#Rosa DeLauro

[tomorrowusa]

Musk may have torpedoed the original House bipartisan continuing resolution last week because it would have regulated his business dealings in China.

House Democrats Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut say their Republican colleagues in Congress caved to the demands of Elon Musk, sinking a bipartisan government funding bill that would have regulated U.S. investments in China. Congress passed a separate stopgap funding bill over the weekend, averting a government shutdown. In a series of posts on X, McGovern said more could have been accomplished. The scrapped provision “would have made it easier to keep cutting-edge AI and quantum computing tech — as well as jobs — in America,” he wrote. “But Elon had a problem.” Tesla, run by Musk, is the only foreign automaker to operate a factory in China without a local joint venture. Tesla also built a battery plant down the street from its Shanghai car factory this year, and aims to develop and sell self-driving vehicle technology in China. “His bottom line depends on staying in China’s good graces,” McGovern wrote about Musk. “He wants to build an AI data center there too — which could endanger U.S. security. He’s been bending over backwards to ingratiate himself with Chinese leaders.” SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor, has reportedly withheld its Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan at the request of Chinese and Russian leaders. Taiwan is a self-ruling democracy that Beijing claims as its territory. Taiwan’s status is one of the biggest flashpoints in U.S.-China relations.

There's an obvious conflict of interest here. Musk doesn't want to offend China because he's worried that it may hurt his bottom line.

Musk contributed $277 million to the Trump campaign and other Republican causes during the 2024 cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Since the election in November, Musk has become a nearly constant presence at Trump’s side, including in meetings with foreign leaders. Trump appointed Musk to co-lead a group that’s not yet formed, but will be tasked with finding ways to cut regulations, personnel and budgets.

At least part of the reason Musk contributed heavily to Trump and other Republicans may be to get them to go soft on China for the sake of his business interests.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:

“The one big thing nobody is talking about: Did Elon want to shut the government down because of his business deals with China?” That was the first line of Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass) multi-part statement Saturday posted on Elon Musk’s platform, X--ironically enough. A similar point was also made Friday by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT)—the ranking minority member of the House Appropriations Committee-in a detailed letter to leaders of the House and the Senate. What was the issue the two were flagging? As Rep. McGovern wrote: “The original funding bill (that he [Musk] killed) included what’s called an “outbound investment” provision—which would limit & screen U.S. money flowing to China. That would have made it easier to keep cutting-edge AI and quantum computing tech—as well as jobs—in America. But Elon had a problem.” DeLauro gave even more context to this provision vetting investments in China: “This outbound investment provision was agreed to after months of bipartisan, bicameral negotiations and years of advocacy from Members of Congress. It would have kept innovation and manufacturing in semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and other cutting-edge technologies in the United States and prevented wealthy investors from continuing to offshore production and U.S. intellectual property into China – benefiting only their bottom lines and the Chinese Communist Party.” But Musk—per these two members of Congress—led the charge to block this proposed legislation because as McGovern accurately noted, Musk’s “second-largest market is China. He’s building huge factories there. His bottom line depends on staying in China’s good graces.” The result was that when the new budget deal was agreed upon Friday, guess what was missing? Yep, the provision that would’ve been bad for Musk’s business deals with the Chinese Communist Party—which is in essence Musk’s business partner as the NY Times detailed earlier this year in an article titled, “How Elon Musk Became ‘Kind of Pro-China.’” (Musk’s exact words.)

Rep. DeLauro explained in more detail the financial incentive behind Musk’s action to block this provision: “Musk’s car company, Tesla has poured billions of dollars into investments in China, particularly its “gigafactory” in Shanghai. The Shanghai plant is Tesla’s largest car manufacturing facility – the Chinese gigafactory produced about 50 percent of Tesla’s global automobile output over the last year.” DeLauro continued, “And in May of this year, Tesla broke ground on a new $200 million factory to manufacture large batteries critical to its electric vehicle supply chain…Notably, proponents of regulating U.S. investment in China have advocated for the inclusion of large battery manufacturing in the list of technologies subject to outbound investment screening.” Yep, these new law could’ve impacted Musk’s new business venture per DeLauro.

