#bipartisan tax bill

[that-starlit-wanderer]

In general I don't support restrictions on freedom of speech; however, I think that from now on it should be illegal for a politician to say that they're going to "put Main Street ahead of Wall Street" or any variation thereof

[intelligentchristianlady]

But according to JD, it's those Democrats, the childless cat ladies, who are anti-family?

[truckers-america-blog]

$10000 Tax Credit to Attract New Truck Drivers

$10000 Tax Credit to Attract New Truck Drivers A new bipartisan bill introduced in Congress aims to combat the ongoing truck driver shortage by offering refundable tax credits of up to $10,000 to new drivers and individuals enrolled in registered CDL apprenticeship programs. Titled the Strengthening Supply Chains Through Truck Driver Incentives Act, the legislation is designed to lower entry…

[afloweroutofstone]

Someone should tell the Democratic Party to attack Trump more for the many bad things he did, rather than the few good ones. Personally I think it's great that Trump's maniacal authoritarian personality made him like Kim Jong Un enough to ignore the Korean Peninsula during his presidency, thereby allowing for the most productive diplomatic period of North-South Korea negotiations in a long time. I think it's cool that he was stupid enough to kill the "bipartisan immigration bill" that included more Republican policies than Democratic policies. Those are two of the only good things he ever did! Can we go back to the anti-corruption/unions/abortion/taxes/clean energy stuff please

[wilwheaton]

What the two different worldviews look like was on display earlier this month, when Republicans and a few Democrats in the Senate killed a bipartisan expansion of the child tax credit, a tax break for parents with dependent children. A hike in that credit during the pandemic cut child poverty dramatically, only for that rate to bounce back when the pandemic relief expired and dropped five million U.S. children back into poverty in 2022. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that the change “underscores the fact that the number of children living in poverty is a policy choice.” On January 31, 2024, the House passed an expansion of the child tax credit that was smaller than the one in place during the pandemic, and Republican vice presidential hopeful Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who has been criticized for comments about “childless cat ladies,” seemed to support the measure when he said, “If you’re raising children in this country, we should make it easier, not harder. And unfortunately it’s way too expensive and way too difficult.” He then falsely accused Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris of calling for ending the child tax credit (she has actually called for expanding it).   But Vance missed the vote, and before it, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told colleagues that passing the bill would “give Harris a win before the election.” According to Chabeli Carranzana of The 19th, Tillis “printed out fake checks made out to ‘millions of American voters’ with the memo: ‘Don’t forget to vote for Kamala!’”  ”

August 14, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson

[saywhat-politics]

Louisiana voters reject constitutional amendments championed by Republican governor

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana voters soundly rejected four constitutional amendments championed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry related to crime, courts and finances.

Voters said no to each amendment by margins exceeding 60%, according to preliminary results the secretary of state’s office released after voting concluded Saturday evening.

Landry and his allies had crisscrossed the state in support of an amendment that would have made sweeping changes to the revenue and finance section of the state’s constitution. The amendment received bipartisan support from lawmakers during a November special session on tax reform and was presented as a way to boost teacher salaries, curb excess spending and get rid of special tax breaks in the constitution.

Yet critics from across the political spectrum lambasted the proposed amendment as lacking transparency. The bill exceeded 100 pages but was condensed into a 91-word ballot question for voters.

[beardedmrbean]

WASHINGTON — In a surprise move, the Republican-led Senate quickly passed the "No Tax on Tips Act" on Tuesday, giving its official stamp of approval to an idea that has gained traction since President Donald Trump campaigned on it in 2024.

The legislation would create a new tax deduction worth up to $25,000 for tips, limited to cash tips that that workers report to employers for withholding purposes on payroll taxes. The tax break is also restricted to employees who earn earn $160,000 or less in 2025, an amount that will rise with inflation in upcoming years.

It was introduced in January by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and a bipartisan group of cosponsors including Nevada's two Democratic senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto.

Rosen brought the bill up in the Senate for a "unanimous consent" request on Tuesday, which means any individual senator can block it. The process is typically used for more mundane matters, and bills are routinely called up and thwarted by an objection. Consequential tax bills usually follow a more complex process. But in this case, none of the other 99 senators objected to Rosen's proposition, which led to the legislation passing.

