Jo Ann Emerson

Upon the invitation of Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson, the expected republican winner of today's Missouri Beauty Pageant will be heading to beautiful Cape Girardeau next month.  From the Southeast Missourian:

Santorum to speak at Cape Lincoln Day next month

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has scheduled a trip to Cape Girardeau next month, where he is to be the featured speaker at the local GOP's Lincoln Day event.

Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, was invited by U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, a Cape Girardeau Republican, who confirmed Monday that he had accepted.[...]

"He really understands blue collar, Middle America," Emerson said. "He has the best overall, well-rounded understanding of some of the challenges in a state like ours. I am so happy he accepted my invitation."

While this might not seem totally out of the ordinary given that congresscritters regularly invite presidential candidates of their own party to campaign with them in order to get national attention, raise money and get a photo-op, what makes it interesting is that Emerson is refusing to state who she's voting for or make any formal endorsement, even though she's already received a nice chunk of change from Romney.

KCTV sums it up:

HOUSE DECISION WOULD RAISE YOUR TAXES

KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) -The U.S. House of Representatives failed to take action Tuesday to extend the payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits for millions.

The House rejected a two-month extension to 160 million Americans on their payroll taxes. This means if you made $50,000 annually then you'll pay about $1,000 more in taxes in 2012.

The Senate-approved bill would have allowed millions of unemployed Americans to continue receiving jobless benefits.

This afternoon, in a purely political move, House republicans voted to hike taxes on 160 million working Americans effective January 1 by rejecting the Senate's extension of the payroll tax cut.

By a final vote of 229 - 113, including Rep. Akin, Rep. Emerson, Rep. Graves, Rep. Hartzler, Rep. Long, and Rep. Luetkemeyer, republicans violated their pledge of not raising taxes.

Given that Rep. Todd Akin has said that he is taking a stand against raising the debt limit, you might think that he has always taken that position. That is not the case. 

Akin and his Missouri Republican colleagues Roy Blunt, Jo Ann Emerson, Sam Graves and Kenny Hulshof voted multiple times during the Bush Administration to raise the debt limit. Two readily available votes on record occurred in June 2002 and November 2004.

And if you don’t remember the major outcry from Republicans for spending cuts, that is because there wasn't really an outcry at all. In fact, the debt increased to $9.815 trillion dollars by the end of Bush’s presidency. 

h/t Think Progress 

Who could have guessed that Americans don't like the plan to privatize Medicare supported by Todd Akin, Roy Blunt, Vicky Hartzler, Jo Ann Emerson, Billy Long, Sam Graves and Blaine Luetkemeyer?  

According to the new CBS News poll, 31 percent of Americans support converting Medicare into a sort of voucher program. Fifty-eight percent said they support keeping the program’s existing structure intact.

[The House GOP plan supported by all of the Missouri Republicans in Washington] plan would eliminate the traditional single-payer Medicare system and replace it with vouchers that could be used in the private insurance market.

h/t Think Progress 

No one could have predicted that the House GOP's plan to phase out Medicare as we know it while giving the very wealthy even more tax cuts would be unpopular: "Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich distanced himself on Sunday from a House GOP plan to make cuts to Medicare, calling it 'too big a jump' for the American people."

From Meet the Press:

The Americans United for Change organization has a new TV spot running in a few Congressional districts around the country highlighting Congressional Republicans' recent vote to phase out Medicare as we know it.  It's a good taste of what's to come.

Reps. Todd Akin, Vicky Hartzler, Blaine Luetkemeyer, Jo Ann Emerson, Sam Graves and Billy Long all voted to eliminate Medicare -- and give the very wealthy even more tax cuts.

A very early entry for Best Ad of the 2012 Cycle:

h/t The Plum Line

Marist has a new poll looking at attitudes toward deficit reduction strategies on the table in Washington, summed up quite well by The Hill: "Raise taxes on wealthy, leave Medicare, Medicaid alone."

[F]ully four in five registered voters oppose cutting Medicare and Medicaid. The House GOP’s fiscal 2012 budget, largely crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), makes fundamental long-term changes to both health entitlement programs, converting Medicaid into a block grant and turning Medicare into a type of voucher system. 

Democrats (92 percent), Republicans (73 percent) and independents (75 percent) all opposed cuts to the two programs, the McClatchy-Marist poll found.

Here's a breakdown of responses about cutting Medicare and Medicaid, and to increasing taxes on income over $250,000, as posted by Slate's Dave Weigel.

Todd Akin, Vicky Hartzler, Jo Ann Emerson, Blaine Luetkemeyer and Sam Graves voted Friday in favor of the GOP's Medicare Elimination Plan.  Included as part of the Paul Ryan budget, it passed today despite bipartisan opposition.

We look forward to hearing from all of the Congressmembers why they voted to

• dismantle Medicare and Medicaid while giving even more tax cuts to the already very wealthy
• double health-care costs for seniors
• increase taxes on the middle-class to finance tax cuts for the rich and
• endanger vital Medicaid services
• make huge education cuts
• undermine another important part of the social safety net

and a whole bunch of other terrible stuff. 

