Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“Ukraine’s president said that Russia is now firing 10 times more artillery shells than his country is able to, and has 30 times more aircraft, in a worrying sign for Ukraine’s ability to sustain its military efforts.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-ukraine-outgunned-10-1-112058462.html
“What constitutes an emergency? According to Congress’ new spending package, research equipment and facilities for the National Science Foundation is an emergency. So are the 2024 Democratic National Committee convention and the Republican National Committee convention. So is NASA space exploration.
By classifying all these line items as emergencies, Congress can get hundreds of millions of taxpayer funding for them with reduced oversight.”
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“According to a January report from the Cato Institute, Congress has approved over $12 trillion in spending for emergencies over the past three decades, making up around 1 in 10 federal budget dollars spent—more than both Medicaid and veterans programs combined.”
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“”Congress has complete discretion in designating spending for emergencies because what qualifies as an emergency is subject to interpretation,” Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett wrote in Cato’s report. While the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has laid out several criteria that emergency spending is supposed to meet, Boccia and Lett note that “the current process lacks a mechanism to evaluate whether an emergency provision meets the OMB’s test, which means that anything can count as emergency spending.”
Once spending gets earmarked as an emergency, it isn’t subjected to typical caps on discretionary spending, allowing Congress to rack up costs with little accountability. “Unfortunately, over the course of the last 30-some years, Congress took what was designed to be a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ escape valve, and they’ve turned it into a major source of funding for federal activity,” David Ditch, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, tells Reason.”It’s just a way for [Congress] to avoid fiscal consequences. And that’s part of how we got where we are.””
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“Cato’s report highlights some particularly egregious examples of this exact phenomenon, including $600 million earmarked for replacing aircraft used in weather forecasting, $347 million for prison construction and detention costs, and $278 million to speed up the building process for a single research center.
“To me, the original sin in all of this is too many members of Congress don’t care at all about where the money comes from, all they care about is getting as much money out the door that they can take credit for,” says Ditch. “They’re more concerned with their next reelection than they are with the nation’s trajectory 20 and 30 years down the line.””
https://reason.com/2024/03/05/congress-wastes-billions-with-bogus-emergency-declaration/
“The filibuster allows a minority of senators to veto virtually any legislation, unless the majority can convince 60 of the Senate’s 100 members to break that filibuster. Because it is quite rare for either party to control 60 seats in the Senate — the last time it happened was a seven-month period in 2009–10 — this means that the minority party can block nearly all bills.
Filibusters used to be exceedingly rare. One common method used to measure the frequency of filibusters is to count the number of “cloture” votes, the process used to break a filibuster, taken every year. And from 1917 until 1970, the Senate held less than one a year.
That number started to rise well before McConnell became his party’s Senate leader. But the rate of cloture votes doubled in 2007, when McConnell first became minority leader. And it has grown rapidly since then. Between 2010 and 2020, the Senate took more than 80 cloture votes every year.
This escalation in filibusters, a tactic spearheaded by McConnell, has transformed the role of Congress in society. And it’s similarly transformed what kind of legislation governing parties even attempt to pass.
In the two years when President Joe Biden had a Democratic majority in Congress, for example, all of his major legislative accomplishments — the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the American Rescue Plan — were spending bills and not regulatory legislation such as a minimum wage hike or a new voting rights law.
A major reason why is that it is sometimes possible to bypass a filibuster of spending legislation through a process known as “budget reconciliation,” but reconciliation cannot be used to regulate. So presidents who wish to accomplish anything at all in Congress must limit their ambition to taxing and spending unless they can convince their opposition to play ball. Parties try their best to get creative within those categories (and sometimes succeed), but it is a huge constraint on policymaking.
Yet, while McConnell essentially eliminated Congress’s ability to regulate, the Republican Party has still enjoyed tremendous regulatory policymaking success over the last decade or more. And the reason why is that Republicans don’t need a functioning Congress to set policy, so long as they control the courts.”
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“While McConnell was busy cutting Congress out of the policymaking process, a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees racked up an impressive array of conservative policy victories.
The Court dismantled much of America’s campaign finance law. It neutralized key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, allowed red states to opt out of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, gave religious conservatives a sweeping new right to defy federal and state laws, sabotaged unions, laid waste to US gun laws, abolished affirmative action at nearly all universities, and eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.
Perhaps most significantly of all, the Court has rapidly consolidated power within itself, at the expense of the two elected branches of government. In many existing federal laws, for example, Congress delegated significant policymaking authority to federal agencies such as the EPA or the Department of Labor. But the Supreme Court gave itself a largely limitless veto power over any of those agency regulations — as long as five justices deem an agency’s action to be too significant.
And so the Supreme Court is now the locus of policymaking in the United States.
This happened in no small part because of McConnell’s Senate leadership. Under President Barack Obama, McConnell’s Republican caucus aggressively blockaded judicial nominees, including holding a Supreme Court seat open for more than a year until Trump could fill it with the archconservative Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Then, once Trump came into office, McConnell transformed the Senate into a factory that rolled out newly confirmed judges almost as fast as the Trump White House could find conservatives to nominate to the bench. The result is a judiciary that routinely engages in political hardball to advance the GOP’s policy priorities.”
https://www.vox.com/2024/2/29/24085915/mitch-mcconnell-broke-congress-supreme-court-filibuster
“It was the last vote for Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., the conservative hard-liner who was all but banished from the party after he insisted that its leaders stop spreading lies about the 2020 election and accept that former President Donald Trump lost. He resigned from Congress on Friday, leaving his seat empty for now.