"Nevada has more tipped workers per capita than any other state. So this bill would mean immediate financial relief for countless hard working families," Rosen said. "'No Tax on Tips' was one of President Trump’s key promises to the American people, which he unveiled in my state of Nevada. And I am not afraid to embrace a good idea, wherever it comes from."

The bill now goes to the House, where Republicans have been seeking to include a version of the proposal in their sweeping party-line package for Trump's agenda. But the broad Democratic support for the idea gives GOP leaders options, including the possibility of passing it separately and removing it from broader legislation to lower the cost or spend the money elsewhere.

"Whether it passes free standing or as part of the bigger bill one way or another, 'No Tax on Tips' is going to become law and give real relief to hard working Americans," Cruz said on the floor. "So I’m proud of what the Senate just did, and I commend Democrats and Republicans, even at a time of partisan division, coming together and agreeing on this common sense policy."

[odinsblog]

Veterans’ health care


A 1996 law set eligibility requirements for military veterans to receive hospital, medical and nursing home care and authorized spending for those services and patient enrollment. That law has not been renewed, but Congress regularly allocates additional Department of Veterans Affairs funding and allows benefits to increase automatically based on inflation. VA provides medical care to more than 9.1 million enrolled veterans, according to the agency.
​

Drug development and opioid addiction treatment

Most of this spending relates to the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act of 2016. That law provided money to the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration to modernize pharmaceutical research and medical trials. It funded research for cancer cures and state-level grants for opioid addiction and other substance abuse treatment.


​State Department

In 2003, Congress passed the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, which set policy priorities and created spending authority for the State Department. That law has not been renewed, but Congress every year since has passed annual funding bills for the department, which Trump has announced he’ll nominate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) to run.


​Housing assistance

President Bill Clinton in 1998 signed the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, which overhauled federal housing assistance policies, including voucher programs and other antipoverty assistance. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies continue using this law to implement federal housing programs.


​Justice Department

In 1994, Congress passed the landmark Violence Against Women Act and has renewed it multiple times since. In 2006, lawmakers packaged a VAWA renewal with authorizing legislation for the Justice Department. As with the State Department, Congress has not approved new authorizing legislation for the Justice Department since, but it has funded the agency — and even authorized hundreds of millions of dollars more for a new FBI headquarters — every year.


​Education spending

The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act delegated power to state and local education officials to set primary and secondary education achievement standards. It gives billions of dollars in federal grant money to state and local education officials to fund schools and school districts. Those standards are still used by the Education Department, even though the legislation has not been reauthorized. Trump has suggested he’d like to eliminate the entire department.

NASA

Stripping funding for NASA, which was last reauthorized in 2017, could spell doom for Musk’s commercial spaceflight firm, SpaceX. The company has contracts worth more than $4 billion — including for return trips to the moon and retiring the International Space Station — linked to programs approved in the 2017 law.


​Health-care and student loan programs

What’s known as the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was actually passed in two separate bills in 2010. The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act represents the second bill, which included some tax revisions and technical changes to the ACA. The law has not been reauthorized since, but the Department of Health and Human Services reported in March that more than 45 million people have health insurance coverage backed by the Affordable Care Act.

The law that made those final tweaks to the ACA also overhauled the Education Department’s student loan program. Where some schools relied on private lenders to issue federally backed loans, with this law, the government itself became the lender. That change has since enabled President Joe Biden to offer student loan debt relief, though many of his most ambitious policies have been blocked by the courts. Student loans are generally funded through mandatory spending — similar to social safety net programs such as Medicare and Social Security — and not subject to annual spending laws.


​International security programs

The 1985 International Security and Development Cooperation Act bundled together authorizations for a number of international security programs, including funding and regulations for arms sales to allies, economic aid for developing countries, airport security, anti-narcotics-trafficking policies, the Peace Corps and more. This Reagan-era law continues to be foundational to congressional funding and federal policy.


