Beyer, Don Rep 97%

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Facing a midnight Friday deadline to prevent a federal government shutdown if no budget is passed, the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, insists he has the votes to secure a continuing resolution, a “CR,” and without any help from Democrats. Democrats have vowed to oppose the measure, citing its spending cuts to health care and veterans’ benefits, as well as the inclusion of controversial policy provisions — despite Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole’s specific claim to the contrary.

Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Monday wrote: “House Republicans want to gut Medicaid. Hard pass.”

IFrame Content

“The 99 page bill continues funding levels for federal agencies through September 30, 2025,” NPR reports. “GOP leaders argued the bill was largely a ‘clean’ continuation of current funding levels, but it does include a boost for immigration enforcement and a boost for defense programs.”

It also includes a little-noticed provision, however, that, according to one longtime congressional staffer, “preemptively surrenders” Congress’s constitutional authority to block President Donald Trump’s highly controversial and unpredictable tariffs, which he appears to be imposing and rescinding on a whim.

Here’s how one noted economist explained President Trump’s tariffs on Tuesday:

“Tariffs are on/off/paused, and are targeted/universal, applied to our friends/foes/everyone, starting sooner/later. They’ll be in place for the short/long run because they are a useful policy/bargaining chip, and will solve our problem with fentanyl/deficits/manufacturing/revenue,” wrote Justin Wolfers a professor of economics and public policy.

Meanwhile, that provision House Republicans quietly inserted into the bill that at least temporarily would revoke their authority is now getting some attention.

“Republicans snuck a provision into the rule for the CR that would preemptively surrender congressional authority to block tariffs,” observes Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA). “When House Republicans vote for this rule today, they will also be voting to support Trump’s tariffs and all the resulting damage to the US economy.”

Congressman Beyer, in a joint statement with U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA), blasted the rule:

“”Every House Republican who votes for this measure is voting to give Trump expanded powers to raise taxes on American households through tariffs with full knowledge of how he is using those powers, and every Republican will own the economic consequences of that vote. It speaks volumes that Republicans are sneaking this provision into a procedural measure hidden from the American people.”

“While [Trump] babbles about making Canada the 51st state, your groceries and housing are getting more expensive and your retirement accounts are getting crushed- and House Republicans are supporting him every step of the way.”

The provision might be able to be removed if the House voted to do so after the CR is passed, but chances of that happening — voting to oppose a core tenet of Trump’s agenda — are slim if the GOP holds the House majority. Trump would also have to sign the bill, or the House would have to overturn a veto.

Some House Democrats are explaining their opposition to other provisions in the continuing resolution, which one of them, U.S. Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL), appears to compare to an exercise in bondage.

“I don’t know whether the GOP will get the votes on their disaster of a bill this week. But I do know that majorities of Republicans voted against similar bills for all of the last 2 years. So what is making them strap on the ball gag and climb into Trump’s dungeon now?” Congressman Casten wrote on social media.

Noting that “Congress has the Constitutional power of the purse and has reaffirmed it through multiple laws (Impoundment Control Act, Anti-Rescission Act) that are being used by multiple courts to block the WH’s over-reach,” Casten warns that the CR “has language that would weaken those cases.”

“This is what you do to cower before a mad king. It is not what you do if you are defending a constitutional democracy,” he declares.

And continuing his explanation for opposing the bill — and continuing his ribald language, Casten notes that the bill “would cut ~$28 billion in funding we passed under the PACT Act to make sure veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange and toxic burn pits get healthcare coverage. P---ing on US veterans is a choice.”

There’s more.

“It would slash funding for USDA food inspectors. You know, the people who go into monitor the spread of avian flu, or to make sure you don’t have E. Coli in your lettuce,” he writes.

“It gives the White House much more discretion over public-private partnerships, essentially allowing them to prioritize infrastructure projects (highways, rail, etc.) only in their political supporters communities. That is anti-American, in the purest sense,” says Casten.

“It cuts rent subsidies for low-income folks. Which means a whole lot of landlords are going to find themselves forced to evict some ~32,000 families. If you think your community needs more homelessness, that’s a good idea. Otherwise… really f’ing dumb.”

