GOP Senatorial primary candidate Rep. Todd Akin (R-2) voted to force the two-month payroll tax cut extension – a Senate compromise worked out after the House forwarded a bill larded with unrelated pieces of legislation – into a conference committee. The only reason for doing this was so that House members like Akin could avoid casting an up or down vote on the last-minute Senate compromise. Bear in mind that the only reason that the cut was extended for just two months was because Republicans wanted to continue their dickering for more concessions into 2012.

But now take a look at Akin’s press release about this latest GOP effort to sabotage the recovery:

Congressman Todd Akin, a member of the House Budget Committee, voted to support a series of year end reforms desperately needed in our ailing economy.

Akin supports the House one year extension of the Social Security payroll tax, as opposed to the two-month Senate version. “People need some predictability and a two month alternative does not provide anything close to predictability,”

Let us be clear abut this – Akin can have no deep-seated objections to a payroll tax cut, nor can he really be too disturbed about the two month time period that was agreed upon in order to accommodate GOP efforts to continue to hold essential legislation hostage into 2012. How do I know this? As I noted a couple of days ago, Akin was all for eliminating the payroll tax for a two-month period when it was proposed by Republicans in 2009.

Instead, with this weasel-worded statement, Akin clearly hopes to convince voters that he was actually holding out all along for a longer-term tax decrease, along with those “reforms” he prattles on about. But, by helping kill the Senate compromise, Akin knowingly voted to raise taxes on middle class Americans and deep-six extended unemployment benefits for those who are out of work thanks to the Bush recession he helped create.  

As for the tactic of attaching controversial, poison-pill  “reforms,” such as the Keystone pipeline, to an essential piece of legislation, the failure of which will harm millions of Americans , Dave Weigel observes that:

In the 2010 Pledge to America, Republicans promised not to attach pet projects to must-pass bills. “No more troop funding bills held up by unrelated policy changes,” they wrote, “or extraneous domestic spending and pork barrel projects.” This might feel like an emergency bill, but they’re just not approaching that way. Nope — it’s a way to get more concessions.

And what did Akin have to say about the Pledge?

This Pledge to America is the beginning of a way forward that respects the U.S. Constitution and embraces economic freedom, lower taxes, fiscal responsibility, protecting human life, cherishing our American values and providing for strong national security. This is the kind of positive change that the people of Missouri want.

Evidently he and his colleagues endorsed the document without reading it. If they had really taken their pledge seriously, we might have seen a lot less gridlock during the past couple of years while the Republican class of 2010 held must-pass legislation hostage to the GOP wish list. And today, of course, middle class Missourians wouldn’t be facing higher taxes next year, while those thousands unemployed through no fault of their own could could rest secure in the knowledge that they would receive unemployment benefits to see them through this hard time.

UPDATE:  Read Steve Benen’s excellent take on why the GOP is insisting on a conference committee here.  

The Republican party, mindful of its role as a supplicant before the voting public, issued a “Pledge to America.” Not to be outdone, the presumably more militant St. Louis and Jefferson County Tea Party groups are offering potential allies a “Treaty,” which, one assumes, affirms the Tea Party’s deepest, most profound principles. Needless to say, it’s a very simple document.

The first of the three provisions, calling for the repeal of The Affordable Care Act (ACA), is the most specific, which is not surprising since the Tea Party’s first raison d’etre was squashing health care reform:

1) I believe that the Health Care Reform bill (Affordable Care Act) should be immediately repealed as an un-Constitutional extension of governmental powers according to Article I of the US Constitution, and thus a burden on the people’s rights as recognized by the 9th Amendment.

While we are all sick and tired of pointing out that attacking the ACA on constitutional grounds is spurious, the Tea Party is not likely to cease and desist anytime soon. Such claims lend a veneer of legitimacy to the whole corporate-orchestrated cacophony. Besides, who knows whether or not the efforts of the Roberts Court to, as TAP puts it, “repeal the 20th century” may yet bear the intended rotten fruit.

The language of the provision, though, is not especially artful. To say that extending health insurance to millions of people is a “burden” on our constitutional rights is akin to saying that dying untreated because one lacks the means to pay is an inalienable right.

