New Bill Would Force Congress To Stay In Washington Until It Passes A Budget

Posted: 11/20/2013 1:26 pm EST  |  Updated: 11/20/2013 1:51 pm EST

WASHINGTON -- New York Rep. Louise Slaughter, the senior Democrat on the House Rules Committee, introduced legislation Wednesday that would prevent Congress from skipping town for the holidays if the House fails to pass a budget agreement by mid-December.
The "No Budget, No Vacation" bill would hold lawmakers accountable for their pledge to reconcile the vastly different House and Senate budgets by Dec. 13, which was one of the key components of last month's deal to end the 16-day shutdown of the federal government. Since then, members of the Budget Conference Committee, led by the House and Senate budget chairs, have twice convened publicly, but there's been little indication that they're headed for a breakthrough.
Democrats will thus attach a vote on Slaughter's resolution to a procedural motion known as "the previous question" on Wednesday. The maneuver is one of the few ways in which the minority in the House can attempt to take control of the floor briefly away from the majority, but it's unlikely to succeed because it would need Republican votes.
Democrats are hopeful, however, that the vote will be tricky for Republicans amid reports that House GOP leaders are done legislating for the remainder of the year and have distributed a blank agenda for 2014 to their members. In a press release, Slaughter cites such articles and points out that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) reportedly joked in a private meeting with Republicans that the House shouldn’t even remain in session in December.
"This Republican House has redefined the term unproductive by setting records for futility with its glacial legislative pace and then shutting down the government when they don’t get their way," Slaughter said. "Now, after this dismal record, the Majority is planning to go on a vacation before fulfilling our most basic role to fund the government. It is time to stop governing crisis–to-crisis and finally give the American people and American businesses the certainty that comes with passing a federal budget. No budget, no vacation."
Slaughter voiced similar frustration over the lack of legislative action in the House on Tuesday when a second vote series was canceled. "Oh did we work too hard today?" she quipped, according to BuzzFeed's Kate Nocera.
As The Huffington Post reported earlier this year, the 113th Congress is on track to be the least productive in modern history, a tough record to beat given the 112th Congress was already the least productive since the 1940s. Boehner has called such reports "total nonsense," and said the American public would like to see Congress repeal laws rather than simply pass them.
But the House GOP has been scrutinized for stalling on comprehensive immigration reform and failing to pass spending bills at the levels set by Republican appropriators.
In terms of a budget agreement, Boehner and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the House Budget Chair, have ruled out any budget deal that includes new tax increases. Democrats have maintained that the federal budget cuts known as sequestration must be replaced with a combination of tax revenues and targeted spending cuts, setting up a possible stalemate ahead of the mid-December deadline.
Boehner nonetheless expressed optimism Tuesday that both sides could agree on a spending level for 2014, a day after top Republican appropriators warned against keeping sequestration in place in a letter to Ryan and Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.).
"It’s important that we do appropriations bills here to fund the government," he said at a press conference. "The idea that we should operate under what are called continuing resolutions is a poor way to do business."
Read the 'No Budget, No Vacation' bill below:
Resolution: No Budget, No Vacation

 

  ..................................................................... (Original Signature of Member)
113TH
CONGRESS 1ST
SESSION

H. RES. ll

Prohibiting the consideration of a concurrent resolution providing for adjourn-ment unless the House has adopted a conference report on the budget resolution.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Ms. S
LAUGHTER
submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on
lllllllllllllll

RESOLUTION

Prohibiting the consideration of a concurrent resolution pro-viding for adjournment unless the House has adopted a conference report on the budget resolution.
Resolved,
That it shall not be in order to consider a
1
concurrent resolution providing for adjournment unless
2
the House has adopted a conference report on S. Con. Res.
3
8, establishing a budget for the United States Govern-
4
ment, by December 13th, 2013.
5
VerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:34 Nov 19, 2013Jkt 000000PO 00000Frm 00001Fmt 6652Sfmt 6201C:\DOCUME~1\NLWOFSY\APPLIC~1\SOFTQUAD\XMETAL\5.5\GEN\C\RULES2~1.XMLH
November 19, 2013 (2:34 p.m.)
F:\NLW\DEM\RULES2013.XML
f:\VHLC\111913\111913.131.xml           (564885|1) 

