President Barack Obama swung behind a $1.1 trillion governmentwide spending bill Thursday, giving it critical momentum as it headed toward likely passage later in the afternoon, despite opposition from tea party Republicans over immigration and Democrats angry over last-minute changes to bank regulations and looser rules on campaign spending.
The legislation narrowly cleared a procedural hurdle by a 214-212 vote.
The White House put out a statement endorsing the measure. Press Secretary Josh Earnest said “it is a compromise and it does fulfill some of the many of the top line priorities that the president himself has long identified.”
With lawmakers facing a midnight Thursday deadline to prevent a government shutdown, Congress was also expected to pass a measure to keep the government running for two days. The aim is to approve the longer-term bill before adjourning Friday, though that could slip into the weekend.
Democrats, whose votes GOP leaders need to adopt the bill, were furious over provisions that weaken regulations on risky financial instruments called swaps and another that allows wealthy donors to flood political parties with campaign cash.
The White House’s moves give Democrats cover to vote for the bill.
Before the White House weighed in, Democratic support was rapidly shrinking.
“If they need 10 to 15 Democratic votes, maybe. If they need more than 15 Democratic votes, unlikely,” said Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., referring to the number of Democrats GOP leaders will need to make up for Republican defections. “If they need more than 30 to 50 Democratic votes, impossible.”
Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., who stunningly knocked off former Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary last summer, was among those who voted “no” on the procedural vote. At some point the measure was failing, but in the end, helped by late switches by lawmakers including Reps. Dave Camp, R-Mich., Kerry Bentivolio, R-Mich., and Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., the House voted to begin debate on the broader bill.
A provision aimed at shoring up financially weak multi-employer pension funds was drawing fire from AARP and some union allies of Democrats over a major change in labor law that would permit plans to cut the pensions of current retirees.
Many Democrats tended to focus more on the bad than the good since the 1,603-page bill was released late Tuesday. Large swaths of Republicans praised it for cutting spending for the IRS and the Environmental Protection Agency.
But Democrats won victories, too, and the alternative is to boot the unfinished spending bills into next year, when Republicans will have retaken the Senate and bolstered their numbers in the House. Republicans were cautiously confident that they would get the Democratic votes they need to pass the bill.
“This may be a ‘hold your nose’ vote,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va. “Do you really think next year, with Republicans entirely in control, that it would actually get better?”
A stubborn group of Republicans votes against any spending bill, and tea party lawmakers want to use it to block Obama’s recent immigration actions. But outrage among Democrats is real, so Republicans will have to post more votes than normal.
“A long time ago the balance in our caucus tipped decisively against this bill,” said Rep. David Price, D-N.C.
The underlying measure funds the day-to-day operations of every agency of government in a year in which such so-called discretionary spending has been frozen at current levels for both domestic agencies and the Pentagon. It’s the biggest remaining item on the agenda of a lame-duck Congress that hopes to adjourn by week’s end. A vote in the House is set for Thursday, and then it would go to the Senate for consideration.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a favorite of liberals and a new member of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s leadership team, promptly broke with him and railed against the measure over a provision eroding the 2010 Dodd-Frank overhaul of Wall Street regulations. Citigroup largely wrote the provision, which critics say is aimed at boosting the bottom lines of a handful of big banks.
Specifically, the provision significantly weakens new regulations that require banks to set up separate affiliates to deal in swaps, the more exotic and riskier forms of complex financial instruments. Bringing swaps trading back into the banks would expose taxpayers to greater risk of a repeat of the 2008 bank bailout.
“The American people did not send us here to work for Wall Street banks,” Warren said.
Killing the bill would mean Democrats would lose hard-fought budget increases for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as well as boosts for NASA and health research. Many of the Democratic victories in the negotiations involved dumping overboard controversial GOP policy “riders” on the environment, gun rights, abortion and new regulations on selling items made with ivory. If the measure fails, those fights would have to be relitigated next in a Capitol in which Democrats would hold far less power — though Obama would provide a powerful backstop with his veto pen.
The campaign finance changes would sharply increase the amount an individual may contribute to various national political party accounts annually, from $32,400 to $324,000 for national conventions, election recounts and headquarters buildings.
Conservatives were angry, too, pressing to use the measure to block Obama from giving deportation protections to nearly 5 million immigrants living here illegally and allowing them to gain work papers and eventually qualify for Social Security and Medicare.
(AP)
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So the fact that rich kids can swan aimlessly from gap year to internship to a job at father’s bank/ministry/TV network – while the poor kids sweat into their barista uniforms – is not an accident: it is the system working normally.
If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited wealth will, on average, “dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labour by a wide margin”, says Piketty. Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice. Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip, nor rhetoric.
.. That it has become so again busts the central myth of, and moral justification for, capitalism: that wealth is generated by effort, ingenuity, work, wise investment, risk taking etc.
For Piketty, the long, mid-20th century period of rising equality was a blip, produced by the exigencies of war, the power of organised labour, the need for high taxation, and by demographics and technical innovation.
..
The policy logic for the left is clear. For much of the 20th century, redistribution was handled through taxes on income. In the 21st century, any party that wants to redistribute would have to confiscate wealth, not just income.
.. All that social democracy and liberalism can produce, with their current policies, is the oligarch’s yacht co-existing with the food bank for ever.
Piketty’s Capital, unlike Marx’s Capital, contains solutions possible on the terrain of capitalism itself: the 15% tax on capital, the 80% tax on high incomes, enforced transparency for all bank transactions, overt use of inflation to redistribute wealth downwards. He calls some of them “utopian” and he is right. It is easier to imagine capitalism collapsing than the elite consenting to them.