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By Karoun Demirjian (contact) 
Friday, July 15, 2011 | 3:19 a.m.
Dean Heller
Sun coverage
President Barack Obama has given a deadline to lawmakers in advance of the ultimate default deadline on the debt — figure out what you can sell to your parties by this weekend, and let’s finish this.
It’s clear that everyone’s patience is wearing thin. Wall Street’s discomfort snapped into sharp focus when Moody’s credit rating service put the U.S. on the block for a downgrade Wednesday, and the S&P followed suit Thursday.
The negotiators, too, are fraying. The majority leaders of their respective houses, Harry Reid and Eric Cantor, spent more time Thursday trading personal barbs than policy solutions.
But convincing the wariest troops isn’t going to be easy.
Nevada’s Republican senator, Dean Heller, counts in that number. Since taking over John Ensign’s Senate seat, he’s had one of the most fiscally conservative voting records in the body, some would say, to a fault. Even before that, he didn’t shy away of voting against government budgets on principle, even where there was a bipartisan compromise on the table and the alternative was government shutdown.
Heller is well aware of the stakes, he says. But he is wary of agreeing to anything that doesn’t drill to what he considers the heart of the problem — a pattern of behavior that’s screaming for a long-term solution.
“I think they’re aggressively looking at $4 trillion, and that’s OK, because that’s a good short-term start,” Heller said. A reduction of $4 trillion is the largest-size plan on the table right now, and Republican House leaders have said it’s likely an impossible deal, because they, like Heller, don’t want to raise taxes, although some tax hikes are likely necessary, most economists agree, to achieve the sort of deficit reduction lawmakers have in mind without making draconian cuts to social spending.
“Even if we accept [the most aggressive] plan and come to a deal on that, by the end of this decade, we’ve still increased the debt by six trillion dollars,” Heller said.
A persistent problem with these potential debt deals is that when the Republican leaders demand to match raises to the debt ceiling with cuts, they’re not talking about the same stretches of time.
Even Cantor admitted Monday that it will be “a challenge” to convince his caucus to approve $4 trillion worth of wiggle room in the debt ceiling that buys the country another three or four years of borrowing authority, when it takes a decade for the parallel cuts to all take effect.
“We need to figure out how we’re going to do this long term,” he said.
For Heller, “long term” equates to a balanced budget amendment. Republicans in the Senate and House have been loudly stumping for a balanced budget amendment vote as part of the debt deal, even though they acknowledge it will do little to solve spending problems in the short term. Even the Paul Ryan budget outspent the confines of a balanced budget amendment.
“It took took us 50 years to get where we are today. We know we’re not going to fix it in five years, we’re not going to fix it in ten years,” Heller said. “But at some point, let’s get this balanced budget amendment out there so this cost curve will start decreasing at some point.”
The House has already scheduled a balanced budget amendment vote for next week. Reid does not seem to be in any hurry to do the same, though a group of Democratic senators have been working to write a “more modest” alternative amendment. Even if a balanced budget amendment passes Congress, it would take referendums in 38 states for it to become law, a pretty high bar to clear.
But at this point, some carrot of a political promise to tackle long-term debt (such as that amendment) may have to be traded to bring Republicans like Heller along to help raise the debt limit, if they can be brought along at all.
Members like Heller don’t like anything that bears the whiff of being a politically expedient deal, even one coming from the ranks of their own party.
Earlier this week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell offered up a last-ditch proposal that would change the Republicans’ bottom-line equation.
In every other deal they’ve laid out, Republicans have insisted that a rise in the debt limit by matched by an equal package of cuts. In McConnell’s proposal, Republicans would demand only political immunity in exchange to allow the debt limit to be raised by putting that authority in Obama’s hands through a three-step process. The upshot would be Republicans would never have to take a vote to raise the limit, a message they could take to the campaign trail.
Democrats have partially embraced the idea, because they say even if it’s a play not to get Republicans’ hands dirty, it’s also an acknowledgement from a top Republican that the country should be raising the debt ceiling. Even House Speaker John Boehner has said he thinks the idea “might be worthy at some point” if negotiators can’t deal on other terms.
But Heller doesn’t want to be anywhere near that sort of compromise, even if showcasing a strong stance against a sub-optimal debt limit package is part of his 2012 strategy.
“It’s very unsettling for me to think that we’re going to put together a back-up plan that does nothing but raise the debt ceiling and doesn’t make any structural changes in the way we do business here,” Heller said.
"Even before that, he didn't shy away of voting against government budgets on principle, even where there was a bipartisan compromise on the table and the alternative was government shutdown."
