Schumuck

Now that I think of it, I do have a few words of my own about Charles Schumer's decision to give Donald Trump and Elon Musk what they wanted by supporting a continuing resolution for the rest of the 2025 fiscal year's budget with severe cuts and with full presidential authority on tariffs.  Let me be as succinct as possible.

Schumer, as Senate Democratic leader had two choices, both bad.  He could either support a continuing budget resolution sent over to the Senate from the House crafted by Republicans with House Democrats frozen out despite the Republicans' paper-thin House majority, a resolution that ceded most if not all power over the budget and other issues to Trump and Musk, or he could have rejected it and let the government shut down, which would have given Trump and Musk just as much leeway to impose their collective will on the federal government as with a continuing resolution - if not more so - and ultimately seen Trump and Musk get their way, but in the latter scenario, the Democrats still would have gone down fighting.  In other words, Schumer had to choose between caving and fighting a losing battle.  He chose to cave.  When the 2026 budget is debated later this year, he will fight a losing battle.  If, indeed, the Democrats have any more opportunities left to fight. Schumer may have squandered the last one, plus any leverage Democrats may have had in the minority in both chambers.

And yet Schumer is still under the illusion that this fight is about spending priorities and policy, not the fight to prevent Trump from assuming dictatorial powers that it is.  To demonstrate just how clueless Schumer is, he thinks that his personal relations with Republican senators are strong enough that he can cut a deal with a couple of them when they're together in the Senate gym while riding their stationery bikes.

Me and the boys,  just me and the boys!

Liberal Oklahoma City podcaster Jennifer Welch's response to Schumer's perceived ability to cut a deal with GOP senators in his gym shorts was to simply demand in the second party that he resign as Senate Democratic leader.

Also House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries.  I, for one, never thought I'd see so littel fight and street smarts in two guys from Brooklyn. 

Is it any wonder that the Democrats have a record-low 28 percent approval rating?

Up Chuck

Today I was going to write a post explaining my disgust with Chuck Schumer's decision to surrender to Trump and to Senate Republicans and allow a horrible continuing budget resolution to fund the government for the rest of the 2025 fiscal year, rather than allow a shutdown that could have caused even more damage than a GOP-engineered resolution giving Trump everything he wanted and make the argument that Schumer should have fought it.

But it turns out that former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer made the argument for me.

Thanks, Dan.

Codify THIS!

Let me get this straight, Senator Schumer . . .

You say you're going to hold a Senate vote today on codifying Roe v. Wade that you know won't pass for the sole purpose of getting Republicans on record as opposing such an action to motivate pro-choice voters to go to the polls in November.  That's your strategy.

But what happens when someone like, say, Republican Senator Ron Johnson, up for re-election in Wisconsin this year and unlucky not to have an opponent named Russell by his mother and Feingold by his father this time, inevitably votes against the codification of Roe?  Oh, sure, it may motivate Wisconsin Democrats, but in a likely tight election in Wisconsin, won't it motivate pro-life voters to come out in full force to Johnson - and possibly tip the election in his favor?

You're not so smart, are you Chuck? 😠 

Hitting The Ceiling

Well, the debt ceiling has been temporarily raised through early December, so a crisis has been avoided . . . for now. And the anger Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer showed toward Senate Republicans for delaying it for as long as they did was all too obvious.

After Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell allowed the vote on the debt ceiling to go through, Schumer excoriated the GOP for letting the crisis go so far.  It was the right speech at the wrong time.  It was too sensitive a moment for such a speech.  All he did was anger McConnell and made him much less likely to step in when the debt ceiling needs to be raised again.  Jesus didn't weep.  But Joe Manchin did.

"Poisoning the well" is too mild a metaphor for what just went down this past week.

The Democrats will likely have to raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation, which will mean that they will have to set a specific number that the Republicans will force them to defend in a midterm election campaign that will focus on too much government spending.  This may be a neutral issue if the Democrats can pass President Biden's "Build Back Better" program - but that's a big "if" . . . and time is running out.

And a continuing resolution has to be passed to fund the government at the same time the debt ceiling has to be raised again.

I'm not optimistic.

Through the Roof

The United States is on the verge of defaulting on its debt, and only a fool would be nonchalant about remaining unworried of the debt ceiling blowing up.

