Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“Trump’s 11th-hour decision to get involved in negotiations, weighing in via social media (and seemingly without coordinating with congressional allies), is reminiscent of his first-term approach to Capitol Hill, when he regularly blew up funding talks and directly caused the longest government shutdown in US history.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/392197/trump-government-shutdown-musk
“When the TCJA passed, analysts projected that it would add to the budget deficit and national debt—and it did. But those problems were more easily waved away when the country was running significantly smaller annual deficits and the debt-to-GDP ratio wasn’t reaching levels unseen since the height of World War II.
A full extension of the TCJA would add another $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office projects.”
https://reason.com/2024/12/02/taxpocalypse/
Elon Musk Already Flexing His Power Over Republicans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iu6K6-2HMg
“The House Foreign Affairs Committee has long been seen as one of the few corners of relative bipartisanship in Congress. Democrats on the panel are warning incoming Chair Brian Mast is about to blow that up.
Three Democratic staffers said Mast is expected to focus on divisive culture war issues and that his previous incendiary statements on the Middle East and Ukraine will make it difficult to get any across-the-aisle work done.
“The days of bipartisanship and collegiality on the committee could be over,” said one staffer, a sentiment echoed by the two others, who were granted anonymity to speak freely about internal conversations. “There are moments when Mast is a level-headed guy, but those are rare. It doesn’t happen very often.”
The House Foreign Affairs Committee holds considerable sway over U.S. foreign policy. Its top Democrat and Republican can block or slow-walk weapons transfers to foreign countries. The committee’s mandate also allows it to scrutinize initiatives by the State Department and other agencies, chart major foreign policy priorities, design sanctions and shape the country’s national security strategy.
Those are the type of issues and crises that Democrats and Republicans have traditionally tried to put aside some of their partisan rancor to solve. Outgoing Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul of Texas took pains to work with Democrats on legislation to support Israel and Ukraine, address the rise of China and publicly show that the committee’s members were working across party lines to advance U.S. national security interests around the world.
Mast’s imminent selection came as a very unwelcome shock to committee Democrats. The assumption had been that either committee Vice Chair Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) or Helsinki Commission Chair Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), both more moderate Republicans, would prevail.
Mast has alienated some staunch Democratic supporters of Israel with incendiary comments about Palestinians. And his hardline views on Ukraine could upend the bipartisan consensus under McCaul that U.S. support for Ukraine should continue and that restrictions on Kyiv’s use of donated weapons should be lifted.
In an interview, Mast reiterated his commitment to giving the State Department “a colonoscopy” to examine how money is spent and to pursuing an “America first” foreign policy on the committee.”
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“Mast separates him from some more moderate critics of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy, including Trump’s pick to be secretary of State, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. Rubio opposed supplemental funding as well, but the Florida Republican argued that his vote was in protest over a lack of funding for tighter security measures at the U.S. southern border. That said, Mast did previously back Ukraine receiving NATO membership and a no-fly zone in Ukraine, a stance that puts him in line with the staunchest allies of Kyiv in both parties.
And the committee could still accomplish bipartisan work on China. Mast, like McCaul and many committee Democrats, supports a tougher line on Beijing. He could also find some common ground with Democrats on policy towards Israel and the Middle East, including the need to provide Israel with defensive weaponry and counter Iranian aggression.
Democrats are expressing hope that the pressures of leadership will change the way he approaches committee work and his relationships with Democrats.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/15/house-foreign-affairs-mast-00194288
“House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.) said Saturday that he will oppose any spending measure that leaves out the billions in extra aid farm state Republicans were seeking for farmers still reeling from Donald Trump’s 2018 trade war, inflation, a delayed five-year farm bill reauthorization and a raft of other economic pressures. Republicans in agriculture-heavy states and some Democrats have warned about a crippling economic crisis hitting rural America, which overwhelmingly supported Trump in the last election.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/15/johnson-farm-aid-deadline-00194390
“Trips to Israel are only one piece of a multipronged strategy for promoting Israel’s interests. AIPAC hosts an annual conference for elected officials in the Washington, D.C., area, which former Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) called the “largest gathering of members of Congress” other than the State of the Union.
The organization spent over $3 million on lobbying last year, and its spending in 2024 currently places it among the top 3 percent of all lobbyist groups tracked by OpenSecrets. Its PAC and super PAC also helped funnel a combined $50.9 million into the 2022 election cycle alone, according to OpenSecrets.
Still, AIPAC’s prolific recruitment of members and staff for travel to Israel — travel which cost at least $10 million, according to LegiStorm data for 2012-2023 — demonstrates the importance AIPAC places on its travel program. According to the Howard Center’s analysis, roughly half of the current members of the House have traveled with the organization since 2012.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/30/israel-aipac-funded-congress-travel-00185167
“Going down the list of attorneys general before Barr, you will see people with extensive legal experience, including former prosecutors, Justice Department officials, judges, and state attorneys general. Gaetz, by contrast, is a 42-year-old graduate of William & Mary Law School who briefly worked for a law firm in Fort Walton Beach before entering state politics in 2010, two years after he was admitted to the Florida bar. He served in Florida’s legislature for six years before he was elected to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District in 2016.
Gaetz’s skimpy legal background is not the only reason many people, including Republican colleagues as well as Democrats, were dismayed by Trump’s choice. As Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella noted, Rep. Mike Simpson (R–Idaho) “summed up the general reaction” on Capitol Hill with this response to news of the nomination: “Are you shittin’ me?” When asked what he thought about Gaetz as attorney general, Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas) was a bit more diplomatic, saying, “I’m trying to absorb all of this.” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska) said Gaetz is “not a serious candidate.” The New York Times describes him as “one of the most reviled members of his conference.””
