#republican study committee

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Judd Legum at Popular Information:

In 2024, reliable access to high-speed internet is no longer a luxury; it is a basic necessity. From job applications to managing personal finances and completing school work, internet access is an essential part of daily life. Without an internet connection, individuals are effectively cut off from basic societal activities. 

But the reality is that many people — particularly those living around the poverty line — can not afford internet access. Without internet access, the difficult task of working your way from the American economy's bottom rung becomes virtually impossible.   On November 21, 2021, President Biden signed the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The new law included the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provided up to $30 per month to individuals or families with income up to 200% of the federal poverty line to help pay for high-speed internet. (For a family of four, the poverty line is currently $31,200.) On Tribal lands, where internet access is generally more expensive, the ACP offers subsidies up to $75 per month.  The concept started during the Trump administration. The last budget enacted by Trump included $3.2 billion to help families afford internet access. The FCC made the money available as a subsidy to low-income individuals and families through a program known as the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program. The legislation signed by Biden extended and formalized the program.  It has been a smashing success.

Today, the ACP is "helping 23 million households – 1 in 6 households across America." The program has particularly benefited "rural communities, veterans, and older Americans where the lack of affordable, reliable high-speed internet contributes to significant economic, health and other disparities." According to an FCC survey, two-thirds of beneficiaries "reported they had inconsistent internet service or no internet service at all prior to ACP." These households report using their high-speed internet to "schedule or attend healthcare appointments (72%), apply for jobs or complete work (48%), do schoolwork (75% for ACP subscribers 18-24 years old)." Tomorrow, the program will abruptly end.  In October 2023, the White House sent a supplemental budget request to Congress, which included $6 billion to extend the program through the end of 2024. There is also a bipartisan bill, the Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act, which would extend the program with $7 billion in funding. The benefits of the program have shown to be far greater than the costs. An academic study published in February 2024 found that "for every dollar spent on the ACP, the nation’s GDP increases by $3.89." The program will lapse tomorrow because Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to bring either the bill (or the supplemental funding request) to a vote. The Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act has 225 co-sponsors which means that, if Johnson held a vote, it would pass. 

[...]

The Republican attack on affordable internet

Why will Johnson not even allow a vote to extend the ACP? He is not commenting. But there are hints in the federal budget produced by the Republican Study Committee (RSC). The RSC is the "conservative caucus" of the House GOP, and counts 179 of the 217 Republicans in the House as members. Johnson served as the chair of the RSC in 2019 and 2020. He is currently a member of the group's executive committee.  The RSC's latest budget says it "stands against" the ACP and labels it a "government handout[] that disincentivize[s] prosperity." The RSC claims the program is unnecessary because "80 percent" of beneficiaries had internet access before the program went into effect. For that statistic, the RSC cites a report from a right-wing think tank, the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), which opposes the ACP. EPIC, in turn, cites an FCC survey to support its contention that 80% of ACP beneficiaries already had internet access. The survey actually found that "over two-thirds of survey respondents (68%) reported they had inconsistent internet service or no internet service at all prior to ACP."

[...] The RSC also falsely claims that funding for the precursor to the ACP, the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program (EBB), "was signed into law at the end of President Biden’s first year in office." This is false. Former President Trump signed the funding into law in December 2020. The RSC's position is not popular. A December 2023 poll found that 79% of voters support "continuing the ACP, including 62% of Republicans, 78% of Independents, and 96% of Democrats."

In 2024, access to the internet is a necessity and not just a luxury, and the Republicans are set to end the Affordable Connectivity Program if no action is taken. The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) provided subsidies to low-income people and families to obtain internet access.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Prem Thakker

States across the country are moving to provide universal free school meals to all our children. Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to stop them from doing just that.

The Republican Study Committee (of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members) on Wednesday released its desired 2024 budget, in which the party boldly declares its priority to eliminate the Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP, from the School Lunch Program. Why? Because “CEP allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.”

The horror.

Of note is that the CEP is not even something every school participates in; it is a meal service program reserved for qualifying schools and districts in low-income areas. The program enables schools that predominantly serve children from low-income backgrounds to offer all students free breakfast and lunch, instead of means-testing them and having to manage collecting applications on an individual basis. As with many universal-oriented programs, it is more practically efficient and, as a bonus, lifts all boats. This is what Republicans are looking to eliminate.

It’s the kind of provision that many would want every school to participate in. Why not guarantee all our children are well fed as they learn and think about our world and their place in it, after all?

