Philip Klein is senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, he served as Washington correspondent for The American Spectator, and before that, worked for over three years as a financial reporter at Reuters in New York.
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As Republicans continued to close ranks around House Speaker John Boehner's debt limit plan, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., expressed confidence that the measure would have the votes to pass.
“I think we have the votes, " Issa said on a conference call with bloggers. "I don’t think all the people whose votes we have yet know it.”
He said he would release a letter to collegues explaining why he supports the Boehner plan and why it shouldn't be compared to the vote to bailout Wall Street banks.
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House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, is touting new and improved Congressional Budget Office estimates of his plan to raise the debt limit. I'll be holding off on making comparisons to the previous report until I see the actual CBO letter, because I want to make sure I'm using apples to apples numbers. But here's what Boehner says:
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President Obama will unveil his proposal to increase fuel economy standards in a Friday speech, the White House just announced.
According to reports, Obama wants to boost the average miles per gallon of the U.S. auto fleet to 56 by 2025. Last month, I wrote about how such standards would drive up costs and limit consumer choice, as well as lead to more fatal auto accidents.
Obama will deliver the speech at the Washington Convention Center.
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's plan for hiking the debt limit would reduce deficits by $2.2 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, with about $1 trillion of that number coming from the expected wind down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, will be rewriting his debt limit plan after a Congressional Budget Office report showed it only reduced deficits by $851 billion over 10 years.
Republicans have vowed to reduce the deficit by more than any debt limit increase. The plan had intended to raise the debt ceiling by $1 trillion based on the assumption that the deficit reduction would be $1.2 trillion.
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House Speaker John Boehner's plan to raise the debt limit will reduce deficits by just $1 billion in 2012 and $851 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The news that the deficit savings are backloaded to occur in years that the current Congress has no control over is likely to increase doubts among House conservatives who were already skeptical about the plan.
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While Republican leadership spent the day attempting to build support for House Speaker John Boehner’s plan to raise the debt limit, the party could actually be better off passing a modified version Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s proposal.
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This afternoon, White House spokesman Jay Carney struggled to explain why President Obama hasn't released his own detailed debt plan, eventually admitting that the president was worried liberal activists would tear it apart if details became public.
Here's the official transcript of the relevant exchange, with video (via National Review) pasted below:
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Four federal agencies were "full partners" in the Obama administration's bungled Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed guns to wind up in the hands of Mexican drug lords, the man who implemented the program revealed today at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
William Newell, the former head of the Phoenix field office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, was pressed by Rep. Pat Meehan, R-Penn. to identify all the federal agencies involved in the operation.
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In the face of a mountain of evidence and contrary testimony by his fellow agents, the man who implemented the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' bungled Fast and Furious operation repeatedly denied that the program let guns flow into Mexico, where they were acquired by drug kingpins.
“We did not let guns walk," the former ATF agent in charge of the Phoenix field office, William Newell said.
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House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., raised alarms about an attempt by the Obama administration to restrict the testimony of witnesses appearing at today's hearing on Operation Fast and Furious.
Issa said that at least two witnesses to the committee had received letters from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ordering them to limit the range of their testimony. Today's hearing features six current or former ATF officials.
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An agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives testified this morning that he was “infuriated” by the prospect that more people could be killed as a result of Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled attempt by the Obama administration to infiltrate Mexican drug cartels by allowing weapons to fall into the hands of violent drug cartels.
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In the fall of 2009, American officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who were stationed in Mexico started noticing a sharp spike in the number of guns heading into the country. But what made things especially strange was that many of them were being traced back to the ATF’s own field office in Phoenix.
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From House Speaker John Boehner's office:
Remarks by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) United States Capitol, Washington, DC As Prepared for Delivery July 25, 2011
“Good evening. I’m John Boehner. I serve as Speaker of the whole House -- of the members of both parties that you elect. These are difficult times in the life of our nation. Millions are looking for work, have been for some time, and the spending binge going on in Washington is a big part of the reason why.
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I won't address most of the content of President Obama's speech, because it was essentially a rehash of the themes that we've covered here before -- his blaming the nation's problems on President Bush rather than taking any responsibility, his attacks on wealthier Americans, his calls for higher taxes cloaked in euphemisms about a need for "shared sacrifice" and a "balanced approach," and his empty calls for compromise. But what struck me as particularly odd was the timing.
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