Remember the video of the guy in the “pimp costume” who got advice from ACORN employees on how to run his prostitution ring? Turns out the whole story was just a lie, a doctored-video smear job on an important organization. The guy never wore a “pimp costume” and the real, undoctored videos showed that ACORN employees did nothing wrong. But a lie travels around the world before the corporate media bothers to check the facts. The “news” media blasted the story everywhere, and Congress was so outraged they forced ACORN to close its doors. And here we are again.

The corporate media is blasting out the story that the IRS “targeted conservative groups.” Some in the media say there was “IRS harassment of conservative groups.” Some of the media are going so far as claiming that conservative groups were “audited.”

This story that is being repeated and treated as “true” is just not what happened at all. It is one more right-wing victimization fable, repeated endlessly until the public has no choice except t believe it.

Conservative Groups Were Not “Targeted,” “Singled Out” Or Anything Else

You are hearing that conservative groups were “targeted.” What you are not hearing is that progressive groups were also “targeted.” So were groups that are not progressive or conservative.

All that happened here is that groups applying to the IRS for special tax status were checked to see if they were engaged in political activity. They were checked, not targeted. Only 1/3 of the groups checked were conservative groups.

Once again: Only 1/3 of the groups checked were conservative groups.

Conservative groups were not “singled out,” were not “targeted” and in the end none were denied special tax status — even though many obviously should have been.

From last week’s House hearings on this:

Rep. Peter Roskam, R-IL: “How come only conservative groups got snagged?”

Outgoing acting IRS commissioner Steve Miller: “They didn’t sir. Organizations of all walks and all persuasions were pulled in. That’s shown by the fact that only 70 of the 300 organizations were tea party organizations, of the ones that were looked at by TIGTA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration].”

Bet you didn’t see that blasted all over your TV news that night.

Click here to watch the video clip of this. It’s worth it.

And from Bloomberg reporting: IRS Sent Same Letter to Democrats That Fed Tea Party Row, (emphasis added, for emphasis)

One of those groups, Emerge America, saw its tax-exempt status denied, forcing it to disclose its donors and pay some taxes. None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected. Progress Texas … faced the same lines of questioning as the Tea Party groups from the same IRS office that issued letters to the Republican-friendly applicants. A third group, Clean Elections Texas, which supports public funding of campaigns, also received IRS inquiries.

In a statement late yesterday, the tax agency said it had pooled together the politically active nonpartisan applicants — including a “minority” that were identified because of their names. “It is also important to understand that the group of centralized cases included organizations of all political views,” the IRS said in its statement.

Again, for emphasis: “It is also important to understand that the group of centralized cases included organizations of all political views,” the IRS said in its statement.”

But no matter, its conventional wisdom now that “the IRS targeted conservative groups.” And it’s very useful to the right if people believe this. But it just is not true. (If you want to see conventional wisdom at work watch this clip from the most recent Saturday Night Live.)

What Did Happen?

Here’s the story. After the “Citizen’s United” decision allowed unlimited corporate money into elections there was a flood of applications to get special tax status that allowed an organization to hide its donors from the public, and in some cases even be tax-exempt. But the rules say that political groups can’t get this special tax status. The IRS has to check out applications for tax status to see if it is really a political group trying to sneak in to a special tax status.

Because they were flooded and couldn’t check out every applying organization, the IRS group looked for things in the applications that “flagged” an organization as a possibly a political group. These flagged applications were then passed along to specialists to look deeper and determine if they were legit or not.

So What Was The “Wrongdoing”?

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) has issued a full report: Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review that looked into the accusation that the IRS “targeted” tea party groups that were applying for special tax status for extra scrutiny. The report is not all that long. You should read it. (Apparently most the people you are hearing from in the media haven’t read it.)

According to the report, the swamped IRS group involved in this came up with ways — “criteria” — to identify groups that really needed to be checked further because it was possible they might be engaged in the kind of political activity that would exclude them from getting the special tax status. (The rules for what constitutes political activity that would keep a group for getting special tax status are, to say the least, not clear. See the PS below.) Some groups were chosen to receive the required scrutiny because they had “political-sounding” names. Some of the “political-sounding names” included the words “tea party.” Others included “We the People” and “Take Back the Country.” (The IG report does not disclose if or which other “political sounding names” were also used as criteria.)

And the other problem was that the scrutiny these groups received involved some “unnecessary, burdensome questions.”

That was the extent of the wrongdoing. At a time when they couldn’t give all applying groups the necessary scrutiny they used criteria that included the names of an applying group to decide if it would get the required scrutiny. And they asked “unnecessary, burdensome questions.” That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Normally all groups applying for special tax status would and should all get looked at to see if they were really political groups. In this case no groups received any extra scrutiny as has been accused, instead many received less than usual. No group was “singled out” or “targeted” for extra scrutiny, instead they were not given the free pass others were getting because of the overload of applicants.

The IG report concluded that it was wrong to use a group’s name as a criteria to help determine if an applicant would be checked out at a time when there were so many applications that every group was not being checked out. (However the IR report did say that most of the groups forwarded with this criteria in fact should have been forwarded.)

Again, that’s the wrongdoing that has triggered the absolute frenzy of outrage you are hearing from … everyone. They said it was silly to use a group’s name as criteria for deciding if they should be checked out thoroughly at a time when the IRS was too busy to thoroughly check all applications as they usually do. And they said groups filing for a special tax status but suspected of political activity were then asked “unnecessary, burdensome questions.”

And again, that’s it, That’s the whole “scandal.” That’s the whole “IRS harassing conservative groups.” That;s the whole “Obama the dictatorial tyrant going after his enemies” hissy-fit. (Pleasee read Digby’s The Art of the Hissy-Fit)

A Few Facts

Fact: The IRS is required to determine whether organizations applying for special tax status are “social welfare” groups or are instead engaged in political activity. Political groups cannot get the special tax status these groups were applying for.

Fact: Only 1/3 of the groups that were passed to specialists for a closer look were “conservative.” Lots of other organizations were also checked, including progressive organizations.

Fact: No groups were audited or harassed or “targeted” or “singled out”. This was about applications for special tax status being forwarded to specialists for a closer look to see if they were engaged in political activity that would disqualify them for the special tax status. This closer look is the kind of review all organization should get, but the IRS was swamped because of the flood of groups applying for a status that let them mask their donors, after Citizens United.

Fact: No groups were harmed. There were delays while the groups were checked to see if they should have special tax status. That’s it. But the rules are that they are allowed to operate as if they had that status while they waited for official approval.

