FIRST: My apologies for not knowing how to format this better. (Well, DUH--of COURSE it's My First Diary) It's just something I haven't learned yet. Also, the length sucks. My bad, but I wanted to be sure everyone got everything in context.
This gem below is just off the AP wires today. I hope Nancy Pelosi's all over this -- as well as our "pal" Wexler.
As for "super sizing" the Social Security proposal, it sounds like a trip to a carnival (lights and sparkles but no substance) and it amuses me to think that ShrubCo, who just said he'd veto the highway bill just passed Tuesday because it lacks "fiscal responsibility," would obviously jump at the chance to do this!
I can hear him now: "PLEASE, Mr. Cheney, can I PLEASE have some more Constitution Candy? PLEASE???"
Cheney: "No, you little chimp, you can't. Besides, we threw that away. It was icky and it got in the way."We HAVE TO stop this filibuster mess. If the Goops dump the judicial filibuster, then the legislative 'buster also is gonna be a goner and SOON. THEN we have a one-party system. And then all bets are off.
{BC-Social Security-Strategy, Bjt,0796}
{House Republicans try to pass Social Security overhaul by} 'super-sizing' bill
{By GLEN JOHNSON}
{Associated Press Writer}
WASHINGTON (AP) - House Republicans are moving to super-size President Bush's Social Security overhaul with measures aimed at breaking Democrats' united front against it - such as bolstering private pension plans and
improving non-retiree benefits for widows, children and the disabled.
Democrats say they will not be tempted by what one member has labeled "artificial sweeteners" as long as any bill includes the private investment accounts Bush is pushing.
"They're trying to get the goods through Customs that way," Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said Tuesday. "In my view, you put aside the insistence on privatizing Social Security, you'll get a retirement agreement in short order."
Rep. Bill Thomas, the committee's chairman, is architect of the new strategy. His panel has a hearing Thursday to discuss, among other things, ideas for assuring that participants in company and union-sponsored defined-benefit pension plans get the retirement checks they were promised.
(MY emphasis) "To only deal with Social Security is to ignore what else is going on in
the society," the California Republican said at an earlier hearing.
While Democrats have been singularly united in their opposition to private accounts, Thomas has previously succeeded in passing a White House
initiative by cloaking it in member-friendly provisions.
In 2003, it was the administration's economic stimulus package, which he helped pass after changing it to include a cut in dividend taxes, instead of eliminating them, as the president wanted. Last year, the chairman succeeded in winning support for a $136 billion corporate tax bill by including various special-interest perks, such as a bailout for tobacco farmers.
Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, branded the vote "a $5 billion problem with a $140 billion tax cut."
"Mr. Thomas wants to go after Democratic proposals. Why? Because they don't want to talk about their proposals, which are bad," Hoyer said.
Thomas hopes to break the Social Security stalemate by broadening the president's initiative to include language appealing to his opponents, perhaps including a provision to expand access to tax-protected retirement
accounts such as Roth IRAs. The chairman has to date talked in generalities, even saying that the personal accounts pushed by the president "can take a number of forms."
While Democrats have remained united against the accounts, there was a fissure this week when Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., announced over the
objections of his party's leaders that he would file his own Social Security legislation. Republicans, after months of hearing their own reject Bush's ideas, heralded the break in the opposition's ranks, even though Wexler's bill included a 6 percent increase in payroll taxes that the president has already ruled out.
Wexler drafted his legislation after being asked recently by a high school student in Florida about his party's lack of an alternative, a question that many Democratic members have faced at town hall meetings.
Thomas's strategy is in part rooted in Democrats' description of themselves as guardians of senior citizens since long before President Franklin Roosevelt signed legislation creating Social Security into law in 1935.
Emanuel's proposals, for example, include measures that would create automatic enrollments in employer 401(k) retirement plans and allow people to direct the Internal Revenue Service to deposit tax refunds directly into retirement accounts.
But he said Democrats will not vote for any of the provisions if they are included in a Social Security bill that lets workers divert to private accounts some of their Social Security taxes now used to pay benefits to retirees.
"He has ideas on health care; we have ideas on health care," Emanuel said of Thomas. "We have ideas on employer-based retirement; he has ideas on employer-based retirement. We have ideas on personal savings; he has ideas on personal savings. They're not far apart. We're farther apart on Social Security through the insistence on privatization."
Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., another member of the Ways and Means panel, acknowledged the success that Thomas has enjoyed in the past using an expand-and-conquer strategy but said it won't happen this time.
"You know, there's nobody in the Hall of Fame in baseball who hit .1000. If they hit .300, they're pretty good," McDermott said. "And Bill isn't going to win this one."