Last Call Fof The GOP Circus Of The Damned, Con't

With Mike Johnson as Ringmaster, the House GOP Clown Show is back, extorting American taxpayers coming and going in the name of owning the libs and protecting billionaire tax cheats.

The White House quickly dismissed a proposal Monday from House Republicans to pay for aid for Israel amid its war with Hamas by cutting funds for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

“Politicizing our national security interests is a nonstarter. Demanding offsets for meeting core national security needs of the United States — like supporting Israel and defending Ukraine from atrocities and Russian imperialism — would be a break with the normal, bipartisan process and could have devastating implications for our safety and alliances in the years ahead,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.

The White House last week outlined a roughly $106 billion national security supplemental funding request that included money for Israel and Ukraine, which is fighting off invading Russian forces, as well as investments in the Indo-Pacific, humanitarian aid and border security measures.

Jean-Pierre argued there is “strong bipartisan agreement” in providing funding for each of the areas included in the White House proposal.

“Threatening to undermine American national security unless House Republicans can help the wealthy and big corporations cheat on their taxes — which would increase the deficit — is the definition of backwards,” Jean-Pierre said.

“Playing political games that threaten the source of funding for Israel’s self-defense — now and into the future — would set an unacceptable precedent that calls our commitment to one of our closest allies into question,” she added. “We cannot afford to jeopardize that commitment as Israel defends itself from the evil unleashed by Hamas.”

 

As Jon Chait points out, the House GOP bill would eliminate the $30 billion in money in last year's infrastructure bill for the IRS, and send a fraction-- $4 million -- to Israel as aid.

House Republicans have framed this demand for weakening the IRS as a deficit-cutting measure. Johnson “has said the new expenditure must be covered by other spending reductions to avoid adding to the debt,” reports the Washington Post. Representative Chip Roy, a right-wing Republican, claims, “I support Israel, but I am not going to continue to go down this road where we bankrupt our country and undermine our very ability to defend ourselves, much less our allies, by continuing to write blank checks.”

But cutting IRS funding does not avoid bankrupting our country. In fact, it hastens it. IRS funding is used to increase collection of tax payments. In theory, the IRS could be funded so lavishly that additional funding does not yield any net tax revenue, but reality is nowhere close to this level.

Research suggests that every additional dollar in IRS funding yields many times more dollars in revenue, through both direct enforcement and by deterring fraud. One recent paper estimates that a dollar of funding yields $12 in revenue.

The Congressional Budget Office, which issues official budget estimates, is required by law to use far more conservative estimates of the budgetary impact of IRS funding. Even so, its conservative methods would predict the GOP plan to reduce IRS funding will increase the deficit by about $30 billion.

So Republicans are saying this is a plan to “pay for” Israel aid. But that description is close to the opposite of the truth. It’s not a pay-for, it’s an add-on. Democrats and anti-Russia Senate Republicans want to add Israel spending to spending for defending Ukraine. Johnson and the House Republicans want to take out the Ukraine spending and throw in a big handout to rich tax cheats.

 

Nobody likes the IRS, so the Clown Show figures this is an easy win on paper.In practice, this won't get past the Senate and everyone knows it, but the point is to run out the clock in 2.5 weeks and crash the economy as we near the shutdown point on Nov. 17.

It's taking hostages. Meet the new Ringmaster, same as the old Ringmaster.

A Bleak Test Case For College

A new NY Times analysis finds that rich kids score far higher on SATs/ACTs than poor kids, which is news something akin to "the sun is a burny hot fusion sphere" because it was true when I was in college 30 years ago, but it's even more true now and to an even more astonishing degree.

 

New data shows, for the first time at this level of detail, how much students’ standardized test scores rise with their parents’ incomes — and how disparities start years before students sit for tests.

One-third of the children of the very richest families scored a 1300 or higher, while less than 5 percent of middle-class students did, according to the data, from economists at Opportunity Insights, based at Harvard. Relatively few children in the poorest families scored that high; just one in five took the test at all.

The researchers matched all students’ SAT and ACT scores for 2011, 2013 and 2015 with their parents’ federal income tax records for the prior six years. Their analysis, which also included admissions and attendance records, found that children from very rich families are overrepresented at elite colleges for many reasons, including that admissions offices give them preference. But the test score data highlights a more fundamental reason: When it comes to the types of achievement colleges assess, the children of the rich are simply better prepared.

The disparity highlights the inequality at the heart of American education: Starting very early, children from rich and poor families receive vastly different educations, in and out of school, driven by differences in the amount of money and time their parents are able to invest. And in the last five decades, as the country has become more unequal by income, the gap in children’s academic achievement, as measured by test scores throughout schooling, has widened.

“Kids in disadvantaged neighborhoods end up behind the starting line even when they get to kindergarten,” said Sean Reardon, the professor of poverty and inequality in education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

“On average,” he added, “our schools aren’t very good at undoing that damage.”

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision ending race-based affirmative action, there has been revived political momentum to address the ways in which many colleges favor the children of rich and white families, such as legacy admissions, preferences for private school students, athletic recruitment in certain sports and standardized tests.

Yet these things reflect the difference in children’s opportunities long before they apply for college, Professor Reardon said. To address the deeper inequality in education, he said, “it’s 18 years too late.”

The children of the top 0.1 percent, whose parents earned an average of $11.3 million a year in today’s dollars, got far better scores than even the children of the families just below them, the new data shows. For the 12,000 students in this group, opportunities that drive achievement were amplified — exclusive private schools, summers traveling the world and college prep services that cost more than college itself — said John N. Friedman, an economist at Brown, who analyzed the new data with Raj Chetty and David J. Deming of Harvard.

But the larger inequality is between the children of the merely rich and those below them. As class differences have grown more extreme, and a college degree has become more crucial to achieving a middle-class lifestyle or better, it has bred competition among parents anxious about their children’s futures.

“People are kind of jockeying to get into the school district that they think is going to be most beneficial for their kid,” said Ann Owens, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, who studies inequality in education. “A lot of this is driven by rising income inequality. When people have more money to spend on stuff, they’re spending it on moving to an affluent neighborhood, or buying their kids test prep and tutors and all these things they think will help them.”

 

And why wouldn't parents help their kids with college test prep? Mine did. The more money you have available, the more assistance you can buy. It's an investment that pays off in the millions over the course of a career.

 

And remember, these numbers are from ten years ago, 2011, 2013, and 2015. It's even worse now in the post-pandemic, assistive-AI, post-affirmative action era of 2023 which we're only now starting to experience.