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How "ObamaCare Cancelled Your Plan" is really an Insurance Co Scam to Rip You Off

How "ObamaCare Cancelled Your Plan" is really an Insurance Co Scam to Rip You Off

by Vyan 

Daily Kos member

We're all now quite familiar with the reported claims by hundreds of people that they've received letters from their health insurance company that their plans have been "Cancelled Due to ObamaCare".   We all know that this wasn't supposed to happen, that the President promised it wouldn't happen and even though many of these plans are only cancelled because they're essentially useless due to their exorbitant co-pays and deductibles that argument hasn't yet been entirely convincing.
As I've previously diaried GOP Reps like Marsha Blackburn have gone ballistic arguing that ObamaCare has taken away people's "freedom" to buy the plan they want, even if it's cheap (and defective).
Presidential Loser Mitt Romney was on Meet the Press this weekend haughtily proclaiming that the President Obama's Failure to the Tell The American People the Truth about the ACA is now rotting his Second Term.
However, Talking Points Memo has a story up today that all of us need to see, bookmark and start forwarding to each and every media outlet that continues to claim that the ACA has "Cancelled" anyones Insurance Plan.
Because it hasn't, that is A LIE - Obamacare didn't Cancel their plan.
Plans that were in place since March of 2010 (prior to the Affordable Care Act)  were "Grandfathered" and excluded from many of the laws requirements so that they wouldn't be cancelled. ObamaCare doesn't FORCE those plans to remain, but it doesn't FORCE them to be cancelled either. TPM reports now that the Insurance Companies themselves have deliberately sent out these cancellation notices, along with automatic renewals into higher rate plans before Oct 1st as a means of preventing people from Shopping on the Exchange and finding better, cheaper plans.
In short, this is all an Insurance Industry Scam to gouge their customers, blame Obamacare for it, and prevent them from taking advantage of improved coverage and savings that the ACA actually provides.

And so far, you have to admit, this Scam has worked beautifully.  The White House has been rocked back on their heels not just by the rollout problems of HealthCare.gov (which is now actually working), but also by these Scammy "Cancellation Letters".
But now the charlatans behind the curtain are finally being revealed.

Donna received the letter canceling her insurance plan on Sept. 16. Her insurance company, LifeWise of Washington, told her that they'd identified a new plan for her. If she did nothing, she'd be covered. A 56-year-old Seattle resident with a 57-year-old husband and 15-year-old daughter, Donna had been looking forward to the savings that the Affordable Care Act had to offer. But that's not what she found. Instead, she'd be paying an additional $300 a month for coverage. The letter made no mention of the health insurance marketplace that would soon open in Washington, where she could shop for competitive plans, and only an oblique reference to financial help that she might qualify for, if she made the effort to call and find out. Otherwise, she'd be automatically rolled over to a new plan -- and, as the letter said, "If you're happy with this plan, do nothing."
If Donna had done nothing, she would have ended up spending about $1,000 more a month for insurance than she will now that she went to the marketplace, picked the best plan for her family and accessed tax credits at the heart of the health care reform law.
"The info that we were sent by LifeWise was totally bogus. Why the heck did they try to screw us?" Donna said. "People who are afraid of the ACA should be much more afraid of the insurance companies who will exploit their fear and end up overcharging them."
Donna is not alone.

No, she's not alone.  It's not clear how widespread this practice has been, but some State insurance commissioners are starting to notice. In Kentucky, Insurance Provider Humana was fined $65,000 for sending out misleading letters.

The Kentucky Department of Insurance has fined Humana $65,430 because it offered policyholders an unapproved opportunity to amend their insurance as part of a letter that regulators have called “misleading.” The department investigated letters sent in August to 6,543 individual plan policyholders in Kentucky. The letters said they needed to renew their plans for 2014 within 30 days or choose a more expensive option that complies with the Affordable Care Act.
But regulators last month called the letters misleading, arguing they did not make sufficiently clear that policyholders could compare and choose competing plans on the state’s health insurance exchanges, which open on Oct. 1, and for which they could be eligible for federal subsidies.

