Mitch McConnell criticized for taking money from firm tied to health website

By John Cheves

jcheves@herald-leader.comNovember 14, 2013 

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is minority leader of the U.S. Senate.

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U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is a vocal critic of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act and its glitch-stricken website, HealthCare.gov, repeatedly calling for repeal of the law "root and branch."
"At this point, senators from both parties can agree: HealthCare.gov is a rolling disaster. Every day seems to bring more, newer comic calamity," McConnell, R-Ky., said Oct. 29 in a Senate floor speech. "The only thing the website seems to be good for right now is creating punch lines for late-night comedians."
However, since 2011, McConnell has accepted more than $75,000 in political donations from health care giant UnitedHealth Group, which owns the technology company that helped build and launch HealthCare.gov for a reported $155 million and now is responsible for fixing it.
The donations came from UnitedHealth's political action committee and five of its top executives; they went to McConnell's 2014 re-election campaign and two fundraising committees that he oversees, the Bluegrass Committee and the McConnell-Cornyn Leadership Victory Committee.
UnitedHealth also co-hosted a $1,000-per-person fundraising dinner for McConnell's campaign last December in Washington, D.C. And the company, based in Minnetonka, Minn., retains former McConnell chief of staff Billy Piper as a Washington lobbyist to work on its behalf in Congress on implementation of the Affordable Care Act, Senate records show.
UnitedHealth, which tends to favor incumbent Democrats and Republicans as it gives more than $1 million in political donations during a typical two-year election cycle, has expressed optimism about the health care law.
"UnitedHealth Group strongly supports making high-quality health care accessible and affordable for everyone," it stated in a news release last year.
Josh Holmes, a McConnell aide on loan to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Thursday there is no indication that UnitedHealth's donations have weakened McConnell's opposition to the health law.
Two conservative groups, however, said UnitedHealth's support of McConnell is further evidence that his only true ideology is power. They already have criticized McConnell for not fully supporting Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and others who fight to defund the health care law, which they call Obamacare.
"Mitch McConnell gets money from lots of corporations for many different reasons, but his close ties to this one makes it unique," said Matt Hoskins, executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has endorsed Louisville businessman Matt Bevin over McConnell in the Republican primary next May.
"This could explain why Mitch McConnell has been so reluctant to oppose funding for the implementation of Obamacare. He and his closest allies apparently have a financial interest in seeing it go forward," Hoskins said.
Another conservative critic, Daniel Horowitz, policy director at the Madison Project, said "the entire McConnell web," including his corporate donors and aides-turned-lobbyists, sees a chance to make money off Obamacare, so McConnell won't stand in the law's way.
"McConnell isn't a liberal, a conservative or a moderate," said Horowitz, whose group also has endorsed Bevin. "His ideology is power. That's all he cares about."
Holmes noted that UnitedHealth donates to many politicians, including $5,000 last year to Ted Cruz and $2,000 to the leadership committee of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., both of whom are prominent foes of the Affordable Care Act.
"Matt Bevin is going to need more than a fake MIT diploma to dupe people into believing that the most prominent opponents of Obamacare, like Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, are not committed to the cause because they receive political support from UnitedHealth," Holmes said. "Clearly, everyone knows where they stand on getting this awful law off the books."
McConnell has repeatedly criticized likely Democratic Senate nominee Alison Lundergan Grimes in recent days for refusing to call for repeal of the health care law.
Grimes, who has not reported receiving any donations from UnitedHealth's political action committee since entering the race in July, has praised portions of the law while calling for changes and delays to some of its requirements.
UnitedHealth's Washington-based vice president for government affairs, Daniel Keniry, who oversees the company's political donations and has personally given $7,500 to McConnell's committees since 2011, did not return repeated calls seeking comment Thursday. Nor did a corporate spokesman at the company's Minnesota headquarters.
UnitedHealth, best known for its health insurance division, owns Quality Software Services Inc., which helped build and launch HealthCare.gov along with another private contractor, CGI Federal of Fairfax, Va. Both companies faced sharp criticism in congressional hearings after the website failed to successfully launch in October. CGI has blamed QSSI for providing the data services hub that caused the first "log jam" on the site.
"We absolutely take accountability for those first days when our tool was part of the issue in terms of being able to handle all of the unexpected volume. And we absolutely will take accountability for helping in any way we can to help this project go forward," Andrew Slavitt, a senior QSSI executive, testified Oct. 24 before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Piper, who left McConnell's office in early 2011 for the Washington lobbying firm of Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock, also did not return repeated calls seeking comment Thursday. Piper has given $7,000 to McConnell's campaign and a related committee, McConnell Victory Kentucky, since 2011.
Senate records show that Piper has several other clients who pay him for his assistance in implementing the Affordable Care Act, including the Federation of American Hospitals. The FAH has praised the health care law for making life easier for patients. The group's political action committee has given a total of $15,000 since 2011 to McConnell's campaign and to his Bluegrass Committee.