 

The book on this era of college admissions is being written now, and if you thought disparity was bad before, well...

The Housing Crisis Is Back

I've been warning of another 2008-style housing sector crash for a while now, and it looks like we're getting close to the current bubble bursting and taking the economy with it.

 

Sales of previously owned homes dropped 2% in September from August to a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 3.96 million units, according to the National Association of Realtors. Sales were 15.4% lower compared with September 2022.

This is the slowest sales pace since October 2010, during the Great Recession, when the market was in the midst of a foreclosure crisis. As a comparison, just two years ago, when mortgage rates hovered around 3%, home sales were running at a 6.6 million pace. The average rate on the 30-year fixed today is right around 8%, according to Mortgage News Daily.

“As has been the case throughout this year, limited inventory and low housing affordability continue to hamper home sales,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist. “The Federal Reserve simply cannot keep raising interest rates in light of softening inflation and weakening job gains.”

There were 1.13 million homes for sale at the end of September, down more than 8% from a year ago. Inventory is now at a 3.4-month supply, which is slightly better than last year, but only because sales have dropped so much. Supply is based on the current sales pace.

Adding to higher mortgage rates, the median price of a home sold in September was $394,300, up 2.8% year over year. Roughly 26% of home sold above list price, due to the lack of supply which is resulting in bidding wars.

First-time buyers made up just 27% of sales. Historically, they make up about 40%.

While sales were lower across all price points, they fell the least on the higher end. That’s because there is more supply at the higher price points and because higher-end buyers can often use cash. Mortgage demand is now at the lowest level since 1995, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

All-cash sales made up 29% of all September transactions, up from 27% in August and up from 22% in September of last year.

“Although affordability is a headwind, the renewed upward energy that followed the Fed’s September projections might have prompted some shoppers to rush to the closing table, lest they face higher mortgage rates and even worse affordability in the months ahead. If so, this could mean a bigger lull in sales activity in the coming months,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist for Realtor.com, in a release.

 

This all should feel very, very familiar to ZVTS readers, except it's not bundled mortgage tranches that's going to kill us, it's hedge funds and venture capitalists with hundreds of billions buying up every house in your county to keep prices artificially high by creating scarcity. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of games being played on Wall Street, but this time the Too Big To Fail recipients will be gigantic hedge funds and Silly Valley vampires.

 

When those prices stop going up at the Big Casino, a lot of wealth is going to vanish again. Maybe trillions this time.  It won't be "We don't know who owns this mortgage" but "We know exactly who owns it and if they don't get bailed out, the economy will collapse."

When you have almost a third of housing transactions being made in all cash, that's unsustainable. Eventually nobody's going to be able to afford the rent and the property goes fallow, and these hedge fund mega-landlords aren't going to be able to sell at all.

 

And if the housing bubble exploding doesn't crash the economy, well, the banks are running for the hills because Jerome Powell is almost certainly going to raise interest rates again until the economy breaks, and the way things are going in the US House, the federal government will augur in halfway through next month.

And then?

KABOOM.

Alabama's Bloody Tide

Alabama Republicans have been refusing federal Medicaid expansion money for years now, and like most non-expansion red states, more and more hospitals are reducing services or closing up entirely as a direct result. Three hospitals near Bimingham are shutting down their maternity wards over the next several weeks, leaving tens of thousands of women without a place to go to deliver babies by Thanksgiving.

 

By the end of the month, two Alabama hospitals will stop delivering babies. A third will follow suit a few weeks later.

That will leave two counties — Shelby and Monroe — without any birthing hospitals, and strip a predominantly Black neighborhood in Birmingham of a sought-after maternity unit.

After that, pregnant women in Shelby County will have to travel at least 17 miles farther to reach a hospital with an OB-GYN. And because the county, one of Alabama’s largest, is bordered by another whose hospital also lacks an obstetrics unit, some of those residents are also losing the closest place they could go to deliver their babies.

“There’s a sense of dread knowing that there’s going to be families who are now not only driving to the county over, but driving through three counties,” said Honour McDaniel, director of maternal and infant health initiatives for the March of Dimes in Alabama.

People in Monroe County, meanwhile, could face drives between 35 to 100 miles to a labor and delivery department.

Trekking that far to give birth is not unheard of in Alabama, in which more than a third of the counties are maternity care deserts, according to the March of Dimes — meaning they have no hospital with obstetrics care, birth centers, OB-GYNs or certified nurse midwives.

The state has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country; only three others had higher rates between 2018 and 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Alabama also had the nation’s third-highest infant mortality rate in 2021, the latest data available.

Physicians currently or formerly affiliated with the Alabama maternity units about to close fear the consequences for pregnant women and babies, especially if people are not able to reach birthing hospitals quickly enough in emergencies.

“People are going to show up delivering in the ER, and you’re going to have bad outcomes,” said Dr. Jesanna Cooper, an OB-GYN who formerly worked at Princeton Baptist Medical Center, the Birmingham hospital closing its maternity services. “If you show up with a very premature baby and deliver in the ER, and you don’t have a NICU and you don’t have an obstetrics team, things aren’t going to go well.”

 

And of course the real kicker:

The closures come as the need for obstetrics care in Alabama is anticipated to rise as a result of its abortion laws. The state has banned almost all abortions since June 2022.

 

At this point, one would have to believe that the state Republican party, having banned abortion, and the same party letting hospitals die on the vine like this, really don't want those people to have sex at all without potentially ruinous consequences.  

When we talk about Alabama having a similar socioeconomic profile to say, Albania, understand that a poor exploitable populace is what the ruling government wants, and has wanted, for generations.

Shutdown Countdown, Clown Town Edition, Con't

House Speaker and Clown Town Ringmaster Kevin McCarthy is running out of time to make a spending bill deal with Democrats before the clowns do him in. WaPo's 202 crew:

Tell us if you’ve heard this one before: The deadline to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month is fast approaching with little sign of how differences will be resolved.

Here’s where things stand in both chambers:

In the House: A half-dozen House Republicans on Sunday proposed a deal to temporarily fund the government until Oct. 31 to buy time for a broader spending agreement.
But it’s far from certain whether the proposal will unite the fractious GOP conference and secure the votes needed to send the bill to the Senate, where it is expected to be rejected, Leigh Ann and our colleague Marianna Sotomayor report.

The tentative agreement is an attempt to appease the conservatives, who held up all progress on government spending until they received assurances on deep spending cuts and other policies, including border restrictions.

