Tagged: budget

Posted: March 20, 2013 at 9:07 pm

ANALYSIS: Republicans Join Democrats for Unanimous, 100-0 Passage of Budget

by Cowgirl

A baffling 100-0 vote for a budget in the Montana house yesterday.

I can’t quite tell what to make of it. Surely the Democrats didn’t get some things that we want, and surely the Republicans got some things they didn’t want (spending items). That is usually the case with any budget that passes any house of the legislature. And this is only a preliminary vote, of course, for the Senate gets a crack at it, and any changes made by the Senate will again require a final approval of the whole legislature. So the items the budget lacks but should contain, such as “family planning funds” to test for cervical cancer and prevent pregnancy and abortion, may yet be inserted. It needs to happen in the Senate, where it can actually pass, and I expect it will.

What I don’t understand is the thought process used by certain GOP house members, those who are vulnerable to a right-wing primary challenge. They have touched kryptonite, hung it around their necks, in fact. They have now voted for a budget that is larger, by every dimension, than the budget proposed by Gvoernor Bullock.

How does a Republican in a conservative district win a primary if he is challenged on those facts by a challenger funded by a right-wing disrupter organixation such as the ones that unseated moderates in the past several legislative elections. Like ATP, or Roger Koopman’s outfit?

So, the question is: what will the Tea Party say? How will Tim Ravndal, Jennifer Olsen, Bobette Madonna, Cindy Baker, and the many other right-wing slobbering yahoos respond to this offensive slight? Is it possible that the Tea party has been so broken down by the events of the last few years that it is in full retreat, and is no longer even bothering to act as a convervative police force?

This is quite perplexing, even astounding. If it’s so, then the GOP has been fully broken, like a horse that can longer pull a cart no matter how hard the whipping–like the national GOP, which is now sending out some of its most conservaive members to make noise about how immigrants need a path to citizenship, or about how maybe all people should be allowed to marry after all.

Two years ago a vote of this kind would have been unthinkable, an act of political primary suicide. And yet now it comes and goes, in the blink of an eye.

Partly this does not surprise me, for I was among the first commentators to observe a distinct lack of enthusiasm this session among the TEAtards, and a commensrate amount of dejection on the faces of GOP moderates, who have come to understand how few options there are for the GOP to regroup and re-emerge a force in state-wide elections with credible candidates and a unified party.

Let’s see where this vote leads. Something tells me the game has just changed.

One thing is crystal clear. Republicans will no longer be able to vote to block health care for 70,000 working poor people because of their opposition to “spending” after making this vote. That excuse is gone.

Posted: January 3, 2012 at 6:02 pm

Presidential Candidates Get A Favor from Rehberg

The Hill has a running list up of which members of Congress are endorsing which presidential candidate. As of this posting, the tallies stood at Romney – 61, Perry-13, Gingrich-8, Paul-3, Cain-1 Bachman-1, Santorum-0.

Montana Congressman Rehberg is not on the list.

To be sure, Rehberg’s absence could simply be explained by his fear to make a choice this early. But given that we already heard his de facto endorsement of Bachmann in February of 2011, it may be that he was asked by the campaigns to do them a solid and stay out. After all, Rehberg has been at the center of Congress’s failure and brinksmanship throughout the budget debate. As David Weigel theorizes in Slate, the brinkmanship and failure to accomplish anything is tanking the popularity of House Republicans:

there has been a rarely-admitted fatigue with the Republican House, and its inability to get anything done unless there’s last-minute stop-the-clock brinkmanship…it started to mean that you were part of Washington machinery that was creaking and belching acrid smoke.

Posted: October 6, 2011 at 6:32 am

The Montana GOP Hypocrite of the Week Award Goes to…

…Dennis Rehberg, who claims to be worried about the deficit, but is actually determined to remove essential cost savings measures and reinstate money-wasting boondoggles.

In his budget bill, Congressman Rehberg eagerly attacks important sources of savings, starting with disease and cancer prevention. Montana public health experts write in the Missoulian this week that:

Prevention costs less than trying to cure people who are already sick. According to the Trust for America’s health, every $1 spent on prevention services saves $5.60. Every $1 spent on childhood vaccines saves $16.50.

One would think that the power to curb disease while cutting costs would appeal to any thinking individual. However, that’s not what we’re dealing with here. And unless Rehberg has received an honorary doctorate from some backwater, unaccredited Bible college, I don’t think we can call him a “doctor.”