Let's follow this logically, if the letters were sent in August and required a response within 30 days - it essentially forced the policy holders to choose the worse possible option before the Oct 1st launch of their State Exchange. That is a classic "High Pressure" sales tactic. "Buy NOW or you'll miss out. SALE ENDING SOON" - when in fact, there was no legitimate reason to push people make a decision in that 30 day window other than to prevent them from shopping on the Exchange.
Read the Human Letter.
2,200 people actually did respond within that 30 period, but Kentucy regulators after finding they had been deceived by Humana released them from that agreement and allowed them to go ahead and shop for a better plan on the marketplace.  Then they fined Humana for their attempted Scam.

[Kentucky Insurance Commissioner Sharon] Clark gave the example of a single mother with children who was urged to sign up for a Humana plan with a monthly premium of $719.86. That price is higher than any comparable plan for sale on the state's insurance marketplace, Clark said -- not to mention that the mother might have qualified for tax subsidies to help pay for it if she went through the marketplace, as Donna did.

So the next time you hear or read about how ObamaCare has caused someone to lose their inexpensive plan only to be forced to choose a much more expensive one.  Don't Believe It. As  Adm. Akbar would say: It's. A. Trap!
Vyan

  

8:42 AM PT: To be fair, as VcLib pointed out in the comments not every plan was automatically Grandfathered.  There were these restrictions via https://www.healthcare.gov/....

All health plans must:

.End lifetime limits on coverage

.End arbitrary cancellations of health coverage

.Cover adult children up to age 26

.Provide a Summary of Benefits and Coverage (SBC), a short, easy-to-understand summary of what a plan covers and costs

.Hold insurance companies accountable to spend your premiums on health care, not administrative costs and bonuses
Grandfathered plans DON'T have to:

.Cover preventive care for free

.Guarantee your right to appeal

.Protect your choice of doctors and access to emergency care

.Be held accountable through Rate Review for excessive premium increases
In addition to the above, grandfathered individual health insurance plans (the kind you buy yourself, not the kind you get from an employer) don't have to:
.End yearly limits on coverage

.Cover you if you have a pre-existing health condition

So if you had a plan that had a lifetime cap, didn't cover your children until they were 26, could be arbitrarily cancelled and didn't spend 80-85% of your premiums on your care - that plan would have to be updated or replaced.  If you had a plan like that, and for some reason liked it then you were always going to have to make an adjustment to a plan that doesn't suck anymore.  The question is, would you be able to shop for the best possible option or would you stay with the options given by your current provider? These letters show that some providers tried to corral their clients into staying and accepting a much higher rate - blaming the ACA for it - and therefore scaring them away from the Exchange Marketplace. We've been hearing that the reason these plans were more expensive is because they had to cover preventive care (Limbaugh had a field-day with that one last week), but as shown above the Grandfathered Plans Didn't.
It's a scam, it's all a scam.
10:13 AM PT: One more issue on Grandfathered Plans via the Comments

Plans could acquire grandfathered status by adding those features to the existing ones, they did not have to already have them in place.  Some of the elements, like the "no lifetime cap" one, were phased in over time, and therefore explicitly allowed adjustment of benefits in an existing plan.  Coverage of children under 26 is not likely to be a feature that many plans had in early 2010, yet clearly insurance plans have added this feature.  My current coverage has grandfathered status.  It had some of these features, like no lifetime cap, other benefits have been added or modified to comply with the grandfathering requirements.

So, you got that?  Grandfathered Plans are not written in unbendable, unbreakable Adamantium, they can and have been amended since 2010.   They don't have to meet all the requirements of the ACA, just a few of them and have to have existed since before the law was passed and signed - That's All.
So let's go back and revisit "If you like your plan, you can keep it" as being flawed or wrong.  It's NOT.  Instead of amending the plans to meet minimum grandfather requirements they are being Shutdown By the Insurance Industries Choice, not by ObamaCare.

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Politics The Republicans' War on the Poor

Politics The Republicans' War on the Poor 

By ELIZABETH DREW | Oct 24, 2013 AT 10:00AM

Republicans are pushing to decimate food-stamp programs.

The way the program to provide the poor with the bare minimum of daily nutrition has been handled is a metaphor for how the far right in the House is systematically trying to take down the federal government. The Tea Party radicals and those who either fear or cultivate them are now subjecting the food-stamp program to the same kind of assault they have unleashed on other settled policies and understandings that have been in place for decades. Breaking all manner of precedents on a series of highly partisan votes, with the Republicans barely prevailing, the House in September slashed the food-stamp program by a whopping $39 billion and imposed harsh new requirements for getting on, or staying on, the program. The point was to deny the benefit to millions.