John Cheves: (859) 231-3266. Twitter: @BGPolitics. Blog: bluegrasspolitics.bloginky.com

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2013/11/14/2931252/mitch-mcconnell-criticized-for.html#storylink=cpy

Here's a tax increase Republican lawmakers support

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans in Congress don't usually fight for tax increases, especially ones that are part of President Barack Obama's health care law.
But GOP senators balked when Democrats proposed delaying a new temporary fee on everyone covered by health insurance.
So employers, insurance companies and other health plan sponsors are in line to pay $63 a person next year for everyone who has coverage. The temporary fee covers all workers, spouses and dependents covered by health insurance.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., proposed delaying the fee in recent budget talks with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. McConnell and other Republican senators objected; the fee was left intact.
GOP senators complained the delay was basically a favor for labor unions, traditional Democratic allies that oppose the new fee.
"It's beyond ironic that the mantra from the president and the Democrats has been, 'There can't be any changes to Obamacare. After all, it's the law of the land,'" said Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa. "And then big labor comes along and wants a change and, lo and behold, there's got to be a change."
But also opposing the fee are large employers, traditional Republican allies, even though in many cases the fee probably will be passed on to workers.
"It's a sizable expense. For some of my employers it's millions of dollars a year and we don't get anything from it," said Gretchen Young, senior vice president for health policy at the ERISA Industry Committee, a group that represents large employers on benefits issues. "It's definitely not solely a union issue."

View gallery."

Graphic shows several examples of how health coverage might change for different people; 6c x 10 inc …

Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., said the proposed delay was meant to balance Republican demands for other changes to the health law. Republicans in Congress have been attacking the law since it was passed in 2010, and earlier this month, they forced a partial government shutdown over Obama's refusal to negotiate changes.
Cardin said he didn't want any changes in the law to be part of the deal for reopening the government and extending the country's ability to borrow. In the end, the only change was an income verification procedure for people applying for tax credits to help them purchase health insurance.
The temporary fee on people with health insurance is designed to raise $25 billion over the next three years.
The money will provide a cushion for insurers from the initial hard-to-predict costs of covering previously uninsured people with medical problems. Under the law, insurers will be forbidden, effective Jan. 1, 2014, to turn away applicants who are ill.
Insurance companies hit by unexpectedly high costs for insuring people with medical conditions will be able to tap the fund, which will be administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. The fund will mainly benefit companies participating in state-based health insurance exchanges.
The fee will total $12 billion in 2014, $8 billion in 2015 and $5 billion in 2016. That means the per-head assessment would be smaller each year, around $40 in 2015 instead of $63.
It is being assessed on all "major medical" insurance plans, including those provided by employers and those purchased individually by consumers. About 150 million workers, spouses and dependents are covered under employer-sponsored health plans.
Large employers will pay the fee directly. That's because major companies are usually self-insured, with the health insurance company that workers deal with basically acting as an agent administering the plan.

View gallery."

