United States Congress of Fail (Part 2)

[Cleopatra7]

@sawasdee, Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon both tried to introduce universal healthcare in the early and mid twentieth century respectively. Neither succeeded. I think two things are at work with our inability to have universal healthcare. First, many Americans have convinced themselves that they live in the best of all possible worlds, and don't know or care that the US has the highest rates of teen pregnancy, maternal death, infant mortality, obsesity, etc in the West world. Second, many whites are willing to forgo a social program that helps themselves if it means that people of color, especially blacks, will be even worse off. The only reason the New Deal passed is because FDR cut deals with Southern Republicans to ensure that the programs wouldn't benefit Southern blacks. In many Northern cities, black women had to agree to being sterilized to receive benefits. When the Great Society programs opened social welfare to all regardless of race, many of the whites who had supposed these programs when they were only for whites turned against them. Honestly, if Trump proposed a universal healthcare scheme that only covered whites, I'm sure it would pass.

[sawasdee]

@Cleopatra7 I didn't know about the forced sterilisation, or the racial elements to the New Deal. Though thinking about it, I should have - a Jim Crow south would not have allowed any equality of participation.

I grew up in the UK, where we don't have the historical baggage that the US still carries. But I do remember back in the seventies, a friend working at an employment agency was horrified that they would put a 'c' for coloured on applicants cards, and a 'nc' for only white workers acceptable to this employer.

It wasn't until 1976 that legislation was  passed to stop discrimination in employment - and there is still work to do. It's not overt today, but it is there - but I don't think at quite the same level as in the US.

I'm an old lady now, and born late to my parents. And my mother was number 9 of 11. My grandfather was born in 1878, and when he and my grandmother came to England from Ireland, there were almost no people of colour. But boarding houses and rentals said 'No Irish'. It almost seems as though society NEEDS someone to discriminate against. And I have no idea how to solve that.

At present, it seems to an outsider that in the States if you are non pure white or non US born or non christian - then you are 'other'.

I can only hope and pray that there are enough people who see this as wrong to reverse what tRump has made acceptable. But I spend a lot of the time very depressed.

[onekidanddone]

@Cleopatra7: Reading your post, I continue to wonder how anybody can keep saying white privilege does not exist. I is ground so deep into our culture, I don't know how it will ever change. 

Greenbelt is a community outside of Washington DC which when developed after the second world war was supposed to be the model of a New Deal society. Affordable housing, green space, proof that a co-op type socialist was good. Only people of color were banned from moving in. Equal justice for all to many does not really mean all.

The genocide of the indigenous peoples is something else whites would rather forget about.  My aunt was taken from her family, forced into boarding school and forbidden from speaking Navajo.  This was an attempt to eradicate her history.  Didn't work though.  All of her children, my four first cousins speak it, and have passed down to their children.

My brother-in-law's family were imprisoned in Japanese camps during WWII. It goes on and on.

 

[candygirl200413]

@Cleopatra7 and @onekidanddone, and the sad thing is that many white people will never accept white privilege. NYT for example just had an opinion piece about how "but wait, poor/ working white class still don't have privilege, we need to help them". While yes that is the case, POC are always outside of this working class and were able to see through Trumps lies, why were WWC?! Plus it hurts that as I, a POC woman can/probably make less money with an advance degree compared to a white woman with just a high school diploma. They (WWC) still have white privilege, and struggle.

[nvmbr02]

I think the book that Chris Hayes wrote, A Colony in a Nation, explains white privilege very well. I know that my fiscally conservative, but socially liberal husband is not a big believer in "white privilege" but he is becoming more aware of the issue and starting to understand. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Isn't this the truth? "The GOP hates red tape — except when it comes to giving poor people health care"

Spoiler

As a law student learning to represent people seeking welfare benefits, I was taught that forms had to be filled out flawlessly. No crossing out words. No white-out. No misspellings. The slightest error would provide an excuse to deny the cash needed for rent, food or a growing child’s shoes.

Republicans revile such bureaucratic rigidity when it inconveniences businesses or the wealthy. Yet they embrace it when it hurts the most vulnerable. We’ve seen this Republican red tape with onerous voter-ID requirements. The American Health Care Act passed by the House to repeal Obamacare is the latest example.