The Republicans aren't worried.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has insisted that the Democrats raise the debt ceiling but themselves but won't let them move ahead with a procedural vote to do it on their own.  He wants the Democrats to do it without any form of Republican participation, which is to say, he wants them to use a budget reconciliation.  Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer can't do that.  It'll take a long time - far longer, most likely, then the expected default date of October 18.

I have cautious optimism and confidence that Schumer can get this job done.  He's vowed to get the debt ceiling raised by having Senate Democrats stay over the weekend if he can't get it done by Friday.  He won't get it done today; the procedural vote he's set up for today to raise the debt ceiling will inevitably fail, thanks to the GOP filibuster.  If the debt ceiling isn't raised, the American economy and possibly the global economy will fail.  The GOP is banking on Democrats to get the blame for letting the country default simply because they control the Presidency and Congress.  If that sounds ridiculous, because everyone can see what McConnell is doing, consider that the Republicans have always pulled this trick and have always dodged the blame and deflected it to the Democrats.  They stonewalled much of Bill Clintons agenda in 1993 and 1994 and did the same to to all of Barack Obama's agenda (except for health care reform) in 2009 and 2010.  Result?  They won the House in the subsequent midterms. 

What really frustrates me - and Democrats as well, I'm sure - is that Democrats tried to work with Republicans in good faith on the Clinton and Obama agendas with much larger congressional majorities when they should have gone it alone.  This time the Democrats have learned their lesson and have been trying to get things done on their own.  But with the narrow majorities they have right now, it's too late.

Meanwhile, the Republican objective to take back power in 2022 and 2024 and turn America into a fascist dictatorship continues full steam ahead.

I only hope we don't end up selling apples on the street two weeks from now. 

Closer To the Edge

Congress is still - still - trying to get an infrastructure bill passed, and as of this writing, nothing has happened.  The vote on the bipartisan infrastructure had been repeatedly delayed - and that's the good news!  President Biden has been trying to broker a compromise, but progressives aren't quite there yet and moderates aren't there at all.  West Virginia's Senator Joe Manchin has made it clear that he wants no more than $1.5 trillion for the reconciliation bill and Arizona's Senator Kyrsten Sinema doesn't want to let anyone known where she is on this because she doesn't seem to know herself.  She jokes about it! 

Meanwhile, Republicans rigging the electoral process for Donald Trump in 2024 are licking their chops as they're waiting to put on the black shirts and weed out the weaklings and smash in their windows and kick in their doors.

With COVID still not quite licked yet (thought we may be getting there slowly), the economy still in a precarious place, and the debt ceiling nearing, it's going to be up to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (above) to deliver in the House of Representatives while Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer has to find a way to make sure Manchin and Sinema are on board.  It's mostly Pelosi's game here, and she needs to bring the legislation before the House at just the right time so it can pass.  If she can pull this off and bring the moderates and the progressives together, she should win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Otherwise, this storm before the calm, as Jonathan Capehart put it, will be more like a storm before the storm.  

One For the Road

And the rails.  And the utilities.  And a whole lot of other things.

Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer is ready to have a procedural Senate vote to continue work on the massive bipartisan infrastructure bill amounting to $1.2 trillion so that it can be passed in tandem with the Democratic-only $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill to expand infrastructure spending to child care, Medicare, and clean-energy programs.  The vote is scheduled for Wednesday,

Can he pull it off?  Republicans are grousing about the rushing of a bill that hasn't been written yet beyond the outline, with the funding still murky.  But it's a safe bet that they'll stay on board in order to help the GOP have something to brag about in the 2022 midterms.  Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, has made a couple of concessions to get the bill through while keeping a close eye on his own priorities. And as Democrats negotiate amongst themselves on how to pay for the reconciliation package, Schumer is making sure that he keeps everyone on the same page, just as he did with the COVID relief bill.  So you might say I'm cautiously optimistic.

Schumer has been preparing for something like this for his entire Senate tenure.  If he succeeds at this infrastructure gambit, he could end up being the most effective Senate Democratic majority leader since Lyndon Johnson.