Congressman Casten concludes, “Here’s the bottom line. When faced with a constitutional crisis, some members of Congress are fighting back. Others are strapping on the ball gag, climbing into Trump’s dungeon and assuming the American people share their masochistic fetish.”

Casten also includes in his analogy Fritschner’s observation about stopping their ability to block Trump’s tariff’s. He responds: “This is how you legislatively mandate the ball gag.”

See the video above or at this link.

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The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is now hoping to sneak through language in a must-pass government funding bill that could kneecap Congress' ability to check a president's ability to impose tariffs.

According to a Tuesday article in Politico, Republicans are now aiming to prevent Democrats from forcing an up-or-down vote on President Donald Trump's controversial tariffs. The threat of double-digit tariffs on imported goods from Canada, China and Mexico has already spooked investors worried about a dip in consumer spending. This has resulted in a sharp slide in financial markets, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nasdaq Composite and the S&P 500 all recently posting some of their worst performances in years.

Trump has imposed the tariffs based on a national state of emergency he declared shortly after taking office relating to fentanyl and undocumented immigrants coming across the U.S. border. Politico is reporting that Democrats have already filed bills aiming to end that national emergency, which could force Republicans to go on the record defending the tariffs ahead of what's likely to be a close midterm election year.

Reps. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) and Gregory Meeks (R-N.Y.) observed that the National Emergencies Act "allows Congress to introduce a privileged resolution to terminate the authority, which must be brought to the House for a floor vote within 15 days." In order to circumvent Democrats, Republicans have since inserted language into a bill that has to pass in order to keep the government funded that prevents a vote to end the national emergency.

Politico reported that Republicans aim to declare that the remaining days in the first session of the 119th Congress "no not qualify as calendar days" in order to prevent DelBene's and Meeks' privileged resolutions from moving forward. This would serve as a loophole around the National Emergencies Act that makes it so Democrats can't force their opponents to go on the record defending the costly tariffs.

"Guess what [Republicans] tucked into this rule, hoping that nobody would notice?” House Rules Committee ranking member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said. "They slipped in a little clause letting them escape ever having to debate or vote on Trump’s tariffs. Isn’t that clever?"

Republicans have defended the measure by saying it "simply prevents the Democrats from limiting the president’s authority." But Democrats say passing the bill with that rule included would make it virtually impossible for Congress to have a say in tariff policy. Congress aims to vote on the rule Tuesday evening.

Click here to read Politico's report in full.

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alternet NO LNX

From moderate to manipulator: Behind the unmasking of John Roberts

WASHINGTON — John Roberts may have a robe. Still, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has no clothes, according to Democrats who are outraged to bewildered by new reporting that paints the nation’s most potent jurist as a masterful MAGA manipulator.

Congressional Democrats are accusing Roberts of bending, twisting and contorting the Supreme Court — along with the Constitution he swore an oath to — to fit former President Donald Trump and the allegedly illegal actions he took that have kept him tied up in state and federal courts alike since he left the White House four years ago.

New illustrious, behind-the-scenes reporting from the New York Times reveals Roberts personally directed the court’s three historic Jan. 6, 2021 rulings, including the one granting presidents sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for their “official acts.”

Democrats are now redoubling their efforts to make the high court a centerpiece of this year’s elections as they continue their uphill battle to pass meaningful ethics reforms to try and rein the high court in.

“Chief Justice Roberts exudes much more of an establishment aura about him, but he really has been a crucial force behind the degradation of constitutional jurisprudence on the Supreme Court,” Rep, Jamie Raskin (D-MD) — a Constitutional lawyer and law professor by trade — told Raw Story after digesting the illuminating new reporting.

According to the scoop-strewn NYT piece by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, Roberts authored a Feb. 22 memo to his eight colleagues “that radiated frustration and certainty” regarding the monumental cases winding through lower courts centered on efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

While revelatory, sadly, the new reporting on the Roberts Court isn’t surprising to Raskin.

ALSO READ: The simple yet powerful way Tim Walz just exposed Donald Trump

“It's what anybody can see in reading their decisions. We know what's going on there. They're not textualists — they completely ignored the text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” Raskin said. “They're not originalists — nobody even made an originalist argument about why the president of the United States should be immune from criminal prosecution for felonies he commits under the cloak of office. And, you know, they have really drifted a long way from any recognizable constitutional jurisprudence of interpretation.”