Now pending in the Senate, the House bill would authorize states to impose work requirements on low-income adults who access health care through Medicaid. Adding these requirements — also present in the president’s budget — was one of several sweeteners for the GOP’s reluctant right wing. Largely a legacy of 1990s-style welfare reform, stringent work requirements currently apply to federally funded safety nets for cash, food and housing, but not health care. Two decades of experience show why these rules are an especially poor fit for Medicaid.

The health-care context magnifies work requirements’ failings. They function mainly to pump out “sanctions,” denials of benefits for running afoul of bureaucratic requirements. The House bill would subject Medicaid enrollees to the same gantlet of busywork that cash recipients already must run. To enforce work requirements, caseworkers assign a stream of employability assessments, “work activities” and reporting obligations. Each mandatory task creates an opportunity to trip someone up and cut them off.

These hassles offer little benefit. Their advocates’ argument — that people need to fear dying of untreated illness to motivate them to work — is cruel and absurd. Whether or not you have health insurance, you still need to pay for food, shelter and clothing. The threat of losing health care hardly increases the financial pressure to work.

Research consistently shows that most sanctions stem from a missed appointment or an incomplete form. Actually refusing a job or interview rarely occurs. Hassling you for seeking help not only denies benefits outright but also discourages people from seeking support in the first place.

Predictably, the most vulnerable bear the heaviest burden. The same challenges that lead people to need assistance in the first place also increase the risk of a misstep in navigating the work bureaucracy. Studies of welfare sanctions repeatedly find that health problems, caregiving obligations and unstable housing or transportation are more widespread among those sanctioned.

Medicaid enrollees are especially endangered by this kind of red tape: A Kaiser Family Foundation report found that, among those not already working, about one-third cite poor health as the reason. Just more than one-fourth cite family responsibilities, and one-fifth cite school attendance. In principle, missing an appointment can be excused for a good reason, such as a child-care or health crisis, but the government bureaucracy can be unforgiving and judgmental. And other research has shown that these judgments are distorted by racist stereotypes about work effort, leading to disproportionate sanctioning against African Americans.

Worse, several financing features of the House bill perversely encourage the use of work requirements to drive people off Medicaid. In a war of attrition against Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, the federal government will start reducing support for new enrollees, thereby shifting costs to the states and encouraging cutbacks. Those already enrolled are grandfathered in — unless they lose coverage for longer than one month. Work sanctions are the perfect tool to generate those coverage breaks that strip away grandfathered status. This explains why the bill includes extra funding to help states create work-requirement bureaucracies. The federal money spent on creating red tape will be offset by savings from denying coverage. These breaks in coverage can also trigger the bill’s provisions allowing discrimination against people with preexisting conditions.

The bill’s “per capita cap” creates similar incentives. This provision limits federal reimbursement to a state if its average enrollee’s care gets more expensive due to rising prices or expanding needs. Above the caps, states bear all the costs. This creates financial pressure to cut off people with more serious (and expensive) problems, leaving healthier people enrolled and driving down average costs. Work sanctions will do this by inherently targeting sicker adults who find it harder to work and navigate the bureaucracy precisely because of their illnesses.

Finally, the House bill’s Medicaid block-grant option also invites using work requirements as a sanction machine. Participating states receive the same amount of federal money regardless of how many people they enroll. Cutting someone off Medicaid allows the state to keep the money and use it for something else.

Anyone serious about streamlining the health-care system should oppose grafting on this additional bureaucracy. But if the GOP’s real goal is to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, cut coverage for the most vulnerable and evade responsibility by blaming the victim, then work requirements are shamefully perfect.

 

That last sentence says it all. The Repugs' real goal is to fund tax credits for the wealthy, cut coverage for the vulnerable, and blame the victim.

[sawasdee]

I seriously cannot comprehend how they can sleep at night.

Those in Congress and in States' governments who vote to take from the poorest and most vulnerable, including children and the elderly, in order to give more to the already obscenely rich.

How can they justify gratuitous cruelty? How can they lie to themselves that what they are doing has any moral grounding?

And as for those who do this and call themself christian  - they make me vomit. Their actions contravene everything Jesus said.

History will not be kind to these political zealots  - but today's needy will have to suffer because of their amorality, greed, venality and subservience to their financial donors.

