Buck, Ken Rep 3%

---

bailed when/why? 11/23

LCV LIFE 3 PERCENT,

2024

0%

0

Pro-environment votes

3

Anti-environment Votes

2023

6%

2

Pro-environment votes

33

Anti-environment Votes

2022

0%

0

Pro-environment votes

17

Anti-environment Votes

2021

9%

2

Pro-environment votes

20

Anti-environment Votes

WIKI

Buck announced in November 2023 that he would not seek a sixth House term, stating that his party's "insidious narratives breed widespread cynicism and erode Americans' confidence in the rule of law." On March 12, 2024, Buck announced he would resign from Congress at the end of the following week on March 22, 2024.^[5][6] Governor Jared Polis scheduled the special election for Buck's replacement for June 25.^[7]

wave of House members who —frustrated by all the chaos — have decided against running in 2024.pension?

note ~ moscow marge on ukraine war

elected 2014

how xian?

Ken Buck is a Tea Party conservative who came up short in his Senate race against Michael Bennet in 2010. Buck was considered the underdog in this year’s Senate race against Mark Udall, but he gave way to Cory Gardner, who’s a stronger candidate, and is now running in a crowded primary for Gardener’s 4th District seat.

===

AN 4 24

Former House Republican Ken Buck of Colorado is calling out U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for “getting her talking points from the Kremlin” and calling her “Moscow Marjorie.”

Discussing the House’s need to pass legislation to help Ukraine fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal war, Buck declared Congresswoman Greene is “on the wrong side of history.” Greene staunchly opposes any support for Ukraine, and has threatened to move to oust Speaker Johnson if he passes aid to support the embattled sovereign nation.

“We know that Russia is propagating these false statements, narratives, about what’s going on in Ukraine,” Buck, who retired from Congress last month, told CNN’s Erin Burnett Monday night (video below). “We know that she is getting her talking points from Russia. And we know that they’re false and Mike Johnson is doing the responsible thing by trying to make sure we get a vote on Ukraine funding, make sure that the Ukrainian people can fight for their freedom.”

READ MORE: DNC Slams Alleged RFK Jr. Campaign Plan to Leverage Kennedy Name So Congress Can ‘Pick Trump’

Buck said Greene is “continuing down this false path” and he doesn’t “think many Republicans are going to support her.”

Burnett mentioned Greene’s recent interview with far-right host Tucker Carlson, who, as The Atlantic‘s Anne Applebaum wrote last year, “repeats the propaganda of foreign dictators” like Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin.

Speaking about Speaker Johnson’s apparent efforts to move a Ukraine aid bill to the floor, Burnett told Buck that Greene “recently suggested to Tucker Carlson something that sort of took me aback she had no evidence to back it up. But she said that the whole reason that he may be doing this is because Johnson may be being blackmailed.”

Buck called Greene’s remarks “irresponsible as so many of the statements that Marjorie has made over the years are completely irresponsible. The idea that somehow the Speaker is corrupt, because he believes that we should be supporting an ally that’s been invaded by a war criminal, Vladimir Putin, and the idea that somehow anybody who is in agreement with Ukraine and our NATO allies, is corrupt. It’s just another distraction that she uses to take away from the core arguments that are so important.”

READ MORE: ‘I’d Rather Sit Down With Hannibal Lecter’: Johnson’s Grip on Speakership Slips Further

“Moscow Marjorie is focused now on this Ukraine issue and getting her talking points from the Kremlin and making sure that that she is popular and she is getting a lot of coverage,” Buck concluded.

On Monday Congresswoman Greene did just that, falsely telling far-right host Steve Bannon Russia is “protecting” Christianity while the “Ukrainian government is attacking Christians, the Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that.”

Numerous credible reports detail Russia’s torture and killing of Ukrainian clergy.

Greene has supported Russia over Ukraine for years.

“Right-wing firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.),” Forbes reported in March of 2022, “suggested Ukraine bears responsibility for provoking a Russian invasion, breaking with the views of Republican leaders in her latest comments that more closely mirror Russian talking points than Western views of the conflict.”