Throw Out the Vote

You knew it was going to happen. Senate Democrats brought up the sweeping election reform bill passed by the House, and Senate Republicans blocked the upper house from even debating it, never mind voting on it.  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell charged that it would federalize elections and take power away from the states to run elections.  He's right.  And that's exactly why you should support voting reform.  Because, with fourteen states having passed severe voting restrictions, particularly in Republican states where Republicans almost lost key Senate and presidential-elector elections, to make damn sure that never happens again, the states (at least Republican states) can't be trusted to run elections. And Congress is clearly within its bounds constitutionally to set guidelines for how states run elections.

To be fair, the "For the People" Act, as written, was probably too sweeping and too constitutionally dubious to pass muster with the courts.  But the GOP won't even consider West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin's compromise proposal , which would allow for voter ID and require no more than a utility bill but also allow fifteen days of early voting and eliminate partisan gerrymandering.  But then, Stacy Abrams, quickly replacing Nancy Pelosi as the national bogeywoman, said something that convinced Republicans to be against it.  She said she was for it.

There might be a way to convince Manchin to weaken the filibuster enough to allow an exception for voter laws, just as there might be a way to convince Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) to endorse climate-change legislation.  Manchin was actually for filibuster reform when he first joined the Senate back in 2011, but he's long since changed his mind about that.  Six years in the minority will do that to you.  For now, therefore, voter reform legislation is on the back burner, but Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer has made it clear that it's not off the stove.

"Make no mistake about it, it will not be the last time voting rights comes up for a debate in the Senate," Schumer, above, said.  "We have several serious options for how to reconsider this issue and advance legislation to combat voter suppression. We are going to explore every last one of our options."  

They'd better.  And it's worth noting that will the bill up for no debate ensures the casting of a ballot, it said little if anything about making sure that ballots are counted.  Some states are already setting things up so that legally cast votes can be thrown out by partisan poll oversight boards based on the mere suspicion of fraud however unfounded.  This could allow the Republicans to steal enough seats to win both houses of Congress in 2022 and overturn popular majorities for the Democratic presidential ticket in 2024.  And if that happens . . . well, it's one giant leap to authoritarianism.

*

P.S.  It has since been reported that Donald Trump wanted to send Americans living or traveling abroad infected by COVID to Guantanamo Bay to keep the case numbers down early in the pandemic.  The next Republican President - who could be named Donald Trump, and not necessarily the one who just left the White House - could, once installed in the White House in a fraudulent election, use an emergency similar to COVID to have a law expanding his powers passed and use it to shut down opposition parties and CNN.

And after that, the only question about the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers will be which group will be nationalized into our new secret police. 😠

Senate Setup

Here's an update on that Senate standoff.  Early last week, Mitch McConnell backed off from his stand against the filibuster and let a power-sharing arrangement go through when he concluded that the Democrats wouldn't be able to get rid of the filibuster thanks to opposition from two Senate Democrats in particular: Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Both Sinema and Manchin are moderates who have a problem with progressives not unlike the problems Republicans have with progressives. But they're more likely to side with Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer on numerous economic issues, so that should help Schumer get President Biden's COVID relief bill passed.

President Biden wants to go big on this bill, and most congressional Democrats don't want to cave to Republican demands to spend less, knowing that the last time they did that, in 2009, they lost the House and also their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate - which allowed the Tea Party to come in and ruin President Obama's agenda.  If the Democrats can pull America out of the COVID crisis, the 2022 midterm elections could be a repeat of the 1934 midterms, when Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal helped the Democrats gain seats in Congress despite being the party holding the executive branch.  (The party that holds the White House often loses congressional seats in midterm elections.)   

Senate Standoff

Although the Democrats control the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote as the Senate's presiding officer (and we might as well call her the 101st senator, since she's likely to cast tie-breaking vote on measures that go along party lines with numbing regularity), the 50-50 split means that Republicans control the levers of power per the rules of the Senate in the previous Congress because Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer and because Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (below) have yet to agree on a power-sharing deal - a deal made necessary by the even split - for the new 117th Congress.

The main sticking point is the filibuster.  McConnell wants it so Republicans can block any legislation they do not like. Schumer, knowing that ending a filibuster by a three-fifths majority would be impossible, wants to get rid of it.  No deal is imminent.  Eve if the Democrats had a clear majority, it would be difficult to end the filibuster, as some moderate Democrats, including Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), want to keep it.  

But if the Democrats had managed to win just one more seat in the Senate - one more seat, that's all - they could have at least organized the committees, fast-tracked President Biden's legislative agenda, and put President Biden's Cabinet nominees on a faster track as well (although Lloyd Austin was confirmed as Secretary of Defense).  That what continues to flabbergast me.  The Democrats couldn't win Senate elections in any of the numerous states where the vote could have gone either way.  Maybe it was because of progressives' calls to defund the police after George Floyd's death.  Maybe it was because the pandemic made it more difficult for Senate Democratic candidates to campaign. Maybe it was the fact that almost all of the tossup Senate elections were in states where the voters stuck with the GOP and voted for Trump - except Maine, which Biden carried the state but where Senator Susan Collins managed to win a fifth term. At any rate, I curse all of the Democratic Senate candidates who had a chance to win but let the elections slip through their fingers.  And for sexter Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, that goes double. 

The Second Time Around

The only thing anyone knows about a trial for Trump following his second impeachment is that there's going to be one.  But no one knows how or when it would be conducted.  All we know for certain is that the Senate trial doesn't start until House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivers the article of impeachment for inciting an insurrection to the Senate, and she ain't saying when she plans to do that.  Should she do so right after President-elect Biden is sworn in, the Senate would have to start the trial immediately, possibly keeping the Senate from confirming Biden's appointees.  Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer (below), soon to become Senate Majority Leader, could decide to bifurcate the Senate schedule to allow both orders of business . . . unless the Senate parliamentarian says you can't do that.  (Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is AWOL on this one.)

And meanwhile, Trump could issue a whole bunch of pardons today and after, perhaps even one for . . . himself.  Which, I assume would pretty much take care of the Senate trial! (Joke.)

Ad there's a pandemic raging, Biden might have a hard time dealing with it with an impeachment trial and more threats of anti-Biden violence, and Mike Pompeo is continuing to etch bad foreign-policy initiatives in stone with the supposition that Tony Blinken might not get confirmed as successor until late February.

To my readers: Don't you dare wish me a happy new year! 😠 

There Goes Your Nineteenth Nervous Shutdown

The shutdown is over, and Congress managed to come up with a deal over the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) issue without involving Donald Trump, who had no idea what he wanted to do about it.  The government will be funded for three weeks - three whole weeks! - after Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer of New York got Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to agree to discuss it . . . later.  While Trump chief of staff John Kelly and Trump adviser Stephen Miller retard and block any real progress on immigration reform. 

And Schumer trusts McConnell (below) to keep his promise?

That's like trusting a lioness to babysit a pair of lambs.

Schumer was supposed to get a deal on replacing DACA with real legislation once and for all, and instead he gets nothing!  He loses! And so do the Democrats, who, by the way, had public support for DACA but not at the expense of letting the government shut down. Which would have been suvivable if they hadn't caved.  

Ask McConnell for a promise?  Schumer might as well asked him for a pie crust.

You know, you silly Democrats, you could have avoided this mess.  You could have chosen as your 2016 presidential nominee the most liberal 2016 presidential candidate on immigration, one Martin Joseph O'Malley.  You had in O'Malley a potential President who was passionate on the immigration issue, who eagerly supported helping and getting legal status for DACA subjects, and who was ready and willing to get immigration reform done come hell or high water.

But instead of getting behind O'Malley (below), you laughed him out of the race, let your national committee anoint Hillary Clinton as your presidential nominee, and got a President who wants to avoid dealing with DACA and wants to stop immigration, come hell or high wall.  And you're still laughing at O'Malley?

You Democrats aren't very smart, are you?

I think I'm going to have a Pop-Tart now . . ..

The Parties Are Over

Donald Trump gave the Democrats what they wanted?  Yes.  And the Republicans are really upset.

Trump agreed with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer to extend the debt ceiling by three months and to pass a stopgap spending bill to fund the government, which made the heads of House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell explode.  Ryan, McConnell, and other Republicans wanted an eighteen-month extension of the debt ceiling, hence it would have pushed a decision on the issue to March 2019 - after the 2018 midterms.  This deal between the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership ensures that the GOP will have to answer for its ineffectiveness in this Congress, and it allows Trump and the Democrats to govern in a bipartisan fashion.