That some church groups continue to support this, in the hope of getting their desired anti abortion, anti LGBT agenda, is for me, one of the great crises that christianity in the US must face. To betray the living , and do so in the name of an unborn they will then also betray, is hypocrisy writ large. And I think it will drive some away from their judgmental, bigoted and intolerant churches, but also damage the way people see christianity itself.

ETA Yes, I'm angry. The more I read about proposed cuts the angrier I get.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Do Republicans who criticize Trump face peril? Jeff Flake is about to find out."

Spoiler

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Sen. Jeff Flake delivered a stark warning to business leaders eager to learn more about GOP plans to remake the health-care system: It’s really hard, and Republicans might not succeed.

“There are some still saying that we’ll vote before the August break. I have a hard time believing that,” he told about 150 members of the local Chamber of Commerce here this week.

Similarly, when a hospital employee asked about how to save the Medicaid program, Flake said, “We’re trying to find that balance, and we aren’t close yet, frankly.”

Flake (R-Ariz.) isn’t afraid to buck President Trump — or to defy the Republican orthodoxy in Washington that the agenda is proceeding apace. He did it last year, refusing to support Trump for president, and he’s doing it again now by publicly doubting that the GOP can revamp the nation’s health-care system.

Few congressional Republicans go as far as Flake, fearful that pro-Trump forces could derail their reelection campaigns next year. And Flake is already paying his own price, drawing a conservative primary opponent and probably earning him the distinction as the GOP incumbent most vulnerable to an intraparty challenge.

“If I wanted an easier path through the primary, then I would line up more with where the president is,” he said. “But I think if you’re an elected official, you’ve got to do what you know what’s right. It’ll be a tougher path than I could have had, would have had, but I think I’ll get there.”

Flake’s independent streak mirrors that of his fellow Arizona Republican in the Senate — John McCain. And it’s not necessarily out of step with his state: Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton 49 percent to 45 percent — the narrowest win for a Republican since 1996, the last year a Democrat, Bill Clinton, won Arizona.

Yet Flake faces challenges that McCain does not — notably name recognition. Polling is scant in Arizona, but a survey last fall gave Flake a 35 percent favorability rating, with roughly 30 percent of voters unwilling or unable to render an opinion of him.

In appearances across Phoenix this week, Flake focused on tempering expectations.

Like other Republicans, he wants to drive down health-care costs for consumers, many of whom in Arizona, he said, are spending more each month on health care than their mortgages. But more than a quarter of Arizonans get health-care coverage from Medicaid, leaving many here vulnerable to Trump’s proposed $1.4 trillion in cuts to future spending on the program — cuts that many Republicans support.

Known as a fiscal conservative eager to slash Medicaid and other entitlements, Flake said he supports the cuts, but only if governors can take more control of the program and if the program remains “sustainable” so that beneficiaries “don’t have the rug pulled out from under them.”

That’s a tricky balance to strike. Flake faces reelection next year in a state where Democrats are making gains, and Republicans may want him to take a harder line on repealing the Affordable Care Act. Defending just eight seats next year, the GOP isn’t expected to lose control of the Senate, but Flake and Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) are expected to earn outsize attention from Democrats, who know that these Western states are increasingly tilting purple or blue.

Meanwhile, Kelli Ward, Flake’s conservative opponent, called his refusal to support Trump last year “treacherous” and criticized him for standing against the president “before Donald Trump became the nominee, after he became the nominee and after he became the president.”

She also warned that nothing short of a full repeal of Obamacare would be acceptable to many GOP voters.

“I wish that over the last seven years that they had been planning for the full repeal that they campaigned on and fundraised upon,” said Ward, who mounted an unsuccessful challenge against McCain last year.

Flake has mostly ignored Ward’s barbs. He plans to hold fundraisers with Mitt Romney on Friday and has already raised money with George W. Bush — two GOP leaders who cast doubt on Trump. He touts his work with former president Barack Obama to open up diplomatic relations with Cuba. A co-sponsor of the 2013 bipartisan immigration bill, Flake tells audiences that he believes the issue might be debated again later this year. At odds with Trump’s nationalist tendencies, he said Tuesday that “we’re all better off because of” globalization and that NAFTA should be renegotiated, not scrapped. And he insists that the only way to fix health care is with bipartisan consensus. 

“Some are saying: ‘Stand on principle, don’t deal with the other side, just ram it through, they did it when they were in charge.’ But then you have others that say you need to work with the other side, that’s the only way it can be done,” Flake said. “There’s push and pull everywhere. You just do the best you can.”

