118th mccarthy 3
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see debt hostage
see maga mike johnson spkr
see benghazi BS weaponization jim jordan
see freedom cocks hard rt
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maccarthy primaries/flanks gaetz 8? 2 24
an 2 24
When 2024 arrived, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) was gone from Congress. McCarthy was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2006 midterms, but after being ousted as speaker in October 2023, he obviously lost his desire to remain a congressman. And instead of serving out the rest of his term, McCarthy made December 31 his final day in the House.
According to Politico reporters Ally Mutnick and Olivia Beavers, McCarthy and his allies are planning revenge against the Republicans who are responsible for him being ousted as speaker.
Far-right Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) triggered a "motion to vacate" that led to a full House vote on McCarthy, and seven Republicans joined Gaetz in voting to oust him as speaker. Collectively, they are known as the "Gaetz Eight" on Capitol Hill, and Mutnick and Beavers report that McCarthy ally Brian O. Walsh is "overseeing an attempt to recruit primary challengers" against them.
"Behind the scenes," the Politico journalists report in an article published on February 1, "McCarthy allies have identified three of the Gaetz Eight as the most vulnerable in primaries — and thus, the ripest targets: Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), Bob Good (R-Va.) and Eli Crane (R-Ariz.). Mace and Good already have strong challengers, but Crane still lacks a compelling prospective candidate to take him on. That quiet work shows McCarthy's appetite for payback remains intense, even months after his October ouster as speaker and December departure from Congress."
Mutnick and Olivia Beavers continue, "It also illustrates that even out of office, the former speaker and his supporters can make life miserable for his detractors — a further sign that the House GOP power struggle between burn-it-down hardliners and more establishment conservatives is alive and well."
Walsh's thirst for revenge was evident in a statement to Politico.
The McCarthy ally said of the Gaetz Eight, "These traitors chose to side with Nancy Pelosi, AOC and over 200 Democrats to undermine the institution, their fellow Republicans and a duly elected speaker. There must be consequences for that decision.”
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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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mma 11 23
Several major national news outlets are promoting House Republicans’ deceptive spin as the party seeks to leverage emergency funding for Israel to enact its top priority of protecting wealthy tax cheats.
President Joe Biden requested $105 billion in emergency supplemental funding earlier this month. His proposed package includes military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan; money to enhance U.S. border security; and humanitarian aid for Palestinian, Israeli, and Ukrainian civilians.
But in a Fox interview last week, newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he planned to split up the package and pass stand-alone Israel funds that would be offset by what he called “pay-fors in the budget.” Johnson explained, “We’re not just printing money to send it overseas. We’re going to find the cuts elsewhere to do that.” House Republicans released their bill on Monday, which pairs $14.3 billion for Israel with $14.3 billion in cuts from the enhanced funding for the Internal Revenue Service passed in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Crucially, this is neither a pay-for nor an offset in any real way but would actually lead to an increase in the deficit: The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the IRA’s $80 billion for the IRS over 10 years, which includes a boost to enforcement spending, would “yield $180 billion in additional revenue for a net savings of $100 billion.” Just last week, the IRS reported that the IRA funds had allowed it to launch a crackdown on wealthy tax cheats that had already brought it $160 million in back taxes.
But the right is violently opposed to the government forcing wealthy taxpayers to pay what they owe. Right-wing propagandists have been screaming about that provision since it was proposed, describing increased funding for the IRS as, among other things, a dystopian plot to “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers.” Republicans, meanwhile, made overturning those funds their top priority.
Johnson’s proposal uses the Israel aid package as an opportunity to achieve the Republican goal of protecting wealthy tax cheats. He’s counting on journalists to fail to explain this to their audiences — and in many cases thus far, that bet has worked out for him.
Some major news outlets promoted the GOP’s spin that the IRS funding cuts “offset” or “pay for” the Israel spending, while providing no information to their readers indicating that those cuts will likely increase the deficit.
The influential Punchbowl AM newsletter reported that the Johnson bill’s Israel funding “would be paid for by cutting an equal amount from the Inflation Reduction Act’s IRS enforcement,” adding that “the House GOP leadership team considered a host of bipartisan pay-fors, but opted to cut IRS money with hopes of dividing Democrats and solidifying GOP support” and “a standalone Israel bill with offsets is a no-go for the Democratic-led Senate.”
Reuters reported that the House GOP legislation would “provide $14.3 billion in aid to Israel by cutting funding for the Internal Revenue Service.”
And CBS News’ write-up claimed that “House Republicans want to pay for emergency aid to Israel by cutting funding to the IRS” and the bill would “would pay for aid to Israel by cutting the same amount in funding that was allocated to the IRS under the Inflation Reduction Act.”
Other outlets similarly privileged the House GOP’s false “offset” framing, but either acknowledged later in their report that the IRS cuts would increase the deficit or at least cited critics making that point.
The Washington Post’s article initially described the Republican bill as “a proposal to pay for emergency aid for Israel’s war against Hamas by cutting IRS funds aimed at cracking down on rich tax cheats and improving taxpayer service.” But the Post went on to provide a detailed accounting of what the IRS funding goes toward, and noted: “Using the IRS funding to offset the Israel aid might not actually save money: The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had estimated in 2022 that the $80 billion IRS expansion would cut the deficit by more than $100 billion by improving collections and enforcement.”
NBC News’ article featured the subheadline “The newly minted Republican speaker is seeking to pay for aid to Israel by slashing $14.3 billion from IRS funds in the Democratic president's signature law.” But the body of the piece instead accurately described the bill as only “rescinding the same amount of IRS funding” as it included in Israel aid, and noted that “the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that the funds will ‘increase revenues by approximately $200 billion’ over a decade.”
CNN’s write-up claimed in its second and third paragraphs that “the GOP-led bill includes the same amount in spending cuts, rescinding $14.3 billion that had been allocated to the IRS as part of the Inflation Reduction Act,” and that “Democrats are warning that the bill’s offsets could cost it passage in the House.” In paragraph 10, it cited Sen. Patty Murray’s (D-WA) statement that “the cuts House Republicans are proposing would actually increase the deficit by curbing the IRS’ ability to go after billionaire tax cheats.”
And Semafor’s Principals newsletter led with the news that House Republicans had “unveiled a bill that would pay for $14.3 billion in assistance to Israel by slashing funding from the IRS” and that Johnson had “argued that emergency funding should be balanced by cuts elsewhere in the budget,” but later cited Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) statement opposing “reducing our tax collections by shrinking the IRS.”
It’s not impossible for outlets to get it right. Some reporters pointed out to their audiences that the GOP’s spin is deceptive rather than echoing it.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the House Republican’s bill “purports to pay for itself by rescinding $14.3 billion of the $80 billion that Congress gave to the Internal Revenue Service last year to improve the agency’s technology and enforcement,” then immediately added, “Cutting the IRS enforcement budget, in fact, would increase budget deficits by making it harder for the agency to catch tax cheats.”
Politico Playbook likewise reported that the Republican bill “not only seeks to offset the spending with cuts elsewhere but taps Democrats’ signature domestic policy legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, to do it,” but then immediately debunked that language.
“As a policy matter, reversing the bill’s IRS plus-up doesn’t make a lot of sense. Cutting the agency’s planned enforcement surge against tax evaders would have the perverse effect of increasing budget deficits, not trimming them,” it stated. “But as a political matter, the logic is impeccable: The libs, after all, were owned.”
Johnson’s first major move as speaker was to try to deceive the press (and through it, the public) in order to achieve one of his party’s long-sought objectives. His success in getting credulous reporters to adopt his spin is an ominous sign for the months ahead.
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shame! 2nd time went thru 20 gop defect on 14m$ if ethics comm found guilty?
crime was pt out trump russ collusion?
https://www.alternet.org/you-but-indict-yourselves-censure/
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no lnx
House Freedom Caucus threatens 'reckless' government shutdown unless far-right demands are met
Jim Jordan's 'political stunt dressed up as an investigation' is 'loaded with blanks': legal experts
Jessica CorbettandCommon Dreams August 22, 2023
With Congress on August recess, the far-right House Freedom Caucus on Monday issued expected but unlikely-to-be-met demands for a stopgap funding bill that wouldavert an October government shutdown.
Members of the Senate and House of Representatives are set to return to Capitol Hill on the first and second Tuesday of September, respectively—giving them little time to pass full-year appropriations legislation before funding runs out at the end of next month.
Considering the time crunch, both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) have recently signaled support for a continuing resolution (CR) that would give lawmakers a few more months to pass a larger package.
So far, McCarthy's fractured conference has only passed one of 12 appropriations bills for fiscal year (FY) 2024. Among the GOP's "five families" is the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), which does not publicly list its members but is made up of a few dozen legislators, including Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Vice Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
In terms of the appropriations legislation for the next fiscal year, the HFC said in a statement Monday that "we remain committed to restoring the true FY 2022 topline spending level of $1.471 trillion without the use of gimmicks or reallocated rescissions to return the bureaucracy to its pre-Covid size while allowing for adequate defense funding."
"In the eventuality that Congress must consider a short-term extension of government funding through a continuing resolution, we refuse to support any such measure that continues Democrats' bloated Covid-era spending and simultaneously fails to force the Biden administration to follow the law and fulfill its most basic responsibilities," the caucus continued. "Any support for a 'clean' continuing resolution would be an affirmation of the current FY 2023 spending level grossly increased by the lame-duck December 2022 omnibus spending bill that we all vehemently opposed just seven months ago."
The HFC declared that its members will refuse to support any CR that does not include the House-passed Secure the Border Act, "address the unprecedented weaponization" of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and "end the Left's cancerous woke policies in the Pentagon undermining our military's core warfighting mission."
The Pentagon language likely relates to U.S. military policies on abortion and gender-affirming care as well as diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility while the DOJ comment is widely seen as a reference to investigations of former President Donald Trump, who has been indicted in four cases this year—including in two probes led by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland after the Republican announced his 2024 presidential campaign.
"We will oppose any attempt by Washington to revert to its old playbook of using a series of short-term funding extensions designed to push Congress up against a December deadline to force the passage of yet another monstrous, budget-busting, pork-filled, lobbyist handout omnibus spending bill at year's end and we will use every procedural tool necessary to prevent that outcome," the HFC added Monday. "Lastly, we will oppose any blank check for Ukraine in any supplemental appropriations bill."
Democrats in Congress quickly warned that the faction of Republicans was up to no good, with Schumer saying in a statement Monday that "if the House decides to go in a partisan direction it will lead to a Republican-caused shutdown."
Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) said that "extreme House Republicans are now threatening to send us into a reckless government shutdown if they don't get their way. A shutdown would be a disaster for Virginians—from missed paychecks to lapses in essential government services that families rely on."
Referencing Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) wrote on social media that "House Republicans are determined to shut down the government and crash our economy. We will fight these MAGA extremists every step of the way. For. The. People."
The New Republic's Tori Otten also suggested that "tanking the economy" could be the goal, noting that the HFC made similar demands earlier this year before McCarthy struck a debt ceiling deal with Democratic President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection:
The government shutdown in 2018 cost the United States $11 billion, including $3 billion in economic activity that will never be recovered, the Congressional Budget Office said at the start of the following year.With a presidential election on the horizon, the Freedom Caucus could be looking for ways to undermine Biden any way it can. Destroying the economy he's helping to recover would do just that.
The Washington Post reported Monday that "White House spokesperson Olivia Dalton told reporters that she had no updates on whether Biden plans to sign a continuing resolution."
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in face swalwell
https://www.alternet.org/kevin-mccarthy-2662503986/
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no lnx $ an 7 23
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/mccarthy-caves-and-caves-more/
Home | McCarthy caves and caves, then caves some more
John Stoehr July 27, 2023
I don’t know about you, but House Speaker Kevin McCarthy does not come off as a figure of genuine authority and respect. If Nancy Pelosi, his predecessor, gave the impression of loving but iron-willed matriarch to her party’s rowdiest juveniles, McCarthy gives the impression of a bachelor uncle babysitting the kids for the day and coming close to giving up.