But indeed, as California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, and as of this week, Vermont, all move to provide universal free school meals in one form or another—and at least another 21 states consider similar moves—Republicans are trying to whittle down avenues to accomplish that goal.

Along with trying to stop schools from giving all their students free meals, the proposed 2024 Republican budget includes efforts to:

• cut Social Security and Medicare • make Trump’s tax cuts for the top 1% permanent • impose work requirements on “all federal benefit programs,” like food stamps and Medicare • extend work requirements on those aged 55–64 • bring back all of twice-impeached and twice-arrested former President Donald Trump’s deregulations, including the weakening of environmental protection.

And that’s just a taste of their hopes and dreams. But don’t mistake it all as just wish-casting: “The RSC Budget is more than just a financial statement. It is a statement of priorities,” the party assures in the document.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Biden reacts to the GOP's proposal to gut social security

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 21, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 22, 2024

In the past few weeks, Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo has deepened our understanding of the right-wing attempt to impose Christian nationalism on the United States through support for Trump and the MAGA movement. On March 9, Kovensky explored the secret, men-only, right-wing society called the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), whose well-positioned, wealthy, white leaders call for instituting white male domination and their version of Christianity in the U.S. after a “regime” change. 

On March 19, Kovensky explained how that power was reaching into lawmaking when he reported on a September 2023 speech by Russ Vought, a key architect of the plans for Trump’s second term, including Project 2025. In the speech, which took place in the  Dirksen Senate Office Building, Vought explained the right wing’s extreme border policies by explicitly marrying Christian nationalism and an aversion to the pluralism that is a hallmark of American democracy. Vought argued that the U.S. should model immigration on the Bible’s Old Testament, welcoming migrants only “so long as they accepted Israel’s God, laws, and understanding of history.”

These religious appeals against the equality of women and minorities seem an odd juxtaposition to a statement by United Auto Workers (UAW) union president Shawn Fain in response to the claim of the Trump campaign that Trump’s “bloodbath” statement of last Saturday was about the auto industry. Fain is also a self-described Christian, but he rejects the right-wing movement.   

“Donald Trump can’t run from the facts,” Fain said in a statement to CBS News. “He can do all the name-calling he wants, but the truth is he is a con man who has been directly part of the problem we have seen over the past 40 years—where working class people have gone backward and billionaires like Donald Trump reap all the benefits…. 

“Trump has been a player in the class war against the working class for decades, whether screwing workers and small businesses in his dealings, exploiting workers at his Mar a Lago estate and properties, blaming workers for the Great Recession, or giving tax breaks to the rich. The bottom line is Trump only represents the billionaire class and he doesn’t give a damn about the plight of working class people, union or not.” 

In the 1850s the United States saw a similar juxtaposition, with elite southern enslavers heightening their insistence that enslavement was sanctioned by God and their warnings that the freedom of Black Americans posed an existential threat to the United States just as white workers were beginning to turn against the system that had concentrated great wealth among a very few men. While white southern leaders were upset by the extraordinary popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the 1852 novel that urged middle-class women to stand up against slavery, it was Hinton Rowan Helper’s 1857 The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It that made them apoplectic. 

Hinton Helper was a white southerner himself and showed no abolitionist sympathies in his deeply racist book. What that book did was to show, using the statistics that had recently been made available from the 1850 census, that the American South was falling rapidly behind the North economically. Helper blamed the system of slavery for that economic backwardness, and he urged ordinary white men to overthrow the system of enslavement that served only a few wealthy white men. The cotton boom of the 1850s had created enormous fortunes for a few lucky planters, as well as a market for Helper’s book among poorer white men who had been forced off their land. 

White southern elites considered Helper’s book so incendiary that state legislatures made it illegal to possess a copy, people were imprisoned and three allegedly hanged for being found with the book, and a fight over it consumed Congress for two months from December 1859 through January 1860. The determination of southern elites to preserve their power made them redouble their efforts to appeal to voters through religion and racism. 

In today’s America, the right wing seems to be echoing its antebellum predecessors. It is attacking women’s rights; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; immigration; LGBTQ+ rights and so on. At the same time, it continues to push an economic system that has moved as much as $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 10% since 1981 while exploding the annual budget deficit and the national debt.

Yesterday the far-right Republican Study Committee (RSC), which includes about two thirds of all House Republicans, released a 2025 budget plan to stand against Biden’s 2025 budget wish list. The RSC plan calls for dramatic cuts to business regulation, Social Security, Medicaid, and so on, and dismisses Biden’s plan for higher taxes on the wealthy, calling instead for more than $5 trillion in tax cuts. It calls the provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that permits the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over prices “socialist price controls.” 