Principle? We do not need this kind of kindergarten principle from a junior Senator. We need to move the economy forward and save these kinds of battles for more stable times.
Hey, Deano!!!
You know what would be very unsettling to ME?
If a CLOWN like YOU ever got ELECTED to the office to which you now reside by virtue of the CLOWN in the Governor's mansion!
So, what say we ACT LIKE ADULTS HERE and make a COMPROMISE befitting the AMERICAN PEOPLE, and you can stand on your GLORIOUS PRINCIPLES at the APPROPRIATE TIME!?!?
That a boy'o, Deano!
I don't suppose you've seen much of a HOBO CLASS up there in the Senate, eh, Deano?
Given that the largest causes for our deficits were caused by Bush era policies as convincingly shown here:
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=vie...
Only the irrational follow Heller, who receives his economic knowledge from a cereal box top.
Dean Heller, another Republican eager to cut Medicare and Social Security so America's seniors get to fend for themselves, and die pre-maturely from malnutrition, and lack of adequate health care.
Seniors, tea bagging seniors included, rely more or less entirely on federal spending, on Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, which together with Defense is almost the entire federal budget. You'd think that most people could master simple math by the age of 65, but, no, not the "mad as hell", "oathkeeping", "patriotic" tea baggers. They want to "cut ssspending", to lower their living standards, and shorten their lives, so America's fat cats, America's richest 1%, those of have benefited the most in America, don't have to lower theirs. Republicans keep perpetuating the myth that America's poor, and middle class, have too much money, and that the rich don't have enough. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch says that top income earners pay too much in taxes while the bottom 51% of Americans don't pay enough. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCRaEwZej...
All her life tea party favorite Michele Bachmann has been cashing government checks and depended on the government to pay her bills, currently as a congresswoman, previously as an IRS-employee, and as a compulsive, obsessive foster parent, with 23 foster kids! Together with her homosexually repressed husband, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/14... , Marcus Bachmann, (who has a Ph.D. from a diploma mill, http://gawker.com/5820437/marcus-bachman...), she started a business, Bachmann & ASSociates, with help from the government, "Bachmann's husband got $137,000 in Medicaid funds" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43570552/ns/... . And the Bachmann family farm, received $251,000 in farm payments between 1995 and 2006, http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrus... . Michele Bachmann has built a career, her whole life on exploiting America's tax payers!
If you want to preserve America's fat cats, free loaders like Michele Bachmann, and sacrifice America's seniors, (hey, they're gonna die anyway, so what's the big deal, eh?), vote Republican! The GOP will "cut ssspending", do away with "government controlled health care", better known as Medicare. BUT they'll give you a discount coupon, Paul Ryan's $5 dollar off on your monthly $2000 premium. How "compassionate"!
The GOP, the party of ignorance, incompetence and intolerance.
Pie chart of the federal budget..
http://dqydj.net/wp-content/uploads/2009...
ladies and gentlemen...
boys and girls...
do you know what this means...
hmmm...
it means that deano "wall street" heller insists on slashing social security...
it means that deano "wall street" heller insists on slashing medicare...
ain't no way around it...
if you refuse to raise taxes on the richest among us...
if you refuse to end loop holes for big oil...
there is but only one other alternative...
YOU MUST DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE!!!
THAT'S WHAT DEANO "WALL STREET" HELLER WANTS TO DO!!!
SidneySpritzer
The bottom 47% pay zero, nothing, nada in federal income tax. How much lower can it go. Sen Hatch IS correct. They don't pay enough.
And as far as Bachmanns business experience, just exactly how much business experience does Obama have. You guessed it...ZERO!
Barrack has been at the public trough his whole adult life. Never had to balance a payroll or have to do the hiring and firing of real people. Not those idiots he has surrounded himself with in the WH.
Heller is a typical run-of-the-mill Republican Party shill who only follows party politics. If he is required to make a decision for Nevada constituents that relies mostly on common sense and doing what's right for us, he'll still not do it, religiously follow party politics on any and all decisions.
He's more than an adequate replacement for the disgraced slime bucket Ensign (who I say still should be prosecuted..for something...anything...charge him with being feloniously stupid or something). And Heller thinks and votes EXACTLY like Ensign. The only thing that differentiates the two is he hasn't shtooped and boffed an aide's wife. Actually, I take that back, Heller is WORSE than Ensign. Because Heller believes southern Nevada should be turned into a nuclear waste toilet by putting the nation's nuclear residue 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Nevada deserves better than this constant line of useless brain dead Republicans who are so committed to making every soul on the planet believe that if you keep the Bush tax cuts in place, it will promote job growth. Don't matter if you call it voodoo economics, trickle down economics, supply side economics, or whatever else gobbledeegoog language you use, the means don't end up with the results that they contend are supposed to happen. It's like these brain dead politicians feel if they keep saying it constantly, repeatedly, LOUDLY and non-stop, then the result may possible happen. Just reveals total stupidity, you ask me.
