Archive for the ‘Chris Christie’ Category
VIDEO – CHRIS CHRISTIE SPEAKS AT THE REAGAN LIBRARY PART 1
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011CHRIS CHRISTIE, AMERICA’S CAESAR
Sunday, August 21st, 2011WASHINGTON POST
Opinion Writer
Chris Christie, America’s Caesar
By George F. Will, Published: August 19
Trenton
Near the statehouse office of New Jersey’s 55th governor sits a sort of shrine to the 34th. Fortunately, Chris Christie is unlike Woodrow Wilson.
Christie, who resembles Falstaff in girth and Jack Dempsey in pugnacity, is a visceral politician who thrives on conflict. Wilson — lean, intellectual and pious, particularly about himself — regarded opposition as impious.
Wilson acquired the governorship, his first elective office, in January 1911, having learned about government mostly from books he wrote about it. (And he wrote “Congressional Government” without ever seeing Congress.) Eighteen months later he was the Democrats’ presidential nominee.
Christie’s only previous elective office was as county freeholder. But later, as the state’s only U.S. attorney, he became prominent while learning a lot about New Jersey’s gamy political culture by prosecuting some of the participants. This unsentimental political education prepared him so well for the governorship that today, in his 20th month, he is being importuned to seek the Republican presidential nomination.
He won’t. Here’s why.
He relishes being America’s Caesar — its most powerful governor. He wields a line-item veto, he can revise spending numbers but only down (he blocked $1.3 billion in spending this year) and he can exercise a “conditional veto,” rewriting legislation and sending it back to the Legislature for approval. The governor and the lieutenant governor, who run in tandem, are the only state officials elected statewide. The governor appoints the attorney general, treasurer, comptroller, all judges and all county prosecutors.
Understanding the first rule regarding political power — “use it or lose it” — he has flexed his institutional muscles. “I don’t want to leave my political capital in my desk drawer to frame when I leave.” A legislature, he says, “is almost genetically predisposed to inaction.” To get it to move on his combative agenda for taming public employees unions, he held 30 town meetings in nine months — almost one a week. (more…)
VIDEO – GOVERNOR CHRISTIE- OBAMA NOT LEADING IN BUDGET AND SPENDING CRISIS
Wednesday, July 20th, 2011GOP GOVERNORS ARE SHOWING THE WAY
Tuesday, June 28th, 2011
- JUNE 25, 2011
State Republicans are tackling the issues voters want addressed. That will be a major asset for the party’s presidential nominee in 2012.
Democrats say otherwise, but Republican governors and their records will be a major asset to the GOP in 2012. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s monumental achievement this week in passing a bill to reform his state’s public-employee benefits is a prime example. As Gov. Christie said Friday, underfunded pension and health-care obligations are “the core problems of government spending in the country.”
This is the kind of leadership Americans want right now: straight talk about the fiscal mess we’re in and a plan to solve it. The good news is Gov. Christie is not alone among Republican governors.
When I became governor of Virginia in January 2010 we faced two historic budget shortfalls totaling $6 billion. The proposals to close these shortfalls spanned the philosophical spectrum. Shortly before leaving office, my predecessor, outgoing Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine, put forward a massive $1.8 billion income-tax hike as one of his solutions.
I knew that in an economy struggling to recover, raising taxes was a nonstarter. So we set forth on a different path. We balanced Virginia’s books by reducing state spending to 2006 levels, putting in place a hiring freeze in state government, making conservative revenue estimates and incentivizing state employees to save taxpayer dollars. The result was a budget surplus just a few months later.
Since February 2010, 67,400 new jobs have been created in Virginia and our unemployment rate has fallen to 6% from 7.2%. Virginia’s unemployment rate is more than a full three points below the national average and the third-lowest east of the Mississippi. It’s not surprising that a majority of Virginians surveyed now believe the state is headed in the right direction, compared to 31% who think the nation is moving in the right direction.
These results can and will be duplicated in other states. This year, 18 new Republican governors took office, and many confronted budget deficits similar to or worse than what we faced in Virginia last year.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
STATES BRACE FOR END OF EXTRA MEDICAID FUNDS
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011As Number of Medicaid Patients
Goes Up, Their Benefits Are About
to Drop
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration injected billions of dollars into Medicaid, the nation’s low-income health program, as the recession deepened two years ago. The money runs out at the end of this month, and benefits are being cut for millions of people, even though unemployment has increased.