Biden responded to the RSC budget, saying: “My budget represents a different future. One where the days of trickle-down economics are over and the wealthy and biggest corporations no longer get all the breaks. A future where we restore the right to choose and protect other freedoms, not take them away. A future where the middle class finally has a fair shot, and we protect Social Security so the working people who built this country can retire with dignity. I see a future for all Americans and I will never stop fighting for that future.”

Biden’s version of America has built a strong economy in the last two years, with extremely low unemployment, extraordinary growth, and real wage increases for all but the top 20%. Inequality has decreased. Today the White House announced the cancellation of nearly $6 billion in federal student loan debt for thousands of teachers, firefighters, and nurses. Simply by enforcing laws already on the books that allow debt forgiveness for borrowers who go into public service, the administration has erased nearly $144 billion of debt for about 4 million borrowers. 

At the same time, the administration has reined in corporations. Today the Department of Justice, along with 15 states and the District of Columbia, sued Apple, Inc., for violating the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. They charge that the company, which in 2023 had net revenues of $383 billion and a net income of $97 billion, has illegally established a monopoly over the smartphone market to extract as much revenue as possible from consumers. The company’s behavior also hurts developers, the Department of Justice says, because they cannot compete under the rules that Apple has set. 

At the end of February, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued to block the merger of Kroger and Albertsons, a $24.6 billion takeover affecting 5,000 supermarkets and 700,000 workers across 48 states. The merger would raise grocery prices, narrow consumer choice, and hurt workers’ bargaining power, the FTC said. The attorneys general of Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming joined the FTC’s lawsuit.  

The benefits of the administration’s reworking of the government for ordinary Americans have not gotten traction in the past few years, as right-wing media have continued to insist that Biden’s policies will destroy the economy. But as Shawn Fain’s position suggests, ordinary white men, who fueled the Reagan Revolution in 1980 when they turned against the Democrats and who have made up a key part of the Republican base, might be paying attention. 

In June 2023 the AFL-CIO, a union with more than 12.5 million members, endorsed Biden for president in 2024 in its earliest endorsement ever. In January the UAW also endorsed Biden. Yesterday the United Steelworkers Union, which represents 850,000 workers in metals, mining, rubber, and other industries, added their endorsement.

Just as it was in the 1850s, the right-wing emphasis on religion and opposition to a modern multicultural America today is deeply entwined with preserving an economic power structure that has benefited a small minority. That emphasis is growing stronger in the face of the administration’s effort to restore a level economic playing field. In the 1850s, those who opposed the domination of elite enslavers could only promise voters a better future. But in 2024, the success of Biden’s policies may be changing the game.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[filosofablogger]

What DO Republicans Want???

Don’t you sometimes wonder just what the Sam Hell it is the Republicans want?  They seem to stand against everything that would help people, and yet they stand for … virtually nothing other than bigotry in its every form.  In a recent newsletter, Heather Cox Richardson gives some insight into their goals … to return this nation to its pre-1933 state where, as Heather says, “Children worked in the…

[tomorrowusa]

Believe Republicans when they say they want to ban abortion and cut Social Security. And don't neglect to remind others about these plans – as frequently as possible.

(emphasis added)

On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) — a caucus that represents 80 percent of House Republicans, including the party’s entire leadership — unveiled a budget that calls for cutting Social Security benefits and establishing that human life begins at conception. The RSC tried to obscure the implications of its Social Security policy by describing its proposal as an increase in “the retirement age,” and declining to specify what the new age should be. But that is just an opaque way of describing a large cut in benefits. As Matt Bruenig notes, Social Security does not have a single retirement age: It has 96 different retirement ages, each associated with a different level of benefits. When lawmakers talk about “raising the retirement age,” they are really calling for an increase in the “full retirement age” — a variable in a formula that determines benefit levels at all 96 retirement ages. Raising the full retirement age to 69 — as the RSC proposed last fall — would translate into a roughly 14 percent cut to Social Security benefits, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Republicans claim that they need to cut benefits and raise the retirement age to keep Social Security from becoming insolvent. Democrats have a much better idea: Raise taxes on the filthy rich while allowing for legal immigration to increase the number of younger workers who pay social security taxes.

