom, but I don’t have the right to marry her,” said the archbishop, whose national public profile as a spokesman for church values rose last year, when he was elected president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Last month, Good As You’s Jeremy Hooper discovered that another anti-marriage group — the Coalition To Save Marriage in New York — has been propagating the discredited theory that gay people can leave the homosexual “lifestyle” and become straight. From the group’s Facebook page:

Rev. Rubén Díaz, a state senator from the Bronx, is leading the opposition in the state Senate and has announced plans to hold a rally on May 15 in the Bronx. Diaz — who held a similar event in 2009 — has urged participants “to paralyze all traffic in the Bronx” on that day and expects up to 30,000 participants.

Cuomo continues to advocate for marriage equality, saying he’s “optimistic” it will pass. Business leaders and clergy from across the state have also offered their support.

Yglesias

The Case For A Public Option For Small-Scale Savings

By Matthew Yglesias on May 6, 2011 at 5:29 pm

Kevin Drum’s stewing about banks and hidden fees seems to me to suggest a case for “postal banking,” in other words a public option for small dollar deposits:

I have a visceral aversion to doing business like this, but I also understand why they do it: any bank that charged simple, flat, annual fees would lose all of its good customers, who would migrate to banks that make most of their money from penalty fees that they’ll never have to pay. Bad customers, conversely, would eventually migrate to the bank with flat fees as they came to realize that it was a better deal with them. So the nice bank would have lots of bad customers and the evil bank would have all the good customers.

If every bank charged simple, open fees, there would be an equilibrium of sorts. But how do you get there? And should we even try? I’d like to, but I can’t pretend it’s very likely to happen, or even that it’s in the top 20 problems facing the poor. So here we stay.

I’m not holding my breath on this, but in principle the solution is to run small-scale banking as a public service. Every Social Security card would come with a bank account attached. The account would pay an interest rate pegged to always be lower than the 30-year treasury rate. You’d get an ATM card and some checks. The accounts would have some fairly low maximum quantity of money that could be deposited ($20,000?) and a very simple, flat, transparent fee structure. The challenge to private sector banks would be to either deliver a level of features and customer service that tempt people out of the public bank, or else to just focus on raising funds from rich people by offering a good interest rate.

You could leave things there, but the government bank accounts could also be a useful lever for other policy initiatives down the road. Each American could be offered a $500 high school graduation present, and the Federal Reserve could be authorized to use the government banking system to deliver “helicopter drops” of money as a macroeconomic stabilization tool.

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