Rep. McGovern also raised concerns about Musk’s future business plans involving China, explaining Musk “wants to build an AI data center there too—which could endanger U.S. security.” Importantly, DeLauro detailed for all to see Musk’s documented personal relations with the Chinese Communist Party, noting, “Musk has ingratiated himself with Chinese Communist Party leadership.” For example, she cited Musk’s close ties with “Chinese premier Li Qiang, who helped rush the construction of Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory.” DeLauro concluded her letter by writing, “It is extremely alarming that House Republican leadership, at the urging of an unelected billionaire, scrapped…this critical provision to protect American jobs and critical capabilities.” Adding, “This is particularly concerning given Elon Musk’s extensive investments in China in key sectors and his personal ties with Chinese Communist Party leadership, and calls into question the real reason for Musk’s opposition to the original funding deal.”

[...] In fact, even a well-known Republican raised alarm bells about Musk’s loyalty to Beijing. Vivek Ramaswamy--who Trump tapped with Musk to co-head the newly created Department of Government Efficiency--was publicly warning in 2023 that Musk was a puppet for the Chinese Communist Party. As CNN recently reported, Ramaswamy was concerned that “Tesla is increasingly beholden to China,” adding damningly, “I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when [China’s leader] Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need.” The GOP silence on Musk’s extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party is beyond hypocritical given that for years Republicans have slammed China as a threat. For example, in January 2023, the House GOP created “The Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party” designed to address the “threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party and develop a plan of action to defend the American people, our economy, and our values.” Earlier this year, the House GOP led the charge to ban Tik Tok from having access to the United States--which was signed into law and goes into effect Jan. 19, 2025 unless the Chinese company that owns the social media platform sells it to a non-Chinese company. But when it comes to Musk, the GOP doesn’t care that he has documented ties to top Chinese Communist Party officials.

CCP puppet and de facto “President” Elon Musk helped block the original CR to protect his business deals with the Chinese government, because it had an “outbound investment” provision that would screen any US money sent to China.

[gwydionmisha]

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro's Closing Remarks on the Continuing Resolution

[ivovynckier]

Didn't know American politics had its blue-rinse brigade. And she's on the right side of things!

[madamspeaker]

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (25th May, 2023)

[textilesimp]

it’s giving congresswoman rosa delauro

btw i think it's so awesome and fun when older people dye their white hair purple or pink or blue or whatever colour they fancy and 'overdress' in bright eye catching ostentatious outfits and have quirky interests and styles. you don't have to be young to have fun and be confident! you can still enjoy life when you're old! who cares what anyone else thinks, you've lived longer than they have and know better than to waste it being miserable just to fit in.

[govtshutdown]

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, made these remarks on the House floor about H.R. 9747

[plitnick]

Smotrich receives a cold American welcome

While fringe American Jewish elements like the Orthodox Union, the far-right Zionit Organization of America and Israel Bonds are welcoming the racist Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, most of the American Jewish community is shunning him. Some of those publicly denouncing him are people who have heretofore hewn to the mantra of never criticizing Israel no matter how horrible its…

[filosofablogger]

Finally!!!

Last night, the House of Representatives finally, after much game-playing and many shenanigans by the likes of Margie Greene and her cohorts, passed the aid bills to fund aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.  The vote for the Ukraine package was 311 to 112, with all those objecting coming from the most conservative wing of the Republican Party.  The Senate is expected to pass the measures early…

[autisticadvocacy]

ASAN welcomes the removal of Section 722 from the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. In June, some members of Congress introduced a rider to the act that would stop the FDA from banning electric shock devices for behavior modification, such as the devices used at the Judge Rotenberg Center. Section 722 said the FDA cannot ban a device that is used by court order. All of the electric shock devices used at the Judge Rotenberg Center are used because of a court order.

If this rider had passed, it would have taken away the FDA’s power to move forward with the proposed rule that ASAN and many grassroots advocates commented to support. Because of your powerful activism, this rider failed to make it into the final bill, and the FDA still has the power to #StopTheShock.

This was only possible thanks to the hard work of our grassroots. You called, emailed, and shared across social media to make your voices heard. Members of our community have fought to end the use of shock devices at the JRC for over a decade, and we will not be ignored. Your calls, along with the hundreds of public comments sent in support of the FDA’s proposed rule, have gotten us that much closer to ending this tortuous practice once and for all. 