​Head Start

Head Start provides preschool education for children from low-income families. In the 2023 fiscal year, more than 800,000 children enrolled in Head Start programs, according to the National Head Start Association. The program also helped place more than 530,000 parents in jobs, school or job-training programs. It was last authorized in 2007.

(continue reading)

[mariacallous]

WASHINGTON ― Congressional Republicans want to use a controversial budget gimmick to pass their $5 trillion tax cut package ― and they plan to steamroll the Senate rules to make it happen.

Their risky and never-before-used strategy hinges on how to account for the bill’s impact on the deficit. Republicans want to use a “current policy” baseline, which assumes the 2017 tax cuts will be extended permanently even though they are due to expire this year. Under this method, which has been roundly panned by bipartisan budget experts, Republicans could claim that a huge part of the tax cuts would be cost-free. In reality, however, they would blow a massive hole in the deficit.

Initially, Republicans were expected to seek a green light on using “current policy” from the Senate parliamentarian, who advises the chamber on its rules and parliamentary procedure. But a meeting between the parliamentarian and Democratic and Republican budget staffers was canceled on Tuesday, a sign that Senate Republicans are planning to go their own way.

Republican leaders argued in a closed-door lunch on Tuesday that Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has sufficient authority under the Congressional Budget Act to score their reconciliation bill using “current policy” himself, without needing a ruling from the parliamentarian.

“By law — it is the chairman’s call,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) told HuffPost.

But Democrats said that ignoring the Senate parliamentarian on the matter and pressing forward with a “current policy” baseline would be tantamount to going “nuclear” and breaking Senate rules, further weakening the institution.

“That would be going nuclear. It shows that Republicans are so hellbent on giving these tax breaks to the billionaires that they’re willing to break any rules, norms and things they promised they wouldn’t do,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters on Tuesday.

“Republicans are adding magic rules to their magic math,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) added. “At the end of the day, none of this will work. A $4.7 trillion tax giveaway to billionaires will cost $4.7 trillion, and cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid will be real and cost millions of people around this country.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mira Lazine at LGBTQ Nation:

On Thursday, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill that would give authority to the Treasury Department to revoke a 501c non-profit’s tax-exempt status if they’re believed to support terrorism.

House Resolution 9495, also known as the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” was sponsored by Rep. Tenney Claudia (R-NY) and passed through the house in a 219–184 vote. It has gone through multiple different forms since it was initially introduced in response to pro-Palestine organizers in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. According to anthropologist and legal scholar Darryl Li, who spoke to Democracy Now, this bill exists exclusively as a means for the right-wing to crush their political opponents, especially those who advocate for the rights of Palestinians, who were recently found by the International Criminal Court to be victims of war crimes enacted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “This bill is essentially a civil rights disaster, that … would allow the government to shut down nonprofits on the smear of being terrorist-supporting organizations…. This law requires an accusation with no evidence, but a tie-in. It’s an accusation that nonprofits are supporting a group on one of the existing international terrorism lists… The bill is essentially discriminatory by design,” he said. “Initially, it did have significant bipartisan support, because, of course, anti-Palestinian racism is one of the great bipartisan unifiers in Congress.”

Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) justified the bill as a plain way to defund terrorism. “We, as members of Congress, have the duty to make sure that taxpayers are not subsidizing terrorism. It’s very, very simple,” he said on the House floor.  Smith didn’t provide evidence that any major U.S. non-profit group has ever supported terrorism. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the only Palestinian-American in Congress, said of the bill, “I don’t care who the president of the United States is. This is a dangerous and unconstitutional bill that would allow unchecked power to target nonprofit organizations as political enemies and shut them down without due process.” The bill doesn’t just pose a danger to advocates for war refugees trapped in Gaza, but also possibly to LGBTQ+ nonprofits as well. As the Trump-Vance campaign spent record numbers on anti-trans ad spending, it is increasingly likely that they could use this bill as a pretense to attack the many nonprofits that advocate for LGBTQ+ individuals. Li details that this could be the case for just about anyone who is a political opponent of the ruling administration.