Fact: The only groups actually denied special tax status were progressive groups, not conservative groups. In 2011, during the period that “conservative groups were targeted” the NY Times carried the story, 3 Groups Denied Break by I.R.S. Are Named . The three groups? Drum roll … “The I.R.S. denied tax exemption to the groups — Emerge Nevada, Emerge Maine and Emerge Massachusetts — because, the agency wrote in denial letters, they were set up specifically to cultivate Democratic candidates.”

Fact: The IRS commissioner in charge at the IRS at the time this happened was appointed President George W. Bush.

Fact: According to the IG Report (p. 10) in the “majority of cases, we agreed that the applications submitted included indications of significant political campaign intervention.”

Other scandals?

The stage for this story to take off at this time was set by other “scandals” in the news. The scandal frenzy began when ABC News’ Jonathan Karl falsely reported that White House emails had “taken out” “all references to al Queda and all references to CIA warnings before the attack about the terror threat in Benghazi.” He said that these emails “show that many of these changes were directed by Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson …”

Click here to see the video of this report.

But a couple of days later CNN broke the news that the emails Karl used for his ABC report were edited by Republicans to make it appear they said these things. Parts of the edited emails Karl used were “inaccurate” and “invented” to make the administration and State Department look bad. (The word “fabricated” comes to mind.)

Next came a story that the Justice Department had looked at records of AP reporters to see who in the administration had leaked a story. The story was that an informer high up in al Queda in Yemen had delivered a new kind of bomb to target airliners, while the government was still analyzing how to detect it and the informer was still in Yemen. The Justice Department looked at call records — phone numbers only — to see if they cold spot who had called AP. This became a “scandal” with accusations that the government was “wiretapping” reporters and “secretly monitoring” or “listening in” on their calls — with the “scandal” gaining traction with its conjunction with the “Benghazi scandal” story promoted by ABC.

Driving Right-Wing Themes Out To Wider Audiences

It is worth noting that Jonathan Karl is a graduate of a conservative-movement “media training” program, the Collegiate Network. The significance of this is explained by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), in A Right-Wing Mole at ABC News: Jonathan Karl and the success of the conservative media movement,

Conservatives don’t just complain loudly, endlessly and inaccurately about liberal media bias. They also train right-leaning journalists to make their way into the supposedly hostile terrain of Beltway media. And one of the most famous alums of a conservative media training program is now a major star at a network news outlet: ABC’s senior political correspondent Jonathan Karl.

Karl came to mainstream journalism via the Collegiate Network, an organization primarily devoted to promoting and supporting right-leaning newspapers on college campuses – such as the Rutgers paper launched by the infamous James O’Keefe. The network, founded in 1979, is one of several projects of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which seeks to strengthen conservative ideology on college campuses. William F. Buckley was the ISI’s first president, and the current board chair is American Spectator publisher Alfred Regnery. Several leading right-wing pundits came out of Collegiate-affiliated papers, including Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry and Laura Ingraham.

ABC’s Jonathan Karl is also one of the reporters driving the “IRS scandal” story to a wider audience, with on-air reports like “Document Draft Shows IRS Targeted Conservative Groups,” “IRS IG Report: Targeting Conservatives Began In 2010,” “IRS Scandal Spreads Wider Than Cincinnati Officers” and more such stories, usually with inflammatory headlines and sensationalist scandal-hyping story lines.

The Daou Triangle

In 2005 Peter Daou wrote a widely-discussed paper describing how the right’s media machine works to drive false stories and smears out to wide audiences. In THE TRIANGLE: Limits of Blog Power Daou described how “a triangle of blogs, media, and the political establishment” worked together to “generate the critical mass necessary to alter or create conventional wisdom.” “…it’s still the Russerts and Broders and Gergens and Finemans, the WSJ, WaPo and NYT editorial pages, the cable nets, Stewart and Letterman and Leno, and senior elected officials, who play a pivotal role in shaping people’s political views.”

Describing a triangle of “netroots + media + party establishment = CW,” (netroots = “the base” and CW means “conventional wisdom”), Daou explained how they work together,

“…a well-developed echo chamber and superior top-down discipline, the right has a much easier time forming the triangle. Fox News, talk radio, Drudge, a well-trained and highly visible punditocracy, and a lily-livered press corps takes care of the media side of the triangle. Iron-clad party loyalty – with rare exceptions – and a willingness of Republican officials to jump on the Limbaugh-Hannity bandwagon du jour takes care of the party establishment side of the triangle. “

The Daou triangle described how Republican politicians work in concert with the echo chamber to turn false stories into “conventional wisdom.” One the progressive-aligned side? Not so much. Daou again,

Whereas rightwing bloggers can rely on their leadership and the rightwing noise machine to build the triangle, left-leaning bloggers face the challenge of a mass media consumed by the shop-worn narrative of Bush the popular, plain-spoken leader, and a Democratic Party incapacitated (for the most part) by the focus-grouped fear of turning off “swing voters” by attacking Bush. For the progressive netroots, the past half-decade has been a Sisyphean loop of scandal after scandal melting away as the media and party establishment remain disengaged.

Six years later Doau wrote an update, How the Democratic establishment shunned the left, spawned the Tea Party and moved America right. From Daou’s follow-up piece,

At the root of the problem is this: the GOP benefits from a superior communications mechanism with which to shape and reshape conventional wisdom. Faced with a public that holds opposing views, politicians can either change their positions to match the public’s views or change the public’s views to match their positions — Republicans almost always choose the latter, bolstered by a highly sophisticated framing and messaging infrastructure crafted and funded over decades.

… On the other side you have the Democratic establishment, political leaders, pollsters and strategists who, by and large, are poll addicts, chronically incapable of taking principled stands, obsessed with appealing to independent voters, hostile to progressive advocates, often just as captive to moneyed interests as their Republican counterparts. …

[. . .] So the brashest, loudest, most confident-sounding voices end up filling the knowledge void, voices that sound authoritative and principled. Rush Limbaugh, for instance. Or Sarah Palin. Sean Hannity. Ann Coulter. Bill O’Reilly.

Echoing these blaring ‘voices of authority’ are Republican politicians and the right’s online denizens. Conservative pundits and columnists then lend it all an air of seriousness. And the media, desperately seeking to appear “fair,” give an uncritical national platform to those voices. Not to mention Fox News, which pipes a steady stream of propaganda into millions of American homes. The triangle of establishment, media, and Internet comes together on the right and conventional wisdom is created. Pollsters then dutifully register that shift in sentiment and the media regurgitate it. A virtuous loop for the right.

There’s simply nothing comparable on the Democratic side.