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, left, talks with Dr. Norma Parra, right, afte …

Unions that operate multi-employer health plans also will pay the fee. More than 20 million union workers and family members are covered by such plans.
These unions and large employers argue that they shouldn't have to pay the fee because they won't benefit from the fund.
The AFL-CIO passed a resolution at its convention this year calling for the fee to be repealed. Large employers are fighting the fee, too. But, Young noted, the political atmosphere in Congress, especially when it comes to the health care law, will make it difficult to win any changes.
"The Affordable Care Act is now kind of a third rail," said Young, referring to the law's formal name. "If it wasn't before, it is even more so now."
___
Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Sam Hananel contributed to this report.
___
: http://twitter.com/stephenatap
 

Light 'em up, Ladies and Gentlemen! Let them know how you feel!

Light 'em up, Ladies and Gentlemen! Let them know how you feel! #CTL @UniteBlue #TopProg #LibCrib #P2 pic.twitter.com/6ZN2pw0FxX
— Dennis Wortham (@denniswortham) October 7, 2013

GOP on MATH

How GOP Extortion Is Rooted in Southern Slavery

 The government shutdown is the culmination of an ideology that comes from slaveholders’ distortion of the Constitution. 

  By Robert Parry

October 3, 2013  |  

 

As the Republican-driven U.S. government shutdown careens forward, everyone who’s seen a movie about hostage-taking – “Air Force One,” for instance – knows what happens now. The terrorists press their demands by beginning to shoot hostages.
Arguably, the Tea Party Republicans have already begun to do that by forcing hundreds of thousands of government employees to be furloughed (including intelligence analysts responsible for detecting attacks by actual terrorists), by shutting down cancer-drug trials for children, and by disrupting hundreds of other important federal programs that protect the physical and financial safety of the American people.
By Oct. 17 – when the country’s debt ceiling is expected to be breached – the gun will be put to the head of the “full faith and credit of the United States,” possibly inducing a global financial panic that could reverse the hard-won economic gains of the past five years and throw millions of people out of their jobs and out of their homes.
Or as actor Gary Oldman (playing the lead terrorist in “Air Force One”) might put it: Eventually we’ll wreak so much havoc that you, Mr. President, will have to give us what we want, first the surrender of health-care reform, but once we know how to get our way, there will be no limit to what we can dismantle next.
In the case of Oldman’s movie terrorist, the overarching cause was “Mother Russia.” For the Tea Party’s political terrorists, it is their neo-Confederate interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, a document that they claim to carry around everywhere but apparently have never read.
With all the Tea Partiers’ talk about their “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution, they ignore the reality that the Founding document was written primarily by Federalists, such as George Washington, James Madison (who was then Washington’s protégé), Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris (the chief author of the Preamble).
The Federalists despised the concept of states’ rights (as enshrined in the Articles of Confederation) and believed in centralizing power in the federal government, albeit with a system of checks and balances to restrain ill-advised decision-making, but with few other limits on what elected representatives could do for the nation’s well-being.
That is why – in both the Preamble and in Article I, Section 8 (the so-called “enumerated powers”) – the Framers included language giving Congress the authority to “provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States” and “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.”
As historian Jada Thacker  has written, “The Constitution was never intended to ‘provide limited government,’ and furthermore it did not do so. … This is not a matter of opinion, but of literacy. If we want to discover the truth about the scope of power granted to the federal government by the Constitution, all we have to do is read what it says.”
Given the malleable phrase “general Welfare” and the so-called “elastic clause” for passing all “necessary and proper” laws, Thacker notes that “the type, breadth and scope of federal legislation became unchained. … Taken together, these clauses – restated in the vernacular – flatly announce that ‘Congress can make any law it feels is necessary to provide for whatever it considers the general welfare of the country.’
“Lately there has been an embarrassingly naïve call from the Tea Party to require Congress to specify in each of its bills the Constitutional authority upon which the bill is grounded. Nothing could be easier: the first and last clauses of Article I, Section 8 gives Congress black-and-white authority to make any law it so desires. Nor was this authority lost on the Founders.”


