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Monthly Archives: October 2021

Looks Like Congress!


Mike Luckovich Comic Strip for October 07, 2021
Congress doubling down since the 1800’s
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The Irony of The GOP


October 6, 2021Heather Cox Richardson
Today, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) backed down from his obstructionism, agreeing to let the Democrats raise the debt ceiling by a simple majority rather than by the 60 votes they needed when the Republicans kept filibustering their bills. A quick recap: the issue at stake was whether the United States would default on its debts, which it has never done before. The threat to default was purely a political ploy on the part of the Republicans to try to force the Democrats to abandon their very popular infrastructure measure. Here’s the backstory: Congress actually originally intended the debt ceiling to enable the government to be flexible in its borrowing. In the era of World War I, when it needed to raise a lot of money fast, Congress stopped passing specific revenue measures and instead set a cap on how much money the government could borrow through all of the different instruments it used. Now, though, the debt ceiling has become a political cudgel because if it is not raised when Congress spends more than it has the ability to repay, the country will default on its debts. The cap has been raised repeatedly since it was first imposed; indeed, the Republicans raised it three times under former president Donald Trump. Once again, it is too low, and by October 18, the Treasury will be unable to pay our debts. To meet the nation’s obligations, Congress needs either to raise taxes, which Republicans passionately oppose, or to raise the debt ceiling so the Treasury can borrow more money. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has voted to raise or suspend the debt ceiling 32 times in his career, including the three times under Trump, refused to allow Republicans to vote to raise the debt ceiling. Although the ceiling needed to be lifted because Trump added $7.8 trillion to the debt (which now stands at about $28 trillion), in part with the huge 2017 tax cuts that went overwhelmingly to the wealthy, McConnell tried to tie the need for more money to the Democrats’ infrastructure plan. This was false: the debt ceiling is not an appropriation; it simply permits the government to borrow money it needs to pay debts already incurred. But McConnell and the Republicans want to dismantle an active government, not to build it. They hope to convince Americans that Democrats are racking up huge debts—even though it is the Republicans on the hook for today’s crisis—and that they should not be permitted to pass a bill that supports children and working parents and addresses climate change. The Democrats insisted that the Republicans should join them in raising the ceiling, since they had been instrumental in making it necessary, but McConnell and his caucus refused. Finally, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warning that defaulting would crash the economy and with financial services firm Moody’s Analytics warning that a default would cost up to 6 million jobs, create an unemployment rate of nearly 9%, and wipe out $15 trillion in household wealth, the Democrats tried to pass a measure themselves. Republicans wouldn’t let them. They filibustered it, trying to force the Democrats to save the country by raising the debt ceiling through a bill that can’t be filibustered, a process called reconciliation, which would make it harder for them to use reconciliation for their own infrastructure bill since Congress can pass only one of that type of reconciliation bill per year.It was a remarkably cynical ploy, risking the financial health of the country and our standing in the world to make sure that a Republican minority could continue to hamstring what the Democratic majority considers a priority. Republicans have played chicken with government shutdowns since the 1980s, refusing to pass measures to fund the daily operations of the government and thereby stopping paychecks and government operations. But defaulting on our obligations was a whole new game of brinksmanship. The greatest international asset the U.S. has right now is its financial system. To bring that to its knees to score political points would be interpreted, correctly, as a sign our country is so unstable it must be sidelined. Midday today, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin highlighted this international doubt when he took the unusual step of weighing in on politics. He warned that a default would “undermine the economic strength on which our national security rests.” Paychecks for 1.4 million active duty military personnel and veterans’ benefits for 2.4 million veterans, as well as payments on military contracts, would stop. Equally dangerous, defaulting on loans would devastate the nation’s international reputation “as a reliable and trustworthy economic and national security partner. Democrats said they could not guarantee the country would not default, and they were clearly starting to consider getting rid of the filibuster, at least for this particular issue, to enable them to pass a debt ceiling bill by a simple majority rather than by 60 votes. Then McConnell blinked (although he didn’t cave). In a scorching statement that laid all the blame for the crisis on the Democrats, he offered to “allow” Democrats to use normal procedures—that is, the Republicans won’t filibuster them!—to extend the ceiling into December. Democrats indicate they will take that deal. There is one major takeaway from this manufactured crisis: McConnell was willing to come right to the verge of burning the nation down to get his way. In the end, he stopped just before the sparks became an inferno, but it was much too close for comfort. Still, he stopped. Trump and his supporters did not. The former president has been pushing Republicans to use the threat of default to get what they want, and he was not happy that McConnell had backed down. He issued a statement blaming McConnell for “folding” and added “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand.” Trump’s willingness to burn down the country is ramping up as the January 6 investigation gets closer to him. Tomorrow is the deadline for four of his aides to respond to subpoenas for documents and testimony from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol: former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, adviser Steve Bannon, and Defense Department aide Kash Patel. Meadows worked to overturn the 2020 election results and was in the thick of things on January 6, Scavino had met with Trump to plot to get congresspeople not to count the certified votes on January 6, Bannon strategized with other officials on January 5 to stop the count, and Patel was part of discussions about the strength of the Capitol Police.The four are expected to defy the subpoenas at Trump’s insistence, a defiance that suggests they think he and his people are going to regain power. According to Glenn Kirschner, a former U.S. Army prosecutor, contempt of Congress earns a year of prison time; obstruction of Congress, five years; and obstruction of justice, 20 years.The rest of the former president’s statements today were unhinged attacks on the committee.A final note for October 6: U.S. District Judge Robert L. Pitman has temporarily blocked enforcement of Texas’s S.B. 8, the so-called “heartbeat” bill prohibiting abortions after six weeks, when most women don’t know they’re pregnant. The Justice Department had sued to stop enforcement of the law. Pitman stopped it on the grounds that it deprived “citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right.”—
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Composite Hypocrisy