If anything, in the debt debate, President Obama and leading Democrats were part of the Republican triangle, reinforcing GOP talking points and running roughshod over a country that didn’t even agree with the conservative position.

But The President “Admitted It”

Daou’s last point is key. While Republican politicians work with the conservative movement’s propaganda outlets, often Democratic politicians also echo Republican messages. In the case of the “IRS scandal” the President did just that, saying that what happened was “intolerable” and firing the acting IRS commissioner. This validated and propelled the false message that the IRS had “targeted” conservative outlets for “harassment” instead of refuting the accusations with facts. And this admission served to validate by proxy the other false right-wing scandal accusations about Benghazi and “wiretapping reporters.”

This is not the first time the Obama administration was taken in by false stories originating at right-wing propaganda outlets before the real facts were known. Van Jones had to leave the Obama administration after Glenn Beck accused him of being a “communist” and other right-wing sites accused him of being a “9/11 Truther.” Shirley Sherrod was fired from the Department of Agriculture after the Breitbart (the same website that had showed the doctored ACORN videos) posted doctored video that made it appear she had made racist remarks — even though the full video later showed the opposite to be true.

The great Brad Blog tells these stories, in IRS ‘Scandal’ Appears Nearly as Phony as Shirley Sherrod, Van Jones, ACORN ‘Scandals’,

… if you listened only to the corporate media, you — like the Obama Administration — also probably thought that the phony, trumped-up “scandals” that led to the inappropriate firing of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, the cowardly firing of White House green jobs adviser Van Jones and the outrageous federal defunding of ACORN were also the unhappy result of an endemic culture of corruption by the Obama Administration, the Democratic Party and its insidious political apparatchiks.

Those fake scandals, however, all three of them, were shams. They were eventually identified as such, though only after a great deal of harm to Sherrod, Jones and ACORN had already been done by the Democrats who fell for them and acted out of knee-jerk and cowardly fear to try and contain the perception of “scandal” which was, naturally, helped along by the very loud misreporting of “the nightly news”.

A Teachable Moment

This is a teachable moment — to US — to recognize how the right’s machine operates, to see how the corporate media and DC Democrats react, and to learn not to get taken in by it. This is what they do. We shouldn’t fall for it — again and again. Remember, it was DC Democrats who were taken in by right-wing smear operations, responding by defunding ACORN and censuring MoveOn.

These “scandals” are intended to distract us from the important stories that are unfolding around us, and obstruct the Obama administration from being able to accomplish anything more. For example, one unfolding story is how Senate Republicans are obstructing all attempts to get the government functioning and the economy recovering. By obstructing the NLRB and Labor Dept. nominations, they are preventing the government from being able to enforce laws and rules that enable people to organize and bargain for better wages and benefits. By filibustering laws like last year’s Bring Jobs Home Act and The American Jobs Act they are keeping us from growing the economy and rebuilding our infrastructure, and from preventing the offshoring of jobs. By using hostage-taking tactics with the debt ceiling they are forcing cuts in programs that help people and grow the economy.

This is where our attention should be focused.

PS – A Note About The Law VS The Rules For Groups APplying For Special Tax Status

While researching this post I came across something interesting about the kind of special-tax-status organization that is allowed to do political work while masking its donors. This is called a 501 (c) (4) organization, often just called a “C4.” According to the IRS,

The statute: IRC 501(c)(4) provides, in part, for the exemption from federal income taxation of civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.

The IRS regulation, or “interpretation” of the law: Section 1.501(c)(4)-1(a)(2)(i) of the Income Tax Regulations states that an organization will be considered to be operated exclusively for social welfare purposes if it is primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the people of the community, i.e. primarily for the purpose of bringing about civic betterments and social improvements.

Note the shift from “exclusively” to “primarily.” These words have VERY different meanings. While the law says these “social welfare” organizations cannot engage in what is called political intervention, the IRS “interprets” this to mean that up to 49% of their activity can.

Recently the NY Times explained some of the ambiguity this difference creates, in Uneven I.R.S. Scrutiny Seen in Political Spending by Big Tax-Exempt Groups,

The tax code states that 501(c)(4)’s must operate “exclusively” to promote social welfare, a category that excludes political spending. Some court decisions have interpreted that language to mean that a minimal amount of political spending would be permissible. But the I.R.S. has for years maintained that groups meet that rule as long as they are not “primarily engaged” in election work, a substantially different threshold.

Nowhere do the rules specify what “primarily engaged” means, though there are indications that the agency has begun to re-examine the question. In March, the I.R.S. began sending out questionnaires to roughly 1,300 tax-exempt organizations, including some 501(c)(4)s, regarding their political lobbying and other activities. The agency has said it is merely seeking a clearer picture of how tax-exempt groups operate to ensure better compliance.

So all of those smear ads you see at election time, and no one knows who is paying for them? THAT is the difference between the law and this “interpretation” of the law. This “interpretation” of a law that requires groups with special tax status to operate “exclusively” for the social welfare is used to mask the corporate and billionaire donors and enable the smear ads that are destroying our civility and democracy.

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There was a time when a $200+ billion reduction in the federal budget deficit would have been big news and hailed as a singular achievement worthy of either fiscal sainthood or a dance-on-the-table party…or both.

Yet yesterday’s Congressional Budget Office report showing that the fiscal 2013 federal deficit will be $642 billion, $203 billion less than CBO’s previous estimate of $845 billion, did not create any spontaneous cannonizations or celebrations. It also didn’t change the still-stalemated and crisis-oriented federal budget debate by even a small amount.

The bottomline: It’s in almost no one’s interest to be happy about the budget news that should have made everyone happier.

Here’s why.

1. The $642 billion estimate is indeed an overwhelming reduction from the 2009 $1.4 deficit and a substantial change from CBO’s February projection. But it is also $642 billion more than no deficit at all. That means that all sides in the budget debate will still be able to use even this much lower number to “prove” whatever point they were making before the new estimate was released.

2. The White House couldn’t take a victory lap because anything it said would have been mischaracterized by congressional Republicans as the president supporting a $600+ billion deficit.

3. Even though they could take some credit for keeping the sequester in place and, therefore, lowering spending, the congressional Republican leadership couldn’t take a victory lap because that would have been taken by some tea partiers as an indication that the speaker and majority leader were not going to demand additional reductions.

4. There’s anything but universal agreement among economists that reducing the deficit in the current economic environment is the right fiscal policy and, therefore, that the reduction in the deficit is good news. Given the still-slow corporate and consumer spending, the continuing cutbacks by state and local governments and the continuing economic problems around the word that are limiting trade with the U.S., Americas austerity-like fiscal policy that has been in place for several years may well be the exact wrong plan at this time.