Biden, on the other hand, has called for substantially raising payroll taxes on Americans earning over $400,000 a year in order to sustain Social Security in its current form. It is true that this by itself would not be enough to preserve benefits indefinitely; as boomers continue retiring and America’s ratio of retirees-to-workers rises, larger tax increases would be required to sustain today’s benefit levels through the 2040s. But there is a simple way to alleviate this problem: We could allow more prime-age adults to come to the United States and contribute to its economy. Alas, Trump and his party would like to do the opposite. In any case, the RSC’s budget clarifies the parties’ respective positions on Social Security: Biden wants to preserve existing benefits through higher taxes on the rich, most House Republicans want to cut future benefits by 14 percent, and Trump wants to avoid taking any coherent position while starving the government of revenue, thereby engineering a 23 percent benefit cut by default.

Republicans are never going to stop trying to control reproductive freedom in the United States. It's in their political DNA. Trump boasts about killing Roe v. Wade.

Meanwhile, the RSC’s budget also calls for the passage of the Life at Conception Act, which would establish that “the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization.” This would make abortion illegal in all cases, including for patients who were impregnated through rape or incest. What’s more, the budget would also cut Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program by $4.5 trillion over 10 years, a proposal that might increase the salience of health care policy, which remains a source of Democratic strength. Democrats didn’t wait long before unwrapping this political gift. Biden decried the RSC budget as “extreme” Thursday, noting that it “shows what Republicans value.” The White House then circulated a rundown of the plan’s most unpopular provisions while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced it from the Senate floor.

The GOP MAGA dystopia involves protecting the filthy rich with their lavish lifestyles while removing healthcare from the rest of the population and having the elderly work til they drop dead on the job.

There are certainly other important issues this year, but the ones likely to hurt Republicans the most are abortion and healthcare/Social Security. Any voter with even the slightest interest in these issues should be regularly reminded of the Trump Republican positions on them.

[nudityandnerdery]

How the fuck a human being looks at the federal budget and thinks, "hmm, feeding children, that's where we're spending too much money," I will never understand it.

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week.

January 19-26 2024

The Energy Department announced its pausing all new liquefied natural gas export facilities. This puts a pause on export terminal in Louisiana which would have been the nation's largest to date. The Department will use the pause to study the climate impact of LNG exports. Environmentalists cheer this as a major win they have long pushed for.

The Transportation Department announced 5 billion dollars for new infrastructure projects. The big ticket item is 1 billion dollars to replace the 60 year old Blatnik Bridge between Superior, Wisconsin, and Duluth, Minnesota which has been dangerous failing since 2017. Other projects include $600 million to replace the 1-5 bridge between Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, $427 million for the first offshore wind terminal on the West Coast, $372 million to replace the 90 year old Sagamore Bridge that connects Cape Cod to the mainland,$300 million for the Port of New Orleans, and $142 million to fix the I-376 corridor in Pittsburgh.

the White House Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access announced new guidance that requires insurance companies must cover contraceptive medications under the Affordable Care Act. The Biden Administration also took actions to make sure contraceptive medications would be covered under Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and Federal Employee Health Benefits Program. HHS has launched a program to educate all patients about their rights to emergency abortion medical care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. This week marks 1 year since President Biden signed a Presidential Memorandum seeking to protect medication abortion and all federal agencies have reported on progress implementing it.

A deal between Democrats and Republicans to restore the expand the Child Tax Credit cleared its first step in Congress by being voted out of the House Ways and Means Committee. The Child Tax Credit would affect 16 million kids in the first year and lift 400,000 out of poverty. The Deal also includes an expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit which will lead to 200,000 new low income rental units being built, and also tax relief to people affected by natural disasters

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted for a bill to allow President Biden to seize $5 billion in Russian central bank assets. Biden froze the assets at the beginning of Russia's war against Ukraine, but under this new bill could distribute these funds to Ukraine, Republican Rand Paul was the only vote against.

The Senate passed the "Train More Nurses Act" seeking to address the critical national shortage of nurses. It aims to increase pathways for LPNs to become RNs as well as a review of all nursing programs nationally to see where improvements can be made

3 more Biden Judges were confirmed, bring the total number of Judges appointed by President Biden to 171. For the first time in history the majority of federal judge nominees have not been white men. Biden has also appointed Public Defenders and civil rights attorneys breaking the model of corporate lawyers usually appointed to life time federal judgeships

[amateurvoltaire]

Two hundred and thirty years ago, on a Tuesday, Maximilien Robespierre turned 36.

There wasn’t much to celebrate.

It was an exceptionally bleak year. Famine persisted. France remained embroiled in war. A month earlier, one of his oldest friends had met a grim fate under the guillotine.

