Last October, during the height of his campaign for U.S. Senate in Utah, Sen. Mike Lee (then a Republican candidate) called for a 40 percent cut in federal spending in order to balance the budget. After his opponent pointed out that the idea is “ridiculously irresponsible” and would cause “utter chaos,” the campaign backed away from Lee’s demand, and he appears not to have made it since.

Last week, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) similarly proposed outlandish budget cuts, claiming, “My staff and I sat down, we’ve looked at the federal budget, and just our first swipe across the budget, so to speak, we’ve come up with about $450 billion worth of cuts.” Of course, Bachamann has yet to offer any specifics. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said he’ll introduce “a one-year, $500 billion spending cut” this month, but that remains to be seen. This week at a town hall meeting in Alabama, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) one-upped Bachmann and his new Tea Party colleague:

He said in 1980, the U.S owed $909 billion but in 2010, the debt was $13.5 trillion, and that estimate is expected to hit the $23 trillion mark by 2020, unless there is change.

“This is a road to financial destruction,” Shelby said. “No family could operate like that. … We continue to borrow instead of cutting spending. The day of reckoning is coming.”

He said tough choices have to be made. Shelby said government should streamline.

“I honestly believe we could cut 30 percent across the board,” he said.

That’s right. According to Shelby, the government can reduce spending by more than $1 trillion. The U.S. federal government is expected to spend around $3.8 trillion in FY 2011. In order to cut 30 percent off that, Shelby would have to come up with $1.14 trillion in savings. But according to Shelby, to achieve this lofty goal, all Congress would have to do is review and analyze programs that started 20 years ago to see if they’re still working. “We don’t know if a program we created in 1980 is still working today,” he said.

Indeed, it’s difficult to conceive of where these spending reductions would be coming from. After all, the House GOP laid out a plan last year to cut $100 billion in spending but found out once they took control in January that they could only find around $50 billion to carve out.

But what would implementing Shelby’s plan mean in practical terms? He would need “across the board” cuts — which includes Medicare and Social Security — because leaving that mandatory spending alone would require eliminating nearly all of the discretionary budget, which includes such expenditures as defense and education.

According to the St. Clair Times, Shelby didn’t offer any specific cuts. ThinkProgress inquired with his office, but they have yet to respond for comment.

Thanks to Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), taxpayers are footing a $500 million bill for a NASA rocket that the agency has no plans or desire to continue developing. The Orlando Sentinel reports that pork legislation inserted into a spending bill by Shelby earlier this year is requiring NASA to spend millions on the canceled Ares I rocket program through March, even while the agency can’t find funds to begin a much-needed modernization of the famed Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida:

At the root of the problem is a 70-word sentence inserted into the 2010 budget — by lawmakers seeking to protect Ares I jobs in their home states — that bars NASA from shutting down the program until Congress passed a new budget a year later. [...]

But Congress never passed a 2011 budget and instead voted this month to extend the 2010 budget until March — so NASA still must abide by the 2010 language.[...]

The language that keeps Constellation going was inserted into the 2010 budget last year by U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who sought to protect the program and Ares jobs at Marshall Space Flight Center in his home state.

His office confirmed that the language was still in effect but did not respond to e-mails seeking details.

Nearly all of the money for the program will go to two defense contractors building the Ares rocket, Alliant Techsystems (ATK) and Lockheed Martin, with ATK receiving the bulk. Defense contractors have been a consistent source of financial support for Shelby’s campaigns, contributing to him at higher rates than to other politicians in his state. In particular, Shelby’s 2010 reelection campaign was the top recipient of funds from ATK’s PAC, receiving the maximum $10,000. And the company’s employees appear to have given more to Shelby than to any other politician in the 2010 election cycle.

Shelby certainly has a flair for the dramatic when it comes to extracting pork money for defense contractors in his state. In a “nearly unprecedented” move in February, Shelby placed a blanket hold on every single presidential nominees being considered by the Senate — more than 70 in total, including “top Intelligence officers at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security as well as the number three civilian at the Pentagon” — in order to pressure to Obama administration to do the bidding of Northrop Grumman on a $40 billion contract for which they were being considered.

In an interview with Univision last week, President Obama said: “If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”

Many conservatives took great issue with Obama’s use of the word “enemies” to describe political opponents. Tonight in Cincinnati, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) will give a major “closing argument” speech in which he will attack Obama for the comment:

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a president in the White House who referred to Americans who disagree with him as ‘our enemies.’ Think about that. He actually used that word. When Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush used the word ‘enemy,’ they reserved it for global terrorists and foreign dictators — enemies of the United States. Enemies of freedom. Enemies of our country. Today, sadly, we have president who uses the word ‘enemy’ for fellow Americans — fellow citizens. He uses it for people who disagree with his agenda of bigger government — people speaking out for a smaller, more accountable government that respects freedom and allows small businesses to create jobs. Mr. President, there’s a word for people who have the audacity to speak up in defense of freedom, the Constitution, and the values of limited government that made our country great. We don’t call them ‘enemies.’ We call them ‘patriots.’”

