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Economy

Democratic Senators Introduce Bill To Make Family Tax Credits Permanent

Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) have introduced legislation that would make permanent two tax credits aimed at reducing poverty and helping low-income and working families. Two dozen other lawmakers have signed onto the legislation, which would also expand eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit, which were originally expanded by the 2009 stimulus law and were extended temporarily by the deal to avert the fiscal cliff in January.

The tax credits have received bipartisan support in the past, a point Brown and Durbin made in a release announcing the legislation, The Hill reports:

Enhancing the earned income tax credit should be a bipartisan goal, as President Reagan called EITC the most effective tool in fighting poverty,” Brown said in a statement. “We need to reward Americans who work hard and play by the rules and ensure that they can work and continue to take care of their families.”

This bill is pro-family, pro-work legislation that would permanently extend critical refundable tax credit provisions that have helped lift millions of working families out of poverty,” Durbin added.

Combined, the EITC and child credit kept 9.4 million people out of poverty in 2011, according to data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Nearly 5 million of those were children, and the stimulus expansion kept 1.5 million more out of poverty than the original credits would have. Since then, though, Republicans in Congress have sought to roll back those extensions in different tax plans put forth in the House and Senate.

That would be a mistake, since the tax credits don’t just keep families out of poverty — they also increase future earnings for children who benefit from them, according to CBPP. Brown and Durbin’s legislation would ensure that more families — and more children — would be able to take advantage of those benefits in the future.

Immigration

GOP Immigration Guru Insists DREAMers Should Self-Deport

On Monday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), a long-time advocate of the DREAM Act, strongly rebuked a GOP witness for opposing a pathway to citizenship for young immigrants brought into the country illegally by their parents. The witness, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, rose to prominence for advising Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” immigration policy during the 2012 presidential campaign and is the architect of both Arizona’s infamous “show your papers” law (SB 1070) and the Republican Party’s harsh immigration platform.

Speaking at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing, Kobach insisted that DREAM eligible applicants, many of whom have lived in the United States for most of their lives, should not be rewarded for the “sins of their parents.” Instead, DREAMers should go back to their parents’ country of origin, Kobach said, and “get in line with the rest of their countrymen.”

“That just defies basic compassion,” Durbin shot back, pointing to to Gabby Pacheco, an undocumented immigrant brought to America at the age of eight from Ecuador, who was testifying alongside Kobach. “She’s never known any other country,” Durbin explained, “this is her home.” Watch it:

Kobach responded by reviving self-deportation, arguing that “if you ratchet up the penalties for violating the law, people choose to leave.”

But Durbin predicted that the momentum has shifted from deportation to reform after the 2012 election. “Ultimately the voters have the last word. The voters had the last word on self-deportation on Nov. 6, so we’re beyond that now,” he said.

Under the bill introduced by the Senate’s so-called Gang of 8, individuals in DREAM Act Status can receive their green cards in 5 years and will be eligible for citizenship immediately after. The status only applies to students who entered the U.S. at age 15 or younger and have lived in the the country for at least five years.

Later in the hearing, Kobach argued that “declining to remove an unlawfully present alien is actually amnesty-plus, because — if you liken it to theft — you’re given the person what he is taken, namely presence in the United States. He’s taken it unlawfully, so you’re not only declined to punish, but you also allow him to have what he has taken.”

Immigration

Gang Of 8 Senators: Boston Bombing Should ‘Urge Us To Act Quicker’ On Immigration Reform

Lawmakers part of the so-called Senate Gang of 8 are pushing back against conservatives who are trying to exploit the Boston bombing to slow down the legislative momentum for immigration reform. On Friday, during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s first hearing on a new bipartisan immigration proposal, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said that “[g]iven the events of this week, it’s important to understand the gaps and loopholes” in the immigration system and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) suggested that reform should primarily focus on securing the borders.

But during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) argued that the Boston incident should motivate lawmakers to expedite the immigration debate, as immigration reform bill offered by lawmakers would close dangerous loopholes in the existing system:

GRAHAM: But in terms of immigration, I think now is the time to bring all the 11 million out of the shadows and find out who they are. Most of them are here to work, but we may find some terrorists in our midst who have been hiding in the shadows. When it comes to the entry/exit visa system. The 19 hijackers all students overstayed their visas and the system didn’t capture that. We’re going to fix that… So we are addressing a broken immigration system. What happened in Boston and international terrorism I think should urge us to act quicker, not slower when it comes to getting the 11 million identified. [...]

