Author: Mike Lillis

For Republicans in Washington trying to latch onto the small-government momentum of the Tea Party movement, there’s this little glitch: Their very jobs depend on the same big spending in Washington that the Tea Partiers claim to oppose.

Recall, for example, the GOP outcry when the Democrats proposed to trim some payments (many say overpayments) to the private insurance companies that cover Medicare patients. Or the reaction when the White House proposed to cut a defense project from Sen. Richard Shelby’s (R) Alabama. The message is clear: Republican leaders might defend the virtues of smaller government in theory, but if it threatens popular programs or jobs in their districts, they suddenly don’t want to see that theory realized. Particularly in an election year.

That conflict of ideology hasn’t been lost on Sen. Bernie Sanders. The Vermont Independent, who caucuses with the Democrats, pointed out yesterday that a Tea Party takeover of the Republican Party would be “extraordinarily good for the Democrats.”

“When you analyze and you go beyond the rhetoric,” Sanders told CNN’s Joy Behar, ”what you find out is that these guys want to abolish Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid and the Veterans’ Administration. There really is not a whole lot of policy substance to what they are saying.

“When the American people learn that behind the anger there’s not a whole lot to be said, I think it works to the Democrats’ advantage.”

Sanders argues that the source of the public’s anger isn’t government spending, but a decades-long trend of of middle-class jobs moving overseas for the sake of corporate profits — the trickle-down theory of corporate protection that hasn’t quite trickled down to many working-class folks.

“People in this country, especially men, are extremely angry because the middle class is in the process of collapsing,” Sanders said. “You have guys who are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week, and they’re making less money than they did 10 or 20 years ago. What they are perceiving is there is a gap between the very rich and everybody else. Their jobs are going to China and they are angry.”

Sanders isn’t the only one to call out the GOP recently on their claims of small-government advocacy. Last week, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman also took the Republicans to task, arguing that the GOP tax cuts of the last decade have produced the inevitable deficits that were designed to shrink government.

“The beast is starving, as planned,” Krugman wrote. “It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut.”

From the offices of Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.) comes this description of the latest unemployment benefits extension being put forth by the Democrats:

Unemployment Insurance Extension. Certain unemployment insurance benefits expired on February 28, 2010. Prior to expiration, an unemployed worker could receive up to 26 weeks of unemployment benefits provided by the state in which they were employed.  After the state-provided benefits were exhausted, the worker could qualify for 34 more weeks of benefits provided by the federal government.  If that person was unemployed in a state with an unemployment rate above 6 percent, they qualified for an additional 13 weeks of benefits also provided by the federal government.  Unemployed workers in states with an unemployment level over 8.5 percent qualified for an additional six weeks of benefits also provided by the federal government.  In addition, the federal government paid 100 percent of the cost of state Extended Benefits programs which provided up to 13 additional weeks of benefits for unemployed workers who had exhausted regular state benefits or Emergency Unemployment Compensation.  Last year’s economic recovery bill increased weekly unemployment benefits by an additional $25 per week.

This proposal extends these provisions, including increased unemployment benefits, retroactively to March 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010. This proposal is estimated to cost $70 billion over ten years.

Democrats are hoping to vote this week on the measure, which is part of a much larger package of tax break extension, transportation funding and aid to states.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) just took to the chamber floor asking for unanimous consent to pass a temporary extension of unemployment insurance, COBRA benefits and a handful of additional funding provisions that expired yesterday.

You already know the outcome.

Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) continued his one-man blockade of the legislation, insisting that Democratic leaders come up with the $10 billion the proposal is estimated to cost.

“The debt that we have arrived at,” Bunning said, “it’s unsustainable.”

It marks the eleventh time since in less than a week that Bunning has blocked the bill.

A few weeks ago, Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee, came together in rare bipartisan fashion to propose an $85 billion bill designed to tackle the nation’s employment crisis.

Don’t expect the same cooperation surrounding the latest jobs proposal.

Just moments after Baucus took to the Senate floor this afternoon to outline the Democrats’ latest stimulus bill, Grassley blasted the proposal for being too large and not targeted enough. “Don’t let this package be mislabeled as the Baucus-Grassley package,” he said, adding that it “dramatically differs in cost, balance … and intent” from the original bill. Grassley blamed Democratic leaders — i.e., Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — for “arbitrarily” scrapping the original proposal and replacing it “with a bill that skews toward their liberal wing.”