Just why are these crusaders so worked up about the ACA? The answer is easy – they’ve got that old time pocketbook religion – which brings us to the second provision:

2) I believe the government should reduce taxes and cut spending, as a rejection of the Keynesian model of economics.  Government should be fiscally responsible with the people’s dime.

A quasi-religious manifesto, which is what the “Treaty” is, need not justify assumptions shared by those to whom it is directed. So, if you ask why we should reject Keynesian economics, which have arguably served us well during the past century, expect to get uncomprehending stares and a few indignant, conservative economic cliches, along with lots of poorly-digested babble about “freedom.”

The concept of “fiscally responsible,”  though, really does need to be reclaimed by the linguistically responsible. It does not necessarily mean gutting progressive taxation and cutting social spending. It could just as eaily mean right-sizing taxes and spending in order to meet goals approved by the majority. And by majority I don’t mean the loudest, which would be the Tea Party, but the plurality that voted for Obama, the same majority that, for example, either aproves of the ACA, or disapproves because  it hasn’t gone far enough.

The final provision brings up the last article of faith in the trinitarian Tea Party theology:

3) I believe that we should reduce the federal bureaucracy.  The size and scope of federal regulation endangers all liberty, and hinders accountability to the public.

Does this mean repealing regulations that affect food safety? Or drilling regulations that, if they had been place, would have prevented the Gulf oil spill?  How about financial regulations that would have prevented the crisis in 2007? There are endless examples of beneficial regulation; what kind of fool signs a blanket proviso to scrap them? If you answer seriously deluded industry dupe, you might be on to something. And, while we’re on the topic, do the authors of this document even know what “accountability” means?

In short, which it mercifully is, the “Treaty” confirms the suspicion that the Tea Party is nothing more than lots of “sound and furry, signifying nothing.” However, the propensity of the media to treat their antics with a civility that Tea Partiers themselves rarely exhibit might help boost an essentially empty exercise into a useful tool for rallying the dessicated (as in middle aged and older) right arm of the GOP. We’ll learn in November just how effective gimmicks like the “Treaty” have been.

Today’s the day that some important, initial provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) go into effect.  Given that a majority of the 23% of Missourians who participated in last August’s primaries voted to challenge the ACA, and that state GOPers are still making wild claims about what it will or won’t do, clear, simple, unbiased explanations of the law’s provisions are more important than ever, and that’s exactly what the video below offers. It’s produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation Health Reform Source, an excellent resource, by the way, and it offers a succinct, easy to understand, nine minute summary of the provisions of the ACA and the controversies that surround them:  

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

As Think Progress notes, it’s ironic that on what is essentially ACA day zero, Congressional Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” the GOP plan for the 112th Congress if they take charge after November. An important part of their agenda is the repeal and “replacement” of the ACA. This should not come as a suprise to us in Missouri; state GOPers  have been throwing tantrums since the legislation passed. Its repeal is even included in Roy Blunt’s corporate giveaway list jobs plan:

Repeal and Replace Obamacare – The Democrats’ Government Takeover will cost at least a trillion dollars, according to the Congressional Budget Office.  I’m for repeal of this massive spending bill and replacing it with common sense health care solutions that will create jobs and drive down health care costs.

Oddly enough, though, as The Wonk Room‘s Igor Volsky observes, most of the replacements to ACA provisions that the GOP document puts forward are all already included in the ACA itself. We have to assume that these are also the replacements that Roy Blunt is speaking about in his jobs plan since they echo his past proposals. What is not included, though, is:

… how Republicans plan to offset the $140 billion deficit increase that will result from repealing the ACA or how they’ll lower health care spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the GOP’s previous very similar health care plan  – presented by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) as an alternative to the House health care bill – would increase the number of uninsured to 52 million in 2019 and reduce the deficit by only $68 billion over the 2010-2019 period.

Since the national GOP “Pledge” and Roy Blunt’s very compatible “Jobs Plan” are both really big on railing about deficits – at least in the abstract – it’s surprising that neither address this concern. Perhaps the best characterization of the “Pledge,” and one that can be equally applied to Blunt’s jobs plan, comes from a conservative blogger, Erik Erikson of RedState, who charged that “This document proves the GOP is more focused on the acquisition of power than the advocacy of long term sound public policy.” Well Duh! Maybe more Missourians should keep that in mind when they see ads dinging Carnahan for supporting health care reform.