The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America's Middle Class

Hardly any other federal undertaking – with the exception of the Affordable Care Act – has attracted more hostility from the far right than the food-stamp program. As recently as the mid-Sixties, actual hunger and starvation existed in this country on a significant scale, particularly in the Deep South and Appalachia. In 1967, Robert F. Kennedy took a widely covered trip to the Mississippi Delta, where he was quite evidently shocked at the sight of listless babies with distended bellies who were unresponsive to his touching them or trying to get them to laugh. That same year, a group of doctors took a foundation-sponsored trip to Mississippi and reported, "In child after child we saw: evidence of vitamin and mineral deficiencies; serious untreated skin infestation and ulcerations; eye and ear diseases, also unattended bone diseases secondary to poor food intake; the prevalence of bacterial and parasitic diseases. . . ."

In the years after these devastating revelations, two farm-state senators of different philosophies on many issues – South Dakota Democrat George McGovern and Kansas Republican Bob Dole – joined together to strengthen the program and extend it to more people in need. Over in the House, Thomas Foley, a Democratic congressman from Spokane, Washington – a major wheat­growing area – and later House speaker, was the real legislative hero of the program.

Even before he became chairman of the Agricultural Committee in 1975, Foley had the insight that the way to politically protect food stamps – both in his fairly conservative committee and on the House floor – was to combine the program with agricultural subsidies in the farm bill that came up for renewal every five years or so. The idea was classic if benignly intended log-rolling: Members from urban areas, where unemployment and the need for food stamps is relatively high, would grudgingly vote for the farm bill, while representatives from parts of the country with agricultural interests would grudgingly vote for food stamps. There was a certain substantive as well as political logic in linking nutrition support to farm surpluses – it helped unload excess commodities, while at the same time it could help feed the poor. Grocers also supported the food stamps as a way of selling more goods. (One of the program's greatest fans today is Walmart, which has the distinction of having customers and employees on food stamps.)

In 1979, 12 years after the original report calling attention to the appalling hunger in the Deep South and Appalachia, the Field Foundation sent another medical team to roughly the same areas, and it found that despite no sizable improvement in the condition of poverty, there had been a dramatic reduction in hunger and malnutrition as a result of food stamps and other nutrition assistance. The data shows that while a significant number of nonelderly households left the program as their income improved, the group whose participation had increased the most was the working poor.

"Food stamps are largely responsible for the near-elimination of the severe hunger and malnutrition that was widespread in many poverty-stricken areas," says Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a bearded, Old Testament-like figure who ran the program during the last two years of the Carter administration and is passionate about it. "Were it not for this program, we would see a lot more chronically hungry people and more illness related to malnutrition and undernutrition."

Food stamps are far from an extravagant benefit. The average allocation is $1.40 per person per meal. (Try it some time.) A few years ago, the program was renamed SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to give it a more positive facade, but that headed off not a whit of anger at the notion that hordes of freeloaders were getting benefits they didn't deserve or were electing to become dependent on food stamps rather than get a job.

In 1996, when Congress revised the separate welfare law, it also placed severe new restrictions on food stamps. Able-bodied adults who weren't raising children were limited to receiving food stamps for only three months out of three years if they weren't working at least 20 hours a week or participating in a job-training program. This grim rule applied no matter how hard they tried to find a job and even if they hadn't been able to get a slot in a training program. An exception could be made if they lived in an area of high unemployment and if their governor requested and received a federal waiver. The average income of these people is about $2,500 a year, or 22 percent of the poverty level.

How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich

The job-training program that's part of the food-stamp law is modest, nowhere near the needed capacity, and other job-training programs the government offers are full, with waiting lists in many areas. But Republicans have resisted significant increases in training programs – if this hurts the economy or large numbers of individuals, so be it. First things first: Undermine Obama's presidency.

In 2009, desperately trying to revive the economy from the crash and understanding that money for food stamps is money quickly spent, Obama proposed that the stimulus bill raise food-stamp benefits for all recipients. These increases were scheduled to die at the end of October. Thus the support level for it had been dropping significantly, despite the fact that the economy hasn't recovered to the extent that had been expected.

