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LGBT

Kerry Seeks ‘Equal Treatment Of LGBT Applicants’ In Financial Aid Process

By Guest Blogger on Dec 16, 2011 at 5:10 pm

Our guest blogger is Crosby Burns, special assistant for the LGBT Research and Communications Project at American Progress.

Earlier this week, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) urged the Obama administration to ensure equal treatment of LGBT applicants in the financial aid process. “Taxpayer-funded financial aid is often being misallocated based on sexual orientation when it should be based solely on financial need,” Kerry wrote in a letter addressed to Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Indeed, as a result of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the FAFSA is often unable to count parents, spouses, step-children, and other family members as part of an individual’s application for financial aid. The resulting unequal treatment leads to significant distortions in the allocation of financial aid for applicants who have two mothers or two fathers. As a recent report from the Center for American Progress found, the FAFSA can rob these families of much needed aid to finance applicants’ higher education or could even result in a larger financial aid package to families headed by same-sex couples. LGBT youth and transgender applicants also experience significant barriers to submitting a FAFSA on time, complete, or at all.

For its part, the federal government assigned more than $134 billion in financial aid to more than 14 million students last year, making it the single largest grantee of aid. Since most other financial aid depends on the FAFSA application for federal aid, these distortions will trickle down throughout the entire financial aid application process, even outside of the federal government’s support.

Economy

Super Committee Member Sen. Kerry: Grover Norquist Is ‘The 13th Member Of This Committee’

By Tanya Somanader on Nov 21, 2011 at 10:25 am

Today, the 12-member congressional super committee is expected to announce failure to reach an agreement to cut $1.5 trillion from the federal budget. One of major “sticking divides,” as Democratic co-chair Sen. Patty Murray (WA) noted, has been Republicans refusal to consider a widely supported tax increase on America’s wealthy.

This intransigence is largely motivated by the shadowy influence of lobbyist Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, who threatens to serve any Republican who breaks his anti-tax pledge with electoral defeat. Today on CNN, super committee member Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) noted that Norquist’s handcuffs on his GOP colleagues essentially makes him the “13th member of this committee without being there“:

KERRY: We Democrats put a $4 trillion dollar plan on the table. We had $1.3 trillion of cuts, and we had $1.3 trillion in revenue. Now, some of that revenue, we’re not asking that to happen tomorrow or the next day, it could happen in a year. This is a ten-year plan and longer. So we have the ability here to do something that’s fair for all Americans. But unfortunately, this thing about the Bush tax cuts and the pledge to Grover Norquist keeps coming up. Grover Norquist has been the 13th member of this committee without being there. I can’t tell you how many times we hear about ‘the pledge, the pledge.’ Well all of us took a pledge to uphold the Constitution and to full and faithfully and well-execute our duties and I think that requires us to try and reach an agreement. So we have to compromise.

Watch it:

Despite Norquist’s desire to “crush the other team,” it seems that more and more members of his own team are starting to agree with Kerry. GOP Rep. Mike Simpson (ID) said regarding Norquist’s anti-tax pledge, “I didn’t know I was signing a marriage agreement.” Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) blasted Norquist for “paralyzing Congress.” Freshman Rep. Reid Ribble (R-WI) vowed to never sign another pledge, noting the last straw came when Norquist wouldn’t let Republicans close tax loopholes that subsidize ethanol production. Former GOP Sen. Alan Simpson simply said, “If Grover Norquist is the most powerful person in America, he should run for president” rather than peddle his influence backstage.

Politics

Kerry: What Republicans Are Telling You Is ‘Patently Not True’

By Travis Waldron on Nov 20, 2011 at 12:10 pm

As the deficit super committee nears its deadline with failure likely, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press today to slam Republicans for refusing to negotiate in good faith. Appearing after Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), the number two Senate Republican, Kerry told host David Gregory that much of what Kyl said was “patently not true.”

He also took on the GOP’s proposal for being egregiously misguided. As ThinkProgress has noted, the super committee plan presented by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) would result in a massive tax cut for the rich while enacting budget cuts and tax increases that primarily buden the working- and middle-classes. Today, Kerry called out the GOP’s plan on Meet The Press, calling the proposal the biggest tax cut since before the Great Depression — “we all know how that turned out,” he quipped — and noting that the super committee was formed to reduce the deficit, not to make it larger with huge tax cuts:

KERRY: This is the most important thing of all: The Toomey plan still results in the biggest tax cut since the Great Depression. It would be the biggest tax cut since Calvin Coolidge, and we all know how that turned out. Now, we didn’t come here to do another tax cut for the wealthiest people while we’re (asking) fixed-income seniors to ante up more, people on Medicaid, who are poor, to ante up more.

