ThinkProgress Home
ThinkProgress
ThinkProgress Logo

Stories tagged with “Lamar Alexander”

NEWS FLASH

Sen. Carper And Alexander: Clean Air Is Not A Partisan Issue | Both Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Tom Carper (D-DE) agreed that while the Clean Air Act has achieved significant accomplishments – returning $30 in benefits for every $1 that has been spent — clean air faces challenges ahead. At “The State of the Clean Air Act,” hosted by the World Resources Insitute, Alexander said, “Congress should act in a bipartisan way on clean air issues.” Carper said, “It is possible to have a clean environment and a strong economy.”

By Brad Johnson on Jan 24, 2012 at 10:19 am

Justice

14 GOP Senators Slam Senate GOP’s ‘Unconstitutional’ Filibuster*

By Ian Millhiser on Dec 7, 2011 at 11:00 am

Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) Discuss Their Understanding Of The Constitution

Yesterday, Senate Republicans voted nearly unanimously to block Caitlan Halligan’s nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) broke party lines to join the 54-45 vote to allow Halligan to move forward — leaving Halligan six votes short of what she needed to break the GOP filibuster.

The Senate GOP’s decision to filibuster Halligan earned wide rebukes from Senate Republicans*, many of whom slammed this decision to filibuster a judicial nominee as unconstitutional:

  • Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “I would never filibuster any President’s judicial nominee, period. I might vote against them, but I will always see they came to a vote.”
  • Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA): “Every judge nominated by this president or any president deserves an up-or-down vote. It’s the responsibility of the Senate. The Constitution requires it.”
  • Tom Coburn (R-OK): “If you look at the Constitution, it says the president is to nominate these people, and the Senate is to advise and consent. That means you got to have a vote if they come out of committee. And that happened for 200 years.”
  • John Cornyn (R-TX): “We have a Democratic leader defeated, in part, as I said, because I believe he was identified with this obstructionist practice, this unconstitutional use of the filibuster to deny the president his judicial nominations.
  • Mike Crapo (R-ID): “Until this Congress, not one of the President’s nominees has been successfully filibustered in the Senate of the United States because of the understanding of the fact that the Constitution gives the President the right to a vote.”
  • Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “I think filibustering judges will destroy the judiciary over time. I think it’s unconstitutional”
  • Chuck Grassley (R-IA): “It would be a real constitutional crisis if we up the confirmation of judges from 51 to 60, and that’s essentially what we’d be doing if the Democrats were going to filibuster.”
  • Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX): “[T]he Constitution envisions a 51-vote majority for judgeships…. [Filibustering judges] amend[s] the Constitution without going through the proper processes…. We have a majority rule that is the tradition of the Senate with judges. It is the constitutional requirement.”
  • Jon Kyl (R-AZ): “The President was elected fair and square. He has the right to submit judicial nominees and it is the Senate’s obligation under the Constitution to act on those nominees.”
  • Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “The Constitution of the United States is at stake. Article II, Section 2 clearly provides that the President, and the President alone, nominates judges. The Senate is empowered to give advice and consent. But my Democratic colleagues want to change the rules. They want to reinterpret the Constitution to require a supermajority for confirmation.”
  • Jeff Sessions (R- AL): “[The Constitution] says the Senate shall advise and consent on treaties by a two-thirds vote, and simply ‘shall advise and consent’ on nominations…. I think there is no doubt the Founders understood that to mean … confirmation of a judicial nomination requires only a simple majority vote.”
  • Richard Shelby (R-AL): “Why not allow the President to do his job of selecting judicial nominees and let us do our job in confirming or denying them? Principles of fairness call for it and the Constitution requires it.”
  • John Thune (SD): Filibustering judicial nominees “is contrary to our Constitution …. It was the Founders’ intention that the Senate dispose of them with a simple majority vote.”