Republican Extremism and the Lessons of History

The House's deep slash to the food-stamp program, combined with outlandish restrictions, arose from various impulses. There was, obviously, the long-standing animus within the Republican Party toward poor people, and that's been substantially intensified as a result of the transformation of the party, whose center of gravity has moved south and west. Moreover, a minority of the party in the House, backed by powerful and wealthy outside interest groups, has seized the reins by throwing terror into the ranks that if they don't conform to the Tea Party's agenda, they could face defeat in a primary challenge from the right in the next election. Bob Dole's and George McGovern's time is long gone. Neither the Senate, nor the House, nor American politics are anything like they were in their time. The Republican Party in the Senate contains no Jacob Javits, the late New York senator who fought to protect food stamps. Among the Democrats, there's no Edward Kennedy to champion the causes of the poor, to even enjoy doing battle for them. One of the few unabashed liberals, Tom Harkin of Iowa, is retiring after five terms. Harkin was born into modest means, which he has never forgotten – he needed no lectures about bootstraps.

Adding to the ferocity of the attack on food stamps this year is that Tea Party members had promised that when they got to Washington, they would dramatically cut the size of government, but had little to show for it. Paul Ryan's much-touted budget was actually quite cautious in cutting entitlements in the near term. Medicare and Social Security were too popular, even among the Tea Party's own followers, for Republicans to stick their necks out on those issues. Medicaid is a component of the health-care-reform law, and therefore was being dealt with in another context. That left food stamps.

The idea that the unworthy are cadging off the federal government – at a cost to the right-thinking taxpayers (who, of course, never, ever cheat) – goes deep in our national psyche. Ronald Reagan's frequent evocation of the "welfare queen" driving around in a Cadillac and the "strapping young bucks" said to be dining on T-bone steaks purchased with food stamps touched a racist nerve that is more prevalent in this country than we care to admit.

Through this rhetoric, Reagan helped build the Republican Party's base in the South – with consequences that have lasted to this day. Newt Gingrich, it may be recalled, made a big issue of food stamps in his race for the 2012 Republican nomination, calling Obama the "food-stamp president." But despite Gingrich implying that lazy blacks were the personification of food-stamp recipients, only 22 percent of those who receive food stamps are black (33 percent are white). Of the roughly 47 million Americans on food stamps, nearly half are children.

Policy by anecdote continued into this year's food-stamp debate. This summer, Fox News triumphantly presented an unemployed 29-year-old man from La Jolla, California, named Jason Greenslate, who liked to surf and play in a rock band, and who defiantly posed for the cameras buying lobster and sushi with the food stamps he got from the government. Fox then reportedly distributed the story to House members, and at least one member admitted that it influenced him to vote for a proposal to decimate the food-stamp program.

Until the House took it up this year, the food-stamp program had mostly enjoyed bipartisan support from Capitol Hill. Of all the commissions, committees and ad hoc groups formed in the past few years to propose ways to cut the budget – the sainted (if overrated) Simpson­Bowles, Domenici­Rivlin, the "Gang of Six" – not one of them suggested cutting food stamps.

What's more, the hue and cry about widespread food-stamp "fraud" is belied by the facts. The Agriculture Department reported earlier this year that only 2.8 percent of all food-stamp benefits had been provided to people who were ineligible or had received a larger payment than they should have – and it said that the majority of the overpayments had been the result of inadvertent mistakes by caseworkers or recipients. As for the widespread view that food-stamp recipients are selling food stamps for cash, the department reports that such trafficking involves only one percent of benefits.

The fact that the size of the food-stamp program had more than doubled from nearly $38 billion in 2008 to $82 billion this year of course fed suspicions that there was a tremendous number of new cheaters, or that Obama had loosened the rules for getting on the program. Politicians who made such charges overlooked the fairly obvious fact that beginning in 2008 this country suffered the greatest recession since the Depression. A study published in August by the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research found that most of that increase was attributable to the recession.

None of this got in the way of legislators who lived by homilies about self-reliance when the House took up the issue of reauthorizing the farm bill in June, amid many warnings that the bill was on shaky ground. The Agriculture Committee, which, like so much else in Washington, had been caught up in the House's drift to the right, cut the food-stamp program by $20.5 billion over 10 years. The ranking Democrat, Collin Peterson from Minnesota, cautioned the Republican leadership that this large cut endangered Democratic support for the farm bill and warned that if amendments favored by the extreme right were adopted on the House floor, the whole thing might go down. But Cantor, he of the Southern drawl, icy smile and dagger poised at John Boehner's back, had his own agenda.