Looks like Democratic leaders will be relying again on Scott Brown & Co. if they want to get this thing through the upper chamber, as they hope to do this week.

New day, same drama on the Senate floor.

Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) this afternoon rejected the Democrats’ call to pass a temporary, five-week extension of unemployment and COBRA benefits, again citing the effect of that $10 billion package on the national debt.

“If we can’t find $10 billion to pay for something that we all support, we will never pay for anything on the floor of this U.S. Senate,” he said. “We cannot keep adding to the debt.”

Bunning’s move means that Democratic leaders will now drop attempts to pass a temporary extension and move instead to a longer-term fix. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) is currently on the chamber floor making the case for that package, which would extend the filing deadline for UI benefits through December and provide states with additional Medicaid dollars, among other provisions.

The office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Democrats hope to pass the bill this week, though the process might spill into the next. Meantime, unemployed workers will be gradually exhausting their UI benefits at a rate of roughly 1.2 million per month.

There’s been a great deal of confusion surrounding the Democrats’ proposals to extend the filing deadline for unemployment benefits, which came and went yesterday. And it’s easy to see why. A number of media outlets have reported that the Democratic bills include “an extension of UI benefits,” or some variation thereof. (The Associated Press, for example, wrote a widely circulated piece last week indicating that the Senate bill “would continue to provide additional weeks of benefits to jobless people whose unemployment insurance would otherwise expire.”)

Reports like that one have raised the spirits of many long-term unemployed folks, who are hoping that Congress will create additional tiers of benefits. Sorry in advance for being the bearer of bad news, but the proposals floating around Capitol Hill wouldn’t do it.

“It is not a new tier,” the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) clarified today, “but rather an extension of the expiration of the [existing] tiers.”

The confusion stems largely from the bewildering framework of the UI system itself. Very generally, states offer 26 weeks of benefits to qualified unemployed workers before four tiers (maximum) of federal benefits — dubbed Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) – kick in.

Tier I (20 weeks) and Tier II (13 weeks) were created by last year’s $787 billion stimulus bill. And last fall, lawmakers stepped in again to (1) add an extra week to Tier 2, making it 14 weeks instead of 13 weeks, (2) create Tier III (13 weeks) for states with unemployment rates higher than 6 percent, and (3) create Tier IV (6 weeks) for states with unemployment rates topping 8.5 percent.

The problem: Beneficiaries must exhaust the benefits they’re receiving before they can file for the next level. Because that filing deadline was yesterday, those exhausting their Tier I, II or III benefits from now forward won’t be eligible for the next level without congressional action.

The House passed a six-month filing extension in December. And Senate lawmakers are currently eying plans to go further, extending the filing deadline at least through December, and maybe two months longer. But neither plan would, for example, add a Tier V.

The distinction is notable in an economy where 6.3 million Americans have been out of work longer than 27 weeks.

For conservative Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), already struggling in her reelection bid this year, the news went from bad to worse today, as Arkansas’ popular Lt. Gov. Bill Halter (D) announced that he’ll be challenging her in the Democratic primary. Conservatives have been attacking Lincoln from the right for her vote in favor of the Democrats’ health care reform bill. The populist Halter poses a problem because he’ll be attacking from the left.

“Washington is broken,” Halter said in a video announcing his plans. “Bailing out Wall Street with no strings attached while leaving middle-class Arkansas taxpayers with the bill. Protecting insurance company profits instead of protecting patients and lowering health costs. Gridlock, bickering and partisan games while unemployment is at a 25-year high. Enough is enough.”

Liberal groups are already jumping in to help him. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee today launched a petition and a YouTube video calling Lincoln “one of the worst corporate Democrats in Washington.”

Even before this storm hit, Lincoln was facing a “toss up” in November, according to the Cook Political Report.

There’s plenty of criticism being directed today at Sen. Jim Bunning, the Kentucky Republican who single-handedly prevented the Democrats from extending the filing deadline for unemployment benefits, which arrives Sunday.

Bunning says that he wants the $10 billion cost to be paid for with cuts elsewhere, and, despite his past support for much larger unfunded bills, we’ll take him at his word. But there’s another good reason that Republicans want to prolong the debate over the unemployment benefits bill: Namely, it keeps all other Democratic priorities off the Senate floor.

If that sounds familiar it’s because GOP leaders used the same tactic in October, when they spent weeks delaying a UI extension that eventually passed 98 to 0. Now, like then, they know that the unemployment extension will pass. Now, like then, they know that most (if not all) of their caucus will vote for it. By why would they want the process to move quickly when it would simply allow Democrats to tackle more items on their legislative wish-list before the elections? The longer the Senate is forced to debate must-pass bills like unemployment benefits, the shorter a window Democrats will have to move things like health care reform, financial reform, climate legislation, etc. (The backlog is enormous: There are nearly 300 bills idling in the Senate that House Democrats have already passed this Congress. Few are supported by the Republicans.)

The reason Republicans have chosen this route is simple: It’s worked.

The delay on UI last year kept health care reform off the floor, ultimately forcing a Christmas Eve vote that pushed the House/Senate health reform negotiations into January. Then Scott Brown happened. Then health reform sputtered.

For the Republicans, there are perils here. More than 1 million unemployed workers stand to lose their benefits in March if Congress fails to extend the filing deadline. Republicans don’t want to be blamed when folks start exhausting those benefits, so who do they send to the floor (solo) to delay the process, but the least popular guy in the building — the tempestuous Jim Bunning, who’s retiring at the end of the year because Republican leadership, behind fellow Kentuckian Mitch McConnell, basically pushed him out.

Bunning is kind-of like the hockey thug who’s only role is to go out and punch the other team’s star player. It can’t hurt his reputation at all; even if it did, he’s not up for re-election; and he alone absorbs all the media attention and public scrutiny, while GOP leaders keep mostly silent. (McConnell, after all, has been distancing himself since Wednesday, when Bunning’s one-man filibuster began.)

So the players have changed, but the strategy’s the same: Just stall. Unfortunately for the unemployed, it seems to be working again.

Sen. Jim Bunning’s (R-Ky.) decision to block an unfunded 30-day extension of unemployment insurance, COBRA benefits, and Medicare doctor payments has been largely a one-man endeavor.

No longer.

This morning, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) took the chamber floor in defense of Bunning, who has rejected the Democrats’ $10 billion proposal because it’s not paid for.

“All that the senator from Kentucky has asked for is that we do what every American family has to do,” Cornyn said, “and what every small business has to do, and that is [to] be honest in our accounting of the public’s money.” He added:

We know that there’s broad bipartisan support for the legislation. … All the senator from Kentucky has asked for is that it be paid for — that we not add $10 billion more to the federal deficit.

They aren’t entirely wrong. The national debt has become a national disgrace (and a menacing one). But it’s also difficult to take seriously any claims of fiscal rectitude coming from Bunning or Cornyn, both of whom voted in 2003 for the GOP’s Medicare prescription drug benefit, which is projected to cost $550 billion through 2016 — and not a cent of it offset.

Suddenly $10 billion in deficit spending doesn’t seem like the problem anymore.

Forget partisanship, filibusters and Jim Bunning for a second. The other leading reason the Democrats are having so much trouble passing bills is that House and Senate Democrats can’t stand each other.

From a reporter’s standpoint, the evidence of this is largely anecdotal. (You wouldn’t believe the number of times that Democratic aides — when asked if they’ve spoken with aides in the other chamber about this issue or that bill — have responded with some variation of, “We never talk to them.”)

Latest evidence of the in-fighting: That $15 billion jobs bill — the one that passed the Senate this week with a boost from the upper-chamber’s newest liberal, Scott Brown (R-Mass.) — is going nowhere fast in the House, despite the 76-seat advantage the Democrats have there. Yesterday, the Congressional Black Caucus rejected the proposal for being too small, forcing House leaders to scrap their plans to vote on that bill today.

In part, this is understandable. Economists agree that the $15 billion package — focused largely on business tax cuts – isn’t nearly large enough to put much of a dent in the nation’s unemployment rate, and blacks have suffered disproportionately through the jobs crisis. (While the national jobless rate was 9.7 percent in January, that for blacks was 16.5 percent, according to the Labor Department.)

Still, Senate leaders have been clear that the recent proposal is just the first in a series of bills designed to create jobs. So while the House passed its jobs bill as a $154 billion package in December, the Senate has decided to approach the issue incrementally. Indeed, the $15 billion Senate proposal didn’t include an extension of unemployment insurance, COBRA benefits or the billions of dollars in state help that upper chamber leaders are expected to take up next week.

First, of course, they’ll have to maneuver around partisanship, filibusters and Jim Bunning.

That’s the question being asked by some government watchdogs in the wake of Rep. Charlie Rangel’s admonishment by the House Ethics Committee yesterday.

The New York Democrat, the panel concluded, had violated congressional lobbying rules when he was flown to Caribbean business conferences in recent years at the expense of corporate sponsors. Those same companies, though, had also sponsored the travel arrangements of five other House members — Democratic Reps. Donald Payne (N.J.), Bennie Thompson (Miss.), Yvette Clarke (N.Y.), Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (Mich.) and Delegate Donna Christensen (V.I.) — none of whom were cited for violations of ethics rules. The ethics panel found that those members were unaware that the corporations were funding the travel, whereas members of Rangel’s staff were.

Yet Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, wonders just how unaware they were. In a statement issued yesterday, Sloan argued that if Rangel’s office knew the source of the funds, the others surely would have known as well. “The notion that Rep. Rangel alone was aware the trip was sponsored by corporate donors defies logic,” she said.

There were banners identifying specific corporate donors and Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ),  publicly thanked corporate sponsors.  The fact is, each and every member of Congress present was equally as culpable as Rep. Rangel and all should be held to the same standard.

Of course, admonishment by the ethics committee is just a nominal penalty — a slap on the wrist with few implications beyond the political stink that Republicans are making. The real embarrassment is that, to reach this point, it took the ethics committee eight months, six subpoenas, 29 witness interviews, and 19 meetings of the investigative subcommittee.

Do you think that cost taxpayers more or less than the $11,800 in travel dollars the lawmakers were forced to return?

Senate Democrats this morning tried to pass a 30-day extension of unemployment benefits (among other things), designed to allow the upper-chamber more time to crunch the details of a longer-term fix.

It didn’t happen.

Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) objected to the request for unanimous consent, insisting that the extension be paid for. The Hall-of-Fame baseball pitcher, who’s retiring at the end of this year, has proposed an amendment to cover the $10 billion tab using unspent stimulus funds, though he says he’s in favor of other offsets as well.

“Everybody in this chamber wants to extend unemployment benefits,” Bunning said on the Senate floor. “[But] if we can’t find a $10 billion somewhere for a bill that everybody in this body supports, we will never pay for anything.”

It’s not the first time. Yesterday, a group of Senate lawmakers remained in the chamber until nearly midnight as the Democrats tried to get an agreement on the 30-day UI extension. Bunning didn’t budge.

The impasse means that those who exhaust their UI benefits after Sunday’s filing deadline will have to wait for Congress to pass a longer-term extension — a bill Senate leaders plan to take up early next week.

It won’t  be an immediate vote. Although party leaders have reached an agreement to proceed to the bill (meaning Democrats won’t have to slog through cloture procedures just to bring the bill to the floor), the final vote will likely require a cloture vote due to Bunning’s objections.

Meanwhile, unemployed workers will slowly be losing their benefits, with roughly 1.2 million folks projected to drop from the rolls in March alone without congressional action.

As a dramatic feature, yesterday’s high-profile health care summit in Washington was a flop.

That is, for all the breathtaking headlines inspired by the partisan showdown, there was exactly zero character development. Republicans went into the building both opposed to the Democrats’ comprehensive reform plans and calling for a do-over — and they left feeling the same way. Democrats, for their part, have been convinced that their proposals represent the right prescription for fixing the nation’s dismal health care system — and their views today remain unchanged as well.

Recognizing, then, that the two sides have agreed to disagree about what reform should look like, it’s worth pointing out the main focus of the disharmony, which is this: Democrats hope to enact a plan that would cover a huge chunk of the nation’s uninsured population (currently 46 million people) by taxing high-income folks and adding fees to medical services companies that will surely profit from the new business. Republicans, on the other hand, have no intention of finding ways to cover most of these folks. (”We just can’t afford this,” House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said during the summit.)