The Anti-Federalist Lament
Thacker notes that today’s advocates of “limited government” like to cherry-pick a few quotes from The Federalist Papers to lend some credibility to their claims but ignore the Anti-Federalist Papers, essays written by dissident delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. For instance, Thacker cites the dissent of New Yorker Robert Yates written a month after the Constitution was completed:
“This government is to possess absolute and uncontrollable power, legislative, executive and judicial, with respect to every object to which it extends. … The government then, so far as it extends, is a complete one. … It has the authority to make laws which will affect the lives, the liberty, and the property of every man in the United States; nor can the constitution or the laws of any state, in any way prevent or impede the full and complete execution of every power given.”
Thacker adds: “Yates, it must be emphasized, took pains to identify the ‘necessary and proper’ clause as the root of the ‘absolute power’ inherent in the Constitution well over a year before ratification.”
And Yates was far from alone in both his reading of the unbounded powers of the Constitution and in his first-hand understanding of what the Framers were thinking. For instance, dissenting delegates from Pennsylvania wrote:
“We dissent … because the powers vested in Congress by this constitution, must necessarily annihilate and absorb the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the several states, and produce from their ruins one consolidated government. …
“The new government will not be a confederacy of states, as it ought, but one consolidated government, founded upon the destruction of the several governments of the states. … The powers of Congress under the new constitution, are complete and unlimited over the purse and the sword, and are perfectly independent of, and supreme over, the state governments; whose intervention in these great points is entirely destroyed.”
The Pennsylvania dissenters noted that the state sovereignty language from the Articles of Confederation was stripped out of the Constitution and that national sovereignty was implicitly transferred to “We the People of the United States” in the Preamble. They pointed out that the Constitution’s Article Six made federal statutes and treaties “the supreme law of the land.”
“The legislative power vested in Congress … is so unlimited in its nature; may be so comprehensive and boundless [in] its exercise, that this alone would be amply sufficient to annihilate the state governments, and swallow them up in the grand vortex of general empire,” the dissenters declared.
Fearing for Slavery
Southern Anti-Federalists – the likes of Virginia’s Patrick Henry and George Mason – saw the Constitution as an eventual death knell for slavery, despite the success of southern delegates to insert clauses that implicitly accepted the continuation of slavery.
But Henry and Mason argued that the rights of white slaveholders to own blacks would eventually be challenged by the North as its industries made it more populous and more powerful than the agrarian South. “They’ll free your niggers!” Patrick Henry warned his fellow slave-owning Virginians.
As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in their 2010 book, Madison and Jefferson, Henry and Mason argued that “slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected.” Besides the worry about how the federal government might tax slave-ownership, there was the fear that the President – as commander in chief – might “federalize” the state militias and emancipate the slaves.
Though losing the struggle to block ratification, the Anti-Federalists and their concerns did not disappear. Instead, they organized a powerful political faction behind the charismatic figure of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, who – after returning from France in 1789 – sought to alter the original interpretation of the Constitution into something much narrower, a vision that would protect the interests of “farmers” and would leave plantation slavery untouched.
Jefferson’s ruthless political tactics and Federalist missteps in the complex job of forming the new government combined to help Jefferson defeat President John Adams, a Federalist, in 1800 (with Jefferson’s winning margin coming from the South’s ability to count slaves as three-fifths of a human being for the purpose of representation).
As president, Jefferson rhetorically asserted his “strict construction” view of the Constitution, but in practice he embraced the “originalist” interpretation of the Federalists when it suited his needs, such as when he had the opportunity to buy the Louisiana Territories from France and saw nothing specific in the Constitution to say that he could. With the support of Congress, he simply did so anyway.
As for Madison – after collaborating with George Washington on the Constitution and working with Alexander Hamilton to win ratification – the slightly built Virginian aristocrat gradually slid back into the swamp of Virginia’s slave-owning politics. A major slaveholder himself and representing other slaveholders, Madison shifted his allegiance to the Jeffersonian camp and succeeded Jefferson as president in 1809.
However, after the debacle of the War of 1812 when an underfunded federal government could not defend Washington D.C. from British destruction, Madison reversed direction again, ignoring Jefferson’s “strict construction” principles to support the creation of the Second Bank of the United States in 1817.
In the ensuing decades, the back-and-forth struggle over the scope of federal power continued as the South insisted that Jefferson’s pseudo-constitutional inventions, such as a state’s right to “nullify” federal law, prevented the national government from imposing restrictions on the institution of slavery as it spread to new states in the west.
Finally, with the election of anti-slavery President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the southern slave states seceded from the Union, drafting their own constitution that explicitly enshrined slavery as a permanent fixture. The bloody Civil War finally ended slavery in 1865 and forced the South back into the Union, but white southern resistance continued to federal laws demanding equal rights for blacks.
Rewriting the Constitution
The relevance of this history to the present is not only that the ideological descendants of the Confederacy are now up in arms over the election and reelection of the first African-American president but that they are insisting on the slaveholders’ distortion of the Constitution, over its truly “originalist” interpretation and the plain reading of its words.
The overwhelmingly white Tea Party, with its foothold in the overwhelmingly white Republican Party, has now developed a new variation on the theory of “nullification,” asserting that the Tea Party’s Confederate-style interpretation of the Constitution must be accepted by the rest of the nation or the country will face endless political extortion.
Like Gary Oldman’s team of Russian ultranationalists in “Air Force One,” the Tea Partiers have maneuvered themselves into a position where they can extort concessions from the President. All they have to do is keep shooting hostages until the price becomes so high that the U.S. government acquiesces to their demands.
Then, in effect, the United States will have adopted a new constitutional system in which white neo-Confederates, calling themselves the Tea Party, can extract whatever political outcome they want. They will have done away with not only the Framers’ original intent – that the federal government should do what’s necessary to provide for the general welfare of the American people – but of democratic majority rule, period.
Ironically, the first electoral test of the Tea Party’s neo-Confederate strategy will come in the fight for the Virginia statehouse in Richmond, which once was home to the Confederacy’s capital. The November election of a new governor pits centrist Democrat Terry McAuliffe against Tea Party favorite, Republican Ken Cuccinelli.
Northern Virginia is being especially hard hit by the government shutdown but much of Virginia is considered prime Tea Party territory. So, the Nov. 5 election should be a good measuring stick for whether the Tea Party’s new politics of hostage-taking will succeed, whether the United States will see a new dawn of extremism, a government of, by and for political extortionists.

