Today began with Republican leadership doubling down on its support for Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ), whom the House censured yesterday for tweeting a cartoon video of himself killing a Democratic colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and attacking the president, Joe Biden. Only two Republicans voted with the Democrats in favor of the censure. Former president Donald Trump issued a statement praising Gosar and saying the congressman “has my Complete and Total Endorsement!” In addition to the censure, the House stripped Gosar of his committee assignments, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said today that if the Republicans take the majority and he is elected Speaker, he will likely throw Democrats off committees and give Gosar and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who was stripped of her committee assignments in February after violent threats against Democratic colleagues, better committee assignments. This morning, on the podcast of Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows went after McCarthy, suggesting that Trump should replace him. Then, on Trump loyalist Steve Bannon’s podcast, Meadows suggested that if the Republicans win control of the House of Representatives in next year’s elections, Trump should become Speaker of the House, which would drive Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy.” Bannon suggested he could hold the position for 100 days and “sort things out” before running for president in 2024. While the Trump loyalists were putting the screws to McCarthy, the economic news continued to be good. A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on Thursday showed that the United States is the only G7 country to surpass its pre-pandemic economic growth. That growth has been so strong it has buoyed other countries. Meanwhile, the administration's work with ports and supply chains to handle the increase in demand for goods appears to be having an effect. Imports through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are up 16% from 2018, and in the first two weeks of November, those two ports cleared about a third of the containers sitting on their docks. Then the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its score for the Democrats’ $1.85 trillion Build Back Better Act. The CBO is a nonpartisan agency within the legislative branch that provides budget and economic information to Congress. The CBO’s estimate of the costs of the Build Back Better Act will affect who will vote for it. The CBO’s projection was good news for the Democrats; it was in line with what the Democrats had said the bill would cost. The CBO estimates that the bill will increase the deficit by $367 billion over ten years. But the CBO also estimates that the government will raise about $207 billion over those same ten years by enforcing tax rules on those currently cheating on them. These numbers were good in themselves—in comparison, the CBO said the 2017 Republican tax cuts would cost $1.4 trillion over ten years—but they might get even better. Many economists, including Larry Summers, who has been critical of the Biden administration, think that the CBO estimates badly underplay the benefits of the bill. The CBO score also predicted that the savings from prescription drug reforms in the bill would come in $50 billion higher than the House had predicted. As soon as the score was released, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would vote on the bill tonight, suggesting that she had the votes to pass the bill. And then something interesting happened. Kevin McCarthy took to the House floor to slow down the passage of the Build Back Better Act, throwing the vote into the middle of the night. The minority leader put on a Trump-esque show of non-sequiturs, previewing the kind of speech he would make to rally Republicans behind him if the Republicans retake the House in 2022. The speech was angry, full of shouting, and made for right-wing media: it was full of all the buzz-words that play there. McCarthy spoke for more than three hours—as I write this, he is still speaking. But the blows he was trying to deliver didn’t land. The Democrats made fun of him, catcalled, and eventually just walked out, while the Republicans lined up behind McCarthy looked increasingly bored, checked their phones, and appeared to doze off. When Axios reporter Andrew Solender asked a Republican aide for some analysis of the speech, the aide answered: “I’m watching the Great British Baking Show.” As he spoke, Pelosi’s office fact-checked him, noting that while he is attacking the elements of the bill, saying no one wants them, the opposite is true. According to CBS News, Pelosi’s staff wrote, “88 percent of Americans support Build Back Better’s measures to cut prescription drug prices,” “73 percent of Americans support Build Back Better’s funding for paid family leave,” and “67 percent of Americans support Build Back Better’s funding for universal pre-K.” In addition, according to Navigator Research, “84 percent of Americans support Build Back Better’s provisions to lower health insurance premiums,” and “72 percent of Americans support Build Back Better’s creation of clean energy jobs to combat climate change.” Grace Segers, a politics reporter for The New Republic, described the mood in the House as “hostile.” She noted that Democrats are furious that McCarthy has made no effort to rein in the most extreme Republicans and, after yesterday’s defense of Gosar, have had enough. In his speech, McCarthy was indeed courting that extreme right, posturing not for voters, but rather for his conference, trying to reassure them that he is a strong enough pro-Trump leader to be House Speaker if the Republicans retake the House. But it felt tonight as if the dynamic in the House has changed. The Republicans are now openly embracing Trump and his one-man rule. But their support for Gosar yesterday appears to have created a breach. Democrats are no longer trying to reason with the Republicans and are instead treating them with derision. That is, psychologically at least, a much more dominant position than they held recently. Rather than vote in the middle of the night, the Democrats have delayed the vote on the bill until tomorrow, when the American people can watch. In the past, Republicans have criticized Democrats for passing legislation “in the dead of night.” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said of this important bill that dramatically expands the nation’s social safety net: “We are going to do it in the day.” — Notes:  Preet Bharara @PreetBhararaThe Republican Accountability Project @AccountableGOP Trump's former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows floats the bizarre idea that Trump should be Speaker of the House to own the libs: "You talk about melting down...people would go crazy!" https://t.co/bT1XEs2EqKNovember 18th 2021 1,037 Retweets5,430 Likeshttps://www.cnn.com/2021/11/ https://www.oecd.org/sdd/na/ https://www.washingtonpost. https://www.speaker.gov/ https://talkingpointsmemo.com/  Grace Segers @Grace_SegersNovember 19th 2021 13 Retweets148 Likes Andrew Solender @AndrewSolender November 19th 2021 674 Retweets5,150 Likeshttps://www.upi.com/Top_News/ https://www.speaker.gov/ https://www.cbo.gov/ https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/
