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Health

Senator Who Criticized Sebelius For Soliciting Donations Asked For Private Funds While Serving In Bush Administration

By Igor Volsky on May 13, 2013 at 4:39 pm

A top Senate Republican who compared the Obama administration’s efforts to solicit private donations for a campaign encouraging Americans to enroll in the Affordable Care Act to the Iran-Contra scandal asked for private donations to fund education reform while serving in the George H. W. Bush administration.

On Saturday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) criticized Sebelius for asking businesses and other community organizations to support an enrollment campaign spearheaded by Enroll America, a nonprofit organization working to convince people to sigh up for health care coverage. Alexander said Sebelius’ actions should “cease immediately and should be fully investigated by Congress.”

He cited a report by the Iran-Contra Congressional Joint Select Committee, which says “Congress’s exclusive control over the expenditure of funds cannot legally be evaded through the use of gifts or donations to the executive branch.” Since news broke of Sebelius’ activities on Friday, Republicans have argued that the secretary is raising private funds to work around Congressional refusal to appropriate federal dollars for implementation. Administration officials insist, however, that Sebelius was following authority laid out in the Public Health Service Act and “has made no fundraising requests to entities regulated by HHS.”

But in 1991, while serving as Secretary of Education for President George H. W. Bush, Lamar actively and enthusiastically sought private dollars to fund the administration’s education initiative, America 2000. The plan encouraged states and localities to commit themselves to six broad national education goals and standards and aspired to establish 535 “New American Schools” by the year 2000.

Alexander crisscrossed the country to sell the initiative on behalf of the administration after Congress failed to approve Bush’s education funding request. The president announced the formation of the nonprofit New American Schools Development Corp. and tasked it with raising $200 million to design new school models that communities can adopt, even planning a special meeting with businesses at Camp David to drum up support for more donations.

“Funds are pouring in — I don’t want to say ‘pouring,’ because we’re going to put the arm on you all on in a minute here — but funds are coming in well,” Bush said at the White House in July of 1991. “[A]lready $30 million has been raised, much of it from the corporations that are represented here today,” he added.

The administration continued to fundraise for the effort, with Alexander himself making a pitch. Responding to a Associated Press report from August of 1991, which noted that businesses are hesitant to commit additional dollars to new causes during the recession, Alexander said, “In my opinion, the more you ask for the more you get. We’ve been very timid about asking American businesses to support elementary and secondary education, tiptoeing around the edges,” he added. “We shouldn’t do that. This is a big, rich generous country and we’ve got plenty of money for all the innovations, especially innovations in excellence.”

Bush ultimately let the America 2000 legislative effort die in Congress, “gambling that he would have a second term to try once again with his initiatives.”

Update

During remarks on the floor, Alexander sought to distinguish between the fundraising he engaged in as Secretary of Education and Sebelius’ solicitations, arguing that he was raising money for a private corporation: “Here is a private corporation that’s doing that; we encourage that. Congress wasn’t objecting to that. Congress hadn’t said, you can’t do that. Congress hadn’t been asked to vote on an appropriation for the new development corporation, and Congress had not said, you can’t do that.”

Update

But an op-ed Alexander penned in September of 1992 confirms that Congressional refusal to fund America 2000 forced the administration to solicit private funds. Published in the The San Diego Union-Tribune on Sep. 27, 1992:

President Bush asked Congress to appropriate a half-billion dollars to redesign such new American schools. Congress balked, the business community didn’t. The president has asked American businesses to raise $200 million to fund design teams to help communities create such schools.

They’re raising the money through the New American Schools Development Corp. (NASDC), and they have already funded 11 design teams that are moving ahead with exciting, innovative proposals.

Economy

Top Republican Senator Repeats Debunked Nonsense About Paid Sick Days

By Pat Garofalo on Feb 25, 2013 at 2:31 pm

Nearly three million Americans missed work last month, and many of them did so without having access to paid sick leave. About 40 percent of private sector workers and 80 percent of low-income workers don’t receive a single paid sick day from their employers, forcing them into choosing between their health (or the health of a child or relative) and their paycheck, or even their job.

Democrats have introduced measures to change that, in the process ending America’s tenure as the only developed country that doesn’t require some form of paid leave. But the top Republican on the Senate Labor Committee is having none of it:

Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the top Republican on the labor committee, contends such a requirement “would only make a bad unemployment problem worse” by increasing hiring costs.