Flake, 54, grew up in Snowflake, Ariz., a town named for his great-great-grandfather. Flake served as a Mormon missionary in South Africa in the 1980s before finding his way to Washington to work at a public relations firm. He moved back to Arizona as head of the Goldwater Institute and won a House seat in 2000. His perpetual tan and Jimmy Stewart demeanor earned him national attention when he escaped alone to a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean during a 2009 congressional recess.

In 2012, Flake won his Senate seat and now serves in the long shadow of the state’s senior senator, McCain. During a stop Tuesday at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Tonopah, Ariz., Flake told workers that on a recent flight home to Phoenix on a plane that was also carrying McCain, he sat next to a woman who had no idea he also serves in Congress.

“The guy sitting in front of me finally leaned back and said, ‘Hey lady, he’s the OTHER senator from Arizona!’ ” Flake said.

Updating the workers on events in Washington, Flake lamented that after years of congressional gridlock, “We haven’t regulated the regulators,” allowing federal agencies to impose what he considers burdensome policies on the energy sector and other industries. He explained that “the Senate is kind of in the personnel business,” stuck confirming hundreds of Trump administration appointees. He said that Trump “has assembled a pretty good Cabinet. He’s surrounded himself with a good group of people.” 

But he was more critical of Trump during a private tour of the plant. Riding in a van to inspect a nuclear waste site and reactor, Flake heard pleas to ensure that Kristine L. Svinicki, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, gets reappointed before her term expires at the end of June. If her term ends, the agency that regulates nuclear power would be paralyzed without a quorum. 

Flake told Donald Brandt, the plant’s chief executive, and Robbie Aiken, its Washington-based government affairs vice president, that he believes that Democratic objections to Trump nominees will start to ease as the Senate moves to confirming deputy secretaries and less controversial appointees. But he said that Trump owes Congress hundreds of nominees for political jobs.

“We can’t hold oversight hearings because we can’t call anybody up to testify,” he said.

Not a big fan of Flake, but I do like seeing Reps speaking out against Agent Orange.

[GreyhoundFan]

I usually listen to Scott Simon on Saturdays, but missed this past weekend. I'm glad I didn't hear this interview, I would have started screaming: "Congressman refuses to say if Americans are entitled to eat"

Spoiler

I took a few days off over the Memorial Day weekend for my wedding and tried not to worry about the grim headlines, most of them generated by one man:

●President Trump, shoving a European prime minister.

●Trump, picking fights with Germany and France and destabilizing the seven-decade-old NATO alliance.

●Trump, responding to the pope’s plea, reportedly is ready to pull the United States out of the world climate-change pact.

●Trump, tweeting late-night gibberish — “covfefe” — as investigators probing the Russia scandal queried more members of his inner circle.

Perhaps the most upsetting headline I saw, though, was generated not by Trump but by a 10-year veteran of the House Republican majority. In an astonishing interview Saturday on NPR, this lawmaker repeatedly demurred when asked whether Americans are entitled to the most basic human need.

NPR’s Scott Simon, a genial interviewer, asked Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.), a member of the Ways and Means Committee and an influential figure on agriculture policy, about Trump’s proposal to make vast cuts to food stamps. Smith posited that the program could be cut in ways that “do not harm the most vulnerable.”

“Well, let me ask you this bluntly: Is every American entitled to eat?” Simon queried.

Smith was stumped. “Well, they — nutrition, obviously, we know is very important. And I would hope that we can look to — ”

Simon interrupted: “Well, not just important, it’s essential for life. Is every American entitled to eat?”

Smith agreed that nutrition “is essential” but continued to ignore the question about whether Americans are entitled to eat.

Simon tried a third time: “So is every American entitled to eat, and is food stamps something that ought to be that ultimate guarantor?”

Once again, the lawmaker demurred: “I think that we know that, given the necessity of nutrition, there could be a number of ways that we could address that.”

There was more, but it all came down to this: In the United States, in 2017, a powerful member of Congress refuses to grant that Americans should be able to count on eating food.

That exchange should put in perspective the real and present danger Trump poses. His undermining of NATO, European alliances and climate-change cooperation poses grave dangers, but those are somewhat abstract. But taking away Americans’ food is very tangible, and a real possibility.