The carefully manicured image of Roberts as a moderate is now melting away. It’s left Democrats on Capitol Hill debating how to restore public confidence in a Supreme Court many in the party and the public have lost faith in.

“Very short-term thinking”

It’s more than just Chief Justice Roberts moving in the shadows to orchestrate this year’s three seemingly pro-Trump Jan. 6 rulings. Accusations of corruption are also in the air.

Coupled with the estimated $4.2 million in gifts Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly openly accepted from Republican megadonors over the years, as first reported by ProPublica, many Democrats now fear this Supreme Court has been weaponized by the far-right.

“His court's going to go down as the most corrupt in history and, honestly, the most political in history, too,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) — a former U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein — told Raw Story on the Capitol steps this week.

Then there’s the luxurious all-expense paid fishing trip Justice Samuel Alito accepted from billionaire Paul Singer, which he publicly defended in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Not to mention the politicking. There’s the upside-down American flag that proudly flew outside the Alito’s Northern Virginia home in the wake of the 2021 attack on the Capitol and the “Appeal to Heaven” flag flapping in the ocean breeze outside the Alito’s New Jersey beach house, both of which the justice blames on his wife, Martha-Ann.

As for Thomas, he refused to recuse himself from the monumental J6 cases even after his wife Ginni — and the string of conspiratorial text messages she sent to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — was found to be central to Trump’s efforts to overturn the last presidential election.

“It might not be illegal, but it certainly should scare the hell out of every American that somebody with that kind of access and power and proximity to a Supreme Court justice can be pushing that type of nonsense," former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) — who served as a technical advisor to the select Jan. 6 committee — told Raw Story back in 2022. “The text messages validate that many elected officials believed it.”

Critics are left questioning where the high court ends and the RNC begins.

“I'm naive. I was raised to think that the justices were there to look at the Constitution and the law and work together to find the best decision for the American people. Now they're a function of the Republican Party, which the court never was before,” Don Beyer said. “Very short-term thinking. If we look at our 40-some-odd presidents, only one would it apply to.”

The five-term congressman says Supreme Court justices — especially the chief justice — need to open their eyes because, to him and an expanding chorus of critics, there’s nothing partisan about Democrat’s fears.

“There's no other Republican president I would have worried about,” Beyer said. “Not George Herbert Walker Bush or Ronald Reagan or Gerald Ford — certainly none of our Democratic presidents — but this one. It isn't like he's conferring an advantage on the next Democratic president who will do whatever he wants — no.”

The nakedly political and grossly unethical turn of the Roberts Court weighs on the 74-year-old.

“Incredibly discouraging. I've been discouraged by Justice Roberts for a long time,” Beyer said. “I know the judiciary’s independent — I don't ever want to interfere — but the fact that he could let the ethical abuses go on and on, no treatment whatsoever, which is, I mean, the greatest discouragement.”

Last year, after months of punishing press coverage, Roberts reversed himself and signed off on a new, if unenforced, Supreme Court Code of Conduct. It was unanimous.

These days, the signatures of all nine Supreme Court justices also make the document almost worthless, at least to many lawmakers across the street at the Capitol.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

Throughout this session of Congress, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee in the Senate have relentlessly tried to impose mandatory and enforceable ethics rules on Supreme Court justices—basically, the same ones that apply to every other federal judge in the nation. Republicans have been united in blocking every such effort.

Senate Republicans have the back of the conservative majority on the Roberts Court, much like Roberts has advanced the agenda of congressional Republicans.

“If you go back and look at the most anti-democratic decisions of the Supreme Court — the immunity decision being one, but the little array of insurrection decisions, of which it was a part of in the threesome that's in this article — you see a lot of backstage maneuvering by the chief justice,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told Raw Story as he walked through the basement of the Capitol. “It reminds me of the backstage maneuvering by the chief justice that brought us Citizens United.”

The former Rhode Island attorney general and U.S. attorney is the second highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee where he’s been pushing the SCERT — or Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency — Act, which would place a binding code of conduct and mandatory disclosure requirements on the justices.

