Last Call For Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Con't

House Republicans are doing everything they can to punish the LGBTQ+ community for existing, and that means millions of dollars in cuts to eliminate federal projects entirely.

 

House Republicans struck three Democratic projects that would provide services to the LGBTQ community during Tuesday’s fiscal 2024 Transportation-HUD Appropriations markup, enraging Democrats on the committee.

The three earmarks total $3.62 million, with two in Massachusetts and one in Pennsylvania. The projects were eliminated as part of a Republican en bloc amendment that advanced a range of Republican cultural priorities, including a provision that would ban flying gay pride flags over government buildings. The vote was along party lines, 32-26.

Subcommittee ranking member Mike Quigley, D-Ill., then introduced an amendment to add the three projects back into the bill.

That amendment remained pending as the committee recessed around 3:45 p.m. as it awaited advice from the parliamentarian, after Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., asked that a statement Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis. made be struck from the record.

“There’s a saying, how do you show you’re a bigot without saying you’re a bigot," Pocan said during debate over the GOP amendment. "I’m just saying, there’s a saying."

Pocan also said Harris was too tired from reading the websites of the organizations he opposes to listen to what Pocan was saying, another comment Harris objected to.

Earlier in the meeting, Pocan said the committee’s move to strip the earmarks was “bigoted” and described his own experience getting attacked leaving a gay bar that left him unconscious.

“This is what you guys do, by introducing amendments like this,” Pocan said. “Taking away from people’s earmarks is absolutely below the dignity of Congress, and certainly the Appropriations Committee.”

The earmarks that are set to be stripped include two in Pennsylvania: $1.8 million that Rep. Brendan F. Boyle requested for an expansion project at the William Way Community Center in Philadelphia and $970,000 that Rep. Chrissy Houlahan requested for a transitional housing program at the LGBT Center of Greater Reading.

“This cruel and unjust decision is not rooted in any legitimacy, but instead in bigotry and hatred,” Houlahan said on Twitter.

The third project is $850,000 that Rep. Ayanna S. Pressley, D-Mass., requested for LGBTQ Senior Housing Inc. to convert a former Boston Public School building into 74 units of affordable housing for seniors.

Harris criticized the Greater Reading center for offering services to children as young as 7, and argued the Philadelphia center promotes protests held by the Young Communist League of Philadelphia. And he said the Massachusetts project would discriminate against those who are not LGBTQ or allies.

Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont. said taxpayers should not be paying for the resources for transgender individuals that the LGBT Center of Greater Reading offers.

“The question is, should taxpayers pay for this?” he said. “The answer is no.”

 

And there you are. 

 

Republicans are now instituting a dollar cost for keeping the T in LGBTQ+ in an effort to punish and split the community. Pretty soon it's going to be a legal and criminal cost as well if Republicans have their way in states they control, but these cuts are specifically happening in blue states too.

And yes, this is all part of hundreds of billions in cuts that House Republicans want to defund from President Biden's infrastructure and green energy bills.

A series of GOP bills to finance the federal government in 2024 would wipe out billions of dollars meant to repair the nation’s aging infrastructure, potentially undercutting a 2021 law that was one of Washington’s rare recent bipartisan achievements. The proposed cuts could hamstring some of the most urgently needed public-works projects across the country, from improving rail safety to reducing lead contamination at schools.

Some of the cuts would be particularly steep: Amtrak, for example, could lose nearly two-thirds of its annual federal funding next fiscal year if House Republicans prevail. That includes more than $1 billion in cuts targeting the highly trafficked and rapidly aging Northeast Corridor, which runs between Boston and Washington, prompting Amtrak’s chief to sound early alarms about service disruptions.

In recent days, Republicans have defended their approach as a fiscally responsible way to reduce the burgeoning federal debt. They’ve largely tried to extract the savings by slimming down federal agencies’ operating budgets next year, technically leaving intact the extra funding that lawmakers adopted in the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

But the effect would be the same: The GOP bills would reduce the federal money available for repairs. The cuts would come at a time when the country is grappling with the real-life consequences of its own infrastructure failures, from train derailments in Ohio and Pennsylvania to the collapse of a key portion of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia last month.

I guarantee you that these same House Republicans will blame Democrats when these cuts are forced into must-pass legislation later this year. 

The cruelty is the point.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Donald Trump is at this point exercising in villain monologuing, telling us exactly what his evil plans are if he is elected to anyone who will listen.

 

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.

“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.

The strategy in talking openly about such “paradigm-shifting ideas” before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that the former president has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.” He added, “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”

 

Hey folks?

 

If you're not a MAGA Republican cultist?

 

You're the "deep state" that Trump will eradicate.  

