The Senate finally ratified the new START Treaty, 71-26, more than eight months after it was signed by Obama and Medvedev. And they finally passed a nearly two-year-old bill providing compensation to 9/11 responders and clean-up crews, and even then, only after reducing both how much and how long funding would be available. But, you know national security and caring for the heroes of September 11 are not as important as tax cuts for the rich.
Welcome to the new Republican Party.
On April 28, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched parties from Republican to Democratic. The Senator has been encouraged for years to defect by Harry Reid, Joe Biden and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. But the tipping point came after 161,000 Republicans registered as Democrats to vote in the Hillary-Obama primary in April 2008. Specter feared he lacked the moderate votes to win the upcoming GOP primary and promptly changed allegiances. Specter's calculations were derided by GOP chairman Michael Steele:
Arlen Specter committed a purely political and self-serving act today. He simply believes he has a better chance of saving his political hide and his job as a Democrat. He loves the title of Senator more than he loves the party--and the principles--that elected him and nurtured him.
But it is telling that a sitting senator felt that he had to switch parties to win. Does it not show how out of favor the Republican Party is?
The switch, along with Al Franken's eventual seating, will give the Democrats a 60-seat supermajority, theoretically enough to override a filibuster. The last time the sitting president's party had enough Senate seats and enough cohesion to regularly achieve cloture was 1937.
Which raises the musical questions: Will Specter vote with the Democrats? Does the switch really matter? Specter, after all, has not changed his ideology; he has merely gone from a liberal Republican to a conservative Democrat.
It will change things, just not as dramatically as one might hope. Since 2007, 158 motions for cloture have been filed. Specter's defection undermines Republicans' (perceived?) ability to filibuster. For low-profile issues, the GOP might save face and not even try.
Also, Specter may face an opponent in the Democratic primary, Joe Sestak. The threat from Sestak may push Specter to the left to prove his Democratic bona fides. If he does not, he may well lose the Democratic primary, and irony will have the last laugh.
The Ledbetter Fair Pay and Paycheck Fairness Acts are currently before the Senate. The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is named after Lilly Ledbetter, who sued her employer under the Equal Pay Act (1963) after she discovered that she was being paid less than her male counterparts.
The case went to the Supreme Court. The Equal Pay Act requires plaintiffs to sue within 180 days of the alleged discrimination. Ledbetter argued that the discrimination occurred with each paycheck; with this interpretation, she had filed under the 180-day deadline. The Court found this interpretation inconsistent with the act and ruled 5-4 in her employer's favor. The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would amend the Equal Pay Act so that the 180-day statute of limitations would renew with each paycheck.
The fact is that the average man will earn $434,000 more over his career than the average woman. You can find the pay gap by state and by occupation or education here:
Email your senators and tell them to vote yes on the Ledbetter Fair Pay and Paycheck Fairness Acts. You can find more information here.
Members of Congress apparently do not heed the common-sense findings of non-partisan commissions, deciding instead to listen to special interests or just pretending that the problems will just magically go away. It's cute when this little girl does it, but not grown men and women entrusted with running the country.
First up, Medicare. A bill passed the House that would have put off a scheduled cut in payments to physicians who treat Medicare patients. To fund the measure, money would be taken out of payments to the Medicare Advantage program, which allows patients to receive insurance benefits from private insurers instead of traditional Medicare. According to an independent commission, however, these payments are overly generous and make Medicare solvency more difficult. But Republican Senators sided with the insurance agencies and the bill fell two votes shy of the sixty needed for cloture. Worth noting: Sens. Levin & Stabenow (D-MI) voted for cloture, as did Sen. Obama (D-IL). Sen. McCain (R-AZ) was absent, as was Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) who at least has a good excuse as he's still recovering from brain surgery and cancer treatment.
Secondly, levee systems. A recent opinion piece by Gerald E. Galloway, a civil engineer associated with the University of Maryland and the Army Corps of Engineers, again levels much of the criticism against Congress. Dr./Prof./Brig. Gen. Galloway led a White House study after major flooding along the Mississippi in 1993. The study found that jurisdiction over the levees was scattered among local, state, and federal governments and that many levees "were woefully undersized." But years past and Katrina hit and now the floods in the Midwest and still nothing has happened. Bush requested (and received, I think, the article isn't exactly clear) $30 million in 2006 for the Army CoE to inventory and assess the nation's levees. No funds have been granted since then. Congress passed the National Levee Safety Act in 2007, which formally establihed the assessment, but still has not allocated funds.
So what's Congress doing now?
RECESS!
So, we haven't posted in a while, which of course means that nothing important happened in the past nine days.
Except the brief life of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. The act, which I first heard about on Monday, would have (1) created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases--in my opinion, the best way to limit such pollution--and (2) allowed states to have tougher environmental regulations than the federal government, which California tried to do, but the Bush Administration's EPA denied California this right last December.
And now the bill has been filibustered to death. The supporters of the bill were 12 votes shy of the 60 necessary to invoke cloture and end debate. (Both Sens. Levin and Stabenow voted for cloture.) Senators will now wait until next year, when they will have a more supportive president and hopefully a more favorable legislature, until they try again.
Also on the climate change front, the NASA inspector general released a report stating that "political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years." Shock.
On a lighter note, there's a wolverine in Michigan's thumb!
The '01E Wolverine, North Campus, U-M, munching on the head of an Easter Bunny. (4/5/08)