5. The year-by-year deficit is quickly being replaced by the national debt as the number one fiscal issue. This isn’t surprising: the deficit is falling while the debt is rising and the deficit is in billions while the debt is in trillions. The fact that CBO projects the debt will soon be in a range that most economists would call insignificant makes no difference when the multi-trillion dollar debt sounds so scary.

6. In the wake of the report, the deficit hawk groups are still saying that the deficit is as much of a problem as it was before and pushing for a grand bargain. This too isn’t a surprise. After all, these groups would have less reason for being and far less ability to raise funds if the deficit didn’t exist as an issue.

7. Although the CBO forecasts show the deficit falling from 2013 to 2015, it also shows it rising in nominal terms each year thereafter. Even though that is far less meaningful than the deficit as a percent of GDP, which stays in the low 3.5 percent range, it still allows everyone to cherry-pick the results that best “prove” what they want to say.

So…Do the new CBO numbers mean that there won’t be a fight this fall over the debt ceiling and a continuing resolution? Absolutely not.

Originally published at Capital Gains and Games.

Yesterday I wrote about how obstructionist Republican tactics are hollowing out our government, hobbling its agencies, and diminishing its responsiveness to the needs and concerns of ordinary Americans. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our court system, where Republican obstructionism may have far-reaching, disastrous consequences for public policy. And, again, that’s just fine with Republicans.

With 82 empty seats in our federal district and appellate courts, nearly 10 percent of federal judicial seats are vacant, and have been since President Obama took office. That’s the longest period of judicial vacancies in 35 years. Judicial vacancies have increased 51 percent since President Obama took office, compared to declining by 65 percent and 34 percent under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively.

To make matters worse, 40 percent of those vacancies are in districts that have been declared “judicial emergencies” — where vacancies have persisted for 18 months or more, and the hundreds of backlogged cases wait for someone to rule on them. Businesses and individuals wait longer for their claims to be resolved.

In the 35 circuits/districts declared “judicial emergencies,” people are literally waiting for justice, and often end up settling for something less. Since federal judges must give priority to criminal cases (which have increased by 70% in the past ten years), they’re forced to delay civil cases for years. According to a People for the American Way fact sheet, “Overloaded Courts, Not Enough Judges: The Impact on Real People,” that means longer delays for Americans seeking justice in cases involving:

• discrimination
• civil rights
• predatory lending practices
• consumer fraud
• immigrant rights
• environment
• government benefits
• business contracts
• mergers
• copyright infringement

For Dave Calder, in Utah, it meant a long wait for justice after a faulty gas can exploded in his trailer, killing his daughter and leaving him with severe burns over a third of his body. He sued in 2007. His medical bills reached $200,000 during the 4 1/2 years that passed before the case reached a jury verdict.

For Elizabeth and Nicholas Power, in Illinois, it mean settling for far less, after suing their employer for sex discrimination in 2008. By the time the case finally reached jury selection in 2011, the judge had to halt the trial in order to deal with a growing docket of criminal cases. The Powers settled the case, rather than continue to wait for a trial

It’s not that there aren’t nominees waiting. There are 22 judicial nominees just waiting for Senate confirmation. Their confirmations would fill 1/4 of the vacancies on the bench, and increase diversity of the federal (9 are women.) Of the 22 nominees, 13 were unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and 15 are waiting for Senate floor votes. (The rest are still waiting for hearings.)

Judicial nominees are probably in for a long wait. Some may sail through committee, but just about all them can expect long waits. In fact, President Obama’s judicial nominees have waited much, much longer than those of his predecessors. Obama’s judicial nominees wait an average of 116 days for a floor vote in the Senate, compared to an average wait of 34 days for President George W. Bush’s nominees.

That’s just the average. Some waiting periods are “above average.”

• Richard Taranto waited 484 days to be confirmed to the Federal Circuit Court, by a 91-0 vote.
• William Kayatta waited 300 days to be confirmed for the First Circuit from Maine, 88-12.
• Robert Bacharach waited 263 days to be confirmed to the United States Court of Appeals, 93-0.
• Patty Schwartz waited 18 months to be confirmed to the United States Court of Appeals last month, after the president nominated her in October 2011.

It’s not that the Senate has not confirmed President Obama’s nominees. It’s just confirming fewer than it has under previous administrations; just 160 during Obama’s first term, compared to 200 during Bill Clinton’s fist term and 205 During George W. Bush’s first term. Late last year, the Senate went into recess without any action on 19 non-controversial nominees with support from both parties.

In just four years, judicial vacancies are up, confirmations are down, and delays are longer. What gives?

To hear Republican Senators tell it, the White House is at fault for presenting fewer nominees, due to time-consuming background checks and an incredibly extensive vetting process. But despite those factors, the president isn’t far behind his predecessors. Obama offered 215 nominations in his first term, compared to 247 in Bill Clinton’s first term, and 231 in George W. Bush’s first term.

It’s not up to the president alone to nominate potential judges. Senators have always had a role in the process. Republicans have simply refused to participate in recommending potential nominees.

On its face, the absence of nominees would appear to be a sign that President Barack Obama is slacking. After all, he is responsible for nominating judges, and he did put forward fewer nominees at the end of his first term than his two predecessors. But a closer look at data on judicial nominees, and conversations with people involved in the nomination process, reveals the bigger problem is Republican senators quietly refusing to recommend potential judges in the first place.

The process for moving judicial nominees is simple enough. A president takes the lead on circuit court nominees, while, per longstanding tradition, a senator kickstarts the process for district court nominees, which make up the bulk of the federal court system. Senators make recommendations from their home states, and the president works with them to get at least some of the nominees confirmed — the idea being that senators, regardless of party, are motivated to advocate for nominees from their states. The White House may look at other nominees on its own, but typically won’t move forward without input from the corresponding senators. Once a nominee is submitted to the Senate, he or she receives a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee. If approved, the nomination heads to the Senate floor for a full vote.

According to a fact sheet from the Alliance for Justice, the majority of judicial vacancies without nominees are in states with one or more Republican senators (24 in states with two Republican senators, 17 in states with 1 Republican and one Democratic senator). Some of those states, like Texas and Arizona, have judicial vacancies that have been open for more than 1,000 days, without their Republican senators recommending potential nominees.