The GOP is balking against the proposed spending by the DEMS (who are divided themselves). yet they have gone along with an idiot while using his blustering as a cover for their own budgetary acts. These are the actions of self serving politicians, not leaders. The primary job (supposedly) of elected officials is to administer the government in the best interests of the voters and taxpayers not their party and it’s overall agenda. No matter who you affiliate with politically, it should be noted that weight placed on some is also placed on all in someway or another. The party line is not necessarily what the party leaders do for us or to us. We as taxpayers are left to read between the lines and we need to read carefully. The current fight over budgets and funding is purely political and should not even be happening as the Congress has known for years that our infrastructure and manufacturing has been relegated to unimportant because it costs money. Of course it costs money and that money is why we pay taxes (except for the top 1%). Now the GOP is standing in the way of funding for needed infrastructure. Which they could have and should have done when they were in the majority. The uproar or false information about the burden on future generations neglects the fact that the plan is to cover about 5 to 10 years not one year. The current chip shortage possibly could have been a non issue if the US chip makers were not allowed to put the manufacturing in a foreign country that is our biggest rival in manufacturing and world presence. Thank you Congress for doing the Washington 2 step while whistling Dixie!

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Voters make Changes Not Office holders


Many of us have come to believe that our votes do not count, wrong. Our votes do count and the electeds know it. The recent voting law changes are evidence of that. Historically the current GOP has switched sides several times in order to do as little as possible for the voters and that has not changed to this day. As Democrats they did not want social programs put forth by then President Roosevelt, they then became Republicans and evolved to be who they are now but still the anti public good office holders. The writing has never been off of the wall but many of us have just painted over it in the hope of not looking at it but no amount of primer will cover the facts that the current GOP is a culmination of years of misdeeds on behalf of big money against the people who put them in office. there is no greater sin than ignoring the machinations of the current anti voter GOP. TOTUS has allowed and indeed legitimized lying to get in office and lying to stay there. While politicians are prone to hyperbole and disinformation while actively coloring the truth, there are some who still work for the public good. We as taxpayers and voters need to pay attention to the person we vote for rather than the party they work under. There is no greater error than following a party that works against us while pushing the “we work for the people” line. The current political system is about self service with the end game of retiring with a handsome pension after doing 20 plus years of nominal work. This is America, once a poster child of how a country should work but now the real truth emerges in disastrous ways. Thank you TOTUS for making these facts public though you didn’t know you were doing it.

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This Marjorie Taylor Greene meltdown reveals an uncomfortable truth about Christianity


Noah Berlatsky  4 days ago

On Friday, congressional representatives got into a screaming match on the Capitol steps about, among other things, Christianity. High-volume theological disputes aren’t generally illuminating. But this one showed how Christianity remains a moral bedrock of political dispute in this country — and why that’s a bad thing.

The argument began following the passage of a House bill that would codify abortion rights into law. Right-wing conspiracy theorist and anti-abortion advocate Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., began to yell somewhat incoherently at gathered lawmakers and demonstrators. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., a supporter of abortion rights, yelled back at Greene that she was being uncivil.

“You should practice the basic thing you’re taught in church: respect your neighbor,” Dingell shouted. Greene blasted back, “Taught in church, are you kidding me? Try being a Christian and supporting life!” Dingell responded, “You try being a Christian… and try treating your colleagues decently!”

