Fellow Americans,
We are obligated to be involved in matters of
public interest to influence how public matters are not in disrepute or are not
short-changed or even fall into default and at the end, Taxpayer are made to pay
double-digit penalties from irresponsible behaviours of elected members of
Congress. People must be observant, monitor and involve themselves in peoples
government matters and show and voice concern and decide how their business is
undertaken to save a situation and guard against Public Mandate failing
compliance by engagements or deals of irresponsible representatives who lack
integrity in dealings and managing crucial fundamental matters of public
interest service delivery.
It is sad that John Boehner's Fault awarded
himself with Tea Partiers Red-Card in their muddle of Obamacare
that cause Peoples Government to shut down, instead of dealing with the Budget
to avoid Government being in default and as a result; causing Taxpayer the
burden of shouldering double tragedy of penalty rising from carelessness with
lack of Responsibility and integrity on matters of Public Interest and Concern
they were hired to safeguard and protect in the first place.
Government shut-down means that peoples
Government is closed and is made dysfunctional and peoples business is therefore
put under hostage and in siege from delivering public service delivery including
security of the Country. This is sad
and is unacceptable........
If Congressional Representatives are
hired through peoples vote to represent public interest fail to do
what they are sent to do, but instead put the Government into crisis of a
shut-down, the people have a right for call-back and they too must expect
“No Pay” with penalties incurred for the period the Government
remained shut-down. It is because, if Public facilities are made
to dysfunction and fail to comply, honor the law or negotiate fairly and
effectively then…… the Speaker Mr. John Boehner with Tea Partiers in this case,
have failed their jurisdiction to serve public interest; which therefore, must
follow with consequences to guard from the repeat of the same in
future.
Judy Miriga
Diaspora Spokesperson
Executive Director
Confederation Council Foundation for Africa Inc.,
USA
http://socioeconomicforum50.blogspot.com
Diaspora Spokesperson
Executive Director
Confederation Council Foundation for Africa Inc.,
USA
http://socioeconomicforum50.blogspot.com
---------------------------------------------------------
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
September 30, 2013
Remarks by the President Before Cabinet Meeting
Cabinet Room
5:19 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: This is my Cabinet. And we're going to be discussing the impacts, potentially, of a shutdown and how all of these various agencies will be managing to make sure the core essential functions continue, but also, obviously, to help try to manage what's going to be a very difficult potential situation for the employees of all of these agencies, who are doing outstanding and very difficult work all across the country.
So I appreciate all the members of the Cabinet who are here. They have been doing a lot of planning. I wish they were spending more time focusing on how to grow jobs and the economy as opposed to having to spend time figuring out how they manage a government shutdown. But as always, they're prepared. And we'll be getting a full briefing from the entire crew during the course of this meeting.
Thank you very much, everybody.
END
5:20 P.M. EDT
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
September 30, 2013
Statement by the President
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
5:00 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, everybody. Of all the
responsibilities the Constitution endows to Congress, two should be fairly
simple: pass a budget, and pay America’s bills.
But if the United States Congress does not fulfill its
responsibility to pass a budget today, much of the United States government will
be forced to shut down tomorrow. And I want to be very clear about what that
shutdown would mean -- what will remain open and what will not.
With regard to operations that will continue: If you’re on Social
Security, you will keep receiving your checks. If you’re on Medicare, your
doctor will still see you. Everyone’s mail will still be delivered. And
government operations related to national security or public safety will go on.
Our troops will continue to serve with skill, honor, and courage. Air traffic
controllers, prison guards, those who are with border control -- our Border
Patrol will remain on their posts, but their paychecks will be delayed until the
government reopens. NASA will shut down almost entirely, but Mission Control
will remain open to support the astronauts serving on the Space Station.