In total, 25 of the 61 vacancies without nominees are in states with two Republican senators, and another 14 are in states with one Republican senator and one Democratic senator. Seventeen are in states with two Democratic senators, and the remaining five are in other districts. That means many of the vacancies without nominees can be traced back to Senate Republicans who just aren’t participating in the process — a reality that flies in the face of Republicans’ chief complaint that Obama isn’t putting forward enough judicial nominees.

“It’s disingenuous at best for Republicans to complain about the number of judicial vacancies without nominees when Republicans themselves are responsible for the majority of those vacancies,” said Michelle Schwartz, director of Justice Programs for Alliance for Justice. “Nearly two-thirds of the vacancies without nominees are in states with at least one Republican senator, most of whom have consistently refused to work with the White House in good faith to identify qualified candidates.”

It’s not hard to figure out what Senate Republicans are up to here. Some of it’s just good old fashioned “payback,” for Democrats blocking nominations during the George W. Bush administration. But a big part of it is about blocking Obama’s effort to shift the rightward tilt of our courts, starting with powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where four vacancies leave the second-most-powerful court in the country with a Republican majority. Republicans blocked Obama’s previous nominee for 2 1/2 years, before the nomination was finally withdrawn.

President Obama has pressed senators from both parties in recent weeks to confirm a new federal judge for one of the country’s most powerful courts, using an aggressive strategy to campaign for a judicial nominee whom White House officials consider a potentially crucial figure in boosting the president’s second-term agenda.

The effort reflects a new White House effort to tilt in its favor the conservative-dominated U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is one notch below the Supreme Court and considers many challenges to executive actions.

… Giving liberals a greater say on the D.C. Circuit is important for Obama as he looks for ways to circumvent the Republican-led House and a polarized Senate on a number of policy fronts through executive order and other administrative procedures.

The D.C. Circuit, with four Republican and three Democratic appointees, has four vacancies. It proved an obstacle for Obama during his first term – blocking proposed rules, for instance, to curb interstate air pollution and enhance cigarette labeling. The court also has put on hold dozens of cases relating to rules on workers’ rights, and it has challenged the president’s authority to name recess appointees.

For working Americans and their families, vacancies and the conservative majority on the D.C. Circuit Court has serious consequences. In January of this year, the conservative majority on the D.C. Circuit Court ruled that President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were invalid. The president resorted to the recess appointments after Republicans blocked nominations, to keep the NLRB from issuing rulings. In March, the court’s conservative majority overturned an NRLB requirement that employers put up posters explaining to workers that they have a right to unionize, because it violated employers “freedom of speech.”

Naturally, Republicans want to keep the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia stacked with conservatives.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is known for its conservative leanings. Republicans like it this way and have filibustered nominations of non-conservative-movement nominees to the court. Now four seats are vacant. An April editorial in the Washington Post, Republicans’ D.C. Circuit barricade, explains,

LAST MONTH Senate Republicans unjustifiably blocked an up-or-down confirmation vote on Caitlin J. Halligan, nominated by President Obama to fill one of four empty spots on one of the country’s top courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Despite her impeccable credentials and the support of conservative legal luminaries, only a single Republican voted to break a GOP filibuster.

Again, Republicans are keeping four seats on this court vacant in order to keep these kinds of rulings coming.

In their continued efforts to block President Obama from doing what voters elected him to do — and what they failed to convince voters to elect them to do — Republicans are courting disaster for million of Americans, by keeping our nations courts and government agencies running on empty.

Yesterday, in response to recent IRS admissions, President Obama called the enhanced investigation of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status “intolerable and inexcusable.”  And, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a criminal investigation into the allegations against the IRS.  But both of them are missing the point.

The scandal here is not that political groups were targeted by the IRS, it’s the fact that political groups are being subsidized by John Q. Taxpayer.  Groups that are politically motivated, and not really “social welfare” organizations, shouldn’t receive preferential tax treatment in the first place – regardless of their political affiliation.

A report by the Inspector General stated that “ineffective management” at the IRS allowed conservative groups to be targeted for over 18 months, and resulted in substantial delays in the processing of their non-profit applications.  But, the real “ineffective management” here was Congress’s failure to regulate these organizations, and enforce transparency.  And, what’s truly “intolerable and inexcusable” is the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizen United decision, which opened the campaign-finance floodgates in the first place.

The IRS shouldn’t be apologizing for investigating phony “nonprofit” organizations, they should be investigating all politically-motivated groups who want to be subsidized by the taxpayers.  Congress has repeatedly rejected campaign finance reform, and Citizens United moved oversight from the Federal Elections Commission to the IRS.   It’s impossible to create and enforce reasonable guidelines based on an unreasonable Supreme Court decision.

The only way to really fix this problem is to amend our Constitution to say that money isn’t speech, and corporations aren’t people.  Let’s make it happen.  Join the fight at MoveToAmend.org.

Originally posted at ThomHartmann.com.

On Thursday, House Republicans have scheduled a vote on a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Haven’t they already done that, you ask? Yes, they have, in one form or another, 36 times since it has been enacted. This week’s vote would make 37.

It’s gotten to the point that today the director of the Congressional Budget Office, which is tasked with the job of informing Congress of the budgetary impact of the bills it is considering, said in a letter it didn’t have time to go through the exercise for the 37th time.

One reason, the letter noted, is that “there are hundreds of provisions in the ACA and those provisions are already in various stages of implementation.”

These provisions in effect now include the elimination of lifetime medical benefit limits, requirements that insurance companies cover children under 19 regardless of preexisting conditions, the ability of people up to age 26 to remain on their parents’ health plan, coverage for preventative care, the shrinkage of the notorious Medicare “doughnut hole,” and constraints on how high insurance premiums can increase relative to what they actually pay out in health care claims. In the works are the creation of health-care exchanges, which as early as October will allow people to compare and buy insurance plans online.

The latest CBO letter notes that the last time it did an analysis of the cost of repealing the Affordable Care Act last July, the costs to the federal government outweighed the savings by $100 billion. The raw numbers may have changed somewhat since then, but the bottom line hasn’t. A House Republican caucus obsessed with lowering the deficit keeps voting for a bill that would increase the deficit.

There is one thing that the House could do this week instead that so far the Republican leadership is refusing to touch: vote on a budget. The Senate passed its version of a fiscal 2013 federal budget on March 23, two days after the House passed its version. House and Senate leaders were next supposed to designate conferees to iron out the considerable differences between the two budgets. But it has been 53 days, and House Republicans have yet to move forward to appoint conferees so that budget discussions could begin.

