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02/10/2022

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell made clear this week that the deadly events on January 6, 2021, were a "violent insurrection" meant to stop the peaceful transfer of power -- a comment prompting backlash from a number of House and Senate Republicans.

"It was mostly a peaceful protest," Rep. Michael Cloud, a Texas Republican, said Wednesday in response to McConnell.

"The word 'insurrection' is politically charged propaganda," said Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican.

McConnell isn't moved.

"This is pretty simple," McConnell told CNN on Wednesday. "We are in the middle of a national crime wave. The Republican Party is a pro-police, tough-on-crime party. And I am a pro-police, tough-on-crime Republican across the board."

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell made clear this week that the deadly events on January 6, 2021, were a "violent insurrection" meant to stop the peaceful transfer of power -- a comment prompting backlash from a number of House and Senate Republicans.

11/16/2021

A state court in Connecticut granted a sweeping victory to the families of eight people killed in a 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., who had sued the far-right broadcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars media outlet for defamation.

The judge ruled on Monday that because Mr. Jones had refused to turn over documents ordered by the courts, including financial records, he was liable by default. The decision, combined with previous rulings in Texas in late September, means Mr. Jones has lost all the defamation lawsuits filed against him by the families of 10 victims.

Lawyers for Mr. Jones said he would appeal.

Mr. Jones for years spread bogus theories that the shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators was part of a government-led plot to confiscate Americans’ fi****ms and that the victims’ families were “actors” in the scheme. People who believed those false claims accosted the families on the street and at events honoring their slain loved ones, abused them online, contacted them at their homes and threatened their lives.

The parents of Noah Pozner, the youngest Sandy Hook victim, whose parents were the first to sue Mr. Jones, have moved nearly 10 times since the shooting, and live in hiding.

“I would love to go see my son’s grave and I don’t get to do that,” Noah’s mother, Veronique De La Rosa, said in an interview after the cases were filed in 2018. Each time the family moved, conspiracists published their new home address “with the speed of light,” she said.

A Connecticut judge’s ruling against the Infowars host combines with decisions in Texas to grant a clean sweep for the families of 10 shooting victims.

11/11/2021

One caller instructed Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois to slit his wrists and “rot in hell.” Another hoped Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska would slip and fall down a staircase. The office of Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York has been inundated with angry messages tagging her as a “traitor.”

Investing in the nation’s roads and bridges was once considered one of the last realms of bipartisanship in Congress, and President Biden’s infrastructure bill drew ample support over the summer from Republicans in the Senate. But in the days since 13 House Republicans broke with their party leaders and voted for the $1 trillion legislation last week, they have been flooded by menacing messages from voters — and even some of their own colleagues — who regard their votes as a betrayal.

The vicious reaction to the passage of the bill, which was negotiated by a group of Republicans and Democrats determined to deliver on a bipartisan priority, reflects how deeply polarization has seeped into the political discourse within the Republican Party, making even the most uncontroversial legislation a potentially toxic vote.

The dynamic is a natural outgrowth of the slash-and-burn politics of former President Donald J. Trump, who savaged those in his party who backed the infrastructure bill as “RINOs” — Republicans in name only — who should be “ashamed of themselves.”

Mr. Trump’s frequent threats and insults directed at Republicans whom he considers insufficiently loyal have created powerful incentives for the party’s lawmakers to issue similarly bellicose statements. The former president’s approach has also encouraged an expectation among Republican base voters that their representatives will hew unswervingly to the party line.

Last week’s infrastructure vote has prompted intraparty warfare among Republicans, illustrating how just a few of the loudest voices in the party can — and will — direct a wall of ire at those who break with them even just occasionally.

The 13 Republican lawmakers who broke with their party to support a $1 trillion bipartisan public works bill have drawn anger and threats from their colleagues and constituents.

11/08/2021

With a roughly $1.2 trillion bill to improve the nation’s infrastructure now behind them, Democrats must prepare to turn to their next, perhaps tougher task: Shepherding the rest of President Biden’s economic agenda through Congress.

The successful vote in the House late Friday marked only the first of two spending initiatives that Biden has called on Congress to adopt for months. Still another roughly $2 trillion in new investments are awaiting action in the House and Senate, where party lawmakers harbor grand ambitions to overhaul the nation’s health care, education, climate, immigration and tax laws.

Beginning in the spring, many Democrats had hoped to move these two bills in tandem, a strategy meant to satisfy liberals and moderates who were warring with each other over the size and scope of their spending priorities. But the House this week essentially opted to divorce them, adopting an infrastructure bill that had been stalled since August while voting to open debate on the remainder of their plans.