Why Obama and the Democrats Shouldn't Negotiate With Extortionists 

Robert Reich

 

As a child I was bullied by bigger boys who threatened to beat me up if I didn't give them what they wanted. But every time I gave in to their demands their subsequent demands grew larger. First they wanted the change in my pocket. Next it was the dessert in my lunchbox. Then my new Davy Crockett cap. Then the softball and bat I got for my birthday.
Finally I stopped giving in. When the bullies began roughing me up on the playground some older boys came to my rescue and threatened my tormenters with black eyes if they ever touched me again. That ended their extortion racket.
What's happening in Washington these days may seem far removed from my boyhood memories, but Washington is really just another childhood playground. Its current bullies are rightwing Republicans, now threatening that if they don't get their way they'll close down the government and cause the nation to default on its debts.
"The American people don't want a government shutdown, and they don't want Obamacare," House Republican leaders said in a statement over the weekend. "We will do our job and send this bill over, and then it's up to the Senate to pass it and stop a government showdown."
Really? The American people don't want Obamacare as much as I didn't want my softball and bat.
Okay, maybe not quite as much. But the only settled way we know what the American people want is through the democratic process. And the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is the law of the land. A majority of the House and Senate voted for it, the president signed it into law, its constitutionality has been upheld by the Supreme Court, and a majority of Americans reelected the President after an election battle in which the Affordable Care Act was a central issue.
Moreover, we don't repeal laws in this country by holding hostage the entire government of the United States.
The bullies are a faction inside the Republican Party -- extremists who are threatening more reasonable Republicans with primary challenges if they don't go along.
And where are the Tea Party extremists getting their dough? From even bigger bullies -- a handful of hugely wealthy Americans who are sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into this extortion racket.
They include David and Charles Koch (and their front group, "Americans for Prosperity'); Peter Thiel, leverage-buyout specialist John Childs, investor Howie Rich, Stephen Jackson of the Stevens Group, and executives of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, (all behind the "Club for Growth"); and Crow Holdings' Harlan Crow, shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, and investment banker Foster Friess; executives of MetLife and Philip Morris, and foundations controlled by the Scaife family (all bankrolling "FreedomWorks.")
Their game plan is to not just to take over the Republican Party. It's to take over America. The showdown over the budget and the debt ceiling is a prelude to 2016, when they plan to run Texas Senator Ted Cruz for President. (Cruz, if you haven't noticed, is busily establishing his creds as the biggest flamer in Washington -- orchestrating not only the current extortion but also the purge of reasonable Republicans from the GOP.) Obama and the Democrats must not give in. They shouldn't even negotiate with extortionists. As I learned the hard way, giving in to bullies just encourages them to escalate their demands. The president gave in at the end of 2011 when Republican bullies threatened to go over the fiscal cliff and take the rest of the nation with them. At that time they demanded spending cuts. Now they want to repeal a law they detest. If we give in again, what's next? A coup d'etat?
ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His film, "Inequality for All," will be out in September. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.