Trump’s budget, released last week, would cut programs for low- and moderate-income Americans by $2.5 trillion over 10 years, accounting for 59 percent of the budget’s overall reductions, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The group, a liberal outfit with a reputation for solid math, puts the 10-year cuts to food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) at $193.2 billion, while millionaires would be poised to receive tax cuts of more than $2 trillion.

Trump’s budget is dead on arrival in Congress, but the threat to food stamps is very much alive. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has routinely proposed cuts to SNAP in his budgets. Three years ago, for example, he suggested a $137 billion cut to the program over 10 years by turning it into a block grant for states.

Until the past few years, food stamps had the support of Republicans and Democrats alike. They’ve been around since the Great Depression, but the modern program was a creation of then-Sen. Bob Dole (Republican from Kansas) and late Democratic Sen. George McGovern (S.D.), who, appalled by hunger and malnutrition in America, formed the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs and worked jointly to expand food stamps in 1977.

Food stamps, which give recipients about $1.40 per meal, made serious malnutrition rare in America, and studies by CBPP and others have found food stamps lift more than 8 million people out of poverty, nearly half of them children. The program roughly doubled after the economic collapse of 2008 — serving 43.6 million and costing $74 billion in 2015 — but rather than recognize that as a sign of the persistent economic struggles that propelled Trump to the presidency, House Republicans used Trump’s election as cause to revive talk of slashing food stamps.

Embracing that effort, apparently, will be congressman Smith, who, when I asked his office to elaborate on his position, released a statement saying SNAP is a “necessary safety net” but continued his steadfast refusal to say Americans are entitled to eat.

Perhaps Smith, who says “there could be a number of ways” to meet Americans’ nutritional needs, has a brilliant scheme to distribute vitamin supplements to all Americans in lieu of food, to convert us to photosynthesis, or to have us survive on Soylent Green plankton like in the 1970s sci-fi film.

Otherwise, he and his Republican colleagues and the Trump administration ought to be honest about what they propose: forcing millions of Americans to go hungry.

Adrian Smith is the epitome of a Repug.

[AmericanRose]

I think Republicans are allergic to the word "entitled".

[bashfulpixie]

7 hours ago, AmericanRose said:

I think Republicans are allergic to the word "entitled".

Pretty much. Which is funny, because those jackasses are the most entitled among us

[nvmbr02]

I debated the best place to post this twitter thread but if you read down the comments it lists the 22 senators that urged 45 to leave the Paris agreement. It also includes the letter the sent him

I'm in the middle of something else right now, but if I find the list in a better format (or have time to type it out myself later) I'll post that.

 

Here is a better link that lists the names

https://t.co/MysTc4k8ge

[GreyhoundFan]

@nvmbr02 -- no surprises on that gang of 20. Thanks for posting the info.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Inside Al Franken’s blood feud with Ted Cruz, ‘the guy who microwaves fish’ in the office"

Spoiler

There are few people in the halls of Congress who would dispute that the most hated man among them is Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).

Since he took office in 2013, Cruz seems to have made only enemies. Although the Capitol, and the Senate in particular, is a place where civility and decorum are supposed to be the norm, many of Cruz’s detractors have not bothered to hold back.

He has been publicly called a “wacko bird” and a “jackass” by senior lawmakers. His fellow Texas senator, Republican John Cornyn, said it was a mistake for him to show up at the Republican National Convention last year. “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) once opined.

Harsh words, to be sure.

But no lawmaker, Democrat or Republican, has been as outspoken about his contempt for Cruz as Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who in the past few weeks has ripped into the junior senator from Texas in a string of media interviews and public appearances.

Franken has been promoting his new, sarcastically titled memoir, “Al Franken, Giant of the Senate,” which contains an entire chapter detailing his grievances against Cruz. He has used the free publicity from the book, released Tuesday, to trash his Republican nemesis.

“I probably like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz,” Franken quipped in interviews on CNN Wednesday, using a line that appears in his book.

“He’s kind of a toxic guy in an office, the guy who microwaves fish,” he told Anderson Cooper.

“Ted doesn’t get anything done,” Franken said in an earlier appearance on CNN’s “New Day.” “His big accomplishment was shutting down the government.”

He made similar digs in an interview with USA Today and during a book talk at an event hosted by New York Magazine last month.

