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Category Archives: Congress

Dems Go on Offense. Republicans Bay at the Moon.

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The nutjob “fair tax“ that would eliminate the IRS and impose a 30 percent tax on all retail sales has been introduced to the House before. This Wikipedia page says it’s been introduced “regularly” since 2005, but it’s never made it out of committee. This was true even when Republicans had a big majority in the House. Now it’s in committee again, What’s different is that in years past no one talked about it much. Now Democrats are talking about it, a lot.

“Democrats are seizing on a Republican proposal to impose a national sales tax and abolish the Internal Revenue Service as a cudgel against the GOP, even though the bill has few fans even among Republican lawmakers,” WaPo says. Even the patriarch of tax nutjobbery, Grover Norquist, is calling the fair tax bill a “gift to Democrats.”

Of course, even if the House passed the thing it would die in the Senate and would never be signed by President Biden. It doubt it has any better chance in the House now than it’s had in the past. The point is that the Dems are going on offense for a change. This is a good thing. More of this, please.

Trump’s Facebook and Twitter suspensions have ended. I don’t know if he’s written anything on those platforms yet. If he does, I question whether it will work for him as it has in the past. Charlie Cooke — yeah, I know, it’s Charlie Cooke — has a takedown of Trump on National Review that’s actually worth reading. You will laugh.

There was a point in time at which Trump’s unusual verbal affect and singular nose for underutilized wedge issues gave him a competitive edge. Now? Now, he’s morphing into one of the three witches from Macbeth. To peruse Trump’s account on Truth Social is to meet a cast of characters about whom nobody who lives beyond the Trump Extended Universe could possibly care one whit. … safely ensconced within his own macrocosm, Trump is busy mainlining Edward Lear. Day in, day out, he rambles about the adventures of Coco Chow and the Old Broken Crow; the dastardly Unselect Committee; the (presumably tasty) Stollen Presidential Election; the travails of that famous law-enforcement agency, the Gestopo; Joe Scarborough’s wife “Mike”; and other unusual characters from Coromandel. “Where the early pumpkins blow / In the middle of the woods / Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò / Who STOLLE THE ELECTION / Don’t you know?” …

… Throughout his public career, Trump has resembled nothing so much as a drunken talk-radio caller from Queens, and, on Truth Social, readers get the treat of watching him at the zenith of his rhetorical powers.

Recently Trump declared himself the winner of a golf tournament at his West Palm Beach golf club, even though he hadn’t played the entire tournament. Not that his head was ever screwed on all the way, but I wonder if he’s getting worse.

Now three good people have announced they are running for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat in 2024. These are Adam Schiff, Barbara Lee, and Katie Porter. We need them all in Washington. I understand Feinstein has said she won’t decide about 2024 until 2024. She will be 91 years old in 2024. Someone close to her really needs to tell her to retire.

A letter writer to Talking Points Memo asks people not to throw money at the Senate primary candidates in California too soon. That seat will be won by a Democrat, no matter what. Unlike in 2022, Democrats are defending a lot of Senate seats next year. It’s going to be hard for them to keep the Senate. It doesn’t make sense to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into the California Senate race when those dollars are needed elsewhere.

Debt ceiling updates. Roll Call reports that the House GOP may be wanting to buy themselves more time on the debt ceiling.

House Republicans are mulling an attempt to buy time for further negotiations on federal spending and deficits by passing one or more short-term suspensions of the statutory debt ceiling this summer, including potentially lining up the deadline with the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30. …

… Any such short-term measure would likely be “clean” of any strings attached or specific spending cuts, and be designed as a suspension of the borrowing cap, which had been done repeatedly over the past decade until 2021, rather than a dollar increase in the debt limit. That would presumably make it easier for Republicans to swallow voting for it after pledging to only back a debt limit increase if paired with spending cuts.

However, as Steve Benen wrote yesterday, it’s apparent a lot of House Republicans still don’t understand what the debt ceiling is. Several of them recently have made public statements that linked the debt ceiling to government shutdowns. And, of course, shutdowns are what happens when Congress fails to pass budget legislation with the necessary appropriations. The debt ceiling is something else.

Also yesterday, WaPo reported that House GOP leadership is “embarking on an education campaign to make sure their members understand how the debt limit works, the consequences of failing to raise the ceiling, and the difference between a garden-variety government shutdown and a potential debt default.” Good luck with that, peeps.

Endless Insanity in the New GOP House

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My “congressman,” Jason Smith, was not one of the 20 or so nutjobs who held out against Kevin McCarthy in the speaker vote debacle. Smith was a pro-McCarthy nutjob. Yet he somehow got the chair of the Ways and Means Committee. I can promise you that no good will come of that, unless it’s to utterly bleep up the House Republicans somehow.

For example, Semafor is reporting that McCarthy may have promised the House nutjob fringe that he would allow the House to vote on a “fair tax” proposal, which I believe is the kind of thing that would have to go through Ways and Means.

As part of his deal to become House speaker, Kevin McCarthy reportedly promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax. …

…The idea of a “fair tax” that would replace our current IRS code with a single sales tax was popularized on conservative talk radio in the late 1990s. It has kicked around Washington ever since, popping up in the occasional presidential platform, but never received a vote.

Its current champion in Congress is Georgia Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter, whose Fair Tax Act would swap out the income, payroll, estate, and corporate levies for a 30% national sales tax. It would also send out “prebate” checks to soften the blow on lower income families, all while abolishing the Internal Revenue Service.

If people don’t like inflation, how are they going to feel about a 30 percent sales tax? I can’t imagine this has a serious chance of passing in the House, since I’m sure there are at least some Republicans who realize that this would not be a popular thing if it went into effect. And it wouldn’t have a chance in the Senate. Still, just the fact that some of the House nutjobs take this nonsense seriously says something. Where Jason Smith stands on this issue, I do not know. Smith does want to privatize Social Security, so he can’t be counted on to support anything sensible.

But one thing I do know, is that Rep. Vern Buchanan of Florida is really pissed at McCarthy now.

As I wrote last week, Republicans have been fixated on whether 71-year-old Rep. Vern Buchanan might retire from Congress after losing the House Ways & Means chairmanship to the 42-year-old Speaker’s pet Jason Smith, potentially reducing Kevin McCarthy’s margin of error from four votes to three to pass critical partisan legislation. (If McCarthy somehow loses fabulist George Santos, too, he could be held hostage by as few as two members of his already fractious House conference.) Vern’s people say he won’t retire (despite the rumblings on the Hill), but they didn’t deny that he was mighty pissed to be passed over as the most senior person on the Ways & Means committee by Smith, a member who was fifth in line.

Just how angry was he? Well, a source on the House floor during the vote told me that while McCarthy was gaveling down the votes, Buchanan walked up to McCarthy and said, “You fucked me, I know it was you, you whipped against me.” He then proceeded to chew out McCarthy’s deputy chief of staff for floor operations, John Leganski. It was shocking to see such fury from Buchanan, who’s known for being mild mannered. Indeed, I heard that the tirade was so heated that the Speaker’s security detail stepped in with a light touch. (McCarthy’s spokesperson Matt Sparks disputed this detail saying, “at no point did anyone have to step in.” A spokesperson for Buchanan declined to comment.)

McCarthy got the speaker’s gavel, but how long will he be allowed to keep it?

Note also that Marjorie Taylor Green, Paul Gosar, and Lauren Boebert are now all on the Oversight Committee. James Comer, who is eager to investigate President Biden on the documents issue but thinks Trump has earned a pass, is chair. I suspect the new Oversight Committee will be looking a lot like the old House Un-American Activities Committee in no time.

In other news, Greg Sargent writes that Biden just outmaneuvered MAGA Republicans — and they barely noticed.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas unveiled an initiative on Friday that would extend more protection against deportation to undocumented immigrants who report labor rights violations by employers.

This is a big move by the administration, one long sought by immigration advocates. Biden’s immigration record is decidedly mixed, but this would address a serious problem: Undocumented migrant workers often fear reporting workplace violations — ones they were victims of or just witnessed — because it could lead to their deportation.