Jon Stewart Blasts GOP Over Shutdown: When The Giants Lost, They Didn't Shut Down The NFL

Jon Stewart Blasts GOP Over Shutdown: When The Giants Lost, They Didn't Shut Down The NFL 

 The Huffington Post  |  By Ross Luippold

Jon Stewart opened Monday's "Daily Show" by addressing the government shutdown, and placed the blame squarely on the House Republicans for going to great lengths in their one-sided fight against Obamacare, which he mockingly called "The End of America as We Know It for Reasons No One is Able to Clearly Explain."
"You're just throwing words together," he exclaimed in response to a montage of Republicans rattling off their love of the Constitution to show their hatred of Obamacare, and then those lawmakers blasting Obama for failing to compromise. "It's a f**king law!" he said, pointing out that all three branches of government had thus far upheld the law.
He then compared the Republicans to a losing football team. "Did you see the Giants game on Sunday?" he asked. "They lost 31-7. Do you know what the Giants didn't say after that game? 'If you don't give us 25 more points by midnight on Monday, we will shut down the f**king NFL.'"
But he really drove the point home by invoking one small business owner with a message to the House Republicans about their current situation:

15 Republicans who will shut down the government!

The nine most painful impacts of a government shutdown

 By Brad Plumer

The federal government is shutting down on Tuesday and will stay closed until Congress can reach an agreement on how to fund day-to-day operations. So who gets hurt most by the shutdown?
Everyone's heard that the panda cam at the National Zoo will power down, but that's hardly the most serious consequence of a shutdown. The biggest disruptions are less visible — the workers going without pay, the patients turned away from research clinics, and so on. Here's a rough list:
1) More than 2 million federal workers will see their paychecks delayed — and 800,000 of them might never get repaid.

Federal employees protest the sequester outside the Department of Labor on March 20. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg).

This is, by a fair margin, the biggest immediate consequence of a shutdown. So long as Congress keeps the government closed, many federal workers simply won't get paid during the shutdown (save for those in agencies with independent funding, like Postal Service employees).
There are two classes of federal workers to consider. First, there are the 1.3 million "essential" civilian employees who keep working during the shutdown. These workers may see their paychecks delayed, but they'll eventually get paid once the government reopens.
It's a different story for the 800,000 or so workers deemed "non-essential." These employees have to come in for a few hours on Tuesday, get their files in order, and then go home without compensation, indefinitely. And it's unclear if they'll ever receive back pay. That's completely up to Congress. Non-essential workers did get paid retroactively after the 21-day 1995-'96 shutdown. But this time around, some Republicans are already bristling at the idea of paying federal employees for "work they didn't do."
This could be a fair-sized financial hit for many workers, depending on how long the government stays shut down. Note that many of these federal employees have already gone through a three-year wage freeze and months of furloughs imposed by the sequestration budget cuts.
The economic impacts could also be sizable. Economist Mark Zandi argues that the furloughs could shave 0.3 percentage points of fourth-quarter GDP growth (although some of that activity would come back if the workers get back pay). Maryland, where many federal workers live, could lose up to $5 million per day in income and sales tax revenue.
Note that this doesn't include federal contractors, who will also start furloughing employees as contracts dry up. (During the 1995-'96 shutdown, one-fifth of contracts were put on hold.) It's still unclear how many companies will be affected, but the numbers are large. Fairfax County, Va., alone has 4,100 contractors that bring in about $26 billion per year.
2) Millions of veterans may not receive benefits if the shutdown lasts more than two weeks.

