Via TWI, House Republicans say they can’t block the House procedurally in their plan to pass the reconciliation bill with a self-executing provision considering the Senate bill “deemed” as passed.

House Republicans say they cannot block a Democratic maneuver that would allow Members to avoid a separate vote on the Senate health care bill.

“There is nothing that can prevent it,” said Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the Rules Committee. “It’s something they can clearly do if they have the votes.”

Of course, that’s not preventing Dreier from attacking it.

Dreier ripped the plan as “trying to avoid the accountability of an up-or-down vote” and said it violated Pelosi’s pledge of an open and transparent Congress. “It pains me to see,” he said.

You know what’s coming next, right?

When Republicans were in the minority, they railed against self-executing rules as being anti-deliberative because they undermined and perverted the work of committees and also prevented the House from having a separate debate and vote on the majority’s preferred changes….

When Republicans took power in 1995, they soon lost their aversion to self-executing rules and proceeded to set new records under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). There were 38 and 52 self-executing rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses (1995-1998), making up 25 percent and 35 percent of all rules, respectively. Under Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) there were 40, 42 and 30 self-executing rules in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses (22 percent, 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively). Thus far in the 109th Congress, self-executing rules make up about 16 percent of all rules.

On April 26, [2006] the Rules Committee served up the mother of all self-executing rules for the lobby/ethics reform bill. The committee hit the trifecta with not one, not two, but three self-executing provisions in the same special rule. The first trigger was a double whammy: “In lieu of the amendments recommended by the Committees on the Judiciary, Rules, and Government Reform now printed in the bill, the amendment in the nature of a substitute consisting of the text of the Rules Committee Print dated April 21, 2006, modified by the amendment printed in part A of the report of the Committee on Rules accompanying this resolution, shall be considered as adopted in the House and the Committee of the Whole.”

And which Republican was chairing the Rules Committee in April, 2006? Why, David Dreier, of course.

NPR’s Guy Raz interviewed Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan Sunday. It was another softball moment. You could almost see Raz nodding in agreement with the genial Congressman as he plugged his radical Roadmap for America’s Future. It’s this era’s Contract with America, with Ryan as a more appealing, more narrowly focused Newt Gingrich, pitching a plan for completing the bumpy 30-year-long journey whose destination for middle-class citizens is the bottom of a cliff. A Deadend Plan for America.

Except, of course, for that hunk of the population that decades of upwardly transferring wealth has already fattened to the proportions of Mr. Creosote. For that Top Tenth, Ryan’s plan offers more of the same smooth ride. Raz asked Ryan if he weren’t concerned that the leadership of the GOP has failed to publicly back his plan. That’s the line that Newsweek and the Cato Institute have taken, too. But why should Ryan worry? The leadership will eventually come around. The Roadmap, after all, would transform their Reaganomic fantasies into reality.  

Certainly, Ryan is right about one thing. The United States must get a handle on its taxes and revenues. In spite of supposedly being filled with new ideas, however, the Roadmap for America’s Future is, at its core, just another round of the same old, same old plutocratic plan, including a partial privatization of Social Security, chops in spending except for the military, and lower tax rates for, you guessed it, the guys whose taxes get reduced every time a Republican plops himself down in the Oval Office. But this time the plan is more radical than ever. It would: repeal all federal estate and gift taxes; repeal taxes on interest, capital gains, and dividends; repeal the alternative minimum tax; repeal the corporate income tax and replace it with an 8.5% value-added tax on most goods and services.

Three organizations have taken a look at Ryan’s radical proposals. They’ve all come to the same conclusion: Screw-job for the middle class. Bonanza for the wealthy. Would you be surprised to learn that the Heritage Foundation doesn’t see eye-to-eye with this assessment?

The Tax Policy Center projected the consequences for 2014:

Anybody making less than $20,000 a year would get a break of about $100-$300 on their income taxes. Anybody making $20,000 to $200,000 would get taxed more than now. Anybody making $200,000 to $1,000,000 would rake in the dough. Above a million dollars, the average benefit would come in over half-a-million a year. Ka-ching!

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities took a look, too:

• The higher one goes up the income scale, the more massive the tax cuts would be. Households with incomes of more than $1 million would receive an average annual tax cut of $502,000.

