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Show HN: govuptime.com

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Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#131

Post by GabrielF00 »

bmelton wrote: post #84
VladRussian2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Frankly, I'd like it if it stayed this way. The government shouldn't tax-and-force in "non-essential" areas. you must be kidding. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/2/irs-collectin... "IRS collecting money but not sending tax refunds during shutdown"

That's just due to the politicization of the shutdown. The Executive has actually taken great pains to make things as inconvenient as possible for the citizenry, to ensure that they get the message that government is necessary to their daily lives, whether it would otherwise impact them or not. Websites are shut down, but not like, in a way that would save any actual money. Instead of turning the servers off, they're…

If you owned property, would you allow huge numbers of tourists access to it if you had no staff onsite and no idea when you were going to be able to get staff? Now consider if you owned 401 pieces of property* across the country. Some of these are historic sites that are pretty delicate. Some of these consist of thousands of square miles of wilderness where people get killed even when there ARE park rangers around. These people are charged with protecting the nation's heritage. They're not just going to allow somebody to wander into the Lincoln Memorial and start chiseling their name on the walls. And of course there are liability issues.

*The National Parks Service has 401 units. The actual number of individual sites is higher.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#132

Post by ewoodrich »

bmelton wrote: post #80
bithive123 wrote: post #67

Metrics are cool and all, but this glosses over the really important story here, which unfortunately seems to elude much of the general public: that a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law. They cannot be allowed to do this. I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards.

> a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law So, not to get into a partisan argument (because I'm not a Republican), but the Supreme Court battle for the individual mandate imposed by the ACA circumvented the House's budgetary authority here, and that's why we're log-jammed at the moment. The Constitution prescribes that all spending bills must originate in the Hou…

> taxes are at the discretion of the House, and the Senate ignored that

Wrong. Taxes (actually, any appropriations or taxation) must originate in the House. Which is easily circumvented by replacing the text of an appropriations bill that passed in the House using a Senate amendment, and has been used far before the passage of the ACA.

This is hardly new, and doesn't mean "taxes are at the discretion of the House". Every bill must be approved by both the House and the Senate (and the ACA did, otherwise it wouldn't even be a law at all), the original bill is required to have technically originated in the House.

"According to the Origination Clause of the United States Constitution, all bills relating to revenue, generally tax bills, must originate in the House of Representatives, consistent with the Westminster system requiring all money bills to originate in the lower house. House appropriations bills begin with "H.R.", meaning "House of Representatives". The Constitution also states that the "Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills," so in practice, the Senate and House each drafts and considers its own bill. The Senate then "cuts-and-pastes", substituting the language of its bill of a particular appropriations bill for the language of House bill, then agrees to the bill as amended." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriation_bill

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#133

Post by indrax »

bmelton wrote: post #80
bithive123 wrote: post #67

Metrics are cool and all, but this glosses over the really important story here, which unfortunately seems to elude much of the general public: that a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law. They cannot be allowed to do this. I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards.

> a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law So, not to get into a partisan argument (because I'm not a Republican), but the Supreme Court battle for the individual mandate imposed by the ACA circumvented the House's budgetary authority here, and that's why we're log-jammed at the moment. The Constitution prescribes that all spending bills must originate in the Hou…

>and that's why we're log-jammed at the moment.

This implies that it's just a matter of mistakes made in the past, that it created some mechanical-procedural problem that all our politicians are powerless to fix, and it just needs to work itself out with maybe some nudging.