SCHUMER: And in fact asylum, which the Tsarnaev family came here on was greatly toughened up a few years after. They might not have gotten asylum under the present law.

Schumer added that the leading opponents of the Gang of 8′s bill “can make any amendments they want.” “And we go to the floor any one of the hundred senators could pose amendments,” he said.

During a separate appearance on Meet The Press, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) — another member of the group — added that “there are four specific provisions in this immigration reform bill that will make America safer,” noting that the measure will bolster security along the southern border and institute a system of employment verification.

Justice

Number Two Senate Democrat Says Senate Should Reopen Filibuster Reform

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)

After the Senate Republican minority blocked allowing an up-or-down vote on a completely qualified judicial nominee Wednesday, Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL) suggested it may be time to re-open the conversation on filibuster reform. A proposal to doing so — dubbed the “constitutional option” by then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) — was suggested by Senate Republicans as recently as 2005.

Durbin said in a floor speech:

We have tried at the beginning of this Senate session to avoid this kind of filibuster confrontation. The last several years we have had over 400 filibusters — a record number of filibusters in the Senate. I hate to suggest this, but if this is an indication of where we’re headed, we need to revisit the rules again. We need to go back to it again. I’m sorry to say it because I — was hopeful that a bipartisan approach to dealing with these issues would work. It’s the best thing for this chamber, for the people serving here and the history of this institution. But if this Caitlin Halligan nomination is an indication of things to come, we’ve got to revisit the rules.

In 2005, Senate Republicans slammed what they called the “unconstitutional” filibuster of President Bush’s nominees. They proposed a mid-session rules change to eliminate the power of the minority to block nominees with majority support. This “constitutional option” was only dropped when a bipartisan group agreed to only filibuster nominees in the most extreme circumstances.

Earlier this year, several Democratic Senators proposed significant changes to the Senate rules permitting minority obstruction of legislation and confirmation votes. Rather than pushing major changes, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) reached an agreement with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for a very modest set of reforms.

Already this year, Senate Republicans have filibustered a bill to limit the harms of the sequester, the confirmation of a former Republican colleague to be Secretary of Defense, and — as of Wednesday — the confirmation of John Brennan to be CIA director.

Wednesday marked the second time, Senate Republicans have blocked a confirmation vote for Caitlin Halligan, an Obama nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, dating back to 2011. As 41 Senate Republicans voted to filibuster her, only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted to give her an up-or-down vote.

Justice

Senators Introduce Legislation To Close Loophole Allowing For Large-Scale Cruelty To Puppies

Two Senators are trying again to close a loophole in federal law that allows for the torturous treatment of potentially hundreds of thousands of puppies around the country. The Puppy Uniform Protection and Safety (PUPS) Act, sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), attempts to close a loophole in the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) of 1966 that allows for totally unregulated breeding of puppies for sale online. The AWA requires breeders that sell to pet stores to acquire licenses, but allows them to sell dogs directly to customers without oversight. The Internet has made it possible for breeders to connect directly to consumers, meaning that breeders now double as de facto online pet stores.

This loophole allows “puppy mills,” breeders who aim only at profit and keep puppies in cheap, utterly horrific surroundings, to operate legally and profit handsomely. They sell the puppies directly to happy pet owners, who are oblivious to the fact that their new family member came from a place with “inadequate food and water, [where dogs were housed in] in wire cages with wire flooring so their paws never touch the ground; [and] female dogs mated to produce litter after litter until they can no longer do so and are then killed.” Inspections of two puppy mills in Ohio found, respectively, that “dogs and pups [were] living in horrid conditions and many were sick, emaciated and had visible infections and sores” and “[dogs were] matted with urine, feces and fleas [whose] nails were curled under the pads of feet…Many [had] severe dental disease and 17 [had] eye infections.”