Robespierre had withdrawn from public life since April 19th. Rumours circulated about his health. Some speculated illness while others noted that he continued to endorse decrees from the Committee of Public Safety, so clearly, he wasn’t that unwell. Barère, (approach his accounts with with caution) visited him and implied he appeared dreadful, teetering on the brink of a breakdown.

Deep down, did he sense that it would be his final birthday? Maybe.

Did he mark the occasion in any way? Given that he delivered a formidable speech on the 7th of May concerning the intersection of religious and moral ideas with Republican principles, it’s unlikely there was any celebration. He probably wrote and wrote and wrote some more.

That being said, I like to imagine that the Duplays’ coaxed him from his study for a brief respite, gave him something yummy to eat, maybe raised a toast in his honour and reminded him of how cherished and precious he was to them.

Happy 266 birthday, Maximilien!

You are still cherished.

[qqueenofhades]

The connections:

WELL this is it! This is the smoking gun we’ve all feared! AN EAST ASIAN STUDIES CLASS???? He’s obviously an undercover agent. What are you gonna tell me next? That he ordered Chinese takeout? That he visited the China section of the World Showcase at Epcot???? THE LINE HAS BEEN CROSSED!

(PS I feel like I send you so many things so my apologies but I just… I couldn’t resist sending this one. 😂)

Honestly, I feel like we should 100% encourage the House GOP on this one. After all, their last investigation completely failed to impeach Joe Biden or even politically harm him, and made them look like weapons grade idiots while the Democrats on the Oversight Committee trolled them hilariously, and reminded everyone why they're incredibly incompetent and utterly uninterested in real governing or anything but gibbering and throwing feces. So like, by all means, launch an investigation into Tim Walz taking an Asian studies class and helping some kids from Minnesota broaden their cultural horizons. I'm totally sure that will be the secret sauce that wins Trump the election. Zomgz.

On that note, if you want to ensure that these howling shitgibbons are booted out and don't spend Day 1 of Kamala's presidency launching even more baseless stunt investigations, trying to impeach her, and obstructing her legislative proposals, it's a great time to give money to the DCCC:

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Do you happen to know how often it occurred for wives of arrested deputies to share the same fate of their husbands, so either imprisoned, or condemned to death ? Do you have some examples? I'm referring to the years between 92-95. Moreover if it's not too much to ask for, could you also point out the signature of the CSP members who signed such warrants?

That’s a very interesting question, especially since no official studies seem to have been made on the subject. What I’ve found so far (and it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s way more) is:

Félicité Brissot — after the news of her husband’s arrest, Félicité, who had lived in Saint-Cloud with her three children since April 1793, traveled to Chartres. There (on an unspecified date?) she and her youngest son Anacharsis (born 1791) were arrested by the Revolutionary Committee of Saint-Cloud (the two older children had been taken in by other people) which sent her to Paris. Once arrived in the capital, Felicité was placed under surveillance in the Necker hotel, rue de Richelieu, in accordance with an order from the Committee of General Security dated August 9 1793 (she could not be placed under house arrest in her own apartment, since seals had already been placed on it). On August 11 she underwent an interrogation, and on October 13, she was sent from her house arrest (where she had still enjoyed a relative liberty) to the La Force prison. Félicité and her son were set free on February 4 1794, after six months spent under arrest. The order for her release was it too issued by the Committee of General Security, and signed by Lacoste, Vadier, Dubarran, Guffroy, Amar, Louis (du Bas-Rhin), and Voulland. Source: J.-P. Brissot mémoires (1754-1793); [suivi de] correspondance et papiers (1912) by Claude Perroud)

Suzanne Pétion — According to a footnote inserted in Lettres de madame Roland (1900), Suzanne was imprisoned in the Sainte-Pélagie prison since August 9 1793. In an undated letter written from the same prison, Madame Roland mentions that not only Suzanne, but her ten year old son Louis Étienne Jérôme is there too. I have however not been able to discover any official orders regarding Suzanne’s arrest and release, so I can’t say for exactly how long she and her son were imprisoned and who was responsible for it right now. @lanterne you wrote in this super old post that you’re waiting for a Pétion biography, did you get it? And if yes, does it perhaps say anything about Suzanne’s imprisonment in it? 😯)

Louise-Catherine-Àngélique Ricard, widow Lefebvre (Suzanne Pétion’s mother) — According to Histoire du tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris: avec le journal de ses actes (1880) by Henri Wallon, Louise was called before the parisian Revolutionary Tribunal on September 24 1793, accused “of having applauded the escape of Minister Lebrun by saying: “So much the better, we must not desire blood,” of having declared that the Brissolins and the Girondins were good republicans (“Yes,” her interlocutor replied, “once the national ax has fallen on the corpses of all of them”), for having said, when someone came to tell her that the condemned Tonduti had shouted “Long live the king” while going to execution; that everyone would have to share this feeling, and that for the public good there would have to be a king whom the “Convention and its paraphernalia ate more than the old regime”. She denied this when asked about Tonduti, limiting herself to having said: “Ah! the unfortunate.” Asked why she had made this exclamation she responded: ”through a sentiment of humanity.” She was condemned and executed the very same day.

