United States Congress

[GreyhoundFan]

Because I don't care for, or agree with, much of the Freedom Caucus' agenda, I haven't been as up-to-date on them as I should have been. I found this article about the FC interesting. I didn't realize how very structured the membership s.

Quote

With a mellifluous name suggesting bucolic tranquility, Rep. Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican, is an unlikely object of the caterwauling recently directed at him and the House Freedom Caucus he leads. The vituperation was occasioned by the HFC’s role rescuing Republicans from embracing an unpopular first draft of legislation to replace Obamacare.

A decisive blow against the bill was struck by the quintessential Republican moderate, New Jersey’s Rodney Frelinghuysen, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, whose family has included a member of the Continental Congress, four U.S. senators and, in 1844, a vice-presidential nominee: “Hurrah! Hurrah! The country’s risin’, for Henry Clay and Frelinghuysen.”

Although just a little over two years old, the HFC signals a revival of congressional resistance to the dangerous waxing of executive power under presidents of both parties. The caucus is a rarity, a heartening political development: people giving priority to their legislative craft and institution rather than to a president of their party barking at them.

The House Freedom Caucus’s 30-some members, and six others informally affiliated, are barely 8 percent of the House, but their cohesion is a force multiplier. The cohesion comes, Meadows says, from its members being “here for a purpose.” And, he adds dryly, from the fact that, for many, “This is not the best job they’ve ever had.” Among the never-more-than 537 people who are in Washington because they won elections, none are more threatening to tranquility than the few who are not desperate to be here. They do not respond to the usual incentives for maintaining discipline.

The caucus has rules, bylaws and weekly meetings, often featuring experts on particular issues. House Freedom Caucus members have, Meadows believes, “a competitive advantage” in the House because they hone their arguments together in what Meadows calls “the best debating club on Capitol Hill.” If 80 percent of the caucus agree on an issue, it votes as a bloc, although members can receive two exemptions per Congress.

...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I found this analysis interesting: "As Georgia Vote Nears, G.O.P. Asks if Ideological Purity Matters Anymore"

Quote

ATLANTA — When Michael Fitzgerald, a local Republican leader, took a break from packing up the signs after a candidate forum here last week, he appeared momentarily flummoxed about the state of his party under President Trump.

Early voting has already begun in a closely watched special House election to replace former Representative Tom Price, who became Mr. Trump’s health secretary, but in the suburbs north of Atlanta, few seem quite sure what exactly the party stands for now.

“There are shades,” Mr. Fitzgerald finally said as he considered what it now meant to be a Republican. “Can I point to an individual and say, ‘Here’s your ideal conservative’?” He did not answer his own question, but he did not need to.

Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has blurred the bright-line ideological distinctions that defined the right for the past eight years. Driven more by personal loyalty and a ravenous appetite to win than by any fixed political philosophy, the deal-cutting president has been received warmly by some mainstream conservatives. At the same time, even ideological hard-liners who share the president’s pugilism but not his pragmatism have stuck by him because Mr. Trump has made the right enemies — and gleefully ridiculed them with public insults rarely heard from a president.

Continue reading the main story

These loyalties have upended the Tea Party-versus-establishment divide, which has dominated fratricidal primary seasons since 2010 but increasingly has the air of fins on the back of a car, a quaint relic from an earlier era. With Mr. Trump in charge, the political market for purity on the right has been devalued.

“Because of the loyalty that the most conservative voters in our base have to Trump, there’s a pull there that’s scrambling the ideological lines,” said Andy Sere, a Republican ad man who has been heavily engaged in the party’s internecine wars. “He wants wins on the board, and that’s traditionally been the goal of the pragmatists.”

The shifting conservative fault lines are on display in the affluent and mall-dotted northern suburbs of Atlanta, which were at the front end of the South’s political realignment in the 1970s when they turned away from their Democratic roots and elected a loquacious young college professor named Newt Gingrich to Congress.

The special election on April 18 has drawn substantial attention because one of the Democrats running, Jon Ossoff, has raised a remarkable $8 million, and his success in a Republican-leaning district could presage a midterm backlash against Mr. Trump. (Voters will pick from candidates of both parties on a single ballot; if no one clears 50 percent, the top two finishers will advance to a runoff election.)

But the way the Republican hopefuls are running is just as instructive. Even as they try to win over the sort of conservative activists dedicated enough to participate in a rare April election, the Republicans are casting themselves more as can-do pragmatists in the spirit of Mr. Trump than unwavering ideologues. At the forum and in individual interviews afterward, three of the Republicans in the 18-person field invoked some variation of Ronald Reagan’s maxim that it is better to get 80 percent of what you want than nothing at all.