[...] “Right-wingers and white supremacists in Congress can support this bill, with the assurance that their allies, right-wing extremist groups, are highly, highly unlikely to ever be targeted by this bill, because there isn’t going to — it’s much less likely that they will be smeared with an accusation of being tied to an international terrorist organization that’s already on one of the government lists,” Li said. Groups that could be on the chopping block with this bill include the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, as well as nonprofit news outlets like Mother Jones or ProPublica.

HR9495 is an attack on nonprofit organizations, and Donald Trump and his allies can twist the definition of “supporting terrorism” to not only include pro-Palestinian groups, but also pro-abortion access and pro-LGBTQ+ groups (or any group that opposes the MAGA movement).

It’s time to kill this immoral bill in the Senate.

[truth-has-a-liberal-bias]

The House voted Wednesday night to pass a $78 billion tax package that includes an expansion of the child tax credit, sending it to the Senate, where its path is uncertain. The Republican-led House passed the bipartisan measure 357-70...

...

It now heads to the Senate, where it will need at least 60 votes to advance.

Given the margin in the House, and the scope of the bipartisan support, that might not seem like much of a challenge, but one GOP senator summarized a core problem. NBC News also reported:

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, cast doubt Wednesday on passing a bipartisan tax bill, saying it could make President Joe Biden “look good” and improve Democrats’ chances of holding the White House in the 2024 election. Grassley said re-electing Biden could hurt Republican hopes of extending Trump-era tax cuts.

...

The problem is not that the Iowa Republican opposes the underlying legislation; the problem is that his principal concern is avoiding governing successes that might make President Joe Biden “look good” in an election year.

The longtime GOP senator could put country over party, but by his own admission, he’s reluctant to do so. To hear Grassley tell it, reducing child poverty is fine, but helping the Republican Party’s electoral strategies is better. [...]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Make that Trump and D.C. Be sure to read the caption.

[Thanks Steve Jennings]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 2, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jun 03, 2025

The Republicans’ giant budget reconciliation bill has focused attention on the drastic cuts the Trump administration is making to the American government. On Friday, when a constituent at a town hall shouted that the Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income Americans, meant that “people will die,” Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) replied, “Well, we are all going to die.”

The next day, Ernst released a video purporting to be an apology. It made things worse. “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth. So, I apologize. And I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ," she said.

Ernst blamed the “hysteria that’s out there coming from the left” for the outcry over her comments. Like other Republicans, she claims that the proposed cuts of more than $700 billion in Medicaid funding over the next ten years is designed only to get rid of the waste and fraud in the program. Thus, they say, they are actually strengthening Medicaid for those who need it.

But, as Linda Qiu noted in the New York Times today, most of the bill’s provisions have little to do with the “waste, fraud, and abuse” Republicans talk about. They target Medicaid expansion, cut the ability of states to finance Medicaid, force states to drop coverage, and limit access to care. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the cuts mean more than 10.3 million Americans will lose health care coverage.

House speaker Mike Johnson has claimed that those losing coverage will be 1.4 million unauthorized immigrants, but this is false. As Qiu notes, although 14 states use their own funds to provide health insurance for undocumented immigrant children, and seven of those states provide some coverage for undocumented pregnant women, in fact, “unauthorized immigrants are not eligible for federally funded Medicaid, except in emergency situations.” Instead, the bill pressures those fourteen states to drop undocumented coverage by reducing their federal Medicaid funding.

MAGA Republicans claim their “One Big, Beautiful Bill”—that’s its official name—dramatically reduces the deficit, but that, too, is a lie.

On Thursday, May 29, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed the measure would carry out “the largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years with $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings.” She echoed forty years of Republican claims that the economic growth unleashed by the measure would lead to higher tax revenues, a claim that hasn’t been true since Ronald Reagan made it in the 1980s.

In fact, the CBO estimates that the tax cuts and additional spending in the measure mean “[a]n increase in the federal deficit of $3.8 trillion.” As G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers notes, the CBO has been historically very reliable, but Leavitt and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tried to discount its scoring by claiming, as Johnson said: “They are historically totally unreliable. It’s run by Democrats.”