Watch Buck’s CNN interview below or at this link.

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an 11 23

GOP-led U.S. House of Representatives has been in a state of chaos in 2023. After Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California) was ousted as speaker thanks to a "motion to vacate" triggered by far-right Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), the House went through three nominees before finally confirming Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana).

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) was among the GOP speaker nominees who were rejected by the House Republican Conference. And some of the Republicans who voted against Jordan received death threats, including Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colorado). A frustrated Buck has announced that he won't be seeking reelection in 2024, and he isn't alone.

In an article published on November 23, the Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Hughes describes the wave of House members who —frustrated by all the chaos — have decided against running in 2024.

Hughes explains, "A dozen lawmakers — six Democrats and six Republicans — have said in November that they don't plan to continue serving in Congress, the most in any month since at least 2011, based on data compiled by news site Ballotpedia. Just Tuesday, Republican Rep. Bill Johnson of Ohio, 69 years old, announced he would leave office early next year to lead Youngstown State University."

Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Michigan) is among the Democrats who has decided against seeking reelection.

Kildee told WSJ, "The last few years have been among the most difficult and frustrating times in my professional career with a chaotic House. It's hard to erase that experience from one's mind in making this decision."

Some of the House members who are frustrated by all the chaos plan to serve out the remainder of their terms; others plan to leave before that. Ten-term Rep. Brian Higgins (D-New York) is departing the House in February 2024 to head a performing arts center in Buffalo. And he obviously isn't optimistic about what lies ahead.

READ MORE:How Steve Bannon uses his Capitol Hill 'cavelike studio' to fuel House GOP chaos: report

Higgins told WSJ, "This is a bad patch. But it's the start of a bad patch, not the end of it. Spending more time doing considerably less is not a way that I want to spend the next decade."

READ MORE: Mike Johnson says separation of church and state is a 'misnomer'

*The Wall Street Journal's full report is available at this link (subscription required).

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open s

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an 3 23

"Take away grandpa's Facebook': House Republican blasted after bizarre 'late-term abortion' rant

Brandon Gage

United States Congressman Ken Buck (R--Colorado) peddled bogus right-wing talking points about abortion during a House of Representatives hearing on Tuesday...

{{

this may be extension of thoughts and prayers now is not the time in our grief over mass shootings we cannot be rational in our decision (to increase gun control regulations)

how sleazy is the left that they would use the lives of children and grief of parents to score political points

https://www.alternet.org/send/house-republicans-shooting/

no lnx vid twt an 3 23

Watch: Here’s how 5 House Republicans are responding to the TN school shooting that left 6 dead

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 06: U.S. Rep.-elect Andy Ogles (R-TN) casts his vote in the House Chamber during the fourth day of elections for Speaker of the House at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 06, 2023 in Washington, DC. The House of Representatives is meeting to vote for the next Speaker after House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) failed to earn more than 218 votes on several ballots; the first time in 100 years that the Speaker was not elected on the first ballot. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

David Badashand

The New Civil Rights Movement

March 29, 2023

There are 535 seats in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and another six non-voting seats for delegates. After Monday’s horrific mass shooting at a private Christian elementary school, where three nine-year olds and three adults were shot to death, very few Members appeared on-camera to talk with reporters about the tragedy.

The Democrats who did advocated for various gun control measures, including reinstating the federal assault weapons ban signed into law in 1994 by President Bill Clinton that Republican lawmakers and President George W. Bush refused to renew in 2004, after which mass shootings and gun violence skyrocketed.

President Joe Biden this week repeatedly called on Congress to pass an assault weapons ban, a call he has made over and over again.

In addition to calling for an assault weapons ban, House and Senate Democrats responded to the mass shooting at Covenant Presbyterian Elementary in Nashville by calling for tighter gun control measures including implementing red flag laws.

READ MORE: ‘Troubling Questions’: Experts Slam Ginni Thomas’ Group That Waged Cultural War Against the Left via Web of Dark Money Orgs

The parents of the Nashville shooter have said their child had an emotional disorder and should not have had any firearms. Three were used in the assault and another four were found at the shooter’s home.Tennessee has no red flag law so police were not legally allowed to take the guns away.