…
“Whatever you make of McCarthy’s ouster, Gaetz’s recklessness was on full display in his defenses of Trump. On the night before former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee in February 2019, Gaetz directed a tweet at him: “Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…”
When Democrats accused Gaetz of trying to intimidate Cohen, Gaetz defended the tweet. “This isn’t witness tampering,” he said. “This is witness testing. I don’t threaten anybody.” He later reconsidered that response, deleting the tweet and apologizing to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.). “While it is important 2 create context around the testimony of liars like Michael Cohen, it was NOT my intent to threaten, as some believe I did,” he wrote. “I’m deleting the tweet & I should have chosen words that better showed my intent. I’m sorry.””
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“Gaetz joined 138 other House Republicans in objecting to electoral votes for Joe Biden. When Trump supporters enraged at Biden’s supposedly phony victory invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Gaetz sought to blame leftist provocateurs for the riot. “Some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters,” he said on the House floor the next day. “They were masquerading as Trump supporters and, in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.””
https://reason.com/2024/11/14/matt-gaetzs-personality-irked-his-gop-colleagues-there-are-better-reasons-to-oppose-his-nomination/
“On its face, there’s nothing wrong with providing additional psychological support for federal agents who work with trafficking survivors. But HSI—a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—has quite a questionable record when it comes to “helping” trafficking victims. At times, HSI has been known to subject suspected victims to potentially traumatizing experiences. And much of the “human trafficking” work the agency does just involves plain old prostitution stings.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/30/congress-passes-bill-backing-self-care-for-people-pursuing-prostitution-stings/
“The bill’s reforms aside, its restrictions would have made the border a much more dangerous and inaccessible place for people seeking protection. A similar border-buttoning authority during the pandemic didn’t prevent crossings, but it did lead to thousands of reported instances of kidnapping, torture, and rape suffered by asylum seekers who were returned to or stopped in Mexico. Fortifying the border against asylum seekers, as the bipartisan bill would’ve done and as President Joe Biden is now doing, keeps vulnerable migrants in danger.
Harris and Walz’s eagerness to defend the failed border bill is a sign of the Democratic Party’s rightward shift on immigration and border security this year. The legislation had no grand reform—no pathway to citizenship for undocumented longtime residents, no solution for Dreamers, no farm work visa improvements—to balance the significant asylum restrictions. But the border and immigration have increasingly become liabilities for Democrats (and top priorities for voters), so their messaging has gotten tougher and their appetite for restrictionism has grown.
Congress should work on immigration reform instead of relying on the president to patch up the broken system. As Walz said in yesterday’s debate, “You can’t just do this through the executive branch.” Questions of process aside, this year’s bipartisan bill wasn’t the silver bullet or the humane solution Democrats keep suggesting.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/02/a-pro-immigrant-party-wouldnt-want-to-revive-the-failed-senate-border-bill/
“Noah acknowledges, in passing, one particular provision of the existing nuclear regulatory framework on the United States that’s very important: radiation is held to the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) standard, which makes it essentially impossible for nuclear to be cost-competitive.
Suppose I had a design for a cost-effective nuclear reactor, and I said I should be allowed to build it, because electricity is good and air pollution is bad. The regulator is going to look at it and say, “Well, that reactor seems awfully cheap to build, why not add a bunch more features to make the radiation levels even lower?” And then I will say, “That would be hideously expensive in a way that is net bad for public health, because it leads to more burning of fossil fuels and worse air pollution.” But the regulator comes back and says, “We’re not using a cost-benefit framework, we’re using ALARA.” And I say, “That doesn’t make sense, coal ash is radioactive — you are creating more radiation by raising my costs.” And the regulator says, “I don’t regulate coal plants, I regulate you — ALARA!”
As Jason Crawford writes, “any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.”
This is a deeply dysfunctional regulatory paradigm, and it reflects the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s origins in 1974 legislation that was explicitly motivated by a belief that the old Atomic Energy Commission was too friendly to the industry.
In 2019, Congress passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which, among other things, “requires the NRC to develop new processes for licensing nuclear reactors, including staged licensing of advanced nuclear reactors.” The hope of NEIMA’s proponents was to change 45 years of the NRC fundamentally being an agency that says “no” to stuff and make them into an agency that would create a regulatory pathway under which new kinds of nuclear reactors could be licensed and built. And after several years, the NRC did get around to writing the new rules for SMRs, but they came up with an even longer and more cumbersome regulatory process.
Earlier this summer, the ADVANCE Act reiterated Congress’s determination for the NRC to change.
But the NRC staff, to the best of my knowledge, fundamentally does not believe that America’s elected officials genuinely want them to make it faster and cheaper to build nuclear reactors. And one reason they don’t believe it is that even though the Biden administration says lots of pro-nuclear stuff, has plenty of pro-nuclear appointees, signed the ADVANCE Act, and has done a lot to help with SMRs in terms of financing, they still coughed-up an NRC nominee who basically supports the status quo. You need a team of political appointees at the agency who are willing to both drive change and also personally take the heat when change makes people mad. You can’t “just use nuclear, bro.” You need to put people in place to actually drive specific policy change in a way that will let the industry grow and work.
And of course, even if you did that, it might not work.”
https://www.slowboring.com/p/noah-smith-is-too-down-on-nuclear