Despite these warnings, when the bill came to the House floor, Cantor promoted an amendment sponsored by Rep. Steve Southerland, a Tea Party member from Florida, that imposed harsh and unrealistic new conditions, euphemistically called "work requirements," for receiving food-stamp benefits. Southerland isn't a member of the Agriculture Committee, so this was an end run by Cantor and Southerland around its chairman and Republican membership.

Nevertheless, the Republican leadership was stunned and stung when the farm bill was voted down by the House on June 20th by 234 to 195. Only 24 Democrats supported it and 62 Republicans voted against it – most of them on the grounds that the cuts weren't deep enough. The bill was essentially a victim of the crossfire between the Democrats who thought the food-stamp cuts were too harsh and the Republicans who thought the program hadn't been cut enough.

Cantor, in a bit of a bind, now had to find a way to extricate the leadership from their embarrassment over losing the farm bill. He had two choices: Drop the Southerland amendment, moderate the committee's food-stamp cuts and pass the farm bill with the support of the traditional bipartisan coalition – or appease the far right by splitting the bill into two, which many conservatives had sought. Conservatives were never comfortable with their farm subsidies being polluted by its coexistence with food stamps, and they failed to understand that this had helped their favored agricultural subsidies survive. This would of course make the food-stamp program more vulnerable. Despite the strenuous objections of Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, who, by the strength of his office, would ordinarily be treated with some deference by the leadership, Cantor decided to split the bill. Both bills would have to be passed overwhelmingly – or entirely – with Republican votes. The bipartisan accommodation of more than 40 years was now shelved.

With agricultural interests clamoring for a farm bill to be enacted by the end of September, when the existing program was set to expire, a second one, now consisting of agricultural matters only, was brought up in the House on July 11th, and it was narrowly passed by a vote of 216 to 208. All the Democrats who voted opposed the bill, and they were joined by 12 Republicans.

But Cantor still had to decide what to do with the newly separate food-stamp bill. After a few weeks of quiet meetings with members from both of his party's factions, he threw in with the forces on the right. He awarded the Tea Party radicals a trophy by imposing another $19 billion in cuts to the food-stamp program – on top of the $20.5 billion the Agriculture Committee had already approved.

The GOP's Real Agenda

But his most spectacular and dangerous move was to urge the inclusion of the Southerland amendment. Among other things, this amendment gave hard-strapped states a financial incentive to throw people off the food-stamp program by allowing them to pocket half the federal funds that would have been spent on food stamps and use them any way they wished. This preposterous bribery proposal goes back to atavistic divisions that had bedeviled the food-stamp program in the House from the beginning. (All along, it was more popular in the Senate.) Back in the Sixties, the program was designed to be paid for entirely by federal funds after a huge fight erupted between food stamps' early backers and the Republican-allied "Boll Weevils" from cotton-growing Southern states who wanted states to provide matching funds – which would have been a convenient way to kill the program.

This remarkably mean-spirited food-stamp bill, brought up on September 19th, was passed by a vote of 217 to 210 – even narrower and more partisan than the vote on the farm bill. Every Democrat who voted opposed the Southerland amendment, and they were joined by 15 Republicans, most from districts in the North that weren't safe Republican seats.

Inside the Republican Suicide Machine

The amendment raised an obscure second-term member from Panama City, Florida, a conservative area in the Panhandle, to sudden prominence. But there's strong evidence that Southerland was the instrument of others – in particular, Cantor. Cantor, along with Paul Ryan and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, was a co-founder of the "Young Guns," formed for the 2008 election to search out promising conservative candidates – among them Southerland – and groom them for election. Those who won, and many did in 2010, were expected, according to the Young Guns website, to "play a vital role in keeping our Republican team on offense and help build a lasting and productive Republican majority for the American people."

Southerland has received contributions from Koch Industries and Cantor's Every Republican Is Crucial PAC, which contributed more than $2 million to congressional candidates, most of them highly conservative. Like many Tea Party members, Southerland had no political experience before he ran for the House in 2010, defeating a long-serving conservative Democrat. A prosperous inheritor of a family funeral­home business – his estimated worth in 2010 was nearly $3 million – Southerland is given to homilies about the virtue of hard work and self-reliance. A few days after the food-stamp bill passed, he told a group of unemployed people at a job-training center in Washington, D.C., "I believe work is the greatest gift that you will receive."