Another big cost saver Rehberg wants to take out is family planning. Every dollar spent on family planning saves four dollars of taxpayer funds. That’s because cost of covering a Medicaid-funded birth, is $13,000, according to a May 2010 Guttmacher Institute study. That’s way more than it costs to providing birth control to low-income women in need, which averages only $250 bucks per client per year.

The government spends about $300 million a year on the Title X program, but in 2008 alone, it saved the country $3.4 billion dollars in return.

But Rehberg doesn’t stop with killing cost savers. He’s reinstating proven money wasters like “abstinence only” until marriage education programs. (Never mind that the average age of marriage is 29.) The federal government’s own studies have proven that abstinence only until marriage programs don’t work. Yet this stuff is still pushed by Congressional chastity champs like Rep. Dennis Rehberg and of course Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), a longtime patron of prostitutes.

Rehberg’s entire campaign is designed to convince you that he really, really cares about saving money. But his own proposals don’t do that, as others have pointed out. They’re just the same old Republican ploys to force their religious fundamentalism on you–cost savings be damned.

Posted: September 20, 2011 at 5:47 pm

Something Fishy

After months of waiting for a funding bill from Rehberg’s appropriations committee in the House, the Senate was forced to give up and started work on its own funding bill for the coming year for Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations. This is the committee that funds health care, financial aid, community health centers, Head Start, etc.

This situation is unusual. Traditionally, the Senate follows the House in approving these bills. And this is the first time in nearly a decade that the House’s Committee has failed to put a funding proposal together by August. Under Rehberg’s “leadership,” after two cancellations, the House’s Labor-HHS Committee (which Rehberg chairs), still has not produced its version of the funding bill.

There’s been lots of speculation out there about what’s going on. Today, some clues are starting to emerge.

In a press release, Sen. Tom Harkin today said the Senate bill will be:

“the only Labor HHS bill marked up for this fiscal year. The House Labor-HHS subcommittee was scheduled to consider a bill two weeks ago, but the majority couldn’t muster enough votes to pass it, and has abandoned all attempts to do so.”

Meanwhile, it is already getting cold in Montana. Yet Rehberg seems to have forgotten (or doesn’t care) that he’s in charge of funding low income energy assistance for families and food for seniors that would be forced to go without if it weren’t for the Senate taking over. At least we can be thankful that Rehberg’s not in the Senate himself.

Without any other information, we have to assume his plan couldn’t get support because it was too wacky to see the light of day–and this is a committee made up of a majority of members of his own party. Presumably, Rehberg is so much of a hardliner that he put together something even members of his own party were unable to support. We can’t know however, because Rehberg’s keeping his proposal hidden from Montanans.

Posted: August 18, 2011 at 8:52 pm

Yes It Can (And It Does, in Montana)

There is an interesting op-ed in the NY Times today by Montana’s governor Brian Schweitzer, talking about Montana’s unique position as one of the only governments in America with a large surplus, six years in a row. Says any government can do it, if it uses “ranch-style management.”

Posted: August 3, 2011 at 7:29 pm

No Wonder Reherg Voted Against the Budget Agreement

No wonder that TEA party caucus member, Congressman Dennis Rehberg, did not compromise and vote for the budget agreement. The final package included a guarantee that low income students will still have access to college through Pell Grants over the next two years.

As the Missoulian reports:

The federal debt-ceiling bill approved and signed Tuesday included at least one major spending increase, guaranteeing low-income undergraduate students will continue to have access to college.

Congress increased the federal Pell grant program by $17 billion to help cover tuition costs for 9 million low- and middle-income undergraduate students nationwide over the next two years.

You remember the famous TEA Party rhetoric, reported by the Hill:

Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) has compared Pell Grants to “welfare”.

“So you can go to college on Pell Grants — maybe I should not be telling anybody this because it’s turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century,” Rehberg told Blog Talk Radio in April. “You can go to school, collect your Pell Grants, get food stamps, low-income energy assistance, Section 8 housing, and all of a sudden we find ourselves subsidizing people that don’t have to graduate from college.”

Posted: June 24, 2011 at 12:09 pm

Fuzzy Math

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish–Dr. Seuss 1965

The Montana Legislature, we now learn, was using strange counting methods and fuzzy math, from day one.

