Friday Mashup Part Two (6/25/10) - (updates)

(Part One is here.)

I give you the following from last Sunday’s Area Votes in Congress writeup in the Philadelphia Inquirer (here - the Senate votes were "party line" stuff, in the right way, I mean)…

House

Small-business credit. Voting 241-182, the House authorized the Treasury to lend up to $30 billion to community and regional banks to leverage up to $300 billion in new credit for small businesses. As collateral, the Treasury would receive dividend-paying preferred stock redeemable within 10 years. Financial institutions with assets under $10 billion would be eligible for the program. The deficit-neutral bill (HR 5297) is now before the Senate.

A yes vote was to pass the bill.

Voting yes: John Adler (D., N.J.), Robert E. Andrews (D., N.J.), Robert A. Brady (D., Pa.), Michael N. Castle (R., Del.), Chaka Fattah (D., Pa.), Tim Holden (D., Pa.), Patrick Murphy (D., Pa.), Allyson Y. Schwartz (D., Pa.), and Joe Sestak (D., Pa.).

Voting no: Charles W. Dent (R., Pa.), Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.), Frank A. LoBiondo (R., N.J.), Joseph R. Pitts (R., Pa.), and Christopher H. Smith (R., N.J.).

At least Mike Castle managed to do the right thing here – please spare me the pabulum about how the Repug Party supposedly gives a damn about small business after votes like this.

Small-business investment. Voting 247-170, the House passed a deficit-neutral bill (HR 5486) that uses incentives such as nontaxation of capital gains and the waiver of certain Internal Revenue Service penalties to stimulate small-business growth. In part, the bill eliminates capital-gains taxes on the sale of certain small-business stock bought between March 15, 2010, and Jan. 1, 2012, increases deductions for start-up expenditures, and eases rules for deducting losses from investments in enterprises such as farming and energy exploration. The bill is now before the Senate.

A yes vote was to pass the bill.

Voting yes: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Castle, Dent, Fattah, Holden, Murphy, Schwartz, and Sestak.

Voting no: Gerlach, LoBiondo, Pitts, and Smith.

So Charlie Dent joins Castle among the "Repug enlightened," with Gerlach, Pitts and Smith particularly clueless (and I thought LoBiondo was smarter than this – more fool me, I guess).

Health-care mandate. Voting 187-230, the House defeated a GOP bid to use HR 5486 (above) as a vehicle for repealing the new health law's requirement that individuals who can afford it obtain medical insurance either at work or in a state-run exchange. The purpose of the individual mandate is to hold down everybody's health costs by establishing the largest possible pool of insured people. Critics say the mandate is oppressive because those without coverage will face financial penalties. Robert E. Andrews (D., N.J.) said that eliminating the requirement would increase middle-class premiums because "when a person goes to the emergency room and doesn't have health insurance, they get health care. The question is who pays the bill."

A yes vote was to repeal the individual mandate.

Voting yes: Castle, Dent, Gerlach, Holden, LoBiondo, Pitts, and Smith.

Voting no: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Fattah, Murphy, Schwartz, and Sestak.

Tim Holden continues to be utterly awful; if he manages to go down this fall (to say nothing of other “corpocrat” Dems, it will be over votes exactly like this…an Inquirer commenter objected to the analysis from Rob Andrews on this, even though Andrews is exactly right as to why the individual mandate is important...and let's not forget, to do something about Pancake Joe, click here).

And remaining with U.S. Congressional matters, this article appeared recently in the Bucks County Courier Times…

On a hot Tuesday in a campaign that's set to sizzle, (Dem U.S. House Rep Patrick) Murphy had veterans with him at the Bristol Wharf as he ripped (Repug challenger Mike) Fitzpatrick for voting against a bill in 2005 that would have protected veterans from bankruptcy. Murphy said Fitzpatrick took the side of credit card companies and big banks "against basic protection for veterans."

The legislation, Murphy said, would have exempted veterans from bankruptcy means tests while they are deployed and for two years following active duty, allowing them to transition back to civilian life.

Fitzpatrick tells a different story. He said he voted for a bill "to protect low-income and disabled veterans. That was important to me. It was achieved."