From New Jersey to California, state officials are bracing for the end to more than $90 billion in federal largess specifically designated for Medicaid. To hold down costs, states are cutting Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals, limiting benefits for Medicaid recipients, reducing the scope of covered services, requiring beneficiaries to pay larger co-payments and expanding the use of managed care.
As a result, costs can be expected to rise in other parts of the health care system. Cuts in Medicaid payments to doctors, for example, make it less likely that they will accept Medicaid patients and more likely that people will turn to hospital emergency rooms for care. Hospitals and other health care providers often try to make up for the loss of Medicaid revenue by increasing charges to other patients, including those with private insurance, experts say.
Neither the White House nor Congress has tried to extend the extra federal financing for Medicaid, even though the number of beneficiaries is higher now than when Congress approved the aid as part of an economic recovery package in February 2009.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that federal Medicaid spending will decline in 2012 for only the second time in the 46-year history of the program. But states say they will have to have to spend more on Medicaid as they struggle to make up for the loss of federal money.
State officials say they are resigned to the loss of the extra federal matching payments, given the climate in Congress, where deficit reduction is a paramount goal.
“We all see the reality of what’s going on in Congress,” said Mark W. Rupp, director of the Washington office of Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington State, a Democrat who is chairwoman of the National Governors Association. “It’s more about cutting than spending. Why put a lot of effort into something that did not seem likely to have a positive outcome? It would have been fairly futile.”
Although Medicaid provides health insurance to one in five Americans at some point in a year, it is more vulnerable to cuts than Medicare and Social Security, which have broader political support.
“Medicaid is very much on the chopping block,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care. “Seniors vote. But if you are poor and disabled, you might not vote, and if you are a child, you do not vote — that’s a lot of Medicaid’s population. They don’t have money to do lobbying.”
Medicaid is financed jointly by the federal government and the states, with the federal government paying a larger share in poorer states like Mississippi and West Virginia and a smaller share in higher-income states like New York and Connecticut.
The aid ending next month increased the federal share of Medicaid spending in all states, with additional help for states where unemployment rates had risen sharply. The extra aid was scheduled to expire last December, but Congress extended it for six months at the urging of the White House and state officials.
The additional money pushed the average federal share of Medicaid spending nationwide to 67 percent. It will revert to 57 percent next month. The cutback in federal Medicaid money has put pressure on states to cut the budget for other programs, including education and social services. (more…)
JUDGES FOR HIGHER TAXES IN NEW JERSEY
Sunday, June 12th, 2011
- JUNE 10, 2011
The New Jersey Supreme Court passes an appropriations bill.
- Who needs an excuse to raise taxes when a state Supreme Court will tip the scales? That’s the story in New Jersey, where the justices recently inserted themselves into state fiscal policy, much to taxpayer dismay.
By a 3-2 vote, the state high court ordered the state to spend an additional $500 million for 31 schools in some of the state’s worst districts. The verdict forces Governor Chris Christie to rework his already difficult budget plans in order to accede to the court’s mandate.
Mr. Christie wasn’t thrilled. “You don’t elect the Supreme Court; you don’t expect them to be making law,” he said. “But today, they made law. Because today, they sent an appropriations bill for $500 million that was not passed by the legislature, that was not signed by the Governor. Go to the Constitution and tell me, how the hell did they get away with that?” (more…)
THE GOP FIELD: ALL TALK, NO DO
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
- MAY 20, 2011
If the Republican candidates don’t take on tough issues as Paul Ryan, Chris Christie and others have, they might as well go hold forth with The Donald.
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By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
- Newt Gingrich embarked on a national apology tour this week, which was not exactly how he pictured his 2012 rollout. There’s a simple lesson here for those seeking the GOP nomination: Stop talking.
His rivals, and the press, ought to be thanking Mr. Gingrich for his “Meet the Press” performance, for finally injecting clarity into the GOP battle. Why oh why, everyone keeps asking, does the Republican race excite less enthusiasm than a curling competition? Why does watching the speeches and the interviews require No-Doz . . . or Tums . . . or an epidural? What is the problem, people?
Mr. Gingrich supplied that answer on NBC last weekend as he talked, and talked, and talked. Make no mistake, the former speaker put in the usual fabulously pithy oration—rapping President Obama, summoning Ronald Reagan, knocking House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform. Yet in all that talk, talk, talk, Mr. Gingrich never actually laid out a bold vision of what he’d do, do, do as president. That sums up the problem with the GOP field. (more…)