But many in the hard-line House Freedom Caucus immediately lambasted the proposal even though Freedom Caucus leaders, Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Chip Roy (R-Tex.) and Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), negotiated the proposal with Reps. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), Stephanie I. Bice (R-Okla.) and Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) of the Republican Main Street Caucus, whose members don’t want to shut down the government.

The proposal would lead to immediate, dramatic spending cuts across the federal government, with agency budgets being slashed by 8 percent, except for the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which would be funded at current levels.

The continuing resolution to keep funding the government temporarily would also include a border security bill that House Republicans passed through their narrow ranks in May, while excluding the divisive E-Verify work requirement provision to check immigration status that is opposed by some Republican moderates, especially in New York and California.

If this bill gets a vote and moderates accept it, they are likely to face the possibility of campaign ads highlighting that they voted for deep cuts to programs such as education, food safety and environmental protection.

The goal is to vote on the bill Thursday.

If the proposal makes it through the House, it has zero chance of passing the Senate, and it’s unclear how the two chambers will strike a deal to avoid a shutdown.

 

In other words, McCarthy doesn't even have the votes for an opening offer, while Senate Democrats are hashing out the "real" bill, and the biggest reason is that the hardliner MAGA chuds think 8 percent cuts to the Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Justice, State, and Homeland Security aren't draconian enough.

As to whether McCarthy survives the month without a deal, well, Hakeem Jeffries has some leverage now, doesn't he?

 

McCarthy's biggest problem is he's incompetent. But I don't see how Matt Gaetz is going to talk Jeffries into getting rid of McCarthy when that only makes the prospect of a deal worse. 

We'll see, but we're down to two weeks now, and the prognosis is still that McCarthy shuts down the government and the country will clearly be able to blame him for it, or that he folds and takes the Senate bill with Hakeem Jeffries's help and then gets run out of town like Boehner before him.

He loses either way.

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.

Ukraine Grain In The Membrane

Russia says it will let the UN-brokered grain export deal for Ukraine through Black Sea ports expire in retaliation for a Ukraine security forces attack last week on the main land bridge to Crimea.

 

The announcement appeared to be the most serious blow yet to a year-old agreement that had been a rare example of fruitful talks between the warring nations, and had helped to alleviate part of the global fallout from Russia’s full-scale invasion. Ukraine is a major producer of grain and other foodstuffs, and the United Nations had warned that some countries in the Middle East and Africa faced famine if Kyiv could not export its goods via the Black Sea.

A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told journalists on Monday that the agreement was “suspended,” but added that the decision was not connected to the attack hours earlier on the Kerch Strait Bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea. Russian officials blamed Ukraine for the bridge attack, but Kyiv has not taken responsibility.

Speaking about the grain agreement, Mr. Peskov said: “As soon as the Russian part is fulfilled, the Russian side will immediately return to the implementation of that deal.”

Russia has repeatedly complained about the agreement, which it considers one-sided in Ukraine’s favor. Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Monday issued a statement that emphasized its objections, including what it described as continued Ukrainian “provocations and attacks against Russian civilian and military facilities” in the Black Sea area, and said that the United Nations and Ukraine’s Western allies had not addressed Russian demands.

“Only upon receipt of concrete results, and not promises and assurances, will Russia be ready to consider restoring the ‘deal,’” the statement said.

The deal, known as the Black Sea Grain Initiative and brokered by the United Nations and Turkey, had been set to expire on Monday.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said he would speak to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia about the agreement and signaled hope that he would agree to rejoin it.

“Despite the statement today, I believe the president of the Russian Federation, my friend Putin, wants the continuation of this humanitarian bridge,” Mr. Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul.

Last week, the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, sent a letter containing proposals for Mr. Putin in an effort to meet Russia’s conditions for extending the deal. U.N. and Turkish negotiators spent the weekend awaiting a response from Moscow as the clock ticked down. Grain exports from Ukraine’s ports had dwindled almost to zero in the days before the deal expired.

The deal successfully eased shortages that resulted from blockades in the first months of the war, which caused global wheat prices to soar. It allowed Ukraine to restart the export of millions of tons of grain that had languished for months, and it has been renewed multiple times, most recently in May.

But Moscow has argued that while the deal has benefited Ukraine, Western sanctions have restricted the sale of Russia’s agricultural products. In an effort to address Russia’s demands, Mr. Guterres sent Mr. Putin proposals that he said would “remove hurdles affecting financial transactions” through Russia’s agricultural bank while allowing the Ukrainian grain shipments to continue.

In addition to its hope for smoother financial transactions, Russia has sought guarantees that would facilitate exports of its own grain and fertilizers, and the reopening of an ammonia pipeline that crosses Ukraine.

Ukraine has exported 32.8 million tons of grain and other food since the initiative began, according to U.N. data. Under the agreement, ships are permitted to pass by Russian naval vessels that in effect have blockaded Ukraine’s ports since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The ships are inspected off the coast of Istanbul, in part to ensure they are not carrying weapons.

 

Wheat prices were up by more than 3% in the Chicago commodities market after the announcement. Grain prices are nowhere near where they were in Spring of 2022 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a massive rise in wheat and grain prices worldwide, but if this agreement is suspended for too long things could get very bad, very quickly.

We'll see what happens with Turkey mediating.

Last Call For Shutdown Countdown, Military Edition

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has lost control of his caucus again, with MAGA Republicans now threatening to sink the yearly Pentagon budget over abortion, gender-affirming health care, and Ukraine funding.

 

The House is set to vote on Thursday on whether to limit abortion access, bar transgender services and end diversity training for military personnel, part of a series of major changes that hard-right Republicans are seeking to the annual defense policy bill, including pulling U.S. aid to Ukraine.

The debate was unfolding after Speaker Kevin McCarthy capitulated late Wednesday to a small group of ultraconservative Republicans who had threatened to block the legislation, which provides a yearly pay raise for U.S. troops and sets Pentagon policy, if their proposals did not receive consideration.

Instead the House moved forward on Thursday, with the fate of the $886 billion bill still in doubt. The far right’s proposals to strip away military assistance for Ukraine stand little chance of passage given the strong bipartisan consensus behind the aid, but it was not clear whether a proposal to bar the Biden administration from sending cluster munitions might draw enough bipartisan backing to succeed.

And the measures imposing socially conservative policies on the Pentagon are extremely popular among Republicans. Should they pass, Democrats are likely to abandon the bill in droves, sinking it altogether.

Shortly before debate got underway, Representative Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts, the Democratic whip, told CNN that there would be no support for the bill in her party if it contained the provision to bar the Pentagon from providing time off and reimbursement to service members traveling out of state to get an abortion or other reproductive health services.