Watch it:

NEWS FLASH

Kerry Promises To ‘Leave No Question Unanswered’ On Keystone XL Scandal | Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has raised the stakes on the State Department’s approval process for TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. “There’s a lot at stake here and I’ll do my best to leave no question unanswered, including every possible economic and environmental consideration, before a final decision is made,” Kerry said in a statement. The State Department, which has approval authority over the proposed Canada-to-Texas pipeline, is under increasing scrutiny for allowing TransCanada influence over the environmental impact process and the public hearings, and for potentially undue ties between lobbyists and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Politics

Kerry Cancels Fundraisers, Vows To Avoid Lobbyists While On Super Committee

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Sep 12, 2011 at 11:05 am

As the work of the debt-reduction super committee gets underway in earnest, lobbyists have launched a “full-court press” to protect their clients from the chopping blocks — meeting lawmakers, hosting fundraisers, and engaging in grassroots outreach. “The 12 Members of the Super Committee are going to be lobbied so hard in the next four months, they will be known as the ‘Dirty Dozen,’” Republican lobbyist Alex Vogel told Politico last month. A Democratic lobbyist quipped that he was “preparing by writing 12 really large checks.”

But at least one member of the bipartisan committee has decided to the steer clear of Washington’s influence machine. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) has canceled fundraisers and is swearing off lobbyists while the committee works:

“I’m not meeting with a lot of lobbyists; I’m meeting with people I choose to meet with, who can inform me, assist in the process of crunching numbers and dealing with consequences, and so forth,” Kerry told the [Boston] Globe last week in his first extensive interview about his committee membership. [...]

Kerry said he has already cancelled two fund-raisers and won’t raise any money during the committee’s work through Nov. 23.

“I will not fund-raise; I will raise no money,” the senator told the Globe. “I’m not raising any money while the committee is working.”

Super committee members have scheduled at least 14 fundraisers through Thanksgiving, the committee’s deadline to find $1.5 trillion in savings, according to the Sunlight Foundation. “These events are basically giving access to these members for special interests,” said Sunlight’s Bill Allison. One of those hosting fundraisers is House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), who even created a new fundraising organization that will split money between his personal campaign and his PAC.

Most of the members are already prodigious fundraisers, with large war chests and strong backing from corporate donors and lobbyists. For instance, the Wall Street-aligned Club for Growth is the largest single donor to committee members, giving over $1 million to the group’s Republican lawmakers. The health care and defense industries have perhaps the most on the line in the negotiations, and the industries are employing dozens of former congressional staffers to help influence their former bosses. Meanwhile, many of committee’s staffers, especially on the Republican side, are former lobbyists themselves.

Good government groups have proposed special transparency rules for the super committee, given its unusual powers, calling for real-time disclosure of campaign contributions and meetings with lobbyists.

Green

Climate Hawks John Kerry And Patty Murray Appointed To Deficit Committee

By Brad Johnson on Aug 10, 2011 at 6:58 pm

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) at the Copenhagen climate conference.

Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Patty Murray (D-WA), and Max Baucus (D-MT) have been named to the fiscal super committee tasked with constructing a bipartisan plan to rein in the long-term federal deficit. Considering that Republicans have practically proscribed new revenues, new investments, or eliminating tax subsidies, the committee is likely to continue America’s slide into austerity.

However low the likelihood, the committee does have the opportunity to put together a package that actually addresses the real long-term threats the nation faces, with desperately needed clean-energy and climate-resilience infrastructure spending funded by strict taxes or a cap on carbon pollution.

Kerry has said he believes that climate change “biggest long term threat” to national security. His 2010 climate bill was scored by the Congressional Budget Office to reduce the deficit by $19 billion, even using its extremely conservative assumptions that a massive investment in clean energy and infrastructure would somehow slow economic growth. A more aggressive climate plan that reflects the true urgency of the climate crisis would do even more to restore jobs and cut the deficit.

“We owe it to our children and future generations to get this issue under control and soon,” Murray argues about climate change.