(The Washington Post)

Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs have quietly told Congress that they likely won't have enough money to pay disability claims or make pension payments for veterans if a government shutdown lasts for more than two or three weeks. That could affect some 3.6 million veterans who receive these benefits.
In a briefing with Congress, VA officials warned that many veterans depend almost entirely on these checks for their livelihood, and many have not been given enough time or information to prepare.
3) The CDC will halt its flu program just as flu season gets underway.

(Rogelio V. Solis, File/Associated Press)

Every fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monitors the spread of flu and figures out how best to direct vaccine programs around the country. During the shutdown, however, the agency will be "unable to support the annual seasonal influenza program," according to a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services.
And it's not just the flu. The CDC also has to stop providing "support to state and local partners for infectious disease surveillance." And the agency will have a "significantly reduced capacity to respond to outbreak investigations, processing of laboratory samples, and maintaining the agency’s 24/7 emergency operations center."
(The CDC will, however, continue its overseas malaria and AIDS programs, as those are funded independently.)
4) Some food-safety operations would cease.

Ken Trevarthan/AP - Water can cause harm by entering the egg through its porous shell, increasing the risk of contamination.

During the shutdown, the Food and Drug Administration will have to cease most of its food-safety operations. That includes "routine establishment inspections, some compliance and enforcement activities, monitoring of imports, notification programs (e.g., food contact substances, infant formula), and the majority of the laboratory research necessary to inform public health decision-making."
This past December, the FDA shut down a nut processor in New Mexico after records showed that the facility was shipping products infected with salmonella. That sort of monitoring and enforcement could become much harder.
Now, that doesn't mean all food-safety oversight stops. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will still maintain thousands of inspectors to check out meat and poultry facilities, and the Food Safety and Inspection Service is still allowed to recall workers in the event of an emergency. So there's still a fair bit of oversight capacity in place. But many routine FDA activities on this front will come to a halt.
It's not just food safety either. A wide swath of regulatory agencies will close during the shutdown. The Environmental Protection Agency will stop monitoring air pollution and pesticide use. The Labor Department won't be around to enforce wage and hour laws or occupational safety. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees America's vast derivatives market, will close up.
It's very possible that nothing will go awry while these regulators are closed. But that's hard to say for sure.
5) Nutritional programs for women, infants and children could cease after a week.

Some programs will continue to receive federal funds, but those for the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children would be cut off during a shutdown. (Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post.

During the shutdown, the Department of Agriculture will stop supporting the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, which helps pregnant women and new moms buy healthy food and provides nutritional information and health care referrals to those who need it. The program aids some 9 million Americans.
That won't hit immediately. The USDA estimates that most states have funds and authority to continue their programs for "a week or so," but they'll "likely be unable to sustain operations for a longer period. "Contingency funds will be available to help States -- but even this funding would not fully mitigate a shortfall for the entire month of October."
The agency notes, meanwhile, that food stamp aid for 47 million low-income Americans would be unaffected through the month of October, since that program still gets stimulus funds that won't run out until next year.
6) Financing for small businesses could be hampered.