The failure of Democrats to pass a budget on time was a favorite GOP talking point. Now that the Democrats have put forward its vision of the country’s priorities and how they should be paid for, House Republicans have shown no real interest in doing what it was elected to do: come to an agreement with Democrats on how the country can move forward. Their recent gambit is to insist on a “framework” for a budget deal before the actual dealing – but that’s not how the process should work. That negotiate-the-negotiation tactic is surely their way of refusing to engage with the Senate on the loophole-closings for high-income earners and corporations that are in the Senate bill. Much better to cast a meaningless vote to repeal Obamacare than to struggle to find agreement on the federal budget.

Two numbers to remember: 37 votes to repeal Obamacare, 53 days and counting without a House agreement to negotiate on the 2014 federal budget. That should tell you a lot about today’s House Republicans and the source of dysfunction in Washington.

Republicans in Congress have a new tactic for shrinking government: making sure that nobody’s there to run it. Well into the president’s second term, an alarming and unprecedented number of vital positions in every branch of government remain vacant. As Republicans use and abuse processes that helped government run smoothly once upon a time not so very long ago, government grinds to a halt, and the consequences trickle down to Main Street America. And apparently that’s just fine with Republicans.

As President Obama settles into his second term, a number of presidentially-appointed positions that require Senate confirmation remain vacant – more than were vacant at the end of Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s first terms in office. Of the 68 positions that remained vacant at the end of Obama’s first term in office, 43 had been vacant for more than a year. Those vacancies, spread across several agencies, have the effect of nearly bringing government to a griding halt. Agencies operating under acting directors, without fully authorized leadership, effectively operate in “stand-down mode”

The lack of appointed leaders can create problems. Too many vacancies can put agencies “in stand-down, waiting for policymakers to show up,” said Terry Sullivan, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina who has studied appointments.

Acting heads of agencies “don’t make any big decisions,” said Cal Mackenzie, a professor of government at Colby College who has studied appointments since the 1970s. “Your authority is not going to be recognized in the same way a Senate-confirmed appointee is going to be recognized.”

Therein lies the problem. In a 2010 Brookings Institution paper titled “A Half-Empty Government Can’t Govern: Why Everyone Wants to Fix the Appointments Process, Why It Never Happens, and How We Can Get It Done,” E.J. Dionne and William A. Galston describe a system clogged by abuses of the Senate confirmation process, and end up weakening both the executive and legislative branches, and alter the very structure of our government.

Abuses of the confirmation process, far from strengthening the executive’s accountability to the legislative branch, instead call forth ever more creative executive actions to get around Congressional scrutiny. And that creativity has, in turn, led to an executive branch potentially weaker and less able to control and influence the departments and agencies it depends on to implement its policies.

Without any formal Constitutional change, the very structure of the American government is being altered. A confirmation process designed to safeguard Congress’ prerogatives has, in important ways, undermined them.

As we know all too well by now, Senators wield considerable power over confirmations. Individual Senators can single-handedly shut down the whole “terrible, horrible, no-good Senate confirmation process” by placing “holds” on confirmations, which amount to “silent filibusters” that prevent a vote unless the Senate can round of a two-thirds majority and squeeze in time for debate. Republicans have used such “holds,” and exploited every trick in the book to keep block President Obama’s nominees.

Most recently, Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee refused to even show up for a vote on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection agency. Republicans resorted to the parliamentary equivalent of holding their breath, because they claimed McCarthy failed to comply with their “very reasonable” request that she answer over 1,000 questions (a record number, which The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky labeled “the new McCarthyism.” ). Republicans notified Democrats 30 minutes before the hearing that they would not show up to hear the answers they complained about getting.

(McCarthy’s not alone. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew received 444 questions from senators before his confirmation; more than the last seven nominees combined.)

The Republican’s “boycott” of McCarthy Hearing was merely a tactic employed in the service of the underlying GOP agenda: making sure the EPA could not fulfill its mission. Republicans aren’t going to confirm McCarthy unless she stoops to answer their questions about the “underlying data used to justify EPA’s job-killing regulations,” and promises to force the EPA to subject everything it does to a “business-friendly analysis,” and force the agency to undertake a “whole economy” cost-benefit analysis of its rules and regulations. The result would be enough bureaucratic red tape to ensure that the EPA did almost nothing else. By insisting on conditions that no nominee to head the agency is likely to agree to, the GOP could ensure that the EPA operates in “stand-down” mode for the duration of Obama’s presidency.

The vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board are another example of how GOP obstructionist tactics are impacting government.

After President Obama took office anti-union Senators rolled out a strategy of blocking confirmation of any appointees to the NLRB to keep the agency from having a quorum so it could not operate.

In 2010 the anti-union judges on the Supreme Court ruled that the NLRB could not issue rulings without at least three confirmed members.

Anti-union Senators continued to block confirmations to the NLRB.

In January, 2012 President Obama made recess appointments to the NLRB to enable it to operate again.

In January, 2013 anti-union judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) were unconstitutional.

(As Dave’s post points out, the courts play a huge role in this, Republican obstruction of court appointments has far-reaching implications that are better addressed in a separate post.)

The list of top-level vacancies is long and disturbing.

• The IRS has been without an appointed commissioner since last November, when Bush administration holdover Douglas Shulman resigned.
• A quarter of the senior positions at the State Department remain unfilled.
• Republicans blocked President Obama’s appointees to Election Assistance Commission — an agency charged with helping Americans vote, and which Republicans wanted to do away with in 2011.
• The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services hasn’t had a director since 2006, and still doesn’t since Republicans blocked a vote on Donald Berwick’s nomination. (Obama managed a recess appointment for Berwick, who has since resigned.)
• A hearing on Tom Perez’s nomination as Secretary of Labor was postponed after Republicans threatened to invoke an obscure procedural rule to stop the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee from meeting. The move was driven purely by objections to Perez’s “ideological background.”
• Republicans are attempting to sabotage health care reform by refusing to offer Republican nominees to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, charged with achieving savings in Medicare without sacrificing quality.

Without a presidentially-appointed, Senate confirmed director, the EPA can’t effectively fulfill its mission to “protect human health and the environment.” The NRLB cannot effectively safeguard “employees’ rights to organize and to determine whether to have unions as their bargaining representative, if it lacks enough members to operate. Health Care Reform can’t be fully implemented, and thus can’t help 32 million uninsured Americans, if the agencies that must implement it are without leaders who have the authority to set policy.

All of this is just fine with Republicans in Congress. Keeping government running on empty by keeping offices vacant, through ongoing obstruction of presidential nominees, is a tactic that serves the conservative agenda.