The director of the CBO, economist Philip Swagel, worked as chief of staff and senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisors during the George W. Bush administration. He was appointed in 2019 with the support of Senate Budget Committee chair Michael Enzi (R-WY) and House Budget Committee chair John Yarmuth (D-KY). He was reappointed in 2023 with bipartisan support.

Republican cuts to government programs are a dramatic reworking of America’s traditional evidence-based government that works to improve the lives of a majority of Americans. They are replacing that government with an ideologically driven system that concentrates wealth and power in a few hands and denies that the government has a role to play in protecting Americans.

And yet, those who get their news by watching the Fox News Channel are likely unaware of the Republicans’ planned changes to Medicaid. As Aaron Rupar noted, on this morning’s Fox and Friends, the hosts mentioned Medicaid just once. They mentioned former president Joe Biden 39 times.

That change shows dramatically in cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA is an agency in the Commerce Department, established under Republican president Richard Nixon in 1970, that monitors weather conditions, storms, and ocean currents. The National Weather Service (NWS), which provides weather, wind, and ocean forecasts, is part of NOAA.

NWS forecasts annually provide the U.S. with an estimated $31.5 billion in benefits as they enable farmers, fishermen, businesspeople, schools, and individuals to plan around weather events.

As soon as he took office, Trump imposed an across-the-board hiring freeze, and billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” fired probationary employees and impounded funds Congress had appropriated. Now, as hurricane season begins, experts in storms and disasters are worried that the NOAA will be unable to function adequately.

Cuts to the NWS have already meant fewer weather balloons and thus less data, leaving gaps in information for a March ice storm in Northern Michigan and for storms and floods in Oklahoma in April. Oliver Milman of The Guardian reported today that 15 NWS offices on the Gulf of Mexico, a region vulnerable to hurricanes, are understaffed after losing more than 600 employees. Miami’s National Hurricane Center is short five specialists. Thirty of the 122 NWS stations no longer have a meteorologist in charge, and as of June 1, seven of those 122 stations will not have enough staff to operate around the clock.

On May 5, the five living former NWS leaders, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, wrote a letter to the American people warning that the cuts threaten to bring “needless loss of life.” They urged Americans to “raise your voice” against the cuts.

Trump’s proposed 2026 budget calls for “terminating a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs” and cutting about 25% more out of NOAA’s funding.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has also suffered dramatic cuts as Trump has said he intends to push disaster recovery to the states. The lack of expertise is taking a toll there, too. Today staff members there said they were baffled after David Richardson, the head of the agency, said he did not know the United States has a hurricane season. (It does, and it stretches from June 1 to the end of November.) Richardson had no experience with disaster response before taking charge of FEMA.

Trump’s proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are even more draconian. On Friday, in a more detailed budget than the administration published in early May, the administration called for cuts of 43% to the NIH, about $20 billion a year. That includes cuts of nearly 40% to the National Cancer Institute. At the same time, the administration is threatening to end virtually all biomedical research at universities.

On Friday, May 23, the White House issued an executive order called “Restoring Gold Standard Science.” The order cites the COVID-19 guidance about school reopenings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to claim that the federal government under President Joe Biden “used or promoted scientific information in a highly misleading manner.” (Schools closed in March 2020 under Trump.) The document orders that “[e]mployees shall not engage in scientific misconduct” and, scientists Colette Delawalla, Victor Ambros, Carl Bergstrom, Carol Greider, Michael Mann, and Brian Nosek explain in The Guardian, gives political appointees the power to silence any research they oppose “based on their own ‘judgment.’” They also have the power to punish those scientists whose work they find objectionable.

The Guardian authors note that science is “the most important long-term investment for humanity.” They recall the story of Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, who is a prime example of the terrible danger of replacing fact-based reality with ideology.

As Sam Kean of The Atlantic noted in 2017, Lysenko opposed science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century in favor of the pseudo-scientific idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. This idea reflected communist political thought, and Lysenko gained the favor of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Lysenko claimed that his own agricultural techniques, which included transforming one species into another, would dramatically increase crop yields. Government leaders declared that Lysenko’s ideas were the only correct ones, and anyone who disagreed with him was denounced. About 3,000 biologists whose work contradicted his were fired or sent to jail. Some were executed. Scientific research was effectively banned.