A small business with a big cow in North Carolina. (Bill Russ / VisitNC.com)

The Small Business Administration has provided guarantees for some $106 billion in loans to more than 193,000 small businesses over the last four years. It also runs programs to help small firms win government contracts, help veteran-owned businesses, and boost international trade.
All that would cease in a shutdown. Although the SBA would continue to back existing loans in its portfolio, it wouldn't initiate any new loan guarantees. The one exception here is the Disaster Loan Program, which steps in during natural disasters and other emergencies — that would continue to operate.
For those reasons and others, a recent poll found that fully 41 percent of small-business employers with less than $5 million in annual revenue said that an extended shutdown (three months or more) would force them to pull back on their hiring plans. No one expects a shutdown that long, but even a shorter hiatus could disrupt some economic activity.
7) The tourist trade would take a hit.

Closed! Well, unless Arizona wants to pay to operate it. (Ron Watts / Corbios)

The National Park Service will close more than 400 national parks, museums and sites across the country, including Yosemite National Park in California, Grand Canyon park, Alcatraz in San Francisco, and the Statue of Liberty in New York. Day visitors will have to leave immediately. Campers will have two days to pack up and get out.
That sounds like a minor inconvenience, but it can also have a formidable economic impact. Last time this happened in 1995-1996, some 7 million visitors were turned away. This time around, the National Parks Conservation Association estimates that local communities could lose some $30 million in business for every day of the shutdown. That can start to add up.
8) Head Start programs for hundreds of kids will slowly start closing.

(Carol Kaliff/AP )- Lead teacher Carmen Prybylski works with children Quinn Watson, left, 3, Sofia Coway, 2, and Kayla Lamour, 3, at Head Start's new building in Danbury, Conn. July 17, 2013.

There are some 1,600 Head Start programs around the country providing education, health, nutrition and other services to roughly 1 million low-income children and their families. Those will slowly begin closing during a shutdown.
Initially, only about 20 programs would be affected — the programs whose federal grants expire on Oct. 1 and don't get renewed. Over time, more programs would likely be affected. The effects really vary from community to community. In York County, S.C., for instance, pre-kindergarten classes for some 864 kids will be canceled this Friday. (These programs would likely be reinstated once the shutdown ended.)
Note that Head Start has already faced cutbacks due to sequestration budget cuts, having eliminated services for some 57,000 children this year.
9) Disability benefits could be interrupted.

(Source: Center for American Progress)

During the shutdown, the Social Security administration won't have enough staff to schedule new hearings for those applying for disability benefits. And the Veterans Appeal Board will be closed, which means veterans appealing a decision on disability benefits will have to wait until the shutdown ends.
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Note that these aren't the only consequences of the shutdown. There are plenty of others: Businesses won't be able to access E-Verify to check the immigration status of potential hires. The National Institutes of Health will stop accepting new patients for clinical trials. The Bureau of Land Management will stop issuing permits for oil and gas companies on public lands.
How painful the above impacts are depends on your perspective. Obviously the people affected will care a lot. But how big an outcry will there be from the broader public? Over at Business Insider, Joe Weisenthal suspects that "there's no obvious one thing [about a shutdown] that will be so annoying to the public that the two sides would quickly have to come to a deal." If that's true, a shutdown could last for quite some time.
It's also worth noting that we've already seen disruptive cuts this year after Congress allowed sequestration to hit — and lawmakers haven't exactly rushed to reverse those haphazard budget cuts. Indeed, much of Washington appears to have made peace with sequestration. That makes it hard to guess exactly how long a shutdown might last.
Related: Absolutely everything you need to know about how a government shutdown works.

NAMES OF 40 SENATORS THAT KILLED VETS JOBS

Killing Vets and Vets Jobs

Invasion of the GOP Pod People!!!

Mitch McConnell: Separated at Birth!

• 

Killing Vets wasn't enough

September 19, 20012

Senate Republicans Kill Veterans' Jobs Bill

The bill was fully paid for and entirely bipartisan

• 40 of 45 Republicans voted against the bill
• It was defeated by 58-40 vote
• 60 votes was needed to pass

It would have lowered unemployment among military veterans, giving grants to federal, state, and local agencies, to hire veterans- giving priority to those who served on or after 9/11.

ARE YOU OUTRAGED YET?

STILL VOTING REPUBLICAN?