House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, right, accompanied by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky. speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 2, 2011. (AP)
While Congress is expected to approve a three-week stopgap measure next week to buy more time for negotiations on a longer-term bill, a growing wave of freshmen and conservative lawmakers in the House are refusing to play ball until federal spending is slashed — even if that means not increasing the debt ceiling.
Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas echoed the sentiment of many of his fellow freshman lawmakers when he announced he wouldn’t support the short-term spending plan.
“We were elected to make bold changes to federal spending and to reverse our unsustainable deficits,” he said in a statement Saturday.”By allowing President Obama and Sen. [Harry] Reid to stall a budget they should have completed six months ago, we are being distracted from even bigger tasks: tackling the $1.1 trillion deficit in the president’s reckless 2012 budget and negotiating real budget reform, such as a balanced budget amendment, within a debt ceiling debate.”
Obama and the Senate’s top Republican both declared on Friday they want to take on the huge entitlement programs driving America’s long-term deficits — but their lines of attack differed sharply and that could lead to a showdown over government borrowing.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell warned that GOP senators would not vote to increase the federal debt limit unless Obama agreed to significant long-term budget savings that could include cost curbs for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, laying down a high-stakes marker just weeks before the limit is reached.
Obama said he also wants to tackle military spending and tax loopholes — issues on which he can expect Republican opposition.
A defiant Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer told Southeast Valley business and political leaders Wednesday that she would press her campaign against “an over-reaching federal government” until the feds back off.
Brewer also struck a strong anti-union note as she defended her economic development strategies while pushing reform in education and government.
Those four policies, she said, are the cornerstones of her vision for a prosperous Arizona.
She spoke to about 300 people Wednesday morning at Mesa Community College in a meeting sponsored by the East Valley Chamber of Commerce Alliance and the East Valley Partnership.
“The United States has a federal government, not a national government,” she said. “For the next four years, Arizona will continue to pursue a policy of renewed federalism. . . . Never during our nearly 100 years of statehood has federal interference in . . . Arizona affairs . . . been more blatant than in 2010.”
Western Free Press’ intrepid reporting team—in the person of Brad Zinn and David Leeper—brings you a series of interviews from this weekend’s tea party conference in Phoenix. (Click the image to watch the video.)
Clint Bolick of the Goldwater Institute:
Scott Walker
By Aaron Rodriguez at the The Hispanic Conservative
Governor Scott Walker may be a new marvel to cable news, but he is certainly no stranger to Wisconsin politics. Scott K. Walker, son of a Baptist preacher, began his political career in the early 1990s when he ran for an Assembly seat in the State Legislature. Even as a young legislator in his twenties, Walker took a hard-line, penny-wise approach to labor unions. During a debate in 1993, Walker advocated reforming union laws that oversaw local government labor disputes. Little did he know that his career in Milwaukee politics would be tested and weighed by his exchange with those very laws.
After nine years in the State Legislature, Scott Walker campaigned for Milwaukee County Executive – a seat that no Republican in Wisconsin has ever occupied. But Milwaukee County was recently rocked by a massive pension scandal – one that had given away six-figure backdrops to hundreds of public employees. The area was ripe for a new breed of leadership, and Walker’s message of frugality and fiscal reform seemed to reverberate with the voters. In 2002, Milwaukee County elected Scott Walker, the first ever Republican County Executive.
As Executive, Walker’s skirmishes with unions began shortly after he promised he would balance county budgets without raising property taxes. Without counting on these revenue-raising mechanisms, Walker had to lean on the county workforce for program cuts.
In 2003, Detractors accused Walker of ginning up a false fiscal crisis in order to justify slashing budget items. Drumming up false budgetary crises became a perennial charge against Walker, so he didn’t waste opportunities to remind them that unfunded pension liabilities threatened the solvency of their county government.
First lady Michelle Obama said, “Let’s Move!” Who knew Democratic politicians in Wisconsin and Indiana would take her literally?
Faced with stifling debt, bloated pensions and intractable government unions, liberal Midwestern legislators have fled those states — paralyzing Republican fiscal reform efforts. Like Monty Python’s Brave Sir Robin and his band of quivering knights, these elected officials have only one plan when confronted with political hardship or economic peril: Run away, run away, run away.
Scores of Fleebagger Democrats are now in hiding in neighboring Illinois, the nation’s sanctuary for political crooks and corruptocrats. Soon, area hotels will be announcing a special discount rate for card-carrying FleePAC winter convention registrants. Question: Will the White House count the economic stimulus from the mass Democratic exodus to Illinois as jobs “saved” or “created”? More important question: How much are taxpayers being charged for these obstructionist vacations?
Bill Alerts for week of February 14th thru 18th:
Appropriations
The committee on Appropriations will meet at 2:00 pm on Tuesday, February 15, 2011 in Senate Hearing Room 109.
SB1308 and SB1309 use a Constitutional doctrine to make agreements with other states in order to protect our citizens and establish our sovereignty. No longer will the federal government be able to wrongfully and unconstitutionally interpret the Fourteenth Amendment. These two bills will allow Arizona to be a partner to all of the other states involved in this compact, help regain our country, and not incentivize illegal activity in our homeland.
SB1561 allows the legislature to do its job! SB1561 gives the legislature the authority to appropriate “noncustodial federal monies”. It is an authority that the legislature should have in order to keep our fiscal house in order and to make the decisions that our constituents elected us to do. It will bring transparency to your tax dollars that you deserve.
SCR1051 is a measure that will rein in spending measures that have no specified funding source. Why are we funding programs that do not have funds? This measure will take the handcuffs off the legislature and allows us to balance the budget and maintain programs that are truly funded while not expanding government that has not been paid for.
Banking and Insurance
The committee on Banking and Insurance will meet at 2:00 pm on Tuesday, February 15, 2011 in Senate Hearing Room 3.
Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura sued the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration on Monday, alleging full-body scans and pat-downs at airport checkpoints violate his right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Ventura is asking a federal judge in Minnesota to issue an injunction ordering officials to stop subjecting him to “warrantless and suspicionless” scans and body searches.
The lawsuit, which also names Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and TSA Administrator John Pistole as defendants, argues the searches are “unwarranted and unreasonable intrusions on Governor Ventura’s personal privacy and dignity . and are a justifiable cause for him to be concerned for his personal health and well-being.”
The first-ever National School Choice Week is underway! This week, January 23rd – 29th, school choice advocates from across the country will host events and highlight the benefits of educational freedom.
More than 150 organizations are hosting events in nearly every state. It’s a grassroots movement of national proportions to highlight the benefits of school choice and demand access to quality educational options. Speaker John Boehner, Newt Gingrich, Sens. Joe Lieberman and John McCain and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush – among many others – are all “in” for National School Choice Week.
And it’s a movement whose time has come. Nationally, thousands of children are trapped in more than 1,700 public schools labeled as “dropout factories,” in which less than 60 percent of students graduate within four years. But even for those students not assigned to the worst government schools, academic achievement has stagnated over the years, graduation rates have flat lined, and American students are out-competed by their international counterparts.