• The richest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans — those whose incomes exceed $2.9 million a year — would receive an average tax cut of $1.7 million a year. These tax cuts would be on top of those that high-income households would get from making the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of 2010, permanent. …

• The plan would shift tax burdens so substantially from the wealthy to the middle class that people with incomes over $1 million would face much lower effective tax rates than middle-income families would. That is, they would pay much smaller percentages of their income in federal taxes.

The third group, Citizens for Tax Justice, concluded:

It’s difficult to design a tax plan that will lose $2 trillion over a decade even while requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more. But Congressman Paul Ryan has met that daunting challenge. This analysis makes obvious that Congressman Ryan’s budget plan has nothing to do with balancing the budget, but has everything to do with creating a system that takes more from the poor and less from the rich.

You can read the CTJ’s whole report here [pdf].

Anyone not yet clear on the meaning of class warfare can get the whole gory picture from the Roadmap. Even if the final product is called something else, even if it doesn’t have Paul Ryan’s name on it, even if it’s ultimately presented piecemeal, this monstrosity constitutes the right-wingers’ dream agenda. They’ll sell it as “facing reality” and “necessary medicine.” The alternatives, like progressive taxation, they’ll label “unAmerican.” Same song, 50th verse.

• • • • •

^{h/t to Sam Pizzigati}

John Kasich, who served nine terms in the House before becoming a Fox News host, is now testing whether the revolving door between politics and the media works in both directions.

It clearly goes one way, with many former elected officials ha…

Yes, the apocalypse is at hand. First up, NM Gov. Bill Richardson:

President Obama’s decision to invest in this growing industry comes at a perfect time. Entrepreneurial companies like Virgin Galactic, Scaled Composites, SpaceX, Sierra Nevada Space Systems, Masten Space Systems, Armadillo Aerospace, XCOR Aerospace, and Blue Origin are investing their own money, right now, to create new jobs across the nation, including my home state of New Mexico, as they roll out innovative space vehicles. … Commercial spaceflight represents the type of dynamic innovation that we need to create 21st century jobs.

OK, he agrees with Obama’s NASA policy, and New Mexico has invested in commercial space. Makes sense. Next batters Newt Gingrich and Robert Walker:

The Obama administration’s budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration deserves strong approval from Republicans. The 2011 spending plan for the space agency does what is obvious to anyone who cares about man’s future in space and what presidential commissions have been recommending for nearly a decade.

I think what we have here is actual bipartisan agreement on the President’s policy and the future of space exploration. Now if only sitting Republican lawmakers could follow suit on matters a little closer to home.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich urged a crowded hall of CPAC conservatives on Saturday to be “brave enough” to pursue “responsible, principled bipartisanship” even with the temptation of huge gains in the upcoming elections.

It was a type…

Seriously?

Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and more than half disagree with the theory that humans developed from earlier species of animals, according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

And is anyone surprised to know that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to believe this crap? Extra fun fact: supporters of Kay Bailey Hutchison are even more likely to believe this crap.

Here are some other fun “facts” they believe:

• 38 percent agreed with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago.”
• 22 percent said life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time
• 51 percent disagreed with the statement, “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.”
• only 41 percent know that humans did not live at the same time as the dinosaurs

Maybe instead of rewriting textbooks to teach kids that Newt Gingrich was the most important man ever, Texas should focus on teaching kids that, as Lewis Black said, “The Flintstones” is not a documentary.

With Congress immobilized and bipartisanship apparently a foreign enemy, is there a way out of this stalemate and climate of inertia? Yes; but it’s not easy, it never is in Congress.

If you have been able to pull yourself away from the Olympics, you may have noticed that an entire branch of our federal government has…

Two very different but ultimately very aligned versions of GOP mendacity were on display this week. At one end stands Newt Gingrich. A former college history professor, Gingrich is articulate and knowledgeable. But that didn’t stop him from misrepresenting shoe-bomber Richard Reid’s citizenship in an effort to paint President Obama as a soft-on-terror “radical” — or tie logic in knots trying to justify his “mistake” after the fact. At the other end of the spectrum is Sarah Palin — so clueless she feels the need to make crib notes about boilerplate talking points. She too is willing to completely discard truth, evidence, logic, and the facts to score cheap political points. These two appear destined to compete for the 2012 Republican nomination. Or perhaps they can join forces and form a veracity-vanquishing dream ticket — two peas in a prevaricators’ pod.