Since becoming speaker, he’s fended off demands by some in his party to meet the Democrats’ impeachments of Donald Trump with their own of Joe Biden. On what evidence? They didn’t know, but they were sure they’d find it. As the search for evidence of wrongdoing keeps running into the problem of there being no evidence of wrongdoing, however, some in his party are apparently fresh out of patience. Evidence, schmevidence.
Just do it.
READ MORE: 'It's like a soap opera': These Republicans are weary of their colleagues’ Hunter Biden obsession
The Post reported Wednesday that in a series of meetings this week that McCarthy has “told lawmakers and some members of his leadership team that he is ‘moving closer’ to an impeachment inquiry though he’s not there yet.” He later found himself explaining the difference between things that don’t need to be explained if you’re a figure of authority and respect.
“Impeachment inquiry is not impeachment,” McCarthy told reporters. “Impeachment inquiry is allowing Congress to get the information.” The man badly wants to be seen as a leader but the farther along he gets into his tenure, the more obvious it is that he’s not leading at all. He’s following.
Honestly, it’s embarrassing.
If McCarthy were a true leader, he’d know the problem with trying to appease people who don’t want to be appeased – the moment you give them what they say they want, they say they want something else. And they do that, because they have rightly sized him up. He’s got no backbone.
READ MORE: 'Completely unverified': Even Fox News isn’t buying McCarthy’s rush to impeach Biden
According to the Post, some members of the House Freedom Caucus are now “publicly reminding colleagues that McCarthy’s speakership largely hinges on promises made in January to reduce spending significantly and are demanding steeper cuts that could make for difficult votes for vulnerable incumbents seeking to keep their seats and the GOP majority.”
In other words, they are reminding him of his promise to cut spending as if the speaker has not already attempted to make good on that promise, which was using the debt-ceiling to extort concessions out of Joe Biden. (He did sorta kinda make good on that promise, but also he didn’t really.)
They are now saying that they won’t support must-pass appropriations bills unless he greenlights impeachment. Like all abusers, they’re moving the standard on him. Like all weaklings, he’s going along, no doubt with the expectation that if he caves this time, he won’t have to cave again.
He will, of course.
Think of it this way. When the rowdiest juvenile Democrats made their initial stink about impeaching Donald Trump, what was the first thing Nancy Pelosi did? She said knock it off. Guess what? They listened.
When the rowdiest juvenile Republicans made their initial stink about impeaching Joe Biden, what was the first thing McCarthy did? It wasn’t knock it off. They don’t respect him enough for that kind of thing to work.
It’s gotten so bad that McCarthy did something this week that I just can’t imagine Pelosi doing – parsing the meanings of words that don’t need parsing when you are a figure of authority and respect, to wit: He’s not saying that he’s calling for impeachment. He’s not saying that he’s calling for an impeachment inquiry. All he’s saying is that he’s moving closer to an impeachment inquiry, which is not at all the same as an impeachment.
I don’t know about you, but when a leader finds himself explaining what he doesn’t mean as much as McCarthy does, his number is about to come up.
Pelosi changed her mind, of course, but only after indisputable evidence emerged of the criminal former president’s attempt to extort a foreign ally for the purpose of defrauding the American people in 2020. She stood in the way of empty demands. She did not stand in the way of evidence of constitutional crimes worthy of the risk of mounting an impeachment.
McCarthy isn’t standing in the way of evidence, but that’s because there is no evidence for him to stand in the way of. Try as they might, each of the Republican committees investigating “the Biden family” – which is code for Hunter Biden, the president’s profligate son – keeps running into the problem of failing to find evidence of wrongdoing by the president.
There isn’t just a lack of evidence of constitutional crimes worthy of the risk of mounting an impeachment. There’s a lack of evidence. All bark. No bite.
Just like Speaker McCarthy.
READ MORE: McCarthy invites lawmakers to screen movie with 'anti-Jewish canards' to boost workplace morale
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2x? jan? boast of legis accomplishments?!
https://www.alternet.org/house-republicans-first-week-perspective/
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an 7 23
no lnx
McCarthy invites lawmakers to screen movie with 'anti-Jewish canards' to boost workplace morale
Brandon GageJuly 25, 2023
Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy (R-California) invited lawmakers to a Tuesday night screening of a film that reviews described as antisemitic to help improve workplace morale on Capitol Hill.
Since he obtained the gavel in January, McCarthy has struggled to herd fringe Republicans in the House whose constituencies are often populated by QAnon fans. A sizeable number of these congresspersons are staunch defenders of indicted former President Donald Trump and his debunked lies about the 2020 election. In addition to intra-GOP squabbling, deep partisan gullies between the two major parties regarding an exhaustive host of issues reliably lead to drama inside the chamber.
McCarthy's olive branch is a presentation of Sound of Freedom starring Jim Caviezel, whom National Public Radio noted last week has "been a prominent promoter of the false, violent QAnon conspiracy theory — specifically, the baseless claim that an international cabal of elites is abusing and killing children to extract a substance called adrenochrome."
READ MORE: Kevin McCarthy tells Hannity Biden family’s business is 'rising to the level of impeachment inquiry'
Although the production avoids that one topic and was released prior to QAnon's spread, it contains other ideas that resonate with QAnon's believers.
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Sound of Freedom "draws from a conspiratorial well that includes a number of anti-Jewish canards, including the 'blood libel' accusation," The Times of Israel explained.
"The adrenochrome theory has roots in a blood libel canard leveled at Jews since the Middle Ages," QAnon researcher Mike Rothschildtold the outlet. "The myth that Jews use the blood of Christian children in rituals was used to justify the torture, imprisonment, and murder of Jews for centuries, even taking a role in Nazi propaganda, before it was adopted by QAnon."
McCarthy asserted at a press conference that Sound of Freedom's theme can unite political adversaries behind a common cause.
READ MORE: 'Technique used by Hitler': House Dems urge McCarthy to revoke RFK Jr. invitation to testify before Congress
"One of my goals is to open up the house and get members working together again. We've made some great progress in that where, where bills actually come through, committees where members are now showing up for work. And so tonight I'm gonna have another movie night," McCarthy said. "I'm hoping Republicans and Democrats can come together, see a movie about human trafficking. We could actually find ways to stop the human trafficking that's continuing to move throughout the world."
Watch below or at this link.
READ MORE: Republicans want to 'rewrite history and science' to push white nationalism: former GOP lawmaker
View NPR's report here. The Times of Israel's analysis is here.
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Jewish Republicans 'offended and appalled' by anti-Semitic QAnon congresswoman ›
'QMaga': How QAnon, MAGA and 'Christian nationalism' have pushed the GOP into 'madness' ›
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McCarthy tells Hannity Biden family’s business is 'rising to the level of impeachment inquiry'
https://www.alternet.org/Bank/hunter-biden-2662361445/
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an 7 23
no lnx twt
'Five-alarm fire' as GOP adds over 200 poison pills to House spending bills
Brett Wilkinsand
Common DreamsJuly 17, 2023
A coalition of advocacy groups on Monday sounded the alarm on the more than 200 so-called "poison pill" riders attached by Republican U.S. lawmakers to House spending bills in recent weeks in a bid to block funding for a dizzying range of progressive policies and programs.
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According to the Clean Budget Coalition—which is made up of nearly 260 advocacy groups—"at least 104 poison pill policy riders were added to appropriations bills drafted in the U.S. House over the past week."
"Prior to the July 4th recess, it took two months for House Republican appropriators to add more than 100 new poison pills to draft spending bills marked up in committee," the coalition noted. "In the past week alone, the previous total has doubled to more than 217."
"Most of these measures are special favors for big corporations and ideological extremists that have nothing to do with funding our government and could not become law on their own merits," the groups added."Some of them attack women's health, some fuel political corruption, some harm our environment, and much more."
Some of the riders tracked by the Clean Budget Coalition include measures to block proposed transportation safety rules and prohibit funding for the World Health Organization, climate mitigation, gender equality programs, and critical race theory education. Other riders target gas stove bans, funding for high-speed rail, pesticide warning labeling, wildlife protection, reproductive healthcare, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
"The sheer volume of dangerous riders being included in these draft bills is an overreach and an emergency," Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and co-chair of the Clean Budget Coalition, said in a statement.
"We cannot allow policy that harms regular people, threatens our rights, hurts the environment, and does any number of other terrible things to ride along with the appropriations package," Gilbert added. "We must put out this five-alarm fire by rejecting the inclusion of poison pills."
To that end, the Clean Budget Coalition is calling on lawmakers to "pass clean spending bills" by removing all poison pill riders and opposing passage of "any legislation that includes these unpopular and controversial special favors for big corporations and ideological extremists."
David Shadburn, senior government affairs advocate at theLeague of Conservation Voters—a Clean Budget Coalition member—said earlier this month that "House Republicans continue using the same tired playbook: They're hijacking must-pass bills with harmful poison pill riders that neither the public nor Congress support but benefit their polluter donors."
"Just as Republican leaders held the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to make it easier to pollute, now they are proposing riders to greenlight pipelines, block clean air and water regulations, stall clean energy deployment, and prohibit the federal government from addressing long-standing inequities," Shadburn added. "These must-pass spending bills are already loaded down with harmful poison pill riders that need to be removed—the last thing Congress should do is add more."
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scotus student debt amicus
BRIEF OF SENATOR MARSHA BLACKBURN
AND 42 OTHER MEMBERS OF THE UNITED
STATES SENATE AS AMICI CURIAE IN
SUPPORT OF RESPONDENTS
BRIAN A. KULP
DECHERT LLP
CIRA CENTRE
2929 Arch Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
STEVEN A. ENGEL
Counsel of Record
MICHAEL H. MCGINLEY
JUSTIN W. AIMONETTI
DECHERT LLP
1900 K Street,NW
Washington, DC 20006
(202) 261-3369
steven.engel@dechert.com
LIST OF AMICI CURIAE
Senator John Barrasso
Senator Marsha Blackburn
Senator John Boozman
Senator Mike Braun
Senator Katie Boyd Britt
Senator Ted Budd
Senator Bill Cassidy
Senator John Cornyn
Senator Tom Cotton
Senator Kevin Cramer
Senator Mike Crapo
Senator Ted Cruz
Senator Steve Daines
Senator Joni Ernst
Senator Deb Fischer
Senator Lindsey Graham
Senator Chuck Grassley
Senator Bill Hagerty
Senator Josh Hawley
Senator John Hoeven
Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith
Senator Ron Johnson
Senator John Kennedy
Senator James Lankford
Senator Mike Lee
Senator Cynthia M. Lummis
2a
Senator Roger Marshall
Senator Mitch McConnell
Senator Jerry Moran
Senator Markwayne Mullin
Senator Pete Ricketts
Senator James E. Risch
Senator Mitt Romney
Senator Mike Rounds
Senator Marco Rubio
Senator Rick Scott
Senator Tim Scott
Senator Dan Sullivan
Senator John Thune
Senator Thom Tillis
Senator Tommy Tuberville
Senator Roger F. Wicker
Senator Todd Young
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hottest day ever
https://www.alternet.org/mccarthy-china-india-american-gas/
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walk back
...Politico's Rachel Bade, in an article published on July 28, reports that Trumpworld has "flipped out" because of comments McCarthy made about the 2024 presidential election during a Tuesday, June 27 appearance on CNBC.
McCarthy said of a possible rematch between President Joe Biden and Trump, "Can he win that election? Yeah, he can win that election. The question is: Is he the strongest to win the election?' I don't know that answer."
The fact that the House speaker even entertained, for a minute, the possibility of Republicans nominating someone other than Trump — be it Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley or Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) — is infuriating Trump loyalists.
"Some called McCarthy a 'moron,'" Bade explains. "Others looked to Trump campaign hand Brian Jack, who also advises the speaker and has been a critical bridge between both men, to play mediator as Trump hit the trail in New Hampshire. McCarthy immediately pivoted into clean-up mode. He called Trump to apologize, according to the New York Times. He offered Breitbart reporter Matt Boyle an exclusive interview, during which he walked the comments back and accused the media of taking them out of context. 'Trump is stronger today than he was in 2016,' McCarthy told Boyle."...
