"Successful" Lame Duck Left Middle Class in Worse Shape

Every football season, there are several games in which the winning team scores the most points despite being outplayed by the losing team in every statistical category: time on offense, yards gained, passes completed, first downs, sacks, penalties - the losing team "won" everything. Except the game.

Thus does it appear that President Obama "won" the 111th Congress because so many bills of such great significance passed both House and Senate and were signed into law.

But if you look at the points on the scoreboard - whether the middle-class is better or worse off economically than it was two years ago - the ugly truth is clear:

The Rethuglicans won.

Alex Pareene at Salon:

Even this successful-looking lame duck demonstrated how difficult it's become to do the simplest things in the world's most deliberative body. The Senate had to pass the food safety bill multiple times, because of procedural screw-ups. The 9/11 bill shrunk -- after it "failed" a vote by receiving more than 50 but fewer than 60 votes -- because one cranky senator threatened to single-handedly delay another vote until after Christmas.

The Senate just gave up on slightly difficult but necessary things, like the DREAM Act and the appropriations bill. The failure of the omnibus spending bill will have major repercussions. It means that the government can't actually act on the wonderful progressive things the Senate passed earlier this year, like healthcare reform and financial regulation. If Dodd-Frank can't be implemented, does it even matter? And the Democrats failed to even come close to passing a budget while they still controlled both houses.

Sure, the Senate approved 19 judges. 19 out of 38 pending nominations. One confirmed judge had been awaiting confirmation since January. And as part of the "deal" between Democrats and Republicans, Democrats won't even seek votes on four other pending judges. (This is the point where liberal bloggers all reminisce about the days of "straight up-or-down votes.") After two years, Obama has managed get 60 judges confirmed, which is an absurdly low number, especially for a president whose party "controls" the Senate.

Meanwhile, we've got no climate bill, no immigration reform, no budget, and no hope of improving, rather than dismantling, the healthcare reform law. This was the dying breath of a sick Congress.

Firedoglake:

There’s been a lot of good cheer about the lame duck session, and Democrats are taking victory laps. It’s possible to hold two ideas in your head at once. You can acknowledge that this lame duck has been more productive and cleared out more legislation left for dead than most people thought possible, and you can chalk that up to any number of reasons – a new aggressiveness for Democrats, Republican moderates turning on their party, whatever.

You can also acknowledge that on the biggest issues of the session – tax policy and government funding – the Republicans got their way, and set the stage for the 112th Congress that should feature major spending cuts. In the process, Democrats did not even bother to get important government functions funded, including money for the implementation of their top two legislative achievements, health care and financial reform.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has stopped hiring and halted most travel by agency officials.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to nations like Pakistan is held up, as are American contributions to global health and emergency food programs.

A systems upgrade by the Internal Revenue Service to improve electronic data-keeping and speed tax refunds could be delayed for years — all because the federal government is operating on a temporary measure largely at last year’s levels [...]

“Operating under the continuing resolution is already forcing the agency to delay or cut back enforcement and market oversight efforts,” said John Nester, a spokesman for the S.E.C., which faces a huge new workload to carry out the Wall Street regulation law enacted this year. “The longer we operate under significant budgetary restrictions, the greater the impact.”

You can pass all the bills you want, and it doesn’t matter even a little bit if you can’t fund them. Continuing resolutions are good for preventing government shutdowns, but they are also tantamount to budget freezes. With budgets set at 2010 levels until March, no money for the key measures passed in 2010 will flow. And of course, come March, Republicans will try to hold the line with government funding back to 2008 levels, an effective 20% budget cut, at least $100 billion dollars.

Goodbye stimulus.

And Digby:

One hopes the Democrats and the president will at least challenge that with a jobs and growth plan of their own, bus so far we're hearing they want to talk deficits and austerity, (which just so happens to be the GOP jobs plan, it just sounds worse.) Castellanos admitted that part of their jobs bill would the test votes throughout the year of what Gloria Borger helpfully reminded him was called the "jobs killing health care bill." Somehow, I have a feeling that they are going to enjoy putting the President in the position of having to compromise something very painful to protect his health care plan.