Ethics reform is one thing. Unlimited corporate funding is another corrosive element of contemporary American politics altogether.

Democrats are still smarting from Citizens United and the floodgates of political spending it unleashed. The chief justice also deftly moved behind the scenes to manipulate that 2010 ruling, Whitehouse readily recalls.

“Remember, [Roberts] had to restructure the case. He changed the question presented. He set up the case so that there would be no record — actual record,” Whitehouse recalled. “He changed the standard.”

That was a bipartisan complaint in that Senate of a bygone, if recent, era. The ruling led then-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — who co-authored the McCain-Feingold law that Citizens United decimated — to publicly and personally call out Chief Justice Roberts.

"I am more disappointed in him than any of the other four that voted to overturn McCain-Feingold," McCain said back in 2012.

Republicans beg to differ

Roberts indeed has allies. Lots of them. Powerful ones. And they’re laughing in Democrat’s faces.

Republican Party leaders, like former Senate Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) — who’s running to replace Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — basically just avoid critics and critical reporting, like the New York Times just dropped, these days.

“I think I saw the headline — that's about all,” Cornyn told Raw Story while hopping a tram under the Capitol.

Before arriving in Washington in 2002, Cornyn served on the Texas Supreme Court. He says Roberts shouldn’t even entertain what his senatorial critics have to say.

“He's got lifetime tenure,” Cornyn said through a laugh. “I wouldn't be taking advice from members of Congress on how to do my job if I was him, either.”

Just as they have with Justices Thomas and Alito — no matter the latest eye-popping revelation — today’s Republicans have united around the Chief Justice, as if they are one.

“Even without having read it, I think extremely highly of him and believe him to be a person with the utmost integrity and dedicated to the independence of the courts,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told Raw Story as she walked through the Capitol Wednesday.

Collins must not have gotten the memo from her Democratic colleagues.

The ‘court packing’ myth

Many pundits hailed Roberts for opposing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but in the Dobbs decision, he lost out to the five Republican appointees on ‘his’ court who are seemingly even further right than he is.

Many progressives weren’t buying the righteous, caring and politically aloof version of himself Roberts portrayed back then, and they say this latest reporting shows they were right.

“That's interesting how there's sort of this story out there that Roberts was like a moderate and mediator. And the [NYT] story would suggest that’s not really necessarily the case,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) told Raw Story after voting on the Senate floor this week.

While Republican rhetoric paints all elected Democrats — from the top of the party’s presidential ticket on down — as wanting to expand, or ‘pack,’ the court, only three Senate Democrats have formally endorsed a progressive measure to expand the size of the court, as Raw Story reported last month.

Smith and Massachusetts Democratic Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren are the three who’ve publicly endorsed Markey’s measure to expand the size of the Supreme Court. That’s it.

Even with all the negative press, Smith says other Senate Democrats haven’t approached them about their measure to expand the size of the court.

“I haven't heard any,” Smith said.

That doesn’t mean her colleagues aren’t discussing the Roberts Court.

“There's a lot of conversation about the court and challenges to the court,” Smith said. “Once we get through this election and we have a better understanding of what the landscape is, we'll talk more about it.”

Or maybe they won’t.

“We're not going to get expansion”

Some Democrats have already basically, shut the door on the conversation of expanding the court. Many just don’t see it as a practical solution.

“We're not going to get expansion,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) told Raw Story on his way to a vote in the Capitol Wednesday. “There's a lot of downside to expansion — we expand, they expand — and it politicizes it.”

As President Joe Biden proposed back in July, Welch and most congressional Democrats now support instituting an 18-year term limit for the nation’s justices.

“First of all, that's a very substantial term, and they're inside, so they have the benefit of protections,” Welch argued. “And then number two, every president is going to have an opportunity to appoint two members, so that means the American people get to weigh in indirectly by choosing the president. I think it would really take the extreme politics out of the court.”

As for Roberts, Welch is no fan of the jurist he’s predicting historians will frown upon.

