On the first day of Congress, radical Tea-Publicans gave to me . . .

Wasting no time in pursuit of a radical agenda, Tea-Publicans took some bold moves on the first day of the 114th Congress.

Remember when Tea-Publicans campaigned on a “jobs agenda” and the economy? Yeah, they lied.

Abortion

Arizona’s most extreme ideological congressman and anti-abortion zealot, Trent Franks, is back again with yet another version of his anti-abortion bill. Congress Introduces A National Abortion Ban On Its Very First Day Back:

Republicans in Congress are wasting no time following through on the anti-abortion agenda the GOP laid out after winning significant gains in the 2014 midterm elections.

On Tuesday, the very first day of the 114th Congress, two lawmakers introduced a measure to ban abortions after 20 weeks, in direct violation of the protections afforded under Roe v. Wade. Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) reintroduced the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the same legislation that successfully passed the House last year.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — who introduced a companion 20-week abortion ban in the Senate last year that was stalled by Democratic leadership — has already indicated that he plans to re-introduce his own measure in the next few weeks, too. Now that the Senate is GOP-controlled, Republicans are anticipating that they’ll have enough support to pass the ban in both chambers this year, helping the anti-choice community gain momentum for this particular tactic to limit reproductive rights.

“In a Republican Senate, under my leadership, we would have the kind of real debate on the issues that the American people want,” Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told the audience at the National Right to Life Conference in the fall. “For six years, the president has been isolated from this growing movement. He will be forced to listen to the cause that’s brought us all here this morning.”

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In a statement released on Tuesday, Franks referred to 20-week fetuses as “innocent and defenseless children who can not only feel pain, but who can survive outside of the womb in most cases, and who are torturously killed without even basic anesthesia.”

In fact, doctors agree that fetuses cannot survive outside the womb until about 24 to 28 weeks of pregnancy, which is considered to be the legal point of viability. At less than 21 weeks, no delivered baby has ever survived. Plus, scientific research has repeatedly confirmed that fetuses cannot feel pain until after they are viable; indeed, even the researchers who are trying to learn more about fetal pain don’t want their findings to be used to justify abortion bans.

Nonetheless, 20-week abortion bans have become increasingly popular on the state level. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks reproductive rights policies, nine states currently cut off legal abortion access at 20 weeks based on the assumption that fetuses can feel pain at that point.

It was just a year ago that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Arizona’s appeal from a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion striking down Arizona’a version of the 20-week abortion ban. Supreme Court Won’t Hear Arizona Appeal on Abortion Ban.

Being a religious zealot means never accepting defeat, you just pray harder and try again.

Social Security Disability

Tea-Publicans wasted no time in setting up a fight over “entitlements,” i.e., social security. Republican Congress Launches With Back-Door Attack On Social Security Benefits:

Republicans are starting the new Congress by attacking Social Security funding through a subtle, obscure policy measure buried in the gigantic bill that establishes parliamentary rules for the new session.

The rules measure, passed late Tuesday after other day-one business like formal swearing-in ceremonies for members were completed, escalates the threat of a significant cut to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) within the next two years. The measure bans a common accounting technique that the people who manage Social Security funding have used many times in the past to prevent benefit cuts. The two funds that comprise the Social Security system have essentially borrowed from one another as necessary over the years to ensure that benefits can be paid in full each year. SSDI, which is the primary program for providing federal benefits to people unable to work due to disability, is projected to hit a shortfall in late 2016. Reallocating revenue from the much larger Social Security retirement benefits fund to SSDI would cover the shortfall, and trust fund managers have performed such reallocations 11 times since the late 1950s.

But the Republican rules package prohibits Congress from authorizing such a transfer. That will force a showdown over how to finance disability benefits sometime in the next two years, with the threat of a nearly 20 percent cut to SSDI payments looming over the debate.

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The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities called the rule an “attempt to pit retirement and disability beneficiaries against each other” that misrepresents how the two funds operate, and pointed out that the only reason SSDI is in funding trouble next year is that it got short-changed by the past two reallocations of funding between disability and retirement benefits. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) accused the GOP of “inventing a Social Security crisis that will threaten benefits for millions & put our most vulnerable at risk.” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) called it “a dangerous new rule” that will “set the stage to cut benefits for seniors and disabled Americans,” and pointed out that reallocating funds between the accounts is so uncontroversial that President Reagan oversaw four of the 11 times it has been done in the past.

Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY), who is taking credit for engineering the rules change, has received significant campaign financing from at least one well-heeled conservative supporter of cutting Social Security. Reed has gotten over $134,000 in contributions from people tied to vulture capitalist Paul Singer’s firm Elliott Management, according to the Center for Responsive Politics . . . the generous Republican donor is a sharp critic of American government spending and has called for cutting benefits in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Hmmm, remember who else got some campaign contribution love from vulture capitalist Paul Singer? Arizona’s freshman member of Congress, Martha McSally. Questions for Martha McSally: Are you Paul Singer’s stealth stealth pro-gay marriage Republican candidate for Congress in Arizona? It appears that Singer may have had Social Security on his mind as well.

McSally swore up and down that “I would never do anything to undermine social security” during the campaign. It’s time for our lazy media villagers to ask her where she stands on this GOP rule change, which sets up a legislative fight over social security disability.

Reed told the Associated Press that his rules proposal is intended to force a reckoning over social insurance spending. “We need real reform,” he said, and “this makes that real reform that much more likely.” Leaving aside the question of what Reed means by “real reform,” and the fact that the proposed reallocation would have extended disability funding by 17 years while reducing retirement funding by just one year, the move is raising serious procedural concerns among retiree advocates.

Social Security experts Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson labeled the move “hostage-taking to force changes that the American people do not want to a vital program” in a piece for the Huffington Post. Reed’s rule means that “we could be facing a deadline, and certainly over the last couple of years, we’ve seen Congress seemingly unable to pass bills, even with deadlines in front of them,” the American Association of Retired Persons’ David Certner told the AP.

In a similar vein . . .

“Voodoo Economics” Dynamic Scoring

Tea-Publicans followed through on their threat to rig the rules of the game with their “fuzzy math” to justify the “trickle down” tax cuts they intend pass, by requiring the Congressional Budget office to use “dynamic scoring” (unicorns!) House Republicans Change Rules on Calculating Economic Impact of Bills:

[T]he House on Tuesday approved an obscure but significant rule change requiring the economic effects of legislation to be included in a bill’s official cost to the Treasury.

The change on “dynamic scoring” — ardently sought since the 1990s by Republicans — could ease passage of major tax cuts by showing that their impact on economic growth would substantially reduce their cost to the Treasury. The move is widely seen as a way for Republican leaders to set ground rules for an ambitious overhaul of the entire United States tax code.

“We’re saying, ‘If you think a piece of legislation is going to have a big effect on the economy, then include that effect in the official cost estimate,’ ” said Representative Tom Price, Republican of Georgia, the new chairman of the House Budget Committee.

Democrats blasted the change as “voodoo economics,” a “gamble” and “tax fraud.” Opponents said the rule change would invite politicized scorekeeping, further tilt policy to benefit the rich, and expand the budget deficit. Shaun Donovan, the White House budget director, implored the House not to “upend the level playing field that has existed for decades” and “call into question the accuracy, consistency and fairness” of congressional budget estimates.

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Under the rule change, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office will have to consider the budgetary effects of economic growth, employment, investment income and “other macroeconomic variables” when calculating the official price tag of “major legislation” — defined as any bill expected to cost at least 0.25 percent of the gross domestic product, or about $42 billion using figures from 2013.

The House Budget Committee chairman would have the discretion to declare any other tax or entitlement bill “major” and thus subject to dynamic scorekeeping. The measure would not apply to economic stimulus bills favored by Democrats, such as infrastructure or education bills paid for by spending at Congress’s annual discretion.

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Last year, when Dave Camp, the Michigan Republican who was the Ways and Means chairman before his retirement, drafted a comprehensive rewrite of the tax code, the Joint Tax Committee tried to price the plan by taking into account its impact on the economy.

One estimate suggested economic growth would shave $50 billion off its cost over 10 years, said Ed Lorenzen, a senior adviser for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a deficit watchdog group. Another estimate put the savings at $700 billion. To get that number, Mr. Lorenzen said estimators had to assume that the federal debt would remain stable against the gross domestic product. In other words, there would be undisclosed cost savings in the future. [unicorns!]

Not surprisingly, Mr. Camp chose that estimate when he unveiled his plan.

The importance of the new rule is likely to be determined by the next CBO director, whom Republicans will appoint in the coming weeks. Should Tea-Publicans select a partisan willing to just make shit up using the GOP’s “fuzzy math” to justify their bills, then nothing the CBO produces in the next two years will have any credibility whatsoever.