Looking Ahead: What Are The Next Big Congressional Fights?
Health care reform is now entering the final phases of becoming a law – negotiation. Right now the big fight is what kind of public option we’ll get – triggered, opt out, robust (Medicare + 5) or level playing field. It’s certainly no reason to relax but let’s look ahead to what’s next on the agenda. I really see three big fights on the horizon.
DADT Repeal
Most of us have been very impatient to get this started. Carl Levin has announced that hearings on DADT will start in the Senate next month. I think that puts the DADT repeal on track for bills early next year. As far as I’m concerned it can’t come soon enough but the Obama administration has been very deliberate in making sure that the senior military is on board with the decision. The publication of a study in support of DADT repeal in the military journal Joint Force Quarterly has made the repeal very likely to happen. The remaining question is how hard Republicans will fight against it. This should lead to all kinds of interesting You Tube moments.
Cape & Trade – Climate Change
This bill was given up for dead at almost the same moment it left the House of Representatives. I doubt there would have been any movement in the bill if not for the high profile defections from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, specifically because of the business group’s opposition to cap & trade legislation. John Kerry was able to convince Lindsey Graham to support the legislation (mostly by adding drill, baby drill) but this nominally bipartisan support will probably help move this bill forward, though probably not in time for the Copenhagen Conference in December.
Financial Reform
In my opinion, financial reform will be the biggest fight of all of them because the parties have very different views of business regulation and because the banking and financial industry will fight against it. The House Financial Services Committee has already started working on a bill and one of the most important reforms, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency has already passed out of the committee.
Tags: ACES bill, DADT, Financial Reform
Ah, climate change. That’s when we get to watch the Republicans misuse science. Good times ahead.
Let’s hope your version of health care passes. Massive cuts to Medicare, expansion of the broken Medicaid system, huge fee and tax increases and no lawsuit reform.
2010 get’s better looking everyday.
Mike Protack
The Bush tax cuts are set to expire next year… Congress will have to introduce something quick to keep the middle-class tax cuts while allowing the tax cuts on the rich to expire. There will be endless opportunities for mischevious amendments and obstruction from the GOP. Health care is a biggie but rebalancing tax policy is just as important, and might be an even bigger fight that could consume Congress’s attention.
Yes, I think Inhofe will give us lots of You Tube moments on climate change. You know he’s leading his own climate change deniers brigade to the Copenhagen Conference right?
Good addition anon. I’m not sure what the plans are there. Will they let the whole package expire and pass a new package? I’ll bet they can make the middle tax cuts better than the previous bill.
Dems will have the unfortunate job of raising taxes in an election year. There will be plenty of defectors gravitating toward Republican amendments to comfort the comfortable.
Their only chance is to offer the middle class an even better deal than Bush, while letting the upper income cuts expire. Then they can try to run as tax cutters, even though Repubs will point to the expiration and cry “raised taxes.” The teabaggers will be back next summer screaming about tax increases.
Also, Dems can get clever and offer tax reforms that are not straight rate increases, like closing the carried interest loophole, or changing the way dividend income is counted toward taxes. After all, that is how Repubs stealthily passed their biggest tax cuts for the rich.
“2010 get’s better looking everyday.”
Not when voters realize the only alternative is Republicans. Check the polls, skyboy.
I realize that the official truth is that only Bush deficits were bad and the Obama Deficits are good…
But I think this is the next big thing in congress:
Clock ticking on debt ceiling ($123 billion worth of Treasurys sold this week)
CNN ^ | 10/26/2009 | Jeanne Sahadi,
Roughly $211 billion separates what the country owes and its self-imposed credit limit.
And by Friday, after another week of massive debt sales by the Treasury Department, that gap will likely have narrowed considerably.
It is now expected that the $12.104 trillion debt ceiling could be breached by the end of November.
It is also expected that lawmakers will raise the ceiling, as they have done more than 90 times since 1940 — eight of them since 2002.
If they don’t, the government could be forced to shut down. But that’s not the worst that could happen. In fact, the government did shut down for a spell in 1995 and life went on. The reason lawmakers will eventually approve an increase is because without one ultimately the value of U.S. bonds would sink, jeopardizing the portfolios of countries and investors around the world who invest in U.S. debt.
It makes life a whole lot easier for folks at Treasury if lawmakers take that vote before the ceiling is breached — and they usually do. But there have been times when Congress voted to raise the limit after it was pierced, according to a recent Standard & Poor’s report.