Did I mention that the already very wealthy will get tax cuts while Medicare gets phased out?

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson formally announced the end of her Senate race speculation today.

The League of Conservation Voters released its annual environmental voting scorecard today.  Eighty-one House members received "zero" ratings for their votes against clean energy and commonsense pollution safeguards -- and four of those zeros came from Missouri.  

Here's how the LCV summarizes their methodology:

“While the lack of progress in 2010 is highly disappointing, we applaud those members of Congress who fought to protect public health and the environment and reduce our nation’s dangerous dependence on oil,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, LCV Senior Vice President of Government Affairs. “Conversely, the 2010 Scorecard clearly exposes those members who put corporate polluters and other special interests ahead of the health and well-being of all Americans by opposing efforts to transition our nation to a clean energy economy, enforce commonsense pollution safeguards, and protect the environment.”

Some fodder for your Monday morning water cooler chats:

• Jo Ann Emerson tells the Southeast Missourian that she'll have her announcement about the Missouri Senate race in "a couple of weeks."  Coincidentally, the Missouri's GOP's Lincoln Days event is in "a couple of weeks." 
• Corey Brown, Field Director for Emerson's 2010 Congressional campaign, insists that the Congresswoman is "most definitely not out" of the Senate race
• The SEMO Times is standing by its story that Emerson told at least one GOP state legislator that she's out. In a weekend email to readers: "After breaking the story on the SEMO TIMES twitter feed the congresswoman contacted Jo Mannies of the Beacon to explain she was going to take several more weeks to make an announcement, but in no story did she deny contacting a Republican Missouri State Senator and informing them of her intentions."

Posted this afternoon by the SEMO Times:  "Sources close to U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson have informed the SEMO Times the congresswoman has told Republican Missouri senators she will not run for the U.S. Senate..." 

UPDATE: Emerson insists to The Beacon that she hasn't made up her mind yet. 

If Republicans and their donors hadn't spent enormous sums of time and money in recent years misinforming and confusing the public about the reality of global warming and climate change, this tweet from Rep. Jo Ann Emerson might be funny. 

But they have, and it isn't.

Emeron's tweet is part of a proud tradition here in Missouri.  Leaders in the MOGOP have done way more than their share to advance the causes of their polluting special interests.  Here's just a sampling:

• Sen. Roy Blunt believes "there isn’t any real science to say we are altering the climate path of the earth."
• Rep. Billy Long says "there’s always changing and nobody really knows if it [climate change and global warming] has anything to do with man or not..the science I’ve says it does not."
• Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer says “that human emissions of carbon are causing our climate to change has been proven very doubtful at the most by the sound science that’s being promoted at the present time."
• Rep. Todd Akin says he's "not convinced of the soundness of the science of climate change." 
• Senate candidate Ed Martin thinks "the climate change debate has been now discredited in the sense that the ideological interests involved and the special interests involved have been shown to be corrupt."
• Rep. Vicky Hartzler says "a lot of data I’ve seen shows that perhaps we don’t even have global warming.
• Gubernatorial candidate Peter Kinder says the "science behind global warming is discredited"

Missouri's Todd Akin, Jo Ann Emerson, Sam Graves, Blaine Luetkemeyer, Billy Long and Vicky Hartzler -- along with 165 colleagues -- are supporting a new bill (HR3) in Congress that would redefine rape.  Raw Story summarizes:

Currently, the federal government denies taxpayer monies to be used to pay for abortions, except in cases when pregnancies result from rape or incest or when the pregnancy endangers the woman's life.

However, if the 173 mainly Republican co-sponsors of the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" have their way, that would all change. Instead of keeping the 30-year-old definition of rape in federal law, the bill would modify it to "forcible rape," thereby severely limiting the health care choices of millions of American women and their families.

In other words, rape would not be rape unless violence were involved; however, the term "forcible rape" was left undefined, leading some to speculate its meaning since it is also not defined in the federal criminal code or in some state laws.

"This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible," Nick Baumann of Mother Jones wrote recently.

This morning in The Hotline: "Missouri Republican Rep. Jo Ann Emerson is considering a run for the Senate, adding another name to the growing list of potential contenders to take on Sen. Claire McCaskill...According to sources familiar with Emerson's deliberations, she has been considering the race for two weeks and has made several phone calls to prominent Republicans across the state."

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has scored the Republicans' plan to junk the health care reform law.  Guess what?    Their plan will add $230 billion to the federal deficit over the next decade, leave 32 million Americans without health insurance by the end of the decade and mean "insurance that is less comprehensive, less available, and in many cases more expensive."

H'ray fiscal conservatism!  And never mind the whole "replace" part of their "repeal and replace" promise.

It's almost like Republicans don't have, and haven't had, a real plan for making health care more affordable and accessible.