In the 1930s, Soviet leaders set out to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, and when their new state-run farming collectives failed, they turned to Lysenko to fix the problem with his new techniques. Almost everything planted according to his demands died or rotted. In the USSR and in China, which adopted his methods in the 1950s, at least 30 million people died of starvation.

“[W]hen the doctrines of science and the doctrines of communism clashed, he always chose the latter—confident that biology would conform to ideology in the end,” Kean said of Lysenko. He concludes: “It never did.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Over the last decade, states and municipalities have brought more than 30 lawsuits accusing big oil of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products, and seeking potentially billions in damages. The defendants have worked to kill the cases, with limited success.

Now, with Republicans in control of the White House and both congressional chambers, advocates fear the industry will go further, pursuing total immunity from all existing and future climate lawsuits. To do so, they could lobby for a liability waiver like the one granted to the firearms industry in 2005, which has successfully blocked most attempts to hold them accountable for violence.

“Lawmakers must decisively reject any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to evade accountability and ensure both justice today and the right of future generations to hold polluters responsible for decades of deception,” said the missive, which is addressed to the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer.

Fossil fuel companies have vied for such a get-out-of-jail-free card for years. In 2017, a coalition of Republican officials, economists and oil companies proposed legal liability as a condition of a carbon tax, arguing the industry could not weather both. When the council abandoned the waiver proposal two years later, Exxon threatened to leave the group, documents subpoenaed by the Senate show.

Then, in 2020, a waiver was quietly included in a draft of a Covid-19 spending package but was later removed, the investigative climate outlet Drilled found.

Such a waiver could only pass through the Senate with supermajority support, requiring backing from some Democrats. In a January interview, Michael Gerrard, a climate law expert at Columbia University, said it is “hard to imagine” it winning bipartisan backing. But the advocates fear oil companies could lobby officials to once again quietly tuck the proposal into a larger, must-pass piece of legislation.

“Democrats need to be on guard,” said Aaron Regunberg, the climate accountability project director at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, which signed the letter.

On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to “stop the wave of frivolous litigation from environmental extremists”. And this month, a rightwing thinktank launched a campaign attempting to shoot down litigation from “radical climate groups”, which it called the “biggest risk” to Donald Trump’s energy agenda, E&E News reported. The thinktank has ties to Leonard Leo, who is widely known as a force behind the Federalist Society, which orchestrated the ultraconservative takeover of the American judiciary.

Another development sparking worry at oil companies: “climate superfund” bills, meant to make big polluters help pay for climate action.

Last year, Vermont and New York passed such measures, which are loosely modeled on the US superfund program. Ten other states are considering similar proposals, which could each cost the industry billions or trillions.

Red states and oil lobby groups are legally challenging the laws. This week, the Federalist Society – which Leo co-chairs – hosted a panel criticizing the measures.

It is a major fear for Cassidy DiPaola of the pro-climate superfund group Make Polluters Pay, which signed the letter.

“What’s at stake here isn’t just who pays for climate disasters,” she said. “It’s whether our democracy allows powerful industries to simply rewrite the rules when justice catches up to them.”

[anexperimentallife]

My cardiologist told me to avoid the news if possible, but I'm like, "No, I have to pay attention because--among MANY other reasons--King Musk and the Orange Shitgibbon don't want me to get my January disability check, and I won't find out until Saturday at the earliest whether their congressional pawns are going to let them have their way."

No, really. They absolutely refuse to return taxes on the ultra-wealthy to pre-Reagan levels OR to cut military spending, so things like cancer research for kids and social security are on the table to be cut, and the Muskrat wants NO new spending bill passed until after Jan 20th so his orange pet can take credit; I can't just NOT pay attention.

And oh yeah--even though the Orange Shitgibbon hasn't taken office yet, he told the GOP to tank the bipartisan spending bill they'd developed with Dems, SO THEY DID. And now Musk and Trump have directed congressional Republicans VIA TWEET to tank their OWN bill--the one they developed ENTIRELY ON THEIR OWN.