Dingell thinks being a Christian means being neighborly and civil. Greene thinks being a Christian means attacking anyone who supports abortion rights. But they both agree that being a Christian is morally good, and that Christianity is virtuous.

For a Jewish atheist like myself, that framework is wearisomely familiar. It’s also disheartening. Despite Dingell’s best intentions, the equation of Christianity and goodness buttresses Greene’s white Christian nationalism and the politics of hate and hierarchy that go along with it.

About two thirds of Americans describe themselves as Christian. So it makes sense that people in public life would frame Christianity as a good thing. Christians may disagree strongly about what the Christian virtues are, but they agree that Christian virtues are, well, virtues. That’s part of what being a Christian means.

Many of us, though, aren’t Christian, and don’t want to try to be Christian. Just to take one example: Jewish people’s experience of Christian morality has not been universally uplifting, to say the least.

Some will argue that antisemitism is not real Christianity. But you can’t just disavow a couple of thousands years of persecution and hate. And if Christianity equals virtue, where does that leave Jewish people — or Muslims, or atheists, or Buddhists, for that matter?

Of course there are good Christians, as there are good people of every faith, and of no faith. But one of the hallmarks of immoral forms of Christianity is a belief that Christianity can only be good — and that the good can only be Christian.

This is the logic of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the rabidly Trumpist politics she represents. Sociologist Philip Gorski argued in a 2019 article that evangelical white Christians loved Trump not despite his violent and scabrous language, but precisely because he told them they were better than everyone else. Evangelicals, Gorski said, responded to “Trump’s racialized, apocalyptic, and blood-drenched rhetoric.” That rhetoric harkened back to the Christian language deployed to justify slavery and Native American genocide.

Trump told white evangelical Christians that they had a right and a duty to impose their morality, through force, on others. Marjorie Taylor Greene is following through on a tradition of dispossession and cruelty when she insults abortion supporters or tries to seize control of people’s bodies in the name of a higher morality.

Deb Dingell’s Christianity would seem to be more inclusive — her definition of loving thy neighbor translates politically into policy (same-sex marriage, abortion rights, etc.) that Marjorie Taylor Greene abhors. But nonetheless, it also, inadvertently, reinforces one of the chief tenets of white Christian nationalism — the idea that Christianity has a monopoly on virtue.

Christianity is a powerful and important tradition in the U.S.; it shouldn’t just be left to the Greene’s and the Trump’s. But part of contesting their hold on Christianity is refusing to acquiesce to Christian supremacy. It means acknowledging non-Christians in discussions of America, and in discussions of goodness.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is, unfortunately, still a Christian when she spews ugly antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish space lasers. She’s still a Christian when she attacks her colleagues. She’s still a Christian when she tries to force people to give birth because of her own particular convictions about souls and cell clusters. But being a Christian doesn’t make you a good person, just as being a good person doesn’t make you a Christian. When we, including Dingell, accept that, maybe we’ll be closer to defeating the evil, violent and Christian movement of which Greene is a part.