You’re a free subscriber to Letters from an American. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. © 2021 Heather Cox Richardson Unsubscribe
|
On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln spoke at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where more than 23,000 men had been killed or wounded the previous July defending the United States of America from those who would destroy it. He rooted the nation in the Declaration of Independence, in which the nation’s founders announced that they “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But in 1863, Lincoln was afraid the idea “that all men are created equal” was no longer “self-evident.” In 1863, it was a “proposition.” He told the crowd, “met on a great battle-field,” that they were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” This morning, at 9:46, the House of Representatives passed the “Build Back Better” bill by a vote of 220–213. The bill provides $555 billion to fight climate change by providing jobs in clean industries. It devotes $400 billion to universal pre-kindergarten education for 3- and 4-year-olds, easing the costs of child care and reducing gaps between children when they enter kindergarten. It extends for a year the child tax credit the Democrats put in place in March in the American Rescue Plan, providing parents with $300 per month for every child under age 6 and $250 for every child from 6 to 17. It appropriates $150 billion for affordable housing to build more than 1 million new homes. The United States is one of the few nations that does not provide paid family leave for new parents, and the Build Back Better bill appropriates $200 billion for 4 weeks of paid family or medical leave. It also sets aside $150 billion to expand affordable home care in hopes of reducing the backlog of more than 800,000 people on waiting lists for state Medicaid. If passed into law, the bill will also reduce health care premiums and the cost of medication. The Build Back Better bill, also known as the Reconciliation bill because if it gets through the Senate it will have to do so through the reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered, is a huge deal. It reorients our national investment away from a wealthy few and toward ordinary families, much as Lincoln insisted in 1859 that the country should not invest in elite enslavers, but rather in ordinary men, who would innovate as they worked to provide for their families. When the House passed the bill, Democrats recognized the extraordinary skill of House Speaker Pelosi in nailing together a coalition to get this measure to a positive vote, chanting: “Nancy, Nancy, Nancy.” Every single Republican voted against the measure. This afternoon, a jury in Kenosha, Wisconsin, found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty of intentional homicide, reckless homicide, and attempted intentional homicide in the killing of Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and in the wounding of Gaige Grosskreutz, 27. Rittenhouse shot the three men with an assault rifle on August 25, 2020. Then 17, he traveled from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha to, he later said, protect businesses there that he thought were under threat from those gathered to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by law enforcement officers. The defense presented evidence that the men Rittenhouse killed made him afraid for his life. Wisconsin permits deadly force if a person reasonably believes they are in imminent danger of great bodily harm. The case has national implications. Although protesting is a constitutional right protected by the First Amendment, members of the right wing hailed Rittenhouse as a hero who righteously took up arms against protesters they insist are dangerous to America. Immediately, the white nationalist, neo-Nazi website VDARE reversed victim and offender, tweeting: “Kyle Rittenhouse is the hero we’ve been waiting for throughout the turbulent summer of 2020, where a Black Lives Matter/Antifa/Bolshevik revolution has our country on the brink of total chaos.” With Rittenhouse’s acquittal, we learned that Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson had a film crew creating a documentary about Rittenhouse during the trial. Carlson will interview Rittenhouse on Monday night. Even more ominous than the public praise of Rittenhouse, Republican lawmakers also celebrated his acquittal, inviting a young man without any qualifications other than involvement in a deadly shooting of protesters to accept a position in our government. Former president Trump sent out a fund-raising email, cheering the acquittal and claiming the trial was “nothing more than a WITCH HUNT from the Radical Left,” who “want to PUNISH law-abiding citizens, including a CHILD, like Kyle Rittenhouse, for doing nothing more than following the LAW.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) cheered that Rittenhouse is one of the “good guys” who “help, protect, and defend.” Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) all publicly offered Rittenhouse a congressional internship. Cawthorn told followers that Rittenhouse was not guilty and told them to “be armed, be dangerous, and be moral.” Across the country, Republican lawmakers are backing violence and attacking voting. Wisconsin, where the Rittenhouse trial just took place, is leading the way in trying to rig elections so Democrats cannot win. Senator Ron Johnson is spearheading an attempt to get rid of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, created by Republicans, and to charge the members of the commission with felonies, while giving control of federal elections to Republican lawmakers. Johnson says that the Republicans need to control state elections because Democrats cheat. Johnson has admitted that Biden won Wisconsin fairly in the 2020 election but is arguing for the Big Lie to justify rigging the system in Republicans’ favor. At Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln reminded his audience of those “who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” And he urged them “to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
[Image of Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863, Library of Congress. Lincoln is center left, hatless, standing in front of the tall man in the top hat.] — Notes: https://www.cbsnews.com/live- https://time.com/6121415/  Jeremy Barr @jeremymbarr November 20th 2021 266 Retweets533 Likeshttps://www.cnn.com/2021/11/ https://www.nytimes.com/ I won’t link to VDARE, but you can find the tweet under a retweet by @MichaelEHayden, who is with the Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/ https://www.washingtonpost.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment