Month: January 2023

The GOP’s Current Plan To Cut Spending Is a Political Failure

Posted on by Lone Candle

“According to the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl, the GOP plan so far is to cut $130 billion from discretionary appropriations. Unfortunately, the defense budget and veterans health funds are excluded from cuts, despite making up $993 billion out of $1,602 billion discretionary budget. As Riedl notes, their plan will require “freezing those two items and cutting everything else by 21% immediately.”
This maneuver guarantees political failure for the Republicans’ plan.”

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“imposing cuts on only a small share of the discretionary budget excludes trillions of dollars from scrutiny and is a political nonstarter.”

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“while limiting discretionary spending is a good start, fiscal sustainability requires that Congress also cut the mandatory side of the budget. Indeed, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—not defense or education—are still the chief drivers of our future debt, just as they have been in the past. Along with the interest the Treasury must pay on the debt, these three programs will be responsible for 86 percent of federal spending between 2008 and 2032, says Riedl. In other words, no level of discretionary spending cuts will ever be enough to control the upcoming debt explosion.”

McCarthy’s speaker chaos could make Democrats more powerful

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Given Republicans’ narrow 222-person majority, they can’t really pass much if they lose any more than five votes in their own conference. Since conservatives have been vocal about their commitment to blocking key bills, like an increase to the debt ceiling, in order to get the spending cuts they want, Republicans will likely need Democratic votes to keep essential government functions and services running if they want to do so.
Additionally, given the number of Freedom Caucus members added to the House Rules Committee, Democrats could theoretically join with the conservatives on the panel to block or slow bills favored by House GOP Leadership.

The situation gives Democrats more leverage to put forth their own demands, if Republican leadership is actually interested in getting anything done. Of course, there’s a high chance that they aren’t”

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“In 2011 and 2014, Republican House Speaker John Boehner needed Democratic votes to approve spending bills to fund the government”

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“McCarthy’s concessions included adding multiple members of the Freedom Caucus to the Rules Committee, which plays a key role in deciding what bills make it to the floor and what amendments get considered. Should three ultraconservative Republicans be added to that committee, something McCarthy agreed to, they’d be able to delay bills and push more extreme versions of policies.

That’s led some Democrats to worry these changes will empower Republicans’ conservative flank to use the panel for obstruction. “We have a small faction basically holding Congress hostage,” Scanlon says. “Many of the rules changes that are being proposed by this kind of extreme faction have the same goal.”

Rep. Norma Torres (D-CA), a member of the Rules Committee, notes that conservatives could gum up the process on bills by forcing debate on amendments, whether or not they are germane to the legislation at hand. “It’s impossible to legislate from that perspective,” she said.”

The new front in the right’s war on abortion

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The Biden administration helped expand access to medication abortion last week, with the US Food and Drug Administration finalizing a rule to make the pills more readily available in pharmacies. But this effort to help patients get pills to end a pregnancy could be dwarfed by a major push to restrict access to the medication from anti-abortion leaders and their Republican allies.
As lawmakers head back to state legislatures this month, many for the first time since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, Republicans face new pressure to restrict access to the combination of abortion-inducing drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, used typically within the first 10 to 12 weeks of a pregnancy. Medication abortion has become the most common method for ending pregnancies in the United States, partly due to its safety record, its lower cost, diminished access to in-person care, and greater opportunities for privacy.

Restricting access to the pills is not a new goal for the anti-abortion movement; the Guttmacher Institute tracked 118 medication abortion restrictions introduced last year across 22 states, and many conservative states already have laws on the books for dispensing the drugs that go beyond what the FDA requires and what leading health organizations recommend.

But efforts to crack down on abortion pills have taken on new urgency since the Dobbs v. Jackson decision. More women are finding ways to bypass abortion bans through organizations like Aid Access in Europe, pill suppliers from Mexico, and methods like mail forwarding from states where abortion is legal. While a study from the Society of Family Planning estimated that legal abortions nationwide declined by more than 10,000 in the two months following the Supreme Court’s decision, some or many of those abortions may have been replaced by pills women privately obtained and researchers couldn’t count.

“Everyone who is trafficking these pills should be in jail for trafficking,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Washington Post in December. “It hasn’t happened, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.”

