Last Call For Ridin' With Biden, Con't

President Biden announced at the White House today that a number of infrastructure programs would be getting federal money from the bill passed last year, starting with high-speed internet.

 

President Joe Biden Monday announced how $42.5 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law he championed will be distributed to expand high-speed internet access across the country.

The funding will go to all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories, and is aimed at bolstering internet access particularly for the 7% of people who live in underserved areas, according to the White House.

With White House remarks announcing the funding, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to kick off a three-week pitch aimed at touting their administration's investments across the country -- from the 2021 infrastructure law and a host of other legislation they argue is starting to make concrete improvements in Americans' lives.

It comes as Biden faces political headwinds on his handling of the economy, which consistently is a top issue for voters heading into the 2024 elections.

On Wednesday, he is scheduled to deliver what the White House is billing as a major speech on "Bidenomics" – what his advisers have labeled his economic philosophy of investing in the middle class.

 

Bidenomics includes money for buses and electric vehicles too.

The Biden administration announced Monday it will disperse $1.7 billion for more than 1,700 new buses around the country, some of which are expected to be electric.

Outlining the funds on a press call last week, an administration official said 700 of the buses will be zero-emission — a category that is often electric.

The official said an additional 610 buses will have “low or no” emissions, while 400 will be “traditional” buses and about 14 will be powered by hydrogen.

The Federal Transit Administration did not respond to follow-up questions by The Hill asking for additional details on the “traditional” and low-to-no emissions buses.

The funds announced Monday, which will also go toward other programs like workforce training, come from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This is the second slate of bus grants announced by the Biden administration under the law.

 

Republicans are already attacking this as "wasteful spending" and are vowing to cut or eliminate these programs in spending bills due October 1.

A group of U.S. Senate Democrats last week approved funding levels for dozens of federal departments for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1 — setting up a likely clash with House Republicans as a deadline approaches later this year.

The move to advance the spending plan was essential if Congress is going to avoid a partial government shutdown or a series of stopgap funding bills. But the levels agreed to by the Senate Appropriations Committee are significantly different from the ones their House Republican counterparts adopted last week. The panel approved the numbers following a party-line 15-13 vote.

The next steps will include the panel debating all 12 annual government spending bills and later moving to negotiate those with the House. If Congress doesn’t pass all of the bills by Jan. 1, a provision from the debt limit bill would trigger a 1% across-the-board spending cut until Congress approves all the funding measures.

Appropriations Chair Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, noted the panel is restricted in what it can spend by the debt limit and budget agreement that President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy brokered earlier this year.

That agreement set total spending for the fiscal year set to begin Oct. 1 at $1.59 trillion, with $886.3 billion going toward defense and $703.7 billion for domestic spending accounts.

Murray said she is concerned about those limits, and indicated the committee will take up additional government spending bills to address national disaster response, border security and to boost aid to Ukraine.

“The challenges we face under the limits imposed by the debt ceiling deal do not get any easier and they don’t get any better if we start going backwards, or if we abandon our return to regular order, or we write unserious bills.,” Murray said.

“And as we all know, chaos only helps those who want to see our government shut down, including our adversaries — like the governments of Russia and China — who are rooting for Congress to descend into chaos,” Murray added.

 

The real spending fight will take place in the months ahead.

Russian To Judgment: Putin On A Show

I've read some pretty wild reasons as to why Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin called off his coup after just a day or so, but Occam's Razor reminds us the simplest explanations are most often correct, and in this case, it's that "Putin threatened Prighozin's family and the families of the rest of Wagner's bigwigs."

 

Russian intelligence services threatened to harm the families of Wagner leaders before Yevgeny Prigozhin called off his advance on Moscow, according to UK security sources.

It has also been assessed that the mercenary force had only 8,000 fighters rather than the 25,000 claimed and faced likely defeat in any attempt to take the Russian capital.

Vladimir Putin will now try to assimilate Wagner Group soldiers into the Russian military and take out its former leaders, according to insights shared with The Telegraph.