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an 6 23
house Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) suggested on Monday that the House of Representatives might consider impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Merrick Garland over unsubstantiated allegations from a whistleblower at the Internal Revenue Service regarding Hunter Biden.
“If it comes true what the IRS whistleblower is saying, we’re going to start impeachment inquiries on the Attorney General," McCarthy told the hosts of "Fox & Friends."
This comes after McCarthy made a similar impeachment threat on Sunday ifDavid Weiss, the Trump-appointed prosecutor who brokered a plea agreement with Hunter Biden over late taxes and improperly obtaining a firearm, is not allowed to testify to Congress.
The agreement, which could subject the president's son to probation, was the culmination of years of investigation, and is unusual in that most people accused of similar offenses are rarely prosecuted as standalone crimes; tax charges in particular are highly unusual if the unpaid taxes were already paid back.
FROM EARLIER:'You throw crap against the wall': Former RNC head slaps down Kevin McCarthy for trying to rewrite history
However, Republicans have complained the charges don't go far enough. House investigators have for years pushed an unfounded claim that Hunter Biden accepted bribes from foreign governments, and that President Joe Biden, then the vice president, was in on the scheme.
The House Ways and Means Committee further alleged last week that a whistleblower at the IRS has alleged the Justice Department under Garland interfered with Weiss' investigation; however, House investigators havenot put forward any evidence supporting this claim, and Weiss himself has not made any such allegation against Garland.
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6 23? big cut soc safe net
https://www.alternet.org/economy/house-gop-2661360729/
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an 6 23
no lnx
'Fiery' closed-door meeting highlights bitter infighting among House Republicans
Alex Henderson June 13, 2023
In early June, a group of 11 far-right House Republicans voiced their displeasure with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) and his recent debt ceiling agreement with President Joe Biden by blocking GOP-sponsored bills. Conservative critics of this blockade argued that the 11 Republicans were cutting their noses to spite their faces.
The following week, tensions among House Republicans were evident during a "fiery" closed-door meeting on Tuesday, June 13, according to Axios' Juliegrace Brufke.
Brufke reports, "Multiple GOP sources in the room told Axios that moderates took to the mics to slam the 11 members who froze the floor, arguing that a small group does not speak for the entirety of the conference and blasted their calls for a renegotiated speaker's agreement."
READ MORE: 'Incredible embarrassment': MAGA Republicans tank pro-gas stoves bills to punish McCarthy over debt ceiling
According to Brufke, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-New York) "slammed the blockade" during the meeting, while Rep. Matt Gaetz (D-Florida) defended it.
"Freshman Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) was 'screaming at the mics' about the floor shutdown, 'dropping multiple F bombs' and telling the room 'he's introducing bills to save lives and it's not s**t that gets on Fox News,' according to two sources in the room," Brufke reports. "Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) rebutted Van Orden's criticisms, arguing that he is 'looking to shrink government.'"
Members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus are still furious over the Biden/McCarthy debt ceiling agreement.
Republicans who joined McCarthy in voting to raise the United States' debt ceiling argued that it was necessary in order to prevent the U.S. from defaulting on its debt obligations. But Freedom Caucus members and ultra-MAGA Republicans who voted against the bill argued that the spending cuts Biden and McCarthy agreed on did not go far enough.
READ MORE: 'Not going to stand for it': Kevin McCarthy backs Trump vowing to target attorney general
Meanwhile, progressive Democrats who voted against the bill, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), believed that the cuts were extreme.
"The (House Republican) Conference still has a lot of legislation it wants to pass, ranging from spending bills to FAA reauthorization," Brufke reports. "Fractures within the Conference could make those tasks more difficult and place Speaker Kevin McCarthy's leadership position on tenuous ground."
READ MORE: How Manchin and Sinema quietly influenced debt ceiling negotiations: report
Axios' full report is available at this link.
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an 6 23
no lnx
Freedom Caucus failed to cause an economic catastrophe by forcing the nation into default. They couldn’t get organized enough to challenge Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, partly because no one else wants the job. So they’ve resorted to the one thing they can achieve: They shut down the House of Representatives. The procedural stunt they pulled on Tuesday kicked off a rebellion that has prevented the House from doing anything of substance for the remainder of the week. A defeated McCarthy gave in Wednesday evening, sent everyone home for the weekend, and worsened his leadership crisis by blaming the whole mess on his number two, Majority Leader Steve Scalise. He’s made a very big mess for himself.
On Tuesday, 11 of the rebels pulled their surprise, voting with Democrats to defeat the procedural vote that set the rules for a couple of bills that were supposed to come to the floor. This is always a party-line vote. The minority always unanimously votes against it, the majority always unanimously votes for it, by rote. This was the first time in 21 years that a rule vote was defeated. Since then, the group has dug in and refused to agree to allow any bill to move to the floor until they get concessions from McCarthy.
McCarthy’s self-proclaimed great “victory” on the debt ceiling is now history. His effort Wednesday to try to gloss this over as a spat that would make his next wins even bigger and better has been exposed as so much hot air. He made everything worse by turning on his own leadership team. “The majority leader runs the floor,” McCarthy told reporters, insinuating that Scalise had screwed up.
It’s Scalise’s fault, he insists, pointing to one of the beefs the maniacs brought up as a cause for their rebellion. Rep. Andrew Clyde, Georgia, has a controversial gun bill that Scalise has agreed to bring to the floor. According to Scalise, he’s been whipping it but hasn’t found enough votes. According to Clyde, Scalise threatened to never allow a vote on the bill if Clyde didn’t support the team on the debt ceiling.
The real problem, according to Scalise, is the promises McCarthy made to the extremists to get to be speaker. The maniacs say McCarthy broke those promises with the debt ceiling bill. The reality—and Scalise points this out, too—is that no one but McCarthy and that crew know what those promises were. Not having it in writing, not having it in public, and not even cluing anyone else in leadership in on the deal means that the Freedom Caucus can make up any damned thing and say McCarthy promised it.
“So I still don’t know what those agreements were. Whatever they are, [conservatives] feel that the agreements were broken. That’s got to get resolved. Hopefully it does,” Scalise said. So either McCarthy dealt in total secrecy, not even telling his leadership team the constraints they were operating under with the extremists, or the relationship between these two is so bad Scalise would lie about it.
McCarthy also created this mess by telling everybody what they wanted to hear back in April, to get the House’s original debt ceiling bill passed. The bill was essentially the Freedom Caucus’ wish list for American dystopia, and plenty of regular Republicans didn’t like it. McCarthy essentially told them that this bill was just symbolic, that it was important for the team to get something passed to force President Joe Biden into negotiations with them. It would never become law, he said. Meanwhile he was telling the Freedom Caucus that he would hold tough on their bill, and not agree to a “watered-down version.”
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The problem here is no one can be trusted to be operating in good faith. McCarthy has clearly lied to get what he wanted—first the speakership and then a debt limit deal. The Freedom Caucus people will lie about anything and everything just because. The rest of the Republicans can’t trust the maniacs, but McCarthy has also proven that they can’t trust him either. Neither can his own leadership team. That leaves the House in chaos. As it stands, nothing can move forward until the handful of extremists allow it.
McCarthy has two choices: He can cave and give the Freedom Caucus total control of the House, or he can try to form a coalition government with the Democrats. If he chooses the former, he’s opening himself up to more extortion. His second choice, to appeal to the more moderate voices in his conference and work with the Democrats, depends on whether the Democrats are willing to help him out. They shouldn’t do so without some guarantees locked in, because by now everyone knows McCarthy can’t be trusted.
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an 5 23
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, on Tuesday was the highest bidder among House Republicans for a cherry “chapstick” used by Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. Greene, who promotes herself as a culture warrior and fiscal conservative, made the winning bid for the lip balm after McCarthy sweetened the deal by promising to attend a donor dinner, according to reports.
“During GOP conference today,” Politico’s Olivia Beavers reports, “House Rs did about a 15-min fundraising auction for chapstick used by Speaker McCarthy. The winner: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), whose winning bid was $100,000, her Spox confirms to me.”
“Others bid on it as well, but MTG ultimately won: And as bidding went on, McCarthy would sweeten the deal, throwing in agreeing to attend a dinner with donors/supporters for whoever wins, Spox confirmed,” Beavers adds, citing Greene’s spokesperson. “The chapstick specifically was a Rep. Aaron Bean campaign chapstick.”
READ MORE: Moms for Liberty Leader Says Biden Behind High-Level, Coordinated Effort to Make Kids LGBTQ (Video)
Speaker McCarthy has been allegedly negotiating with President Joe Biden over the debt ceiling. If Republicans refuse to raise the debt limit, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warns by June 1, the U.S. will default on its debt for the first time in history. Experts say the result will likely have global ramifications, drive interest rates sky high, and devastate the U.S. and world economies. It will also destroy international confidence in the American dollar, and permanently increase the interest rate the U.S. spends on its debt.
It is if the $100,000 came from Greene’s personal funds or if it is donor money.
U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) responded to the news, saying, “They doing this insane chapstick shit while the country teeters on default. Wild.”
“$100,000 spent on used chapstick,” said podcaster Rachel Vindman. “Please bring this up when people say this woman is relatable and down-to-earth.”...
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an 5 23
united States Representative and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) scoffed at a reporter's question on Thursday morning about suspended Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Garret O'Boyle, whom The New York Times revealed in March has financial connections to an ally of former President Donald Trump.
O'Boyle is one of several so-called "whistleblowers" scheduled to testify at Thursday's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing.
"We're talking a lot about in the point of this press conference, the point of the hearing is to talk about how the FBI is politicized, but do you think it's appropriate for some of these whistleblowers, including two who will get your hearing today, to be paid by one of the former president's closest advisors?" the correspondent asked Jordan. "Kash Patel, who actively..." she continued until Jordan abruptly cut her off.
READ MORE: Congresswoman tears into Jim Jordan for abusing his office for 'performance'
"They got a family. How they supposed to feed their family?" Jordan snapped. "Four hundred and fifty days the FBI has kept these, uh, has kept Mr. O'Boyle in, in limbo where he can't work without pay. He's got four kids. He was selected to come to this special unit they were forming here in Virginia. He moves his family and the day he gets here, the day he gets here, they say, 'Hey, we're suspending your clearance.' And they won't let him get access to his furniture, his clothes, and he's got a two-week-old newborn child.I mean, you gotta be kidding me. Of course, they're gonna, they're gonna do whatever they can to feed their family and I don't fault them for that."
Watch below or at this link.
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MMA 4 23
Fox News pundits warned its viewers that expanded funding for the Internal Revenue Service passed by Democrats last year would create a dystopian armed force that would be “at war” with Republicans. In reality, the funding enables the agency to hire workers to man its tax preparation hotline phones, dramatically reducing wait times this tax season – but House Speaker Kevin McCarthy still made pulling the funding a priority in the hostage demands he issued on Wednesday for raising the debt ceiling.
Fox retains its audience by keeping them alternately terrified and enraged about the state of U.S. politics. Its propagandists regularly catastrophize over Democratic politicians and the purported impact of their policies, real or imagined. But even by those standards, Fox’s commentary last year about the roughly $80 billion in funding for the IRS that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act was uniquely deranged and irresponsible.
Fox’s star host Tucker Carlson, for example, posited in August that Democrats were “hiring another 87,000armed IRS agents” with the funds “just to make sure that you obey,” a demagogic mash-up of a pair of right-wing falsehoods. Carlson depicted the move as part of President Joe Biden’s “war on his own population” which targets “Trump voters” with “acts of aggression and hostility.”
Carlson’s conspiracy theories were part of a Fox campaign of toxic rhetoric against the IRS, as I noted at the time:
Fox pundits have described the potential wave of IRS hiring as an “economic, financial militiaagainst regular people” deployed by those who “want to control you”; a“new army” that will “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers”; a “new Gestapo” Biden will use in an “abusive, corrupt manner”; “a Praetorian Guard that will be unleashed again” to “grab all the cash they can by any means necessary”; and “part of an orchestrated campaign to target Americans and have the federal government be at war with those Americans.”