Now they will have improved access to a legal process that can defer their deportations for two years and potentially extend them work permits. The hope: To encourage them not just to report unsafe or exploitative working conditions, but also to cooperate with ongoing Labor Department investigations, improving working standards for all workers.

So far, Sargent continues, the anti-immigrant Right hasn’t paid much notice to this policy change. To come out against it they’d have to come out in support of predatory employers. Well, they’ve done worse.

See also Josh Marshall, Trump’s Disappearing, and He Knows It.

Sen. Josh Hawley Is a Pathetic Weenie

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Great bit of work from Chris Hayes’s show last night.

What makes Hawley even more pathetic is that back on January 4 — an auspicious date, come to think of it — Hawley had a meltdown over protesters outside his home. The Associated Press reported,

Protesters who gathered outside the Virginia home of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley Monday evening were peaceful and they left when police explained they were violating local picketing laws, police said Tuesday. The Missouri senator on Twitter accused the protesters of vandalism and threatening his family.

Officers were called to Hawley’s home in Vienna, a Washington suburb, around 7:45 p.m. after someone reported that there were “people protesting in front of the house.” Officers who responded to the scene found that the “people were peaceful,” said Master Police Officer Juan Vazquez, a spokesman for the Town of Vienna Police Department.

The demonstrators said they went to Hawley’s home because he said he would object when Congress convenes Wednesday to affirm Joe Biden’s election victory.

Vazquez said the protesters had been violating several laws, including a Virginia code about picketing in front of a house, a town ordinance about making noise in front of a home and a littering code. But he said the officers explained the violations and “everyone just left.”

“There were no issues, no arrests,” he said. “We didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”

Hawley accused the group of threatening his family.

“Tonight while I was in Missouri, Antifa scumbags came to our place in DC and threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel,” Hawley wrote on Twitter. “They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door. Let me be clear: My family & I will not be intimidated by leftwing violence.”

In short, Hawley is a pathetic weenie in a tightly taylored weenie suit.

And, of course, we all remember this proud moment in the life of the Missouri freshman senator, just two days later:

Unlike some other senators — Rand Paul and Ron Johnson come to mind — Hawley isn’t stupid. He’s a moral and ethical vaccuum with the integrity of sawdust, but he’s not stupid. This is calculated. He thinks that acting like a right-wing jerkwad will make him president some day. If he destroys the United States in the process, that’s just collateral damage to him.

He’ll never be POTUS — I prayerfully hope — but he may be a senator from Missouri for a long time, alas. This sort of crap sells around here. I’m beginning to think Anheuser-Busch products are rotting people’s brains.

Trump’s Day of Reckoning

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Charles Pierce, today:

The Rules Committee of the House of Representatives met shortly after dawn on Friday to try and set up a process by which Paul Ryan’s tax-cut plan could pass the full House at some point later in the day. On Thursday, after everything fell apart, the president* sent the head counselors at Camp Runamuck down to the Capitol to tell recalcitrant Republicans that what they had before them was his take-it-or-leave-it offer and that, if they chose not to pass it, then 24 million Americans wouldn’t lose their health insurance, get sick, go broke and/or die. The president* is betting that Republicans in Congress don’t want that on their consciences.

So they’re going to attempt another vote today on an Obamacare replacement bill that’s been rewritten so many times the Congressional Budget Office can’t keep up. As I wrote yesterday, Trump tried to get the Freedom Caucus on board by letting them make changes that made the whole thing even worse, but even that failed to close the deal. So, Trump-style, the so-called president told Congress that if they didn’t pass their bill today, they’d never get another chance at it and Obamacare would have to remain on the books.

Such a deal-maker, this guy. James Hohmann wrote,

 If you read Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” substituting “contractors” for “conservatives,” the president’s ultimatum to House Republicans on health care is not at all surprising. “You have to be very rough and very tough with most contractors or they’ll take the shirt right off your back,” Trump wrote in the 1987 business classic.

As a businessman, Trump bragged about his ability to drive a hard bargain to win favorable terms and make lots of money. “I also protect myself by being flexible,” he explained. “I never get too attached to one deal or one approach. … I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first.”