As far as I'm concerned, Heller is temporary.
I'm voting him out as soon as I can.
The Republican Party has simply blown it. Not one single voter, whether they are Republican, Democrat or Independent, can afford to take a chance with the mystical cure-all snake oil they try to sell all the time. We're not getting anything done here in Nevada with these idiots. We simply deserve better than having our politicians on the national stage for all the wrong reasons like scandals, incompetence, flat earth society beliefs and self-serving pure unadulterated selfish greed.
We're in an economic downturn. It's already proven Republicans are doing everything they can to mire us even down further in it. We need to get rid of them. ALL of them. You vote more of them in, you deserve every single thing they do to you. They only serve themselves and their filthy rich masters who always have their mouths open for more and more corporate welfare. Their whole history shows they could care less about the middle class. And definitely not the poor. Wake up, Nevada. Get rid of these knuckleheads.
I wonder if he will ever be asked why his car was a the house of a convicted pot farmer and right wing radio host.
Colin
"Don't matter if you call it voodoo economics, trickle down economics, supply side economics, or whatever else gobbledeegoog language you use, the means don't end up with the results that they contend are supposed to happen."
Then why didn't Obama veto the legislation that allowed for the Bush tax cuts to continue?
Wasn't his decision also self serving. I mean, why didn't he stick to his guns and do what he PROMISED to do when he was campaigning? Obama promised to end the Bush tax cuts.
BOTH parties are guilty!!
You are selective in your memory of how it happened.
Back when the Bush tax cuts were continued, President Obama had no choice. Due to the machinations of the entire Republican Party, those tax cuts would have discontinued to include the middle class and everyone else. Not the intended goal of ending the Bush tax cuts for the filthy rich. The Republicans blocked it from just effecting the filthy rich, holding the middle class hostage to get their way.
There was no way President Obama would do that to the middle class, the people who are hurting the most during an economic downturn. Justifiably so.
President Obama decided to let those tax cuts expire at the beginning of 2013, deciding it was the best thing for the American people to wait and then get what everyone really wants.
And make no mistake. Those horrible Bush tax cuts will expire in 2013. And no. It's not a "tax increase." It's an adjustment for the filthy rich to pay the amount they have avoided paying for over ten years now.
One of these days, we will get beyond those stupid time bombs the Bush/Cheney eight years of incompetence layered into law. Very hard to do, but it'll get done one way or the other.
Another attempt at the revision of recent political history. Quit watching Fox News because the more you watch, the less you know.
And the GOP continues to play chicken with the economy. The last election they said that tax cuts for the rich create jobs. They got voted in. Not many new jobs as far as I can see.
The party of 'no' has said that their #1 priority is to make sure President Obama is a one term president.......not jobs.....not economic stability......not helping the American people.......just making sure a Republican gets elected in 2012. Sad GOP, really really sad. Your politics have gotten in the way of the job you were hired to do.
Colin
BOTH parties are guilty!
Can you honestly sit there and say the Dems had absolutelt NOTHING to do with the mess we are in.
That would be delutional.
I am glad to see the back bone of deficit cutting at work.
The blame game is fun but provides nothing.
Obama has doubled the spending in his term, that has to stop.
Sign the pledge Senator Heller, sign the pledge!!!
Which one?
The one where you pledge to specify, in detail, exactly what the financial consequences will be for the citizens, local and state governments of Nevada upon enactment of your proposals.
Will your rancher friends go along with paying market rates for water, paying out of their own pockets for irrigation ditches, for tolls on miles and miles of good road leading to towns of 50 people, for the true cost of air service to Ely and Wendover, for the Extension Service office, for ag support,
for paying their own way without Safe and Secure Schools and communities?
Not likely!
Republicans announced today that they are changing their emblem from an elephant
to a condom because it more clearly reflects their party's political stance.
A condom stands up to inflation, halts production,
discourages cooperation, protects a bunch of pricks,
and gives one a sense of
security while screwing others.
Transplanted,
Not bad!
Robert2,
I agree with your contention that both parties are to blame. But the proverbial "bleeding hart big liberal spender" hasn't been a factor for 20 years now. The federal deficit as a percentage of GDP was shrinking under Clinton (a president whom, at the time, I didn't like), but then exploded under Bush. The latter started two multi-trillion dollar wars, slashed revenues by giving away those tax breaks that were promised to be sunsetted away as they only were supposed to temporarily jump-start the stalled economy, presided over the ensuing, phony, bubble economy he and the Fed caused, and launched the massive bailout of the corrupt finance industry. (And is was this bailout which spawned the huge spike in spending. This is the real reason spending grew during Obama's term -- Obama inherited Bush's mess). While I like the notion, but only in principle, of not confiscating people's money, it's unrealistic and callow. We have to pay for what we spend. Any talk of solving the budget deficit without owning up to the effect of the tax-cuts and the two neo-con/GOP-started wars is a waste of time. The reality is that the Stephen Schwarzman's of the world rape the economy and society, siphon of billion-dollar yearly salaries, all while comparing the Prez to Hitler for daring to raise his tax bracket up from 15%. For crying out loud, librarians and nurses pay more than 15%. So Schwarzman and his ilk can SHUT UP. Wall Street and the GOP have been a far bigger part of the problem than the Dems and the rest of us, for the last two decades. And Dean Heller doesn't begin to have a clue.
DTJ
I have been for a flat tax rate for many years. So if you want to close the loopholes, that have allowed billionaires to only pay 15% I am all for it. As you stated we have to pay as we go and that is where the real trouble begins. While I disagreed with many of Bush 43 policies, I am also keenly aware that it was the Dems who controlled those purse strings; they did after all control congress. That seems to be one little oversight many forget when talking about him. Obama as a Dem had a Dem congress for two full years yet they were unable to pass a budget last year and when the Repubs came in they had the unenviable task of doing something that the Dems had the responsibility of doing. Who let who down? They didn't pass a budget because of political maneuvering, plain and simple in an election year. Instead Obama used all of his political capital to force a healthcare bill, which we are still finding more and more expenses that were overlooked, down the throats of the American people. This was done in backroom deals. No transparency there, as promised in his campaign. So"there is plenty of blame to go around and it is hypocritical to suggest otherwise. The political climate in DC is the worst I have seen in my lifetime. I wanted and believed Obama would be different. I was not going to vote for McCain. I have never seen my country so divisive. I have read blogs and heard of people talking about riots and revolution. James Carville was being politically correct when he said "unrest". So that's where we have comt to, talking about riots because people won't get those so called entitlements that they demand. I remember a time in my country when a man would get these entitlements with a little bit of gratitude. Now we have a culture that demands that the government go into my pocket and take my money. This is unacceptable.
Robert2,
I'm with you on the flat tax and no loopholes. Philosophically, I could even argue that as your income goes up, your marginal rate should DECREASE, but A) society is not ready for that, and B) in the real world, this would never pay for what we actually spend.
As for 2009-10, the Dems did NOT have de facto control of anything. The united Republicans played their cards perfectly and blocked any real reform Obama really wanted. McConnell, Boehner and Co. were the Party of NO. I can see we are not about to agree on health care reform -- that is an another entire debate for another day. But suffice it to say that both the health care legislation, as well as financial reform, were stripped down, essentially neutered, and not at all what the President was trying to do. Progressives consider him a huge sellout and pawn of Goldman Sachs, by the way.
Yeah, both parties are largely corrupt and are selling us down the river. Until we get money out of politics -- and that would require no less than a constitutional amendment and at least a generation to argue and hash out -- the monied interests (standing in the shadows of *both* parties) will manipulate and defeat the rest of us.
DTJ
Then we are in agreement with flat tax.
We are not in agreement about Healthcare and that is OK. I believe the Supreme Court is going to shoot it down. I already see the politics for Justice Elana Kagan to recuse herself because of her previous relationship with the current administration. I have read that Justice Thomas may have to do the same because of his wife, but that one is not as likely as Kagan. Their decision will probably happen in the summer of 2012 and it will hurt Obama's election. But in late summer 2012 all troops will be out of Afghanistan and he will have a bounce.
I would like to see an amendment to balance the budget but it has no hopes of passing the senate because it needs 67 votes. I would also like to see term limits for Congress too. Now really, is there any reason Hatch should be a Senator for 42 years, what about Reid.
Many of our politicians don't even talk to each other. I believe they are disconnected with the people who have to live with their decisions, you and me.
Mr. Heller, next time we go to war, how do we pay for that, once your "balanced budget amendment" is in place? Where would the money be stolen from to pay the troops? Your party seems to be the one that "favors war" in answer to many things as in, "war on terror". Do think that is going away any time soon?