During a pro forma session designed to block recess appointments (streams crossing), Steny Hoyer asks for unanimous consent to bring up the Senate two-month stopgap on the payroll tax, unemployment insurance and the doc fix. Instead of just objecting to UC, the presiding officer, in this case Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), just ignores Hoyer and gavels down the session, walking away. This allows Hoyer to grandstand on CSPAN.

What the Republicans are doing is saying that a natural disaster must cause government accounts to drop. It assumes there’s a finite amount of money available for spending, and if a hurricane blows through your house, someone else, in this case hybrid vehicle manufacturers, have to pay for it. Now, the Chevy Volt had nothing to do with the hurricane. But they’re bearing the burden for rebuilding after the storm.

This is completely unprecedented in the history of the nation and defies common sense; that’s why Reid is fighting it, to make sure it doesn’t become a new normal.

There is now a deal, and Speaker Boehner needs Democratic votes to pass it because of his unruly and recalcitrant TeaParty membership, members of the Progressive Caucus must stop the deal. By stopping the deal at the last minute, the House Progressive Caucus forces President Obama to use his constitutional authority to ignore an illegal law that questions America’s public debt: the debt ceiling.

Kill the deal. Fourteen-four or Bust!

John Boehner’s plan for raising the debt limit, which would lead to “the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history” according to one budget analyst, cannot pass the House of Representatives because it’s not conservative enough, according to the chair of the Republican Study Committee, Jim Jordan (R-OH). Jordan, who announced his opposition to the Boehner plan yesterday, says that the bill does not have the required 218 votes needed to pass the House.

I called Hoyer’s office this morning to ask if he considers cutting the COLA a benefit cut, but haven’t received a response.

In Social Security’s 76 year history, it has always been dealt with independent of the general budget, through the normal legislative process. Rather than enact major changes in haste and, we believe, repent at leisure after the damage has been done, we urge policymakers to focus on Social Security after the debt limit has been raised, in its own legislative vehicle, through the normal legislative process with full hearings and open debate. Let’s go with the old-fashioned way, rather than some new, untested third way.

I appreciate the “a strange game, the only winning move is not to play” technique here, but in the final analysis, you have nobody in the House and Senate willing to say that the debt limit just ought to be increased and the budget ought to be proper for the current times, when there are millions of people out of work, rather than drastically austere. And this hysterical deficit debate is playing out while other countries just pass us by.

In the interest of “common ground,” we could see a proposal like increasing cost sharing in Medicare. It would be astounding for Democrats to do so, coming off of a successful effort to blame Republicans for… increasing cost sharing in Medicare, by ending the program and giving seniors a too-small coupon to purchase health insurance.

Russ Feingold may be well-positioned to return to the US Senate if he chooses, now that Herb Kohl has retired. A normal politician in that position would not make waves with any party leaders, or take up principled causes where both parties have failed. Feingold is not that normal politician. The Hill reports that he publicly shamed several Democrats in an email to supporters of his new organization, Progressives United. But they don’t make clear what the fuss is about.

Is Steny really suggesting that Congressmen are not aware of who their donors are, are not intimately familiar with how much they’re raking in from contractors?