The analysis offers clues into the mystery of why Prigozhin, the Wagner Group leader, called off his mutinous march on Moscow on Saturday just hours before reaching the capital.

There remains speculation about what formal deal was struck, if any. The Kremlin said on Saturday that Prigozhin would head to Belarus in exchange for a pardon from charges of treason.

There has been no comment from Prigozhin over the suggestion. It also remains unclear if Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defence minister, is set to be demoted or fired, as Prigozhin demanded.

On Sunday, the Russian MP Andrey Gurulyov, a prominent Kremlin propagandist, said there was “no option” but for Prigozhin and another high-profile Wagner figure to be executed.

Putin has not been seen in public since addressing the nation on Saturday morning, but a pre-recorded interview filmed earlier in the week was played on state television on Sunday.

 

As far as how long Prigozhin himself survives, well, that's the million-ruble question, isn't it?

On Sunday, intelligence officials and diplomats — unsure if they had just witnessed an aborted coup or a thwarted mutiny — were left to parse official Kremlin statements and re-watch blurry videos posted on Telegram, the social network that Prigozhin has used to try to convince the Russian people that the war in Ukraine has been a strategic disaster led by incompetent commanders and political sycophants.

Publicly, U.S. officials have highlighted the possible benefits to Ukraine from the chaos in Russia. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that the brief Wagner revolt, and how it was ultimately if tentatively resolved, showed “cracks in the facade” of Putin’s authoritarian leadership.

“Think about it this way: 16 months ago, Russian forces were on the doorstep of Kyiv in Ukraine, believing they would take the capital in a matter of days and erase the country from the map as an independent country. Now, what we’ve seen is Russia having to defend Moscow, its capital, against mercenaries of [Putin’s] own making,” Blinken said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

“Certainly, we have all sorts of new questions that Putin is going to have to address in the weeks and months ahead,” Blinken added.

Officials in the United States and around Europe said they were unsure of what comes next and were concerned about the instability that could follow an effort by Putin’s rivals, including Prigozhin, to unseat the president at a vulnerable moment.

High on the list of questions policymakers are now putting to their intelligence analysts is whether Prigozhin has managed to shake the foundations of the Kremlin so strongly that Putin will feel compelled to sack top generals or ministers leading the war, as Prigozhin has repeatedly demanded.

More immediately, though, there’s another question: What just happened? One minute, Prigozhin had taken over a key military headquarters in the south running Russia’s war machine in Ukraine. The next, he had agreed to a truce brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who’s more accustomed to playing second fiddle to Putin than intervening between warring factions.

“Why did it calm down so quickly, and how come Putin’s puppet Lukashenko got the credit?” asked one senior European diplomat, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. “What impact will it have on Russia’s defenses, and are there going to be any personnel changes in the military leadership?”

 

Remember, US intelligence services have been crippled for a decade by Dudebro Defector's leaks exposing means and methods against Russia. Moscow's been a black hole for the US ever since. The fact that we're seeing multiple US news outlets tells us that both the State Department and intelligence services know basically nothing other than "something was up" in the weeks leading up to the coup and know even less now about Russia and its nuclear arsenal is...not good.

The UK is in a better position, it seems, to gather information from Putin and his oligarchy, than we are. That should worry a lot of people.

A Supreme Week From Hell

With the last week of June upon us, several critical Supreme Court decisions are still awaiting, and these rulings could affect the rights and lives of tens of millions of Americans in the days ahead.

The Supreme Court is set to hand down key decisions this week on student debt relief, affirmative action and federal election laws as it enters the last week of its summer session with 10 cases pending.

The court has given no indication it will break its norm of finishing decisions by the end of June, and the next batch is slated to be released Tuesday morning.

Beyond the decisions, the court is also forming its docket for the next term. The justices on Monday could announce whether they will take up several high-profile cases, including on guns, racial discrimination and qualified immunity.