It’s not that the GOP is “no longer a serious partner in governing,” as a New York Times editorial put it. That which Republicans didn’t win the right to govern last November, they have resolved to make ungovernable. But Republicans aren’t just disrupting the agenda that won President Obama a second term. By keeping vital government positions vacant, they are implementing an un-mandated shrinking of government.

Conservatives have always said that government doesn’t work, when they really believe that it shouldn’t work. Given enough power to do so, once elected they set about making damn sure government can’t work. And, like I said earlier, government can’t work if there’s nobody around to run it.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first of many hearings on comprehensive immigration reform.  In the seven and a half hour hearing, senators debated 32 of the three hundred proposed amendments to the bill, and adopted 21 of the changes.  The proposals ranged from plans to correct technical immigration issues, to Sen. Ted Cruz’s amendment to triple the number of border control agents, to Sen. Jeff Sessions’ proposal to construct a 700 mile, double-layered fence along our Southern border.

Thankfully, most of the extreme amendments were voted down, but there’s still cause for concern over the proposals they accepted.  One of the most contentious changes was Republican Senator Chuck Grassley’s  mandate, that the Department of Homeland Security submit a plan to stop 90 percent of illegal border crossings in high-risk areas, before undocumented individuals already living here can even apply for so-called “provisional immigrant” status.  This provision is only slightly better than Grassley’s rejected, poison-pill amendment, which set unattainable benchmarks that DHS had to meet before any pathway to citizenship would be considered.

After losing the Hispanic vote in the 2012 election, Republicans have attempted to paint themselves as pro-immigration, but it’s all an act.  The racist and unrealistic GOP amendments in this legislation show they have no real desire to fix our nation’s immigration system.  As the Senate Judiciary Committee debates the hundreds of remaining amendments over the coming months, we must prevent these poison-pill provisions from making immigration reform meaningless.  Call your Senators and tell them to fight these poison-pill amendments, and support provisions that actually fix our broken immigration system.

Earlier this week, I noted that the Republican plan to take the debt limit hostage to demand unspecified tax reform at a future date was too ridiculous to be believed.

But that battle plan looks like the Invasion of Normandy compared to the latest Keystone Kops scheme the Republicans floated to Politico today: hold the debt limit hostage for the “kitchen sink” full of “conservative goodies.”

The plan is simple: craft a debt ceiling hike onto a bill loaded with tons of conservative goodies to put lots of options on the table to garner 218 GOP votes.

Options being floated internally include language approving the Keystone XL pipeline, slashing regulations with the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act and additional spending cuts — perhaps even a framework for tax reform.

To make it even more attractive to voters back home, they’d frame it as a so-called job-creation bill. Basically, anything they could say creates jobs has a chance of landing in this legislative package.

There’s also real effort from the right — supported by leadership — to forestall Obama’s health care law in the fight to lift the debt ceiling.

To call this absurd would be an insult to Absurdists.

For Republicans to actually hold the debit limit hostage, threatening the stability of the entire global economy, for a slapdash wingnut wish list that has nothing to do with debt is the political equivalent of suicide by cop — an entire party running out of the house, waving weapons frantically in the air, racing into throng of armed voters in hopes of being blissfully annihilated, ending the pain and misery of actually having to govern, then buried in an unmarked grave next to the Whigs.

To repeat myself from Monday, this is so unbelievable, I don’t believe it.

Once again, we have a party leadership that deep down understands that more debt limit chicken is no path to regaining majority status (remember the Republicans temporarily suspended the debt limit in February, for fear of taking the blame for economic disaster). Yet the leadership is still stuck with a rank-and-file detached from political and policy reality, and needs to posture for as long as possible to avoid primary challenges.

Republicans are too afraid to force a real showdown over what they were claiming threatens American’s fiscal stability — Social Security and Medicare. And Republicans are too afraid to tell their right-wing base voters that we have to increase the debt limit to pay the bills Congress has already spent the money on. So they are scurrying around to come up with something, anything, to serve as a ransom.

But the public lurching from one proposed ransom to the next exposes the pathetic state of the Republican Party, incapable of unifying around a reasonable position. Politico describes the division:

The approach of slapping a number of conservative ideas together represents one pole — the other approach is embodied in what Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) is pushing toward. Camp, with the tacit support of Ryan, has been advocating tying tax reform to the debt ceiling — an approach that has drawn skeptics and supporters in GOP leadership. Conservatives are skeptical of that as well.

The last time Republicans were this divided, it was during the fiscal cliff talks. They caved then, too.

According to the Washington Post and Politico, GOP leaders are laying the groundwork to refuse any debt limit increase this year, reneging on debt payments mandated by Congress, shredding the full faith and credit of the American government, thereby plunging the global economy into the abyss, unless Washington … does some sort of unspecified revenue-neutral corporate tax reform at a future date.

Go ahead. Read that again if you wish. Try to make sense of it. You can’t.

There was at least superficial, if deeply flawed, logic regarading past Republican threats to take the debt limit hostage. If you think America is on the verge of becoming Greece, then it makes some sense for Republicans to say: we’re already on the verge of a debt crisis, so there’s no risk in threatening to expedite that crisis by pressuring Congress and the President to support budget cuts that would avert the crisis.

But to take the debt limit hostage and risk the stability of the global economy to demand something that wouldn’t cut the debt, isn’t otherwise urgently needed and isn’t being pushed by the public … is ludicrous.

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait mocked Republicans for giving up their prior demand to cut Social Security and Medicare and replacing it with something revenue-neutral: “If obtaining retirement cuts went from so urgent it was worth threatening to nuke the world economy over to ‘meh,’ the next step is to figure out the next thing to nuke the world economy over … So House Republicans are prepared to refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats agree to let them cut tax rates without increasing revenue. Their extraordinary threat, first presented as a way to force a reduction in the deficit, is now being wielded to prevent a reduction in the deficit.”

Chait deems this strategy the “gotta nuke something” philosophy of Nelson from “The Simpsons.” The Washington Post’s Jonathan Bernstein characterizes it as “extortion for extortion’s sake” because they don’t have any actual fleshed out policy ideas to pursue.

It’s unbelievable. By which I mean, I don’t believe it.

As the Washington Post originally noted, Republicans don’t want to go to mat over Social Security and Medicare because “some Republicans fear that embracing them would be political suicide.”

Chastened Republicans have been afraid of political suicide all year, prompting them to repeatedly back down from their knee-jerk threats.

In January, they flinched at the edge of the “fiscal cliff,” accepting tax increases on the top 2% for the first time since 1990. Why? Because gridlock would mean taking the blame for automatic tax increases on every taxpayer, including middle-class voters.

