Congress Approves ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Measure

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Congress approved a plan to end Washington’s long drama over the “fiscal cliff” late Tuesday after House Republicans surrendered to President Obama’s demand to let taxes rise on the nation’s richest households.

The House voted 257 to 167 to send the measure to Obama for his signature; the vote came less than 24 hours after the Senate overwhelmingly approved the legislation.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) and most other top GOP leaders took no public position on the measure and offered no public comment before the 10:45 p.m. vote. Boehner declined even to deliver his usual closing argument, leaving House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) to defend the measure as the “largest tax cut in American history.”

The bill will indeed shield millions of middle-class taxpayers from tax increases set to take effect this month. But it also will let rates rise on wages and investment profits for households pulling in more than $450,000 a year, marking the first time in more than two decades that a broad tax increase has been approved with GOP support.

The measure also will keep benefits flowing to 2 million unemployed workers on the verge of losing their federal checks. And it will delay for two months automatic cuts to the Pentagon and other agencies that had been set to take effect Wednesday.

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Boehner to Reid: ‘Go F*** Yourself’

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House Speaker John Boehner couldn’t hold back when he spotted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the White House lobby last Friday.

It was only a few days before the nation would go over the fiscal cliff, no bipartisan agreement was in sight, and Reid had just publicly accused Boehner of running a “dictatorship” in the House and caring more about holding onto his gavel than striking a deal.

“Go f— yourself,” Boehner sniped as he pointed his finger at Reid, according to multiple sources present.

Reid, a bit startled, replied: “What are you talking about?”

Boehner repeated: “Go f— yourself.”

The harsh exchange just a few steps from the Oval Office — which Boehner later bragged about to fellow Republicans…

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Bait and Switch: In Face of Fiscal Cliff, Obama Demands Spending Boost for 2013

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President Barack Obama smashed a completed fiscal-cliff deal with a last-minute demand for increased spending in 2013, according to an e-mail from the GOP’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.

Under the deal, planned tax increases on middle-class Americans would be cancelled, but Obama insisted on raising tax rates on Americans earning more than $400,000 per year.

“They’re holding that [deal] hostage” to boost 2013 spending, GOP Sen. Bob Corker said shortly after Obama lauded the pending agreement.

“The tax piece is complete and done as of last evening at 1:45 a.m. I thought the entire deal was sealed. Early this morning, the White House called demanding that we also turn off the sequester,” said the email, signed “Mitch.”

The sequester refers to scheduled cuts in spending during the first nine months of 2013. Half of the $109 billion in cuts are to be imposed on the Pentagon.

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Georgetown Law Professor: US Constitution ‘Archaic, Idiosyncratic and Downright Evil’

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With hours to go before nation heads off the fiscal cliff, Georgetown Law professor Louis Michael Seidman writes that the time has come to scrap the Constitution.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times Monday, Seidman, a constitutional law professor, claimed that the nation’s foundational document is the real impediment to progress and solutions to America’s troubles.

“As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken,” Seidman wrote. “But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.”

According to Seidman, the country’s insistence that it maintain the will of a centuries-old document “has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public.”

Seidman, author of the forthcoming book “On Constitutional Disobedience,” explained that adherence to constitutional law, which he has taught for over 40 years, is just “bizarre.”

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Senate Approves ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Deal; House Meets New Year’s Day

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The White House and congressional lawmakers have reached a deal to avoid the “fiscal cliff” that would delay harsh spending cuts by two months, Obama administration officials said on Monday.

The plan was hammered out by Vice President Joe Biden and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The Senate overwhelmingly approved the deal, 89 to 8, in a vote just before 2am ET on New Year’s Day. The House of Representatives is expected to vote or take up the deal when it meets on New Year’s Day.

So, technically, the U.S. went over the cliff when midnight struck and some $600 billion of tax hikes and spending cuts kicked in but a deal could be approved by the full Congress in the next few days.

The agreement, which includes both spending cuts and revenue increases, extends tax cuts on incomes up to $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for couples. Those earning above that would be taxed at a rate of 39.6 percent, up from 35 percent.

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Report: Wind Generation Costs Twice As Much As Government Estimates

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As lawmakers rush to hash out a deal to extend tax credits for wind energy generation, a new report shows that, once hidden costs are accounted for, the true cost of wind power generation is twice that of what previous government estimates have shown.

“Once these hidden costs are included and subsidies are excluded, wind generation is not close to being competitive with conventional generation sources such as natural gas, coal or nuclear,” said George Taylor, lead author of the report and senior fellow in energy policy at American Tradition Institute, in a statement.The Energy Information Administration reported in its most recent “levelized cost of electricity” that wind generation costs eight cents per kilowatt hour. However, this understates the true cost of wind generation because it leaves out indirect and infrastructure costs which are hard to measure and raise the true cost of generating wind power.

For example, wind generation costs three times as much as natural gas-fired electricity and up to 50 percent more than government estimates for new nuclear and coal power generation.