Here is a post with more details on the bill Fitzpatrick voted against, by the way, including the roll-call vote from April 2006. And since Fitzpatrick doesn’t provide more details on this bill be supposedly voted for to “to protect low-income and disabled veterans,” I’m not going to do his homework for him.

Instead, I’ll just link to this prior post which tells us the following about what our vets have endured over the last eight years or so in particular…

Injuries are not always physical, though. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that one in three troops returning from Iraq will seek counseling within a year, though most believe the number may actually be higher.

Already, those with serious mental-health needs are being turned away because of underfunding. The result will prove to be the same as it was with the Vietnam veterans - many will be unable to cope with the transition back to civilian life and become drug addicts, alcoholics, homeless, or worse - suicidal.

IN THE PAST few years, there have been plenty of votes in Congress that might not completely solve the problem, but would go a long way toward giving veterans the care they need and deserve.

Both (former) Reps. Fitzpatrick and ("Crazy Curt") Weldon repeatedly voted no on helping these 21st-century patriots. They voted no on a bill to extend the military health care program to members of the National Guard and reserves, on an amendment that would have increased funding for VA services by $2.6 billion, and another that would have increased funding by $3.1 billion.

The prior post also tells us that, under Mikey’s congressional “oversight,” our vets seeking help from the VA needed duct tape to hold their prosthetic limbs together.

And as noted here, Fitzpatrick opposed expanding access to the military’s TRICARE health insurance program to thousands of Reservist and National Guard members, even though 20 percent of all reservists did not have health insurance, and 40 percent of reservists aged 19 to 35 lacked health coverage (HR 1815, Vote #221, 5/25/2005).

With all of this in mind, please click here to support Patrick Murphy and send Mikey back to private life, hopefully once and for all.

Update: Kudos to Murphy for this also.

Update 6/28/10: Patrick's amendment in response to Citizens United passed here - well done.

Finally, it looks like trouble for the Congressional Dems this fall, if Byron York has a clue about things here (always problematic in his case)…

The latest evidence is a new survey from pollsters Peter Hart and Bill McInturff for the Wall Street Journal and NBC. The number of people who say the country is headed in the wrong direction is 62 percent -- the highest it has been since the final days of George W. Bush. The troubled economy, of course, is the most important issue, and 66 percent say they expect the economy to stay the same or get worse in the next year.

"There is a sense across the board that things aren't working," says Republican pollster David Winston.

Obama's approval rating is at 45 percent, versus 48 percent disapproval -- the first time the president has ever been underwater in the Journal poll.

Could Obama’s numbers be better? Sure. However, his predecessor would have killed for a 45 percent approval rating in his final days, just to remind everyone (and what does anyone expect a Republican pollster to say, by the way?).

With this in mind, I thought this article in the New York Times today was interesting, particularly the following…

...digging deeper, beyond the national numbers, reveals at least a few glimmers of hope for Democrats — still fairly distant and faint, but bright enough to get campaign strategists scanning the horizon and weighing the odds.

That is because different parts of the country are recovering at different rates — and, in a bit of electoral good luck for the Democrats, some of the areas that are beginning to edge upward more quickly, like parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, happen to be in important battlegrounds for the House and the Senate.

“A lot of the trend lines are turning positive in many of these contested areas,” said Mark Zandi, a chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. “It really boils down to: Is there enough time for the trend lines to trump the still pretty difficult conditions in the minds of the voters?”

…

The Times has identified 114 House seats and 17 Senate seats that are expected to be the most competitive in November. The largest numbers of closely contested elections are expected to be in Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio, where The Times projects a combined 26 competitive House races.

All three states, coincidentally, are considered to be on the leading edge of the nation’s recovery. Since December, they have added jobs at a faster rate than the country as a whole and even led the country in the total number of jobs added in April. One reason is that manufacturing, a traditional backbone, has been on the rebound; another is that these states generally did not suffer as acutely as other regions from the housing boom and bust.

While much attention has been paid to the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate, political scientists have found little correlation between that measure and midterm elections results. Instead, they have found more broad-based indicators, particularly real personal disposable per capita income, which measures the amount of money a household has after taxes and inflation, to be better gauges.

As the party in power during a congressional midterm election, it is practically inevitable that the Dems are going to take a hit.

However, if the Party of No thinks that they will recapture power on Capitol Hill with stunts like this (part of this), they are utterly dreaming.