One estimate suggests that several hundred thousand puppy-mill dogs per year are sold online because of the online loophole. Investigators at the International Fund for Animal Welfare asked several experts on puppy mill operations and dog breeding to examine the ads at major online sellers and develop an estimate, based on general characteristics common to puppy mill ads, of how many puppy mill dogs were sold through these websites per year. Their results were shocking:

Using the criteria developed by the expert panel, investigators found that 5,911 of the ads qualified as “likely puppy mill,” which equaled 62% of the ads analyzed from the six dedicated puppy sale websites. Further applying this 10% sample with the 62% “likely puppy mill” findings to the six websites would mean that as many as 57,447 ads and 107,425 individual puppies would potentially be classified as stemming from a “likely puppy mill” on that one day of the investigation…given the conservative nature of the determinations and the strong likelihood that many puppy mill ads were overlooked due to marketing manipulation, the expert panel and investigators felt that the total number of puppies coming from puppy mills may have been significantly underestimated.

The PUPS act would (judging from a draft proposed last legislative session) address this problem by extending the AWA commercial breeder rules to all breeders that sell 50 or more dogs per year and creating new exercise standards requiring breeders to let their dogs move around. The USDA recently proposed its own regulation accomplishing a similar effect last year, but it has yet to be implemented.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that most animals, including dogs, are conscious, feel pain, and have complex internal and emotional lives.

Politics

The 1996 Illinois Senate Campaign And How Candidates Can Win On Gun Safety

A look at the 1996 United States Senate campaign between then Democratic U.S. Rep. Dick Durbin and Republican Illinois State Rep. Al Salvi sheds an all-too-familiar light on how the effort to prevent gun violence has become a make-or-break issue for Illinois voters in next Tuesday’s special election to fill former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr’s seat.

After edging out the moderate Republican candidate Lt. Gov. Bob Kustra in the 1996 GOP primary, Al Salvi represented the most appealing, convincing candidate the Republican Party had presented in Illinois and was believed to have a legitimate chance at winning the Senate seat. The young NRA poster boy for Illinois spent his time on the campaign trail asserting the ’94 federal assault weapons ban was “silly,” calling the ’93 Brady Handgun Bill “cosmetic,” and offering to legalize concealed weapons in order to cut crime.

Meanwhile, Salvi’s opponent, then Representative Durbin was actively campaigning for sensible gun violence prevention measures. After co-sponsoring the ’93 Brady Handgun bill and supporting the ’94 assault weapons ban, he told Illinois voters, “We will not be a safer nation, a safer state, if people are carrying guns around shopping malls and restaurants.” Durbin joined forces with President Reagan’s former press secretary and gun-control activist Jim Brady to film a campaign ad that portrayed Salvi as an extremist on gun issues. In a Sunday radio interview just days before the election, Salvi responded by falsely charging that Jim Brady “used to sell” machine guns. Salvi later apologized and conceded, “Turns out that was a different Jim Brady.”

Salvi’s last-minute gaffe and extreme stance on guns proved to fracture the Illinois Republican party and rally Illinois voters around candidates who supported gun violence prevention. In one example, the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police opted to support Democratic House candidate Rod Blagojevich over the Republican incumbent, U.S. Rep Michael Flanagan, who earlier that year had supported an attempt to repeal the federal assault weapons ban. In his endorsement, the union’s president, Bill Nolan, said, “(It’s) almost a one-issue thing, and that is the guns.”

Salvi’s extreme stance on guns cost him the election. Durbin won the race by a landslide, leading Salvi 57 percent to 40 percent. Durbin acknowledged in his victory speech how important gun violence prevention was to Illinois voters: “I hope this victory tonight is a message that no political official in this state should ever, ever be cowered by the gun extremists.”

Salvi learned his lesson and two years later completely reversed his position, coming out in support of commonsense gun violence prevention measures, including the Brady law and the federal assault weapons ban. He wrote a guest editorial in the Chicago Sun Times making the about face in the hopes of positioning himself for another Senate run. Salvi explained: “I’m a solid conservative who recognizes I made a mistake on presenting my position on the gun issue. I lost the big picture. I was wrong.”
Read more

Justice

Iowa’s GOP Election Official Has Found Only 6 Examples Of Voter Fraud Out Of 1.6 Million Votes Cast

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday on voting rights in the wake of the 2012 election, Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz said a “lack of confidence in our elections is one of the reasons people don’t vote,” before citing voter fraud as the primary source of that lack of confidence and touting voter ID laws. “Anyone who says that voter fraud does not exist should look at the numbers that have been produced in a few short months,” he said. Responding to similar testimony from Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) probed senators on what exactly those numbers are:

DURBIN: If you believe, and we all do, that voter fraud is a serious, if not a crime … I would like for both of you to give me the evidence in Iowa and Arizona of convictions for voter fraud that have led to your changes in the law.