It was an unusual situation for the defense bill, normally a bipartisan matter that is considered one of the few must-pass items to come before Congress. This year, with Republicans in control of the House, it has become a partisan battleground whose very survival is in doubt.

“It is outrageous that a tiny minority of MAGA extremists is dictating how we’re going to proceed,” Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts and the ranking member of the Rules Committee, said early Thursday morning, denouncing G.O.P. leaders for accepting the demands of what he called “a dozen far-right wing nuts.”

“When you have a razor-thin majority in one half or one branch of government, you don’t get to dictate every single amendment that comes to the floor,” Mr. McGovern said. “Democracy means compromise.”

Republican leaders, who can afford to lose no more than four votes on their side if Democrats remain united, have been counting on Democratic votes to help pass the defense bill. Some of them have expressed frustration with hard-right lawmakers’ demands to load the bill with a deeply conservative cultural agenda that could cost them those critical votes.

“We’ve got some people that want all the things that will cost us Democratic support, but won’t guarantee you yet, if they don’t get X, Y, or Z, that they will actually vote for final passage or even for a rule,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the rules panel, said in an interview Wednesday.

Still, Mr. Cole said he would likely vote in favor of the socially conservative amendments.

The proposals have alienated some mainstream Republicans, including those from politically competitive districts. Their opposition could block the changes, potentially salvaging the defense measure.

If you think that the MAGA meatballs are going to be allowed to sink the defense bill, normally I'd say no way in hell.

But Kevin McCarthy's "in charge".

So who knows?  

Expect scores of amendments for the legislation, any which could sink the bill, and if Republicans manage to get things passed like stripping all assistance for Ukraine's defense or banning abortions for military personnel, well, things are going to get bad.

We'll see.

mage

Indepen-Dunce Week: Defunding The DoJ

The Clown Caucus is vowing to defund the Justice Department, including slashing funding for the FBI, CIA, NSA, and whoever else may have evidence against Donald Trump, and impeachment of AG Merrick Garland is still coming, these stalwarts promise.

 

House Republicans are taking their fight with the FBI and Justice Department to a new level — weighing punitive steps against both agencies that would have been unfathomable a decade ago.

Half a year into their majority, and with an increasingly restless right flank, the House GOP is ready for a confrontation after a spate of recent decisions it sees as either anti-Trump or pro-Biden. At the top of the list: Hunter Biden’s plea deal with federal investigators and Donald Trump’s indictment over his handling of classified documents.

That push against the FBI and DOJ will become a cornerstone of Republicans’ agenda in a chaotic back half of the year. Speaker Kevin McCarthy has already threatened to explore impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland. Conservatives have also gone after FBI Director Christopher Wray, weighing whether to force a vote recommend booting him from office.

Additionally, some conservatives who believe the agencies have targeted Republicans are eager to cut the law agencies’ budgets. Then there’s the long-brewing congressional fight over a soon-to-expire warrantless surveillance program that has sparked bipartisan accusations of abuse by the FBI.

Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), a leadership ally, predicted that conservative colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee’s government politicization panel and their allies would take their battle against FBI and DOJ to the chamber floor. Those Republicans, he said, “believe the best way to send a message is to use the power of the purse.”

Whether they prevail in the form of budget cuts, impeachment, or other measures remains to be seen. Conservative efforts could backfire, instead exposing tension with centrist and more establishment Republicans who embrace the party’s pro-law enforcement roots — the prevailing sentiment inside the GOP before Trump came along.

The fault lines emerged during closed-door House GOP spending meetings in recent weeks, as some lawmakers warned others to think twice about how they use spending bills to target specific agencies. In one session, conservative Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) said he privately urged his colleagues to “be careful” about how they talk about Justice Department funding, adding: “I’m not in favor of cutting DOJ.”

 

It doesn't matter what Republicans like Ken Buck want, Donald Trump went on a social media tirade over July 4th, demanding action by the GOP and demanding protests in the streets to get the Justice Department to drop all charges. 

What Trump wants, his flunkies get him, or they find out the hard way what happens to "traitors".

Ask Huckleberry Graham how that goes.

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.

Shutdown Countdown, The Revenge Con't

Republicans didn't get anywhere near what they wanted in the debt ceiling hostage situation they created for themselves earlier this year, so apparently they see a second bite at that poison apple with the raft of government spending bills due in September, complete with trillions in Social Security and Medicare cuts and rollbacks of Biden's infrastructure and environmental bills.

 

After narrowly avoiding a federal default, the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-led Senate are now on a collision course over spending that could result in a government shutdown this year and automatic spending cuts in early 2025 with severe consequences for the Pentagon and an array of domestic programs.

Far-right Republicans whose votes will be needed to keep the government funded are demanding cuts that go far deeper than what President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to in the bipartisan compromise they reached last month to suspend the debt ceiling, but such reductions are all but certain to be nonstarters in the Senate.

The looming stalemate threatens to further complicate a process that was already going to be extraordinarily difficult, as top members of Congress try for the first time in years to pass individual spending bills to fund all parts of the government in an orderly fashion and avoid the usual year-end pileup. If they cannot, under the terms of the debt limit deal, across-the-board spending cuts will kick in in 2025, a worst-case scenario that lawmakers in both parties want to avoid.

The clashes began this week, when House appropriators began considering their spending bills and, working to appease their ultraconservative wing, said they intended to fund federal agencies at below the levels that Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy had agreed to.

Democrats balked, saying the move would wreak havoc with the economy and the smooth functioning of government.

“I fully intend to follow the dictates of what we passed in the Senate and the House and what the president signed,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee. “I am putting them in their box of chaos,” she said of House Republicans.

The approach was particularly unwise, she added, given that many of the right-wing lawmakers it was aimed at appeasing reflexively vote against government spending bills anyway.

“I don’t believe the country wants us to be there; they don’t want chaos,” Ms. Murray said. “They don’t want a small minority of people to dictate where our economy is going to go.”

Facing a rebellion by hard-right Republicans over the debt limit agreement, Mr. McCarthy and his leadership team blindsided Democrats this week by setting allocations for the 12 annual spending bills at 2022 levels, about $119 billion less than the $1.59 trillion allowed for in the agreement to raise the debt ceiling.

The lower spending levels, demanded by Freedom Caucus members who shut down the House last week to register their ire at the debt limit deal, were pushed through the Appropriations Committee on a party-line vote on Thursday after hours of acrimony during which Democrats accused Republicans of backtracking on the compromise.