Marie Anne Victoire Buzot — It would appear she was put under house arrest, but was able to escape from there. According to Provincial Patriot of the French Revolution: François Buzot, 1760–1794 (2015) by Bette W. Oliver, ”[Marie] had remained in Paris after her husband fled on June 2 [1793], but she was watched by a guard who had been sent to the Hôtel de Bouillon. Soon thereafter, Madame Buzot and her ”domestics” disappeared, along with all of the personal effects in the apartment. […] Madame Buzot would join her husband in Caen, but not until July 10; and no evidence remains regarding her whereabouts between the time that she left Paris in June and her arrival in Caen. At a later date, however, she wrote that she had fled, not because she feared death, but because she could not face the ”ferocious vengeance of our persecutors” who ignored the law and refused ”to listen to our justification.” I’ve unfortunately not been able to access the source used to back this though…

Marie Françoise Hébert — arrested on March 14 1794, presumably on the orders of the Committee of General Security since I can’t find any decree regarding the affair in Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public. Imprisoned in the Conciergerie until her execution on April 13 1794, so 30 days in total. See this post.

Marie Françoise Joséphine Momoro — imprisoned in the Prison de Port-libre from March 14 to May 27 1794 (2 months and 13 days), as seen through Jean-Baptiste Laboureau’s diary, cited in Mémoires sur les prisons… (1823) page 68, 72, 109.

Lucile Desmoulins — arrested on April 4 1794 according to a joint order with the signatures of Du Barran (who had also drafted it) and Voulland from the CGS and Billaud-Varennes, C-A Prieur, Carnot, Couthon, Barère and Robespierre from the CPS on it. Imprisoned in the Sainte-Pélagie prison up until April 9, when she was transferred to the Conciergerie in time for her trial to begin. Executed on April 13 1794, after nine days spent in prison. See this post.

Théresa Cabarrus — ordered arrested and put in isolation on May 22 1794, though a CPS warrant drafted by Robespierre and signed by him, Billaud-Varennes, Barère and Collot d’Herbois. Set free on July 30 (according to Madame Tallien : notre Dame de Thermidor from the last days of the French Revolution until her death as Princess de Chimay in 1835 (1913)), after two months and eight days imprisoned.

Thérèse Bouquey (Guadet’s sister-in-law) — arrested on June 17 1794 once it was revealed she and her husband for the past months had been hiding the proscribed girondins Pétion, Buzot, Barbaroux, Guadet and Salles. She, alongside her husband and father and Guadet’s father and aunt, were condemned to death and executed in Bordeaux on July 20 1794. Source: Paris révolutionnaire: Vieilles maisons, vieux papiers (1906), volume 3, chapter 15.

Marie Guadet (Guadet’s paternal aunt) — Condemned to death and executed in Bordeaux on July 20 1794, alongside her brother and his son, the Bouqueys and Xavier Dupeyrat. Source: Charlotte Corday et les Girondins: pièces classées et annotées (1872) by Charles Vatel.

Charlotte Robespierre — Arrested and interrogated on July 31 1794 (see this post). According to the article Charlotte Robespierre et ses amis (1961), no decree ordering her release appears to exist. In her memoirs (1834), Charlotte claims she was set free after a fortnight, and while the account she gives over her arrest as a whole should probably be doubted, it seems strange she would lie to make the imprisonment shorter than it really was. We know for a fact she had been set free by November 18 1794, when we find this letter from her to her uncle.

Françoise Magdeleine Fleuriet-Lescot — put under house arrest on July 28 1794, the same day as her husband’s execution. Interrogated on July 31. By August 7 1794 she had been transferred to the Carmes prison, where she the same day wrote a letter to the president of the Convention (who she asked to in turn give it to Panis) begging for her freedom. On September 5 the letter was sent to the Committee of General Security. I have been unable to discover when she was set free. Source: Papiers inédits trouvés chez Robespierre, Saint-Just, Payan, etc. supprimés ou omis par Courtois. précédés du Rapport de ce député à la Convention Nationale, volume 3, page 295-300.