In February, they flinched at attaching any conditions to increasing the debt limit. Why? Because gridlock would mean taking the blame for a global economic meltdown that would condemn the party to the historical dust bin alongside the Whigs.

Granted, Republicans held the line on sequester. But as bad as the sequester is, its impact is far more diffuse and uneven than what the cliff and the debt limit would have unleashed. Sequester was the low-hanging fruit of obstruction.

But there is no reason to think Republicans are suddenly more eager to play debt limit chicken than they were three months ago. The fact that they have buried their Social Security and Medicare threat is further proof.

The switch to tax reform is most likely a desperate attempt to save face with the Tea Party right while tacitly admitting there is no alternative to raising the debt limit.

Politico reports that the not-yet-final Republican debt limit proposal would work as follows: “Legislation would authorize something like a three-month bump in the debt limit while simultaneously giving the same amount of time for the House to act on its tax-reform plan. When the House passes something, the debt limit would bet increased again, and when the Senate moves its own tax-reform product, Congress would authorize another bump in the debt ceiling. A larger increase in the borrowing limit could come if President Barack Obama signs the legislation…”

In other words, there would be three increases to the debt limit without the two parties having to agree on anything!

As the current debt limit is not expected to be reached until this fall, that timeline could well get them past the midterm elections.

This is a clear ratcheting down of the debt limit threat. Yet Republicans want to sell this to their detached-from-reality base as playing hardball.

But Politico suggests this won’t fly: “…Chris Chocola, the president of Club for Growth, said he’s concerned that the GOP has given up leverage by publicly saying that they won’t let the nation plunge into default. ‘That’s Obama and Democrats’ expectation: that they aren’t willing to breach it, so they don’t have to worry about it,’ he said.”

Republican leaders have not only previously said as much, they showed their cards in February.

You can take your yellow ribbons off the oak tree. There will be no hostages.

All of the original justifications for budget cuts have gone away. The sequester is hurting the economy and keeping unemployment high. But instead Republicans plan to double down on cuts. Apparently their real game is to force high unemployment and desperation for 99% of us to further enrich the 1%.

A continuing series
Read the full series

The Republican justification for cutting was “soaring deficits.” But with recovery and tax increases the deficits are falling dramatically, already down by half. Even so Republicans continue to say we need cuts, even though cuts hurt the economy and cause continued high unemployment.

Deficit Down By Half And Falling

The deficit is falling dramatically. The deficit is already down by 50% as a share of GDP. From See Deficit Falling Even More Dramatically, Few Know It,

Academic Support For Cutting Was Found To Be Just Wrong

The intellectual justification for Republican demands to stop government efforts to grow the economy and cut instead came from work by Harvard economists Reinhart and Rogoff. Their work claimed that government debt hurts growth, even though the historical record showed that government spending is needed to stabilize the economy at times when businesses are nit hiring and people are not spending. Scolars examined Reinhart and Rogoff’s work and found numerous errors and apparently intentional omissions, including a spreadsheet error, and found that when those problems are fixed their conclusions were reversed. There are numerous news stories explaining the whole story.

Sequester And Other Cuts Are Hurting The Economy And Costing Jobs

As a result of the budget cuts the economy is barely moving. Jobs growth is stagnant. There were cuts from previous “deals” forced by Republican hostage-taking, but the “sequester” cuts an additional $85 billion from critical programs this year and over $100 billion more each year for the next decade.

NY Times: Budget Cuts Seen as Risk to Growth of U.S. Economy,

The cuts — a result of a policy known as sequestration — most likely would reduce growth by about one-half of a percentage point in 2013, according to a range of government and private forecasters.

That could be enough to again slow the arrival of a recovery, producing instead another year of sluggish growth and high unemployment.

[. . .] The cumulative effect of the sequester and the tax deal struck in January might slash economic growth by as much as 1.25 percentage points — from a growth rate that otherwise might have been more than 3 percent — in 2013, economists estimate.

Dylan Matthews at WaPo: Yes, the sequester is hurting growth, (click through for chart)

One of the factors appears to be that the sequester, particularly the defense spending cuts, took a bigger bite out of the economic recovery than anyone expected: …

Global Post: Government spending cuts hold US Q1 growth to 2.5%,

The “sequester” spending cuts held back the US economy in the first quarter, the Commerce Department said Friday, with GDP growth coming in at a lower-than-hoped 2.5 percent for the period.

… But federal government spending, hit by the “sequester” budget cuts, continued to drag on the economy, falling 8.4 percent, enough to diminish the impact of a rebound in private-sector activity.

According to Goldman Sachs the sequester cuts and a”consumer setback” is costing us GDP growth.

Republicans Doubling Down On Demands To Cut In Spite Of Having No Justification To Cut, And The Harm Cuts Are Doing

In spite of all the evidence that cutting government now is hurting the economy and killing job growth, Repubpican are demanding even more cuts, and are preparing to use the debt-ceiling again to try to force these cuts.

AP at Daily Herald (Chicago): House GOP gears up for debt showdown this summer,

Just as they did in 2011, Republicans are demanding spending cuts in exchange for increasing the debt limit again. Republicans say it’s the only way to get Democrats to agree to significant spending cuts, and they point to the 2011 debt showdown as proof.

… “With Washington again about to hit the debt limit, we are still faced with the same old problem — getting Washington’s spending finally under control,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairmen of the Ways and Means Committee. “While Americans want Washington to start living within its means, they also know the full faith and credit of this country must never be questioned.”

Get spending “under control?” But it is under control — the deficit is down by half and falling.

What Is Real Reason For Republican Demands?

Republicans have achieved every publicly-stated goal and the deficit left behind by Bush is down by half and falling rapidly. But they continue to demand cuts anyway. Perhaps their publicly-stated justification for these terrible cuts was not their real agenda.

Very wealthy people are profiting from this austerity push. Dean Baker explains, in Deficits Are Bad and the Sun Goes Around the Earth,

…many people can profit from slow growth and high unemployment. The after-tax profit share of GDP is at its highest level more than 60 years. For those who own lots of stock and are at the top of the income ladder, times are good. These people may see efforts to lower unemployment as posing a risk. With lower unemployment workers may be able to get a larger share of productivity growth. This may be good for most of the country and mean increased economic growth, but it would mean less for the one percent.

Yes, “people can profit from slow growth and high unemployment.” And politicians are being paid to maintain the slow growth and high unemployment and other things that are driving all the income and wealth to a top few.

Repeal the sequester. Cut the deficit in good times – like Clinton did.

Click here to tell Congress: Repeal the Sequester.
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