*All quotes are taken from when George W. Bush was president. But, of course, that doesn’t matter because — in the words of Cornyn — “we need to treat all nominees exactly the same, regardless of whether they’re nominated by a Democrat or a Republican president.”**

**Cornyn’s statement was also made when George W. Bush was president.

NEWS FLASH

Senate Rejects Rand Paul Pollution Bill, 56 – 41 | Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) bill to kill a new Environmental Protection Agency rule that will reduce cross-state air pollution from coal-fired power plants in Kentucky and 26 other states was resoundingly defeated by a bipartisan 56 to 41 vote. Democrats Joe Manchin (WV) and Ben Nelson (NE) supported Paul’s radical bill. Republican senators Kelly Ayotte (NH), Scott Brown (MA), Olympia Snowe (ME), Susan Collins (ME), Mark Kirk (IL), and Lamar Alexander (TN) opposed the Congressional Review Act resolution. “Nine million people a year come to see the Great Smoky Mountains, not the Great Smoggy Mountains,” Alexander said. The 41 supporters each received an average of $361,370 from the mining and utility industries, 188 percent greater than the average contributions to the 56 opponents. Sens. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), John McCain (R-AZ), and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) did not vote.

By Brad Johnson on Nov 10, 2011 at 2:32 pm

Climate Progress

GOP Sen. Alexander Will Vote Against Rand Paul’s Bill To Kill Clean Air Rule: Pollution ‘Makes Our Citizens Sick’

By Tanya Somanader on Nov 8, 2011 at 2:00 pm

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R) is a bottomless source of slipshod attacks on environmental protections and the EPA. This year, Paul insisted that the EPA “turns everyday life into a federal crime” and regulations like the Clean Air Act have somehow “done more harm than good.”

Continuing his crusade against breathing, Paul is forcing a vote on a resolution this Thursday to overturn the EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, a regulation that “seeks to reduce smog and particulate-forming pollution from power plants in 27 eastern states.” But not all Republicans are falling in line. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) announced yesterday that he would vote against Paul’s resolution, “a rare instance of a split within the Republican party over environmental policy.” His reason is simple: Air pollution “makes our citizens sick“:

“Air pollution blowing in from other states makes our citizens sick, especially children and older Tennesseans,” Al[e]xander said. “It is also a jobs issue — pollution makes our mountains smoggy, driving away tourists. And it makes it harder for communities to secure the air-quality permits that allow auto suppliers and other manufacturers to locate in, and bring jobs to, our state.”

Alexander is correct. The EPA notes that this protection actually prevents “as many as 34,000 premature deaths by limiting harmful air pollution that crosses state lines.” As an economic driver, clean air regulations pushed the GDP in 2010 to “1.5 percent higher than it would have been without the Clean Air Act.” The Institute for Clean Air Companies estimated that complying with just one clean air standard created about 29,000 full time jobs each year for the past seven years.

The White House threatened to veto this resolution that “would cause substantial harm to public health and undermine our Nation’s longstanding commitment to clean up pollution from power plants.” Noting that the rule also prevents “more than ten thousand heart attacks and hospital visits for respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and alleviate hundreds of thousands of childhood asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses,” the White House points out the rule “will yield hundreds of billions of dollars in net benefits each year.”

Economy

Despite Record Student Debt, Republicans Oppose Obama’s Student Loan Plan

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 27, 2011 at 5:35 pm

House Education Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN)

The Obama administration this week, as part of its effort to boost the economy without having to rely on congressional action, announced a new plan to help higher education students reduce their loan debt. The administration’s plan would both help students refinance and consolidate their loans, as well as lower the amount that students can be required to pay from 15 percent of their income to 10 percent.

The GOP, after refusing to even consider President Obama’s American Jobs Act in the House and filibustering it in the Senate, has come out against the student loans plan:

HOUSE EDUCATION COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN JOHN KLINE (R-MN): “Sadly, the President has once again chosen to put politics before policy, touting a plan that will do nothing to help the nation’s unemployed workers…What this plan will do instead is encourage more borrowing across the board. That means more debt for students, more debt for taxpayers, and more red ink on the government’s books.”

SEN. MIKE ENZI (R-WY): “While I agree that the rising cost of higher education is a problem that must be urgently addressed, the president has made no effort to work with Congress to find any bipartisan solutions on the student loan debt issue…Because this latest plan was literally drafted behind closed doors, we are left with more questions than answers. The president should stop campaigning and start working with Congress to get the results that the American people expect.”

SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER (R-TN): Alexander said that “the real way to reduce the burden of student-loan debt is to slow down the growth of tuition and the best way to do that is to ‘reduce health care costs and mandates that are soaking up state dollars that in the past have gone to support public colleges and universities.’”

The right-wing media have also piled on, saying that Obama just wants to “buy some votes of the youth,” or “buy votes at the expense of the American taxpayer.”

It’s not surprising that the GOP is taking a stand against a plan that could lower loan payments for some students by hundreds of dollars per month. After all, Republicans vigorously opposed reforms that stopped billions of federal dollars from going to banks to act as unnecessary middlemen in the federal student loan program, falsely calling the end to flagrant corporate welfare a “Washington takeover” of the student loan industry.

Outstanding student loan debt is expected to hit $1trillion this year, and student debt has already surpassed total credit card debt. Reducing these debt burdens can help create jobs by freeing up money for those with loans to spend elsewhere. But the GOP is still standing against Obama’s plan, for reasons that are entirely unclear, beyond the fact that Obama proposed it

Education

Republican Education Bills Appease The Right But Do Little To Help Struggling Students

By Guest Blogger on Sep 16, 2011 at 4:50 pm

Our guest blogger is Jeremy Ayers, Senior Education Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

Yesterday a group of four Republican Senators, led by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), introduced a package of bills to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, a law that certainly needs revising. But the Republican rewrite would take away the requirement of states and districts to act to improve struggling schools. And partisan bills like these only make it harder to revise the law in a bipartisan way, something Alexander said he was committed to doing earlier this year.

The Republican bills would, together, do four things: fund the expansion of successful charter schools, consolidate various programs into state block grants, create a differential pay program for teachers, and scale back the accountability of states and school districts. A more detailed overview can be found here. But a few obvious problems stand out.

First, turning federal programs into block grants may seem attractive to those on the far right who think anything that Washington had its hand in is tainted. But it’s poor stewardship of taxpayer money to have zero accountability for how federal money is spent and to have no focus on disadvantaged students, the main federal role in education.

Secondly, if Republicans think that performance-based pay programs (and block grants) alone will improve the teacher workforce, they’re naïve. It takes far more than that, like better training, support in the classroom, and policies that focus on teachers’ effectiveness with students.

Thirdly, accountability is a good thing; it holds states’ and districts’ feet to the fire for improving student progress. The Republican package would only focus on the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools in each state. It would let states and districts do whatever they want — including nothing or very little — for the remaining 95 percent. That is simply insufficient in today’s economy when American students compete with highly-educated students from around the globe in an increasingly competitive job market.

Following the debt limit crisis, the public has witnessed a demoralizing breakdown in bipartisan governing. It is unfortunate that these bills only add fuel to the fire. Rather than reaching an honest hand across the aisle, these Senators put up a partisan roadblock to progress.

No wonder Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he’ll soon offer states relief from the broken current law in exchange for engaging in real reforms to improve our nation’s schools. That kind of action offers real hope to struggling schools and students that the federal government is working to make their lives better. Republicans need to stop playing politics with America’s children and get back to the negotiating table.

Education

Did Senate Republicans Promise To Prevent Pell Grant Cuts In 2011?

By Pat Garofalo on Jan 11, 2011 at 3:13 pm

The continuing resolution that was passed by Congress in December — which kept the government’s lights on through March 4 — addressed a key problem by providing $5.7 billion to cover a funding shortfall in the Pell Grant program that resulted from increased demand for grants in the face of the Great Recession. House Republicans griped that the funding was included, but were not successful in getting it removed.

However, when the resolution runs out in March, Pell Grants will once again be under siege, as both House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and House Education Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN) are eying the program for cuts. But did Senate Republicans make a deal that Pell Grants would be fully funded for the full 2011 year?

