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The Washington Post reports:
The House on Friday passed a Republican budget plan for 2012 aimed at privatizing Medicare and dramatically scaling back the size of the federal government.
Voting along party lines, the House approved the $3.5 trillion GOP blueprint 235 to 193 after final debate was repeatedly interrupted by protesters chanting and singing in the gallery.
The vote came a day after Congress passed a contentious budget deal for fiscal 2011 that ended the possibility of a government shutdown before Sept. 30, when the current fiscal year ends.
The debate on various 2012 budget blueprints unfolded as Republicans were smarting from President Obama’s attacks on their cost-cutting goals and Democrats were growing more frustrated with the GOP’s growing power and deficit-reduction zeal.
The GOP plan that passed the House on Friday was crafted by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Republicans have dubbed it “The Path to Prosperity.” Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have belittled it as the “Road to Ruin.”
In debate before the vote, Democrats argued that the GOP proposal would drastically affect the entitlement programs valued by voters, especially seniors, and would deny funding for crucial infrastructure investments.
“This Republican plan ends Medicare as we know it and dramatically reduces benefits for seniors,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House minority leader, said in a floor speech. She said it would force the average senior citizen to pay twice as much for half the benefits while giving “tens of billions of dollars” in tax breaks to big oil companies.
The GOP plan “reduces Medicaid to our seniors and nursing homes . . . while it gives tax breaks to companies that send jobs overseas,” Pelosi said. “That’s just not fair.”
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) defended the Ryan budget plan, saying it “shows families and small business that we are serious about dealing with America’s spending illness.” He said Americans “understand that we can’t continue to spend money that we don’t have” at a time when the national debt tops $14 trillion.
Boehner blasted President Obama for a speech earlier this week that the speaker described as advocating “more taxing, more spending and more borrowing.” He also criticized Obama for asking Congress to raise the debt limit while rejecting any linkage to Republican policy prescriptions in return.
“The president wants a clean bill, and the American people will not tolerate it,” Boehner declared. “There will be no debt limit increase unless it is accompanied by serious reforms.”
Obama rejected the Ryan plan in his speech on the country’s debt earlier this week. “We will all need to make sacrifices, but we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in,” he said in a speech at George Washington University. “And, as long as I’m president, we won’t.”
More tax cuts for the rich paid for by the poor, middle class and elderly! Brilliant. Anyone who isn’t on a corporate Board of Directors who votes for the GOP is an idiot.
I find it interesting that Rep. Rehberg, the guy planning to run against Jon Tester for Senate in Montana next year, voted against the Ryan budget after voting with the conservative GOP members against the continuing resolution yesterday. What’s with that?
And who’s the McKinley frosh out of West Virginia who voted against this?
Ryan was gracious in victory, thanking by name the innumerable staffers who toiled day and night to assemble his incoherent budget. It’s apparent that public-sector make-work has gone too far, or is perhaps misdirected. Surely, they could be deployed more productively, doing something the Hoover Commission might applaud, like sweeping the Capitol steps. They can’t be happy staffers, lacking serious work, and paying obeisance to nonsense.
I’m curious. Why was it okay to pass this budget, a budget that results in a comprehensive overhaul of the entire federal government, with less than two weeks for debate about the contents of the bill when we needed well over a year to debate a less-than-comprehensive overhaul of the country’s health care system?
You’ve now got 235 of them on record as voting to scrap Medicare and Medicaid to fund massive tax cuts for the wealthy. If the Democrats don’t shove it up their butts they don’t deserve to win.
Now off to the Senate it goes to die.
The GOP should beware of the austerity measures they’re avidly promoting. Here’s how Britan’s austerity is affecting its economy, according to today FT.
“Public sector cuts are now taking effect and this has hit the north and Midlands hardest,” said director Matthew Hopkinson. “However, Londoners can’t sit there smugly. There are now four London fringe locations with vacancies above 25 per cent, and places like Wandsworth, Brixton and Bow are all above the national average vacancy rate of 14.5 per cent.”
The British Retail Consortium said on Mondaty that high street spending in March had seen the biggest drop since 1995, although retailers dispute whether spending patterns are as clear as vacancies suggest.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ecf86d52-66d0-11e0-8d88-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1JceoYpaK
Hopefully the Senate will give it a mercifully fast vote.
I love how you can represent a minority of the country – the Tea Party – and brand it as “the American people”; I seem to recall the GOP howling like mad dogs being buggered by Smeggy when the Dems and Obama won their elections….
Now off to the Senate it goes to die.
I think you guys are missing something here. It’s not going to die. This is the Republican budget proposal for 2012. We’re going to spend the next year arguing about it. I’m sure a lot of Republicans in the senate would like it to go away but it’s not going to.
I guarantee that there will be GOPers in the Senate that will vote against the Ryan plan.
We are witnessing an absolutely pristine example of The Shock Doctrine nationwide.
GOP raids the treasury for the good of the wealthy and corporate interests for nearly a decade.
Economy collapses as a result of these policies.
Use economic crisis to ram through partisan agenda which punishes the masses, while rewarding their wealthy benefactors yet again.