One theme he kept coming back to is that you’ve got to be willing to walk away or, more precisely, convince the people you’re negotiating with that you are. Trump recalled a 1981 meeting with the attorney general and the head of gaming enforcement for New Jersey in which he threatened to walk away from Atlantic City – despite already making huge investments on the Boardwalk there – if he didn’t get certain concessions.

He described the pitch: “Much as I wanted to build a great casino on the great site I’d assembled, I said, I have a very successful real estate business in New York and I was more than willing to walk away from Atlantic City if the regulatory process proved to be too difficult or too time-consuming. The bottom line, I concluded, was that I didn’t intend to invest any more money – or to begin any construction – until I got a decision one way or the other on my licensing.”

The problem, of course, is that a president has absolutely no authority — or “leverage,” as they say — to stop the House from passing any dadblamed bill it wants to pass. Sure, he could eventually veto it. But if sometime down the road Congress managed to pass an ACA replacement bill that nearly all Republicans and a couple of Democrats actually liked — a long shot, I realize — those same Republicans could do Trump a world of political hurt if he vetoed the thing.

But of course, it’s possible a sufficient number of House Republicans are too stupid to realize all that, and seriously think OMG if we don’t vote yes today Obamacare will be the law of the land forever!

The Koch boys are adding to the generally merriment by promising candy and flowers to Republican reps who vote no.

Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners, the two political action hubs of the Koch donor network, announced Wednesday night that they had a “seven-figure fund” ready to help Republicans who reject the American Health Care Act.

The fund will supplement an ongoing online campaign that’s thanking lawmakers who’ve promised to oppose the bill, which they say retains too many elements of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

“In seven years, we have never wavered in our commitment to a full repeal of this disastrous law,” AFP President Tim Phillips said in a statement. “We want to make certain that lawmakers understand the policy consequences of voting for a law that keeps Obamacare intact. We have a history of following up and holding politicians accountable, but we will also be there to support and thank the champions who stand strong and keep their promise.”

One suspects that wavering congress critters are getting a lot of phone calls today, and not just from their constituents.

Politico is saying the vote today is too close to call. I am making no predictions. If it passes, the Senate is likely to take it apart and rewrite it anyway. And if it fails, that certainly doesn’t mean the danger is over. But failing would make the so-called president look very, very weak.

Worse Than McCarthyism

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In the last post I quoted Walter Shaub, director of the Office of Government Ethics, who criticized Donald Trump’s so-called “plan” to plop a fig leaf over obvious conflicts of interest by allegedly separating himself from his businesses without actually separating himself from his businesses. Such criticism would seem to be to be part of Shaub’s job; he’d be remiss if he said nothing. My understanding is that most people who knows stuff about government ethics agree with Shaub.

Republicans might have reacted to this criticism in many ways. They might have disagreed with it; they might have offered counter-arguments. But here’s what they did, courtesy of  Jason Chaffetz, the head of the House Oversight Committee.

On Thursday, Chaffetz opted to go full Salem on the nonpartisan Office of Government Ethics, attacking Shaub for having done his job. The Republican threatened to subpoena Shaub if he refuses to participate in an official transcribed behind-closed doors interview. The calculus here seems to be that if nobody sees this crooked behavior by supposed ethics guardians like Chaffetz, then it didn’t happen.

OGE, set up post-Watergate, is nonpartisan and advises executive branch officials on avoiding conflicts. Shaub’s five-year term expires in January 2018.

Chaffetz demanded in a letter that he appear before lawmakers in the aforementioned closed-door, transcribed interview, to answer questions in a deposition-style setting. Richard Painter, who served as the ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, told the New York Times that this was “political retaliation” by Republicans against nonpartisan ethics officers for doing their basic duty.

Using threats of subpoenas and hearings to intimidate and silence political opponents is an old tactic for the American Right. Sen. Joe McCarthy was infamous for it back in the day, as was the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee.