After last year’s school mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two adults were shot to death, some states took action. Tennessee, where the Nashville school shooting became the nation’s 130th this year, did little.

“We’re not looking at gun restriction laws in my administration right now,”Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, said after the tragedy. “Criminals don’t follow laws, criminals break laws. Whether they are a gun law, a drug law, criminals break laws.”

“We can’t control what they do.”

But in a sense, Governor Lee did control what they do.

READ MORE: Tennessee Governor Slammed After ‘Praying’ for Nashville School Community Without Mentioning Mass Shooting

In 2021 ago he signed into law a permit-less open-carry law: no permit required, no training required, no background check required.

A Tennessee Republican U.S. Congressman, Tim Burchett this week repeatedly decreed there’s nothing that can be done.

:{

Echoing almost word-for-word Governor Lee’s remarks from three years ago, in now-viral video, Rep. Burchett infamously on Monday declared, “We’re not gonna fix it. Criminals are going to be criminals.”

He did, however, invoke religion, calling for a Christian revival, and declaring that was the answer to fixing mass shootings and gun violence.}:

:{On Tuesday Rep. Burchett was back in front of the cameras, furthering his call to do nothing.

“I don’t know what law we could pass,” he said. “Evil people are going to do evil things.”}:

:{

U.S. Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) appeared on CNN this week and responded to the Nashville slaughter by defending his threat to President Biden to try to take his AR-15 away.

In a rare example of excellent journalism, CNN’s Phil Mattingly pressed Buck after the far-right Republican tried to change the topic.

“If Joe Biden is interested in reaching a resolution on the issue let him deal with the Southern border,” Buck defiantly declared, literally blaming President Biden’s border policies for gun violence.

He also tried to link the Nashville mass shooting to a mental health problem and then tried to link that to drug laws and a lack of funding for states for mental health services.

Rep. Buck last year voted against two mental health bills, and since 2019 has voted against the vast majority of 40 or so health care bills.}:

“What’s the burden on you?” Matttingly asked Buck.

READ MORE: New WSJ Poll Is Devastating for DeSantis and His ‘Anti-Woke’ Policies

Unyieldingly, Buck replied, “My burden is to follow the Constitution, and the Second Amendment protects – there are more than two million AR-15s.”

:{Republican U.S. Congressman Andy Ogles, who represents Nashville, Tennessee and came under fire again this week for his 2021 Christmas card showing him and his family, including young children, holding assault weapons, was asked about banning AR-15s.

Rep. Ogles’ response was to answer the question with another question: “Why not talk about the real issue facing this country?” which he declared, like Rep. Buck and others, ismental health. He then walked away.}:

:{U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) took a different tact on the GOP’s do-nothing policy while supporting the GOP’s walk-away response.

He equated assault weapons with politics and emotions.

“If you’re gonna talk about the AR-15 you’re talking politics now,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju.“Let’s not get into politics. let’s not get into emotion, because emotion feels good, but emotion doesn’t solve problems.”}:

He then just walked away.

But perhaps the greatest example of the Republican response to gun violence and mass shootings came from House Republican’s leader, Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

On Tuesday, McCarthy stood in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall to pose for photos with some tourists.

:{CNN’s Manu Raju asked the Speaker about the “incredibly serious situation” in Nashville, suggesting it required a response from the Speaker of the House.

McCarthy’s response?

He refused to provide one, then walked away.}:

Watch the videos above or at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Watch: 'Furious' Gen Z lawmaker delivers blistering remarks to GOP following Nashville school shooting ›

'Absolutely repulsive': Some House Republicans are now wearing an assault weapon lapel pin ›

Some Democrats fear a mass shooting on House floor — by a QAnon-Republican ›

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}}

an raw 3 23

During a House Judiciary hearing this Tuesday, things got a little heated as lawmakers discussed the role of religion and God when interpreting the Constitution.

According to Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), the notion that “all our rights areGod-given”doesn’t make sense.