Or, as Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein wrote today:

The most important thing Republicans think is that if there are Americans who can’t afford the insurance policies that private insurers are willing to offer, then that’s their problem — there’s nothing the government or the rest of us should do about it.

This is hardly news. Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee and a participant at yesterday’s pow-wow, said in no uncertain terms last month that, “We’re not trying to get to universal coverage.” He was talking about Republicans.

Instead, the GOP plans to call for loosening regulations to allow patients to buy insurance policies from across state lines. The theory is that the increased competition would solve the access problem by making health plans more affordable — the Milton Friedman strategy for covering the uninsured. Nevermind that it would likely cause most companies to move their headquarters to states where regulations are most lax — much like all those credit-card companies have set up P.O. boxes in Delaware and South Dakota.

Indeed, private insurance companies have had decades to lure these tens-of-millions of uninsured Americans into buying coverage by dropping rates. That they haven’t done so says quite a bit about where their priorities rest.

One year after the Obama administration launched its $75 billion anti-foreclosure program, the housing market remains volatile, loan modifications have been scant, foreclosures are still sky-high — and more and more lawmakers are wondering why the White House hasn’t been more aggressive in tackling the crisis.

Administration efforts to stabilize the troubled housing market have prioritized lenders above struggling homeowners, a number of House Democrats charged Thursday, leading to thousands of foreclosures that might otherwise have been prevented — and threatening thousands more in the months to come.

Although the Obama White House has offered billions of dollars to banks that successfully alter loans to make them more affordable, only 116,00 of those modifications have been made permanent, the Treasury Department reported last week. Meanwhile, nearly 3 million homes went into foreclosure in 2009 alone. The reason for the discrepancy, some Democrats contend, is clear: The decision to modify loans, under Obama’s programs, has been left in the hands of the same mortgage servicing companies that often stand to profit more from foreclosures. That conflict of interest, critics say, all but ensures that the administration’s voluntary modification program will fail.

“The industry that received a trillion dollar bailout,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), head of the Oversight Committee’s Domestic Policy subpanel, charged Thursday, “has been unwilling to absorb the losses, to write down bad debts, and their recalcitrance is holding up the resolution of the foreclosure crisis.”

He’s right about at least one thing: Despite the fact that the free-falling housing market was at the root of the global economic collapse, Washington policymakers have dedicated more attention — not to mention dollars — to the bankers of Wall Street than the homeowners of Main Street. The results are tangible. More than 2.8 million homes went into foreclosure last year — a jump of 21 percent from 2008 and 120 percent from 2007, according to RealtyTrac, an online foreclosure database. And it isn’t over. In January, another 315,000 homes went into foreclosure, RealtyTrac reported — up 15 percent from the year before.

Phyllis Caldwell, who heads the Treasury’s Home Affordable Modification Program, defended the administration’s efforts Thursday, telling lawmakers that, aside from the 116,000 permanent loan mods under HAMP, nearly 1 million more homeowners are in trial modifications. The administration, she argued, is making “significant progress” toward its goal of reaching out to 3-4 million struggling homeowners by 2012.

“There are clear signs that our efforts are having a substantial impact,” Caldwell said.

Others aren’t so sure. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) went after the HAMP for a lack of oversight he said has led to foreclosures even among those receiving trial modifications. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) accused the Treasury of taking on a task better suited for housing-specific agencies like HUD. And Kucinich blasted the administration for allowing the lenders to decide if homeowners should receive help.

“You’re going to have to do better,” he told Caldwell.

And that was just the Democrats. The Republicans had their own laundry list of complaints surrounding the HAMP, most of which boiled down to their feeling that the federal government has no business dabbling in the affairs of free-market lenders to begin with. “I just question the idea that the big federal government can do these things,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), senior Republican on the subpanel.

The disastrous effects of the housing collapse can’t easily be overstated. The banks, heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities, first required bailing out, and more recently have been reluctant to lend due to the continuing volatility of the housing market. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that consumers lost more than $7 trillion in equity when the housing bubble burst — equity that many had leveraged to buy things they really couldn’t afford. The combination has exacerbated the recovery of an economy utterly dependent on consumer spending and the easy flow of credit.