“The ink is barely dry on the bipartisan budget agreement, yet we are here to consider the Republican majority’s spending agenda that completely reneges on the compromises struck less than two weeks ago,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee.

Representative Kay Granger, Republican of Texas and the committee’s chairwoman, said using the lower number would allow the House to “refocus government spending consistent with Republican priorities.” Mr. McCarthy said that he considered the spending caps established in the agreement simply as a maximum, and that the House wanted to push spending lower.

“There is no limit to how low you could go,” he said, asserting that Republicans wanted to show the public that they could “be more efficient in government, that we can save the hardworking taxpayer more, that we can eliminate more Washington waste.”

But the divergent approaches on either side of the Capitol from the two parties are certain to make passing the spending bills extremely difficult. Failure to pass and reconcile the House and Senate bills by Oct. 1 could lead to a government shutdown. And if the individual bills are not approved by the end of the year, a 1 percent automatic cut would take effect that defense hawks say would be devastating for the Pentagon and U.S. support of Ukraine’s military.

 

So the GOP plan is "Our hostage situation failed, what we need is a new hostage situation!"  The thought process is that maybe more Republicans will side with killing fewer hostages this time around, making the cruelty more palatable and targeted instead of scorched earth.

 

It's so bad that the damage would be a near-permanent economic depression caused by a catastrophic $16.3 trillion spending cut over the next ten years.

The Republican Study Committee (RSC), the largest conservative caucus in the House, put a heavy focus on opposing “woke” policies in its annual model federal budget, while proposing $16.3 trillion in spending cuts over a decade.

The model budget for fiscal 2024, first shared with The Hill, includes policies that oppose gender-affirming health care for transgender youth and beyond, boost protections for religious institutions, and take aim at critical race theory — a framework that examines systemic racism in institutions.

“Nearly every major problem facing our nation can be traced back to a failure to budget,” said RSC Chairman Kevin Hern (R-Okla.).

“It all boils down to something we’ve heard the President say quite a few times this year: Show me your budget, and I’ll show you your values. Our values are clearly on display with this budget,” Hern said.

It would balance the federal budget in seven years, according to the caucus, while also cutting spending by $16.3 trillion and taxes by $5 trillion over a decade. It cuts spending slightly less and cuts taxes more than the group’s model budget from last year, which had $16.6 trillion in spending cuts and $3.9 trillion in tax cuts.

“The RSC Budget is a reflection of our commitment to defending our constitutional rights, championing conservative values, and safeguarding the foundational principles that make our country great,” Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.), chair of the RSC Budget and Spending Task Force, said in a statement.

The Senate doesn't want to go through this again, so we'll see what happens, but yeah, there was no way Kevin McCarthy and his Clown Show were ever going to keep their word in the debt bill.

Shutdown Countdown, Armageddon Edition, Con't

With House Republican Circus of the Damned Ringmaster Kevin McCarthy and President Biden reaching a tentative debt ceiling deal last night, it's now up to Republicans in the House and Senate to pass it, and there's no guarantee at all that McCarthy has the votes.

 

To get the legislation through a fractious and closely divided Congress, Mr. McCarthy and top Democratic leaders must cobble together a coalition of Republicans and Democrats in the House and the Senate willing to back it. Members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus have already declared war on the plan, which they say fails to impose meaningful spending cuts, and warned that they would seek to block it.

So after spending late nights and early mornings in recent days in feverish negotiations to strike the deal, proponents have turned their energies to ensuring it can pass in time to avert a default now projected on June 5.

“This is the most conservative spending package in my service in Congress, and this is my 10th term,” Representative Patrick T. McHenry, Republican of North Carolina and a lead member of Mr. McCarthy’s negotiating team, said at a news conference on Capitol Hill on Sunday morning.

House Republicans circulated a one-page memo with 10 talking points about the conservative benefits of the deal, which was still being finalized and written into legislative text on Sunday, hours before it was expected to be released. The G.O.P. memo asserted that the plan would cap government spending at 1 percent annually for six years — though the measure is only binding for two years — and noted that it would impose stricter work requirements for Americans receiving government benefits, cut $400 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for global health funding and eliminate funding for hiring new I.R.S. agents in 2023.

“It doesn’t get everything everybody wanted,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters on Capitol Hill. “But, in divided government, that’s where we end up. I think it’s a very positive bill.”

Mr. Biden told reporters that he was confident the deal would reach his desk and that he would speak with Mr. McCarthy on Sunday afternoon “to make sure all the T’s are crossed and the I’s are dotted.”

“I think we’re in good shape,” the president said. Asked what sticking points were left, he said, “None.”

Still, the deal, which would raise the debt ceiling for two years while cutting and capping some federal programs over the same period, was facing harsh criticism from the wings of both political parties.

“Terrible policy, absolutely terrible policy,” Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” referring to the work requirements for food stamps and other public benefit programs. “I told the president that directly when he called me last week on Wednesday that this is saying to poor people and people who are in need that we don’t trust them.”

Ms. Jayapal, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said she wanted to read the bill before she decided whether to support it.

Some on the right had already ruled out doing so before seeing the details.

“No one claiming to be a conservative could justify a YES vote,” Representative Bob Good, Republican of Virginia and a member of the House Freedom Caucus, wrote on Twitter. Representative Dan Bishop, Republican of North Carolina, posted his reaction to news of the deal: a vomit emoji.

Russell T. Vought, President Trump’s influential former budget director who now runs the Center for Renewing America, encouraged right-wing Republicans to use their seats on the House Rules Committee — which Mr. McCarthy granted them as he toiled to win their votes to become speaker — to block the deal. “Conservatives should fight it with all their might,” he said.

Some Senate Republicans, who under that chamber’s rules have more tools to slow consideration of legislation, were also up in arms.

“No real cuts to see here,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said on Twitter. “Conservatives have been sold out once again!”

“With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?” asked Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, who has vowed to delay the debt limit deal.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, was also critical — though for a much different reason. He called the deal too stingy, demanding more robust military funding, particularly for the Navy.

“I am not going to do a deal that marginally reduces the number of I.R.S. agents in the future at the expense of sinking the Navy,” Mr. Graham said on “Fox News Sunday."

So, a huge pile of sausage being made, Republicans get their Medicaid work requirements expansion, and get hundreds of millions in IRS, CDC, and Covid funding cuts, and yes, Biden's student loan forgiveness program remains all but dead after SCOTUS killed it.

Worse, Student loan repayments are going to have to restart later this year, and that's going to hurt millions of Americans, period.

