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

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.

Shutdown Countdown, Armageddon Edition, Con't

Ringmaster Kevin McCarthy and the Shutdown Clowns are once again announcing their plans to cut trillions in social spending and crash the economy with the debt ceiling, not caring that the demand is supposed to be "or" not "and".

In his speech Monday, McCarthy sought to lay the blame for any potential market fears of a default at Biden’s feet.

“The longer President Biden waits to be sensible to find an agreement, the more likely it becomes that this administration will bumble into the first default in our nation’s history,” he said.

Biden, meanwhile, has demanded that House Republicans produce their own budget as a starting point to negotiations. But getting his entire caucus — whose members disagree on what to cut and by how much — to sign on to one budget blueprint would be a herculean task for the Republican speaker.

“Let me be clear, defaulting on our debt is not an option. But neither is a future of higher taxes, higher interest rates, more dependency on China and an economy that doesn’t work for working Americans,” said McCarthy. “Addressing the debt requires us to come together, find common ground and reduce spending.”

The fact that McCarthy was roping two unrelated legislative tasks – passing a debt ceiling hike and approving a federal budget – together as one deal remained a nonstarter for the White House.

In statement Monday morning, White House spokesman Andrew Bates accused the California Republican of “holding the full faith and credit of the United States hostage, threatening our economy and hardworking Americans’ retirement.”

Despite McCarthy’s attempt to portray the White House as lagging behind or late to the table, the current state of affairs lines up with what a White House official told CNBC earlier this spring.

The Biden administration planned to pursue negotiations in earnest with Congress only after Tuesday’s tax deadline.

At that point, the official said, the federal government would have a better idea of how much revenue was coming in from taxes, and how far it would go toward paying the country’s bills. This would influence how urgently the White House would need to reach a deal with congressional Republicans.

 

Biden has a budget proposal and a debt ceiling proposal, McCarthy doesn't have the votes for either. That's the difference...and oh yes, the spending cuts the House GOP want would smash a hole in the economy, and the House also wants the ability to take the economy hostage again a year from now so they can do even more damage and blame Biden for it.

It's a pretty horrific situation, but the worst part is, again, McCarthy doesn't have the votes to pass anything without Democratic help. Maybe that forces him to the table, but maybe that leads to default and economic depression.

We'll see. The clock is running out and all sides know it.

Shutdown Countdown, Armageddon Edition, Con't

House GOP "moderates" are making it clear that there will be trillions in cuts to social programs, education, infrastructure and health care or they will crash the economy and throw us into a depression.

 

House Republicans from swing districts are flatly rejecting the White House’s position that there be no negotiations with Congress over raising the national debt ceiling, insisting that they won’t bend to the Democrats’ take-it-or-leave-it approach to avoid the first-ever debt default with no conditions attached.

The Republicans, many of whom hail from districts that President Joe Biden won or narrowly lost and are seen as the most likely to break ranks with their party’s leadership, said they are not willing to back a “clean” debt ceiling increase, insisting there must be some fiscal agreement first. That view is in line with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who is calling for negotiations with the White House before a possible default occurs later this year.

But the White House and Senate Democratic leaders, wary of the ferocious fiscal fights with the House GOP that dogged then-President Barack Obama, see little upside in giving in to any of the GOP demands to impose spending cuts on domestic programs, believing instead that McCarthy and Republicans will cave facing the prospect of a looming default and with no viable legislative alternative.

The White House is badly miscalculating, Republicans say.

“I don’t think that a clean debt ceiling is in order, and I certainly don’t think that a default is in order,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate whose Pennsylvania district Biden carried, told CNN, indicating he planned to engage in bipartisan talks next week over a compromise proposal when lawmakers return to Washington.

The early back-and-forth underscores how Washington is heading into a period of deep uncertainty with global ramifications – with a newly empowered House GOP majority eager to use its leverage in the debt limit fight to enact priorities that otherwise would be ignored by the Democrats running the Senate and the White House. Some congressional sources in both parties believe that McCarthy may ultimately be jammed by the Senate and forced to vote on a bipartisan compromise crafted in that chamber, though that scenario would take weeks if not months to play out.

o work around McCarthy, Democrats would need to win over some potential GOP swing votes to sign on to a “discharge petition,” which could force a House floor vote if six Republicans signed on to the effort with the 212 Democrats currently in the chamber.

Republicans insist there’s little chance of that tactic succeeding at the moment – especially if it’s to force a vote on a clean debt ceiling increase with no other conditions or concessions.