We also thank the many members of the House Appropriations Committee who supported removing Section 722. At last night’s markup of the bill, Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro and Representatives Chellie Pingree and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz all used their opening remarks to point out the harm this rider would have caused, and the urgent need to remove it. Subcommittee Ranking Member Sanford Bishop spoke in his remarks about our community’s work to educate the Committee members on this issue. We are thrilled that the House Appropriations Committee listened to our community on this urgent issue and acted to protect disabled people from torture.

We are grateful that this rider did not make it into the current version of the bill, but the fight isn’t over yet. The full House of Representatives, and the Senate, still need to vote on this bill. Thanks to your efforts, we have built strong bipartisan opposition to Section 722. We will continue to work with Congress to make sure this rider stays out of the final bill. Meanwhile, the FDA still needs to do their part with the power our community fought for them to keep. ASAN calls upon the FDA to swiftly release the final version of their proposed rule “Banned Devices; Proposal to Ban Electrical Stimulation Devices for Self-Injurious or Aggressive Behavior.”

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network seeks to advance the principles of the disability rights movement with regard to autism. ASAN believes that the goal of autism advocacy should be a world in which autistic people enjoy equal access, rights, and opportunities. We work to empower autistic people across the world to take control of our own lives and the future of our common community, and seek to organize the autistic community to ensure our voices are heard in the national conversation about us. Nothing About Us, Without Us!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Joseph Gedeon, Lauren Gambino, and Sam Levin at The Guardian:

The US Senate has approved a stop-gap funding measure to avert a government shutdown shortly after a midnight deadline with a bill that defied Donald Trump’s demand for a debt-limit suspension. The legislation was signed by Joe Biden on Saturday morning, the White House confirmed. The Senate passed the bill in an 85-11 vote, hours after an overwhelmingly bipartisan 366-34 vote in the House. It was passed 38 minutes after the deadline but the government did not invoke shutdown procedures in the interim.

The White House had said in a statement earlier on Friday that the president supports “moving this legislation forward” and averting a government shutdown days before the Christmas holiday. Passage of the funding bill, which extends federal funding at current levels through and adds $100bn in disaster aid and $10bn in assistance to farmers, capped a week of turmoil that offered a preview of the internal clashes to come when Trump returns to power on 20 January. “We’re excited about this outcome,” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said after the vote. He said he had spoken with Trump and that the president-elect “was certainly happy about this outcome, as well”.

Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader, called the House’s passage of the government funding bill “a victory for the American people”. In the House vote, Democrats provided more support than Republicans to advance the measure. “The House Democrats have successfully stopped extreme MAGA Republicans from shutting down the government, crashing the economy and hurting the working class Americans all across the nation,” he said. A shutdown would have forced thousands of US government workers to be furloughed and could have snarled holiday travel. The last – and longest – federal shutdown happened in December 2018, in Trump’s first term. Criticism by Trump and one of his top advisors, billionaire Elon Musk, incited a Republican revolt against an earlier funding deal Johnson had struck with Democrats. On Thursday, House Republicans voted down Johnson’s attempt to pass a pared-down spending bill.

The original bipartisan bill had been negotiated by House Republicans and Democrats, but was attacked on Wednesday by Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Trump. Musk warned that any lawmaker who supported the “outrageous” spending bill “deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” In response, Johnson, put forward a second version of the bill, a pared-down budget proposal that included a brand-new demand from Trump: a suspension of the debt ceiling. Trump had calculated that suspending limits on the national debt while Biden was still in office would save him a difficult fight in his first few months in the White House. Democrats decried the new bill as a cover for a tax cut to benefit wealthy backers such as Musk, while creating trillions of dollars in additional debt for the US. Several Republicans also rebelled, outraged by the proposed lifting of government borrowing limits. The bill failed by a vote of 174-235, a humiliating setback for Trump. The political drama this week showed that Trump’s grip on the Republican party is not ironclad. The president-elect had furiously urged the package to be passed, including threatening to support primary opposition candidates of Republicans who opposed it.

The Musk/Trump/GOP-caused government shutdown that was feared about earlier this week thankfully didn’t come to fruition, as President Biden (D) signed a 3-month CR to keep the US Government running. The House voted 366-34 and the Senate voted 85-11 to pass it on Friday.

[odinsblog]

False Equivalence

Why does the mainstream media keep depicting lunatic-right Republicans and normal Democrats as equidistant from the center?