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Letter From An American



September 30, 2021Heather Cox Richardson
Oct 1
Tonight, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that extends funding for the government until December 3, 2021. The government won’t shut down tomorrow.In the Senate, Republican Tom Cotton (R-AR) tried to amend the measure to stop aid for Afghan refugees who were evacuated to the United States. That amendment reflected the demands of former president Donald Trump, who insisted that Republicans should oppose the bill, calling it “a major immigration rewrite that allows Biden to bring anyone he wants from Afghanistan for the next year—no vetting, no screening, no security—and fly them to your community with free welfare and government-issued IDs.” Trump suggested they would bring “horrible assaults and sex crimes” that would be “just be the tip of the iceberg of what’s coming if this isn’t shut down.”For all their talk of concern about taking care of our Afghan allies during the evacuation of Afghanistan, all 50 Republican senators voted for Cotton’s measure. Democrats killed it on a strict party line vote.Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) also tried to amend the bill. He wanted to prohibit the use of federal funds to implement vaccine requirements for the coronavirus. This failed, too, but only after all Republicans voted for it.The Senate went on today to confirm Rohit Chopra to direct the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) for a five-year term. Chopra worked with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to establish the CFPB after the financial crisis of 2008, and in its first five years it recovered about $11.7 billion for some 27 million consumers. Former president Trump appointed former South Carolina representative Mick Mulvaney to head the bureau while he was also the director of the Office of Management and Budget; when he was in Congress, Mulvaney had introduced legislation to abolish the bureau. At its head, Mulvaney zeroed out the bureau’s budget and set about dismantling it.When he took office, Biden began to rebuild the bureau and, in mid-February, appointed Chopra to head it, but Republicans objected to him. Now, more than seven months later, with Republicans insisting he would be anti-business, Vice President Kamala Harris cast the deciding vote to confirm his appointment.The rest of the congressional day was consumed with Democrats trying to hash out a final version of the Build Back Better infrastructure bill. While the Republicans largely sat the debate out—they oppose the Build Back Better plan altogether—conservative Democrats want to pass a smaller $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure measure before taking up the larger $3.5 trillion measure currently under discussion. That smaller measure focuses on repairing roads and bridges and extending broadband, and lobbyists for construction industries are very keen indeed on getting it into law.But progressive Democrats cut a deal months ago that the smaller measure would go forward together with the larger one, and they are refusing to allow conservatives to change the terms of that deal now. The Build Back Better bill appropriates $3.5 trillion over ten years to expand child care and elder care, expand Medicare, cut prescription drug prices, provide two years of community college, extend the child tax credit, and combat climate change.Aside from the measure itself, there are two issues at stake in the debate over it.The first is about how the Democrats should interpret their victory in 2020. Conservative Democrats like Senators Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) appear to think the Democrats should limit the scope of their legislation to try to pick up moderate Republican votes in the future. More progressive Democrats, led by Pramila Jayapal (WA), who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, believe the Democrats were elected to pass laws that help ordinary Americans who have felt unrepresented by Republicans.The other fight behind the Build Back Better measure is over how Americans choose to spend their tax dollars. Republicans, and even some conservative Democrats like Manchin, believe that spending $3.5 trillion on human infrastructure is a waste of money and that the new programs will create an “entitlement mentality.”In contrast, though, Congress spends very little time discussing the defense budget, which, at its current rate, would cost $7.78 trillion over the next ten years. That amount is significantly higher than the defense spending of any other nation in the world. In 2020, the U.S. spent $778 billion on defense, making up 39% of our overall spending. China, the country with the next highest defense budget, spent 13% of its overall spending on defense at $252 billion, India spent 3.7% at $72.9 billion, Russia spent 3.1% at $61.7 billion, and the United Kingdom spent 3% at $59.2 billion.At the heart of the question of how we spend our tax dollars, of course, is who pays those tax dollars. The Biden administration wants to fund the Build Back Better plan not by borrowing, but by closing tax loopholes and clawing back some of the 2017 cuts to corporate taxes and income taxes on the nation’s highest earners. At Rolling Stone today, reporters Andy Kroll and Geoff Dembicki wrote that political groups funded by the network of right-wing libertarian billionaire Charles Koch, who is deeply invested in fossil fuels, are pouring money and effort into killing the Build Back Better plan.Meanwhile, the Senate still has not taken up either of the two voting rights acts passed by the House or the Freedom to Vote Act hammered out this month by Democratic senators led by Manchin.Yesterday, the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab released a report that noted the new voter suppression laws in place in 18 Republican-dominated states but focused instead on 17 new election subversion laws in 11 of those same states. Those new laws put into place the policies former president Trump’s campaign demanded in 2020. They threaten election officials with prosecution if they send out mail-in ballots to anyone who has not requested one, require legislatures to agree to changes in election rules, transfer control of elections or reporting results from nonpartisan officials to political operatives, and allow candidates to demand recounts at will.A new law in Arizona, for example, “shifts control of election litigation from the secretary of state (currently a Democrat) to the attorney general (currently a Republican). The provision is designed to sunset on January 2, 2023, when a new attorney general potentially takes office.”“When Voting Rights Lab launched a few years ago, we knew we’d be busy tracking many disturbing, and oftentimes veiled efforts to suppress the vote of historically excluded Americans,” the report concludes. “What we couldn’t have anticipated at that time was that current officeholders would warp the election process itself….”—Notes:https://www.defensenews.com/global/2021/04/26/the-world-spent-almost-2-trillion-on-defense-in-2020/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/cotton-amendment-defeated/2021/09/30/7fb1a02c-2206-11ec-8200-5e3fd4c49f5e_story.htmlhttps://www.cnn.com/2021/09/30/politics/government-shutdown-deadline-congress-votes/index.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/magazine/consumer-financial-protection-bureau-trump.htmlhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/30/rohit-chopra-cfpb/https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/21/trump-signs-738-billion-defense-bill.htmlhttps://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/climate-koch-brothers-lobbying-biden-build-back-better-1234815/https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/top-biz-lobbyists-sing-song-of-wtfs-and-woe-over-bif-in-the-balancehttps://votingrightslab.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/20210924-VRL-Election-Subversion-Report-.pdfhttps://www.cnn.com/2021/09/29/politics/election-subversion-new-laws/index.html
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