Progress Illinois

The Ward Room dug up a list of 15 "anti-spending reforms" new Republican U.S. Senator Mark Kirk says should be attached to legislation that affects the federal debt. A number of Kirk's deficit reduction ideas we've heard before, including his call for a line-item veto (which the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional) and his support of the late Sen. Paul Simon's balanced budget amendment (which would sap the federal government's ability to respond to recessions).

Kirk's call to freeze federal worker pay is already in place; nothing is mentioned of the anti-stimulative impact of this policy, of course. He also demands a hold on federal civilian hiring, despite no evidence of a skyrocketing increase in federal workers. According to PolitiFact, between January 2008 and November 2010, approximately 98,000 employees were added to the federal payroll; overall public employment rose by a mere 1 percent since January 2007, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post points out today. These numbers are unsurprising, given that people lean more on public resources during hard times. And the economy would have taken more of a hit had additional public workers been laid off, as Klein points out.

Unsurprisingly, Kirk fails to mention the budget-busting Bush tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans that he recently voted to extend temporarily (he also supported them while a member of the U.S. House of Representatives). And health care barely gets a mention in Kirk's list -- he merely issues a general call for enacting medical malpractice reform to reduce costs.

But the cost of health care is what's driving much of the long-term federal deficit that Washington's newly-empowered Republicans say they care so much about. Just take a look at this chart from the Congressional Budget Office (h/t Mother Jones). You simply can't demand deficit reduction without talking about health care. Repeal of the Obama administration's health care reform bill, something Kirk has said he wants to do, would cost $230 billion. This isn't a serious list.

Most Congressional observers these days have been following bills related to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the DREAM Act, and the START Treaty. Lost in the lame duck shuffle is the apparent end to a promise President Obama made on his first day in office -- the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As part of the defense authorization bill -- the one that did not include a repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and was passed in the House on Friday -- was a ban, pushed by Republican members of the Illinois delegation, on the transfer of the detainees, which would last until the end of September, 2011.

Sen. Mark Kirk threatened to put a hold on the authorization bill unless it prohibited the transfer of the Gitmo detainees, and vowed to oppose repeal of DADT unless the ban was in place. (In the end, Kirk voted to put an end to DADT.) The reason for the outcry from Kirk is, at least in part, because it has long been the administration's plan to move the prisoners to the vacant Thomson Correction Center in the Northwest area of the state, a move that conservatives have claimed would bring "Jihadists" to the Prairie State. 

The news, which seems to doom any chances of shifting the detainees to the mainland where they would receive due process, is coupled with the state's failed attempt to auction Thomson. That was supposed to happen this afternoon, but there was a bit of a problem -- no one showed up. It's looking like Thomson is going to remain vacant for a long time.

Amidst the celebration from progressives over repeal of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, many missed the regrettable news that the DREAM Act failed to get 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster. That point is worth repeating. The DREAM Act did have the support of a majority (55) of Senators but it did not have the super majority necessary to end Republican obstructionism. Just one member of the Grand Old Party -- Alaska's Lisa Murkowski -- voted for the sensible legislation to give immigrant youth an avenue to earn citizenship via college or the military.

Joining in the filibuster brigade was Illinois' junior senator, Mark Kirk (who has received attention for his "gloating" and "grandstanding" during the lame duck session). The most recent in an unprecedented list of filibusters has Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who sponsored the DREAM Act and has been fighting for the bill with everything he's got, railing against the Republican use of the manuever. Appearing on Fox News this weekend, Durbin said, "It's a clear abuse of what was supposed to be a rarely used procedural option. ... We need to put an end to secret holds in the United States Senate. That's archaic, it's wrong, we need more transparency."

Durbin isn't the only one to use strong language to criticize the Republican caucus. Josh Hoyt, the executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights called the filibuster of the DREAM Act "a disgraceful display of partisan gamesmanship." He added:

In addition Sen. Kirk and his colleagues cheapened our American Democracy today. A Democracy is not real when it prevents some 12 million illegal workers who contribute with their toil in our fields, our restaurants, and our hotels from having any way at all of becoming legal. We cannot say we live in a great Democracy when we tell children that we will punish them with exclusion and condemn them to the margins because of the decisions of their parents. This is un-Democratic. It is also an attack on the deepest call of our faith to love and charity, which is why the leaders of Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish and Muslim faiths were united in support of the DREAM Act.