Few embraced the Tea Party moniker. And none of the highest-polling candidates pledged to join the Freedom Caucus, the hard-line conservative group whose uncompromising ideology helped derail Mr. Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

...

 

[47of74]

Ugh.  (He's WI, not IL).

shareblue.com/gop-rep-defends-trump-attack-on-internet-privacy-nobodys-got-to-use-the-internet/#.WPD7n5MS5Uo.twitter

Quote

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-IL) offered a strangely antiquated defense of Donald Trump’s recent decision to roll back an Obama-era protection that stopped internet providers from selling information about their customer’s browsing habits.

When a concerned voter at Sensenbrenner’s town hall asked about Trump’s assault on internet privacy, Sensenbrenner told her “nobody’s got to use the internet.”

The internet is vital to modern life. It is used to communicate, conduct commerce, and disseminate information like no medium ever has. It is absurd for a congressman to assert that usage of the internet is optional. He should know better.

The necessity of the internet is what has made Trump’s decision to strip online privacy protections so unpopular. Only 6 percent of people polled support the law, while 83 percent opposed it — including 80 percent of Republicans.

Yeah what about your browsing habits Sensenbrenner?  If we looked at your browsing habits would we discover the electronic version of wide stancing it online?

[Audrey2]

27 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Ugh.  (He's WI, not IL).

shareblue.com/gop-rep-defends-trump-attack-on-internet-privacy-nobodys-got-to-use-the-internet/#.WPD7n5MS5Uo.twitter

Yeah what about your browsing habits Sensenbrenner?  If we looked at your browsing habits would we discover the electronic version of wide stancing it online?

Of course, since the Internet is optional, staying off it and protecting your privacy would prevent you from keeping up as closely with the news, allowing the cretins in Washington to screw you over in even more ways. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Republicans may be making a mistake by swinging only for the fences"

Quote

A couple of weeks after the 2008 election, Rahm Emanuel, the incoming White House chief of staff, and Phil Schiliro, the incoming White House director of legislative affairs, huddled with the Democratic congressional leadership to talk strategy.

Everyone knows the big agenda they pursued — an $800 billion economic stimulus, a sweeping health-care law and an overhaul of Wall Street regulations — but the leaders also agreed on a parallel strategy that was almost as critical. That effort became a steady supply of smaller bills, more niche in focus but also bipartisan in support, ranging from enhancing consumer protections in the credit-card industry to making it easier to stop children from smoking.

“The singles,” Emanuel, now the mayor of Chicago, called those efforts in an interview last week while visiting Washington. These smaller measures filled the House and Senate floor throughout early 2009 as committee chairmen battled behind the scenes on the finer print of the much bigger legislation to come.

Eight years later, President Trump and his Republican-led Congress have swung for the fences early and, so far, have struck out. As Republicans again try to craft a repeal plan for the 2010 Affordable Care Act and continue shooting for a massive tax cut, Emanuel wonders from where the GOP will get its momentum.

“The bunt singles,” he said, motioning his arms like a ballplayer trying to get the smallest of hits, “they don’t even have them.”

A quarter of the way through Trump’s first year in office, Republicans’ only legislative successes have come on small bills that wiped out regulations from the last weeks President Barack Obama was in office. Lawmakers are using the obscure Congressional Review Act of 1996 to do so on party-line votes.

Those dozens of nixed regulations do represent a win for Trump, and Republican leaders are aware of the need to demonstrate some wins. In an interview before Congress left for its two-week spring break, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) noted that undoing regulations “unfortunately doesn’t make a lot of news” and said his office was going to compile a report on the sweep and impact of those moves.

But Congress’s authority to undo a previous administration’s regulations through the CRA process expires early next month. Confirming Justice Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, only after blowing up Senate rules to do so on a simple majority, is the only other solid victory the GOP can so far claim.

“The only reason that we were able to do them is they were 51-vote situations,” McConnell said.

McConnell has made clear that the overhaul of the tax code is the only other big piece of legislation that would fall under special budgetary rules allowing for a simple majority in the Senate.

Everything else will require a minimum of eight Senate Democrats, and all 52 Republicans, to overcome a filibuster in that chamber. That makes it much more difficult for Republicans to get things done than those early regulatory repeals and confirming members of Trump’s cabinet.

It’s unclear what Republicans will do while leaders and committee chairmen continue haggling behind closed doors over the big battles on health and tax policy.

Their agenda is starting to look pretty barren.