Buck voted “no” on the spending bill, and said he’d have voted “hell no” if possible. But despite his unassailable fiscal conservative credentials, he lost his stature on the right for insisting his party reject the stolen-election claims, reflecting a new litmus test.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/house-republicans-had-bad-day-012737762.html
“The U.S. government, for all the money and agents it’s thrown at the border over the past several decades, has never been able to practically “shut down the border” or achieve zero illegal crossings (all the legal issues with those proposals aside).
Between the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and January 2021, the U.S. has spent $333 billion to fund the agencies tasked with immigration enforcement, according to the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit. The budgets for those agencies have been rising for years.
But more enforcement money hasn’t necessarily led to lower illegal crossings. As budgets have gone up, apprehensions of people who crossed the border between authorized ports of entry have gone up, down, and remained static. In other words, they don’t cleanly align: Though Customs and Border Protection reported 2.05 million apprehensions in FY 2023, it reported somewhat close to that number—over 1.5 million—in FY 2000. Annual apprehensions hovered below 500,000 from FY 2010 through FY 2018.”
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“The U.S.-Mexico border stretches nearly 2,000 miles, much of it treacherous. No matter the funding and no matter the enforcement mandate, there’s no way that agents could stop every illegal crosser traversing the deserts, mountains, and waters that make up the border region. That’s proven impossible along much smaller and more surveilled borders, such as the boundaries of East Germany and North Korea.”
https://reason.com/2024/02/02/zero-illegal-crossings-is-an-unattainable-goal-for-the-border/
“The constitutional law here appears straightforward: Congress can’t outright ban TikTok or any social media platform unless it can prove that it poses legitimate and serious privacy and national security concerns that can’t be addressed by any other means. The bar for such a justification is necessarily very high in order to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights, Krishnan said.”
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“members of Congress have not provided concrete proof for their claims about Chinese digital espionage and seem to have little interest in offering any transparency: Before the committee voted to advance the bill Thursday, lawmakers had a closed-door classified briefing on national security concerns associated with TikTok.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/24094839/tiktok-ban-bill-congress-pass-biden
“The Ukrainians are losing thousands of people because they don’t have enough ammunition…political game in Washington, it’s an election year…thousands of people are dying because of this.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R31hMWs25UI
“Lawmakers who support a new generation of advanced nuclear power are setting their sights on what they see as the technology’s top obstacle: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The Biden administration has touted small, factory-built reactors as a possible lifeline for an aging nuclear industry and a crucial step toward cutting the nation’s planet-warming emissions. But only one reactor design has gotten the greenlight from the NRC, and administration-backed advanced nuclear energy projects are struggling to get off the ground.
Key leaders in the House and Senate are now considering fundamental changes to the NRC, an independent federal agency tasked with protecting public safety and health.
The House Energy and Commerce and Senate Environment and Public Works committees are negotiating a compromise legislative package that would streamline regulations at the NRC and potentially adjust the agency’s mission statement, as I write today.
The talks come after four Senate Democrats recently kneecapped a renomination bid for one of the NRC’s longtime regulators, Jeff Baran, who was first appointed by former President Barack Obama.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was among the Democrats who called Baran an overzealous regulator overtly hostile to nuclear energy. Today, Manchin said he won’t support any nominee who’s too focused on safety.
“We’re just looking for people who understand that we have to have nuclear energy in the mix,” Manchin said.
Lawmakers believe fundamentally changing the NRC, in leadership and policy, will give so-called small modular reactors a fighting chance to succeed.”
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/power-switch/2024/01/24/congress-takes-aim-at-nations-nuclear-regulator-00137531
“Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma spoke on Wednesday about the political challenges he’s encountered while serving as the top GOP negotiator on a bipartisan border security deal.
In a speech shortly before the expected failure of the deal, Lankford bemoaned the fact that some fellow Republicans were objecting to the bill for purely political reasons.
“Some of them have been very clear with me,” Lankford said of his GOP colleagues, “they have political differences with the bill. They say it’s the wrong time to solve the problem. We’ll let the presidential election solve this problem.”
Lankford went on to say that a “popular commentator” — without naming any names — threatened to “destroy” him if he negotiated the deal during a presidential election year, regardless of what was in it.
“I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election,” Lankford recounted the commentator saying.
“By the way, they have been faithful to their promise, and have done everything they can to destroy me,” he added.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sen-lankford-says-popular-commentator-200553824.html
“Putting all the provisions together, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the deal will lift about 400,000 children out of poverty, and make another 3 million less poor, in its first year. By 2025, it will be keeping 500,000 children a year out of poverty. The Tax Policy Center finds that the bulk of the tax cut will go to families earning $20,000 to $40,000 a year, with most families in the bottom fifth of the income scale getting a tax cut. Because of the business tax cuts, the total package winds up concentrating its benefits at the bottom and at the very top of the income scale.
While nothing to sneeze at, this is a far cry from the roughly 3 million children that would been lifted out of poverty in 2022 if the 2021 expansion of the credit had been extended. It is a dramatically more modest step. It also takes as a given that the credit will not be available to families with zero earnings, a key disagreement between Democratic and Republican legislators on which the latter have shown no flexibility.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/1/16/24035922/child-tax-credit-wyden-smith-deal