Unfortunately, Kerry and Murray have not yet spread their climate-hawk wings and pointed out that the only solution to the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook involves solving the climate crisis. On Meet the Press, Kerry described his view thusly:

And the real problem for our country is not the short-term debt. We can deal with that. It’s the long-term debt. It’s the structural debt of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid measured against the demographics of our nation. That, then juxtaposed to the lack of jobs and job creation and growth. That’s our problem, structural.

In a joint statement with Baucus, Kerry and Murray said:

Our challenge is to find common ground without damaging anyone’s principles. We believe we can get there.

Their challenges is to save this nation’s long-term economic future. One can only hope they choose reality over compromise, even if Republican Party principles like denying science are damaged.

Update

The average League of Conservation Voters score of the nine members named to the panel so far is 38.11 out of a possible 100.

NEWS FLASH

Democratic Sens. Murray, Baucus, Kerry Named To Debt Super Committee | Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has reportedly tapped Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA), John Kerry (D-MA), and Max Baucus (D-MT) to join the super committee created by the deal that raised the federal debt ceiling. The super committee is charged with crafting a deficit reduction package by Thanksgiving; seven of the 12 members have to approve the plan to send it to the full Congress.

NEWS FLASH

Kerry and McCain Introduce Resolution Giving Obama Time on Libya | Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced a resolution shielding President Barack Obama from criticisms that the ongoing U.S. commitment to military operation in Libya violates the War Powers Act by skirting Congressional approval. Some Democrats and Republicans — much to the chagrin of the more hawkish wing of their party — questioned the legal basis for U.S. involvement in Libya’s civil war. McCain and Kerry’s resolution would authorize, as Kerry put it, “limited use of American forces in a supporting role” for up to a year after it passes.

Green

[Updated] Climate Hawks Boxer, Kerry And Cardin Confirm Opposition To All Climate Zombie Amendments

By Brad Johnson on Apr 1, 2011 at 6:05 pm

Climate hawks are starting to take a strong stand against the Senate frenzy to cripple Clean Air Act rules on behalf of global warming polluters. Four anti-climate amendments have been attached to unrelated small business legislation now under consideration. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), with the support of nearly the entire Republican caucus, submitted the Upton-Inhofe climate denial bill, while Democratic senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Max Baucus (D-MT), and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) introduced their own bills to hogtie the Environmental Protection Agency.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) have been leading the fight against limits of Clean Air Act enforcement of greenhouse pollution rules. Today, spokespeople for these climate hawks confirmed to ThinkProgress that they are committed to opposing any and all of these pollution riders, no matter which party has introduced the legislation.

A vote on at least the McConnell amendment is expected next week.

To call your senator and find out the stance on the four anti-science, pro-polluter amendments, check out the Credo whip count page.

Update

A spokesperson for Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) confirms that he is joining the other climate hawks to vote against any anti-EPA carbon amendment.

Politics

Gingrich In 2004: ‘You Can’t Flip-Flop And Be Commander-In-Chief’

By Judd Legum on Mar 24, 2011 at 11:10 am

Yesterday, ThinkProgress documented Newt Gingrich’s complete flip-flop on whether the United States should have militarily intervened in Libya. In response, Gingrich offered multiple contradictory and incoherent “explanations.”

ABC News described Gingrich’s position as a flip-flop: “But it turns out that Gingrich, who is a potential Republican candidate for President, was for a no-fly zone before he was against it.”

In 2004, however, Gingrich repeatedly bashed then Democratic nominee for President John Kerry, saying his flip-flop on Iraq war funding disqualified him from being president. A sample:

Gingrich on Neil Cavuto, 9/17/04: “You can’t flip-flop and be commander-in-chief.”

Gingrich on Hannity & Colmes 9/27/04: “I think Kerry’s problem is one of identity… He can’t quite decide, you know — and so I think what you’re going to see more likely with him is a kind of schizophrenia. And if the moderator’s at all serious with Kerry, and puts Kerry on the spot as saying, now, you said a, and you said b. Which is it? I think Kerry’s got a big problem.”

Gingrich on Hannity & Colmes, 5/5/04: “I think maybe the pretzel should become the symbol of the Kerry campaign, because he kind of twists himself into a pretzel trying to fit every group he shows up in front of and trying to appeal to each group on the national issues. I’m beginning to think it’s not such a shock he’s running for president. It’s a little bit of a shock he survived as a Senator.”

What would the Gingrich of 2004 say about candidate Gingrich in 2011?

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