[thebiscuiteternal]

Less than 48 hours before defaulting and triggering a shutdown, Congress is still scrambling to pass a stopgap funding resolution that will keep the U.S. government funded and functional through the next few months. After several starts and stops, Republicans were reduced to infighting on Wednesday after Elon Musk — Trump’s “first buddy” and government “efficiency” adviser — rejected a proposed funding deal and called for a legislative freeze and government shutdown until Trump’s inauguration in late January.  As a result, the new stripped-down funding bill proposed on Thursday is literally throwing out the baby with the bathwater: It will exclude $190 million for the bipartisan “Give Kids a Chance” program for child cancer research. Sam Stein of The Bulwark points out that the new bill also excludes funding for research on premature labor, sickle cell disease treatment, early detection of breast and cervical cancer, the Rural Broadband Protection Act, an anti-deepfake porn bill, and more. “Fuck cancer. Especially pediatric cancer,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) wrote on X. “These people want to punish these previous little kids to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest corporations in human history.” President-elect Donald Trump endorsed the new funding bill on Thursday afternoon, writing on Truth Social: “Speaker Mike Johnson and the House have come to a very good Deal for the American People. The newly agreed to American Relief Act of 2024 will keep the Government open, fund our Great Farmers and others, and provide relief for those severely impacted by the devastating hurricanes.”  “A VERY important piece, VITAL to the America First Agenda, was added as well — The date of the very unnecessary Debt Ceiling will be pushed out two years, to January 30, 2027,” Trump added. “All Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our Country, and vote ‘YES for this bill.”  Democrats have been trolling Trump since Musk sank the original funding deal on Wednesday, referring to the billionaire as “President Musk” after he bent congressional Republicans to his will. Musk, like Trump, seems pleased with the new version of the legislation. He posted an image of the amount of pages of the now-dead deal compared to the substantially smaller number of pages of the new bill, adding a laughing emoji.

I'm gonna throw up.

[misfitwashere]

September 9, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

SEP 10

Last night, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launched a new section of its website detailing her policy positions. Titling her plans “A New Way Forward,” Harris vows to build the American middle class through an “opportunity economy.” Her vision for the future, she says, “protects our fundamental freedoms, strengthens our democracy, and ensures every person has the opportunity to not just get by, but to get ahead.” 

Harris’s economic plan builds on that of the Biden-Harris administration. This makes sense, since their focus on investing in the middle class has created the strongest economy in the world. Harris is emphasizing the need to bring down household costs of food, medicine, housing, healthcare, and childcare, all issues important to Americans.  

The website provides concrete economic actions she plans to take with a willing Congress. They include expanding the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, investing in more housing, and supporting the PRO Act, which protects the rights of workers to unionize, while continuing the crackdown on business consolidation that kills competition and rolling back the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

The biggest economic shift from the current administration is pegging a new capital gains tax for those earning more than a million dollars a year at 28%, significantly lower than the 39.6% President Joe Biden proposed in his 2025 budget. The plans also call for the first-ever national ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries (37 states already have such laws). 

Aside from strictly economic plans, the policy pages say Harris backs passing the bipartisan immigration bill that Republicans killed on Trump’s orders, protecting reproductive healthcare and restoring Roe v. Wade, and protecting the right to vote and ending partisan gerrymandering through the John Lewis Voting Rights and the Freedom to Vote Acts.

Republicans have charged that Harris has not offered specifics for her policies, but much of what is now clearly laid out is already in the public record. By the standards of American history, it is a strikingly moderate agenda that reflects the belief that the best way for the government to protect opportunity and nurture the economy is to make sure that the system is fair and that ordinary people have access to opportunity.

The “New Way Forward” in Harris’s plan seems to be less a new set of policies than a rejection of the politics of the past several decades. She and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz appear to be attempting to reshape the political landscape to bring Americans of all parties together to stand against Trump’s MAGA Republicans. The campaign has actively reached out to Republicans, several of whom spoke at the Democratic National Convention. On Saturday, Harris said she was “honored” to have the endorsement of former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and former vice president Dick Cheney, both staunch Republicans. “People are exhausted about the division and the attempt to divide us as Americans,” she said. “We love our country and we have more in common than what separates us.” 