According to a spokesman for Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, they sure did:

A spokesman for [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell, R-Ky., denied that McConnell made such an agreement. Mississippi Republican Cochran’s spokesman, however, said there may have been a “general understanding” the Pell funding would be continued for the rest of the fiscal year. He noted that Senate Republicans were waiting to hear from their House counterparts on how they proposed to cut $100 billion from the federal budget.

Despite what Cochran’s understanding of the deal is, both McConnell and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) seem to be on-board with putting Pell Grants on the chopping block. “I think everything is on the table,” Alexander said. “Anytime you’re borrowing 42 cents of every dollar you spend, you have to say everything is on the table.”

But reducing Pell Grants not only has a detrimental effect on students in the short-term, it hinders the country’s long-term economic competitiveness. America is now 12th worldwide in percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds with a college degree, and by 2025, according to estimates by the Lumina Foundation, our nation will be short 16 million college-educated workers, which is a shortfall that Pell Grants can help to address. Saving a few dollars now is not worth denying access to potential college graduates, particularly since Pell Grant recipients come largely from traditionally underserved communities.

Of course, even if Senate Republicans renege and try to cut Pell Grants, Senate Democrats and President Obama can stand in their way. But it would be encouraging if the Senate GOP already agreed that such a move is not in the cards, regardless of what sort of funding level comes out of the House.

Politics

Bachmann’s Tax Double Standard: Cuts For Middle Class Cost Money, Cuts For The Rich Do Not

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Dec 8, 2010 at 5:16 pm

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is one of a growing number of Republican lawmakers who are unhappy with the recent tax deal struck between the White House and the GOP, because, in their mind, the compromise contains too few tax cuts and too much money spent to help unemployed Americans. But discussing her stance on Fox News yesterday with host Megyn Kelly, Bachmann also took issue with the inclusion of President Obama’s cuts in payroll taxes for the middle class, complaining that they will increase the deficit. Employing an egregious double standard, however, Bachmann simultaneously denied that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will increase the deficit:

BACHMANN:[W]e’re pleased to see that we’re looking at a two percent reduction in the payroll tax, what we normally call the Social Security tax for employees. … What this will mean is a decrease in revenue for the Social Security Trust Fund. That will, again, add to the deficit going forward. So both of these measures that President Obama is proposing will actually have a cost towards increasing the deficit.

KELLY: Is it worth it to you though, to give the president the things that he’s asked for, like the extension of unemployment benefits, in order to preserve tax cuts for all Americans? [...]

BACHMANN: It’s curious to me that they say there’s a cost involved when people are allowed to keep their own money. And they’re talking about Americans being able to keep $700 billion of their own money. The cost is to the Treasury, but really it’s a cost out of the American peopeles’ pockets. So that’s a definition of terms.

The real cost will be in the outlay of unemployment benefits and in the reduction to the treasury in the Social Security taxes.

Watch it:

Of course, both the Obama payroll tax cuts and the Bush tax cuts will increase the deficit, but why does Bachmann only acknowledge this reality when it comes the middle-class cuts? Bachmann says “it’s curious” to suggest the Bush cuts cost money because they merely let people “keep their own money.” But this is exactly what the Obama payroll tax cuts do as well. Bachmann, who was for a practicing tax attorney for years, litigating “hundreds of civil and criminal cases,” should know better (and likely does).

Last night, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) offered the same double speak to Fox News host Greta Van Susteren. “The idea of cutting the payroll tax temporarily has been a Republican idea, as well as a Democratic idea. The problem is it costs money.” Nowhere in the interview did Alexander worry that the Bush cut for the wealthy also “costs money.”

And on Monday, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) resorted to same cynical tactic on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show, distorting the payroll tax cut as government “spending,” while ignoring the cost of the Bush cuts.

Tax cuts are a core component of conservatives’ governing agenda, and they have spent the last six months constructing a fantasy world in which cutting taxes does not increase the deficit. But it appears that when those tax cuts are for the middle class, and not the wealthy, those cuts suddenly become vilified as “spending,” and as costing too much money.