“I just wonder, when God decided to give women the right to vote, and why God didn’t give women the right to vote back in the 1700s,” Cohen said. “And when God decided that slavery would be illegal — God was okay with slavery until we had a war millions of people were killed, then God changed his mind? That’s hard to fathom.”

Cohen went on to provide the same analogy for abortion and interracial marriage. He clarified that he has respect for people’s belief in God, but added that he doesn’t believe the notion that every right is “God given.” “God did not decide to keep African Americans as slaves until there was a Civil War, and then God changed his mind,” he said.

IN OTHER NEWS: Greene gets schooled after her ‘divorced from reality’ rant at House Homeland Security hearing

Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) then chimed in, saying that in the view of the Founders, and his view as well as other Americans, the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were given to us by God.“That doesn’t mean that God makes a decision on every single law that is passed in this country,” Buck said. “That doesn’t mean that God doesn’t frown sometimes when there are horrible historical actions by human beings, like slavery, like the denial of the right to vote and some other things.”

“But life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are recognized in our founding documents as given to us by God, and those rights are the rights that everything else flows from,” Buck said.

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) then accused Cohen of not caring about the rights endowed in the Constitution. “He embraces that modern Democratic Party’s view that it’s not about God, it’s not about God’s will or what God has created in mankind, you cannot trace rights to the existence of God … that’s all passe … Okay, that’s what we’re up against,” Bishop said.

Bishop declared that he is “absolutely certain that Thomas Jefferson and the other authors of the [Declaration of Independence] were correct.” He continued with his rant before being cut off, but he refused to yield his time.

“I’m not gonna yield! Because I’m gonna make this statement really clear.”

Watch video below or at this link.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/gop-populism/

Some analyses of Trumpism and Republican populism have claimed to detect a strain of anti-corporate sentiment. It is true that today’s right-wingers are willing to criticize big tech companies for supposedly treating them unfairly. But most of the time the GOP continues to serve the interests of big business.

That was clear during an important hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust, commercial and administrative law. Subcommittee chair David Cicilline (D-R.I.), vice-chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), other Democratic members and the witnesses all raised serious questions about the current regulatory system, focusing on issues such as disclosure and social equity.

The Republicans, on the other hand, did their best to change the subject or spoke in favor of less rather than more oversight. Ranking member Ken Buck (R-Colo.) used his opening remarks to attack executive overreach and praise the Trump administration’s wholesale attack on regulation.

Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) spent his time attacking what he claimed was a plan by the Justice Department to treat parents critical of school boards as domestic terrorists. One of the witnesses, NAACP climate justice director Jacqueline Patterson, was asked by Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) whether she was a revolutionary. She was also chastised for a facetious tweet about vaccines. The comments of GOP members on regulation were mainly limited to attacks on so-called woke bureaucrats.

Despite these antics, there was a serious exchange between the Democrats and the witnesses on the failures of the current regulatory system. These issues are also addressed in theStop Corporate Capture Act introduced by Jayapal.

The legislation would create more transparency in rulemaking, reduce corporate influence over the process and create a framework for considering social equity. It would fine companies that lie about the impact of public interest rules. It would also create a public Advocate to provide for more robust public participation.

It turns the usual discussion on its head. Rejecting the idea of executive overreach, the bill correctly diagnoses the problem as a situation of what one might call regulatory anemia. Agencies are not aggressive enough in tackling serious problems relating to the environment, the workplace and the marketplace. The parties meant to be targeted instead are playing an outsized role in creating the rules. Hence the reference in the bill’s title to regulatory capture.

Jayapal’s proposal is what one might call a populist approach to reforming the regulatory system—one that is not likely to receive support from corporate lobbyists. When they are not simply kicking up dust, Republicans, by contrast, are doing the bidding of big business by continuing the Trump Administration’s drumbeat against regulation.

This is one of those areas in which the conventional labels of U.S. politics continue to baffle me. Why are those working to benefit giant corporations called populists, while those who are seeking to rein in that power are called elitists?

