The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

Reader Vincent writes to point out that Randy Kuhl is one of 135 signers of a letter [pdf] to Secretary of State Condolezza Rice.  The letter urges a more vigorous approach to Israel-Palestinian diplomacy, as well as a more aid to the Palestinian Authority.  It is supported by a bi-partisan group of Senators and Representatives.  More analysis here.

Judging from today's blog post, holding two conflicting thoughts at one time doesn't seem to phase Randy Kuhl.   In that post, Randy notes that the IRS is printing forms which assume that the AMT has not been repealed.  Through Randy's looking glass, this is somehow the Democrat's fault.

Either Randy doesn't suffer from cognitive dissonance, or he doesn't remember his vote last week against the repeal of the AMT.

Since Congress is going away for Thanksgiving, yesterday was a busy day.  Before recessing just before midnight, the House acted on the following:

• Passed the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act.  This bill is designed to address some of the issues raised by the recent subprime mortgage meltdown. It tightens up licensing requirements for mortgage brokers, restricts some mortgage types (including those with big balloon payments), and requires more due diligence on borrower repayment ability.
• Passed a new electronic surveillance bill.  This bill is an attempt to address the issues raised by the use of warrantless wiretapping.  It has provisions to restrict warrantless wiretapping to times when the nation is under a declaration of war, or when an act of Congress authorizes it.  The bill also instructs the President to turn over information about all warrantless wiretaps since 9/11.
  
• Failed to override President Bush's veto of the Labor, HHS and Education appropriation bill.

Randy Kuhl voted against the mortgage reform and wiretap reform bills, and against the veto override.  The mortgage reform bill had significant Republican support (64 votes).  The wiretap bill was essentially a party line vote.  The override vote also had a good number of Republicans supporting it (54), through Kuhl's vote against it is consistent with his original vote against the bill.

Late last night, the House passed another war funding measure with strings attached.  The current set of strings is a withdrawal by next Christmas, and no torture.   The vote was almost identical to the last round of war funding bills.  Two more Republicans voted for funding.  Randy Kuhl, almost all the Republicans, and a small group of liberal and conservative Democrats voted against.   The measure will be vetoed, apparently after a filibuster in the Senate.

Exile at Rochesterturning also found an item in Politico that details the Democrats new strategy on S-CHIP.  The latest threat is to extend the current program until a month before the 2008 elections, and then force a showdown vote. 

The Democrats are clearly betting that the general public will view the Republicans as obstructionists who block legislation that everyone wants.   That strategy may work, but I also think the Democrats run the risk of appearing as obstinate and stubborn as Bush, with the added bonus of the reek of impotence.   The current leadership doesn't seem to be searching very hard for fault lines in the Republican minority, especially on S-CHIP.   And the notion that they are failing to do so because they are standing on principle isn't supported by facts.  When you rush a vote to  confirm an Attorney General who can't say that waterboarding is torture, and when you're on the verge of giving telecoms immunity from illegal, widespread wiretapping, then your grasp of principle is a little weak.

Today's Massa press conference started with the vets, worked its way through tax cuts, and ended with transparency. More after the break.

Massa began with a discussion of vets and their access to health care. Noting that Randy Kuhl had recently discussed veterans' benefits (and been quoted in the news), he said:

Every veteran I've spoken to is angered and frustrated by professional politicians [...] five years after starting this war, veterans are not getting the benefits promised to them. As a veteran, this is no surprise. Nothing is good enough for our veterans, and that's exactly what Randy Kuhl and George Bush are giving us. They brag about the increase in benefits, but it took a new party and new leadership to make it happen this year.

Massa used the example of a recent amendment to HR 3687, the Small Business Contracting Program Improvements Act, which he said would have hurt the ability of vets to start a new business. Massa noted that Kuhl had voted for the amendment, which was opposed by the American Legion. (Here are the relevant congressional record pages and vote.)

"The VFW and DAV gave Randy Kuhl a rating of somewhere in the vicinity of 7%," he said, and added that Kuhl just "hopes no one is watching"

Massa moved on to the alternative minimum tax, Massa noted that the recently-passed reduction to the AMT will affect 50,000 people in the 29th district, and it would have "closed a lot of the millionaire loopholes."

I asked Massa if he thought that Kuhl's charge that the bill would damage entrepreneurs was correct. He said that, for the 29th district, the 50,000 family members whose taxes would have been reduced would have seen significant increases in net family income.

The problem is multinational corporations, which donate millions to campaigns of people like Randy Kuhl, that didn't want the loopholes closed. We saw it with S-CHIP, where Randy Kuhl said he wouldn't support a [tax on tobacco]. 75% of his money came from corporate PACS last quarter.

Massa added, "How could anyone not want to give tax relief on AMT? It's a no-brainer, but they bring up these scarecrows."

I then asked Massa his take on Governor Spitzer's reversal on his drivers' license plan: "It's a shame that governors all over the country have to do the job that the Commander-in-Chief was hired to do."

It's a shame that George Bush has failed to secure our borders. It illustrates a fundamental reality that Washington is broken. They don't care about illegal immigration. People like Randy Kuhl want immigrants in the country [...] to work for sub-minimum wages. It has been five years since 9/11. This administration and its rubberstamps in Congress have failed to secure our borders.

I also asked Massa if he would follow the lead of Kirsten Gillibrand and publish his schedule on his website, and establish a grants central if he was elected.

I have great admiration for Kirsten Gillibrand. I especially like her idea that once a month her entire DC staff comes to the district and sets up tents, [calling it] "Washington on the Corner". [...] I would like to see Randy Kuhl publish his schedule. [...] When I'm in Congress, I'm going to see how open my schedule can be.