Overheated commentary from right-wing pundits and politicians triggered concerns of potential violence against IRS employees. But the dire predictions of the Fox crew never materialized. In reality, the increased funding led to an 85% reduction in the time taxpayers waited to speak to a representative this tax season, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday:
The agency answered 2.4 million more taxpayer phone calls with live assistance this year through April 7, compared with the same period last year. And wait times fell to four minutes, down from a sitcom-length 27 minutes a year ago.
“We made a quantum leap this year,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said Monday, on the eve of tax day, citing the $80 billion funding Congress provided last year. One of the first moves to transform the tax agency was hiring thousands of customer-service representatives to answer the phones.
How much has customer service improved? The IRS says its representatives answered nearly nine out of 10 calls, compared with less than two out of 10 calls last year.
The IRS also revealed earlier this month a 150-page plan for using the rest of the funds, which includes additional improvements in customer service and technology as well as additional enforcement targeted at large corporations and taxpayers who make more than $400,000 annually.
Fox’s paranoid IRS conspiracy theories provide the GOP with cover for its bog-standard policy preferences. Republican politicians want to ensure that rich people are able to get away with cheating on their taxes and that everyone else goes through a filing process that is as excruciating as possible to reduce public support for higher taxes and tax enforcement.
After Republicans won control of the House, the first bill they passed repealed the IRS funding boost.That legislation was dead on arrival in the Senate, which Democrats retain, and would be vetoed by Biden. But the GOP hasn’t given up hope on helping tax cheats and hurting normal taxpayers – when McCarthy put forward his demands for what House Republicans required as their price for raising the debt ceiling and avoiding a global financial catastrophe, a sizable IRS funding cut was included.
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https://www.alternet.org/worst-house-speaker-in-history/
debt nyse
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https://www.alternet.org/kevin-mccarthy-2659871666/
no lnx
New analysis fact-checks McCarthy’s claim that Biden has cost families $7400
Meaghan EllisApril 18, 2023
A new analysis is pushing back on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-Calif.) argument that American families are now more than $7,000 poorer since President Joe Biden took office.
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According to The Washington Post, McCarthy's remarks were made on Monday, April 17.
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Responding to the inquires about McCarthy's remarks, E.J. Antoni — who serves as a regional economics research fellow for the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis — attempted to break the numbers down during a phone conversation.
READ MORE: Kevin McCarthy instructs House GOP to 'immediately investigate' looming Donald Trump indictments
Per the Post:
“Nominal earnings are multiplied by CPI in Jan. ’21 and divided by the latest month’s CPI,” Antoni said. That yields a loss of $2,802.77 or 5.1 percent. He assumes a typical family has two parents working, so he doubles that figure to come up with $5,605.53.
However, reporter Glenn Kessler offers a fact-check of those figures.
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"McCarthy was citing a figure that Fox News promoted in January. The numbers may change from month to month, and so it’s slightly improved since then," Kessler wrote. "Antoni’s most recent calculation is that the average American family is $7,100 poorer since Biden took office. That still doesn’t sound good."
Kessler's also noted that economists have also weighed in with skeptical reactions to Antoni's calculations. Donald R. Grimes, an economic specialist at the University of Michigan, offered his take in an email.
READ MORE: Marjorie Taylor Greene unleashes on Kevin McCarthy with chilling warning and post-election prediction
“We lost a disproportionate number of low-wage jobs during the early stages of the pandemic,” Grimes said in an email. “As the economy recovered more fully from the pandemic (which is what occurred during the first couple years of the Biden presidency) the average went down because we were disproportionately adding more lower-wage workers in industries like accommodation and food services.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, also shared a different perspective to reach a more accurate total.
“I would use real disposable income per capita,” said Zandi. “It is the most comprehensive consistent measure of how well Americans are doing from a government source. It accounts for all income, and it is after-tax and appropriately accounts for inflation.”
Martin Neil Baily, the former Council of Economic Advisers chairman, also echoed Zandi's remarks saying, “Real disposable income per capita is much better measure.”
“The personal income per capita does incorporate the additional income that is earned by more people working,” Grimes added. “The personal income per capita data also includes unearned income, for example, it includes all those stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, etc. So it really is a broader measure of economic welfare than wages.”
READ MORE: 'Absolutely appalling': Kevin McCarthy is fundraising off giving January 6th footage to Tucker Carlson
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an 4 23 no lnx vid
CNBC host calls Kevin McCarthy a hypocrite to his face for 'unsustainable' Trump tax cuts
David EdwardsandRaw StoryApril 17, 2023
CNBC host Sara Eisen challenged House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Monday after he demanded spending cuts in return for raising the nation's debt limit.
During an interview in New York, McCarthy told Eisen that the country was like a child with a credit card.
"Would you just raise the limit?" he asked.
"Well, if it meant playing with America's standing and full faith and credit of U.S. government debt, I feel like you can deal with the spending in other ways, which is totally legitimate," Eisen observed.
McCarthy suggested that there was no other way to reduce the nation's debt.
"You did it three times in the Trump administration," Eisen noted.
"We never raised the debt ceiling by itself," McCarthy insisted.
"And tax cuts," Eisen interrupted. "That was like $2 trillion in deficit."
But McCarthy argued that the Trump-era tax cuts were good for the economy.
"So I was going to ask you about taxes because I wonder, because you want to extend the Trump tax cuts, correct?" Eisen asked. "But isn't that a little hypocritical when you're talking about finding savings everywhere and being on an unsustainable fiscal path?"
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"How's that hypocritical when it's bringing tax cuts, tax savings?" McCarthy retorted. "I will always advocate for the idea that we are streamlining our tax policies, that we're also streamlining our regulation."
Watch the video below from CNBC.
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Even Republicans are balking at McCarthy's cruel budget proposal - Alternet.org ›
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https://www.alternet.org/debt-ceiling-krugman/ red states hurt more
https://www.alternet.org/send/kevin-mccarthy-2659874733/
https://www.alternet.org/worst-house-speaker-in-history/
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an 4 23
barely ...Speaker Kevin McCarthy spoke at the New York Stock Exchange Monday, attempting to convince Wall Street that if the nation defaults on its debts in a few months and causes a global financial crisis, it’s all going to be President Joe Biden’s fault. That’s a tough sell since it’s been McCarthy’s GOP that has been arguing for months that a default could be managed by the Treasury Department while they flailed around unable to come up with a plan of their own.
“He’s probably trying to reassure investors and Wall Street … that Congress is capable of doing something, and we’re going to do something,” Rep. Steve Womack told The Washington Post, calling it a “test” for McCarthy. He added that the “real problem” is whether McCarthy can find 218 votes among the GOP to pass any kind of bill, much less a plan to present to the White House.
One thing McCarthy apparently wants is to make people go hungry. A centerpiece to the budget-cutting message he took to Wall Street is steep cuts to food assistance programs. That’s getting a tepid response from Republicans in the Senate (where it’s not going to pass). One GOP Senate aide scoffed “I mean, Godspeed. Get what you can. We’re going to live in reality over here.”
Arkansas GOP Sen. John Boozman reiterated that reality, saying it “would be difficult to pass in the Senate with 60 votes.” He’s doubtful it would even get 218 in the House GOP. “You look at the margin in the House,” he said, “It might be difficult to pass it in the House.”
McCarthy has four votes to spare, and plenty of his members have constituents among the 41 million low-income Americans who get Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program help. That includes a bunch of swing-state Republicans, including a new group of freshmen members from New York.
That’s just one aspect of the massive cuts McCarthy would have to pass to achieve the kind of spending reductions he’s talking about–cuts that he’s going to find impossible to find 218 votes for.
That’s just one reason he has no plan, as Biden was quick to point out. “Show me his budget,” Biden told reporters early Sunday morning, on his return from his trip to Ireland. Biden released his budget on March 9. McCarthy has released nothing. Not even an agreed upon outline for the cuts he’s demanding.
"I don't know what we're negotiating if I don't know what they want, what they're going to do,” Biden stressed.
That’s one reason the White House is as adamant as it is in arguing that the only option is a clean debt ceiling that is separate from budget negotiations. They can count to 218, even if McCarthy can’t. They can also point to plenty of evidence that just one side of this argument thinks that breaching the debt limit isn’t such a big deal.
Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House, responded to the latest from McCarthy in a statement reflecting that. The House should “immediately take a default on our obligations–which would worsen the fiscal outlook–off the table.”
“House Republicans must address the debt limit; that’s their non-negotiable obligation under the Constitution,” Bates said.
House Republicans have spent more time putting together an inoperable plan for what the Treasury Department could do after a default rather than putting together any kind of budget to take to Biden to begin a real negotiating process. Taking the nation into default has actually become a thing that some Republicans think should happen. For real.
“My view is that the crisis at hand is the debt; it’s not that we might not pass the debt ceiling,” said Stephen Moore, a leading economist at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. “It’s that we can’t just stay on this path. There will be a financial train wreck.”
Meanwhile, on Wall Street, real economists’ hair is on fire. “It will be financial chaos,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, if the nation even comes close to default. “Our fiscal problems will be meaningfully worse. … Our geopolitical standing in the world will be undermined.”
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an 4 23
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is poised to propose cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which supports millions of Americans — but many of his Republican colleagues doubt he'll be successful,Politico reports.
According to The Washington Post, over the last few weeks, the "GOP has focused its attention on two anti-poverty programs: Medicaid, which enrolls the poorest families in health insurance, and food stamps" — or SNAP — "which provide grocery benefits to those in need."
The Post reports:
[The GOP's] demands largely come in the context of a brewing fight over the federal budget. Many Republicans have said that federal aid programs offer a way for policymakers toboost U.S. workforce participation [3.5%?!] while saving Washington money — a stance that infuriates Democrats, aid workers and others, who say such changes could harm vulnerable families still reeling since the coronavirus pandemic.
READ MORE: 'Cowards': GOP pushes bill targeting food aid for the poor
However, Politico reports Senate Democrats are not going for it, having "said such measures are dead on arrival in the upper chamber, and with the help of key Senate Republicans, they have killed off a series of similar House GOP efforts over the years — including a 2018 push involving McCarthy and his current top debt limit lieutenant Rep. Garret Graves (R-LA)."
Politico notes "the early response from Senate Republicans this time around does not bode well for a different outcome in 2023.
An anonymous Republican lawmaker's aide said regarding the proposal, "I mean, Godspeed. Get what you can. We're going to live in reality over here."
Similarly, Politico adds Sen. John Boozman (R-AK), who is a lead on the Agriculture Committee the controls SNAP, said days "after the 2022 midterms that the effort 'would be difficult to pass in the Senate with 60 votes.'"
READ MORE: 'If it were Matt Gaetz': Florida Congressman floats cutting SNAP
Likewise, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) said of McCarthy's measure, "I'm sure it won't be easy" to achieve.
Politico reports:
Already, the talk of shrinking SNAP, which currently serves 41 million low-income Americans,is raising pressure on many Republicans that represent districts President Joe Biden won in 2020. Several of those members have raised internal concerns, especially about proposals from their colleagues that would add work requirements for some low-income parents who have children under 18 living at home, according to two other people involved in those conversations, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal caucus matters.
"The President has been clear that he will oppose policies that push Americans into poverty or cause them to lose health care," White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa said according to The Post. "That's why he opposes Republican proposals that would take food assistance and Medicaid away from millions of people by adding burdensome, bureaucratic requirements."
READ MORE: GOP ramps up cruel push for work requirements
Politico's full report is available at this link. The Washington Post's report is here (subscription required).
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https://www.alternet.org/elise-stefanik-promised-trump-an-aggressive-house-gop-response-to-alvin-bragg-cnn-2659667985/
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an 4 23
all of the concessions that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) made in his desperate bid to become House Speaker are coming back to haunt him as his caucus can't seem to get on the same page and now he is starting to point fingers at his deputies for their failings -- many of which are his fault.
According to a report from Politico, McCarthy's travails have led him to start looking for "scapegoats" in an effort to escape blame and allay doubts that he is not up to the job.