I also want to be very clear about what would change. Office
buildings would close. Paychecks would be delayed. Vital services that seniors
and veterans, women and children, businesses and our economy depend on would be
hamstrung. Business owners would see delays in raising capital, seeking
infrastructure permits, or rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy. Veterans who’ve
sacrificed for their country will find their support centers unstaffed.
Tourists will find every one of America’s national parks and monuments, from
Yosemite to the Smithsonian to the Statue of Liberty, immediately closed. And
of course, the communities and small businesses that rely on these national
treasures for their livelihoods will be out of customers and out of luck.
And in keeping with the broad ramifications of a shutdown, I think
it’s important that everybody understand the federal government is America’s
largest employer. More than 2 million civilian workers and 1.4 million
active-duty military serve in all 50 states and all around the world. In the
event of a government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of these dedicated public
servants who stay on the job will do so without pay -- and several hundred
thousand more will be immediately and indefinitely furloughed without pay.
What, of course, will not be furloughed are the bills that they have
to pay -- their mortgages, their tuition payments, their car notes. These
Americans are our neighbors. Their kids go to our schools. They worship where
we do. They serve their country with pride. They are the customers of every
business in this country. And they would be hurt greatly, and as a consequence,
all of us will be hurt greatly, should Congress choose to shut the people’s
government down.
So a shutdown will have a very real economic impact on real people,
right away. Past shutdowns have disrupted the economy significantly. This one
would, too. It would throw a wrench into the gears of our economy at a time
when those gears have gained some traction.
Five years ago right now, our economy was in meltdown. Today, our
businesses have created 7.5 million new jobs over the past three and a half
years. The housing market is healing and our deficits are falling fast. The
idea of putting the American people’s hard-earned progress at risk is the height
of irresponsibility.
And it doesn’t have to happen. Let me repeat this: It does not
have to happen. All of this is entirely preventable if the House chooses to do
what the Senate has already done -- and that’s the simple act of funding our
government without making extraneous and controversial demands in the process,
the same way other Congresses have for more than 200 years.
Unfortunately, right now House Republicans continue to tie funding
of the government to ideological demands like limiting a woman’s access to
contraception, or delaying the Affordable Care Act, all to save face after
making some impossible promises to the extreme right wing of their party.
So let me be clear about this. An important part of the Affordable
Care Act takes effect tomorrow no matter what Congress decides to do today. The
Affordable Care Act is moving forward. That funding is already in place. You
can’t shut it down. This is a law that passed both houses of Congress; a law
that bears my signature; a law that the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional;
a law that voters chose not to repeal last November; a law that is already
providing benefits to millions of Americans in the form of young people staying
on their parents’ plan until they’re 26, seniors getting cheaper prescription
drugs, making sure that insurance companies aren't imposing lifetime limits when
you already have health insurance, providing rebates for consumers when
insurance companies are spending too much money on overhead instead of health
care. Those things are already happening.
Starting tomorrow, tens of millions of Americans will be able to
visit HealthCare.gov to shop for affordable health care coverage. So Americans
who’ve lived for years in some cases with the fear that one illness could send
them into bankruptcy, Americans who’ve been priced out of the market just
because they’ve been sick once, they’ll finally be able to afford coverage --
quality coverage -- many of them for the first time in their lives.
Some of them may be sick as we speak. And this is their best
opportunity to get some security and some relief. Tens of thousands of
Americans die every single year because they don’t have access to affordable
health care. Despite this, Republicans have said that if we lock these
Americans out of affordable health care for one more year -- if we sacrifice the
health care of millions of Americans -- then they’ll fund the government for a
couple more months. Does anybody truly believe that we won’t have this fight
again in a couple more months? Even at Christmas?
So here’s the bottom line: I’m always willing to work with anyone
of either party to make sure the Affordable Care Act works better, to make sure
our government works better. I’m always willing to work with anyone to grow our
economy faster, or to create new jobs faster, to get our fiscal house in order
for the long run. I’ve demonstrated this time and time again, oftentimes to the
consternation of my own party.