But why do I claim that what Chaffetz tried to do is worse? Because he had no excuse. At least HUAC and McCarthy were ostensibly trying to investigate espionage and subversion in the United States, even though they were mostly just using said investigations as partisan political tools. But Chaffetz didn’t even bother to concoct some reason to harass Shaub that served some greater good. Back to Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

In an interview with me on Friday, Norm Eisen—who led ethics initiatives during President Obama’s first term—agreed with Painter’s assessment that this is simply retaliation:

Democrats and Republicans alike, Richard Painter and myself included, are outraged by the chairman’s demand for a closed, Star Chamber–style interrogation of Director Shaub simply because he said exactly what bipartisan experts agree upon: that Trump’s proposed conflicts solution is woefully inadequate. An even more chilling aspect of the chairman’s letter is the not-so-veiled threat to cut OGE’s funding. All of this is merely the latest salvo in all-out attack on ethics oversight. The effort to shut down OCE, the four [Cabinet] nominees who had no ethics vetting who the majority tried to ram through confirmation hearings, Trump’s flouting precedent and the Constitution in his own [conflicts of interest] plan, and now this bullying of Shaub and threat to close OGE.

“It’s open season on ethics in D.C.,” Eisen added.

In the old days the enemy was Communism; now the enemy is ethics.  See also “Earnest: ‘Outrageous’ For Chaffetz To Threaten To Subpoena Ethics Chief” by Matt Shuham at Talking Points Memo.

In other news, Trump has now taken to tweeting insults about Rep. John Lewis. The creature has no shame at all.

Abnormal Is the New Normal?

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I was busy doing other things and missed all the fireworks. So I’m still catching up on the dossier scandal. What fun! And then there was Trump’s bizarre “press conference,” in which he pretty much dashed anyone’s lingering hopes that he’d drop out of Asshole Mode once elected.

Trump is going to turn his companies over to his sons, he said. PBS Newshour did a segment on this yesterday that’s very much worth watching.

See also Remarks of Walter M. Shaub, Jr., Director, U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

The only thing this has in common with a blind trust is the label, “trust.” His sons are still running the businesses, and, of course, he knows what he owns. His own attorney said today that he can’t “un-know” that he owns Trump tower. The same is true of his other holdings. The idea of limiting direct communication about the business is wholly inadequate. That’s not how a blind trust works. There’s not supposed to be any information at all.

Here too, his attorney said something important today. She said he’ll know about a deal if he reads it in the paper or sees in on TV. That wouldn’t happen with a blind trust. In addition, the notion that there won’t be new deals doesn’t solve the problem of all the existing deals and businesses. The enormous stack of documents on the stage when he spoke shows just how many deals and businesses there are.

I was especially troubled by the statement that the incoming administration is going to demand that OGE approve a diversified portfolio of assets. No one has ever talked to us about that idea, and there’s no legal mechanism to do that. Instead, Congress set up OGE’s blind trust program under the Ethics in Government Act. Under that law anyone who wants a blind trust has to work with OGE from the start, but OGE has been left out of this process. We would have told them that this arrangement fails to meet the statutory requirements.

Republicans will do their best to keep Trump’s butt covered on this matter, but it’s also the case that if, someday, they decide he’s a liability to the party and their careers, and they want to get rid of him, the guy comes with a built-in impeachable offense. So that’s something.

With everything else going on, you might not have noticed that yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a bill that could cripple the ability of government to regulate private industry. Also yesterday, as predicted, the Senate — at 1:30 a.m., no less — approved a budget procedure that will allow them to gut the Affordable Care Act through a simple majority vote. The actual repeal legislation is supposed to be ready to go by January 27.

Rex Tillerson’s confirmation hearing yesterday went badly enough that Charles Pierce thinks he could nixed for the Secretary of State position.

Our journey into the Twilight Zone continued today, with the Justice Department announcing an investigation of the FBI.

Dr. Ben Carson was grilled by the Senate as the nominee for heading Housing and Urban Development. As expected, Carson barely knew where he was, but the hearing went smoothly enough. He could not promise that the Trump family would not profit from HUD decisions.

And then this happened:

C-SPAN confirmed Thursday afternoon that its online feed had been temporarily interrupted by the Kremlin-backed news outfit RT, formerly known as Russia Today.

Of course.

House Republican Priorities

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So the very first thing House Republicans did when they got back to work was to vote to gut the independent Office of Congressional Ethics.