With the final passage of the debt ceiling deal, Democrats got off easier than one might have expected, given that it was a deal between a mainstream Democratic president and a Republican House in thrall to the lunatic far right. In drastic contrast to the scorched-earth budget bill initially passed by the Republican-controlled House, the cuts were about par for the course in a divided government; and they spare the country a repeat of this debt-hostage ordeal for two years.

However, much of the media played the agreement as a compromise between two equal extremes. The New York Times story about the House passage of the deal included this astonishing sentence: "With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks."

Think about that for a moment. There is no doubt that Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar et al. are far-right by any definition, as white supremacists, Christian nationalists, election deniers, and nihilists on fiscal policy.

But no Democrats in the House can fairly be described as hard left. Those who voted against the deal included moderate liberals such as Joaquin Castro, mainstream progressives like Rosa DeLauro and Jan Schakowsky, as well as self-described democratic socialists including Cori Bush and AOC. But none of them are "hard left," which suggests anti-democratic, any more than Franklin Roosevelt was hard left.

The Times coverage reinforces a narrative of false equivalence that the media keeps repeating, with lazy catchphrases like "partisan bickering." It also plays into the hands of corrupt No Labels and Third Way types, who promote the idea that the best course for the republic is to split the difference between neofascists and a normal mainstream Democratic Party and president.

Big media, obsessed as it is with the appearance of fair and balanced coverage, took years to give itself permission to accurately describe Donald Trump with the impolite word "liar." But its treatment of the two parties as in any sense symmetrical is far more insidious than using euphemisms to characterize Trump’s lies.

Our friend Peter Dreier, whose observations inspired this post, points out that by any reasonable definition, "even the most left-oriented Democrats (AOC, Bush, Bowman, Raskin, Jayapal) are not extremists. They are shades of social democrats. They are pro-union, pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-LGBT equality, pro-Green New Deal, pro-progressive taxation. But the most right-wing Republicans are extremists and reactionaries."

(continue reading)

[grayheartart]

Democrat Scum Rosa DeLauro Has a Meltdown After Pork-Filled Funding Bill is Rejected. Makes Stupid Unhinged Claim That Elon Musk Got the Bill Shut Down.

Lol

Democrats act like the American people can't read their bullshit funding bills and see how the lions share of funding is for personal gain and a pittance is given to the issue people want resolved.

[nudeartpluspoetry]

Rosa DeLauro SHREDS "President Musk" & MAGA Republicans

[darkmaga-returns]

A Democratic lawmaker in the House of Representatives is proposing the creation of a so-called "shadow government" to challenge the administration and policies of President-elect Donald Trump.

U.S. Rep. Wiley Nickel (D-NC) has suggested setting up a "shadow cabinet" to oppose the Trump administration. Nickel claimed that this idea, adopted from the British parliamentary system where the leading opposition party creates a shadow cabinet to hold the government accountable, could serve as an essential check against what he described as "extreme MAGA attacks on our government."

"As Democrats, we simply failed to convince the American people we have better ideas to solve their problems, but we do," said Nickel. "Now we need to dust ourselves off and get ready to fight."

Nickel clarified that the shadow cabinet would question Trump's policies and give alternative solutions to tackle urgent national issues. He proposed that U.S. Senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA) should serve as the shadow U.S. attorney general (AG) to oppose Trump's nominee, former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). However, Gaetz withdrew his name as a potential nominee and was replaced by former Florida AG Pam Bondi.

"If Trump attempts to weaponize the justice system against his political opponents, we need leaders like Schiff to stand up for independent justice," Nickel declared.

He also suggested U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-CT) as shadow education secretary to protect public education, and U.S. Rep. Greg Meeks (D-NY) as shadow state secretary to handle foreign policy concerns and defend the United States' international allies and commitments. He also recommended that U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) could serve as shadow health and human services secretary to protect so-called "reproductive rights."

Finally, Nickel nominated Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) as shadow head of the Environmental Protection Agency, to oppose Trump's pick, former U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), who Nickel claims might undermine environmental protections and policies. 

[meandmybigmouth]

HAPPY VETERAN'S DAY FROM ALL THE CORPORATIONS, FAMILY AND FRIENDS VOTING REPUBLICAN TO CUT YOUR BENEFITS!