But one faction of one party, in one house of Congress, in one
branch of government doesn’t get to shut down the entire government just to
refight the results of an election.
Keeping the people’s government open is not a concession to me.
Keeping vital services running and hundreds of thousands of Americans on the job
is not something you “give” to the other side. It’s our basic responsibility.
It’s something that we’re doing for our military, and our businesses, and our
economy, and all the hardworking people out there -- the person working for the
Agricultural Department out in some rural community who’s out there helping some
farmers make sure that they’re making some modest profit for all the hard work
they’re putting in. They’re the person working for HUD who’s helping somebody
buy a house for the first time. They’re somebody in a VA office who’s
counseling one of our vets who’s got PTSD.
That’s who we’re here to serve. That’s why we’re supposed to be
carrying out these responsibilities. It’s why we should be avoiding these kinds
of constant brinksmanship. It’s something that we do in the ordinary process of
this extraordinary system of government that we have. You don’t get to extract
a ransom for doing your job; for doing what you’re supposed to be doing anyway;
or just because there’s a law there that you don’t like.
The American people sent us here to govern. They sent us here to
make sure that we’re doing everything we can to make their lives a little bit
better -- to create new jobs, to restore economic security, to rebuild the
prospects of upward mobility. That’s what they expect.
And they understand that there are differences between the parties
and we’re going to be having some tough fights around those differences. And I
respect the fact that the other party is not supposed to agree with me 100
percent of the time, just like I don’t agree with them. But they do also expect
that we don’t bring the entire government to a halt or the entire economy to a
halt just because of those differences.
That’s what they deserve. They’ve worked too hard, for too long to
recover from previous crises just to have folks here in Washington manufacture
yet another one that they have to dig themselves out of.
So Congress needs to keep our government open, needs to pay our
bills on time, and never, ever threaten the full faith and credit of the United
States of America.
And time is running out. My hope and expectation is that in the
eleventh hour, once again, that Congress will choose to do the right thing and
that the House of Representatives, in particular, will choose the right
thing.
Thank you very much.
END 5:12 P.M. EDT
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Congress continues to squabble on first day of a government shutdown
Tuesday, October 1st 201319 minutes ago
The Democrat-controlled Senate on Tuesday voted to table the House bill passed overnight that proposed the committee. The House bill also included language that would prohibit congressional staff members from receiving subsidies for their health care plans and delay Obamacare’s individual mandate to buy health insurance for one year.
By transitioning to a conference committee, the House and Senate would each appoint members to work out a deal to fund the government and end the shutdown. But appointing a committee would take the talks from public view to closed-door negotiating rooms where lawmakers and staffers could hash out their differences in private.
The Senate's refusal to accept the Republican proposal is the latest indication that the government shutdown, which began at midnight Tuesday, won't end immediately. This is the first shutdown since federal operations closed down under former President Bill Clinton in 1996
Before turning down the latest House offer Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that the upper chamber would not accept conference talks until the House approves a measure to fund the government for six weeks that includes no extra amendments such as the ones aimed at crippling the federal health care law. Until the House passes a “clean” bill, he said, negotiations would stall.
"We will not go to conference with a gun to our head,” Reid said on the Senate floor.
The result of a shutdown came after House Republicans repeatedly refused to pass a bill to set federal spending levels unless the federal health care law was defunded or delayed. Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama repeatedly said they would not accept any spending bill that tampers with the law.
Last week, the House passed a bill to completely defund the health law. When the Senate rejected it, the House passed another version that would have abolished a tax on medical devices and delayed the law for a year. When the Senate rejected that, House Republicans passed another bill that would have delayed the individual mandate and revoked health insurance subsidies for congressional staffers. After the Senate said no to that, the clock ran out and the government shut down. That’s when the House asked for private negotiations — surprise, the Senate turned that down — and that’s where the parties stand now.