Boehner’s sanctimony is truly stunning, considering that since the start of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and through his time as President of the United States, an office for which Boehner professes much reverence in his speech, Republicans have directly attacked Obama as everything from a “gangster” to Adolf Hitler, and suggested in myriad ways that Obama is an enemy to America, or perhaps not even actually an American.

A limited collection of the worst things Republicans have said about Obama:

– Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) was forced to apologize for “calling President-elect Barack Obama a ‘Marxist’ and comparing him to Adolf Hitler.” [11/12/08]

– Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) also compared Obama not only to Hitler, but also Hugo Chavez. [07/09/09]

– Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) questioned whether President Obama was an American, saying: “Well, his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate. You have to be born in America to be president.” [02/23/09]

– Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) also questioned Obama’s citizenship, saying birthers “have a point” and that “I don’t discourage it.” [07/29/09]

– Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said she was “very concerned that [Obama] may have anti-American views.” [10/17/08]

– Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) called Obama “an enemy of humanity” for his pro-choice views. [09/26/09]

– Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) called Obama “a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda,” and said he was “a dedicated enemy of the Constitution.” [07/22/10]

– Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said that the Obama administration was a “gangster government.” [11/12/09]

– Bachmann, too, accuses Obama of heading a “gangster government.” [06/10/09]

– As Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin famously said Obama is “palling around with terrorists.” [10/04/10]

– Palin also said the president was being advised by “thugs” from Chicago. [06/10/10]

Boehner did not repudiate a single one of these comments, but has suddenly found a sense of political decorum. Perhaps the next time an elected Republican accuses Obama of trying to destroy America, Boehner can give another speech.

Richard Shelby thinks this Nobel laureate is unqualified to set monetary policy.

Earlier today, Federal Reserve Board nominee Peter Diamond won the Nobel Prize in Economics along with two of his colleagues. Yet, despite the fact that President Obama nominated this Nobel laureate to the Fed nearly six months ago, his nomination is currently being blocked by just one senator. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) believes that this year’s winner of the highest honor in the economics profession is unqualified to actually set economic policy:

[U]nder an arcane procedural rule, the Senate sent Mr. Diamond’s nomination back to the White House on Thursday night before starting its summer recess. A leading Republican senator, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, said that Mr. Diamond did not have sufficiently broad macroeconomic experience to help run the central bank. [...]

As Mr. Shelby noted, Mr. Diamond is not a specialist in monetary economics — the control of the supply of credit and the setting of interest rates — which is the Fed’s traditional purview. But of the five current governors of the Fed, only two, Mr. Bernanke and the vice chairman, Donald L. Kohn, are academic economists who specialize in monetary economics. The other three include a former community banker, a former Wall Street executive and a legal scholar.

Shelby, of course, has a history of this kind of abuse of the Senate Rules to prevent eminently qualified nominees from being confirmed. Earlier this year, Shelby briefly took over 70 nominees hostage in an attempt to strongarm the administration into awarding a $35 billion defense contract to his state — although he later lifted these holds once they became politically embarrassing.

But Shelby, of course, is only able to get away with these kinds of shenanigans because the Senate’s rules are shockingly easy to abuse. Indeed, while it is common wisdom that 60 senators are required to get virtually anything done, the reality is much bleaker — most Senate business now requires all 100 senators to consent.

The reason for this is because dissenting senators can force the Senate to waste hours or even days effectively doing nothing in order to pass a single bill or confirm a single nominee. Indeed, as a recent Center for American Progress white paper explains, there isn’t enough time in two entire presidential terms to confirm all of a new president’s nominees by the time that president leaves office:

In other words, the entire government can be hollowed out by a tiny group of senators with a vendetta. Today, Sen. Shelby thinks that a Nobel laureate doesn’t know enough about economics, so that nominee must languish without an up or down vote.  Tomorrow, another senator could disapprove of a nominee’s haircut, and that alone may be sufficient to spike the nomination.

This morning, multiple media outlets including ThinkProgress noted comments made by Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in which he told the editorial board that financial reform is like “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.” In his criticism of the scope of banking reform, Boehner appeared to be minimizing the financial crisis, which caused America to lose over 8 million jobs.

This morning, ThinkProgress caught up with Senate Banking Committee ranking member and financial conference member Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) outside of a fundraiser for U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina (R-CA). Asked what he thought about Boehner’s metaphor for the financial crisis and the bill to fix it, Shelby said, “I basically agree with that”:

TP: This morning, it was reported that Minority Leader John Boehner said that financial reform is too broad, it’s basically like using a nuclear weapon on an ant. Do you agree with that kind of sentiment?

SHELBY: Well, I basically agree with that. I voted against it. We could have had a meaningful, substantive bill. There a few good things in it, but it’s a broad reach of power, and you got to ask a question, the real question, ‘are we going to be better off because of this legislation?’ And that’s problematic.

Watch it:

For months, bankers and their lobbyists have coaxed Republicans in both the House and the Senate to fight reform for their industry. At the outset of the legislative process, Shelby told a group of bankers that they could help kill reform if each of them gives $10,000 to Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), who is running for Senate. The fundraiser Shelby attended today for Fiorina was hosted by bank lobbyists, including Charlie Black, who is representing a trade group for financial firms, and Dan Meyer, a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs.