HOUSE Republican Leader John Boehner

Introducing the New GOP.gov

Conference Vice Chairman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) introduces the new and improved website of House Republicans:

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Dem “Stimulus” A Raw Deal For American Families

Democrats’ trillion-dollar spending bill provides $1.10 per day in tax relief to workers, while saddling every American family with $6,500 in added debt.

Following are some very tentative quick facts on the trillion-dollar “stimulus” spending deal slated to be rushed through the House and Senate today or tomorrow by Congressional Democrats, as compiled by the Office of House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH).  These are based on best estimates on legislative text and scoring and may be subject to revision.

1.  Generational Theft.  The final agreement will cost each and every household more than $6,500 in additional debt, paid for by our children and grandchildren.

2.  Paltry Tax Relief for Working Families and Small Businesses.  The “Making Work Pay” tax credit at the center of the plan amounts to $1.10 a day, not even enough to ride the bus one-way to work.  According to the Associated Press, “Officials estimated [the bill’s tax relief provisions] would mean about $13 a week more in people’s paychecks when withholding tables are adjusted in late spring.  Critics say that’s unlikely to do much to boost consumption.”  (Taylor, Andrew; “Economic stimulus package on track for final votes,” Associated Press, 12 Feb 09).  While the specifics remain unknown, it appears likely that tax relief to help small businesses — the primary engine of American job creation — represents even less of a share of the final tax package, and it had been only a tiny percentage of the overall package to begin with.

3.  Massive Government Expansion.  The final agreement is almost as much as the annual discretionary budget for the entire federal government.

4.  A Trillion-Dollar Spending Bill.  The $789.5 billion final agreement slated for a House vote either today or tomorrow will exceed more than $1 trillion when adding in the interest of approximately $300 billion between 2009-2019.

5. Unnecessary Spending That Won’t Create Jobs.   Apparently included in the final “jobs” bill is money for plug-in vehicles, money for STD prevention, and money for ACORN (via the Neighborhood Stabilization Program and CDBG program).  The final agreement also creates new programs and funds existing programs that can be used to fund earmarks and pork-barrel projects.

Further details and analysis to come, as details become available.

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White House Census Takeover Could Waste Billions in Taxpayer Funds

In a letter sent this afternoon to President Barack Obama, House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and the entire House Republican leadership team joined Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and other Oversight & Government Reform Committee Republicans in warning that the Administration’s plan to transfer control of the 2010 Census to political operatives on the White House staff could result in billions of taxpayer dollars being abused and misallocated.An estimated $300 billion in taxpayer funding is distributed by the federal government annually on the basis of Census data - data that would be corrupted by partisanship under the current White House plan, GOP leaders warned.Under an Administration plan revealed late last week, control of the traditionally nonpartisan Census Bureau and the 2010 Census would be transferred from the Commerce Department to political operatives on the White House staff, which is headed by the former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Rahm Emanuel.

Contrary to Democratic claims, there is no historical precedent for placing the Census under the control of political operatives on the White House staff.  According to former Census Bureau Director Bruce Chapman, who directed the Census Bureau from 1981 to 1983 under President Ronald Reagan: “[T]he White House and its Congressional allies are wrong in asserting that the Census in the past has reported directly to the president through his staff.  Directors of the Bureau often brief presidents and their staffs, but, as a former director (under President Reagan), I don’t know of any cases where the conduct of the Bureau was directly under White House supervision.  That includes Clinton in 2000, Bush 41 in 1990 and Carter in 1980.”

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Coast to Coast Criticism of Democrats’ “Stimulus”

Newspapers and commentators from coast to coast have continued to criticize the House Democrats’ trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ bill as an ineffective and costly plan in editorials and columns this past week.

The more Americans hear about the contents of the Democrats’ so-called stimulus bill, the less they seem to support it.  In fact, according to Rasmussen,  only 37% of Americans support the Democrats’ “stimulus”; 50% of voters say the “stimulus is likely to make things worse; and, 62% want stimulus plan to have more tax cuts and less spending.

Here’s what editorials and opinion makers are saying about the Democrats’ bloated “stimulus” bill:

“Stimulating welfare,” Rocky Mountain News:

Several provisions in the stimulus package would immediately grow the welfare state.  One would make Medicaid, the federal health program for the indigent, available to anyone who’s unemployed - former millionaire CEOs and laid-off retail workers alike.  Another measure would, for the first time, provide taxpayer subsidies under the COBRA health-insurance law.  Either of these proposals would undermine individual responsibility, allowing people who can afford to pay for medical insurance from their own pockets to collect taxpayer subsidies.

“Mission Creep,” The Chicago Tribune: 

We’ve been skeptical about this whole process. The mantra on this page has been that if the U.S. has to do this, the spending has to be timely, targeted and temporary. In other words, try to jump-start the economy, but don’t let the rush to a “stimulus” package become the smoke to hide a lot of ways to permanently expand government.

“The President must improve stimulus legislation to get the biggest bang for America’s buck,” New York Daily News:

The spree extended to paying for a campaign against sexually transmitted diseases, for efforts to help smokers quit, for the Coast Guard to design an icebreaker, as well as for many more things having nothing to do with stimulating the economy.

It was probably too much to hope that Pelosi, Obey & Co. would behave as anything other than entrenched Beltway insiders - even with the nation’s fate in the balance.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Rep. Manzullo (R-IL) Questions Bailout Czar Neel Kashkari

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DEMOCRATS’ MIDNIGHT “STIMULUS” POWER PLAY

So this is “transparency” under the Democratic regime. . .

It appears that Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid’s staff met all through the night in secret with Democratic conferees’ staff to cobble together the “stimulus” conference report.  Republican conferees were frozen out.

The objective appears to be to produce a final conference report on the trillion-dollar spending bill by this afternoon so that floor action can take place in both chambers by Thursday.

They intend to ram this trillion-dollar spending bill through with as little debate and scrutiny as possible.

The House voted unanimously yesterday in support of a Republican measure stating that the American people should have 48 hours to review the bill prior to passage.  Will Democrats follow through?  Or will they do the opposite of what they voted to do yesterday?

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Economists Dispute Notion of Consensus on “Stimulus”

Last night, in a prime time press conference, President Obama said there is a consensus among economists that a dramatic increase in borrowing and spending by the federal government is necessary reverse the economic recession that is gripping our nation.   With all due respect to the President, there are hundreds of economists who disagree.

More than 50 American economists spoke out against the notion that our nation can simply spend its way back to prosperity via Leader Boehner’s “skeptical economists” project, launched in December after an Associated Press article quoted unnamed presidential advisors as saying “only one” prominent economist had questioned the concept of a massive stimulus bill focused on borrowing and spending hundreds of billions of dollars.  Leader Boehner has publicly released comments from many of these economists; they can be seen HERE and HERE.

The Washington, D.C., based Cato Institute published a full page ad in several newspapers which listed more than two hundred economists who don’t believe that a trillion-dollar spending bill will help steer the economy back on a path of growth or put Americans back to work.

Many prominent economists who supported a stimulus package have since recanted their support for the Congressional Democrats’ “stimulus.”  Among those economists who are now opposed is Mark Zandi, an often cited “former McCain advisor.”  There are just two small problems with that - Zandi is a Democrat, and he opposes the Democrats’ “stimulus.”

Mark Zandi, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal, said:

If I were king for the day I might define the stimulus differently…The part of it that doesn’t really fit what I was hoping for was the spendout ratio on infrastructure.  The spendout ratio is slower than expected.

The Wall Street Journal noted that: Read the rest of this entry »

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Welfare Reform Under Fire in “Stimulus”

One of the most successful bipartisan reforms of the 1990s was reform of the federal government’s welfare system-a system that had trapped successive generations in a cycle of dependence.  Welfare Reform was one of the signature items of the GOP’s 1994 Contract with America.  The Personal Responsibility & Work Opportunity Act, signed in 1996 by President Bill Clinton after two unpopular vetoes, led to dramatic drops in the States’ welfare rolls as a system of entitlements was replaced by a system of work and education requirements.

Sadly , these highly successful  welfare reforms-even requirements that recipients obtain a high diploma or GED-appear to be the latest causality of the Democratic Congress.  Buried on page 608, deep within the $1 trillion, 778 page Senate version of the “stimulus bill,” is a provision to spend $3 billion for “temporary welfare payments.” (text of the bill here)

Writing in the online magazine Slate, Mickey Kaus states that this provision is “part of a larger liberal campaign to use the recession to weaken work requirements and let millions of non-working single mothers back on the welfare rolls.  Specifically, it would apparently reward states that expand their welfare caseloads–even if the increase is only the product of loosened work requirements rather than a worsening local economy.”

Liberal opponents of welfare reform recognize that the “temporary welfare payments” contained in the “stimulus” bill will lay the groundwork for reversing the success of welfare reform passed by Republicans like Leader Boehner in 1996. Read the rest of this entry »

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Boehner-Led Congressional Delegation Visits Afghanistan

House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) visited Afghanistan Saturday and Sunday, continuing a six-member congressional delegation trip that began in Iraq last week.  The  delegation’s visit comes as renewed attention is focused on Afghanistan and the efforts of an international coalition - led by the United States - to root out terrorism and bring stability to the country.  House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), Armed Services Committee Ranking Republican John McHugh (R-NY), Intelligence Committee Ranking Republican Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), and Reps. Tom Latham (R-IA) and Jo Bonner (R-AL) joined the trip.

The delegation spent a day and a half in the country, first landing Saturday afternoon in the capital of Kabul.

Reps. McHugh, Hoekstra, Bonner, Latham, Boehner, and Cantor arrive in Kabul

The visit gave members the opportunity to gain an on-the-ground perspective of the daunting challenges the country faces.

Afghanistan is a poor, war-torn nation with a still largely agrarian economy that has been consumed by violence and brutality for centuries, and it lacks the human capital - with illiteracy rates reaching as high as 75 percent - to find success quickly.  U.S. Ambassador Bill Wood briefed the members on Saturday afternoon, providing an overview of the current situation, a brief history of the country and why it makes the task at hand even more difficult, and a current state-of-play on the government led by President Hamid Karzai.   These facts make clear, the Ambassador told the members, that Afghanistan is a much more complex and longer-term challenge than Iraq.

The new Obama Administration is undertaking a strategic review of the situation in Afghanistan and there is broad consensus that more troops are needed, especially in southern Afghanistan where the Taliban has a more significant presence.  The members were briefed on the security situation by General David McKiernan - head of U.S. Forces as well as NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, the coalition of 39 nations with a presence in Afghanistan.

Pakistan and the tribal areas along the border of Afghanistan that have become a sanctuary for terrorists was a key concern expressed by the members during this briefing.  General McKiernan updated the members on security efforts along the border and the fight to root out terrorist strongholds.

On Sunday, the members visited Camp Bastion, the British-built base in the Helmand province of Southern Afghanistan.  Helmand was described as ground zero in the fight against the Taliban, and is where some two-thirds of the world’s opium is produced.  More U.S forces are expected to be deployed to Helmand in the coming months.  One of the highlights of the trip was the members’ meeting with Helmand Provincial Governor Gulab Mangal.

Leader Boehner meets Helmand Provincial Governor Gulab Mangal

The Governor is credited with beginning to make a real difference in fighting government corruption, combating the rampant opium drug trade in the province, and bringing the local government and its services closer to the people.

Also at Camp Bastion, Leader Boehner and the members ate lunch with the troops at Helmand and visited with those from their local districts.  It was a another reminder of the enormous sacrifice our men and women in uniform make every day, even as they are apart from their families, friends, and loved ones.

What’s the takeaway on Afghanistan?  This challenge is infinitely more complex and will take more time to achieve real, sustained results.  One thing we know for sure: Leader Boehner, the other members on this trip, and all House Republicans are committed to doing everything possible to support our men and women in uniform and give them all the resources they need to succeed in their mission here.

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Boehner, House Republicans Witness Iraqi Progress Firsthand

House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) led a six-member delegation of House Republicans to visit Iraq yesterday just a week after provincial elections were held successfully and without significant violence.  House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), Armed Services Committee Ranking Republican John McHugh (R-NY), Intelligence Committee Ranking Republican Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), and Reps. Tom Latham (R-IA) and Jo Bonner (R-AL) joined the trip.  

First and foremost, the Iraqis should be congratulated on last week’s successful provincial elections — which were held without any major violence.  Each opportunity Iraqis have to participate in the political process in a peaceful manner increases Iraq’s stability and marginalizes terrorist organizations, like al-Qaeda, and Iranian-linked extremist groups.  It is yet another positive sign that the Iraqis are taking greater control of their future, and it was evident in the briefings members held throughout the day with Iraqi political leaders and our commanders on the ground.

While last week’s success is another important milestone, as General Odierno and Ambassador Crocker reminded the members yesterday in our meeting, the gains created by the surge and the political reconciliation process are fragile and reversible.  Al Qaeda is still looking to wreak havoc where it can, and while violence is down sharply throughout the country, the mission is not yet complete.

The members also met with President Jalal Talabani and discussed the recently-signed Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), the blueprint for ensuring Iraq stays on the current successful path.  They also discussed the future of the Middle East, the Iranian influence, and the Iraqi economy.  Boehner thanked Talabani for his leadership and commitment to the future of his country.

Lastly, the members had an eye-opening visit with Major General John Kelly (USMC) at Al Asad Air Base in Anbar province.  The “Anbar Awakening” has turned into a model for the rest of the country.  Major General Kelly reported that Anbar Iraqi Security Forces have assumed full lead in protecting the population, and that the provincial elections occurred last week without any violence.  He reported that while the insurgency has largely been defeated (the first 90 yards of the field), the last 10 yards must be won by the government of Iraq.  All signs indicate they are on the right track.

The visit also had significance as members visited with troops from their local districts.  The Greenville, Ohio national guard unit is stationed at the air base, and Leader Boehner visited with them after the briefing yesterday.

American troops have made remarkable progress in Iraq under the leadership of General Petraeus, General Odierno, and Ambassador Crocker over the last two years. Now is not the time to let our guard down, all of the members agreed.  One more thing they agreed on: The resolve, commitment and sacrifice shown by our military forces each and every day is nothing short of amazing and humbling to watch, and it was evident at every stop.

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