Last week’s government funding deal approving spending limits for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 passed the House today and is expected to pass the Senate, setting the stage for the next big budgetary task in Congress: raising the nation’s debt ceiling. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said the U.S. will reach its legal borrowing limit around May 16th.

Several Republican members of Congress have taken the debt ceiling — and thus the credit worthiness of the United States — hostage for various demands. For instance, many Republicans say that they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Congress approves a balanced budget amendment or agrees to cut Social Security benefits.

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) said on Sunday, “I will not support an increase in the debt ceiling without real and meaningful changes in spending in the short-term and in the long-term.” However, back in 2002 Pence felt very differently about the debt ceiling. During a speech on the House floor, Pence said that the debt ceiling needs to be increased because failure to do so could threaten Social Security benefits. “I truly believe if you owe debts, pay debts,” Pence said:

PENCE: I rise today as a conservative Member of this institution, Mr. Speaker. I did not come here to increase the government’s debt. I came here believing, as so many people I represent believe, that if you owe debts, pay debts.

I spoke to an elderly woman on a radio program in Richmond, Indiana, today, in the heart of the heartland district that I represent. And Mr. Speaker, she said with fear in her voice that she was worried that a conservative like me would not support raising the debt ceiling and would put at risk her Social Security check. She assumed that my loathing of red ink would cause me to vote in such a way or fail to act in such a way that it would jeopardize her benefits and the benefits of people that she loves.

Well, I assured her then and I rise today to assure all those that are listening, Mr. Speaker, that I will not do that. I truly believe if you owe debts, pay debts.

Watch it:

Pence is far from the only Republican who once found raising the debt ceiling to be a noncontroversial task worthy of wide support, but now wants to extract concessions in return for doing it. It’s also worth noting that Senate Republicans voted to raise the debt ceiling immediately after passing the budget-busting 2003 Bush tax cut.

Today, President Obama will meet with congressional leaders from both parties in an attempt to hammer out a budget deal and prevent the government from shutting down at the end of this week. After initially refusing to commit to attend, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) will show up fashionably late to the White House meeting.

Republican leaders have repeatedly said they don’t want the government to close its doors. “Our goal is to avoid a shutdown,” a spokesman for Boehner said this week. Rep. Hal Rodgers (R-KY) — a powerful House budget negotiator who will attend the meeting –told ABC News yesterday that Republicans in Congress are “serious about trying to prevent a government shutdown.”

Behind closed doors, however, it doesn’t appear they are all that serious:

House Republicans huddled late Monday and, according to a GOP aide, gave the speaker an ovation when he informed them that he was advising the House Administration Committee to begin preparing for a possible shutdown. That process includes alerting lawmakers and senior staff about which employees would not report to work if no agreement is reached.

Republicans have been rallying their Tea Party base with calls for a shutdown for weeks, despite public pronouncements to the contrary. For example, influential Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) has repeatedly said that “nobody wants a government shutdown” — but then spoke at a Tea Party rally last week and cried out: “Shut ‘er down!”

For over 40 years, the government’s Title X initiative has supported family planning programs that provide contraceptive, health, and family services to over 5 million low-income women and men each year. Title X “makes no funds available for abortion” but provides grants to a network of organizations that play “a critical role in ensuring access to confidential, voluntary family planning services and information to all who want and need them.” Of the millions of women served by these clinics, 28 percent receive care at Planned Parenthood.

Recognizing the “important work” such clinics like Planned Parenthood perform “in our inner cities,” Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) pushed back against criticism of the House GOP’s plan to gut the program in a recent radio interview, saying he himself has “never advocated reducing funding for Title X”:

“I’ve never advocated reducing funding for Title X,” Pence said during a recent radio interview with the chairman of a county Right to Life organization in his home state.

“Title X clinics do important work in our inner cities,” Pence said. “They provide health services for women and children that might not otherwise have access to them.”