“I’m not in favor of Biden’s no-negotiating strategy, and I’m not inclined to help,” said Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican whose Nebraska district Biden carried, indicating Republicans campaigned against government spending and inflation. “The GOP can’t demand the moon, and Biden can’t refuse to negotiate. There needs to be give-and-take on both sides.”

Bacon said there needs to be “good faith” talks with the White House and some “commitment for fiscal restraint” before he would even consider signing onto a discharge petition.

 

The problem is there is no Republican "good faith" effort.  It's trillions in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, schools, roads, bridges, food stamps, health care, you name it, House Republicans are going to get rid of it.

The second Biden gives in to these terrorists, America will collapse.  Luckily, the White House and Democrats have a couple months to go around and say "Look, these guys are going to crash the economy, cost us millions, maybe tens of million of jobs, wipe out benefit programs that you've earned and paid for, and for what?"

We'll see where we go on this, but we're at the point where both parties believe they have already won the argument, and that's just not true.

 

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

I've been telling everyone that President Manchin holds 100% of the cards in the Build Back Better/Good Package negotiations because he's stacked the deck, and now we finally get to see the last and most powerful card in his hand if David Corn's story is to be believed, and Manchin actually calls it "Bullshit".

In recent days, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) has told associates that he is considering leaving the Democratic Party if President Joe Biden and Democrats on Capitol Hill do not agree to his demand to cut the size of the social infrastructure bill from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion, according to people who have heard Manchin discuss this. Manchin has said that if this were to happen, he would declare himself an “American Independent.” And he has devised a detailed exit strategy for his departure.

Manchin has been in the center of a wild rush of negotiations with his fellow Democrats and the White House over a possible compromise regarding Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better package, and Manchin’s opposition to key provisions—including Medicare and Medicaid expansion, an expanded child tax credit, and measures to address climate change—has been an obstacle that the Democrats have yet to overcome. As these talks have proceeded, Manchin has discussed bolting from the Democratic Party—perhaps to place pressure on Biden and Democrats in these negotiations.

He told associates that he has a two-step plan for exiting the party. First, he would send a letter to Sen. Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, removing himself from the Democratic leadership of the Senate. (He is vice chairman of the Senate Democrats’ policy and communications committee.) Manchin hopes that would send a signal. He would then wait and see if that move had any impact on the negotiations. After about a week, he said, he would change his voter registration from Democrat to independent.

It is unclear whether in this scenario Manchin would end up caucusing with the Democrats, which would allow them to continue to control the Senate, or side with the Republicans and place the Senate in GOP hands. In either event, he would hold great sway over this half of Congress.

Without Manchin’s vote, the Democrats cannot pass the package in the 50-50 Senate. And a vote on this measure is key to House passage of the $1 trillion bipartisan road-bridges-and-broadband infrastructure bill the Senate approved in August. (Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, has also been a problem for the party.) Manchin has met with Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and a variety of his fellow Senate Democrats this week in an effort to strike a deal. Through it all, he has insisted that $1.75 trillion is his top and final offer, and he has constantly said no to proposed programs that almost every other congressional Democrat supports. He has told his fellow Democrats that if they don’t accept his position, they risk getting nothing.

Manchin told associates that he was prepared to initiate his exit plan earlier this week and had mentioned the possibility to Biden. But he was encouraged by the conversations with Sanders and top Democrats that occurred at the start of the week and did not yet see a reason to take this step. Still, he has informed associates that because he is so out of sync with the Democratic Party he believes it is likely he will leave the party by November 2022.

Manchin has repeatedly said that he has a significant philosophical difference with most of his fellow Democrats. He has told reporters that he believes major programs in the Build Back Better bill would move the United States toward an “entitlement mentality” and that he cannot accept that. In a recent meeting with Biden, Manchin told the president that he sees government as a partner with the public not the ultimate provider, according to people who heard the senator’s account of the conversation. He explained to the president that in his view Biden didn’t win the presidency last year by championing progressive proposals, and he pressed the president to recall his campaign promise to bring people together. He also reminded Biden that he has vowed not to support any package unless it contains the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, except in cases of incest or when the life of the mother is at risk.

 

Now that if up there is a big one. David Corn isn't exactly the best person in the beltway Village. He's had #MeToo issues and credibility problems on the Steele Dossier in the past, and been publicly called out on both.