In a closed-door meeting Monday night, Republicans adopted House rules changes that would have essentially gutted their own oversight watchdog — a move that would have defied Trump’s “drain the swamp” mantra aimed at making Washington more transparent and less cozy.

The surprise move on Monday night appeared to catch even House GOP leadership off guard, and the conference approved a pitch that would have put the Office of Congressional Ethics under the thumb of lawmakers on the House Ethics Committee. Monday’s effort was led, in part, by lawmakers who have come under investigation in recent years.

The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) came into being in 2008, when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker. The House Ethics Committee had devolved into something that simply made excuses, it was said. The OCE operates independently of Congress. It has no subpoena power but has investigated both Dems (Maxine Waters and Charlie Rangel) and Republicans (Michele Bachmann).

Some people thought the OCE was overzealous, apparently.

In place of the office, Republicans would create a new Office of Congressional Complaint Review that would report to the House Ethics Committee, which has been accused of ignoring credible allegations of wrongdoing by lawmakers.

“Poor way to begin draining the swamp,” Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, said on Twitter. He added, “Swamp wins with help of @SpeakerRyan, @RepGoodlatte.”

Mr. Goodlatte defended the action in a statement on Monday evening, saying it would strengthen ethics oversight in the House while also giving lawmakers better protections against what some of them have called overzealous efforts by the Office of Congressional Ethics.

To be fair, I understand Speaker Ryan was caught off guard by the announcement as well, which shows us even other Republicans think he is a useless dweeb.

The announcement yesterday quickly became a public relations debacle and blew up in the announcers’ faces.

Then The Donald issued a couple of tweets expressing mild disapproval. The plan was reversed. Although most news outlets are reporting that the tweets caused the reversal, Josh Marshall denies this is true. ” … the bigger point is that this started blowing up last night and was full firestorm before Trump said anything,” he wrote.

Even so, news media are crediting Trump with saving the OCE. The Times also said,

The comments constituted a public break by Mr. Trump with rank-and-file Republicans, who overrode their top leaders on Monday in a vote to significantly curtail the power of the ethics office, which was set up in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.

I think the three members were Rep. William Jefferson, Rep. Rick Renzi and Sen. Ted Stevens, but I’m not sure. Tom DeLay didn’t ever do jail time, I don’t think.

I just think it shows us what House Republicans consider to be priorities. As soon as Trump is elected, Paul Ryan started babbling about gutting Medicare. As soon as they get back to work, their first act is to try to relieve themselves of ethical oversight.

My Plan for Fighting Zika

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The Senate has nixed another Zika funding bill.

As Congress returned from a seven-week recess on Tuesday, Senate Democrats again stymied a $1.1 billion plan to fight the Zika virus, demanding that Republicans drop an effort to block Planned Parenthood from receiving money to combat the mosquito-borne disease.

Democrats, who had essentially blocked the same legislation in late June, had enough votes Tuesday to prevent Congress from moving emergency funding public health experts say is desperately needed as they prepare for the possibility that Zika will spread to other states along the gulf coast. The vote was 52 to 46, and Republicans needed 60 votes to advance the bill….

… The Republican-driven package was supposed to resolve the differences between a bipartisan Senate plan and a less Democrat-friendly House version. The bill would exclude Planned Parenthood from the list of providers that get new funding for contraception to combat spread of the virus, which can be sexually transmitted.

Mitch McConnell sorrowfully wondered how Democrats could be so stubborn.

“It’s hard to explain why, despite their own calls for funding, Democrats would block plans to keep women and babies safe from Zika,” Mr. McConnell said before the vote.

Tell us about how you want to keep women and babies safe by blocking Planned Parenthood funding, Mitch. I’m sure you’ve got an excuse, somewhere.

Oh, and my plan is to spread a rumor in Washington that Zika doesn’t just affect pregnant women; it also causes permanent and untreatable erectile dysfunction. In a month or two there wouldn’t be a mosquito left on the East Coast. Maybe in the Western Hemisphere.