To recap, imagine the FCC yanking the licenses for any network that displeases Trump. Imagine the FTC and SEC fining "woke" businesses billions. Imagine the FBI, IRS, Border Patrol and US Marshals used against Democratic lawmakers and the people who voted for them. Imagine the EEOC or HUD saying there are too many Black employees or homeowners in a certain area that needs to be reduced in order to stop racism against white folks. Hell, imagine the FAA ending all commercial flights to California airports. If the guy can figure out how to use the EPA to shut off water to blue cities, he'll do that, too.

 

Keep laughing, because Trump and his merry band of fascist assholes are dreaming of this nonsense right now, and betting on a SCOTUS that will allow them to do whatever they want. You thought Dick Cheney's plenary executive era was bad? Wait until Trump gets back in power.

 

While Republicans continue to bleat and fart about Biden "politicizing the Justice Department" not only is Trump planning to order that same DoJ to go after Biden, Obama, Clinton, Pelosi, Schumer and every other Democratic politician, he's planning to use every other executive agency to do it too. 

Again, telling you his evil plans, because he figures nobody's going to stop him.

Unless we do that in 2024, nobody will ever stop him.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Didn't take more than a couple of business days for Georgia's state supreme court to flush Team Trump's dumbass argument to try to end Fulton County DA Fani Willis's investigation into his 2020 election interference in the state.

The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday unanimously rejected former President Donald Trump’s bid to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the 2020 presidential election probe and to quash a special purpose grand jury’s final report that recommends people be indicted.

Acting promptly to address Trump’s motion filed late Thursday, the state’s highest court said the former president’s legal team had failed to present “extraordinary circumstances” that warranted its intervention. As for Willis, Trump “has not presented in his original petition either the facts or the law” necessary to warrant her disqualification, the court said in an unsigned five-page order.

Willis has signaled that in the coming weeks she will ask one of two recently seated grand juries to hand up an indictment in the election probe. She has not said who could be formally charged, but Trump is expected to be one of the defendants.

With that on the horizon, Trump’s lawyers asked the state Supreme Court to put a halt to the grand jury proceedings and let their motion be heard. It also sought to prevent Willis from using any evidence obtained by the special grand jury, which heard testimony from almost 75 witnesses.

The state Supreme Court said the normal course of action would be for Trump’s legal team to file a petition first before a Fulton Superior Court judge, whose decision could then be appealed. Trump, the order said, cannot turn to the state’s highest court to try and “circumvent the ordinary channels for obtaining the relief he seeks without making some showing that he is being prevented fair access to those ordinary channels.”

Trump’s lawyers did file such a petition in Fulton Superior Court, saying they had done so out of an abundance of caution. No ruling has been issued in that case, which was filed Friday.

The state high court’s order indicated the Superior Court case is likely going nowhere. Even if Trump’s petition had been filed in an appropriate procedural posture, Trump “has not shown that he would be entitled to the relief he seeks,” the state Supreme Court’s order said.

I don't expect Trump will get anything, and Willis's indictment is expected sometime in the next six weeks or so, if not sooner. So we'll see Trump arraigned a third time this year on charges, and as Steve M notes, it'll probably raise his approval rating. 

Trump's numbers have improved. Gallup says his polling average while he was president was 41%; in his final poll while he was in office, he was at 34%. In other words, he's 12 points more popular than he was in the immediate aftermath of January 6. Presidents' poll numbers tend to rise after they leave office -- but other presidents haven't been repeatedly indicted on felony charges. Trump's legal woes haven't hurt his polling at all -- just the opposite, in fact. Two indictments haven't hurt him. A third one probably won't either. Even if he's convicted somewhere, he'll appeal and tell everyone that the conviction wasn't the last word. His poll numbers suggest that half the country will accept that argument. 

I want everyone to understand that all the things we find repulsive about Donald Trump are shrugged off by nearly half the public -- while Joe Biden's poll numbers are mediocre at best. As a result, Trump is polling better against Biden than he did in 2020, and he's polling better than he ever did against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Remember that he doesn't need to win the popular vote to win the Electoral College -- Republicans have a built-in advatange in the Electoral College now, primarily because Democrats' popular vote totals include millions of excess votes in California, and millions of votes in states where they're all but guaranteed to fall short (Florida, Ohio, Texas). And next year Biden will lose votes to whoever runs on the No Labels line, as well as to Cornel West on the Green Party line (who's getting campaign help from Jill Stein).

I know I'm repeating myself, but Biden is facing a much more difficult lift than most people realize. The evidence is in plain sight.

Trump will be at even higher numbers after the Georgia RICO charges and Jack Smith's remaining federal charges on 2020 election interference and now January 6th related crimes. There still could be other charges related to Trump's inaugural financing.  If things keep going at this rate, he's going to be well above 50% as more and more Americans decide they want to be on the "winning" side when the purges start in 2025.

Watch.