Massa said that he likes the idea of posting grants, and he wants to reach out to "find critical sources of funding that do not add to the deficit and increase quality of life in the district." However, he noted that pork-barrel spending must be brought under control, saying that Randy Kuhl is "more than happy to charge millions of dollars to our children, yet he won't raise the price of tobacco 25 cents and change."

I was the only person who asked questions on the call, but there were others on the call who did not identify themselves.

Governor Spitzer will be meeting with the New York Congressional Delegation today.  According to the Star-Gazette and every other paper and blog around, he will also announce that he's dropping the plan to license illegal immigrants.

The Ontario Republican notes that the recent Democrat and Chronicle Op-Ed on S-CHIP, signed by two Rochester Labor leaders, is boilerplate that's appeared in a number of other newspapers.  

The issue here isn't the content of the letter, or the fact that it's boilerplate:  talking points are talking points, and I'm sure the labor guys who signed the letter weren't the first ones to try to slip one by the editors at the D&C.  The issue is the blind reprint of the letter as an op-ed by an editorial board that is constantly trumpeting its high journalistic standards.  I thought the Republican put it well:

Now, question to the D&C Editorial Board: Is it your policy to publish cut and paste editorials, or is it too hard to do a simple Google search to verify whether the content of the editorial you have hasn't been published elsewhere?

The Elmira Star-Gazette has a new list of Randy Kuhl's town meetings.  Kuhl will hold meetings next Monday and Tuesday.  His official site also has the list by county.

Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand is a Democrat from Albany (NY-20) in her first term.  In her first few months in office, she's started two common-sense efforts that both serve her constituents and increase transparency.

First, she's published her daily schedule on her website.  This might seem like a small thing, but she's one of a half-dozen members (and two senators) who do so.

Second, she's tried to increase the number of grant applications in her district.  According to a Albany Times-Union story,  she's had her staff launch a "grants central" section of her website to help connect constituents with available federal grants.  As I've explained here earlier, the grant process is far more transparent than earmarks, since it requires that grant applicants meet a set of requirements mandated by law and supervised by non-political federal appointees.

These are two simple, non-partisan, good government reforms.  The 29th deserves the same level of transparency from its representative.

(Thanks to the Albany Project for posting about the Times-Union story.)

The recent tax vote brought a predictable outcry from Republicans.  Randy Kuhl's blog headline, "AMT - 130 Percent Tax Hike", portrays the pay-as-you-go provisions of the tax bill as an economy-depressing tax hike.  The current Republican position is that an AMT cut is a great thing, but we should just cut it without enacting a corresponding paygo tax increase.

Tax cuts, and damn the consequences, is great sloganeering, but unpleasant fiscal realities are beginning to intrude on this rosy picture.  Here's one:  the dollar is at 50-year lows compared to some other currencies.  Much of the dollar's fall is due to the need for low interest rates to weather the mortgage crisis, but some of it is simply market reaction to the inability of the United States to keep its fiscal house in order.
Here's what the Wall Street Journal says:

To understand the dollar's current woes, you have to look elsewhere -- to monetary policy and economic management. The supply of dollars in the world is ultimately controlled by a single source, the Federal Reserve. With its aggressive easing in September, and again in late October, the Fed has signaled to the world that it cares more about creating dollars in the hope of limiting U.S. credit problems than it does about the dollar's value. Investors can see this, and so they are dumping dollars and looking for other assets to hold.

[...]

Our current financial woes are in large part the result of previous monetary excess, which fueled a debt and asset boom that has become a banking bust. The way to emerge from the mess is to slowly but honestly work off the bad debt and write down the losses. The one sure way to make things worse is with more monetary excess.

When the Journal talks about "monetary excess", they're referring to the insanely low interest rates that were used to stimulate the economy earlier this decade.  Those interest rates fueled the mortgage boom.  As a Nobel-Prize-winning economist put it in this month's Vanity Fair:

[...] the job of economic stimulation fell to the Federal Reserve Board, which stepped on the accelerator in a historically unprecedented way, driving interest rates down to 1 percent. In real terms, taking inflation into account, interest rates actually dropped to negative 2 percent. The predictable result was a consumer spending spree. [...] Credit was shoveled out the door, and subprime mortgages were made available to anyone this side of life support. Credit-card debt mounted to a whopping $900 billion by the summer of 2007.

This economist was the head of President Clinton's board of economic advisors, so Republicans might want to be skeptical about his views of the economy.  But it looks to me that he and the Journal are saying the same thing:  lowering interest rates is a trick that isn't going to work much longer. 

So what does this have to do with tax cuts?  Simply this: we must borrow money to finance tax cuts.   And the markets are going to require that we raise interest rates if we want to keep borrowing.  So it will cost a lot more to borrow the money to finance tax cuts in the future.  That old saw, "mortgaging our children's future" takes on new meaning when the mortgage rate keeps going up.

Here's a chilling passage from the Vanity Fair article:

A large portion [of the monetary crisis] will take decades to fix—and that’s assuming the political will to do so exists both in the White House and in Congress. Think of the interest we are paying, year after year, on the almost $4 trillion of increased debt burden—even at 5 percent, that’s an annual payment of $200 billion, two Iraq wars a year forever. Think of the taxes that future governments will have to levy to repay even a fraction of the debt we have accumulated.

Randy Kuhl, and other members of his party, would rather not think about it.  If raising taxes is taboo, what's the alternative?   This is the challenge for Republicans, and all their anti-tax rhetoric isn't going to change the fix we're in.