But Biden is getting 98% of the funding passed last year in the Infrastructure and Green New Deal bills too, so...nobody's going to be happy with this bill.

Will it pass?

We'll see. I remind everyone who is complaining about this bill that you elected Republicans to run the House, and this is the direct result.

Maybe stop electing them?

Last Call For The Colorado Compact

As climate change continues to cause more storms, droughts, floods and shortages of water and crops in the Western US and elsewhere, states are turning towards broad agreements on rights for waterways like the Colorado River out of necessity.

The seven states that depend on the Colorado River announced on Monday that they have reached an agreement on cutting water use from the river over the next three years to prevent reservoirs from falling to critically low levels.

Representatives of the states reached the consensus after months of negotiations, with California, Arizona and Nevada together committing to reduce water use by about 3 million acre-feet between now and the end of 2026.

The Biden administration announced that the federal Interior Department, which had laid out options for larger reductions, will analyze the proposal from the states.


“This is an important step forward towards our shared goal of forging a sustainable path for the basin that millions of people call home,” Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland called the agreement a testament to the Biden administration’s commitment to working with states, tribes and communities in the West “to find consensus solutions in the face of climate change and sustained drought.”

The federal government last month had laid out two options for preventing the Colorado River’s depleted reservoirs from reaching dangerously low levels, saying the water cuts could be imposed by following the water-rights priority system or by using an across-the-board percentage. Under those alternatives, federal officials said the cuts would reach more than 2 million acre-feet — a major reduction from the three states’ total apportionment of 7.5 million acre-feet.

 

Water sources like the Colorado River, Great Salt Lake, and the Rio Grande are drying up at record paces. Cities are becoming less and less sustainable as they are right now, places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles will have to adapt over the next decade or essentially perish.

Of course, singling out those cities isn't completely fair despite them being ludicrously unsustainable for their size, because we all have a lot of work to do, and increasingly little time and political will to do it in.

Sunday Long Read: Personal Foul By The QB

Our Sunday Long Read this week is Michael Rosenberg's piece in Sports Illustrated detailing how former all-everything NFL QB Brett Favre almost certainly knew what he was doing by leveraging his fame in his home state of Mississippi, in order to get a state college sports facility built for his daughter's team with what was supposed to be welfare assistance for some of the poorest people in America.

 

Three years ago, the State of Mississippi arrested a 67-year-old grandmother with no known criminal record at her office.

Nancy New was a lifelong educator. She had run her nonprofit, Mississippi Community Education Center, for more than 25 years. When state auditor Shad White’s agents interrogated New on multiple occasions, she didn’t even bring an attorney, according to a person with direct knowledge of the meetings. At the end of one of those interviews, one of New’s alleged accomplices, 63-year-old accountant Anne McGrew, expressed surprise that the auditor’s agents had guns, the person says. The agents explained that while they worked for the auditor’s office, they were not auditors. They were state police.

At that time, they were focused on the state’s welfare-agency director, John Davis, and two former professional wrestling brothers he allegedly enriched. But the misspending of welfare funds went far beyond that. Investigators kept peeling back layers of the scheme until they arrested New and a handful of others, at which point White declared, “The scheme is massive. It ends today.”

Only a few weeks later—after investigators stumbled upon more information, more was leaked publicly and the story exploded—did a more full picture come into focus:

New was mostly following orders from Davis, the welfare chief.

Davis largely operated on behalf of Mississippi’s then governor, Republican Phil Bryant.

And Bryant worked relentlessly to please the state’s most famous athlete, NFL legend Brett Favre.

Favre has portrayed himself as an unknowing and tangential participant in the welfare-embezzlement scheme. But it appears nobody benefited more. Interviews and an analysis of legal filings and records, which include dozens of text conversations—some of which have not previously been public—paint Favre as a ringleader from start to finish.

Favre had promised his alma mater, Southern Miss, that he would build a volleyball facility for his daughter Breleigh’s team there. But he was obsessed with not paying for it himself. So he got Mississippi’s welfare agency to build indoor and beach volleyball facilities for him—using money intended for the poorest people in the nation’s poorest state—and then he kept pushing to get more for a business venture, with the governor often helping him, according to texts from those involved.

“Brett Favre’s repeated demands for this grant money were certainly the driving force” for millions of dollars in illegal transactions, says former U.S. Attorney Brad Pigott, who had been hired by current Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves to independently investigate the scandal—until Pigott started looking at the volleyball deal and Reeves fired him.

Favre was a leading character in a drama full of political alliances and personal favors; of celebrities and their sycophants; of unchecked power and unconscionable use of federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds. Illegal behavior was so institutionalized that some perpetrators showed no fear of getting caught. One of Favre’s business partners referred to Bryant as part of his “team,” to which the governor replied, in part: “We will get this done," according to texts Sports Illustrated obtained over the course of several months of reporting. The governor texted Favre about “our cause.”

When it unraveled—starting with an accidental, seemingly innocuous discovery—the most powerful players started outmaneuvering the others. Eventually, people who plotted with one another plotted against one another—a theme that continues to play out in both ongoing civil and criminal cases.

Mississippi Today’s Anna Wolfe won a Pulitzer Prize for her exemplary reporting on all aspects of the scandal. SI set out to explain and examine Favre’s role.

At times, the former quarterback comes off as comically clueless. Often, he seems highly manipulative. Throughout, he was relentless in his pursuit of government money. After Davis was forced out of his job at the Department of Human Services and the scheme started to splinter, Favre kept pushing. At one point he told New, “I’ll keep asking weekly.” Shortly before the arrests, as he fretted about securing cash, he wrote in a text, “I [can’t] focus on anything else with this looming.”

Three years later, something else looms over Favre: the distinct possibility he will be indicted.

This is the story of what Favre did—and how he did it.

 

This is a critical piece, along with Anna Wolfe's stellar reporting breaking the scandal, I covered it back in September.

The larger issue is that a guy that got paid tens of millions to throw a ball around was too cheap to pay for his legagy buildings at his alma mater and then conspired to embezzle the price tag by taking it from state welfare cash. It may be the most literal case of welfare fraud in US history.

Number Four here needs to go to prison, along with all the folks in former Gov. Phil Bryant's government who assisted this fraud.

Shutdown Countdown, Armageddon Edition, Con't

Folks like Alex Shephard at TNR continue to believe that Kevin McCarthy and the House GOP are trying to run a hostage negotiation and that they are doing it badly, and while that would be true if McCarthy was actually trying to play the standard Washington kabuki script, that's not what is actually going on.