This suggests that it is not the case that some group is actively maintaining a condition of closed government offices.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#134

Post by ewoodrich »

bmelton wrote: post #128
moocowduckquack wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have a law that disallows the entire civil federal budget being held to ransom, such as declaring that the final date for a funding vote for an established government service must come at least 3 months ahead or else the service is automatically assigned funds. That way, all the sections of the budget that are not under contention would have been assigned funding 3 months ago and the worst that could be don…

There are currently laws that require the executive branch to submit a budget every year (the Budget Control Act of 1921), which the president violated for a few years consecutively, forcing the past few years' continuing resolutions (and in part, the sequester). There are additional Budget Acts (passed in the mid-70s, 90s, etc.) that require those budgets to be acted upon by Congress or reconsidered, which have all…

Here is a portion of the summary of the President's 2013 budget proposal. [1]

I don't know where you get the idea that the President is violating the Budget Control Act. The issue is that the Senate and the House refuse to conference, due to the remote possibility of an actual revised budget being passed. Therefore CRs are used to maintain funding without dealing with the seemingly intractable partisan disputes in the current split Congress.

(and the Budget Control Act of 2011 was attempt to move this debate from the full floor to the Supercommittee, which promptly failed and resulted in the sequester) I'm not sure how that's relevant. [2]

[1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Congress_Joint_Se...

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#135

Post by canweriotnow »

bmelton wrote: post #96
dragonwriter wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was not originally presented as a tax, but as fees. How something is presented is tangential, and often outright irrelevant, to its Constitutional status. You statement that the Court struck down the mandate but offered a tax as an option is simply, directly, factually wrong . They upheld it, which is exactly the opposite of striking it down. > but both taxes are indeed at the discretion of the House, or we woul…

I feel like this argument is one of semantics, so I'll just attempt to clarify. Justice Roberts, the swing vote, would have struck down the penalty but for his characterization of it as a tax, as well as having characterized that tax as a flat penalty against which modifiers were imposed. As a result of its tax characterization, it violates the Origination Clause of the Constitution, which has never been remedied. Wh…

I think you're also forgetting: post Marbury v. Madison, the meaning of the Origination Clause is at the discretion of the Supreme Court.

Match point.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#136

Post by canweriotnow »

adammichaelc wrote: post #107
dragonwriter wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, not to get into a partisan argument (because I'm not a Republican), but the Supreme Court battle for the individual mandate imposed by the ACA circumvented the House's budgetary authority here, and that's why we're log-jammed at the moment. This is simply false. > The Constitution prescribes that all spending bills must originate in the House. Presumably, you mean tax bills, as saying this of spending bills wou…

Relevant. http://xkcd.com/386/

You're telling me. I actually took a break from Guild Wars 2 to comment on this thread.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#137

Post by guelo »

bmelton wrote: post #80
bithive123 wrote: post #67

Metrics are cool and all, but this glosses over the really important story here, which unfortunately seems to elude much of the general public: that a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law. They cannot be allowed to do this. I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards.

> a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law So, not to get into a partisan argument (because I'm not a Republican), but the Supreme Court battle for the individual mandate imposed by the ACA circumvented the House's budgetary authority here, and that's why we're log-jammed at the moment. The Constitution prescribes that all spending bills must originate in the Hou…

None of what you say makes sense. Obamacare is constitutional because the Supreme Court said it was constitutional, that's how our system works.

The Republicans are dead set against the law and are prepared to burn the government down to stop it. Simple as that. It's not some techinical procedural legality as you make it out to be.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#138

Post by hughlomas »

arscan wrote: post #7

Ah, that chart on the bottom is on a log scale. I wasn't expecting that... and if I didn't look closer I would have completely misinterpreted it (for example, it appears that the DoD is mostly shut down).

It should also be a stacked bar chart, not two individual bars.

Re: Show HN: govuptime.com

#139

Post by jleader »

asperous wrote: post #13

It's too bad the http://www.usdebtclock.org/ isn't updated for Furlough, it would show some pretty happy numbers right now.

Except I had the impression that restarting shelved projects, catching up after delays, etc. is going to end up costing more money than the shutdown saves. Not to mention the effect on the economy if it goes on for too long, which will affect tax revenues.

[Edited to add:] Also, my understanding is that you can't get an EIN (Employer ID Number) issued during the shutdown, which means you can't legally start a new business and hire employees until this is over.

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