Senators on Tuesday blocked an amendment from Senate Democrats aimed at protecting Social Security.
Senators voted 51-48 on a procedural motion, after Democrats tried to override the decision of Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), the chairman of the Budget Committee, to block the amendment.
The amendment would have required any proposal that cuts benefits or raises the Social Security retirement age meet a “point of order” requiring a supermajority of 60 votes for passage.
Senators on Tuesday blocked an amendment from Senate Democrats aimed at protecting Social Security.
Senators voted 51-48 on a procedural motion, after Democrats tried to override the decision of Sen. Mike Enzi's (R-Wyo.), the chairman of the Budget Committee, to block the amendment.
The amendment would have required any proposal that cuts benefits or raises the Social Security retirement age meet a “point of order” requiring a supermajority of 60 votes for passage.
But, Enzi blocked the amendment, saying it was not "germane" to the budget.
Here, the ALJ has determined what functions he believes Mascio can perform, but his opinion is sorely lacking in the analysis needed for us to review meaningfully those conclusions. In particular, although the ALJ concluded that Mascio can perform certain functions, he said nothing about Mascio’s ability to perform them for a full workday. ...
[W]e agree with other circuits that an ALJ does not account “for a claimant’s limitations in concentration, persistence, and pace by restricting the hypothetical question to simple, routine tasks or unskilled work.” ...
Mascio’s argument stems from the ALJ’s use of the following language in his opinion:
After careful consideration of the evidence, the undersigned finds that the claimant’s medically determinable impairments could reasonably be expected to cause the alleged symptoms; however, the claimant’s statements concerning the intensity, persistence and limiting effects of these symptoms are not credible to the extent they are inconsistent with the above residual functional capacity assessment.
We agree with the Seventh Circuit that this boilerplate “gets things backwards” by implying “that ability to work is determined first and is then used to determine the claimant’s credibility.” ...
[A] claimant’s pain and residual functional capacity are not separate assessments to be compared with each other. Rather, an ALJ is required to consider a claimant’s pain as part of his analysis of residual functional capacity.
A former Social Security Administration employee was sentenced Friday to 21 months in federal prison for accessing the agency’s electronic databases to steal government money, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Carwin Shaw, 33, of Arlington, was also ordered to pay $78,165 in restitution for his role in the scheme. ...
He also caused unauthorized payments to be issued and to have duplicate payments issued for his conspirators. Shaw had more checks sent to his accomplices by reporting that their initial checks were lost or stolen. He then split the money with them, authorities said.
A top adviser to President Barack Obama on Friday slammed a House Republican maneuver aimed at forcing a showdown on Social Security as early as next year, signaling that it won't fly with the White House.
"The House provision was un-constructive and at odds with how this issue has been addressed time and time again in a bipartisan manner," Brian Deese, senior advisor to the president, told reporters at a breakfast downtown hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. "It is just not tenable to walk away from what has been a very clear bipartisan approach to addressing the [disability fund] issue." ...
Deese said the president would welcome a conversation about Social Security but said the "right way to address this issue" is what Obama's budget released in February proposed: a "clean" reallocation to shore up the disability fund, something congressional Democrats also support.