 

If Corn is right here, it means Democrats need to take President Manchin's deal, accept what he allows you to have, or get nothing and lose the Senate. Note that he's saying it's "likely" that he will leave the party by November 2022. Whether that means siding with the GOP and Biden losing everything, well, now that's up to Biden, isn't it, said the hostage taker.

Of course, Manchin doesn't want to be seen as the hostage taker so as I said up top he's denying all of this.

 

MANCHIN to @burgessev and me on the report he is threatening to leave the Democratic Party if his demands are not met on infrastructure: “I can’t control rumors and it’s bullshit, bullshit spelled with a B, U, L, L, capital ‘B’”: pic.twitter.com/ex8iHMIiSs

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) October 20, 2021

So we're right back to "Will he, won't he" because frankly, feeding David Corn this rumor would be a GOP operative's dream story sowing Democratic disarray.  What would Manchin gain from going down as the most hated Democratic senator since Joe Lieberman and John Edwards? 

The answer is a shitload of money, frankly.

Besides, it's not like Manchin cares too much about making deals or getting things passed as voting rights went down in flames again in the Senate on Wednesday.

Democrats argued that the bill is a necessity after Republican state legislatures passed laws limiting access to the ballot box following former President Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

"Across the country, the Big Lie -- the Big Lie -- has spread like a cancer as many states across the nation have passed the most draconian restrictions against voting that we've seen in decades," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said. "If nothing is done, these laws will make it harder for millions of Americans to participate in their government." 

President Joe Biden issued a harsh statement during the vote, calling it "unconscionable" that Republicans would block the legislation from advancing. 

"The United States Senate needs to act to protect the sacred constitutional right to vote, which is under unrelenting assault by proponents of the Big Lie and Republican Governors, Secretaries of State, Attorneys-General, and state legislatures across the nation," Biden said. 

Amid the Republican blockade, Democrats on the left have increasingly called on their party's senators to gut the Senate's filibuster rule requiring 60 votes to advance most legislation. 

Pennsylvania Lt. Governor John Fetterman, a Senate Democratic candidate, said in a statement, "every Democratic Senator who votes in favor of this bill today, but won't support getting rid of the filibuster, is engaging in performative politics, and is content with the GOP's complete assault on our democracy." 

But at least two Democratic senators — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — have said they are unwilling to change the filibuster rule and are crucial votes for the Biden administration's economic agenda. 

 

On the other hand, Corn does have a lot of clicks and views and follow-ups to gain if he's the bad faith actor here and he's being rolled by his sources.

On the gripping hand, well, Manchin himself has been conducting this entire trashing of the Biden plan in bad faith.

Of course if the story is true, the best part is after Manchin gets done playing this game, then it will be Vice-President Sinema's turn to whittle the bill down even more to see what she can get out of the deal as well. Something will pass I expect, but what that something is will be 100% up to the two of them.

The real question is which of these known bad faith actors then is acting in bad faith. I don't know the answer to that, but I do know the answer to the general Manchin/Sinema problem.

 

Remember, the answer here is more and better Dems, not staying home in 2022. That would render Manchin's antics irrelevant. Sinema too. 53, 54 Democrats in the Senate, and somehow keeping the House, and we're in far better shape.

But if history's any indication, we'll only get five or six more Republicans in the Senate and fifty or sixty more in the House instead.

Hostage Taking 101, Con't

Donald Trump made it clear again this week that he expects the people in the states who didn't vote for him to suffer catastrophic effects and that he refuses to help them in any way.

President Donald Trump says it would be unfair to Republicans if Congress passes coronavirus "bailouts" for states because he said the states that would benefit from that funding are run by Democrats. 

"I think Congress is inclined to do a lot of things but I don't think they're inclined to do bailouts. A bailout is different than, you know, reimbursing for the plague,” Trump told the New York Post in a sit-down interview in the Oval Office on Monday. 

The president continued, "It's not fair to the Republicans because all the states that need help — they're run by Democrats in every case. Florida is doing phenomenal, Texas is doing phenomenal, the Midwest is, you know, fantastic — very little debt."

The president named California, Illinois and New York as examples of states that are currently run by Democratic governors and are in "tremendous debt" because he said they "have been mismanaged over a long period of time." 

Democrats have made it clear that approving funding for states and municipalities is their top priority for the next piece of legislation. 

Maryland's GOP governor, Larry Hogan, who serves as the chairman of the National Governors Association, has also been urging Congress to send states financial aid. His own state is facing a nearly $3 billion budget shortfall this year. 