But to what end?  It's no secret that Trump wanted the debt ceiling issue pushed back - and hurricane relief settled - to promote his tax plan, which would benefit the wealthiest Americans.  Also, even if his base doesn't necessarily vote for Republicans in the midterms, he's made himself look reasonable and eager to "get things done" - and keep his base in his corner for his re-election bid in 2020.  Thus, he could get re-elected.   And Pelosi and Schumer - both of whom have served in Washington since Ronald Reagan was President and are old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan was an actor - have just fallen into Trump's trap.  They are such clueless insiders that they demonstrate why seniority is just another variation of senility.  The Democrats need new, bold leaders who can stand up to Donald J. Trump, not a couple of old pros who are seasoned enough to screw up everything by dealing with him.  

As Martin O'Malley said, now we fight.  As Pelosi and Schumer say, "Who is Martin O'Malley?" 

The congressional Democratic leadership is not doing anyone any favors by working with Trump.  You don't lie down with dogs . . . lest you wind up with fleas. :-p       

However, with the Republican Party having been burned by their own President and with the Democratic Party about to be burned as well, the resulting collapse of the current two-party system can only be a good thing.  Note to progressives: Call a convention and form a new party now.    

RIP ACA

The Affordable Care Act is dead.

On Wednesday, incoming Vice President Mike Pence met with his onetime Republican U.S. House colleagues to prepare for repealing the law known as Obamacare, and they're trying to get a head start on defunding and scrapping it in an expeditious matter.  They're hoping to put it on a repeal-and-delay timetable, in which they officially repeal the Affordable Care Act and set up a period for the Republicans to come up with an alternative.

Which will likely be a return to the way things were in 2009.

And don't think the Democrats will be able to stop them, either; the Republicans plan to push the repeal through in a Senate-filibuster-proof budget resolution, which is, ironically, how the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act in the first place.

At least one Republican in Washington, as well as with some Republican governors, is fearful that this move could lead millions of  people in limbo and without health insurance.  U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has demanded that his party come up with a health care plan of its own before scrapping the current law.  "We need to think through how we do this, and it's a huge mistake for Republicans if they do not vote for replacement on the same day as we vote for repeal," he said.

He's unlikely to get any support from any fellow Republicans, except maybe Senator Susan Collins (R-ME).

Meanwhile, President Obama, with only a few days left to go in office, held a pity party to buck up Democrats in Congress to urge them fight the Republican onslaught on his signature legislation, even though they're outvoted.  The biggest Obamacare proponent in the Senate is Democratic leader Charles Schumer (NY), who famously attributed the Democratic loss of the Senate in 2014 to the party paying too much attention on - you guessed it - health care.

Ironically, Obamacare was based on Republican market reform ideas from the nineties.  The Democratic proposal of the time - Medicare for all - never got anywhere, and it certainly won't get anywhere in this Congress, as Paul Ryan is working on a new program - Medicare for no one.  

Yeah, Obamacare is as good as gone.  And don't start threatening to move to Great Britain, boys and girls, because the British National Health Service is slowly being done away with too.   

Funny how what took the Tories in the U.K. seventy years to do, the Republicans are going to be able to do in a few short months.

From Russia With Love

Okay, all of those Hillary fans blaming Russian hackers for their candidate's loss to Donald Trump may have a case . . . 

The Washington Post just reported that the CIA suspects that agents in the Russian government may have been responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee computer and, for the purpose of getting Vladimir Putin's man Trump in the White House, providing WikiLeaks all those embarrassing e-mails showing a cynical, jaded Democratic establishment trying, ironically, to manipulate the campaign.  I haven't heard anything about voting machines being hacked, but this story of possible manipulation of information designed to implicitly help is a disturbingly new spin on an old story.

Russia also hacked the Republican National Committee computer, according to the CIA, but withheld its embarrassing e-mails so as not to help Hillary.  Julian Assange, meanwhile, says WikiLeaks did not act in concert with the Russians to produce those e-mails.    

Although Trump - now famous for not receiving most intelligence briefings as President-elect - doesn't buy the CIA's charges, two Democratic senators, Charles Schumer of New York and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, and two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have called for an investigation into the charges.  McCain has cited past attempts by the Russians to manipulate elections in other Western countries and says that the integrity of our own elections is at stake.  President Obama has launched an investigation as well, which may or may not be completed by January 20.

I only hope that once they do that, someone starts investigation the rigging of the Democratic primaries.    

Some people are already calling for a do-over of the election.  Can we have a do-over of the nominations while we're at it?