SCHULTZ: I think that’s a great question and I think it’s a very difficult question in some ways because not until now have we had resources to even go after this.

DURBIN: I beg your pardon.

SCHULTZ: Not until recently have we as a Secretary of State’s office had resources dedicated towards an investigator to go and do investigations into these crimes.

DURBIN: So excuse me sir. You’re saying that the law was changed in Iowa even before the investigation began?

SCHULTZ: Well let me back up. The law hasn’t been changed in Iowa. Let me address some of your concerns that you say in your opening statement. Iowa has 40 days of early voting. Our polls are open from 7-9 on Election Day. We do everything we can to encourage people to go vote. The question is then, when you have noncitizens who are registered to vote and voting, you have potential people double voting, you have absentee ballot fraud.

DURBIN: Do you have evidence of noncitizens voting in Iowa?

SCHULTZ: Yes, since August 2012, six people have been arrested.

DURBIN: Six. How many have voted since 2012?

SCHULTZ: Well it’s a difficult question because we had identified 3,582 noncitizens who were registered to vote but we weren’t sure if they were still noncitizens.

DURBIN: I’m guessing that millions have voted?

SCHULTZ: 1.6 million.

DURBIN: 1.6 million and there are six cases.

Durbin then followed a similar of questioning with Bennett, who said Arizona had prosecuted 15 cases in the last 18 months out of an estimated 2.3 million voters. Although Durbin asked for numbers of those convicted, the secretaries instead provided the numbers arrested and prosecuted. These miniscule numbers are consistent with figures nationwide. As the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund’s Nina Perales explained during the hearing, most states have reported prosecutions of less than 20 individuals, eclipsing the numbers of people deterred from voting by purge letters informing legitimately registered citizens that they are not eligible to vote.

Watch it:

Schultz was right when he said that Iowa hasn’t yet passed a law. A voter ID bill that passed the House in 2011 never became law. But the state did institute an aggressive purge effort by comparing the voter rolls to driver’s license data — an effort Perales pointed out is grossly misleading:

Secretary Schultz … said he had identified 3,500 noncitizens using the driver’s license rolls. He did not. He identified 3,500 people who were noncitizens at the time that they obtained their driver’s licenses. And we know that since that time and before they registered to vote, the overwhelming majority and perhaps all of them have become naturalized citizens. So at this point, anyone who undertakes to accuse people of non-citizenship based on driver’s licenses should be on notice that this is not correct and should not be done. It’s fundamentally unfair.

Voter fraud efforts like this one nonetheless fueled voter suppression laws and purges around the country this election season, though many of the worst attempts were blocked by courts. The real challenge will come when the U.S. Supreme Court reviews the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act in February.

Economy

Democratic Senator Compares Private Student Loans To Dickens-Era Of Debt Prisons

The inability of Americans to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy proceedings creates a system of indebtedness like the one that existed during the era of Charles Dickens, when people who couldn’t afford to pay their debts were routinely tossed into prisons, a top Democratic senator declared this week.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin (D) has introduced legislation that would make it easier to discharge private student debt in bankruptcy proceedings, much as people are able to do with debt from mortgages, credit cards, and other loans. But even as Americans are collectively swimming in nearly a trillion dollars of student debt — $150 billion of which is owed to private lenders — the legislation has gone nowhere, leaving them crushed by debt they often can’t repay, Durbin said:

How can it be that the deck is so stacked against students who borrowed to go through school? How can “certainty of hopelessness” be the standard for borrowers to obtain any relief in bankruptcy court. This harkens back to the debtors prisons of Europe and England. Charles Dickens would have a ball with this standard.

Congress needs to address this issue. Right now there is $150 billion in outstanding private student loan debt that is crushing many borrowers -– $150 billion. I have a bill, the Fairness for Struggling Students Act, that would once again permit private student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy as they were before 2005. Mark my words, there is no good reason why private student loans should be treated differently in bankruptcy from any other type of private unsecured debt.

Nearly every other type of debt is easily discharged in bankruptcy, but student loan debt, particularly that which is acquired through private lenders and for-profit colleges, is not, even as the total amount of student debt held by Americans has ballooned in recent decades. Undoing those restrictions as Durbin suggests would do away with what The Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal called “a giant subsidy to private agents” who lend to students.