After they figure out a way to keep government agencies funded by April 28, Republicans do not have much lined up to push onto center stage on the House and Senate floors.

They’ve got some bills waiting to reauthorize the Food and Drug Administration’s collection of user fees on the makers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, along with legislation to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration and the state-based Children’s Health Insurance Program.

If they’re not careful, Republicans could head into the long August recess without adding anything more to their win list than the already-repealed regulations and Gorsuch’s confirmation.

That’s not exactly the sort of vision that Trump cited in his January inaugural address when he vowed: “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”

Sixteen years ago, the George W. Bush administration operated with amazing early efficiency. By mid-June 2001, Bush had signed into law a $1.3 trillion tax cut and the House and Senate had approved their versions of the No Child Left Behind education legislation — each passing with significant Democratic support.

...

But Democrats had succeeded on one level — passing some progressive laws and giving their supporters something to show for the losses they suffered politically. Now, Republicans are struggling to enact their overarching agenda, and their counterparts think that it’s because the GOP never learned how to do the basics as an opposition party. Instead, maybe Republicans should be seeking a few smaller pieces of legislation.

“One of the reasons they are in the mess they are is that they didn’t do that,” Manley said. “They swung for the fences immediately with batters who didn’t have a lot of batting practice and weren’t used to hitting at all.”

Well, I for one, hope the Repubs don't get a damned thing done other than signing a continuing resolution to keep the government funded and running. Less chance for them to ruin our world.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Democrats fear that Trump has barred key federal workers from speaking to them"

Quote

Democrats in Congress are accusing the Trump administration of ordering officials in federal departments and agencies to withhold information they need to carry out their duties, such as preparing for committee hearings.

Party leaders say officials have routinely provided documents and detailed explanations of programs in the past, but now at least two ranking Democrats on congressional committees say their staff members were told directly by workers in agencies that they could no longer speak with them.

The issue started in January and grew into such a concern that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) asked Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) to track Democrats’ correspondence to the executive branch that have gotten no response. So far, Sarbanes said, there are more than 100 cases from the House.

“House Democrats have sent more than 100 letters to the Trump administration seeking answers to urgent questions … and received no response,” said Ashley Etienne, a spokeswoman for Pelosi’s office. “If there is a concerted effort by the Trump administration not to respond to House Democrats … we will take appropriate action to address it.”

The Trump administration did not respond to a request from The Washington Post to address the allegations of an apparent gag order, but at least one administration spokeswoman denied that her department forbids officials to speak to minority-party lawmakers.

Although responding to letters from lawmakers in the opposition party is a common courtesy practiced by previous administrations, they don’t always respond to every one. Each of the letters Sarbanes shared with The Post were written in March, and some appeared to require time for an adequate response.

A few of the letters seemed political in nature, such as a March 2 letter from Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, questioning Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States and calling on Sessions to resign.

But most sought answers or action seemingly on behalf of constituents. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) asked the administration on March 7 to maintain a $9 billion fund to fight opioid and prescription drug abuse in the United States. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) asked Sessions to investigate the slayings of transgender women around the country as hate crimes.

Rep. Annie McLane Kuster (D-N.H.) asked the Secretary of Defense James Mattis for information on reports that up to 30,000 Marines were under investigation for sharing and commenting on obscene photos of female Marines. Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) and other Democrats in California’s congressional delegation called on President Trump to declare a major disaster in the state after storms caused mudslides and overflowing reservoirs.

Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), the ranking minority member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, released an angry statement after meeting with officials at the General Services Administration in March. Carper wanted to know whether the use of public land by a Trump hotel in Washington financially benefited the president.

At the end of a list of complaints, Carper stated that “I am even more disturbed by the explicit statements made by GSA officials during this briefing that, beginning on Jan. 20, 2017, the Trump administration changed GSA’s long-standing practice of providing certain documents requested by minority members of Congress.

“During the briefing,” Carper continued, “agency personnel stated that its new practice only assures that such documents will be provided to the committee’s chairman.” Both congressional chambers and their committees are controlled by Republicans, putting Democrats at a disadvantage that did not exist during previous administrations.

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said a similar thing happened when he asked his staff to gather information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Department of Interior last month. Grijalva was stunned when his chief of staff informed him that the staffer tasked with retrieving the information from a congressional liaison office was turned away.

Grijalva said he was told that Fish and Wildlife workers couldn’t speak to minority staff unless they were called as a witness at a hearing. “I’ve been on this committee going on my 15th year,” Grijalva said. “This kind of response is unprecedented.”

...