As the report notes, "Within days of Kevin McCarthy clinching the speakership, some of his allies began to fret: How the hell was he going to live up to all the promises he’d made to conservatives to win their support? How, in particular, would he pass a budget that would balance within 10 years — a tricky feat even before he took cuts to Social Security and Medicare off the table?"
Adding that his "chickens coming home to roost," the report states that the embattled McCarthy won't own up to his failures and now wants to spread the blame.
Pointing out that McCarthy has taken shots at Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX) as "incompetent" and chief deputy Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) as "ineffective," the report states, "People close to McCarthy tell us that he perceives both men as disloyal (and we know from covering McCarthy for almost a decade that he holds grudges)."
According to one Republican aide, it was inevitable that McCarthy's unbridled ambition would put him in the place he is today.
“He made a bunch of promises during the speaker race that were always untenable, but he made them anyway,” they explained. “At a certain point, a lot of that stuff is going to collide, and he’s getting nervous and looking for others to blame.”
You can read more here.
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an 3 23 no lnx kos
House Republicans' sedition caucus has been engaged in a sternly worded letter-war with Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg of late. It started with Republican committee chairs Jim Jordan, James Comer, and Bryan Steil demanding Bragg turn over all documents pertaining to his probe of Donald Trump's possible campaign finance or corporate fraud violations associated with Trump's 2016 hush money payments to an adult film actress—a blatant attempt to dig through the evidence Bragg has found so that it can be leaked to Trump's lawyers or so witnesses can be publicly identified, demonized, and threatened.
Bragg's team responded with a letter essentially suggesting Jordan and company go fornicate themselves, which led to the Republican trio reiterating and doubling down on their demands in a new letter dated March 25.
Most of it's just a repeat of the previous Republican bellowing, but Andrew Feinberg spotted an intriguing new claim by the Republican trio. Now Jim Jordan and Trump's other House saboteurs are claiming they need all of Bragg's information about the Trump investigation not just so the House can prove that Bragg is a big stupid poppyhead, but because House Republicans are looking to write a new law banning former presidents from being indicted for anything, ever.
[B]ecause the federal government has a compelling interest in protecting the physical safety of former or current Presidents, any decision to prosecute a former or current President raises difficult questions concerning how to vindicate that interest in the context of a state or local criminal justice system. For these reasons and others, we believe that we now must consider whether Congress should take legislative action to protect former and/or current Presidents from politically motivated prosecutions by state and local officials, and if so, how those protections should be structured. Critically, due to your own actions, you are now in possession of information critical to this inquiry.
That's right, the party of Lock Her Up now wants to write new laws saying that Actually, people who become president can commit as many crimes as they like and nobody's allowed to do anything about it.
Shoot someone on 5th Avenue? If a former president does it it's legal.
Sex trafficking? Rape? Bank fraud? Building an explosive device in your spare bedroom? All legal now, if you're a president or have ever been one. You can run down fifty people in your custom limousine and state prosecutors won't be able to lift a finger. That's what the Republican Party stands for.
Rep. Jim Jordan may have become the most visible House Republican due solely to the aggressiveness with which he covered up his past coverup of college athlete sexual abuse, but he's on to bigger and better things now. House Republicans have apparently decided that Donald Trump has committed so many likely crimes that rather than sabotage just one or two cases, it's more efficient to just pass a new law saying nobody can indict him for anything, in any state, for any crime.
The rest of the letter is mostly unsubstantial. Bragg's team correctly noted in their own letter that Congress has no authority to dip into active criminal investigations by state prosecutors and grand juries, not even if Congress wants to do some super-important witness tampering or leaking or what have you; Jordan and crew are now responding with a new supposed reason they need all of Bragg's records, which is that (and you can almost hear the gears grinding away in House Republican heads as they come up with this stuff) they need to examine Bragg's records so that they can take "legislative action" to protect presidents from being arrested not just now, but forever.
Jim Jordan is a pathetic, pathetic man. At some point Donald Trump is going to shuffle off his mortal coil; what will Jim Jordan do with his life then, when his every waking moment isn't devoted to protecting Dear Orange Leader from everything from impeachment to fraud to bad hair days?
If you're wondering? No. No, this supposed legislation will never pass, and it almost certainly will never even be seriously proposed. Jim Jordan and his collaborators are Making Shit Up. Nobody's going to vote for a new law immunizing former presidents from committing crimes, because none of these human sporks could stomach a world in which Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden could go around breaking Republican kneecaps with golf clubs while flashing a presidential immunity card at anyone who tried to get in their way.
Jim Jordan is just lying to Bragg, flat out. As usual. House Republicans may have oozed into Dear Leader-worshipping fascism, but that doesn't mean that they've suddenly gained any brain cells—or even a thin thread of integrity. Jordan wants to know if there's any witnesses he needs to tamper with or any justice that needs to be obstructed, and all of the rest of the House Republican argument is slapped together as means to that end. It's sad, it's pathetic, and it's business as usual for the crooked seditionists Republicans now revere as their most important figures.
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mma 3 23 matt g
Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) plan to blame President Joe Biden’s economic policies for the Friday collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has hit a snag.
McCarthy wants the Republican message to be that Biden’s spending triggered a rise in inflation, and the Federal Reserve’s subsequent interest rate increases wiped out the bank. But his members have instead been claiming that the bank failed because it was too “woke,” a charge so ludicrous that a caucus leader reportedly urged them to “stop tweeting / going on tv if they don’t understand” the situation.
But McCarthy’s dilemma won’t be as easy to solve as that: It stems from the fact that GOP members of Congress are downstream from the same right-wing misinformation and infotainment apparatus as the party’s base. And that system has spent the Biden administration forcing every policy issue, no matter how complex, through its culture war lens.
SVB failed for banal finance reasons, as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine has detailed. It had a customer base of venture capitalists and the start-ups they fund. Those customers generally don’t require short-term, variable-rate business loans, so SVB instead invested their deposits in long-term, fixed-rate bonds without sufficiently hedging its risk. As interest rates rose, those bonds lost value. Some SVB depositors feared the bank’s finances had become too weak and withdrew their funds; since venture capitalists are panicky and move in a herd, the result was an old-fashioned bank run, and on Friday, regulators took over SVB, saying it lacked liquidity and had become insolvent.
But as the bank collapsed, the right-wing media concocted a very different story that fit neatly into their culture war narratives. In their telling, SVB failed because it was too “woke” and had excessively focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Digital media outlets, online influencers, right-wing podcasters, powerful Fox hosts, and columnists at the staid Wall Street Journal all converged on the same talking points.[twt]
republican politicians echoed this theme as it spread through the right-wing press, parroting the message that they perceived was popular among their political base. And not just random backbenchers — over the weekend, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who leads the party’s investigations as chair of the House Oversight committee, went on Fox News to decry SVB as “one of the most woke banks,” while likely presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis argued on the same show that its leaders had been “so concerned with DEI and politics” that it “really diverted from them focusing on their core mission.”
McCarthy had lost control of the GOP message to propagandists who produce political takes that are optimized for ratings and clicks, and now he is desperately trying to get it back.
This isn’t the first time the right has blamed bank failures on excessive support for people of color. In 2008, it became commonplace to blame the financial crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act. As Fox’s Laura Ingraham put it at the time, that law, which was enacted in 1977, “pushed all these institutions to lend to minority communities, many were very risky loans.”
That argument was wrong — only a small percentage of subprime mortgages were issued by depository institutions under the CRA — and it scapegoated borrowers rather than the predatory lenders who in many cases deceived them or the bankers who profited handsomely by selling those subprime mortgages packaged in complicated financial products, even though it dramatically increased their institutions’ risk.
But the CRA charge was at least vaguely related to actual federal economic policies. That reflected the sizable portion of right-wing media attention paid during the Obama administration to developing talking points in favor of deregulation and other conservative economic priorities like cutting taxes, particularly for wealthy Americans and corporations, and slashing the social safety net.
The right’s priorities have shifted since then to increasingly favor the empty calories of the culture war. President Donald Trump signed legislation deregulating banks like SVB, just as he signed into law a huge regressive tax cut and pushed to kick people off health insurance by dismantling Obamacare. But he was largely uninterested in broad areas of federal policy, instead reflexively viewing issues through his own personal grievances. The right-wing press, and the GOP, adjusted to match his focuses.
By the time Biden took office, the right’s policy debate muscles had atrophied. Biden offered a far-reaching economic agenda, but in early 2021, Fox’s coverage instead revolved around the “woke mob” supposedly targeting Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss. Even when the network’s influential commentators discussed Biden proposals like his $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill, they fixated on the 0.06% of the total supposedly wasted on “social justice stuff.” The rest of the right-wing popular press followed Fox’s lead.
The shift by Republican propagandists has been bad for the party’s electoral prospects. As Fox’s hosts trained their audience to fixate on their own bizarre grievances, Republican politicians followed along. But it turns out that normal people don’t care about the same things as millionaire TV hosts like Tucker Carlson — in the 2022 midterms, Fox-friendly candidates who pushed the network’s obsessions were trounced, helping Democrats retain the U.S. Senate and several governorships while keeping the House closely divided.
To date, McCarthy has shown little interest in creating daylight between his members and the right’s infotainers — he’s fresh off of giving Carlson’s team exclusive access to January 6 security footage so the Fox host could generate revisionist propaganda. And now the House leader is reaping the fruits of his party’s right-wing media grievance addiction.
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intercept
silicon Valley Bank Used Former McCarthy Staffers to Weaken Regulations, Lobby FDIC
Ken Klippenstein
Two senior aides to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy were among the top lobbyists for the bank at the center of a new financial crisis.
aFTER SUCCESSFULLY LOBBYING for the rollback of new rules applied to Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis, lobbyists for Silicon Valley Bank immediately began pressing their case further to the federal authority that insures bank deposits in the event of another crisis, according to lobbying disclosures reviewed by The Intercept. The lobbying effort managed to exempt banks the size of Silicon Valley Bank from more stringent regulations, including stress tests aimed at uncovering the type of weaknesses that led to the bank’s implosion Friday. Two of the bank’s top lobbyists previously served as senior staffers for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who himself pushed for the repeal of significant pieces of the landmark Wall Street reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank.
The meltdown of Silicon Valley Bank represents the second-largest bank collapse in American history and the first since the 2008 financial crisis. Over 90 percent of the bank’s deposits exceed the amount federally guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, meaning that those people may either never see their money again or lose substantial amounts.
Silicon Valley Bank President Greg Becker himself pushed for weaker banking regulations, telling Congress to lift “enhanced prudential standards … given the low risk profile of our activities,” as The Lever reported.
A chief culprit, economists say, is legislation President Donald Trump signed into law in 2018, which rolled back key parts of the Dodd-Frank banking regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. That 2018 legislation, called the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, passed with strong support from the Republican Party and critical support from some Democrats. Among those leading the charge was McCarthy, then House majority leader.
“We’re going to move this Senate bill directly to the president’s desk to ensure these reforms help the economy to grow further by making community banks stronger,” McCarthy said of the legislation in 2018. “This is going to free up a great deal of capital and this will help a lot.” two former staffers for McCarthy are registered lobbyists for Silicon Valley Bank, according to the disclosures, one of whom lobbied on the Dodd-Frank repeal law that experts say made the current crisis more likely.
Other Silicon Valley Bank lobbyists worked for political figures across both parties, including former President Bill Clinton; former Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wy.; former Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.; Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn.; former Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa.; and former Rep. Jay Inslee, now governor of Washington state.
Brian Worth served as coalitions director for McCarthy from January 2011 to May 2014, when McCarthy was House Republican whip. Since March 2017 Worth has been a partner at the Franklin Square Group, where he’s worked as a lobbyist for Silicon Valley Bank. Wes McClelland served as a policy adviser and senior policy adviser for McCarthy from April 2011 to September 2015 and joined Franklin Square last January, where he has also lobbied on the bank’s behalf.
Franklin Square is the only lobby group that Silicon Valley Bank has used in over a decade and has lobbied on the bank’s behalf every year from 2009 to 2023. The only other lobby shops the bank has employed are DLA Piper from 2009 to 2010 and McGuireWoods from 2010 to 2011.