Some of the restrictions on medication abortion leaders are considering extend well beyond those pursued by lawmakers in previous years, when their focus was generally on banning telemedicine and adding more requirements for dispensing pills in person, like mandatory ultrasounds, waiting periods, and visits with doctors.

Anti-abortion activists are exploring new strategies, such as laws to ban websites like Aid Access and Plan C and laws to make health care providers newly liable for disposing of aborted fetal tissue. In a federal lawsuit filed in November, one religious conservative group has challenged the FDA’s approval of mifepristone writ large, alleging the agency abused its authority 23 years ago in authorizing the drug at all.

Some lawmakers are looking to test the limits of their extraterritorial powers, exploring how and whether they could punish a resident for getting an out-of-state abortion, or retaliate against providers in other states who facilitate them.

“Anti-abortion advocates are throwing the kitchen sink in an attempt to see what might work,” said Jenny Ma, a senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “That’s the same playbook the anti-abortion movement had before Dobbs … but they’ve become emboldened.””

Garland appoints special counsel to review Biden documents

Posted on by Lone Candle

“White House lawyers initially found sensitive documents at the Penn Biden Center in Washington — where Biden kept a personal office — on Nov. 2, a day before the midterm elections, and notified the Justice Department. On Dec. 20, Biden’s team notified the department of a second batch of documents in Biden’s Wilmington garage. On Thursday, they informed the department of another document found in Biden’s house. Garland was briefed on the investigation on Jan. 5.”

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“there are significant differences in the timeline of the Trump-related documents and those found at Biden’s office and home. The National Archives discovered the presence of records with classified markings at Mar-a-Lago in January 2022, after a protracted effort to reclaim presidential records that Trump had warehoused at his estate since leaving office. Trump sent an initial batch of 15 boxes back to the archive that month.
After discovering the material marked classified, the Archives forwarded the matter to the Justice Department, which soon subpoenaed Trump’s presidential office for all other documents with classified markings. The department also subpoenaed security footage to review the handling of the documents, which were kept in a storage room and Trump’s personal office.

But Justice Department investigators said evidence they collected showed that even after the subpoena, Trump’s team had not turned over everything in their possession — even as the ex-president’s aides presented the department with a signed attestation that all subpoenaed documents had been turned over. The FBI discovered another trove of sensitive records after executing a search at Trump’s estate in August, including some that he kept in his personal office.

Biden’s team, by contrast, has repeatedly emphasized its proactive approach to the discovery of the records. In two statements, White House lawyer Richard Sauber said Biden’s own team discovered the documents, immediately alerted the Archives and the Justice Department and returned the records. Similarly, they conducted additional searches and have pledged to cooperate with department investigators.

Trump sued last year to demand the return of documents seized by the FBI, a battle that reached the Supreme Court, only to result in a sharp rejection of his effort to sideline the Justice Department investigation. Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have demanded assessments of the potential damage to national security caused by the handling of the documents.”

House GOP obsesses over mirage of a backroom-deal doc

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his GOP allies insist that no back-room promises were made to land his gavel after 15 frenetic ballots, that no plum committee spots, precise spending cuts, or debt limit strategy were guaranteed in a quid pro quo. Agreements and goals were reached with conservatives who initially withheld their votes from the speaker, GOP leaders say, but nothing was formalized in writing.”

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“One McCarthy holdout, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), bluntly told Fox News when asked “what did you get” that he would join the influential GOP Steering Committee “as Speaker McCarthy’s designee.”
McCarthy also informed members that the House would take its first-ever vote this Congress on a contentious national sales tax bill that Georgia Republicans — including McCarthy dissenter Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) — have pushed for decades.

“That was part of the negotiation. The 20 conservatives who were holding out, one of the things that they wanted was to see it come to the floor for a vote,” Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) said.”

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“Another McCarthy promise was to diversify the membership on coveted House panels, which in practice means adding more Freedom Caucus members and other conservatives. That has begun to happen: Four speaker-race holdouts — Clyde, Donalds, Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) and Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) — were awarded spots on prime committees”

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“Clyde stressed: “There’s no secret rules addendum. There’s just an agreement.”

The rumored existence of a binding secret document, however, prompted multiple GOP lawmakers to approach their leaders about it, texting each other in search of the missing paper.”

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“Some House Republicans argue that the most divisive of the concessions floating around are “aspirational” — particularly on issues like spending and the debt limit, which would need to get buy-in from the Democratic Senate and White House to go anywhere.”