"To stabilize state budgets and to make sure states have the resources to battle the virus and provide the services the American people rely on, Congress must provide immediate fiscal assistance directly to all states," Hogan recently said in a statement. 

Hogan said that if Congress doesn't appropriate at least $500 billion specifically for states and territories to meet the budget shortfalls, "states will have to confront the prospect of significant reductions to critically important services all across this country."
Last week, Trump addressed the issue on Twitter, saying, "Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states (like Illinois, as example) and cities, in all cases Democrat run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help? I am open to discussing anything, but just asking?" 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has suggested that instead of Congress sending aid to states, they should declare bankruptcy, a comment that has deeply angered Democrats.

Trump won't sign a bill that gives money to blue states, period.  If they suffer, why should he care? What is California going to do, not vote GOP?

Be more like red states.

Because red states are completely great with money.

The state of Mississippi allowed tens of millions of dollars in federal anti-poverty funds to be used in ways that did little or nothing to help the poor, with two nonprofit groups instead using the money on lobbyists, football tickets, religious concerts and fitness programs for state lawmakers, according to a scathing audit released on Monday.

According to the report, released by the state auditor’s office, the money also enriched celebrities with Mississippi ties, among them Brett Favre, a former N.F.L. quarterback whose Favre Enterprises was paid $1.1 million by a nonprofit group that received the welfare funds. The payments were for speaking engagements that Mr. Favre did not attend, the auditors said.

Other large sums went to a family of pro wrestlers whose flamboyant patriarch, Ted DiBiase, earned national fame performing as the “Million Dollar Man.” In a news conference on Monday, Shad White, the state auditor, said it was possible that many recipients of the money did not know it had come from the federal welfare program.

Mr. Favre could not be reached for comment Monday. Mr. DiBiase declined to comment.
Mr. White called the findings “the most egregious misspending my staff have seen in their careers.” The audit found that more than $98 million from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF, was funneled to the two Mississippi-based nonprofit groups over three years. About $94 million of that was “questioned” by state auditors, meaning the money was in all likelihood misspent or the auditors could not verify that it had been spent legally, Mr. White said.

The breadth of the audit — which auditors said included funds that were “misspent, converted to personal use, spent on family members and friends of staffers and grantees or wasted” — raises broad questions about the efficacy of America’s social safety net.

In 1996, the TANF program converted the old federal welfare system, in which cash benefits to poor families were deemed an entitlement, to a system of block grants issued to the states. The new program created work rules and time limits on aid — and, notably, gave each state much more leeway on how to spend the money. Critics say that states do not have to clearly justify that they are spending the money on helping the poor.
“There’s this incredible amount of flexibility,” said LaDonna Pavetti, vice president for family income support policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It could allow for a lot of things to happen.”

Mississippi Republican lawmakers concerned about the misuse of federal funds have enacted safeguards to prevent fraud by potential welfare recipients. A ThinkProgress article found that in 2016, only 167 of the 11,700 Mississippi families who applied for a TANF payment were approved.

For those who support anti-poverty initiatives, the unfolding scandal has left a particularly bitter taste. “It’s just, ‘How can you?’” said Oleta Garrett Fitzgerald, southern regional director for the Children’s Defense Fund.

Monday’s audit comes after the arrest in February of John Davis, the former director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, the agency that distributes the federal welfare block grants. Mr. Davis is accused of taking part in a multimillion-dollar embezzlement scheme.

Trump's been a grifter all his life, maybe the most successful con artist in human history.  But the grift in the GOP has been there for decades, and it always comes at the expense of the people who can least afford it.

Last Call For Going Postal, Con't

The White House is making its move to "save" the US Postal Service by amputating its limbs for a infected, festering wound that Republicans inflicted on it a decade ago. 

The Treasury Department is considering taking unprecedented control over key operations of the U.S. Postal Service by imposing tough terms on an emergency coronavirus loan from Congress, which would fulfill President Trump’s longtime goal of changing how the service does business, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Officials working under Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who must approve the $10 billion loan, have told senior officials at the USPS in recent weeks that he could use the loan as leverage to give the administration influence over how much the agency charges for delivering packages and how it manages its finances, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are preliminary.

Trump has railed for years against what he sees as mismanagement at the Postal Service, which he argues has been exploited by e-commerce sites such as Amazon, and has sought to change how much the agency charges for the delivery of packages. (Amazon’s founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Under the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus relief passed last month, the Treasury was authorized to loan $10 billion to the USPS, which says it may not be able to make payroll and continue mail service uninterrupted past September. Mnuchin rejected a bipartisan Senate proposal to give the Postal Service a bailout amid the negotiations over that legislation, a senior Trump administration official and a congressional official previously told The Post.

