The agenda: Taxes, executive orders
Posted: Monday, November 10, 2008 9:21 AM by Domenico Montanaro
The Washington Post front-pages, “President-elect Barack Obama plans to push ahead with a middle-class tax cut soon after taking office, his choice for White House chief of staff said yesterday. Rahm Emanuel also hinted that Obama would not postpone a tax increase for families earning more than $250,000 a year despite the deepening economic gloom. He said Obama's proposals would reduce taxes for 95 percent of working Americans by an average of $1,000 each, resulting in ‘a net tax cut’ for the overall economy.”
The New York Times suggests that some executive orders are going to get signed pretty quickly. "As Mr. Obama prepared to make his first post-election visit to the White House on Monday, his advisers were compiling a list of policies that could be reversed by the executive powers of the new president. The assessment is under way, aides said, but a full list of policies to be overturned will not be announced by Mr. Obama until he confers with new members of his cabinet."
More: "In January 2001, on his first full day in office, Mr. Bush reinstated the so-called global gag rule, initiated during the Reagan administration and overturned by President Bill Clinton, which prohibited taxpayer dollars from being given to international family planning groups that perform abortions and provide abortion counseling. After Mr. Obama’s victory last week, the Center for Reproductive Rights delivered a 23-page memorandum to his transition team, calling for “bold policy change,” including a repeal of the gag rule. On Sunday, in a sign that the presidential campaign had definitively ended and that the fast-forming administration had become the focal point, the faces of Mr. Obama’s new team appeared across the spectrum of Sunday talk shows, a changing of the guard more than two months before he officially assumes power."
The AP notes the likely change in Cuba policy that's coming and how the Cuban hard-liners are worried about their political power because of it. "Cuba's communist leadership has long cast itself as David standing up to the U.S. Goliath and the crippling force of America's punitive trade and travel embargo. Now they have a problem: If Barack Obama follows through on campaign promises to ease restrictions on the island, he could chip away at the Castro brothers' best case for staying in power."
"A senior Pentagon advisory group, in a series of bluntly worded briefings, is warning President-elect Barack Obama that the Defense Department's current budget is ‘not sustainable,’ and he must scale back or eliminate some of the military's most prized weapons programs. 'Business as usual is no longer an option,' according to one of the internal briefings prepared in late October for the presidential transition, copies of which were provided to the Globe. 'The current and future fiscal environments facing the department demand bold action.' ... Pentagon insiders and defense budget specialists say the Pentagon has been on a largely unchecked spending spree since 2001 that will prove politically difficult to curtail but nevertheless must be reined in."
Does Obama owe no one? So claims the Boston Globe. "Interest groups are furiously drawing up wish lists for the incoming Obama administration, many of them hoping to cash in on the investments they made - in volunteers, political support, and campaign contributions - in Obama's commanding win. But given the nature of Obama's victory, which was propelled more by a grass-roots army of millions than by traditional Democratic constituencies, is the president-elect really indebted to anybody?
“Some analysts and Washington veterans say no. ‘He owes nothing to anyone except the people who elected him,’ said Democratic strategist Steve McMahon. Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that the unprecedented ground organization and campaign infrastructure that Obama built left him less reliant on groups such as labor unions to get voters mobilized and to the polls. As a result, he said, Obama is less obligated to them now."
"President-elect Obama will enter office with an immediate opportunity to begin shaping the federal courts by filling four dozen openings on trial and appeals courts. Federal judges, with lifetime appointments, can be a president's most enduring legacy. President Bush receives uniformly high marks from Republicans for his selection of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito."