The Energy Information Administration reported in its most recent “levelized cost of electricity” that wind generation costs eight cents per kilowatt hour. However, this understates the true cost of wind generation because it leaves out indirect and infrastructure costs which are hard to measure and raise the true cost of generating wind power.

Most electricity cost estimates fail to take into account, the cost of keeping fossil fuel power plants online to balance out the variations in wind power generation, and the increased fuel consumption — per unit of output — which wind requires of power plants. Estimates also typically don’t include the additional long-distance transmission costs required by wind, as well as the electricity losses associated with it.

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New Year’s Eve On the Cliff: Lawmakers Have No Bill and No Deal (+Update)

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UPDATE: Deal in the Works?

Senate leaders and Vice President Biden are putting the finishing touches on an agreement to extend income tax rates for the vast majority of the country, just hours before the “fiscal cliff” deadline.

The agreement will extend Bush-era income tax rates on individual income up to $400,000 and on family income up to $450,000, according to a senior GOP aide. It will adjust the estate tax rate to 40 percent, up from 35 percent, but maintain the exemption for all inheritances below $5 million, the aide said.

GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is engaged in one-on-one talks with Biden, said the tax portion of the deal was finished, and that a broader agreement was at hand.
“I can report that we’ve reached an agreement on all of the tax issues,” McConnell said. “We are very, very close.”

Republican leaders in the House, meanwhile, said they would not hold a late-night vote even if tax and spending legislation cleared the Senate, guaranteeing that the nation will go over the fiscal cliff at midnight, if only for a few hours. Read more from this story HERE.

New Year’s Eve On the Cliff: Lawmakers Have No Bill and No Deal

Senate leaders are racing against the clock to reach a “fiscal cliff” deal the House and Senate can approve on New Year’s Eve.

Leaders in the upper chamber narrowed their differences Sunday as Republicans agreed to drop a demand to curb cost-of-living increases to entitlement benefits, while Democrats showed flexibility on taxes.

Yet after months of talks on ways to avoid the fiscal cliff of tax hikes and spending cuts at the end of 2012, House and Senate lawmakers find themselves approaching the new year without a bill to present to their members.

Significant differences remain over two key parts of a deal — the automatic spending cuts known as the sequester and the estate tax.

Instead of working through the night, the Senate recessed at 7:27 p.m. Sunday with plans to reconvene Monday at 11:00 a.m., and the House recessed around the same time. Read more from this story HERE.

Death of Tea Party Exaggerated? Members in House Appear to Hold Key Fiscal Vote (+video)

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The Tea Party has had an up-and-down political ride since the movement helped Republicans take control of the House in 2010, but those elected in the midterm elections still appear to wield considerable power in the fiscal negotiations.

The roughly 50 members elected to the House two years ago have been a challenge for the more moderate House Speaker John Boehner since they took office. Perhaps most memorably, many of them refused last year to support a debt-ceiling bill because they said it didn’t reduce federal spending enough.

Just last week they squashed Boehner’s fiscal plan by refusing to compromise and vote on a tax increase for any American, despite the House speaker — in his so-called “Plan B” — having suggested extending tax cuts only for those making more than $1 million annually.

And their most powerful vote might be yet to come, should Tea Party-backed House members reject a possible Senate proposal over the next two days to extend tax cuts and perhaps avert massive federal spending cuts that start January 1.

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Californians’ Support for Death Penalty Goes Against Trend

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Even as Californians voted to maintain the death penalty, the nation’s support for capital punishment continued to wane in 2012, with relatively few states performing executions.

Only nine states executed inmates in 2012, and three-fourths of the executions occurred in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a monitoring group critical of capital punishment. Connecticut became the fifth state in five years to abolish capital punishment.

California, whose voters rejected a November ballot measure to repeal the death penalty, is not expected to resume executions for three years, according to Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye. Litigation has blocked executions in California for nearly seven years.

Despite its unused execution chamber, California’s death row, already the largest in the nation, continued to swell in 2012. Fourteen inmates were added, mostly from Los Angeles and Riverside counties.

Nationally, there were fewer than 80 new death sentences, the second-lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, the center said.

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Obama Vows to Make Gun Control Priority, Put ‘Full Weight’ Behind Efforts

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President Obama on Sunday said he would make gun control a priority in his new term, pledging to put his “full weight” behind passing new restrictions on firearms in 2013.

“I’m going to be putting forward a package and I’m going to be putting my full weight behind it,” Obama said in an interview aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I’m going to be making an argument to the American people about why this is important and why we have to do everything we can to make sure that something like what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary does not happen again.”

In the wake of the Dec. 14 mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., school, the president has launched a White House task force led by Vice President Biden to present proposals in January to help stem gun violence. Obama has said that he would seek a broad approach to the problem addressing the role of violence in entertainment and measures to improve mental healthcare.

But he has also called on Congress to move quickly to reinstate the federal assault weapons ban and a ban on the sale of high-capacity magazines.

Obama on Sunday repeated those calls and said he would meet with lawmakers on both sides of the aisles to see action.

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