No More Thoughts and Prayers

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Update: “Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) ended a blockade of the Senate floor after nearly 15 hours Thursday, announcing Republican leaders had agreed to hold votes on Democrat-backed measures to expand background checks and prevent suspected terrorists from acquiring guns.” (WaPo)

***

Some House Democrats walked out on the House’s “moment of silence” for the victims of Orlando, and as soon as the moment had passed some remaining Democrats shouted their frustration at speaker Paul “granny starver” Ryan.

House Democrats staged protests Monday evening in response to a moment of silence on the floor to remember the victims of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the deadliest in American history.

After Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) led the House in the moment of silence in honor of the 49 people who died in the massacre on Sunday, the chamber erupted into shouting as Democrats expressed frustration over the lack of votes to restrict guns after repeated mass shootings.

“Where’s the bill?” Democrats chanted.

Today, Senate Dems are holding an old-fashioned filibuster on gun control.

Led by the senators who represent Newtown, Connecticut — where a gunman fatally shot 26 people, including 20 children, in 2012 — Democrats took control of the Senate floor Wednesday and vowed to keep talking until lawmakers start doing something about gun violence.

“Newtown is still putting itself back together, probably will be for a long time,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who launched the filibuster-style takeover, declaring it was time for the Senate to do something about gun violence beyond the usual ineffective debates.

He said lawmakers could not go about business as usual after a mass killing at a gay club in Orlando, Florida, on Sunday claimed 49 victims.

“This is a different moment today than it was at the end of last week,” Murphy said. “There is a newfound imperative for this body to find a way to come together and take action, to try to do our part to stem this epidemic of gun violence and in particular this epidemic of mass shootings.”

This filibuster is still going on as I write this.  There’s a live feed at Wired.  It’s several hours of not-silence. A number of Democrats have participated; I don’t have a list of them yet.

So credit where credit is due. I hope this is just a beginning.

I’m Back

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Brought the Mahalaptop home today. The geeks had to do a factory restore, meaning it was pretty much wiped, and I’m having to reinstall software now. The problem apparently was caused by the Windows 10 upgrade I did a few weeks ago, so if you haven’t done that yet, hold off until they get more bugs fixed.

I see Canada has nixied Stephen Harper in favor of the more progressive and also more handsome Justin Trudeau. Yay.

Let’s look at what’s going on with Obamacare, starting with the newest effort by Republicans to repeal it.

The repeal legislation, Restoring Americans’ Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Ac, is being brought through a legislative procedure known as budget reconciliation, which only requires a simple majority to advance in the Senate and thus could overcome Democratic opposition to land on President Obama’s desk. However, the maneuver is only workable, under parliamentary rules, if it reduces the deficit and a full-on Obamacare repeal would add $353 billion to the deficit, the Congressional Budget Office has found. So Republicans are targeting only certain aspects of the law — such as the individual and employer mandates — that, if repealed, would reduce the deficit. It would also almost certainly be vetoed by the president.

However, according to Heritage Action, this is not good enough.

Heritage Action for America — the lobbying arm of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation — issued a statement threatening to consider the vote on the House bill, expected Friday, a key vote for conservative members.

In the statement, communications director Dan Holler accused GOP leadership of “putting their members in a terrible position,” as the legislation leaves in place some aspects of Obamacare, and argued that by voting in favor of the bill, Republicans are “undermining any serious effort to repeal the law in 2017.”

Actually repealing it would require Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, plus the White House. Well, they’re going to keep the House for awhile. However, my understanding is that the Dems are in pretty good shape to take back the Senate. And I sincerely think the White House is out of reach for Republicans. So good luck with that, Heritage Action.

Heritage Action is complaining because the partial repeal bill leaves the exchanges and medicaid expansion intact. If Heritage Action had half a brain, it would know that ending the individual mandate all by itself would kill the exchanges, and the rest of Obamacare as well, but we’re talking about wingnuts here.

Oh, and Fun Fact — states that didn’t expand Medicaid are paying more for it.

Insurance co ops also are in trouble. Nonprofit insurance co ops were allowed under Obamacare as a weak alternative to the private option.  Republicans saw to it that the co ops would be fragile, at best; see Richard Mayhew for an explanation. Since some co ops are failing, Republicans are trying to kill the entire program.

In other news, Jim Webb dropped out of the presidential race. Bye, Jim Webb.