A spokesperson for McCarthy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Worth lobbied on the repeal law beginning on October 1, 2017, right up to its passage on May 24, 2018. Then, starting on July 1, 2018, Silicon Valley Bank began lobbying the FDIC — the very same federal agency responsible for insuring bank deposits and was tasked with implementing critical portions of Dodd-Frank.
Though Franklin Square has lobbied on behalf of Silicon Valley Bank since 2009, the 2018 filing represents the first time it had ever lobbied the FDIC.
Beginning on April 20, 2022, McClelland also began lobbying the FDIC for Silicon Valley Bank, which both he and Worth continued right up until the bank’s last lobbying filing this year.
The lobbying disclosures do not provide any more detail about the work. Neither Worth nor McClelland immediately responded to requests for comment.
“This was a 100 percent avoidable problem,” economist Dean Baker told The Intercept in an email, pointing to the Dodd-Frank repeal bill. “That bill raised the asset threshold above which banks have to undergo stress tests from $50 billion to $250 billion. SVB would have been required to undergo regular stress tests before the revision; among the stresses you look at are sharp rises in interest rates, which is apparently what did in SVB. Presumably, if its books had been subject to this test, the risk would have been detected and they would have been required to raise more capital and/or shed deposits.”
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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/house-republicans-plan-crush-401k/
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furious Tara Setmayer dropped the hammer on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on MSNBC on Saturday afternoon for not only allowing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)to act as speaker pro tempore on Wednesday in his place -- but for also embracing her and promoting her in the party with key committee assignments.
Appearing on "The Alex Witt Show" on MSNBC, theformer GOP campaign consultant was asked about Greene's high-profile Wednesday gig and immediately went on a tirade about the controversial Georgia lawmaker, eventually calling her a "degenerate," before attacking McCarthy.
Pointing out that Taylor Greene was handed the gavel by McCarthy on International Women's Day, Witt prompted her guest with, "What a difference two years makes from being removed from all of her committees to having the speaker's gavel. What does this say, Tara, about Marjorie Taylor Greene's increasing influence in the party?"
"First of all, hearing that makes my stomach turn and it should make every American stomach turn that this woman, this Confederate-wannabe, insurrectionist, degenerate, whatever sits behind and has the speaker's gavel and preside over anything in the House of Representatives."
'It's bad enough to tax dollars pay her salary," she continued before adding, "It says more about Kevin McCarthy than it does about her -- she is who she is."
"And you know we see her despicable contemptible behavior all of the time," she added. "It's that Kevin McCarthy is a coward and he has decided that he will acquiesce to this MAGA side of the Republican Party which has now overtaken the mainstream Republicans. He has as part of this Faustian bargain, he has done everything possible he can to lick the boots of MAGA in order to have that position including putting that woman in positions of power."
"That tells you everything you need to know about where the Republican party is today and why it's irredeemable," she added.
Watch below or at this link:
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ass kicked by biden sotu
https://www.alternet.org/rick-scott-plan/
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that time when the
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/old-man-handed-them-asses/
https://www.alternet.org/this-is-insane-kevin-mccarthy/ santos china sec mtg
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impeach mayorkas 2/2 by biggs
basically no change title 42? in court? biden admin expanded countries on it?
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As the nation last week was focused on bombshell revelations allegedly exposing Fox News as "a propaganda network" that is "void of the most basic journalistic ethics," Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was handing over to that network's top propagandist, Tucker Carlson, 41,000 hours of footage from the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
"Now his shows — 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' on Fox News, and 'Tucker Carlson Today' and 'Tucker Carlson Originals' on the streaming service Fox Nation — have a massive trove of raw material," Axios' Mike Allen notes in an exclusive report.
"Carlson TV producers were on Capitol Hill last week to begin digging through the trove, which includes multiple camera angles from all over Capitol grounds. Excerpts will begin airing in the coming weeks," Axios adds, noting that "Carlson has repeatedly questioned official accounts of 1/6, downplaying the insurrection as 'vandalism.'"
Indeed, on the same night last year in June as the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack was presenting its evidence on national TV, Tucker Carlson declared, "it tells you a lot about the priorities of aruling class that the rest of us are gettingyet another lecture about January 6th tonight from our moral inferiors, no less. An outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards, that took place more than a year and a half ago, but they've never stopped talking about it."
Carlson on his Fox News primetime show that night called the Committee’s hearing "deranged," and bragged, "we're not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we are not going to help them do it. What we will do instead is to try to tell you the truth. We've attempted to do that since the day this happened."
He did not stop there.
Carlson called it "vandalism" and flat-out denied it was an insurrection.
"We hated seeing vandalism at the U.S. Capitol a year and a half ago, and we said so at the time, but we did not think it was an insurrection because it was not an insurrection. It was not even close to an insurrection. Not a single person in the crowd that day was found to be carrying a firearm – some insurrection."
Last week a legal court filing from Dominion Voting Systems alleged that Fox News' top brass, from Rupert Murdoch on down – including Carlson – knew Donald Trump was lying about the election being stolen.
In an opinion piece at MSNBC, senior fellow for Media Matters for America Matt Gertz writes: "Out of fear that Fox News's audience was leaving for its competitors, the brief alleges, the network chose to buttress President Donald Trump's lie that the election had been stolen from him, helping to set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection."
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Critics of Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, including some conservative Republicans, have long described the ultra-MAGA congressman as an example of style over substance. To Jordan’s detractors, he is a showman and a buffoon, not a serious lawmaker.
On the right, former House Speaker John Boehner detests Jordan and has described him as a “legislative terrorist.”And when former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was putting together a bipartisan select committee on the January 6, 2021 insurrection, she made it clear that Jordan would not be a part of it. Pelosi welcomed the participation of two right-wing GOP conservatives — then-Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — but she believed that Jordan’s theatrics would make a mockery of the committee.
But Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, now House speaker, regards Jordan as an ally. And according to a report for The Hill by journalists Rebecca Beitsch and Emily Brooks, the congressman and staunch Donald Trump defender now enjoys greater prominence in the U.S. House of Representatives than ever before.
READ MORE: 'Because Biden didn't defy a subpoena!' Chuck Todd fact-checks Jim Jordan on Mar-a-Lago 'raid'
In an article published on February 2, Beitsch and Brooks explain, “Once a thorn in the side of House GOP leaders, Jordan has been elevated to be a top attack dog against Democrats. With the new power to not only direct congressional hearings but utilize subpoenas, Jordan will be both a standard-bearer for the GOP base and a sculptor of the Washington political landscape for the next two years.”
After serving in the Ohio State Legislature for over a decade, Jordan was first elected to the U.S. House in 2006. That year, Democrats enjoyed a major blue wave thanks to frustration with the George W. Bush Administration and the war in Iraq. But Jordan entered Congress via a highly gerrymandered district and has been reelected eight times; he is now serving his ninth term and has been a key member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus.
During the Boehner-era House, making Jordan chairman of the House Judiciary Committee would have been unthinkable. Now, in the McCarthy-era House, Jordan holds that position.
“It’s a role that will leave the fiery Jordan front and center in representing the GOP, this time imbued with subpoena power as he works to arm-wrestle Biden Administration agencies previously under little obligation to comply with minority oversight,” Beitsch and Brooks note.
READ MORE: 'Unbelievable': Twitter users blast Jim Jordan after 'real America' post backfires
Read The Hill’s full report at this link.
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In order to be chosen as House speaker and win over far-right MAGA holdouts, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California had to make a lot of promises. And that includes giving choice committee assignments to the hardliners in his caucus.
Journalist Emily Brooks, in an article published by The Hill on January 30, takes a look at three of those lawmakers.
Brooks reports, “The addition of Republican Reps.Chip Roy (Texas), Ralph Norman (S.C.), and Thomas Massie(Ky.) to the House Rules Committee — one of the concessions from Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that helped him secure the gavel — means that the frequent antagonists of leadership have the opportunity to create significant barriers to getting legislation to the House floor. But the three say that if they use their leverage, it will be to enforce the kind of open-process demands that fueled resistance to McCarthy in the drawn-out speakership battle."
Roy, Norman and Massie, according to Brooks, “could derail bills if they do not conform to their standards.” And Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts used the word “yikes” to describe the new rules process in the McCarthy-era House.
READ MORE: Hakeem Jeffries rips Kevin McCarthy's apparent double standard' with committee assignments
Read The Hill’s full article at this link.
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an ah 1 23vs 90 secs doomsday clock
despite all the controversy that has surrounded him, GOP Rep. George Santos of New York has maintained that he has no plans to resign from Congress and intends to serve out all of his two-year term. And Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California is in no hurry to see him go, as he has given Santos a position on the House Science Committee.
Santos’ critics have been arguing that with the Queens/Long Island congressman having lied about so many things, the last thing McCarthy should do is reward him with committee assignments. In addition to lying about his employment and education history, Santos falsely claimed that his grandparents were Holocaust survivors and that his mother was inside the World Trade Center during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Records obtained by NBC News show that Santos’ mother was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 11, 2001.
But journalist Andy Levy, co-hosting a late January episode of the Daily Beast’s podcast “The New Abnormal,” argued that as appalling as McCarthy’s decision to put Santos on the Science Committee is, it makes sense from a GOP standpoint. Republicans, Levy told co-host Danielle Moodie, “don’t believe in” science — and McCarthy thought he was putting Santos on a lesser committee.
READ MORE: George Santos is living the GOP's values
Levy told Moodie that "this is Kevin McCarthy showing exactly what he thinks of science and what he thinks of this Science Committee. It's like: Well yeah, throw George Santos on there. We don’t really need that Committee anyway. There are definitely no scientific problems threatening the entire planet. It all checks out if you look at it from that perspective. It makes perfect sense.”
Moodie, meanwhile, described her reaction upon learning that Santos will be on the Science Committee.
The co-host told Levy, “I laughed so very hard. And then, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this man is going to be on the Science Committee.’ Like, do we not realize how critical science is to where we are currently? We’ve had a global health pandemic, we have a climate change crisis, we have all of these things that are happening in the world that, you know, come back to this really important field.”
READ MORE:Kevin McCarthy standing by George Santos as scandals worsen
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https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-hard-right-rewarded-after-mccarthy-stance-boebert-plum-role-2023-1
no lnx
GOP Freedom Caucus is reaping its reward for holding House speaker election ransom, with even holdout Boebert given plum committee role
Sinéad Baker Jan 18, 2023,
GOP Freedom Caucus members initially held out on voting for Kevin McCarthy for House speaker.
Many have now received key appointments, including Lauren Boebert on the Oversight Committee.
McCarthy reportedly flipped members of the group by pledging committee seats for ultraconservatives.
Members of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus have benefited from holding back on supporting Rep. Kevin McCarthy's bid for House Speaker, with members, including Rep. Lauren Boebert, now receiving roles on key committees.
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Boebert and several other Freedom Caucus Republicans have been given seats on the House Oversight Committee, the main oversight body in the House of Representatives.
The committee will lead any investigations that Republicans launch into President Joe Biden and his administration.
Boebert has regularly criticized Biden, both questioning his competence and suggesting that his family are a "crime family."
Reps. Byron Donalds, Paul Gosar, and Scott Perry, other members of the Freedom Caucus, were also put on the committee, Axios reported.
Members of the Freedom Caucus, which include vocal Trump supporters and 2020 election deniers, repeatedly refused to support McCarthy in his bid for House speaker.
It took 15 rounds of voting for McCarthy to eventually get the support he required. Boebert never voted for him, even in the final ballot, when she was one of six holdouts.
McCarthy's bid to become the House speaker earlier this month was one of the most drawn out votes for the position in history. Most of the holdouts were members of the Freedom Caucus, with many of those flipping to vote for McCarthy in later ballots only after he agreed to key demands.
The New York Times reported in January that among the concessions McCarthy agreed to was granting ultraconservative members of the party approval over a third of the seats on the Rules Committee, which controls which legislation reaches the House floor.
Rep. Andy Bigs, a caucus member who didn't vote for McCarthy, and Rep. Dan Bishop, a caucus member who eventually gave his support, have kept their roles on the House Judiciary Committee,NBC News reported.
