Under the agreement allowing the earlier health care vote, Senate Republicans have been guaranteed votes on four amendments to the second debt ceiling bill that the Democrats would probably rather have avoided. According to the Senate Calendar, the Republicans will be allowed to hold votes on the following amendments (all will be subject to a 60-vote requirement) when the second debt ceiling vote takes place in January:

• Sen. Thune (R-SD) TARP amendment — would end the Troubled Assets Relief Program (Wall Street bailout) and require that all TARP funds that are repaid by banks be spent on reducing the debt. Many Democrats want to use repaid TARP money for job creation measures.
• Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) EPA amendment — seeks to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouses gas emissions if Congress fails to pass their own climate change legislation.
• Sen. Coburn (R-OK) rescission amendment — not much information available on this one, but it will likely change the rules and require that Congress votes on presidential rescission packages.
• Sen. Sessions (R-AL) spending caps amendment — would set spending caps for the next five years on all discretionary government spending. Besides entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, the amendment would limit spending growth to a maximum of 2 percent per year for the next five years.

The Washington Post did a tally of all the votes in the U.S. House of Representatives to see how many actually voted.

Rep. Gresham Barrett (R, SC-3), in spite of his $174k annual salary, missed 337 out of 971 votes in 2009–about 34.7%. Votes Barrett missed include the vote to reprimand Rep. Joe Wilson for his “You lie!” outburst and a key budget appropriations vote on 12/10 which contained abortion funding.

Shenanigans like this earned another legislator,  Sen. John Edwards of NC, the nickname “Senator Gone.”

Barrett’s excuse? “Serving in Congress while running for governor is a balancing act, and he hopes most people will understand.” In contrast, Tennessee Rep. Zach Wamp (who is running for governor of Tennessee) only missed 8.1% of Congressional votes.

Now, what do you call a soldier who doesn’t show up to battle?

The four stage plan to pass Obamacare has been publicly confirmed and is ready to be implemented:

1. Senate Finance Committee (headed by Sen. Max Baucus) passes a conceptual framework of Obamacare out of committee. This is a less-radical version of Obamacare is likely pass out of committee this week since the CBO released a favorable score yesterday.
   Status: incomplete.

2. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid must merge the Senate Finance Committee bill with another (more liberal) bill from the Senate Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions (HELP) Committee.
   Status: in progress.
   
   1. The actual final text will be determined by Reid himself.
   2. Reid can draft and insert text into the bill not approved by either committee.
   3. This process will take place with no senate hearing or public conference committee.
   4. No one will be allowed to read the bill before the Senate debate except senators chosen by Reid and the Obama Administration.
3. Sen. Reid will move to proceed to HR1586 (the house bill passed in March which taxes bonuses received by certain TARP recipients) in order to get around the Constitutional requirement that tax bills originate in the house. Reid’s final version of the healthcare bill will be inserted into HR1586 and passed.
   Status: confirmed.

4. The house will then take up Obamacare and could pass it without amendment (sending the bill directly to the President without a House-Senate conference committee and another round of votes in the House and Senate–and a longer period of public scrutiny of what the proposed law actually says).
   Status: implementation in progress.

Successful execution of this strategy is possible but not without difficulties:

1. It will be difficult for Sen. Reid to keep all 60 democratic Senators happy as he merges the two committee bills. These bills diverge on some of the most sticky issues, including the public option.
2. Sen. Reid has never attempted to merge committee bills before and the process is intensely complex, which leads me to believe that it could take longer than they expect.
3. The House may not pass the bill without amendment, which would force a House-Senate conference committee to resolve the differences and thus open up a period for public scrutiny of the bill.
4. Any delays will reduce the chance of final passage.

Arrogance: It helps when the Little People understand You're simply better than they are!

Paid to do nothing

From federaltimes.com:

The U.S. Postal Service, struggling with a massive deficit caused by plummeting mail volume, spends more than a million dollars each week to pay thousands of employees to sit in empty rooms and do nothing.

Mail volume is down 12.6 percent compared with last year, and many postal supervisors simply don’t have enough work to keep all employees busy. But a thicket of union rules prevents managers from laying off excess employees… So they sit–some for a few hours, others for entire shifts. … Employees are often forbidden from doing almost anything while on standby time … [t]hat means no books, no playing cards, no watching television.

“Thirty thousand employees, that’s how much we’re overstaffed,” said Mark Saunders, a spokesman for the Postal Service.

So What Would Congress Do?

Democrats moved to exempt the Postal Service from having to make $4 billion in payments due next week to cover retirement health benefits for its employees. [From Politico.com]

In other words, a $4 billion dollar bailout.

Hmm, do you suppose we could pay Congress to do nothing? In a way, we already are…

Paid more to be idiots

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released the unemployment numbers as of August, 2009: a whopping 9.7% nationally, and 11.5% in SC.

So What Would Congress Do? Again, from Politico.com:

Under a House-Senate conference measure poised for passage on Wednesday, spending for the legislative branch will increase 5.8% this year, boosting Capitol Hill’s annual budget to $4.7 billion.

The measure includes:

• $500,000 pilot program for senators to send out postcards about their town hall meetings
• $30,000 for receptions for foreign dignitaries
• $4 million for consultants
• $15.8 million for salaries for the Senate Appropriations Committee (plus an extra $950,000 for the committee’s administrative expenses)
• 128% budget hike for House office buildings ($84 million)
• 17.8% budget hike for The Architect of the Capitol
• $12.7 million for Government Printing Office technology upgrades
• 4.3% budget hike for (D) Vice President Joe Biden (to $2.5 million)
• 4.3% budget hike for (D) Senator Harry Reid (to $5.2 million)
• 4.3% budget hike for (D) Senator Bob McConnell (to $5.2 million)
• 4.1% budget hike for (D) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (to $5.1 million)
• 3.9% budget hike for (D) Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (to $2.5 million)
• 4.0% budget hike for (R) Minority Leader John Boehner (to $4.5 million)
• 3.7% budget hike for (R) Minority Whip Eric Cantor (to $1.7 million)
• 3.7% budget hike for (D) Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (to $2.2 million)
• 6.2% budget hike for (R) Rep. John Kyl (to $3.3 million)
• 6.2% budget hike for (D) Rep. Dick Durbin (to $3.3 million)

Sen. Ben Nelson’s (D-Neb) spokesman Jake Thompson had the clear unmitigated gall to state:

“This is a fiscally responsible bill.”

So, besides a lot of new debt, what’s in it for us?

[I]t includes language added by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to force the Senate for the first time to put its expenses online.

Oh, and did I mention–if you don’t vote for it, the government shuts down this month:

With the fiscal year ending Wednesday, Congress needs to pass a short-term, stopgap resolution to keep the government funded through October — and that resolution is included in the legislative appropriations bill, meaning a defeat for the bill could shut the government down.

Hmm, might not be such a bad idea, considering how things are going.

YOU are paying for this

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe Lawrence O’Donnell disclosed three new tax brackets and a 35% punitive tax on private health insurance plans:

[H]alf this legislation is a very big tax bill, a very big tax bill. New forms of taxation that are being invented have never been used before, nobody’s talking about it…

Here’s the video: