Madison Project

Last week, I bemoaned the fact that Alabama is one of the most conservative states, yet it sports a mediocre congressional delegation.  Alabama has one of the earliest congressional primaries; they will overlap with the presidential primary this coming Tuesday.  It turns out that several of the incumbents have primary challengers.

The one sane Republican in the state, Mo Brooks (CD-5) is being challenged by former Congressman and former Democrat Parker Griffith.  Obviously, we must support Brooks over Griffith.

In CD-1, Jo Bonner has several primary challengers.  This 5-term moderate once called the RSC budget cuts “misguided”  and eventually terminated his membership with the RSC.  He scored a 54% from Heritage Action last year.  The only challenger who has spent some money and has gained any traction is businessman Dean Young.  Although he has no record as an elected official, he has successfully fought against tax increases on  a local level and will clearly be more conservative than Bonner.

Then we have Spencer Bachus in the 6th district.  We don’t need an ethically-challenged supporter of big-government as the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.  This central Alabama district is perhaps the most conservative congressional district in the country.  If we’re going to reelect folks like Bachus from this district, we should just fold up shop.

The only viable candidate against Bachus appears to be state senator Scott Beason.  Beason has amassed one of the most conservative records in the Alabama legislature and is the sponsor of Alabama’s HB 56 anti-illegal immigration law.  His entire career has been marked by challenging the Republican establishment; he beat moderate incumbents for his house and senate seats.  He is not the type of guy to fall in line with leadership.

We learned last week from the defeat of Jean Schmidt that a small amount of effort can go a long way in a low-turnout primary.  It is in these districts that we must elect conservatives if we have any chance of securing a conservative majority to Congress some day.

The Fiscal Year 2013 budget season is right around the corner as we await the much-anticipated Ryan budget over the next few weeks.  However, a few conservative senators decided to get a head start on the process by announcing their blueprint to balance the budget in just 5 years.  Yesterday, Rand Paul, along with Mike Lee and Jim DeMint, introduced a stellar budget proposal, which achieves a budget surplus by FY 2017.

Here are some key aspects of the budget, A Plan to Revitalize America.

• Discretionary spending: Eliminates 4 entire departments: Commerce, Energy, Education, and HUD.  Several agencies within the USDA and the DOI would be eliminated.  It also privatizes the TSA.  Most other discretionary programs and agencies are frozen at 2008 spending levels.  But the sharp cuts of the sequester on the military are eliminated. Dodd-Frank and Davis-Bacon are completely repealed.
• Entitlements: Medicare is transformed from an open-ended benefit to a defined-contribution premium support model, which is similar to the current health insurance options that are presented to members of Congress.  Social Security retirement age is raised and growth of benefits is slowed for higher-income.  There is no private account option (the one thing I don’t like).  Medicaid, SCHIP, food stamps, and child nutrition programs are block granted to the states.
• Budget balance: Overall, this proposal would spend $11.1 billion less than the CBO alternative budget baseline over 10 years.  Paul envisions a $579 billion surplus by the end of the 1-year budget frame.

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Last week, we endorsed veteran Congressman Don Manzullo over Adam Kinzinger in the member-on-member battle for the newly-created 16th district in Illinois.  I have to confess that although Manzullo is far superior to Kinzinger, we had some  reservations about putting out brand on someone who voted for the debt ceiling deal.  Nobody has a perfect voting record, but that vote was extremely consequential.

Well, any compunction we had about our endorsement is gone.  Yesterday, Eric Cantor announced his support for Adam Kinzinger.  Cantor made the following declaration:

Adam Kinzinger is hands down the candidate the conservative cause needs to win the primary for Congress on March 20th and he has our enthusiastic endorsement for a second term in Congress.

Our endorsement is not perfunctory. Adam Kinzinger is a key member of our team and has our total support in his campaign for a second term in the United States House of Representatives.

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Earlier today, the Senate began voting on a series of 30 amendments to the highway bill (S.1813).  The three important amendments regarding energy subsidies that we referenced earlier (2 bad, 1 good) were postponed until next week.  However, here is a list of other commonsense amendments that were voted down by Democrats.  It is truly sad that at a time when gas prices are at a record high Democrats are willing to place the interests of the eco-radicals ahead of American consumers.  They also showed that, once again, they have no interest in creating jobs or cutting spending:

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Yesterday, John Boehner threatened conservatives that if they don’t support his insipid highway bill, he would punish them by bringing the Senate bill to the floor.  Well, today, he executed his temper tantrum and announced that he will indeed bring the tax and spend Boxer/Obama Senate bill to the floor of the House.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday the House plans to take up the Senate’s highway bill once it clears the upper chamber, conceding that his own last-ditch effort to save a House GOP measure had not succeeded.

“As I told the members yesterday, the current plan is to see what the Senate can produce and to bring their bill up,” Boehner told reporters at his weekly news conference Thursday.

Let’s take a step back for a moment.  We have a Republican-controlled House that offers a big spending highway bill.  Then, when conservative demand that we offer a “Republican” solution, Boehner punishes them by bringing up the Democrat bill.  That’s real leadership, Mr Speaker.  The reason why voters vested you with control of the House was to fight the liberal proposals that emanate from the Senate, not to use them to play hardball with conservatives.

At The Madison Project, we are committed to finding Republican candidates for the House who will oppose John Boehner as Speaker in the 113th Congress.

We’ve been gunning hard for the Pompeo/DeMint bill, which would end all subsidies and special tax preferences for energy companies.  This is our chance to stand decisively on the side of the free-market and against crony capitalism and picking winners and losers in the market.