Here are the remaining cases as the Supreme Court wraps up its annual term:

President Biden’s plan to forgive student debt for more than 40 million borrowers will soon be greenlighted or blocked, depending on how the justices rule.

Biden’s plan would forgive up to $10,000 for borrowers who meet income requirements and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.

But the debt relief remains on hold until the Supreme Court resolves two lawsuits challenging the plan.

If either succeeds, the debt relief will be blocked.

During oral arguments, the conservative majority cast doubt that the administration had the authority to cancel the debts, expected to amount to hundreds of billions of dollars.

But before they can strike down the plan as unlawful, the justices must first decide whether any of the challengers have legal standing.

The six GOP-led states and two individual borrowers challenging the plan have promoted various arguments.

Missouri’s argument received the most attention, and conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals in questioning the state’s theory during oral argument.

The cases are Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown.

When the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action in college admissions in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her majority opinion made a temporal prediction:

“The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” she wrote.

That landmark decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, marked its 20th anniversary Friday.

It might not reach its 21st.

The justices have been weighing whether to overturn Grutter — and decades of affirmative action programs in higher education along with it — in challenges to admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

During oral argument, the majority appeared skeptical of upholding race-conscious college admissions.

The justices tend to write no more than one majority opinion for each monthly argument session.

Chief Justice John Roberts and conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh have not yet issued majority opinions for any cases argued in November, when the affirmative action challenges were heard, meaning one of them is the likely author.

The cases are Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.

Web designer Lorie Smith, an evangelical Christian, is challenging Colorado’s public accommodation law on free speech grounds.

Like many other states, Colorado’s law prohibits businesses that serve the public from discriminating based on sexual orientation.

Smith wants to expand her business to create wedding websites. But Colorado’s law would demand she create same-sex wedding websites if she wants to do so for opposite-sex unions, and Smith is vehemently opposed to gay marriage.

The justices are now set to decide whether public accommodation laws, as applied to Smith and other artists, violate the First Amendment by compelling their speech.

The conservative majority signaled support for Smith during oral argument.

Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch appear to be the likely pool of authors because they are the two remaining justices who have not issued majority opinions from a case argued in December.

The case is 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis.

The court is weighing a major election clash that will decide who has the final word on setting federal election rules.

North Carolina Republican lawmakers appealed a state court ruling that struck down their congressional map, promoting to the justices a sweeping argument known as the “independent state legislature” theory.

That theory asserts that state legislatures have exclusive authority to set federal election rules under the Constitution.

Adopting it would claw back the ability of state courts and state constitutions to block legislatures’ congressional map designs and other regulations surrounding federal elections.

It’s possible, however, that the court tosses the case without reaching the theory’s merits.

As the justices considered the case, Republicans regained control of North Carolina’s top court and overturned the underlying decision that struck down the state’s congressional map.

The Supreme Court has been paying close attention to whether they still have jurisdiction in the case, a potential offramp from the high-stakes dispute.

Based on the decisions released so far, Roberts or Gorsuch appears to be the likely author of the majority opinion.

The case is Moore v. Harper.

Again, predicting SCOTUS decisions is something even the experts get wrong, and I'm just a guy with a blog who probably should have walked away a decade ago. But as I'm here and you're reading this, I expect three really awful conservative decisions and a punt on the independent state legislature nonsense, with the court all but begging for cases where they can greatly expand on the precedents set in all four cases.

But if the worst comes to pass, and the Roberts Court sides with NC in the final case there, our democracy is all but finished. The notion that state legislatures can simply determine the electoral college outcome of each state regardless of the vote for president is heartstopping lunacy, and you'd better believe that Republican state legislatures will anoint Republican winners for everything across the board, no matter what the voters actually say or do.

Granted that would mean Democratic state legislatures could simply appoint democrats across the board too, but who knows how far that could go? We don't need to find out.

The point is, this is most likely going to be a dismal week, starting Tuesday.