That tees up for Congress an eleventh-hour sprint in the waning moments of the year through treacherous political terrain. The $2 trillion tax-and-spending proposal is still unsettled policy in the eyes of moderates, including Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who long has sought to whittle down its price tag. And the debate is set to arrive just as Congress is preparing to take on a host of additional challenges, including a renewed need to fund the government in December, that could distract Democrats in the end.

For all the hurdles they face, however, Democrats this week sounded an upbeat note — emboldened anew after achieving a fresh political victory.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/11/06/congress-biden-spending-deal/

The successful vote in the House late Friday marked only the first of two spending initiatives that Biden has called on Congress to adopt for months.

11/08/2021

Congress has passed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, delivering on a major pillar of President Joe Biden's domestic agenda after months of internal deliberations and painstaking divisions among Democrats.

The final vote was 228-206. Thirteen Republicans voted with the majority of Democrats in support of the bill, though six Democrats voted against it.

The bill now heads to the President's desk to be signed into law, following hours of delays and internal debating among Democrats on Friday, including calls from Biden to persuade skeptical progressive members of the Democratic caucus.

The legislation passed the Senate in August, but was stalled in the House as Democrats tried to negotiate a deal on a separate $1.9 trillion economic package, another key component of Biden's agenda that many Democrats had tied to the fate of the infrastructure bill.

The legislation that passed Friday night will deliver $550 billion of new federal investments in America's infrastructure over five years, including money for roads, bridges, mass transit, rail, airports, ports and waterways. The package includes a $65 billion investment in improving the nation's broadband infrastructure, and invests tens of billions of dollars in improving the electric grid and water systems. Another $7.5 billion would go to building a nationwide network of plug-in electric vehicle chargers, according to the bill text.

Congress has passed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, delivering on a major pillar of President Joe Biden's domestic agenda after months of internal deliberations and painstaking divisions among Democrats.

10/18/2021

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/18/politics/colin-powell-dies/index.html

Colin Powell, the first Black US secretary of state whose leadership in several Republican administrations helped shape American foreign policy in the last years of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st, has died from complications from Covid-19, his family said on Facebook. He was 84.

10/12/2021

When the Biden administration looked for ways to pay for the president’s expansive social policy bill, it proposed raising revenue by cracking down on $7 trillion in unpaid taxes, mostly from wealthy Americans and businesses.

To help find those funds, the administration wants banks to give the Internal Revenue Service new details on their customers and provide data for accounts with total annual deposits or withdrawals worth more than $600. That has sparked an uproar among banks and Republican lawmakers, who say giving the I.R.S. such power would be an enormous breach of privacy and government overreach.

Banks and their trade groups are running advertising and letter-writing campaigns to raise awareness — and concern — about the proposal. As a result, banks from Denver to Philadelphia say they are being deluged with calls, emails and in-person complaints from both savers and small-business owners worried about the proposal. JPMorgan Chase & Company has issued talking points to bank tellers on what to tell angry customers who call or come into a branch to complain.

“We have heard a lot from our customers about their concerns about their privacy,” said Jill Castilla, the chief executive of the one-branch Citizens Bank of Edmond, just outside Oklahoma City. “I’ve gotten calls, emails, and then we’ve had many customers come in.”

Banks already submit tax forms to the I.R.S. about the interest that customer accounts accrue. But the new proposal would require they share information about account balances so that the I.R.S. can see if there are large discrepancies between the income people and businesses report and what they have in the bank. The I.R.S. could audit or investigate the gaps to see if those taxpayers are evading their obligations.

Biden administration officials say the United States needs more information from taxpayers to crack down on those who do not pay what they owe. The measure, which would affect more than 100 million households and millions of businesses, is estimated to capture $460 billion in additional revenue over a decade, primarily from the wealthiest Americans.

“This is a very serious policy proposal,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said at a congressional hearing last month. “We have a $7 trillion estimated tax gap that we have a great deal of tax avoidance by individuals and businesses — typically very high-net worth, high-income individuals and businesses that have opaque sources of income that are not paying the taxes that are due.”

Treasury officials say the effort is not about tracking individual transactions and is not aimed at lower- or middle-class households. The $600 threshold was chosen to w**d out accounts that are generally dormant or get little use, such as children’s accounts, while still giving the government the broadest possible visibility. Administration officials say audit rates for taxpayers who earn less than $400,000 per year will not go up.