Economy

Sen. Alexander: The Bush Tax Cuts Are Free, But Obama’s Tax Cuts Cost Money

By Pat Garofalo on Sep 7, 2010 at 5:30 pm

A handful of Republican lawmakers have tried to claim recently that extending all of the Bush tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest two percent of Americans, is free. “Continuing the [Bush] tax cuts isn’t a cost,” said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). “It doesn’t score anything to continue them.”

Of course, back in the real world, Republicans designed the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of this year, so relative to current law it costs more than $3 trillion over ten years to extend all of them. Extending the cuts for the richest two percent of Americans alone costs $830 billion.

Some Republicans, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), attempt to wish away this cost by claiming that revenues increase when taxes are cut (even though all of the data indicates otherwise). But Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has taken the tax absurdity to new heights, claiming that extending the Bush tax cuts is free, but President Obama’s latest proposal to cut business taxes by permanently extending the research and development tax credit may cost too much money:

Alexander, the chairman of the Senate Republican Caucus, said GOP lawmakers will consider Obama’s latest proposal to provide a research and development tax credit for businesses. But such a tax credit should come only after the White House agrees to extend the Bush tax cuts, including those on those earning more than $250,000 a year.

“The first thing we need to do is to make sure that we don’t raise taxes (by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of the year),” Alexander said. “That is going to take most of September. Then we can turn our attention to seeing if we have money to reduce taxes.”

There are two problems with this. First, Alexander is clearly willing to hold the R&D credit hostage until he gets hundreds of billions in tax cuts for the rich (since Obama and the Democrats have already made it clear that they plan to extend the Bush tax cuts for the middle class). But second, why do we have to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy before deciding whether or not we can afford the business tax credit?

Permanently extending the R&D credit will cost about $100 billion over ten years, and the administration said that it intends to (at least partially) pay for it by closing other tax loopholes. When you boil it down, Alexander is saying that we have to wait and see “if we have money” for $100 billion in research and development, but should be spending $830 billion on the very richest Americans without a second thought.

This dichotomy has been at play when it came to other measures aimed at alleviating the pain of the Great Recession. For instance, the same Republican lawmakers who said that extending $33 billion worth of unemployment benefits was too expensive also pushed to extend all of the Bush tax cuts. But they rarely, if ever, did so in consecutive sentences.

Climate Progress

GOP Put Party Over Planet, Claim Pollution Is Energy

By Brad Johnson on Jun 29, 2010 at 4:44 pm

GOBPThe habitability of our planet is threatened by fossil-fueled politicians who can’t tell the difference between pollution and energy. After a White House meeting on energy reform this morning, Republican senators rejected President Obama’s call for a price on carbon pollution, repeating the Newt Gingrich lie that it would be a “national energy tax”:

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “As long as we take a national energy tax off the table, there’s no reason we can’t have clean energy legislation.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK): “A cap-and-trade energy tax will not sell at this time. We’ve got to find a path that does not put an added burden on American taxpayers.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who refused to attend the meeting: “I wish the president would focus his attention on stopping the spill and cleaning it up instead of trying to use this crisis as an opportunity to push for a new national energy tax.”

These senators know they’re lying when they equate greenhouse gas pollution with “energy.” Their states are being ravaged by our overheated climate system, including the freak flooding of Nashville and Kentucky and the melting of Alaska’s tundra.

Murkowski is being especially disingenuous about finding a “path that does not put an added burden on American taxpayers.” Right now, American taxpayers are paying the costs of fossil fuel pollution — the destruction of our health, our oceans, and our climate — while corporate polluters like oil disaster giant BP rake in the profits.

The rhetoric of these climate peacocks who put party over planet can’t hide their track record of playing the willing stooge for pollution profiteers.

Update

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) stumbled in her statement following the meeting, attempting to reconcile her record in support for climate action with obeisance to right-wing talking points. “I’ve long asserted that placing a price on carbon will send the appropriate signals to entrepreneurs that would unleash the innovation to position America as a global clean energy industry leader,” she said, but “we cannot afford economy-wide approaches to carbon reduction.” NRDC’s Dan Lashof found the silver lining in Snowe’s half-hearted call to “more narrowly target a carbon pricing program through a uniform nationwide system solely on the power sector.”

Older

Switch to Mobile