None of this to say that the victories aren't worthwhile or the price worth paying. I quarrel mightily with the overall strategy that left the tax cuts on the table to the very end, but when you are dealing with a Party that is perfectly willing to allow the people to suffer and die if they don't get what they want, it's tough to negotiate. You have to find something these people will accept in return and the price will be very, very high. And it was.

Going forward, if the president sees his main function as stopping health care repeal and cuts to education and Veterans benefits, then we'll have gridlock, which considering the current dynamics, may be the best we can hope for: now that the Republicans have their tax cuts, I'm afraid that the only thing left that the Republicans will consider "common ground" are cuts to the safety net.

Speaking of the health care bill, Ezra Klein reports:

The Senate passed the Continuing Resolution 79-16 this afternoon. Another way of saying that: The Senate voted to defund the implementation of both health-care reform and financial-regulation reform....

Republicans had been talking about attacking the health-reform law by defunding it, but few thought they'd succeed without a fight. The assumption was that Democrats would shut down the government before they let Republicans take that money. But as it happened, there was no fight at all. The omnibus spending bill collapsed, and the continuing resolution compromise was reached within a few days. Most senators probably don't even know the implications their vote had for the implementation of bills passed over the past year.

However, Mitch McConnell has told us how Obama can get more of this Village media love when the new, even more radical, congress comes in next month:

“If the president is willing to do things that we believe in, I don’t think we’re going to say, ‘No, Mr. President, we’re not going to do this any longer because you’re now with us,’” McConnell told POLITICO in his ornate office across from the old Senate chamber. “Any time the president is willing to do what we think is in the best interest of the American people, we have something to talk about.”

I'm fairly sure that's how the vaunted tax "compromise" worked, so there's no reason to think it can't happen gain. Obama himself just told us that "this lame duck shows that we are not doomed to gridlock." Let's hope his definition is better than McConnell's.

Firedoglake again, on how tax cuts for the rich trumped everything:

That was really all they cared about, as Robert Reich argues:

When it comes to protecting the fortunes of America’s rich (mostly top corporate executives and Wall Street) and maintaining their strangle-hold on the political process, Senate Republicans, along with some Senate Democrats, don’t budge.

Bipartisanship is possible on foreign policy. It’s even possible on certain social issues, such as gays in the military. But it’s not possible when it comes to the core economic and political reality of the United States today — the almost unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top, and the way it’s being used to corrupt our democratic system.

In this respect, Democrats are better than Republicans, but not much better. Both parties have rejected efforts to close tax loopholes that would treat much of earnings of hedge-fund and private-equity managers as ordinary income rather than capital gains (taxed at 15 percent). Both parties have refused to cap the size of Wall Street’s major banks or force the banks to aid of distressed homeowners whose mortgages they hold.

Neither party has had the intestinal fortitude to suggest that taxes should be permanently raised on multi-millionaires. Neither will take the initiative on significant campaign finance reform.

It really gets worse than that. Inside the continuing resolution is the two-year pay freeze for public employees. The defense authorization bill funds the war in Afghanistan with basically no strings attached. Inserted in that defense bill were strict limits on the transfer of detainees out of Guantanamo, making federal trials almost impossible. Stripped out of that defense bill was a provision from Roland Burris to allow VA hospitals to perform abortions paid for with private money.

The bipartisan consensus on the corporate-backed economy, the war machine foreign policy, and even some areas of social policy held in the lame duck session, and set up many consequential fights ahead. You cannot divorce the tax cut deal from the looming spending fight. You cannot divorce the START treaty from the fading possibilities of follow-on nuclear disarmament treaties. These things are more lasting than ephemeral victories at the end of Congress. We can savor the victories, but the fight on many key issues, especially the economy, hasn’t even been taken up.

This is Class War as it has not been waged in this country in more than a century. The obscenely wealthy are determined to restore the Gilded Age of opulence and wretchedness, with nothing in between.

Rethuglicans are fighting on the side of the rich. Workers, liberals, unions, small businesses and the rest of the reality-based community are fighting on the side of the middle-class.

President Obama and Congressional Democrats will fall in line behind whoever looks like a winner.

Which side are you on?

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?