The amendment with Southerland's name on it had actually been written by a mysterious and highly conservative organization of 17 state secretaries of human services and workforce agencies called the Secretary's Innovation Group, or SIG, that appeared out of nowhere a couple of years ago and started issuing policy papers and testifying before congressional committees. The thrust of their work reflected the arch-conservative views of Jason Turner, the group's executive director, who had published his own policy papers. In February of this year, Turner testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, where he presented what was to become the Southerland amendment. Southerland was so excited about these ideas that Cantor made him the public face of these schemes for throwing more people off food-stamp rolls and making them inaccessible to many, many others who would otherwise qualify.

As is typical of the groups on the far right that have sprung up or gained new prominence in the past few years, SIG has connections with the conservative Heritage Foundation, where Turner is a visiting fellow. Heritage is run by Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator who had managed to annoy many of his Republican colleagues by promoting Tea Party candidates for the Senate (and in the process blowing opportunities for the Republicans to take several seats) before resigning his own seat to take leadership of Heritage earlier this year. Not exactly of a scholarly bent, DeMint has steered Heritage in a far more political direction than before: He was a mentor to Ted Cruz as Cruz conducted his bootless effort to force the defunding of Obamacare, by threatening to shut down the government. Heritage is funded by (unsurprisingly) the Koch brothers and some of the nation's largest corporations, among them defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, insurance companies such as Allstate, and drug manufacturers like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer Inc.

So-called reform groups like SIG use anodyne language that masks their true intent: For example, SIG's stated goal in regard to food stamps is "promoting employment and self-sufficiency for able-bodied, working-age recipients." Who's to argue against that? The problem was its proposals have nothing to do with helping the unemployed find jobs. In connection with its most unusual bribery system, it allowed states to deny or terminate an entire family's food-stamp benefits if a parent wasn't employed or enlisted in a job-training program – even if there weren't any jobs or training programs in the vicinity. It forbade waivers, thus closing the trap on the able-bodied unemployed in areas where jobs are scarce.

In sum, the House-passed food-stamp bill would throw 3.8 million low-income Americans off the food-stamp program in 2014, while reducing benefits to many others. In a statement he issued at the time, Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, ripped into the Republicans for their misleading portrayal of their "reforms" by adding "work requirements." On the contrary, he said, "These provisions would end food-stamp assistance for large numbers of people who want to work, are looking for jobs and will take a workfare or job-training placement, but who cannot find a job in a weak labor market."

Where does all this leave not just the food-stamp program but also the country? Both have been the subject, or the victim, of narrow-gauged fanatics who observe no boundaries and in their recklessness have left a lot of wreckage in their wake. The Senate has passed a unified farm bill containing the food-stamp program. The bill cuts $4 billion from the program by addressing a widely recognized, unintended loophole in the way benefits are paid out. House-Senate negotiations are to occur, and Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow says that the issue won't be over the difference between the figures of $4 billion and $39 billion, but over the policies that produced those figures. She had no intention of meeting the House halfway or accepting its extremist policies. The bribery provision, she says, leaves her speechless.

Even Before the Shutdown, House Republicans Couldn't Get Anything Done

Whatever happens in the short term, the longer-term question is whether the damage done to many areas of governance and policy that reflect long-standing American values and the delicate balances that have kept American democracy going can ever be repaired.

This story is from the November 7th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-republicans-war-on-the-poor-20131024#ixzz2jVNj3URG
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Time for corporations to disclose political donations

By Lisa Gilbert

Sound unfair – and like a bad way to run a business? Sadly, that’s the case for shareholders – owners of the largest corporations in America – who’d like to know how their profits are being spent on political causes.  Now Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are holding a briefing to explain why shareholders’ need this information in their hands.

Since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, corporations have been allowed to contribute as much so-called “dark money” as they would like to independent entities like 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofits, and 501(c)(6) “trade associations” like the Chamber of Commerce. The corporations don’t have to tell their own shareholders or the American public how much dark money they’re paying or where it’s going, and the nonprofits don’t have to disclose their donors. The winners are corporate executives with a political agenda and politicians. Shareholders and the American public are the losers.

Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission has a chance to adopt a rule to require disclosure of public companies’ political spending. The SEC put such a rule on their agenda at the beginning of 2013.  Nine months later, we believe it is the time to see some real movement since pro-disclosure retail investors around the country have set the all-time comment record at the SEC, with more than 640,000 supportive comments on the rulemaking petition.

The Menendez-Warren briefing (which, due to the government shutdown, is expected later this month) will call for the SEC to move the rule forward in tandem with the Dodd-Frank rulemakings. As a part of its mission of protecting investors and maintaining efficient, transparent markets, the SEC has a responsibility to mandate disclosure of material political spending information.

By doing so, they will be right in line with current trends at public companies. Increasingly, S&P 500 companies are voluntarily disclosing at least some of the dark money they’re giving to those groups – about 12 percent of those corporations currently do so. Furthermore, a new study from the nonpartisan Center for Political Accountability and the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that more than three in four corporations are more transparent now than they were a year ago when it comes to political disclosure practices.

In fact, many leading American corporations are doing the right thing. Microsoft has divulged corporate contributions since 2007, Merck responded to a shareholder resolution by making their contributions public in 2004, and Aflac prioritizes being transparent to its shareholders, disclosing all contributions to outside groups. By serving as role models of industry, these corporations are leading the way toward a system of greater corporate accountability.

Still more telling, most corporate executives support the corporate disclosure trend.. Recently, the nonpartisan Committee for Economic Development found that 79 percent of Republican business executives, and almost all surveyed Democratic executives, would support a transparency rule for corporate political contributions.

It’s time for the SEC to move this rulemaking to the next phase and require disclosure. Corporations tell investors that they are spending in their best interest; if that is really the case then there is no need to hide this spending information. In fact, it is critical for a fair marketplace.Gilbert is the director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch Division.

Sound unfair – and like a bad way to run a business? Sadly, that’s the case for shareholders – owners of the largest corporations in America – who’d like to know how their profits are being spent on political causes.  Now Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are holding a briefing to explain why shareholders’ need this information in their hands.

Since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, corporations have been allowed to contribute as much so-called “dark money” as they would like to independent entities like 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofits, and 501(c)(6) “trade associations” like the Chamber of Commerce. The corporations don’t have to tell their own shareholders or the American public how much dark money they’re paying or where it’s going, and the nonprofits don’t have to disclose their donors. The winners are corporate executives with a political agenda and politicians. Shareholders and the American public are the losers.

Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission has a chance to adopt a rule to require disclosure of public companies’ political spending. The SEC put such a rule on their agenda at the beginning of 2013.  Nine months later, we believe it is the time to see some real movement since pro-disclosure retail investors around the country have set the all-time comment record at the SEC, with more than 640,000 supportive comments on the rulemaking petition.

The Menendez-Warren briefing (which, due to the government shutdown, is expected later this month) will call for the SEC to move the rule forward in tandem with the Dodd-Frank rulemakings. As a part of its mission of protecting investors and maintaining efficient, transparent markets, the SEC has a responsibility to mandate disclosure of material political spending information.

By doing so, they will be right in line with current trends at public companies. Increasingly, S&P 500 companies are voluntarily disclosing at least some of the dark money they’re giving to those groups – about 12 percent of those corporations currently do so. Furthermore, a new study from the nonpartisan Center for Political Accountability and the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that more than three in four corporations are more transparent now than they were a year ago when it comes to political disclosure practices.

In fact, many leading American corporations are doing the right thing. Microsoft has divulged corporate contributions since 2007, Merck responded to a shareholder resolution by making their contributions public in 2004, and Aflac prioritizes being transparent to its shareholders, disclosing all contributions to outside groups. By serving as role models of industry, these corporations are leading the way toward a system of greater corporate accountability.

Still more telling, most corporate executives support the corporate disclosure trend.. Recently, the nonpartisan Committee for Economic Development found that 79 percent of Republican business executives, and almost all surveyed Democratic executives, would support a transparency rule for corporate political contributions.

It’s time for the SEC to move this rulemaking to the next phase and require disclosure. Corporations tell investors that they are spending in their best interest; if that is really the case then there is no need to hide this spending information. In fact, it is critical for a fair marketplace.Gilbert is the director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch Division.

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