What McCarthy and the Circus of the Damned are actually doing is trying to crash the economy so that America blames Biden and elects the GOP to power in 2024. If you accept they will not negotiate and will kill as many hostages as possible until their terms are 100% met, everything they are doing makes complete sense.

 

McCarthy has been more or less open about the fact that this is not a real bill. “This bill is to get us to the negotiations,” he said on Tuesday. “It is not the final provisions, and there’s a number of members who will vote for it going forward to say there are some concerns they have with it. But they want to make sure the negotiation goes forward because we are sitting at $31 trillion of debt.”

This bill may get the Republican Party to those negotiations over raising the debt limit, which must be done by early June or the United States will face potentially calamitous economic consequences. It’s hard to assess what the outcome of potential negotiations will be, especially since the White House’s position is “Send a clean debt limit bill, or pound sand.” What is clear, however, is that this bill is a disaster for Republicans.

It is not being treated that way everywhere. The New York Times’ Carl Hulse, who should know better, described it as “a narrow win but a win for Speaker Kevin McCarthy nonetheless.” Politico’s Playbook, meanwhile, declared that this was a coronation of sorts, an occasion in which McCarthy “proved his naysayers wrong.” I suppose if you squint a certain way, you can see it, but these laurels should actually be seen as participation trophies.

Sure, if McCarthy had failed to get anything across the line he would have looked completely incompetent, even by the standards of recent Republican House leaders. Nevertheless, a bill filled with devastating cuts and manifestly unpopular positions is arguably worse than getting anything done at all. The GOP passed a messaging bill that provides Democrats with the better message, something that they can use to hurt the GOP in swing districts for the next two years; a bill that shows that Republicans’ ultimate goal is to gut health care and food stamps and education—and even veterans benefits. There is no universe in which a clean bill, raising the debt ceiling and moving on, isn’t more politically advantageous for the GOP.

The whole sorry episode has only shown that Kevin McCarthy just isn’t good at this. It’s never been entirely clear why he wanted to be speaker of the House in the first place. It’s always been clear, however, that he is not up to the task. To gain the gavel, McCarthy had to make a series of humiliating, enfeebling concessions to his far-right flank that more or less disempowered him. Now, put in a position where he needed to get something done, he once again had to cave to the same right flank—indeed, it was Matt Gaetz, who had previously relished holding back McCarthy’s ascendence to the speakership, who forced him to add more draconian Medicaid work requirements to the bill.

McCarthy essentially wakes up every morning conscripted into a race to the bottom by those in his party with the worst political instincts and ideas. This should not be particularly surprising to McCarthy, but his abject supplication is nevertheless notable. This bill does not matter. It will not pass. It is not intended to pass. Republicans had an opportunity to aim a productive salvo at swing voters, the better to convince them that GOP majorities can deliver prosperity, and giving them some sign that the party was tacking back from the heights of extremism that alienated voters in the last midterm elections. Instead, the message being sent is that the party is all about owning the libs and slashing aid for veterans and the poor. The GOP can’t even fake being a party interested in governing anymore. That’s bad news for the man stuck presiding over this clown show.

 

Again, the problem is the assumption that the goal is to get to a negotiation without crashing the economy, and that's completely wrong, and the more quickly people realize this, the fewer people suffer.

 

This isn't a hostage negotiation, it's a hostage execution with manufactured post-facto justification. Republicans are admitting as such as Paul Davies at WaPo explains:

“However you want to frame it, we’ve got to sit down and talk. And so I think it’s critically important that all the parties sit down, at the White House with the president, and start having these conversations. And they should meet every single day until they get there, together,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), co-chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, told reporters Friday.

But those House Democrats, having lost the majority in last November’s elections, lack the leverage to actually start such talks. Instead, from the relatively moderate Coons to a fiery liberal like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Senate Democrats view even a modest concession, such as a relatively powerless debt commission, as a reward for taking this hostage.

“The problem with that approach is that it signals to the rest of the world that America’s commitment to paying its debts is contingent on some underlying political negotiation over spending that is otherwise too damn contentious to get through on its own,” Warren told reporters Thursday.

But this Democratic approach seems to assure that little will happen until the deadline draws perilously close and then, at that momentous hour, assumes House Republicans will cave out of fear for getting blamed for tanking the economy.

That strategy, so far, is nowhere close to working. House Republicans in swing districts are digging in for a protracted fight and expressing little interest in passing a so-called clean debt hike. They are demanding spending cuts that will begin to rein in the debt.

“It’s certain that if we don’t raise the debt ceiling our economy will crash, but if we don’t do things to limit spending, our economy will also crash,” said Rep. Nick LaLota, one of six New York Republicans on the Democratic target list for next year’s elections. “Reasonable people should adopt that dual-pronged understanding.”

“We have to negotiate. Passing a clean debt ceiling [hike] is not going to happen. He’s going to have to meet us partway,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), whose district favored Biden by 6 percentage points in 2020, recently told reporters.

Democrats also seem to be betting that Senate Republicans will step in as more mature political actors and defuse this situation, but even one of the most productive dealmakers is supporting McCarthy’s approach.

“This bill is not the final deal, but it opens the door for a negotiated deal,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said Thursday.

Cassidy noted that in past fiscal showdowns, the perceived victor tended to be the one that made the other party look most reckless.

“Partly the public perception of this is going to be really important,” he said.

 

To recap, Republicans are looking to see how many hostages they can kill and still come out looking like the good guys. The second Democrats give in, that number goes up to "everyone".

Republicans believe they can win the political standoff by making Biden and Democrats look petty by refusing a basic negotiation. Fresh off his narrow win on his debt bill, McCarthy held a valedictory news conference Wednesday evening in Statuary Hall.

“The Democrats need to do their job. The president can no longer ignore [us] by not negotiating,” McCarthy said.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Team Biden has figured out that Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis having school libraries living in fear and banning books to keep from being defunded is, you know, a major vulnerability for the entire Republican party.

Presidential campaigns often are waged on whether or not the country is ready to “turn the page.” President Joe Biden wants his reelection bid to hinge on whether or not there is a page to turn.

The president’s team has made the issue of book banning a surprisingly central element of his campaign’s opening salvos. He referred to GOP efforts to restrict curriculum — Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” was the third most banned title in America last year — in his first two campaign videos. He presents himself in each video as the defender of the country’s core values, a bulwark against an extreme Republican Party rolling back America’s freedoms.