Indeed, William Dennis, senior fellow at the NFIB Research Foundation, a small-business advocacy group, said this week that the collapse of the real estate market is a central reason that companies aren’t hiring. “You’re not going to address the small business problem until you address real estate,” Dennis said.

Ron Blackwell, chief economist for the AFL-CIO, agreed. His group has endorsed a moratorium on all foreclosures — a move that would force the banks to renegotiate mortgage contracts. That proposal was seen as anathema to the banking industry, however, which has retained tremendous influence over lawmakers despite its role in the economic turmoil.

“The government has been very, very tender in its care of banks,” Blackwell said this week.

Congress has also offered new fixes for the foreclosure crisis in recent months. The sweeping financial reform bill passed by the House in December includes $3 billion to help unemployed homeowners meet their mortgage obligations. The idea is that, while unemployment benefits can put food on the table, those checks often aren’t enough to cover the mortgage as well.

The Senate is expected to unveil its version of financial reform shortly, although it could be months before members of the upper-chamber vote on the bill — if they do at all.

Meantime, many Democrats are hoping the Obama administration will step in on its own with mandatory programs to knock down principal balances to keep folks in their homes.

“The administration that inherited the crisis will be judged for how they respond,” Kucinich said. “That judgment can be as harsh as if they had created the crisis themselves.”

Despite yesterday’s bipartisan Senate vote on a $15 billion jobs bill, Republicans on Capitol Hill have been pretty much united in their condemnation of additional deficit spending as a remedy to the nation’s entrenched jobs crisis.

“The time has come,” Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) said this week, “to stop pretending we can spend our way out of the recession.”

Enter David M. Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general and now head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which advocates for balanced budgets. Walker — teaming up with Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute — said this week that a temporary bump in federal spending is the solution to longer-term deficit troubles, rather than part of the problem.

“A focus on jobs now is consistent with addressing our deficit problems ahead,” Walker and Mishel wrote in Politico.

The difficulty is that many politicians and news organizations often cast deficit debates as a dichotomy: You either care about them or you don’t.

But this is rarely accurate. The fact that the two of us, who have philosophical differences on the proper role of government, find much to agree on about deficits is a testament to the importance of dropping this useless dichotomy and finally talking about deficits in a reasonable way.

The reasonable way is first to make the distinction between temporary, emergency spending designed to pull the country out of recession and auto-pilot entitlement spending that’s the true root of the nation’s long-term budget troubles.

The unlikely duo of Walker and Mishel is calling for programs that (1) target job creation specifically, (2) would build jobs quickly, and (3) wouldn’t rely on federal funds in the long run. Infrastructure funding, a hiring tax credit for businesses and an extension of unemployment benefits, they write, all meet these criteria.

The “targeted, timely and temporary” diagnosis is hardly a new one, but its reiteration now — a year after passage of the Democrats’ $787 billion stimulus bill — is good evidence that lawmakers didn’t focus enough on those parameters the first time around (as many economists have indicated).

Will lawmakers learn the lessons of the last year? Not probable in an election year when voter anger, more than economic necessity, seems likely to dictate what Congress can do.

The health care summit now underway in Washington is being packaged by both sides as a serious debate over the most pressing problems facing the nation’s dysfunctional health delivery system.

It’s hardly the case.

Republicans have entered the building dead-set in opposition to the Democrats’ reform plans, and it doesn’t matter that a number of GOP provisions are a part of the proposals, nor that it was the Republicans who seven years ago enacted the largest (unfunded) Medicare expansion in the history of the program. GOP leaders will emphasize that the Democrats’ bill was pieced together behind closed doors (a partially accurate claim), and call for the whole thing to be scrapped in favor of a piecemeal approach — never mind that decades of piecemeal approaches are largely the reason that the health system is broken to begin with.