Meanwhile, Obama, who has called on Congress to pass a clean bill to fund the government, called the shutdown “completely preventable.”
"This shutdown was completely preventable,” Obama wrote in a letter to federal employees. “It should not have happened."
Obama is scheduled to make a statement in the Rose Garden at 12:25 p.m. ET about the opening Tuesday of Obamacare insurance exchanges and about the government shutdown.
The back-and-forth between the parties will continue throughout the day, as House Republicans recalibrate their strategy and Senate lawmakers huddle for partisan meetings this afternoon.
Unless they can find a compromise, the government will remain shut down until further notice.
The Republican strategy of coupling anti-Obamacare legislation with the threat of a government shutdown is unpopular, according to a national Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday. American voters oppose the GOP's tactic by a ratio of 72 to 22 percent, according to the poll.
-----------------------------------------
Congress
Yes, It Is John Boehner's Fault
Photograph by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Mitch McConnell (C), John Boehner (R) and Jon Kyl (L) speak to the media outside of the White House on Feb. 25, 2010
(Second paragraph corrected to reflect the date of the Tea Party's origins)
And not because he can’t control the Tea Party.
It’s tempting to feel sorry for House Speaker John Boehner. He seems like a reasonable man caught in a trap. His Republican majority in the House can’t decide whether a repeal or delay of the Affordable Care Act needs to be a condition of any agreement on anything else. But Boehner, along with the rest of the Republican leadership at the time, built this trap for himself in 2009 and early 2010, before the Tea Party caucus was formed.
In 2009 the Republican minority, faced with what would eventually become the Affordable Care Act, he had a choice. Obama, like every President, wanted to pass something that someone might call a “bipartisan achievement.” To get that, he needed a couple of Republicans to make an offer, a price in exchange for their votes. The answer, from the entire caucus: nothing. No price, no votes. Under any conditions. There was extraordinary, Pelosi-like discipline among Republicans in the House and the Senate. No offer, no deal, no votes.
After a televised meeting with the president in late February of 2010, Boehner, then-Senator John Kyl (R-Ariz.), and Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) huddled in front of the White House to answer questions. “What we think we ought to do is start over, go step by step, and target the areas of possible agreement,” said McConnell. “That’s why the bill needs to be scrapped,” said Boehner. “We need to start over on those things that we can work together on.”
Kyl, like Boehner and McConnell, agreed on some unspecified areas of future agreement. But those areas would not be reached by “tweaking” the bill, he said. “The whole concept of the bill, with its government mandates, its taxes, its spending, and all of the other features of it, are what make it unacceptable to us and to the American people,” said Kyl, “and that’s where we have to start.” McConnell then jumped in so that he, too, could say “scrap this bill.”
Scrap. Start over. Not tweakable. It was clever at the time. Sound reasonable but ensure that none of those reasonable-sounding ideas would accidentally become concessions in a bill made law. Adults could agree on modest steps to fix health care. But the Affordable Care Act was unfixable.
The next month, Obama sent a letter to Republicans, offering to expand tax-favored health savings accounts, more aggressively investigate Medicare fraud, and fund demonstration projects to seek alternatives to medical malpractice lawsuits. These had all been Republican ideas, but Boehner, in a statement, gave the same answer: “There is no reason to lump sensible proposals into a fundamentally flawed 2,000-page bill. … The American people want the President to start over with a clean sheet of paper.” Scrap it. Start over. It’s not tweakable.
It doesn’t matter whether this was a cynical strategy or a sincere act of political conviction. In 2010, Boehner sent a message to the party that was still his to lead: No part of this bill is acceptable. It cannot be allowed to pass. Period.
So now he’s stuck. He has a majority in one of the chambers of Congress, but he can’t use it to improve any aspect of health policy, because the Affordable Care Act—which is currently law, remember—is unfixable. He should not be surprised or frustrated that members of his own party have reached the obvious and logical conclusion to a strategy he signed off on three years ago. If Obamacare is unfixable and unacceptable, what kind of American would accept it? Why would we expect our politicians to do anything other than fight it in the air and on the sea?
