Although he opposed government strikes, Reagan supported government workers’ efforts to unionize and bargain collectively. As governor, he extended such rights in California. As president he was prepared to do the same. Not only did he court and win Patco’s endorsement during his 1980 campaign, he directed his negotiators to go beyond his legal authority to offer controllers a pay raise before their strike — the first time a president had ever offered so much to a federal employees’ union.I don’t think this column absolves Reagan under any stretch of the imagination, but it’s interesting reading anyway (and from the “past is prologue” department, I give you this).
But the impact of the Patco strike on Reagan’s fellow Republicans has long since overshadowed his own professed beliefs regarding public sector unions. Over time the rightward-shifting Republican Party has come to view Reagan’s mass firings not as a focused effort to stop one union from breaking the law — as Reagan portrayed it — but rather as a blow against public sector unionism itself.
In the spring, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin invoked Reagan’s handling of Patco as he prepared to “change history” by stripping public employees of collective bargaining rights in a party-line vote. “I’m not negotiating,” Mr. Walker said. By then the world had seemingly forgotten that unlike Mr. Walker, Reagan had not challenged public employees’ right to bargain — only their right to strike.
With Mr. Walker’s militant anti-union views now ascendant within the party of a onetime union leader, with workers less able to defend their interests in the workplace than at any time since the Depression, the long-term consequences continue to unfold in ways Reagan himself could not have predicted — producing outcomes for which he never advocated.
HouseCut, “crap” and balance Mikey strikes again, as noted here (so bad a deal that even Tim Holden voted against it).
Speaker Boehner's debt plan. Voting 218-210, the House on Friday passed a bill (S 627) written by Speaker John A. Boehner (R., Ohio) to immediately raise the $14.3 trillion national debt ceiling by $917 billion and require both houses of Congress to soon pass a balanced-budget constitutional amendment.
A yes vote was to send the bill to the Senate.
Voting yes: Charles W. Dent (R., Pa.), Michael Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.), Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.), Frank A. LoBiondo (R., N.J.), Pat Meehan (R., Pa.), Joseph R. Pitts (R., Pa.), Jon Runyan (R., N.J.), and Christopher H. Smith (R., N.J.).
Voting no: Robert E. Andrews (D., N.J.), Robert A. Brady (D., Pa.), John Carney (D., Del.), Chaka Fattah (D., Pa.), Tim Holden (D., Pa.), and Allyson Y. Schwartz (D., Pa.).
Oh, and by the way, it recently occurred to me that I’ve gone all of this time since the thoroughly wretched 112th Congress convened and I haven’t had a word to say about Jon “How Much Tax Can I Get Away With Paying On My Farm” Runyan. And that’s because he’s pretty much voted like the total Repug shill I knew he would be.
U.S.-Canada oil pipeline. Voting 279-147, the House on Tuesday set a deadline of Nov. 1 for President Obama to act on a Canadian firm's application to build a 2,000-mile pipeline for shipping crude oil extracted from tar sands in the province of Alberta to U.S. refineries in Texas. The bill (H.R. 1938) is nonbinding because this is solely an executive-branch decision. The administration says it could decide by year's end whether to allow TransCanada Corp. to build the Keystone XL pipeline, which would be in addition to its existing oil pipeline between Alberta and Cushing, Okla.Another utterly wasteful, non-job producing exercise sponsored by the ruling gaggle of idiots…
A yes vote was to pass the bill.
Voting yes: Brady, Dent, Fattah, Fitzpatrick, Gerlach, Holden, LoBiondo, Meehan, Pitts, Runyan, and Smith.
Voting no: Andrews, Carney, and Schwartz.
Endangered Species Act. The House on Wednesday upheld, 224-202, existing procedures for listing plants, animals, and their habitats as candidates for protection under the Endangered Species Act. This killed language that sought to use a funding cutoff to prevent the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2012 from taking this first step toward potentially protecting certain declining species. About 260 species are listed as potential candidates for protection under the law. The vote was taken during consideration of a GOP-drafted Interior Department budget (H.R. 2584) that remained in debate.In my perfect world, Pancake Joe would be the only “endangered species” in PA-16 for a whole mountain of ridiculous votes like this one.
A yes vote backed the amendment.
Voting yes: Andrews, Brady, Carney, Dent, Fattah, Fitzpatrick, Gerlach, Holden, LoBiondo, Meehan, Runyan, Schwartz, and Smith.
Voting no: Pitts.
Greenhouse-gas regulation. Voting 235-191, the House on Wednesday cut in half the fiscal 2012 budget for the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, under which power plants, refineries, and other major polluters must disclose emissions data to the Environmental Protection Agency. The amendment to H.R. 2584 (above) shifted $6.2 million of the program's approximately $13 million budget to deficit reduction.Hmmm, I smell another “safe” vote for Gerlach and Mikey the Beloved to hone some pro-environmental bona fides while this awful pro-Greenhouse gases bill passed anyway (this tells you how Hal Rogers of Kentucky is partly to blame, though he has plenty of company).
A yes vote backed the amendment.
Voting yes: Dent, Holden, LoBiondo, Meehan, Pitts, Runyan, and Smith.
Voting no: Andrews, Brady, Carney, Fattah, Gerlach, Fitzpatrick, and Schwartz.
SenateThis week, both chambers took up fiscal 2012 appropriations bills and measures to raise the national-debt ceiling (uh, yep).
FBI Director. By a vote of 100-0, the Senate on Wednesday confirmed Robert S. Mueller 3d to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation for two more years. Mueller began a 10-year term as FBI director on Sept. 4, 2001, as a George W. Bush appointee. President Obama retained Mueller for a shortened term to add continuity in his national-security team after the recent additions of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and CIA Director David Petraeus.
A yes vote was to confirm Mueller.
Voting yes: Thomas Carper (D., Del.), Bob Casey (D., Pa.), Chris Coons (D., Del.), Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), and Pat Toomey (R., Pa.).
There will be no first default in U.S. history; no economy-damaging short-run austerity; no attack on the nation’s core social protection programs or on universal health care; and no repeat of the last month’s shabby spectacle for at least 15 months. All of this was in doubt even a week ago as Congressional intransigence threatened to make the problem of acceptably raising the debt limit insoluble. The Hippocratic Oath applies in economics as well as medicine and so it is no small thing for the Administration to have reached an agreement that does no immediate harm. It may well be that no better agreement was achievable given the political dynamics in Congress.In response to the "austerity" remark, this post from Think Progress tells us that 1.8 million jobs could be sacrificed as part of the debt deal (sounds pretty “austere” to me).
Summers also tells us that “The United States’s current problem is much more a jobs and growth deficit than an excessive budget deficit.”
As noted here, though, Summers has favored reduction of capital gains taxes as opposed to infrastructure investment as a financial stimulus, with the latter being a much more effective job creator. Also, Summers told former Dem CT Sen. Chris Dodd to remove caps on executive pay for firms receiving TARP funds, including Bank of America and Citigroup.
Summers had the opportunity to advocate for policies that would have created more good jobs for those seeking work (and in the process, advocate also debt reduction for real). And we know what happened, as Stirling Newberry reminded us in the October 2009 post…
Anyone who believes (Summers) when he pats himself on his back should remember that Summers' record of being wrong about everything of significance is awe inspiring in its completeness. This is the man who helped create the necessary preconditions for the financial crisis through radical deregulation of financial markets, then didn’t see the crisis coming till it was already well underway.It did then, just as it does now (sigh).
…
Welcome to endless war, money for rich people, and trickle down for you. The future looks an awful lot like the past, doesn’t it?
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