Today, it was announced that the Senate will consider several non-germane amendments to the highway bill (S.1813).  Senator DeMint is offering his bill as an amendment (#1589) to the highway bill later this afternoon.  This is where we will separate the men from the boys within the Republican Party.  Please call your senators and tell them they must vote for the DeMint amendment if they are really sincere about ending corporate welfare.

Unfortunately, there are other amendments that will be offered in an attempt to further shield the inveterate rent-seekers in government. Senators Menendez and Burr are offering an amendment  (#1782) to pass the T. Boone Pickens natural gas subsidies.  Boone Pickens’s plan would grant a $4,000 tax credit per car produced by all manufacturers of natural gas vehicles.  It would also give consumers  a $7,500 tax credit for purchasing one of these vehicles.  Companies that install commercial fueling stations for these vehicles would be entitled to a $100,000 subsidy per station!

We’re not just against handouts for green energy; we must oppose them for natural gas as well.

Also, Senator Stabenow will offer an amendment (#1812) to counter DeMint’s bill.  Her amendment would extend all of the green energy credits and subsidies, including many of the new provision enacted in the 2009 Porkulous. [more background here]

Vote no on the Stabenow and Menendez-Burr amendments.  Vote yes on the DeMint amendment.  After today, we will know who really stands on the side of limited government.

Here we go – the trickle of Republican lawmakers who are squeamish of full repeal of Obamacare will now begin to surface.  The Hill reports that Alabama Republican Richard Shelby is raising some concerns about the effect of repealing Obamacare on the funding sources of other programs he deems worthy:

“The administration has used the Affordable Care Act’s mandatory spending, which is not subject to a vote by Congress every year, to backfill key discretionary programs,” Shelby said in his opening remarks.

“The administration then diverts discretionary dollars to fund new programs. When the Affordable Care Act is repealed, many important programs like Community Health Centers and the [federal] Immunization program at the Centers for Disease Control will be in jeopardy because their base funding … has been so significantly reduced.”

Shelby also raised concerns with the budget’s flat-funding of medical research at the National Institutes of Health, at $31 billion. The administration says it is overhauling its NIH grant-making process in order to increase the number of new research grants.

Anyone with any understanding of the healthcare sector knows that if the law is fully implemented, our entire healthcare system will collapse, engendering the ultimate single-payer system.  Yet, Shelby is concerned about the technicality of funding other healthcare programs, which shouldn’t exits anyway, in the event that the Obamacare funding is rescinded.

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Democrats have a penchant to misconstrue the parlance related to tax credits and subsidies.  They refer to subsidies as tax cuts and tax cuts as subsidies.  They would have you believe that oil companies are completely on the dole, while solar and wind companies are heavily taxed entities in desperate need of some “tax breaks” and loans in order to alleviate the burden of producing their auspicious form of energy.

Yesterday, CBO released a report stating the obvious.  They found that in 2011, federal subsidies for green energy totaled $24 billion.  Also, between 2009 and 2012, the DOE provided $25 billion in loans “primarily to producers of advanced vehicles, generators of solar power, and manufacturers of solar equipment.”  Fossil fuels, on the other hand, received $3.4 billion in “tax preferences.”

However, those numbers don’t tell the full story.  Most of the tax preferences for fossil fuels go towards more universal deductions like expensing for exploration costs.  Green energy receives direct subsidies per kilowatt hour produced – benefits that are awarded solely to the wind and solar industries.  Also, due to the inefficiency and cost of green energy, these companies fail to generate enough revenue to incur a tax liability.  As such, many of these tax preferences are actually refundable.  Fossil fuel companies pay millions in taxes.  To illustrate the point, Heritage scholar David Kreutzer shows how wind companies receive 1,000 times the subsidy that is given to oil companies.

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Who needs Democrats when so many Republicans are willing to orchestrate their agenda for them?

The Senate is on the precipice of passing Barbara Boxer’s highway bill with overwhelming support.  Mitch McConnell is negotiating a deal with Harry Reid in which Republicans would be granted a vote on some of their choice non-germane amendments.  After Democrats summarily defeat those amendments, Republicans will return the favor by voting for the underlying bill, which overspends its revenue source by 43% and raises taxes to bridge the gap.

The sad thing is that S. 1813 is not just Boxer’s highway bill.  It was supported by every Republican on the committee level, and only 9 Republicans voted against cloture to proceed with the bill on the floor.  In a sane world, McConnell would be negotiating proposals to cut mass transit and eliminate the 10% beautification mandates on the states instead of securing failed votes on non-germane amendments.  Then again, most Republicans in the Senate actually support the idea of federally funded transportation.  They also buy into Obama’s puerile logic that it will create new jobs, instead of spreading around existing ones.

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Romney wins AK, OH, VA, MA, VT, and ID; Gingrich wins GA; Santorum wins OK, TN, and ND.  Here are some random thoughts.

1) It looks like Romney will eke out a very narrow win in Ohio.  The pattern is becoming familiar.  Romney can’t just outspend his opponents; he must swamp them in order to pull out a narrow victory.  There is simply no comparison between Romney’s campaign apparatus and Santorum’s primitive organization.  Yes, a win is a win, and Romney is racking up many important ones.  But if superior money and organization is the only way to compensate for his flaccid appeal to the public, then what does that say about his chances against Obama in the general election when he will lack those advantages?

2) Ron Paul was able to garner 41% against Romney in Virginia, where Santorum and Gingrich were off the ballot.  He even won CD-3, picking up 3 delegates. This is not a vote of confidence in Mitt Romney.

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