Three years ago, this strategy nearly worked. Democrats had a tough time getting it together when Scott Brown (R-Mass.) entered the Senate and it looked like they’d need a single Republican vote to pass the bill. We should not feel too badly for John Boehner or any member of the Republican leadership that the rhetorical stand they took in 2010 is proving such a bother now.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-30/the-government-shutdown-is-john-boehners-fault?campaign_id=yhoo
It’s tempting to feel sorry for House Speaker John Boehner. He seems like a reasonable man caught in a trap. His Republican majority in the House can’t decide whether a repeal or delay of the Affordable Care Act needs to be a condition of any agreement on anything else. But Boehner, along with the rest of the Republican leadership at the time, built this trap for himself in 2009 and early 2010, before the Tea Party caucus was formed.
In 2009 the Republican minority, faced with what would eventually become the Affordable Care Act, he had a choice. Obama, like every President, wanted to pass something that someone might call a “bipartisan achievement.” To get that, he needed a couple of Republicans to make an offer, a price in exchange for their votes. The answer, from the entire caucus: nothing. No price, no votes. Under any conditions. There was extraordinary, Pelosi-like discipline among Republicans in the House and the Senate. No offer, no deal, no votes.
After a televised meeting with the president in late February of 2010, Boehner, then-Senator John Kyl (R-Ariz.), and Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) huddled in front of the White House to answer questions. “What we think we ought to do is start over, go step by step, and target the areas of possible agreement,” said McConnell. “That’s why the bill needs to be scrapped,” said Boehner. “We need to start over on those things that we can work together on.”
Kyl, like Boehner and McConnell, agreed on some unspecified areas of future agreement. But those areas would not be reached by “tweaking” the bill, he said. “The whole concept of the bill, with its government mandates, its taxes, its spending, and all of the other features of it, are what make it unacceptable to us and to the American people,” said Kyl, “and that’s where we have to start.” McConnell then jumped in so that he, too, could say “scrap this bill.”
Scrap. Start over. Not tweakable. It was clever at the time. Sound reasonable but ensure that none of those reasonable-sounding ideas would accidentally become concessions in a bill made law. Adults could agree on modest steps to fix health care. But the Affordable Care Act was unfixable.
The next month, Obama sent a letter to Republicans, offering to expand tax-favored health savings accounts, more aggressively investigate Medicare fraud, and fund demonstration projects to seek alternatives to medical malpractice lawsuits. These had all been Republican ideas, but Boehner, in a statement, gave the same answer: “There is no reason to lump sensible proposals into a fundamentally flawed 2,000-page bill. … The American people want the President to start over with a clean sheet of paper.” Scrap it. Start over. It’s not tweakable.
It doesn’t matter whether this was a cynical strategy or a sincere act of political conviction. In 2010, Boehner sent a message to the party that was still his to lead: No part of this bill is acceptable. It cannot be allowed to pass. Period.
So now he’s stuck. He has a majority in one of the chambers of Congress, but he can’t use it to improve any aspect of health policy, because the Affordable Care Act—which is currently law, remember—is unfixable. He should not be surprised or frustrated that members of his own party have reached the obvious and logical conclusion to a strategy he signed off on three years ago. If Obamacare is unfixable and unacceptable, what kind of American would accept it? Why would we expect our politicians to do anything other than fight it in the air and on the sea?
Three years ago, this strategy nearly worked. Democrats had a tough time getting it together when Scott Brown (R-Mass.) entered the Senate and it looked like they’d need a single Republican vote to pass the bill. We should not feel too badly for John Boehner or any member of the Republican leadership that the rhetorical stand they took in 2010 is proving such a bother now.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-30/the-government-shutdown-is-john-boehners-fault?campaign_id=yhoo
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