A favorite Republican claim is that any new business requirement will cause job losses. In the case of paid sick leave, though, the research shows nothing of the sort. Study after study has shown that paid sick leave has no effect on job creation. In fact, San Francisco business expansion picked up after the city required employers to provide paid sick days. The same pattern has held true in early evaluations of Connecticut’s new paid sick leave law.

Republicans, business leaders, and the Chamber of Commerce constantly gripe about paid sick day laws. But the evidence hasn’t borne out their warnings, instead showing that fair labor policy is good for both workers and employers.

Justice

Sen. Alexander: Senate Republicans Should Be Able To Confirm No One To Any Job

By Ian Millhiser on Feb 1, 2013 at 12:00 pm

In 2010, Congress passed and President Obama signed a law creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Shortly thereafter, Senate Republicans promised to effectively render this agency a nullity by refusing to confirm anyone to head it — no matter who President Obama nominated. In other words, despite the fact that the Constitution requires a new Act of Congress to clear both houses and the presidential veto power in order to eliminate the CFPB, Senate Republicans thought they could make an end-run around the Constitution by not allowing anyone to be appointed to the one key position within the agency. Eventually, President Obama blocked this attack on the rule of law by recess appointing Richard Cordray to head the CFPB.

Last week, the severely conservative United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit embraced the Senate GOP’s end-run around the Constitution by declaring these recess appointments unconstitutional. Indeed, the D.C. Circuit didn’t just declare these appointments unconstitutional, it declared most modern recess appointments unconstitutional as well. If the court’s surprising rationale is upheld on appeal, it would effectively remove the recess power from the Constitution altogether.

In an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) rooted for this outcome — claiming Republicans should be allowed to hollow out the entire federal government by refusing to confirm anyone at all if they chose:

CHUCK TODD: The president of one party could be in the White House — get elected. There could be a political part that controls the Senate on the other side — so then the president has no recourse if that United States Senate of the opposite part of the president decides “you know what? We’re shutting down the confirmation process,” because, you know that can be done. Is that what . . . there’s no recourse at all for the executive branch here?

ALEXANDER: Yeah, the next election is the recourse for the executive branch. . . .

TODD: You can hold up cabinet appointments for four years?

ALEXANDER: It could be two years, yeah. Of course it could. . . . The president has to keep sending people until he finds someone who can gain the support of the senate.

For the record, we just had “the next election” and President Obama won — as did Senate Democrats, who picked up two seats in a year when the overwhelming majority of the seats in dispute had Democratic incumbents. And President Obama can’t “keep sending people” until he finds a CFPB head Senate Republicans will not filibuster because Republicans promised to block anyone Obama nominates.

Economy

GOP Senators Want To Take Debt Ceiling Hostage In Order To Raise Retirement Age

By Pat Garofalo on Dec 28, 2012 at 4:00 pm

Two Republican senators want to use the threat of an economic meltdown to raise the retirement age and cut Medicare. Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) introduced a plan today that would raise the federal debt limit by $1 trillion in exchange for $1 trillion in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, as The Hill reported:

The Corker-Alexander dollar-for-dollar plan has several components.

It would structurally reform Medicare by creating competing private options giving seniors greater choice of healthcare plans. It would not, however, cap Medicare spending.

The plan would also give states more flexibility to manage Medicaid programs and prevent states from “gaming the federal share of the program with state tax charges.”

It would gradually raise the Social Security retirement age and use the “chained CPI” formula to calculate cost-of-living adjustments, curbing the growing cost of benefits.

In exchange, it would direct the debt limit be increased by the same amount as the savings generated from entitlement reform.

The U.S. will hit its debt limit on or around December 31st. The Treasury Department estimates that, using extraordinary measures, it could avoid default for another two months or so. Allowing the U.S. to default on its debt via not raising the debt ceiling could cause a complete financial meltdown. The 2011 debt ceiling debacle — during which House Republicans nearly pushed the country into a default due to their intransigence on taxes — cost the country about $19 billion in higher interest payments and at least one million jobs.

Corker and Alexander are threatening more economic chaos in order to achieve one of the most regressive potential policy changes. Though lawmakers point to America’s increasing life expectancy in order to justify raising the retirement age, life expectancy is only increasing for wealthier workers in non-physical jobs. As the Center for Economic and Policy Research put it, “there has been a sharp rise in inequality in life expectancy by income over the last three decades that mirrors the growth in inequality in income.”

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.

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