US Politics Mega-thread - Page 146

On March 05 2013 09:20 Sermokala wrote:

The sequester has already happened, what they're doing now is a reaction to that fact. If obama and dems go against this then they're bad and hate the military and vetrens. If they do go for it then the republicans were the ones that were able to bridge the gap between the parties.

Its just good politics.

On March 05 2013 09:16 Mindcrime wrote:
So the Republican solution to sequestration, which was intended to threaten both parties' sacred cows, is "hey hey, hands off our stuff"

what a shock

Jeb Bush’s new tome, “Immigration Wars: Forging An American Solution,” hit bookstores on Tuesday and is already making waves in the immigration debate and 2016 sweepstakes alike.

Bush’s book, co-authored by Goldwater Institute director Clint Bolick, shares a lot in tone and style with other works by plausible presidential candidates. A lot of feel-good American rhetoric, inspiring anecdotes about average citizens, hat tips to popular causes in the party, and reminders of the author’s accomplishments in unrelated areas (in this case, education.) Its core parts are a framework for immigration reform and a political manifesto about GOP outreach to Latinos, both of which are hotly debated within the party and could be directly affected by Bush’s book. Here are some of the highlights:

Obamacare Is Bad Because Citizens Whose Parents Are Illegal Get Benefits

Here’s a surprise. Seemingly out of nowhere, Bush condemns the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, recently accepted by his successor, Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL), for doling out “welfare” to the children of illegal immigrants.

“This is why the Obama administration’s attempt to coerce states to adopt a major Medicaid expansion as part of its national health-care program had the effect of inflaming anti-immigration sentiment,” he and co-author Clint Bolick write. “Although the administration assured the states that illegal immigrants would not be eligible for Medicaid benefits, their children who are born in the United States are eligible because they are citizens. Moreover, if illegal immigrants are offered a path to citizenship or permanent legal residency, eventually they will become eligible as well. Fortunately the US Supreme Court struck down the Medicaid expansion by a 7-2 vote as unduly coercive and therefore contrary to constitutional principles of federalism. The proposal should not be resurrected.”

What’s strange is that Bush isn’t even complaining about illegal immigrants getting Medicaid benefits, he’s complaining about American citizens who were born in the country whose parents are undocumented. But that has nothing to do with Obamacare: the president didn’t invent Medicaid and those kids were already free to apply, just as their citizenship lets them apply to myriad social programs. It is true, as Bush notes, that more of these children will be eligible for Medicaid benefits in states like Florida now. That’s because more Floridians in general will be eligible for Medicaid under the Obamacare expansion.

On March 06 2013 03:16 oneofthem wrote:
healthcare for kids. oh the horror

On March 06 2013 03:39 ACrow wrote:

How unamerican. And even for kids whose parents were not citizens! Those pesky second-grade citizens. Shocking!
Reminds me of the Simpsons episode in which they try to expel all "non-native" Americans, haha.

On March 06 2013 03:50 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

What happens in Germany?

On March 06 2013 04:14 ACrow wrote:

In which case specifically do you mean? Generally speaking, every citizen has to have health insurance; there are some rare exceptions in which you can fall through the net, but generally we have two kinds of insurance companies, private and public, of which the public ones have to accept everyone (again, there are some rare unlucky circumstances like you are a business owner that opts out of the public system to save money and later goes bankrupt, but even in that case his kids would have to be accepted by the public insurers, that way at least for kids it is insured that they have health coverage). With immigrants it gets complicated and I don't actually know much about the law in that case, and there didn't used to be a lot of immigration until the EU expanded eastwards recently, and even that is within limits and not comparable to US. Former Turkish immigrants from the sixties/seventies all usually have citizenship.

I didn't mean to gloat or poke fun at the problem from a distance btw, sorry if I came across as arrogant, I very well know that the topic of immigration doesn't have an easy solution. I just thought that Bush's stance was very hypocritical and that he is fishing for right wing votes with that - I mean a citizen is a citizen, no matter how you acquired your citizenship, right? Especially considering that almost all Americans have heritage roots somewhere else, I found it funny that he suggests to discriminate against some kids only because their parents immigrated more recently than his own grand-grand-grandparents or whatever.

On March 06 2013 04:42 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Yes a citizen is a citizen. Because of that there's a perverse incentive for people to come to the US and give birth so their kinds can have benefits. So I'm a bit curious if countries in the EU have a better solution or if illegal immigration just isn't a big issue there.

It would, according to the president on Tuesday, “jeopardize military readiness ... eviscerate job creating investments in education and energy and research ... emergency responders ... border agents ... FBI agents...federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go ... air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks ... more delays at airports across the country ... thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off ... tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care ... hundreds of thousands will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings,” and the list went on.

"There’s a lot of posturing — ‘I’m going to lay off my employees today unless you do something. We’re going to close the hospitals down. We're going to take all the prisoners from jail and put them on the street. Spare me. I live in that world. I mean come on, let's get serious here."

-Michael Bloomberg

The Pinocchio Test

Obama’s remarks continue the administration’s pattern of overstating the potential impact of the sequester, which we have explored this week. But this error is particularly bad--and nerve-wracking to the janitors and security guards who were misled by the president’s comments.

We originally thought this was maybe a Two Pinocchio rating, but in light of the AOC memo and the confirmation that security guards will not face a pay cut, nothing in Obama’s statement came close to being correct.

Ms. Napolitano also cited Chicago’s O’Hare and Atlanta’s Hartfield-Jackson airports as suffering from security checkpoint lines that were “150 to 200 percent as long as we would normally expect” at a recent meeting to discuss sequester fallout.

The Telegraph reported Tuesday, however, that officials with these very same airports denied any longer lines or airline delays.

Today, Senate Republicans are pushing legislation that would hand Obama a scalpel rather than a meat cleaver. The Toomey-Inhofe alternative would give the president discretion to allocate the sequester’s cut largely as he sees fit.

The bottom line is that Republican bill makes the sequester easier to live with, and the White House doesn’t want the sequester to be easier to live with. The point of these poorly constructed spending cuts, in the White House’s view, is that they’re hard to live with, and that forces both sides to compromise. Making the sequester a bit better makes it much harder to replace.

On March 06 2013 05:06 oneofthem wrote:
some of these budget outlays were already made ahead of time and altering them would cause some trauma, resulting in layoffs and so forth.

the problem with the republican proposal seems to be an expansion of executive power to make domestic cuts, but not military ones.

On March 06 2013 05:06 oneofthem wrote:
some of these budget outlays were already made ahead of time and altering them would cause some trauma, resulting in layoffs and so forth.

the problem with the republican proposal seems to be an expansion of executive power to make domestic cuts, but not military ones.

On March 06 2013 05:18 HunterX11 wrote:
they just want to give him more power than he even asked for, but he demurred?

On March 06 2013 05:15 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

I thought the Rep proposal was for power over all cuts and the military fix was a separate bill?

The White House argues that the Toomey-Inhofe bill doesn’t give it quite as much control as its proponents say. For instance, it gives the president the power to move cuts from defense spending over to domestic spending, but not to do the reverse. And within the defense cuts, there are limitations on the president’s authority. It forces him to largely abide by the spending decisions made in the National Defense Authorization Act — a limitation it doesn’t place on the domestic side. It also subjects whatever recommendations the White House does make to a congressional vote of disapproval.