The campaign’s first TV ad, a 90-second spot running in seven states over the next two weeks as part of a seven-figure buy, warns Republicans “seek to overturn elections, ban books and eliminate a woman’s right to choose.” Biden followed up with a tweet hitting “MAGA extremists … telling you what books should be in your kids’ schools.” That followed the explicit reference to book bans in Biden’s launch announcement video Tuesday.

The early focus on book banning is part of the campaign’s attempt to reinforce a broader message, said one Democratic adviser involved in the effort: Biden is the only one standing between the American people and a Republican Party determined to roll back rights and limit freedoms.

“People just don’t understand why we should ban books from libraries,” said the adviser, who spoke with candor about the campaign’s strategy on the condition of anonymity. “So it’s a measure of extremism and another thing [Republicans] are trying to take away.”

Biden’s message is based on mounds of research by Democratic pollsters over the last several months, as the president’s advisers and the Democratic National Committee have expanded the constellation of pollsters and data analysts tracking voter attitudes and the effectiveness of certain messages.

The potency of book bans, along with issues like abortion and gun safety, is quite clear, according to multiple people familiar with the campaign’s data.

“Book banning tests off the charts,” said Celinda Lake, one of the Democratic pollsters who tested the issue for Democrats. “People are adamantly opposed to it and, unlike some other issues that are newer, voters already have an adopted schema around book banning. They associate it with really authoritarian regimes, Nazi Germany.”

Authoritarian book bans: poll-tested, voter disapproved!

I keep seeing all this agita over Biden being too old and too unpopular to win a second term, and all I have to say is "It's pretty easy to beat the party that's in the news weekly for banning books in schools and public libraries."

At least, I hope it is.  I mean, it's not like Trump is disagreeing with the concept, either.

Or, anyone in the GOP, for that matter. This is a slam dunk and I'm glad to see Biden opening with the most obvious "These parties are not the same" comparison in decades.

Book Ban Bonanza, Con't

For now, a Texas county commission will keep their library open after a federal judge ordered the county reverse its book ban for the public library, which caused the Llano County, Texas county commissioners to consider closing the library rather than comply with the judge's order.

A small-town Texas library system threatened with extinction was spared Thursday after the Llano County commissioners said they would abide by a federal judge's order to restore the books they banned rather than shut the system down.

Llano County Judge Ron Cunningham, who is the head of the county commission, made the announcement after county leaders heard from more than a dozen residents at an emergency meeting.

"The library will remain open while we try this in the courts, rather than through the news media," said Cunningham, who said the county has already spent more than $100,000 on legal costs and vowed to appeal the federal judge's decision.

Outside the county building, loud cheers could be heard as jubilant opponents of shutting down the libraries celebrated.

"That's a victory," the Rev. Kevin Henderson of Sunrise Beach Federated Church declared. "That's a victory for free speech!"

A disappointed Eva Carter disagreed. She said she was on the side of those who wanted to close the libraries and predicted the federal judge's ruling would be overturned on appeal.

“We need to fight it in the court system and get this salacious material removed," Carter, 82, said. "We have God on our side, and we expect he will get the glory when this is said and done.”

Before the commissioners made their decision, residents were given two minutes apiece to weigh in at an emergency meeting. And some of the first to speak denounced the commissioners for threatening the century-old system that, they said, has long been a vital part of the community and a haven for students seeking to do schoolwork and research.

They also dismissed as nonsense claims some in the community have made that the targeted books are pornographic.

"These books are not pornographic," librarian Suzette Baker, who works at the Kingsland branch of the system, told the commissioners.

Jeff Scoggins paused from livestreaming the meeting to warn the commissioners that they will hear it from the voters if they bow to a "minority" that is pushing to close the libraries.

It will be a black eye for Llano County, and "this could domino" to other Texas counties where local libraries have been targeted by small but vocal groups of conservative critics, Scoggins warned.

 

Of course, as Republicans target public schools, public libraries, public transportation and public services for elimination, it's up to us to get involved locally and fight to keep even basic governance. Republicans don't want any of it.

 

What they want are dumb, uneducated slaves who are suffering while they profit. And in a lot of red states, they are going to get that. Everyone gets to deal with church-based everything: health care, education, social services who only help who they see as worthy of it. Don't want to play ball? Suffer without, die or leave, it's all the same to the "Christians" running the show.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Leaving county school and election boards and other local offices to the MAGA CHUDs mean you don't get these offices, or the services they provide, back. The goal is to drive everyone with a brain cell out of local civil service until they control everything, and then shut all of the local services -- schools, libraries, and elections -- down for good. A perfect example is Buckingham County, Virginia:

 

Lindsey Taylor loved running elections here.

The previous registrar had spent nearly three decades in the job, and Taylor, 37, hoped to do the same when she was hired in 2019. She loved her staff and the volunteer poll workers, and she took pride in the detail-oriented work. She implemented dozens of new laws in 2020, ran elections through the pandemic and impressed many in the rural, conservative, tight-knit community of Buckingham County.

But then the voter fraud claims started.

In January, the GOP assumed control of the Buckingham County Electoral Board that oversees her office, and local Republicans began advancing baseless voter fraud claims that baffled her. The electoral board made it clear it wanted her out of the job.

“There were people saying that they had heard all these rumors — that the attorney general was going to indict me,” Taylor said, days after leaving the office for the last time. “Mentally, I just — I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Three weeks ago, frustrated and heartbroken, Taylor, along with two part-time staffers, quit. Their resignations followed a deputy registrar who left in February, citing the same conflict.

The four departures left residents without a functioning registrar’s office; there was no way to register to vote or certify candidate paperwork, at least temporarily.

A state elections worker arrived in town a week later to try to pick up the pieces, looking through drawers and opening the mail, as the two remaining members of the electoral board — both Republicans, because the one Democrat had also recently quit — began the difficult process of restaffing a completely barren department.

“It’s just sad that the big lie has come to Buckingham,” said Margaret Thomas, who worked as the general registrar in Buckingham County for more than 28 years before retiring. “And before it was never here.”

Years after former President Donald Trump began pushing his lies about stolen elections, communities like Buckingham County are grappling with the aftershocks: What happens when election denialism drives out the people needed to keep local democracy running?

“A lot of election officials I’ve talked to are asking themselves: Why am I doing this? Why am I getting paid like a civil servant to be constantly harassed?” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research that helps support election officials. “Whether it’s the intent or not, the effect is to drive a lot of these public servants — upon who we’ve relied for decades in some cases — out of the field, which will leave elections more vulnerable than they’ve been before.”

Which is, of course, the exact point of the exercise.

Republicans don't want any of these to exist outside of their total control of them.