The chief forecaster for how much money the state should expect to have in its coffers on a quarterly basis is Terry Johnson, who reports to legislative leadership. He and Schweitzer butted heads throughout the last four sessions session, because Schweitzer was evidently crunching the numbers and thought that there was more money available than was being estimated by Johnson, who takes marching orders from his bosses Jim Peterson (R-Buffalo) and Mike Milburn (R-Cascade). As a result, as in states like Wisconsin, Florida and other places where the Tea Party as created a false premise panic about a lack of funds, the Republicans in the 2011 session were able to justify across the board cuts. Cuts in education, cuts in assistance to poor, and the denying hard working state employees a 1% pay raise they were slated to receive after years of going without.

In fact, the board of regents has announced that tuition at the University system must now be raised because of the Republican legislature’s cutting of funding for higher Ed.

Yesterday, I saw a mailing from the Policy Institute, a group run by Pat Williams, Ken Toole and other progressives, discussing the importance of standing up for what you value. The mailing attributed democratic losses in 2010 to a tendency to try to reach persuadable voters at the expense of the base. I agree with much of this.

But it also needs to be understood that many Democratic legislators seem not to have the stomach for butting heads with GOP front-man Terry Johnson and his crew, and instead enjoy singing kumbaya with him. Those who were guilty of this, and consider themselves progressives, now need to take a good, long look in the mirror.

UPDATE: Hamm on Wry has a good discussion of the Republican’s pathetic response.

Posted: May 11, 2011 at 7:21 am

The Blame Game

The end of the legislative session should have been a triumph for Senate President Jim Peterson and Speaker of the House Mike Milburn — a celebration of the Republican agenda that the Republican incumbent Congressman Denny Rehberg could tout in his U.S. Senate race. But if you read the latest series of news reports, topped of with Milburn and Peterson’s latest complaining in guest editorial form one finds only whinging, finger-pointing, and dejection.

“This is extremely disappointing,” said House Speaker Mike Milburn, R-Cascade, summing it up in in the Ravalli Republic.

In news reports about the GOP’s breach of budget deal, GOP leadership is coming across as increasingly desperate it their attempts to place the blame on the other party, rather than where it really lies –with themselves.

Here’s how the blame game went down.

At first, Peterson tried to claim to the press that he couldn’t understand how he had reneged on the deal.

“We did everything that he asked us to do,” added Senate President Jim Peterson, R-Buffalo. “I don’t see there is any reason for him to break the deal, other than he just wants to.”

Then, when the public got wise to the fact that the GOP hadn’t delivered the bills their leaders promised, Peterson and Milburn put out an awkward spin on the deal, saying they hadn’t really promised to deliver anything on their end, only to try to make an attempt.

Milburn said the deal was to have a vote on not only SB94, but also on a pay increase for state employees and a $100 million bonding bill for state construction projects — but that he didn’t promise that any of them would pass. All three bills were killed by the House last Thursday.
“I can only do what I can do,” said Milburn, who voted for SB94 but voted against the other two measures. “I don’t have total control over everyone.”

Which is just a pathetic way of saying that their caucus hadn’t granted them the authority to act on its behalf. If this is true, they shouldn’t have written checks that their caucus wouldn’t cash, making commitments and promises that their own colleagues were unwilling to uphold (whether through incompetence an lack of leadership ability or the GOP takeover by the far right fringe it is unknown).

There’s a problem with this claim that Milburn “could only do what he can do.” It simply isn’t true. The GOP leadership could have gone to their caucus at any time during the negotiations to ask them if they had they would vote to pass the measures that were part of the deal. Their caucus could have done so and then Peterson and Milburn could have let the Governor know — and moved forward with the negotiations on other fronts. Failure to make this happen shows that the budget battle was between Republicans and Republicans, rather than between the parties. As it was, that they had come to the table on false pretenses.

Fast forward to today. Schweitzer is using the breach of trust as an opportunity to fix a slate of GOP bills with line-item vetoes. He nixed a GOP tax on businesses and a bill to gut voter passed initiatives–actions that benefit the people of Montana.

Meanwhile, the GOP leadership is playing the blame game, while at the same time still making the ludicrous claim that the session was a smashing success because – get this - that they had spent less time trying to make a budget that any legislature in previous history (as if this slamming through of the peoples business with less than diligent oversight is a good thing.) No wonder it needs a few last minute line-item fixes.