The borrowing terms have only been discussed among both agencies’ leadership and have not been made public because the Postal Service hasn’t officially requested the loan, the two people familiar with the matter said. Mnuchin could still decide not to pursue tough terms as the September deadline nears. The Postal Service would not have to use the entire $10 billion loan at one time, but could borrow up to that amount at any given time.

In discussions with senior USPS personnel, Treasury officials have said they are interested in raising rates on the Postal Service’s lucrative package business, its sole area of profitability in recent years. Treasury also could review all large postal contracts with package companies to push for greater margins on deliveries.

Treasury officials have said they may press the agency to demand tougher concessions from its powerful postal unions — among the public-sector unions that still retain significant leverage in negotiations with the government.

The officials have also said Mnuchin wants the authority to review hiring decisions at the agency’s senior levels, including the selection of the next postmaster general, a decision that until now has been left to the Postal Service’s five-member board of governors.

USPS spokesman David Partenheimer confirmed in an email that the agency and Treasury have begun “preliminary discussions” over the loan, but that the Treasury had not yet asked “to impose any of those conditions on that borrowing authority.” He declined to say whether these or any other terms were under discussion.

In 2006, Republicans rammed through the Postal Accountability and Enhacement Act, which mandated that unlike any other US corporation, the US Post Office was required to pre-fund all employee retiree benefits for 50 years.

The law requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056. This is a $5 billion per year cost; it is a requirement that no other entity, private or public, has to make. If that doesn’t meet the definition of insanity, I don’t know what does. Without this obligation, the Post Office actually turns a profit. Some have called this a “manufactured crisis.” It’s also significant that lots of companies benefit from a burden that makes the USPS less competitive; these same companies might also would benefit from full USPS privatization, a goal that has been pushed by several conservative think tanks for years.

Trump's plan is Hostage-Taking 101: either the House and Senate pass legislation to put the USPS under the control of the Treasury Department, or Trump stands by and watches the postal system fail. The collapse of the postal service would hurt Trump's voters the most, but so did Chinese and EU tariffs and they still love him for it.

We'll see very quickly if Trump is this deranged, and betting against "Trump being willing to go this far" never ends well.

Stockholm Syndrome Politics

Via BooMan, we see the 2012 argument against Obama by the Sensible Centrist crowd is beginning to pick up play.  "If we vote Obama out, the Tea Party will vanish!"  Leonard Pitts at the Miami Herald at least entertains the idea:

You might think Obama’s re-election would solve this, offering as it would stark repudiation of the politics of panic, paranoia and reactionary extremism this ideology represents. The problem is, these folks thrive on repudiation, on a free-floating conviction that they have been done wrong, cheated and mistreated by the tides of history and progress, change and demography. So there is every reason to believe, particularly given the weakness of the economy, that being repudiated in next year’s election would only make them redouble their intensity, confirming them as it would in their own victimhood.

And ask yourself: what form could that redoubling take? How do you up the ante from this? What is the logical next step after two years of screaming, rocks through windows, threats against legislators and rhetoric that could start a fire?

An awful, obvious answer suggests itself. You reject it instinctively. This is, after all, America, not some unstable fledgling democracy.

Then you realize it was not so long ago that a man blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City out of anti-government sentiment not so different from that espoused by the tea party. And you remember how that tragedy exposed an entire network of armed anti-government zealots gathering in the woods.

And you read where the Southern Poverty Law Center says the number of radical anti-government groups spiked to 824 in 2010, a 61 percent increase over just the previous year.

And you wonder.

No, I don't wonder.  Like BooMan, I know that if the Tea Party really wanted to do damage to America and blow everything up and cause untold hardship to tens of millions of Americans, we'd just have to follow their economic and social policies.  So yeah, if you really, honestly think the Tea Party is A) that dangerous and B) will simply vanish into that good night once Obama's gone, you really do deserve a country run by these dangerous idiots.

Expect to see a lot more of this as the months roll on and we get closer. It's the crucial argument that the Sensible Centrist need in order to convince America to vote against their own self-interest.  It's a patently ridiculous argument that assumes the Tea Party is going to just vanish after being handed the reins.


You have to look no further than states like Florida or Ohio to see what kind of future that path holds for America.

New Tag:  Hostage Taking 101.