“This is about making sure the top 1 percent can’t evade $160 billion per year in taxes,” said Alexandra LaManna, a Treasury Department spokeswoman.

Top Democrats say that empowering the I.R.S. is key to making the economy more fair. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has warned that the I.R.S. is handicapped when it comes to tracking the income of the wealthiest.

“The kinds of income that the I.R.S. has the least visibility into are the kinds of income that are overwhelmingly concentrated among the very richest taxpayers,” Ms. Warren said. “Strengthening information reporting, as well as providing protected and sustained I.R.S. funding, would ensure that we focus enforcement on the biggest fish.”

But the pushback is putting pressure on the Biden administration to scale back the proposal. Lawmakers are discussing raising the required disclosure level to $10,000 rather than $600, a Treasury official said, and making taxpayers who are paid through payroll-processing companies exempt from the required reporting. The Treasury estimates that could reduce the amount of money it could recoup to between $200 billion and $250 billion over a decade.

To help fund its new initiatives, the Biden administration wants banks to report more customer information. Account holders aren’t happy.

10/07/2021

Senate Democrats and Republicans neared agreement as they met into the early morning hours Thursday to temporarily pull the nation from the brink of a debt default. The deal would punt their showdown on raising the federal borrowing limit to December after Republicans bowed to pressure to stave off immediate fiscal calamity.

With the threat of a default as little as 12 days off, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, made a tactical retreat on Wednesday and announced that Republicans would allow Democrats to vote on a short-term extension. He did not, however, lift his blockade of a longer-term increase in the debt cap, demanding anew that Democrats eventually use a complicated and time-consuming budget procedure known as reconciliation to lift it into next year or beyond.

Democrats declared the offer at least a temporary victory, even as they said they would never capitulate to Mr. McConnell’s longer-term demand. Senators met late into the night to try to iron out the details, though Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, adjourned the Senate for the day shortly after midnight Thursday without a firm agreement.

“We’re making good progress — we’re not there yet, but I hope we can come to agreement tomorrow morning,” Mr. Schumer said.

Democrats said they would move forward with a vote as early as Thursday, then quickly pivot to negotiating a multitrillion-dollar measure to address climate change, expand the social safety net and raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

“Around here, two months is a lifetime,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and the chairman of the Budget Committee, who hailed Mr. McConnell’s offer as “very good news.”

With a default on federal debt as little as 12 days away, Senator Mitch McConnell offered to let Democrats temporarily lift the borrowing limit.

10/04/2021

A transformed Supreme Court returns to the bench on Monday to start a momentous term in which it will consider eliminating the constitutional right to abortion, vastly expanding gun rights and further chipping away at the wall separating church and state.

The abortion case, a challenge to a Mississippi law that bars most abortions after 15 weeks, has attracted the most attention. The court, now dominated by six Republican appointees, seems poised to use it to undermine and perhaps overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion and barred states from banning the procedure before fetal viability.

The highly charged docket will test the leadership of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who lost his position at the court’s ideological center with the arrival last fall of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. He is now outflanked by five justices to his right, limiting his ability to guide the court toward the consensus and incrementalism he has said he prefers.

The chief justice, who views himself as the custodian of the court’s institutional authority, now leads a court increasingly associated with partisanship and that recent polls show is suffering a distinct drop in public support. At a time when the justices have become uncharacteristically defensive in public about the court’s record, one poll taken by Gallup last month found that only 40 percent of Americans approved of the job the court was doing, the lowest rate since 2000, when Gallup first posed the question.

Irv Gornstein, the executive director of Georgetown Law’s Supreme Court Institute, told reporters at a briefing that it had been decades since the court faced a similar dip in public confidence.

“Not since Bush v. Gore has the public perception of the court’s legitimacy seemed so seriously threatened,” he said, referring to the 2000 decision in which the justices, splitting on ideological lines, handed the presidency to George W. Bush.

The recent poll followed a spate of unusual late-night summer rulings in politically charged cases. The court’s conservative majority rejected the Biden administration’s policies on asylum and evictions, and it allowed a Texas law banning most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy to go into effect. In the Texas decision, which was both procedural and enormously consequential, Chief Justice Roberts joined the court’s three Democratic appointees in dissent.

In a series of recent public appearances, several justices have insisted that their rulings were untainted by politics. Justice Barrett told an audience in Kentucky last month that “my goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

The court, which is dominated by six Republican appointees, will confront a charged docket, including a case asking it to overrule Roe v. Wade.

09/29/2021

Pentagon leaders publicly acknowledged on Tuesday that they advised President Biden not to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan ahead of a chaotic evacuation in which 13 U.S. service members died in a su***de bombing and 10 Afghan civilians were killed in an American drone strike.

During an expansive Senate hearing on the war in Afghanistan, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also defended his actions in the tumultuous last months of the Trump administration, insisting that calls to his Chinese counterpart and a meeting in which he told generals to alert him if the president tried to launch a nuclear weapon were part of his duties as the country’s top military officer.

General Milley was adamant that he did not go around his former boss. “My loyalty to this nation, its people, and the Constitution hasn’t changed and will never change as long as I have a breath to give,” he said. “I firmly believe in civilian control of the military as a bedrock principle essential to this republic and I am committed to ensuring the military stays clear of domestic politics.”

Some six hours of public testimony from senior Pentagon leaders were at times acrimonious and at times verging on political theater. Republican senators who had in the past defended President Donald J. Trump’s desire to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan demanded resignations from military leaders who carried out a Democratic president’s orders to withdraw. Democrats, who are traditionally tougher on military leaders, on this occasion, provided solace in the form of softer questioning and traced flaws back to the Trump administration.

Under repeated questioning from Republican senators, the Pentagon leaders broke with parts of Mr. Biden’s defense of the pullout, acknowledging that they had recommended leaving 2,500 American troops on the ground, and had warned that the Afghan government and army could collapse as early as the fall if the United States withdrew its forces.

General Milley called the “noncombatant evacuation” in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, last month “a logistical success but a strategic failure,” echoing the words of Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, from earlier in the hearing.

During a heated Senate hearing, Gen. Mark Milley also defended his actions in the final months of the Trump administration.

09/28/2021

A federal judge agreed on Monday to lift all remaining restrictions on John W. Hinckley Jr., who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981, next year if he stays mentally stable and continues to follow the conditions that he has been living under, prosecutors said.

Judge Paul L. Friedman, during a hearing in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, said he would issue his written order on the plan this week, his office said.

“If he hadn’t tried to kill the president, he would have been unconditionally released a long, long, long time ago,” The Associated Press quoted the judge as saying during the hearing. “But everybody is comfortable now after all of the studies, all of the analysis and all of the interviews, and all of the experience with Mr. Hinckley.”

At the hearing, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said it would agree to Mr. Hinckley’s unconditional release in June 2022 “if he continues to comply with the conditions of his current release order and maintains his mental stability between now and then,” Bill Miller, a spokesman for the office, said in a statement.

Barry Levine, a lawyer for Mr. Hinckley, 66, said in a telephone interview that he and prosecutors had agreed before the hearing on the unconditional release and that Judge Friedman granted their joint request. He said the reason to wait until June was related to two major events in Mr. Hinckley’s life: Mr. Hinckley’s mother died in July, and his therapist is retiring in January 2022.

“The court wants to just see how he does,” Mr. Levine said.

Mr. Hinckley, 66, who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, will be “untethered to the court” next year after a judge’s ruling on Monday, his lawyer said.

09/28/2021

Senate Republicans on Monday blocked a spending bill needed to avert a government shutdown this week and a federal debt default next month, moving the nation closer to the brink of fiscal crisis as they refused to allow Democrats to lift the limit on federal borrowing.

With a Thursday deadline looming to fund the government — and the country moving closer to a catastrophic debt-limit breach — the stalemate in the Senate reflected a bid by Republicans to undercut President Biden and top Democrats at a critical moment, as they labor to keep the government running and enact an ambitious domestic agenda.

Republicans who had voted to raise the debt cap by trillions when their party controlled Washington argued on Monday that Democrats must shoulder the entire political burden for doing so now, given that they control the White House and both houses of Congress.

Their position was calculated to portray Democrats as ineffectual and overreaching at a time when they are already toiling to iron out deep party divisions over a $3.5 trillion social safety net and climate change bill, and to pave the way for a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure measure whose fate is linked to it.

The package that was blocked on Monday, which also included emergency aid to support the resettlement of Afghan refugees and disaster recovery, would keep all government agencies funded through Dec. 3 and increase the debt ceiling through the end of 2022. But after the bill cleared the House a week earlier with just Democratic votes, it fell far short of the 60 votes needed to move forward in the Senate on Monday.

The vote was 48 to 50 to advance the measure. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, was among those voting “no,” a procedural maneuver to allow the bill to be reconsidered at some point. But there were no immediate details about next steps.

Senate Republicans opposed legislation to avert a government shutdown and prevent a debt default at a critical moment for Democrats’ domestic agenda.

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