Democrats, for their part, are hoping that the high-profile summit (what else is anyone talking about today?) will dull some of those criticisms of back-room deals and a lack of transparency. (They never anticipated that something as wonky as extra Medicaid funding for Sen. Ben Nelson’s (D) Nebraska — a deal that’s rightly become emblematic of everything that’s wrong with Washington — would stir so much voter anger.) Yet Democrats, too, are coming to the summit convinced that their reform bills are the right diagnosis for the sick system. In this sense neither side is there to debate so much as they’re there to sell preconceived ideas to the viewing public.

In other words, the health care summit is perfect daytime TV: Rehearsed, emotional, full of platitudes and, finally, meaningless.

So says The Washington Post, reporting this morning that, for the sake of passing banking reforms this year, the White House is willing to drop its insistence on a stand-alone consumer protection agency — an idea championed by a number of consumer advocates, including Elizabeth Warren, who heads the TARP oversight committee.

President Obama’s economic team is now open to housing the consumer regulator inside another agency, such as the Treasury Department, though they still prefer a stand-alone agency. In either case, they are insisting on a regulator with political autonomy and real teeth so it can effectively enforce rules designed to protect consumers of mortgages, credit cards and other financial products.

Politically, this was probably inevitable. Republicans are unanimously opposed to a new stand-alone agency, arguing that it would represent just another lumbering bureaucracy incapable of tying its own shoes. They fear it would become the EPA of the finance world (i.e., that it would hinder companies’ ability to do exactly what they want). They aren’t going to vote for such a plan, particularly since Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) — the Republican leading the negotiations with Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) — is as adamantly opposed as the rest of his caucus.

Translation: The banks may be unpopular, and they may be the reason that the global economy collapsed, but their influence over lawmakers still ensures that they’ll get most of what they want on Capitol Hill.

As job creation continues to be the caboose of economic recovery, employment experts of all stripes are hiking the pressure on Congress to tackle the crisis by encouraging employers to cut hours rather than firing workers. And more and more lawmakers are taking heed.

Seventeen states have already adopted so-called “job-sharing” programs, which encourage employers to reduce workers’ hours in lieu of firing them outright. The state government, in these cases, then steps in to make up a portion of the lost wages. Between 300,000 and 350,000 workers are participating nationwide, saving roughly 100,000 jobs that would have otherwise been scrapped, according to Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research and a long-time supporter of the concept.

Yet that’s just a drop in the bucket relative to the 12-million-job crater the country is in, leading many economists — not all of them liberal — to push Congress for a much larger federal investment in job-sharing programs.

Kevin A. Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told lawmakers this week that such programs are among the most targeted and cost-effective ways to tackle the nation’s jobs crisis, which has left nearly one in five workers without a job or underemployed.

The concept is simple: Rather than laying off a few workers during lean times, businesses instead could spread the pain by reducing work hours for many. In Hassett’s example, if five workers had their hours cut by 20 percent it would prevent one worker from being fired at no cost to the company. And if Congress were to alter its policies surrounding emergency unemployment insurance, those workers could then access a portion of those benefits — in this case, 20 percent.

Workers benefit by keeping their jobs. Employers win because they don’t have to train new part-time workers. And states would gain because their share of the partial benefits would be less than they would otherwise have to pay.

“Right now the government only really shares in supporting that worker if you lay the whole worker off,” Hassett said Tuesday before the House Financial Services Committee, advocating a policy that isn’t supported by the Republicans who invited him to testify. “By adopting job sharing, we could give firms an incentive to slow job destruction.”

The call is timely. Even as the nation’s unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent last month, the number of long-term unemployed — those without work longer than 27 weeks — jumped to a historic high. Economists are projecting not only that unemployment will rise later this year, but also that it will remain above 8 percent even two years from now — higher than the peak jobless rate in either of the last two recessions.

Hassett pointed out that the job numbers coming out of the Labor Department each month are net figures reflecting the difference between the millions of jobs created and the millions of jobs lost — a constant churning that he says represents a vital opportunity for lawmakers interested in reducing unemployment.

“There is already a massive amount of job creation out there,” he testified. “If we can slow job destruction even a little bit, then we will have set the stage for big increases in net job creation.”

Reducing involuntary job losses by 10 percent, Hassett estimates, would be the equivalent of adding 200,000 jobs a month to the economy. Job-sharing policies in Germany have kept unemployment rates steady, Hassett said, even while that country’s GDP has tanked almost as drastically as that of the United States. And an additional perk: job sharing would be particularly beneficial to black workers, Hassett said, for the simple reason that blacks are often the first folks to be laid off in tough economic times.

Congress is paying attention. Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) called Hassett’s proposal “very useful.” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) offered to give him an extra five minutes to testify. And Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) called job sharing “a wonderful idea.”

“I turned to my staff and said, ‘Go draw me a bill that will do this kind of sharing, if nobody else has introduced that bill,” Watt said.

Turns out, the legislation is already out there. Bills sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) would provide more money to the 17 states already operating job-sharing programs, while offering additional funds to other states that choose to adopt similar initiatives. The White House, Baker said in a phone interview Wednesday, is supportive, though officials there seem intent to let Congress design its own jobs legislation.

Not everyone, though, is on board. Republicans, claiming that the first stimulus hasn’t done anything to help the economy, are near-united in opposition to another large spending bill — regardless of what it contains.

“I’m really surprised that we’re even debating the need for a new stimulus in light of our experience with the old stimulus,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus (Ala.), senior Republican on the Financial Services panel.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) agreed, arguing that the Democrats’ $787 billion stimulus bill was “a complete failure.”

“I’m not even sure that John Maynard Keynes would have [supported] that particular stimulus program,” Hensarling said. “And here we are contemplating another one.”

Testifying before the House panel Tuesday, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, carried another message, warning lawmakers that current interest-rate and deficit-spending levels leave policymakers will few remedies should the country slip back into recession. With that in mind, Zandi urged panel members “to be aggressive” in crafting more stiumulus measures.

“If we have another recession, we will have no policy response,” he said. “We have to err on the side of doing too much.”

Appearing on CNBC yesterday, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) decried the Democrats’ plans to cover tens of millions of uninsured Americans by “mandat[ing] that people have to buy a government insurance policy.”

Actually, no.

The proposed individual mandate, which doesn’t apply to everyone, would require most Americans to buy private insurance on government-backed marketplaces, called exchanges. The government insurance policy Hatch refers to — commonly known as the public option — wasn’t included in the Senate-passed bill and it wasn’t a part of the White House proposal unveiled earlier this week.

Hatch, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, knows this, but evidently doesn’t see a problem with publicly misrepresenting the nature of the proposed reforms. It’s not as irresponsible as death panel claims, but it’s disingenuous nonetheless.

It’s no wonder that there’s so much opposition to health care reform – until folks are told what’s in the bills.

The Republicans blasting the Democrats’ health reform proposal as an unaffordable new entitlement are continually running smack into the tiny inconvenience that, just seven years ago, GOP leaders enacted the Medicare prescription drug benefit — a new federal program projected to cost taxpayers $550 billion dollars through 2016 alone. And not a cent of it was offset by spending cuts elsewhere.

The media have caught on, and they’re pressing some GOP leaders to explain themselves. Not that the Republicans are ready to concede their hypocrisy.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told CNBC yesterday that Part D has been worth the additional taxpayer costs because the program has helped millions of seniors “get their drug costs down.” (As if the 30+ million Americans estimated to get health coverage under the Democrats’ bills wouldn’t similarly benefit.) Republicans “couldn’t have [offset] it if we wanted to,” Hatch added, “because they would not have paid for this.” He was talking about Democrats.

We would have paid for it but we didn’t have the votes to force paying for it. So don’t blame Republicans for that.

That’s a bit different from the explanation that Hatch gave USA Today in December, when he said that the Republicans didn’t offset the new entitlement because, in 2003, “it was standard practice not to pay for things” — a convenient position to have when your party controls both the Congress and the White House, but not necessarily one to set the country on the path to financial stability.

Bruce Bartlett — former economic adviser to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — has been quick to call out those Republicans who want to have it both ways. Writing in Forbes in November, Bartlett called Part D “a pure giveaway with a gross cost greater than either the House or Senate health reform bills how being considered.”

It astonishes me that a party enacting anything like the drug benefit would have the chutzpah to view itself as fiscally responsible in any sense of the term. As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt. Space prohibits listing all their names, but the final Senate vote can be found here and the House vote here.

Hatch, it should be noted, voted in favor of the largest entitlement expansion since Medicare was created.

H/t: The Hill.