Françoise Duplay — a CGS decree dated July 27 1794 orders the arrest of her, her husband and their son, and for all three to be put in isolation. The order was carried out one day later, July 28 1794, when all three were brought to the Pélagie prison. On July 29, Françoise was found hanged in her cell. See this post.

Élisabeth Le Bas Duplay — imprisoned with her infant son from July 31 to December 8 1794, 4 months and 7 days. The orders for her arrest and release were both issued by the CGS. See this post.

Sophie Auzat Duplay — She and her husband Antoine were arrested in Bruxelles on August 1 1794. By October 30 the two had been transferred to Paris, as we on that date find a letter from Sophie written from the Conciergerie prison. She was set free by a CPS decree (that I can’t find in Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public…) on November 19 1794, after 3 months and 18 days of imprisonment. When her husband got liberated is unclear. See this post.

Victoire Duplay — Arrested in Péronne by representative on mission Florent Guiot (he reveals this in a letter to the CPS dated August 4 1794). When she got set free is unknown. See this post.

Éléonore Duplay — Her arrest warrant, ordering her to be put in the Pélagie prison, was drafted by the CGS on August 6 1794. Somewhere after this date she was moved to the Port-Libré prison, and on April 21 1795, from there to the Plessis prison. She was transfered back to the Pélagie prison on May 16 1795. Finally, on July 19 1795, after as much as 11 months and 13 days in prison, Éléonore was liberated through a decree from the CGS. See this post.

Élisabeth Le Bon — arrested in Saint-Pol on August 25 1794, ”suspected of acts of oppression” and sent to Arras together with her one year old daughter Pauline. The two were locked up in ”the house of the former Providence.” On October 26, Élisabeth gave birth to her second child, Émile, while in prison. She was released from prison on October 14 1795, four days after the execution of her husband. By then, she had been imprisoned for 1 year, 1 month and 19 days. Source: Paris révolutionnaire: Vieilles maisons, vieux papiers (1906), volume 3, chapter 1.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kavitha Surana at ProPublica:

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat. She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C. But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison. Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail. It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome. Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state. There are almost certainly others. Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.

Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans. Doctors warned state legislators women would die if medical procedures sometimes needed to save lives became illegal. Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C. “They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban. Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.

The availability of D&Cs for both abortions and routine miscarriage care helped save lives after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, studies show, reducing the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% the first year after abortion became legal. But since abortion was banned or restricted in 22 states over the past two years, women in serious danger have been turned away from emergency rooms and told that they needed to be in more peril before doctors could help. Some have been forced to continue high-risk pregnancies that threatened their lives. Those whose pregnancies weren’t even viable have been told they could return when they were “crashing.” Such stories have been at the center of the upcoming presidential election, during which the right to abortion is on the ballot in 10 states.

Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.

But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica. Thurman and her son had recently moved out of her family’s home and into a gated apartment complex with a pool, and she was planning to enroll in nursing school. The timing could not have been worse. On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica. Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.

On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect. Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment. Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said. At the clinic, Thurman sat through a counseling session in which she was told how to safely take the pills and instructed to go to the emergency room if complications developed. She signed a release saying she understood. She took the first pill there and insisted on driving home before any symptoms started, Baker said. She took the second pill the next day, as directed.

Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare. Out of nearly 6 million women who’ve taken mifepristone in the U.S. since 2000, 32 deaths were reported to the FDA through 2022, regardless of whether the drug played a role. Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis. Most of the remaining cases involved intentional and accidental drug overdoses, suicide, homicide and ruptured ectopic pregnancies. Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.

The consequences of draconian abortion bans are being felt, as at least two women in Georgia died over being denied emergency medical care.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A new budget by a large and influential group of House Republicans calls for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and restructuring Medicare.

The proposals, which are unlikely to become law this year, reflect how many Republicans will seek to govern if they win the 2024 elections. And they play into a fight President Joe Biden is seeking to have with former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as he runs for re-election.

The budget was released Wednesday by the Republican Study Committee, a group of more than 170 House GOP lawmakers, including many allies of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Apart from fiscal policy, the budget endorses a series of bills “designed to advance the cause of life,” including the Life at Conception Act, which would aggressively restrict abortion and potentially threaten in vitro fertilization, or IVF, by establishing legal protections for human beings at “the moment of fertilization.” It has recently caused consternation within the GOP following backlash to an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that threatened IVF.

The RSC, which is chaired by Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., counts among its members Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his top three deputies in leadership. Johnson chaired the RSC from 2019 to 2021; his office did not immediately respond when asked about the new budget.

