Hoyer Blames GOP Leadership For 'Do Nothing' Congress
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 2:17PMBy Adrianna McGinley
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters at a press briefing Tuesday he remains hopeful that Republicans and Democrats will work in the last weeks of the year to pass economic recovery legislation, but the GOP must be willing to cooperate.
“There is no doubt in my mind that if Mr. Boehner, Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Cantor and I sat down and we could all agree that we’ll both come up with a majority, under the following circumstances…we could do it,” Hoyer said. “The issue is whether or not we’re going to do it in a bipartisan way or pursue a partisan message.”
Hoyer blasted Republicans for moving less than half the amount of legislation the Democratically-controlled Congress moved in 2007 under a Republican administration and attributed the lack of action to a complete unwillingness of the GOP to move away from political messages.
“They voted three times to end Medicare, we’re not going to do that, they continue to vote for it. [They] voted ten times on regulatory bills that do not create jobs…They voted 23 times against initiatives to create jobs…They voted 14 times to repeal patient protections and put insurance companies back in control of healthcare, they know that’s not going to pass the Senate, they know the president is not going to sign it. These are all political message bills for their base, a relatively narrow base.”
“We’ve moved a lot of legislation through the House which the speaker must have known, we knew, had no chance in the Senate, but it was their political message,” Hoyer added. “They’ve been pursuing their political message, not policy.”
When asked if he thinks House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is responsible, he said, “Yes, I think the Speaker bears responsibility. He is, after all, the leader.”
With the current continuing resolution expiring in two weeks, Hoyer said “we are going to urge staying here until we get [the sustainable growth rate, unemployment insurance, and payroll taxes] done.”
On the legislation proposing an extension and increase of the payroll tax, Hoyer said Republicans are alienating their constituents, citing that roughly 75 percent of Americans support raising taxes on millionaires to aid the middle class.
“I frankly think the millionaires’ tax is putting a lot of heat on the Republicans,” Hoyer said.
He criticized arguments that raising taxes on the wealthy would negatively affect small-business owners, saying it “is not going to impact at all, according to any economist, job creation in America. What it will do is give us resources to protect the most vulnerable in America.”
“Every bipartisan group that has looked at it says you cannot get to where we need to get if you do not deal with additional revenues, and very frankly, almost every Republican leader that I’ve talked to agrees,” Hoyer added.
While he does not want to see sequestration take effect, Hoyer said, Democratic leadership is not working to avoid it, and he believes Democrats will support a presidential veto on any legislation with that goal.
“We need to keep the sequester in place, but realize it is an incentive, a reason, a demand, if you will, that we come to an agreement and adopt a balanced response to the fiscal challenge that confronts us…The sequester was the discipline. If you now simply spend time figuring out ‘well how can we get around the sequester,’ frankly, it eliminate the discipline.”
Obama Invokes Teddy, Pushes Congress To Pursue Fairness
By Adrianna McGinley
President Obama called on Congress Tuesday to channel the policies of former President Theodore Roosevelt to bring the country out of recession and keep the “American dream” alive for middle-class Americans.
“At the turn of the last century, when a nation of farmers was transitioning to become the world’s industrial giant, we had to decide: would we settle for a country where most of the new railroads and factories were controlled by a few giant monopolies that kept prices high and wages low? Would we allow our citizens and even our children to work ungodly hours in conditions that were unsafe and unsanitary? Would we restrict education to the privileged few? Because some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress,” Obama said during remarks in Osawatomie, Kansas. “Theodore Roosevelt disagreed.”
“He believed then what we know is true today, that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history,” Obama added. “But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can.”
Obama said Roosevelt was called a radical, socialist and communist for his progressive ideas, but reminded his audience that those ideas were what eventually brought the country out of depression. According to Obama, Roosevelt faced the same skepticism that exists today from “a certain crowd in Washington” who claim the market would “take care of everything…if only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes.”
These critics, Obama said, praise the “trickle-down” theory; a theory he believes lacks what the country needs.
“It’s never worked,” he said. “It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible post-war boom of the 50s and 60s.”
Obama said that a child born into poverty in the years following World War II had a 50 percent chance of reaching the middle class and in 1980 their chance dropped to 40 percent. Today, he said, their chance has fallen to just one in three.
“The idea that those children might not have a chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work? That’s inexcusable. It’s wrong. It flies in the face of everything we stand for,” Obama said.
“This isn’t just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”
Obama called on Congress to pass comprehensive, long-term tax reform, consumer protection measures and support for higher education to bring the U.S. back to prosperity.
“In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class… We shouldn’t be making it harder to afford college, we should be a country where everyone has the chance to go.”
Obama pushed for an extension of the payroll tax and unemployment benefits to aid struggling middle class families immediately but said “we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally” in the long term.
“We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can’t afford to do both. That’s not politics. That’s just math,” Obama said.
The president called out Republicans for continuing to defend the Bush-era tax cuts and criticized his conservative colleagues for refusing to ask millionaires to return to Clinton-era tax rates.
When Clinton proposed tax increases on wealthy Americans, Obama said, there were fears it would “kill jobs and lead to another recession” but instead, nearly 23 million jobs were created and the deficit was eliminated.
“I’m here to reaffirm my deep conviction that we are greater together than we are on our own,” Obama said. “I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.”