It’s absolutely sickening to witness.
The GOP is hell bent on turning the United States into a Banana Republic, where a small group of elite plutocrats rule over 300 million struggling citizens.
How does this happen? Fear. Exploit the fears of the population with a massive propaganda campaign. Fool them into supporting an agenda which is firmly against their own financial interests.
Classic shock doctrine.
This technique has been used by the U.S. government throughout the third world for generations. Now, it’s being used at home.
This is how a great nation dies.
Or there’s the other scenario where the oppressed peons rise up and start putting the wealthy in tumbrils. Fortunately, neither scenario looks likely here. The Republicans have over reached and if the Democrats do a half decent job they’ll pay an electoral price. Several conservative leaning commentators have already pointed out that Ryan has given Obama and the democrats the perfect wedge issue for 2012.
The problem is that trusting in the Democrats to “do a half decent job” is like saying “We can defeat Russia, but only if we start a land war in the wintertime”…
Yeah you have to wonder why Obama is president they’re so damned useless.
The Republican party has now officially lost their minds. Eisenhower has spun so fast in his grave he is now in orbit. I have no idea why the party allowed some Randian crank from Wisconsin take over the party, they are freaking insane. I honestly wish they had tried this back in 1995 and they would have suffered so thorough a thumping then that it would have been that for this crap for a generation, now we have to deal with this insanity for a full year. If they can pass this budget they can nominate Bachmann.
When Bush won re-election he proposed a far more modest Social Security very partial privatization and had his ass handed to him in the 2006 election, Rick Santorum who had been pushing it hard lost by 19 points. Honest to God I am appalled at how insane the party has become to pass something this deranged. The United States needs 2 viable political parties in order to keep each other honest.
Now off to the Senate it goes to die.
They wish! This thing is going to be exploited by the Dems.
Every.Day.till.Election.Day.2012.
Count on it.
As well it should be.
medinnus, this is precisely what is so alarming. If the Democrats scare the pants off of Seniors then it could be an epic rout next year, I don’t think this is good for America. Democrats themselves will then overreach and worse, just pass what is best for them at the moment. We need comprehensive and bipartisan entitlement reform, both parties need to own it, if Republicans are routed they won’t and so Democrats themselves won’t touch it since it will be a political loser. This is a bad day for America.
Until we remove the massive cash influx into politics, its going to remain a game rigged by the rich for their benefit. The Dems will never force the issue — they need the contributions of the rich just as much as the GOP does. Neither side is going to really take action against the top 2% – that’s their cash cow to exploit.
I have to disagree with you Frumplestilken. We have been hampered as a country by one party too egotistical to think it needs intelligence and sanity and another party too crippled by the specter of the 60′s to actually fight for what they believe in. Such a defeat is likely to equalize both parties, finally.
Honest to God I am appalled at how insane the party has become to pass something this deranged. The
I’m not. The only hope for the GOP to remain a national party in the America of the future is a catastrophic defeat. A series of defeats really. Otherwise the far right will always be able to rationalise it away. We weren’t Republican enough. At the end of the day it depends on the light bulb coming on with the American people as it did in 2006/2008. The Republicans made big gains in 2010 because the turnout was about 82 million whereas it was 130 million in 2008. If the middle classes in the US don’t want to be screwed they need to get off their butts and vote. If they don’t they deserve to be shafted.
Otto, I wish you were right that another big defeat would teach them something, but Republicans already got pasted twice and learned nothing. Just after Obama was elected Republican panelists on the networks were insisting how his election showed how we were a Center right nation. The teabaggers are simply incapable of learning, a catastrophic defeat will leave only the teabaggers in really red districts and we can have a repeat of 2010 in 2014.
Democrats learned after their defeats. If Bill Clinton had kept it in his pants we would have avoided the disastrous Bush presidency and the Iraq war.
What ever happened to the Bob Doles, the GWHB’s, the Tom Keans. Now NJ has a guy who looks like he should wear a track suit and have been an extra on the Sopranos and the Republican is taking its marching orders from a person who admires Ayn Rand. Has global warming made a large segment of America insane?
I would like to see some centrist Republicans with balls tell Eddie Munster to shut the hell up. Democrats long ago did that to the Kuchinichs of the party.
The only thing that is going to cause the Republican party to tack back to the center is electoral defeat. A thousand DF’s can start websites, the great and the good in the chattering classes can waffle on about bi-partisanship, etc but it won’t make a dimes worth of difference. The GOP is out on a limb on so many issues that are going to be an increasing electoral burden (social issues, immigration, inequality, the environment) that they need to climb back down and the base will never be persuaded of that unless it costs them office. The geographical orientation of the GOP is going to make this a long drawn out process but I see no alternative.
I think trying to convince people their interests are the same as the wealthy after several years of hard times is going to be harder than the Republicans are used to. Since I am feel certain Obama will veto it, I’m glad they did such a foolish thing. Hopefully, this in coordination to Wisconsin will wake people up.
I don’t think it will be as crushing a defeat as it needs to be for them to start listening to the sane members of their party, but then again, you never know when you are going to reach the tipping point.