As a prominent and influential House Republican, Pence and his defense of Title X may be able to win over the program’s most voracious opponent: Mike Pence. Not only did he vote to “eliminate the entire Title X program” in February, he is the chief sponsor of the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act — a bill that would ban those clinics that “do important work” from receiving any federal funds because they may provide abortions.

Readily admitting that the law prohibits federal funds from being used to pay for abortions, Pence insists that “common sense says there’s no question that taxpayer dollars received by Planned Parenthood are used to cover allowed expenses like overhead operational costs, thus freeing up other money for clinics that do provide abortion.” His bill, he says, would “close the loophole that’s forced millions of pro-life Americans to subsidize the nations leading abortion provider, sustaining and underwriting this nefarious trade.”

NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan told ThinkProgress there’s only one way to view Pence’s open hypocrisy: “Clearly, Pence is feeling the political heat for being the head cheerleader for an over-reaching agenda that would take away millions of Americans’ access to contraception, cancer screenings, and health-care services.” But whatever he may say, his actions speak louder than words. (HT: Raw Story)

On November 10, President Obama addressed a crowd at the University of Indonesia about a “shared humanity” in the face the deep tension between the U.S. and Muslim communities. “In an age of rapid change and colliding cultures, what we share as human beings can sometimes be lost,” he said. “But I believe that the history of both America and Indonesia should give us hope. It is a story written into our national mottos. In the United States, our motto is E pluribus unum — out of many, one. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika — unity in diversity…our nations show that hundreds of millions who hold different beliefs can be united in freedom under one flag.”

More than shared humanity or diversity, the big takeaway from this speech for the Congressional Prayer Caucus was Obama’s choice of motto. Yesterday, in a letter obtained by Minnesota Independent, 41 Republicans — including Reps. Michele Bachmann (MN) and Mike Pence (IN) — and lone Democrat Mike McIntyre (NC) took to their bully pulpit to lambast Obama for forsaking the official U.S. motto “In God We Trust” in favor of E pluribus unum. Finding a “pattern” of subversive omittances among Obama’s speeches, the outraged lawmakers slammed Obama’s “disservice to the people you represent” and demanded Obama “issue a correction” to his speech:

E pluribus unum is not our national motto.[...]

As President of the United States, you are our representative to the rest of the world. By misrepresenting things as foundational as the Declaration of Independence and our national motto, you are not only doing a disservice to the people you represent you are casting aside an integral part of American society.

John Adams said, “It is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.” If Adams was right, by making these kinds of statements to the rest of the world, you are removing one of the cornerstones of our secure freedom. If we pull the threat of religious conviction out of the marketplace of ideas, we unravel the tapestry of freedom that birthed America.[...]

We respectively request that you issue a correction to the speech you gave, as it does not accurately reflect America and serve to undercut an important part of our history. We are willing to meet with you to discuss this further if you would like. As President Ronald Reagan warned, “if we ever forgot that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.

To bolster their own view, these lawmakers blatantly ignore Obama’s repeated references to God in his speeches. In fact, they pointedly ignore his multiple references to God in the very same Indonesia speech in which Obama shows no sign of trying to avoid the subject.

In blasting his choice of U.S. motto, these lawmakers also insinuate that the motto E pluribus unum “does not accurately reflect America.” But while “In God We Trust” has been the nation’s official motto since 1956, E pluribus unum, or “out of many, one,” is the motto on the Seal of the United States and was the nation’s original “de facto motto” until 1956. Ironically, John Adams — a founding father who signed his name to the idea that the U.S. “is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” — suggested E pluribus unum as the young nation’s motto in 1776.

In fact, only when “the nation was suffering through the height of the cold war, and the McCarthy communist witch hunt” did Congress, desiring to differentiate between communism and Western capitalistic democracies, replace that motto with “In God we Trust.” And while some among the Congressional Prayer Caucus have no problem with Senator Joe McCarthy’s methods, most try to avoid the comparison.

View full letter here: Read more