“He’s very skillful and, unfortunately, a driving force, I think, in the radical redirection of the court,” Welch bemoaned to Raw Story. “The court has got an extreme radical majority. It's lost public respect.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/critics-blast-republican-climate-agenda/

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'Poisoning our communities and cooking our planet': Critics blast 'destructive' Republican climate agenda

Matthew Rozsa.

Brett Wilkins and Common DreamsJune 02, 2022

Climate campaigners and progressive U.S. lawmakers reacted with disdain and derision Thursday to news that House Republicans would put forth a purported climate strategy that calls for increased fossil fuel production and sets no targets for reducing planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.

Politico reports the "energy, climate, and conservation task force" created last year byHouse Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) will release a six-point strategy that recommends increasing all types of energy production with the goal of reducing record-high fuel and other energy costs, and with an eye on the 2022 midterm elections.

The plan—which would also boost gas exports while easing the permitting process for fossil fuel infrastructure—contains six elements: "Unlock America's Resources," "Beat China and Russia," "Let America Build," "Build Resilient Communities," "American Innovation," and "Conservation with a Purpose."

While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce welcomed the proposal, Jamal Raad, executive director at the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, blasted it as "little more than a how-to guide for accelerating the climate crisis."

Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement that "this climate plan sounds like it was concocted by a comic book supervillain."

"Republicans have managed to devise a scheme that would make climate change even more destructive," Hartl added. "It's an oil industry wish list that would throw future generations under the bus to make a buck."

The advocacy group Food & Water Action called the plan a "climate farce" and a "pro-fossil fuels road map to climate chaos."

"Over a dozen years ago, no one would have mistaken 'Drill, Baby, Drill' for serious climate policy," the group's managing director of policy Mitch Jones said in a statement referring to 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's infamous campaign slogan.

"The fact that Republicans have not changed course in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence and cascading climate-fueled disasters speaks volumes," Jones continued. "What's needed now are serious plans that meet the monumental scale of the crisis, and also deliver the economic benefits and job opportunities that are so desperately needed."

"We need to elect climate champions this year who will prioritize shifting off of dirty fossil fuels that poison communities and enrich corporate polluters," he added.

Those corporate polluters contribute tremendous amounts of campaign cash to congressional lawmakers and candidates. The House Oversight Committee noted last October that just four fossil fuel giants—BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell—plus the industry group American Petroleum Institute spent a combined $452.6 million lobbying the federal government since 2011.

According to the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, McCarthy has received nearly $2.1 in career oil and gas industry contributions. GOP task force chair Rep. Garret Graves—whose Louisiana district is one of the most fossil fuel infrastructure-intense in the nation and is experiencing climate-driven sea level rise and increased illness—has taken nearly $700,000 in Big Oil donations.

With $414,824 in campaign contributions during the 2022 election cycle alone, McCarthy is the House's leading beneficiary of oil and gas contributions, according to data from the watchdog group OpenSecrets.

In return, the government lavishes the fossil fuel industry with around $20 billion in annual subsidies,which Joe Biden promised to end while campaigning for president.

However, doing so would require congressional approval, and even members of his own party—notably Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Congress' number one recipient of fossil fuel contributions during the 2022 election cycle and the seven-figure beneficiary of a family coal business—are fighting to protect subsidies.

"Lining the pockets of fossil fuel companies is not a long-term fix; it puts American families' health and the future of the planet at risk," tweeted Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.)."The cost of climate-fueled extreme weather events in the most recent year for which we have data was $100 billion."

"The solution is blindingly obvious: clean energy,"he added. "The more we are able to shift to clean energy, the better it will be for our health, and the less dependent we will be on fossil fuels, and the less susceptible our economy and American families will be to oil price swings."

Raad of Evergreen Action asserted that "real and effective climate solutions are at our fingertips, but McCarthy and his caucus are so beholden to their donors in the fossil fuel industry that they'd rather double down on the technologies of the past that are poisoning our communities and cooking our planet."

"Every election year, Republicans in Congress try to greenwash their records to mislead voters who overwhelmingly support common-sense climate action—and every time they seize power, they stand in the way of real solutions and subsidize the industries that are fueling this crisis," he added. "This stunt is a not-even-thinly veiled attempt to bullshit the press and the public. It's time to stop falling for it."

meadows on raff call

~ beyer

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/trump-gop