==

===

Obama is an “imperialist” or a monarch for conserving public lands

In response to the announcement that President Obama was planning to protect one of Colorado’s most popular rivers,Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) said of the President: “He is not king. No more acting like King Barack. That is not how we do things in the U.S.”

Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), a former member of the House, called Obama an “imperial president” for expanding a national monument that protects critical areas of the Pacific Ocean. Yet 16 presidents, from both political parties, have protected incredible landscapes using their executive authority, including President George W. Bush.

==

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Buck

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/06/24/tea-party-pick-ken-buck-thumps-jane-norton-in-colo-senate-race/

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/politics/blogs/tea-party-backed-ken-buck-steps-up-his-denial-of-global-warming

grist:

Colorado climate scientists tell Ken Buck: Global warming is not a 'hoax'

By Brad Johnson

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

Colorado’s climate scientists — among the world’s leaders in the field — have sharply dismissed the assertions made by the state’s Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate that global warming is a “hoax.” Colorado is a hub of American climate science, home to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory. On Thursday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Colorado State University would house the North Central Climate Science Center, leading a consortium of the University of Colorado, Colorado School of Mines, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Wyoming, Montana State University, University of Montana, Kansas State University, and Iowa State University. Nevertheless, Ken Buck, the Republican candidate for Senate in Colorado, is a radical denier of the science of global warming, campaigning with Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) this week:

Sen. Inhofe was the first person to stand up and say this global warming is the greatest hoax that has been perpetrated. The evidence just keeps supporting his view, and more and more people’s view, of what’s going on.

Colorado’s climatologists have responded to Buck, en force. In a press conference hastily arranged by the League of Conservation Voters on Friday, Colorado State University climatologist Scott Denning blasted the anti-science position of Buck, Inhofe, and the like:

There’s really no question at all that CO2 molecules emit heat. It seems like the onus is on them to explain how you can add heat to the surface without warming it up. The basic science of the effect of human-produced CO2 on climate change is 150 years old. It was first measured in 1863. The first estimates of the effect were published in 1896. It piles up and the more stuff you put up there, the more heat you’re going to get. [Emphasis mine.]

In an exclusive email interview with the Wonk Room, Denning’s colleague Dennis Ojima, chair of Colorado State’s Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory and a senior scholar with the Heinz Center, explained that “there is no hoax”:

Quite simply, there is no hoax in studying climate change. It is an important research concern, the same as studying cancer or the economic growth. There is no controversy about the role human actions have made to alter the climate system through the emissions of greenhouse gases over the past 150 years. The fundamental physics associated with the impact of this change in atmospheric concentrations of these gases is not disputed. The manner in which these gases react in the atmosphere is one of the fundamental properties of the climate system. The science at the fundamental level related to greenhouse gases and climate are as solid and as important as the finding that germs are responsible for illnesses and that there are specific strategies to reduce germs in the environment we live in.

“Climate science is not at all a hoax,” climatologist Caspar M. Ammann, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told the Wonk Room. In fact, when Ammann heard comments by Buck several months ago on Colorado Public Radio questioning the science of climate change, Dr. Ammann contacted the Buck campaign, offering to explain “why we are sure most of the warming in the last thirty to forty years is human made.”

Ammann received no response from Ken Buck.

In the interview, Ammann emphasized how severe the changes to the global climate will be if greenhouse pollution is not curtailed:

The magnitude of temperature change will be comparable to interglacial periods, when New York City and the Upper Midwest were covered with an ice sheet, about 5-6 C degrees of temperature change. If we keep going with our emissions, we could get that temperature change in a hundred years. We expect 4 C and it could be more by the end of the century, about five times as much warming as we’ve already experienced. The magnitude, even on a geologic perspective, is a substantial change, far larger than anything human civilization has ever seen.

“It’s very likely it’s disruptive to anything we’re doing and take for granted at the moment,” Ammann cautioned.

And yet, it seems that because the response to this civilizational threat requires some form of governmental regulation, Buck’s ideology does not permit him to accept that the problem even exists.

Brad Johnson is the editor for ThinkProgress Green at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.