The growth in debt has had severe effects on the nation’s economy, and those effects could pose an even bigger risk in the future. The growth in student debt has held back the housing recovery since the Great Recession, and a growing number of America’s elderly are being crushed by debt they took on to help family members attend college. The securitization of student loans by big banks has made it possible that loans could be the next “debt bomb” facing the economy, similar in structure (if not in size) to the mortgage bubble that burst before the recession.

Given that 80 percent of bankruptcy lawyers have reported a “substantial increase” in clients struggling with student debt, Durbin’s legislation to undo bankruptcy restrictions could reduce the threat posed by the growing mass of student debt Americans hold. (HT: Kay Steiger)

Health

Top Senate Democrat Backs Away From Raising Medicare Eligibility Age

As rumors swirl that Democrats may consider raising the Medicare eligibility age to reach a deal before the looming “fiscal cliff,” a top Senate Democrat expressed opposition to that option Sunday. Speaking on Meet the Press, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) said raising the age at which seniors can receive Medicare from 65 to 67 would leave retired seniors with a dangerous gap in their health coverage:

DAVID GREGORY (HOST): I want to pin you down on one point about Medicare. You say you want to basically put off this discussion until later. But bottom line, should the Medicare eligibility age go up? Should there be means testing to really get at the benefits side, if you’re going to shore this program up, because as you say, 12 years before it runs out of money?

DURBIN: Here’s what it comes down to David. I do believe there should be means testing. And those of us with higher income in retirement should pay more. That could be part of the solution. But when you talk about raising the Medicare eligibility age, there’s one key question–what happens to that early retiree? What about that gap in coverage between their workplace and Medicare? How will they be covered? Now I listen to Republicans say we can’t wait to repeal Obamacare and the insurance exchanges. Well, where does a person turn if they’re 65 years of age and the Medicare eligibility age is 67? They have two years there where they may not have the best of health. They need to have accessible, affordable medical insurance during that period.

Earlier this week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) also rejected raising the Medicare eligibility age as part of a year-end deal on spending cuts and tax increases, saying, “I am very much against it, and I think most of my members are.” President Obama was reportedly willing to support raising the Medicare eligibility age during 2011 debt negotiations, but has not said where he stands on the issue as part of the current deal.

A Congressional Budget Office study of the proposal to raise the Medicare age to 67 found it would have “little effect on the trajectory of Medicare’s long-term spending” because the youngest Medicare beneficiaries are the healthiest and least costly to the program. The costs, meanwhile, would include an estimated net increase of $5.6 billion in out-of-pocket health insurance costs for beneficiaries who would have been otherwise covered by Medicare, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study. Seniors in Medicare Part B would also face a 3 percent premium increase, the study found, since younger and healthier enrollees would be routed out of Medicare and into private insurance. Beneficiaries in health care reform’s exchanges would see a similar spike in premiums with the addition of the older population.

Economy

Democratic Senator: ‘Encouraging’ That GOP Is Abandoning Norquist, But ‘Still A Long Way To Go’

That Republicans have begun to split from radical anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and his pledge to never raise taxes takes “political courage,” a top Democratic senator told ThinkProgress Tuesday.

In the last week, Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (SC), Saxby Chambliss (GA), and Bob Corker (TN) have all distanced themselves from Norquist’s pledge. Though that is an “encouraging” sign for debt negotiations, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said the two sides still had “a long way to go” to reach a deal before automatic spending cuts and tax increases take effect at the end of the year:

[Norquist is] a real bully boy when it comes to Republican primaries. When my Senate Republican colleagues step up and say our first obligation is to this country and not to Mr. Norquist or a piece of paper, it takes a lot of political courage. We still have a long way to go, but the fact that they’re willing to split from him, to run the risk of his opposition in the future, speaks very well of their commitment to our country.

Watch it:

Republicans who have thus far split with Norquist haven’t come far on taxes, and they still oppose raising marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. Instead, they’ve endorsed raising revenue through the closure of tax loopholes and the elimination of tax breaks, and many, like Graham, have demanded reforms to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security in exchange, even as Democrats have already offered such reforms in recent years. The Republican “compromise,” at this point, looks more like the proposals failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered during the 2012 election.

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