Meanwhile, Rep. Josh Brecheen, who voted for McCarthy on the 12th ballot, was given a seat on the Homeland Security Committee, while Reps. Mike Cloud and Andrew Clyde, who both eventually voted for McCarthy, have been given seats on the House Appropriations Committee.
Caucus member Marjorie Taylor Greene, who supported McCarthy throughout the process, was given a seat on theHomeland Security and Oversight Committees, and pledged on Tuesday to investigate Biden.
It is still not clear how much power McCarthy had to concede to finally get the role he has long coveted, Insider's Taiyler Simone Mitchell reported earlier this month.
Republicans won control of the House in the November midterms, but only by a slim majority, meaning that internal disagreements could limit their chance of pushing ahead with stated goals, including launching investigations into the Biden administration.
Republicans have 222 seats in the House, compared with 213 for the Democrats.
Read next
NEWS
The House speaker battle showed a 'schism within a schism' in the GOP as MTG and Matt Gaetz were on opposite sides and even a plea from Trump couldn't sway some of his biggest supporters
Freedom Caucus
Kevin McCarthy
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BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Republicans are getting hit for putting a bunch of firebrands and a couple of kooks on the House Oversight Committee. Again, the game that is being played here is that Republicans might not have done that, right? Republicans might not have put Paul Gosar on, for example, the House Oversight Committee if Democrats had not been in the habit of kicking people off committees. So now the game is going to be Democrats seat everybody, Republicans seat everybody and they kick other people of the opposing party who they don't like off these various committees.
It is worth noting here the media is making a huge deal over the fact that you have some of the, sort of, more loud members of the caucus -- more of the media-centric members of the caucus, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and Paul Gosar on the House Oversight Committee. But let me read you a list of the people on the House Oversight Committee....
So, like a thousand people on the Oversight Committee, obviously.
This is making everybody in the media utterly insane. But the reality is that putting people on the Oversight Committee so that they can ask tough questions of member of government is really not the biggest deal in the world. And it is good to have people who are more firebrandy, like Boebert, on committees like that one. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
If you're going to put people on committees then that seems like a pretty good committee to put them on. Those are the investigative committees where they, actually, would like to be and you're going to get a lot of aggressive questions answered.
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After a few arduous days of voting, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) finally won over his GOP colleagues on the 15th vote and began his stint as House Speaker. Now that he’s been in the role for a full week, McCarthy reflected on what he believes was a successful first week for the party in a recent New York Post op-ed.
In his reflection, McCarthy asserts that he is currently basking in the confidence that he and fellow House Republicans are already making significant progress on behalf of the American people.
However, MSNBC blogger Steve Benon reports that the Republicans’ impact, so far, is quite the opposite of successful, and he set the record straight on what the House GOP members have actually achieved
READ MORE:Kevin McCarthy's humiliation is a case study of entitled comeuppance
McCarthy wrote thathis reign is “the start of a new direction in Washington," insisting that the party is “following through on our pledge for a more accountable, more transparent, more open chamber."
"House Republicans began this Congress by passing a rules package that transitions away from the top-down, centralized control that has defined this institution for many years," the GOP leader claimed.
In his reporting, Benon argues that McCarthy's view of success is "a matter of perspective" and offers a look into the real impact of the rules package, as well as the impact of the ongoing list of what House Republicans have both done and “undone” in their effort to “address Americans’ top concerns."
Benon contends that McCarthy’s new rule package has already "weakened congressional ethics rules.” AlterNet previously reported that advocates pushed back on the rule changes, arguing in a letter to Congress that the "changes weaken [the Office of Congressional Ethics] to the point where the office would struggle to perform its core function, dismantling one of the only ways members of Congress are held accountable for ethics violations.”
House Republicans also managed to pass their first bill, which repeals funding for 87,000 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents. Though McCarthy claimed in his op-ed that the bill fulfills Republicans’ “commitment to America to protect hardworking taxpayers and small businesses from being spied on and shaken down by tax collectors," the Congressional Budget Office said the bill will increase the deficit by $114 billion.
Mother Jones Senior Editor Michael Mechanic notes that the "Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act," as the bill is named, is actually a misnomer. Rather than protecting taxpayers, it would instead protect “tax cheaters” by rolling back IRS funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
In the op-ed, McCarthy also shed light on his spearheading of the House GOP’s launch of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government. In a recent statement, and as a response to the launch of this committee, New York Democratic Congressman Jerry Nadler said, "Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy claim to be investigating the weaponization of the federal government when, in fact, this new select subcommittee is the weapon itself."
Nadler continued, “It is specifically designed to inject extremist politics into our justice system and shield the MAGA movement from the legal consequences of their actions.”
Benon also highlighted that Republican members have also started the process of “imposing new abortion restrictions," placed an alarming number of "election deniers” on existing congressional committees and have notably "pretended to care about the mishandling of classified materials” amid former Republican president Donald Trump’s investigation by the Department of Justice.
Despite McCarthy’s optimistic analysis of the GOP's first week in power, and his prediction of a bright future for America under their congressional leadership, Benon concludes that the party's success is, perhaps, in the eye of the beholder.
READ MORE:Paul Krugman: House Republicans’ economics are as 'divorced from reality' as their election lies
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Freshman New York Republican Congressman George Santos has been handed two committee assignments, including one on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, which oversees NASA.
MSNBC’s Ryan Nobles reports Santos, who is seen by many as a serial liar and is under investigation on multiple fronts, also landed a seat on the House Small Business Committee. Nobles reports Speaker Kevin McCarthy defended allowing the New York Republican two seats, citing “protocol.”
According to its government website, the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has broad jurisdiction across many areas. Some could pose potential national security risks.
The committee has jurisdiction over all research and development in critical areas including energy, astronautical and outer space, civil aviation, the environment, marine research, commercial application of energy technology, and standardization of weights and measures and the metric system.
READ MORE: McCarthy Runs Defense for Santos
In addition to NASA it also oversees the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation, and the National Weather Service.
Last week Santos suggested he would like to sit on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, promising that he was a “workhorse.”
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A Republican who served as the vice chairman of the powerful House and Ways and Means Committee blasted Kevin McCarthy after he lost the chairmanship to a congressman with far less seniority, apparently as part of a large set of deals the new Speaker of the House made to finally win the gavel. The 71-year-old Republican congressman might choose to retire, which would narrow McCarthy’s majority even more.
“You f**ked me. I know it was you, you whipped against me,” Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) told Speaker McCarthy, according to Puck.
Rep. Buchanan “exploded after losing Ways & Means to a McCarthy ally, fueling anxiety that he could retire out of pique—and that McCarthy’s favor trading has eroded his narrow margin of support.”
The chairmanship ultimately went to “the 42-year-old Speaker’s pet Jason Smith, potentially reducing Kevin McCarthy’s margin of error from four votes to three to pass critical partisan legislation,” Puck reports.
In a glimpse into how chairmanships are awarded, Puck also reveals fundraising plays a critical role, at least on the Republican side of the House.
“It couldn’t have been a surprise that Buchanan, who is independently wealthy and a key donor whisperer, isn’t taking the snub lightly. ‘Vern put out more money in fundraising than anyone else, and he wanted that job,’ said a source. Another noted that the congressman had raised more than $4.1 million for the National Republican Congressional Committee and threw together a last-minute fundraiser at his house—at McCarthy’s request—for Anna Paulina Luna, with special guest Newt Gingrich. ‘But Smith is a McCarthy crony,’ this person said.”
Buchanan was so angered he “proceeded to chew out McCarthy’s deputy chief of staff for floor operations, John Leganski. It was shocking to see such fury from Buchanan, who’s known for being mild-mannered. Indeed, I heard that the tirade was so heated that the Speaker’s security detail stepped in with a light touch. (McCarthy’s spokesperson Matt Sparks disputed this detail saying, ‘at no point did anyone have to step in.’ A spokesperson for Buchanan declined to comment.)”
READ MORE: ‘Vengeance Is Mine Declares the Lord’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Serves Up Old Testament Rant on ‘Evil’
According to Florida Politics, “The Ways and Means results were a surprise to many in [Buchanan’s] orbit. Buchanan had seniority on the panel over all other Republican members. And while there were reports McCarthy had encouraged Smith to run because he felt Buchanan had more loyalty to Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Buchanan’s political team always believed McCarthy could support the Florida lawmaker, the only Sunshine State Representative seeking a full committee gavel this Congress.”
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an ah 1 23
Over the years, one of the GOP’s favorite economic talking points has been that “tax cuts pay for themselves.” The argument is that when the wealthy are given tax cuts, they create new jobs and stimulate growth — and the growth makes up for a decrease in tax revenue. That argument was used when Republicans passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 during Donald Trump’s presidency.
But Washington Post opinion writer Catherine Rampell, in her recent column, argues that someHouse Republicans have unintentionally “admitted” that “tax cuts don’t pay for themselves.”
“The House rules package recently passed by the newly GOP-controlled House included some notable, occasionally troubling things,” Rampell explains. “For example, one set of measures would kneecap congressional ethics probes. Another provision would make it harder to swiftly raise the debt ceiling. But also tucked into the rules package, and attracting somewhat less attention, was a change to how lawmakers treat changes to tax law.”
READ MORE: GOP planning 'catastrophic default' if Democrats refuse to cut Social Security and Medicare
Rampell continues, “Specifically, they’ve rigged the system so that tax cuts will be much easier to pass, and tax rate increases harder to pass. On the other hand, investments in the poor and various other kinds of spending increases — on so-called mandatory programs, such as Medicare or food stamps — would be more challenging to get through.”
House Republicans, according to Rampell, have found “ways to stack the deck against raising taxes.”
“Under the new rules package,” Rampell observes, “the budgetary requirements are more one-sided — in favor of tax cuts. Going forward, tax cuts do not need to be offset with any sort of savings elsewhere in the budget. They can add trillions to the debt. No problem.But this is not true of spending programs. Spending program increases still have to be paid for.”
Rampell continues, “Not only that, but the savings to offset expansions of mandatory programs have to come from cuts to other spending programs. They cannot be offset by tax revenue increases. In practical terms: An expansion of food stamps can’t be paid for by raising taxes on the rich — only by cutting, say, Medicaid or disability benefits. So basically, any attempt to provide more support for poor or middle-income people is likely to come from other programs that help those same group. A separate portion of the House’s rules package says that any increase in tax rates would require a three-fifths vote rather than a simple majority, as in years past.”
READ MORE:Paul Krugman: House Republicans will risk a 'financial crisis' to 'slash Social Security and Medicare'
On Friday, January 13, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned, in a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, that she expects the U.S. to reach its $31.4 borrowing limit on Thursday, January 19. Yellen noted that there is a “limited amount of time” and urged Congress to “act in a timely matter.”
Rampell argues, “If you read between the lines, you’ll learn that even Republicans don’t believe their own longstanding promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves. After all, if the GOP genuinely believed this, they wouldn’t need to make it easier to pass tax cuts that don’t pay for themselves. Because such tax cuts would not exist.”
READ MORE:Republicans would rather tank the global economy than stop corporations from destroying the planet
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The new GOP-controlled U.S. House of Representatives got off to a chaotic start when Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California was rejected as House speaker in no less than 14 roll-call votes before he finally closed the deal with the 15th vote on Friday night, January 6. It was an uphill battle, but McCarthy now has the House speaker position he has spent years hoping for.
Media Matters’ Matt Gertz, in a listicle published by Media Matters on January 10, offers five “key takeaways” on the role that right-wing media played when McCarthy was struggling to get the far-right “Never Kevin” holdouts to support him as House speaker.
“After a historic week of messy party infighting,” Gertz observes, “the Republican-led House of Representatives has finally selected a speaker, passed a rules package, and gotten to work on its agenda of making the country safer for wealthy tax cheats. There are important lessons to learn from the chaos given the likelihood of future interparty rifts over the next two years — and the centrality of the right-wing media to the GOP.”