For someone who constantly whined that the Obama administration wasn't transparent, this administration is unbelievably secretive.

[GreyhoundFan]

"This cowboy-poet is trying to steal a Republican House seat in Montana"

Quote

BILLINGS, Mont. — Rob Quist, the Democratic candidate for Montana’s sole U.S. House seat, had a problem. Big Sky Rising, the local progressive group — one of many that grew out of the National Women’s March — had filled a room for his speech.

But the room didn’t have a sound system for Quist, a 69-year-old folk musician, to strum and sing his campaign theme song.

“Let me just recite a poem for you about how I feel about our public lands,” said Quist. “Her gown is luscious green when she attends the annual springtime ball. And she fancies orange and gold and harvest moon in the fall. Her wild and natural beauty — it will take away your breath. Oh, but take her for granted? It could easily mean your death.”

It had been just 48 hours since a surprisingly close special election in Kansas kicked off Republican hand-wringing about forfeiting Montana’s May 25 special election to replace ex-Rep. Ryan Zinke (R), now President Trump’s interior secretary.

The Democratic candidate in Montana is a mustachioed 6-foot-3 poet who appears everywhere — churches, fundraisers, and television interviews — in a white cowboy hat and black Ariat boots.

That cowboy-poet has raised $1.3 million so far and was competitive with a self-funding Republican contender Greg Gianforte, who jumped into the race after a near-miss 2016 gubernatorial run. President Trump easily won Montana, but Democrats still compete strongly for statewide offices.

Republicans, flush with cash but facing unbridled Democratic enthusiasm, are taking Quist a bit more seriously. On Thursday, the National Republican Congressional Committee began a $273,000 digital and TV ad buy, accusing Quist of singing in “harmony” with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). The GOP-allied Congressional Leadership Fund is committing at least $1 million to the race, though Executive Director Corey Bliss said last week that Quist had no chance to win.

“Rob Quist is such a pathetic candidate that we almost feel bad running ads against him,” said Bliss. “At the end of the day he’ll lose by double-digits.”

Montana is one of five special elections this year in open House seats — four of them vacated when Trump plucked Republican lawmakers to become part of his administration. So far, Democrats are doing better than anticipated in conservatives’ seats — including Kansas, where the Democrat came within seven points last Tuesday of a winning a seat Trump nabbed by 27 points.

But while the Georgia race is seen as a test for the “rising electorate” of minority voters and highly educated white voters, the Montana race is a test for populism. Quist, who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president, portrays Gianforte as a plutocrat who will work only for his class. It’s the argument Democrats failed to stick to Trump, and one they want to see working in the places where working-class white voters bolted their party.

Gianforte, who’s been criticized for holding few public events, plans to welcome Donald Trump Jr. — an avid hunter who argued for Zinke at Interior — to the state next week. The first son will swing into Montana for rallies and fundraisers, $25 a pop.

...

“One of my top priorities in Congress will be to stop these corporate interests from dictating policy,” Quist told pipefitters at their Billings union hall. “When I was younger, there was a graph that showed the distribution of wealth across the classes. Now, if you look at the same graph, it’s flat across the bottom, and when you get to the super-rich, they have so much of the wealth that it flies off the page.”

Soft-spoken left-wing populism like that helped Quist become the nominee. Our Revolution, the group founded by Sanders, has endorsed Quist and in an interview last week, Sanders said he was looking for an opportunity to stump for him.

“If you look up Montana in the dictionary, you see a picture of Rob Quist,” said Rep. Denny Heck (D-Wash.), who chairs the Democratic Congressional Committee’s recruitment program.

“Rob Quist’s as Montana as Montana can get,” said Gov. Steve Bullock (D-Mont.), who defeated Gianforte, Quist’s opponent, just five months ago. “He’s been in all these small communities. He’s working hard. He reflects our values.”

The implication is that none of those kinds of words apply to Gianforte. Crisp and confident, the Republican moved to Montana 24 years ago and grew a software company, RightNow Technologies, out of Bozeman. (He was 33, having sold his first company for $10 million.) In Quist’s TV ads, he argues “there are enough millionaires in Congress“ and brands Gianforte as an East Coast arriviste.

...

Quist was more relaxed when it came to attacks on his finances. It was true, he said, that he’d faced $15,000 tax liens and settled in 2016. But he has a multi-millionaire to defeat.

“I probably should have declared bankruptcy,” he said. “But that’s not the Montana way.”

I so hope Quist can pull off the victory.

[GreyhoundFan]

Here's an interesting Fact Check article about members of Congress and their health insurance options.