For Social Security, the budget endorses "modest adjustments to the retirement age for future retirees to account for increases in life expectancy." It calls for lowering benefits for the highest-earning beneficiaries. And it emphasizes that those ideas are not designed to take effect immediately: "The RSC Budget does not cut or delay retirement benefits for any senior in or near retirement."

The new budget also calls for converting Medicare to a "premium support model," echoing a proposal that Republican former Speaker Paul Ryan had rallied support for. Under the new RSC plan, traditional Medicare would compete with private plans and beneficiaries would be given subsidies to shop for the policies of their choice. The size of the subsidies could be pegged to the "average premium" or "second lowest price" in a particular market, the budget says.

The plan became a flashpoint in the 2012 election, when Ryan was GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's running mate, and President Barack Obama charged that it would "end Medicare as we know it." Ryan defended it as a way to put Medicare on better financial footing, and most of his party stood by him.

Medicare is projected to become insolvent in 2028, and Social Security will follow in 2033. After that, benefits will be forcibly cut unless more revenues are added.

Biden has blasted Republican proposals for the retirement programs, promising that he will not cut benefits and instead proposing in his recent White House budget to cover the future shortfall by raising taxes on upper earners.

The RSC budget also presents a conundrum for Trump, who has offered shifting rhetoric on Social Security and Medicare without proposing a clear vision for the future of the programs.

Notably, the RSC budget presents three possible options to address the projected insolvency of the retirement programs: raise taxes, transfer money from the general fund or reduce spending to cover the shortfall.

It rejects the first two options.

"Raising taxes on people will further punish them and burden the broader economy–something that the spend and print regime has proven to be disastrous and regressive," the budget says, adding that the committee also opposes "a multi-trillion-dollar general fund transfer that worsens our fiscal situation."

That leaves spending cuts.

The RSC budget launches blistering criticism at "Obamacare," or the Affordable Care Act, and calls for rolling back its subsidies and regulations that were aimed at extending insurance coverage.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 15, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 15, 2023

Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a 175-member group of far-right House members, released their 2024 “Blueprint to Save America” budget plan. It calls for slashing the federal budget by raising the age at which retirees can start claiming Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, and enacting dramatic tax cuts that will starve the federal government.  

I’m actually not going to rehash the 122-page plan. Let’s take a look at the larger picture.

This budget dismisses the plans of “President Joe Biden and the left” as a “march toward socialism.” It says that “[t]he left’s calls to increase taxes to close the deficit would be…catastrophic for our nation.” Asserting that “the path to prosperity does not come from the Democrats’ approach of expanding government,” it claims that “[o]ver the past year and a half, the American people have seen that experiment fail firsthand.”

Instead, it says, “the key to growth, innovation, and flourishing communities” is “[i]ndividuals, free from the burdens of a burdensome government.” 

It is?

Our history actually tells us how these two contrasting visions of the government play out.

Grover Norquist, one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”

Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross national product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States. 

The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity. 

When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people. 

The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in painters and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism. 

That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic, a high from which it is still coming down), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.

So why is there a growing debt?

Because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic. The United States is nowhere close to the average tax burden of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations. 

Republicans who backed those tax cuts now insist that the only way to deal with the growing debt is to get rid of the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and eventually promoted civil rights, all elements that stabilized the nation after the older system gave us the Depression. Indeed, the Republican Study Committee calls for making the Trump tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2025, permanent. 

“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his acceptance speech. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”

When the Republican Study Committee calls Biden’s policies—which have led to record employment, a booming economy, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor— “leftist,” they have lost the thread of our history. The system that restored the nation after 1933 and held the nation stable until 1981 is not socialism or radicalism; it is one of the strongest parts of our American tradition.

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[odinsblog]

What Mike Johnson Has Said About Cutting Social Security

Now elected House speaker after more than three tumultuous weeks following the ousting of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, attention is being drawn to Representative Mike Johnson's stance on America's entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

During his tenure as chair of the Republican Study Committee (RSC) from 2019 to 2021, Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, vigorously championed budget resolutions proposing trillions in cuts to these programs.

According to Bobby Kogan, senior director of Federal Budget Policy at American Progress, the proposed cuts were staggering;

roughly $2 trillion from Medicare,

$3 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act,

and $750 billion from Social Security.

At an American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research event before he was elected speaker, Johnson did not mince his words, saying that entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security pose an “existential threat” to the American way of life and the “whole form of government.”

(continue reading)