READ MORE: 'Absolutely furious': How the 'Never Kevin' chaos created bitter infighting at Fox News
The “takeaways” that Gertz offers in his listicle are: (1) “The GOP’s leaders are fueled by right-wing media,” (2) “Fox (News) is now the GOP establishment,” (3) The narratives of the right-wing press will form the core of the GOP agenda,” (4) “Fox’s competitors will use party fights to gun for the network’s market share,” and (5) “Tucker Carlson is the most influential right-wing media figure.”
“Gaining prominence in the modern Republican Party virtually requires a willingness to rub elbows with the right-wing press,” Gertz explains. “New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) spent the last several years cozying up to Fox hosts…. He also benefited from the backing of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the congresswoman from QAnon and an ally of Steve Bannon, and Jim Jordan (R-OH), whose regular Fox appearances helped him ascend from back-bencher to incoming House Judiciary chair.”
Gertz adds, “Meanwhile, McCarthy’s most prominent opponents included Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who has gained prominence entirely on the basis of his courting of the right-wing media and reportedly sought jobs at Fox and its competitors, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), another favorite of the fringe-right press. The right-wing media will be the key battleground for future fights between those sides.”
Gertz points out that “almost all of” Fox News’ “prominent personalities lined up behind McCarthy’s bid and sought to stifle the revolt against him.”
But while much of Fox News was rooting for McCarthy, some of the hosts at Newsmax TV expressed sympathy for the “Never Kevin” holdouts. Newsmax is the cable news outlet that prides itself on being to the right of Fox News and Fox Business and on being even more pro-Donald Trump.
“As Fox rallied behind McCarthy, its rivals in TV and digital media saw an opening,” Gertz observes. “They became the propaganda support for the anti-McCarthy campaign, savaging the would-be speaker and championing his critics. They also went after Fox, denouncing the network and its top hosts for purportedly selling out in an offensive more extensive than any from the right since late 2020, when Fox declared Joe Biden the president-elect and Trump urged his supporters to switch to its competitors. Expect more of this in the future as right-wing outlets try to use internal GOP fights to build their audiences at Fox’s expense.”
Carlson’s show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” debuted on Fox News in 2016, and he has since become the right-wing cable news channel’s top-rated host. And Carlson’s prominence at Fox News, according to Gertz, was obvious during McCarthy’s struggle to become House speaker.
“Carlson’s show is a festival of white nationalism, far-right conspiracy theories, and violent rhetoric that seeks to work his viewers into a frenzy,” Gertz writes. “It is also a guiding force in the modern GOP. While his colleagues were foursquare behind McCarthy, Carlson was playing all sides of the debate, criticizing the would-be speaker one moment, praising him the next, and, above all else, seeking specific concessions. It worked — Carlson got the House inquiry into the purported ‘weaponization’ of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies that he’s been building up to for years. Now, he’ll be able to spend the next two years cheering on the Republican efforts to spread his conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection and whatever else the panel tries to push.”
READ MORE: Why angry ‘Trump superfans' are turning against 'terrible journalist' Sean Hannity: report
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an 1 23 no lnx vids see comer anno
https://www.alternet.org/james-comer/
U.S. Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee is repeatedly pushing a baseless narrative that President Joe Biden, who has served his nation for 50 years, is “compromised.”
Chairman Comer, who has promoted the false theory of fraud in the 2020 election, blaming alleged “troubling reports of irregularities and improprieties” on Democrats, has been regularly criticized. He was deemed “a fundamentally unserious, dishonest, laughable caricature,” by Democratic strategist Sam Cornale on Wednesday, and mocked by The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank last year.
“In interviews with Fox News and other public pronouncements, Comer has alleged that the president’s son is responsible for just about everything,” Milbank wrote last year. “Why is fentanyl flowing into the United States? Hunter Biden. Why is President Biden pushing electric vehicles? Hunter Biden. Why isn’t the president tougher on Russian oligarchs? Hunter Biden. Why isn’t the administration pinning the pandemic on a Wuhan lab leak and battling China over currency manipulation? Hunter Biden and Hunter Biden. Why did the United States rejoin the Paris climate accord? Hunter Biden.”
On Tuesday, Fox News’ Sean Hannity led a highly-criticized interview with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, and Oversight Chair James Comer that was shockingly filmed inside the U.S. House of Representatives.
READ MORE: ‘The Deep State’ Wants to ‘Wipe Out the American Cowboy’ Warns GOP Congressman in Conspiracy-Laden Rant (Video)
New York University Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and authoritarian leaders, responded by declaring, “Americans, I give you…President Murdoch and the coronation of Fox News as state media.”
Hannity and the top Republicans were surrounded by dozens of House Republicans, sitting quietly, as the Fox News personality promoted their talking points.
In addition to posting video, journalist Matt Laslo tweeted, “Hannity noted *to the lawmakers* (who are obediently sitting and saying nothing which is WILD) that many of the lawmakers in attendance might not make it on TV tonight but they gave up an hour to support the Speaker.”
But Chairman Comer made news for two remarks (both seen in the clip below): calling Ukraine – which is fighting to protect democracy in Europe and thus around the globe – an “adversary” of the United States, and strongly suggesting President Joe Biden is “compromised.”
READ MORE: Watch: Democrats File Ethics Complaint Against George Santos After GOP Leadership Calls It an ‘Internal’ Matter
“You know there’s a pattern here with Communist China, with Ukraine, with Russia, with our adversaries across the world,” he told Hannity. “And you look at the bad decisions that Joe Biden makes and this White House makes every day that has a detrimental effect on every American – you wonder, is this President compromised?”
Hannity himself has promoted the baseless claim that President Biden may be “compromised.”
In a December interview with Comer, Hannity, known to have had nightly conversations advising Donald Trump when he was president, concluded with this question: “Do you believe it’s possible Joe Biden is compromised by Russia and China?” Comer dutifully replied, “I fear that he is.”
That word, “compromised,” is now being used by Comer and his fellow House Republicans repeatedly against President Biden – and his family.
On Monday, U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), the former chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, a former policy advisor to an anti-LGBTQ hate group, and an alleged co-founder of the Stop the Steal movement, called President Biden, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, and Hunter Biden, “compromised” – while making false claims about classified documents (and the Biden think tank) that were immediately handed over to the National Archives.
On Wednesday, Chairman Comer again baselessly used the word “compromised” against President Biden.
“The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating President Biden’s involvement in his family’s foreign business practices and international influence peddling schemes,” Chairman Comer wrote in an official letter published by ABC News, to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, making an unsubstantiated clam as if it were fact.
“The Committee is investigating President Biden’s knowledge of and role in these schemes to assess whether he has compromised our national security at the expense of the American people,” Comer wrote.
ABC News adds that Comer “called the Biden probe a ‘top priority for House Republicans during the 118th Congress.'”
READ MORE: GOP Congressman From Texas Calls for Defunding Homeland Security
“The American people must know the extent of Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s shady business deals and if these deals threaten national security and his decision-making as president,” Comer told ABC.
Comer wasn’t done using the “compromised” word against President Biden.
“In a letter to the White House counsel today,” Politico on Wednesday reported, “new Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said the committee ‘is concerned that President Biden has compromised (intelligence) sources and methods with his own mishandling of classified documents.'”
Chairman Comer has even set up a microsite on the House Oversight Committee’s website, titled, “Biden Family Investigation.”
On it, he alleges, “If President Biden is compromised by deals with foreign adversaries and they are impacting his decision making, this is a threat to national security.”
Donald Trump’s tax returns show numerous foreign bank accounts, including in China, and there were reports of real estate deals in foreign countries while he was president, but Republicans ignored that.
“Two years into his presidency,” OpenSecrets reported in 2019, “Donald Trump continues to make money from properties and licensing deals in nearly two dozen countries around the world, fanning the flames of concerns that the Trump administration is subject to unprecedented levels of foreign influence.”
“Trump continued to hold more than $130 million in foreign assets in a revocable trust as his second year in office came to a close, according to OpenSecrets’ analysis of the president’s most recent annual personal financial disclosure released by the Office of Government Ethics last month,” the website, which tracks money in politics, noted. “Trump’s business entanglements continue to leave him with positions, assets, trademarks and other business interests in more than 30 countries.”
In November of last year, CNN reported, “The governments of six foreign countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, spent more than $700,000 at then-President Donald Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel over the first two years of his presidency, according to newly released accounting documents.”
Watch the videos above or at this link.
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an 1 23 krugman
On Friday night, January 6, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California finally overcame a major obstacle: He got enough far-right MAGA Republicans to vote in favor of making him House speaker. A total of 14 roll-call votes had found McCarthy being repeatedly rejected for that position; on the 15th vote, McCarthy finally made it past the finish line.
McCarthy had to jump through countless hoops and make a lot of promises in order to get the MAGA holdouts, including members of the House Freedom Caucus, to vote for him. And many Democrats have been warning that House Speaker McCarthy is now indebted to the most extreme members of his party.
In an opinion column published by the New York Times on January 6, liberal economist Paul Krugman argues that McCarthy “seems set to be speaker in name only” — which is Krugman’s way of saying that far-right MAGA conspiracy theorists, during the next two years, will have more influence in the House than McCarthy himself. Those MAGA Republicans, according to Krugman, believe “a number of untrue things.” And that includes things about the U.S. economy.
“Many, perhaps most, believe that the 2020 election was stolen, or at least that Joe Biden is somehow not the legitimate president,” Krugman observes. “Many believe that COVID vaccines do more harm than good, a belief that has contributed to thousands of excess deaths among Republican partisans. Quite a few either subscribe to or are at least friendly to beliefs of the QAnon cult, which claims that the world is run by a vast conspiracy of pedophiles. And just about all of them, again as far as I can tell, believe that the U.S. economy is in terrible shape, with the federal government at great risk of going bankrupt.”
Krugman goes on to describe “the current state of the U.S. economy” as one in which “inflation has been coming down” and unemployment remains how.
“There wasn’t a recession in 2022,” Krugman notes. “Indeed, the U.S. economy ended the year with continuing strong job growth, and the unemployment rate all the way back down to what it was before COVID…. As usual, the GOP is insisting that the budget can and must be balanced entirely by cutting spending. And as usual, this insistence runs up against the reality that spending cuts that big would be politically impossible…. Other than military spending — only a small fraction of which, even now, goes to defending democracy in Ukraine — federal dollars mainly go to retirement and health care programs on which scores of millions of Americans, including many Republicans, depend.”
Krugman continues, “So, the new House majority is living in a fantasy world, insisting on a completely unworkable solution to a largely imaginary crisis. Unfortunately, as we learned on January 6, 2021, political fantasies can have dire real-world consequences.”
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https://www.alternet.org/Bank/irs-mccarthy/
cut IRS balloon deficit
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cli wire https://www.eenews.net/articles/conservatives-urge-mccarthy-to-disband-climate-committee/
conservative groups are pushing to end the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis if Republicans take control of the House next year.
In a letter to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), 18 conservative organizations said there is “no need for a select committee on climate change.”
“With no ability to advance legislation to the House floor, the Select Committee historically serves as a soap box for tax and spend politicians to intimidate American energy companies, energize climate activists and stump for big-government policies that raise energy prices for consumers and weaken American energy independence,” they wrote The group includes Americans For Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Energy Alliance President Tom Pyle and Heartland Institute President James Taylor....The letter reflects an ongoing split in the party that could echo into next year in the likely event that McCarthy becomes speaker after Tuesday’s midterms.
While Pyle, Ebell and others have spent years advocating against climate policy and disputing mainstream climate science, elected Republicans have taken on a softer tone on the issue in recent years.
If Republicans do choose to revive the panel, it could serve as a platform for the party to discuss Biden administration energy policies and for Select Committee ranking member Garret Graves (R-La.) to amplify the party’s messaging. Graves has declined to say publicly whether the committee would return.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) created a predecessor to the panel when Democrats took the House in 2008, then formed the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis in 2019 after they came back to power. It has no legislative authority but has at times caused friction with other committee chairs.
The conservative groups argued the issue would be better served being addressed by the standing committees.
“We urge you to disband the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis and let the committees with appropriate jurisdiction and legislative ability take up the topic of climate change,” they wrote.
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https://twitter.com/Mike_Palicz/status/1588610503978668032/photo/1
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