Quote

Question: “Who pays your salary?”
Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.): “I am self-employed, I’ve been self-employed, and I pay more taxes inside my own company personally than I’ll ever receive from being in Congress. I pay my own, and I pay my own insurance. … So don’t mislead and think that you’re paying mine. I do. Also, every member of Congress, they pay for their own insurance, too. We are put into the exchange. We’re not a federal employee. We go into the D.C. exchange and we personally have to pay for 100 percent of it. Not a percentage, all of it.”
— Exchange during a town hall, April 10, 2017

Question: “Where do you get your insurance?”
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.): “I will say, just because there’s a lot of misinformation on it: I am on Obamacare. So that’s what Congress does.”
— Exchange during a town hall, April 10, 2017

The Fact Checker has been receiving lots of fact-check suggestions from readers who attended district town halls, in response to our new initiative to fact-check what members of Congress tell constituents during the April recess.

Not surprisingly, some of the most heated exchanges at many of the town halls involved health care and the failed GOP replacement bill for the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

These two answers by lawmakers in Oklahoma and Wisconsin provided an interesting look at the way members are framing their own health-care options. It’s actually quite complicated, and neither member captured the nuances. So we dug into it, for the constituents who didn’t get the full story at their town halls. Here’s what’s really going on.

...

Given Republicans’ push to repeal and replace Obamacare, it’s only natural for their constituents to ask how their policy decisions will affect their own health insurance. Is their insurance funded by taxpayers? How similar is their insurance to their constituents’? How will they be affected if Obamacare is replaced? Lawmakers owe their constituents an accurate and detailed explanation.

Neither Grothman nor Mullin quite captured the complexities in their answers at their town halls. Grothman’s spokeswoman said he was making a distinction between the federal health insurance program and the D.C. small-business exchange, because many of his constituents believe he’s on the federal program. It would have been better for him to explain that in detail at the town hall, but we’re glad to get a more nuanced explanation from his staff. We won’t rate his claim.

Mullin, however, went too far by claiming that members and staffers pay 100 percent of their insurance from the D.C. exchanges. That’s not accurate: They receive a taxpayer-funded subsidy for two-thirds of their premiums. And he misled his constituents by repeatedly asserting that taxpayers don’t pay for his salary or his insurance, or his staffs’ insurance. We award Mullin three Pinocchios.

The claims won a 3 (out of 4) Pinocchios.

[GreyhoundFan]

Another good article about Repubs getting push back on healthcare: "Two Republican lawmakers face anger, from their own voters, on health care"

Quote

PALATKA, Fla. — Inside a government building here, far-right Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) scolded his party’s leaders for rolling out an “ill-advised” health-care bill and blamed House Speaker Paul D. Ryan for the ensuing debacle.

The next evening on a college campus nestled in the Rocky Mountains, moderate Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) held the House Freedom Caucus — to which Yoho belongs — culpable for the legislation’s defeat.

In both places, Republican voters also pointed fingers — at President Trump, Ryan, their members of Congress, or all of them.

Fewer than 100 days after Republicans assumed complete control of Washington, their botched attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and broader struggles to cooperate have stoked widespread distrust and despair inside the party. The friction is evident at town hall meetings across the country during the current congressional recess.

One lifelong Republican attending Coffman’s town hall in Colorado exclaimed that he was “shocked” by the congressman’s support for the health-care bill, which both Trump and Ryan backed. At Yoho’s event, an attendee pressed the congressman on his role in the Freedom Caucus.

The open warfare threatens the president and the GOP agenda, but is also dampening enthusiasm with Republican voters who can no longer blame Democrats or divided government for the dysfunction.

“I think it’s just tough working with our conference,” Coffman said in an interview, referring to the fact that House Republicans find it almost impossible to agree.

The frustration is visible in both purple areas such as Coffman’s district, which will factor heavily into the battle for Congress in 2018; and ruby-red regions, such as Yoho’s seat, which voted strongly for Trump and could be crucial in 2020. It is present in districts represented by members who supported the bill like Coffman, as well as those who opposed it like Yoho.

Bob White, a Republican who attended Yoho’s town hall here Tuesday, raised a worrisome question for GOP lawmakers on the ballot next year.

“If there was another election I’d still vote for Ted Yoho,” he said in an interview the next day. But a few moments later, White abruptly raised a different possibility:

“Or maybe I would just skip over his name.”

...

It's a fairly lengthy article, but interesting. I love how Coffman says it's tough working with the rest of the Repubs. Um, yeah, maybe if they stopped acting like cranky toddlers... Yeah, I know, that's not going to happen.