Trump’s website offers slogans rather than policies, so Harris’s website compares her policies to the comparable sections of Project 2025, the playbook for a second Trump term laid out by a number of right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation. Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from Project 2025, but at his rallies, he has offered the policies in it—like firing nonpartisan civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, and abolishing the Department of Education—as his top priorities. 

While Harris focused on policy, as critics have demanded, MAGA Republicans today spread slurs about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, claiming they are eating other people’s pets and local wildlife. Right-wing media figure Benny Johnson, who was one of the six commenters whose paychecks at now-disbanded Tenet Media were paid by Russia, was one of those pushing the false stories. So was X owner Elon Musk. 

The story was debunked almost immediately by the Springfield police, but Republican politicians ran with it. The X account for Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee ran it; so did Texas senator Ted Cruz, who shared an image with two kittens saying: “PLEASE VOTE FOR TRUMP SO IMMIGRANTS DON’T EAT US.” And the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, posted: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.” (The Haitians in Springfield are in the U.S. legally.)

Perhaps most significantly, Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who is challenging Democratic Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, pushed the story. That Senate seat is crucial to the Republican attempt to take control of the Senate, and Moreno has just launched a $25 million ad campaign against Brown, accusing him of giving undocumented immigrants taxpayer-funded benefits. Today’s disinformation was well timed for that ad campaign. 

The Justice Department today announced  charges against two leaders of the white supremacist Terrorgram Collective, an international terrorist group that operates on the platform Telegram. Dallas Humber of California and Matthew Allison of Idaho have been charged with “soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.” They “solicited murders and hate crimes based on the race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, and gender identity of others,” U.S. Attorney Phillip Talbert said. They had a hit list of federal, state, and local officials, as well as corporate leaders, and they encouraged attacks on government infrastructure, including energy facilities. Their plan was to create a race war. 

“Hate crimes fueled by bigotry and white supremacy, and amplified by the weaponization of digital messaging platforms, are on the rise and have no place in our society,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said.

Congress is back in session today and must fund the government before October 1 or face a government shutdown. Although Congress negotiated spending levels for 2024 and 2025 back in June 2023, the House has been unable to pass appropriations bills because MAGA extremists either refuse to accept those levels or insist on inserting culture war poison pills into the bills. 

Now, Trump has demanded that a continuing resolution to fund the government must include a measure requiring proof of citizenship to vote. Since it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in elections for president or members of Congress and there is no evidence it is anything but vanishingly rare, the measure actually seems designed to suppress voting. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) went along and put the measure in the bill. He also designed for the measure to last until next March, making the budget so late a new president could write it, but also blowing through a January 1 deadline set in the June 2023 bill to require automatic cuts to spending.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote to his colleagues: “House Democrats have made it clear that we will find bipartisan common ground on any issue with our Republican colleagues wherever possible, while pushing back against MAGA extremism.” Jeffries called the Republican bill “unserious and unacceptable.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told House and Senate leaders that the cuts required by law if Congress pushes the budget into March would drastically affect the military. “The repercussions of Congress failing to pass regular appropriations legislation for the first half of [fiscal] 2025 would be devastating to our readiness and ability to execute the National Defense Strategy,” Austin wrote.

Meanwhile, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is back to his old trick of blocking a military promotion, this time of Lieutenant General Ronald Clark, one of Austin’s top aides. Tuberville says he placed the hold because he has concerns that Clark did not alert Biden when Austin had surgery. Biden has nominated Clark to become the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Pacific, a position currently held by General Charles A. Flynn, younger brother of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor who resigned after news broke that he had hidden conversations with Russian operatives. 

Today, ten retired senior military officials endorsed Harris, saying she “is the best—and only—presidential candidate in this race who is fit to serve as our commander-in-chief…. Frankly stated, Donald Trump is a danger to our national security and our democracy. His own former National Security Advisors, Defense Secretaries, and Chiefs of Staff have said so.”

—