Erika Eichelberger

Reporting Fellow

Erika Eichelberger is a reporting fellow in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She has also written for The Nation, The Brooklyn Rail, and TomDispatch. Email her at eeichelberger [at] motherjones [dot] com.

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House Republican Conspiracy Theorist Hearts the Word "Lunatic"

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Thu Dec. 6, 2012 7:48 AM PST

"Terror baby" conspiracy theorist, birther conspiracy theorist, and Muslim Brotherhood inflitration conspiracy theorist Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), who also said the Aurora shooting happened because we lost Jesus, would like America to make sure the term "lunatic" remains in federal law. He was the lone no vote yesterday on a House bill that ends the use of the outmoded and offensive term, which appears in laws that allow banks to act as a trustee of mentally disabled people's estates.

But Gohmert's nay vote wasn't out of self-interest. As the Washington Post reports, it was due to his sense of civic duty: "To keep spending and not pay the price, that is immoral," Gohmert said. "That's why we shouldn’t eliminate the word 'lunatic.' It really has application around this town...We want to eliminate the word 'lunatic' from the federal code? That's lunacy."

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Will Obama Beat Back a "Nuclear" Attack by the Big Banks?

Financial regulators are scrambling to finalize the Volcker rule—and Wall Street has mounted a full-on blitz to defang it.

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Thu Dec. 6, 2012 4:13 AM PST

Sergey Nivens & pterwort/Shutterstock

Wild bets by taxpayer-insured banks helped put the US economy in the toilet four years ago. With financial regulators scrambling post-election to finalize long overdue rules for Wall Street, banks have intensified their war on regulation. In particular, the financial industry is lobbying like mad to add key loopholes to the Volcker rule, a provision of the sweeping 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act that is supposed to restrict high-risk speculation by commercial banks.

During the campaign, Mitt Romney vowed to repeal Dodd-Frank, and regulatory agencies were waiting to finish crafting the details of the Volcker rule. Whether that rule will emerge as Congress intended, or as a watered-down half-measure, is what's at stake in the current battle between reformers and industry.

[Read the full article]

The GOP Channels Romney on Latest Debt Deal Offer

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Tue Dec. 4, 2012 2:11 PM PST

Republicans have apparently taken a cue from presidential loser Mitt Romney on how to put together a budget plan: Explain nothing. House Speaker John Boehner's latest offer, issued Monday, proposes serious reductions in spending, but fails to specify exactly how those cuts would play out in reality, according to the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Exhibit A: The plan proposes $600 billion in mystery healthcare cuts, way more than the widely-touted Bowles-Simpson deficit proposal (which backers say is centrist, and critics say favors business and the wealthy), and way more than Obama's proposal.

CBPP did the wonk work for Boehner, and concluded "the health care cuts in the Republican offer will likely be draconian":

For months, we have studied options to generate savings in this part of the budget, and we can’t get close to $600 billion...with items that wouldn’t seriously hurt low-income and vulnerable individuals.... Some news accounts report the House Republican leaders would raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67 and increase Medicare premiums for more affluent beneficiaries, although those items are not mentioned anywhere in the new offer. But if so, those measures would raise only about one quarter of the $600 billion.

Republicans' most recent budget offer also includes $300 billion in blanket cuts to "non-health mandatory programs," which includes things like disability benefits and Food Stamps. There are no specifics there, either.

"The proposal is an exercise in 'look Ma, no hands' budgeting," CBPP director Robert Greenstein said in a statement.

An additional $300 billion is slashed from discretionary spending, including education, childcare, and research. Here the CBPP says they can better assess what the damage will be. As the CBPP's James Horney explains, since Republicans aren't going to make any more defense cuts, low-income programs will inevitably be on the table. Conclusion: "Adding large further cuts on top of the steep cuts that [last year's deficit reduction pact] requires would be most unwise," according to Greenstein.

So why the reluctance to include the nuts and bolts on how spending cuts will work out? Math. The CBPP says there isn't enough revenue in Boehner's plan to cover all the spending—not even the cost of keeping Bush tax cuts for the rich and keeping estate taxes low. As a middle-school pre-Algebra teacher might say, "Show your work."

Obama to Help Screwed Homeowners (Finally)

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Tue Dec. 4, 2012 11:23 AM PST

Remember when Wall Street got $700 billion after destroying the economy, and the tens of millions of people who took out crappy home loans didn't? Well, homeowner problems didn't go away. And though the Obama administration has a pretty abysmal record of assisting homeowners so far, the president could soon make his biggest move yet to help them—by replacing the housing agency head who has blocked attempts to write off some Americans' mortgage debt.

Prominent economists say cutting home loan balances is the single most important thing the administration could do to revive housing, but Obama and Co. only recently began to heed this advice. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner regularly blocked efforts to use TARP bank bailout funds for a mortgage relief program that could have had a real impact on the economy. In 2009, Geithner invoked "moral hazard," claiming that reducing Americans' mortgage debts would incentivize delinquency.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Conservatives: If You Can't Win the Presidency, Make It Weaker

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Sat Dec. 1, 2012 8:08 AM PST

It's one thing to expand executive powers when your guy is in the White House—but what if the other party holds the Oval Office? That's what elite conservative legal minds were mulling at an American Enterprise Institute event Friday headlined "Founders betrayed? New threats to US democracy and rule of law." Conservative luminaries, including Bush-era torture-justifier John Yoo, warned of a grave constitutional threat in the Obama administration's use of executive power.

CATO institute fellow Nicholas Rosenkranz said Obama had seized a "vast amount of executive power" by allowing people who entered the country illegally as children to stay (though as my colleague Adam Serwer pointed out last summer, presidents from both parties have long claimed the authority to grant stays of deportation). He was also concerned about the possibility that the DOJ may decline to enforce federal drug laws in states that recently legalized pot. (This coming from the same school of thought that says the 10th amendment allows states to ignore federal laws they don't like.) "For those of you who are nervous about some of the tendencies of of this particular president," Rosencranz said, "I would keep your eye on the executive choices like declining to execute law."

He said Congress should clarify that the president must enforce federal laws. Would this, then, apply to Obamacare under a "President Ryan in 2017," asked moderator Henry Olson, director of AEI's National Research Initiative. Well, yes, Rosencranz said—yes, it would.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]