The jabs continued in a recent town hall discussion with The Hill, where Franken told a story about how some lawmakers tried to avoid drawing Cruz in the Senate’s “secret Santa” gift exchange.

“I’ve had people pick out Cruz’s name and then drop it on the floor,” he said. “I’ve actually had that happen.”

Cruz has taken the bait.

Last week, he told Politico that Franken had “decided that being obnoxious and insulting me is good for causing liberals to buy his books.”

On Wednesday, he used President Trump’s extraordinary Twitter typo to strike back again. When Trump asked his followers to “figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe,'” Cruz responded: “Hard to say, but I hear Al Franken’s new book is full of it.”

...

On the surface, it all has the feel of a schoolyard beef, and there’s no denying it makes for good publicity for both men. Cruz, in his four years in the Senate, has reveled in his fellow lawmakers’ disdain, as The Washington Post has reported. And Franken, known as much for his career in comedy as his work in the Senate, seems giddy at the opportunity to show off his comedic skills at Cruz’s expense. (He drew laughs at a variety show in Minnesota last year when he called Cruz “the love child of Joe McCarthy and Dracula.”)

But beneath the made-for-meme insults and witty burns, Franken holds some serious objections to Cruz’s conduct in the Senate. In short, it’s not just Cruz’s politics that Franken finds disagreeable. More than anything, Franken hates Cruz because, he says, he’s a nightmare of a colleague.

“Ted Cruz isn’t just wrong about almost everything. He’s impossible to work with. And he doesn’t care that he’s impossible to work with,” Franken writes in his new book.

When Cruz and Trump were vying for the GOP nomination last year, Franken writes, establishment Republicans were so put off by his behavior over the years that they refused to rally behind their counterpart in the Senate.

“Even if you like what he stands for, the most he’ll ever be able to accomplish is being an obnoxious wrench in the gears of government,” Franken writes, citing the Cruz-led government shutdown in 2013. “Real senatoring requires that you build productive relationships with your colleagues. And Ted just isn’t that kind of guy.”

The chapter on Cruz in Franken’s book is called “Sophistry.” For the uninitiated, that means deceitful or fallacious argument. Franken says the title came from an interaction with Cruz after the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, in which a gunman killed 20 children and 6 adults.

As the story goes, Franken was deciding whether to co-sponsor a bill reviving a ban on assault weapons when Cruz approached him on the Senate floor and told him that anyone who favored the ban was “engaged in sophistry.” When Franken challenged him about the statement some days later, Cruz pretended the exchange never happened.

“A flat denial,” Franken writes. “That’s when I realized that Ted Cruz was really something special.”

The rest of the chapter recounts a number of episodes, most of which took place on the Senate floor or in hearing rooms, highlighting what Franken says is Cruz’s duplicity, dishonesty and self-righteousness.

“I could fill several chapters with Ted Cruz awfulness,” Franken writes.

It’s not all negative, though. Cruz is extremely smart, Franken allows, citing his stint as a clerk for the late William Rehnquist, former chief justice of the United States, and his skills as a lawyer and polemicist. He also says Cruz has a sense of humor. In one anecdote, he recalls how Cruz came into the Capitol after a week-long recess and raved about how funny he found one of Franken’s famous Stuart Smalley skits on “Saturday Night Live.”

But for Franken, none of that saves Cruz from denunciation and ridicule. Cruz, he writes, has broken “unwritten rules” of civility in the Senate, namely the one that says don’t “repeat in public a conversation you’ve had with a colleague in private if that conversation makes your colleague look bad in any way.” The prime example, he said, was a now-notorious episode in 2015 when Cruz accused Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) on the Senate floor of lying to Congress and the press.

“It was the sort of thing that just isn’t done, a breach of decorum so shocking that even I haven’t committed it,” Franken writes.

Franken’s criticisms seem to echo much of what other lawmakers and Republican officials have said about Cruz in the past, though typically with much more restraint (and sometimes anonymity).

“Cruz is a grandstander, they say, who trashes fellow Republicans for his own gain,” reported The Post in 2015, describing the views of some of Cruz’s colleagues.

A story in the Atlantic last year drew similar conclusions, saying Cruz’s “lack of regard for his colleagues, and for the niceties that have traditionally governed the upper chamber,” were a recurring problem for him.

Cruz has signaled time and again that he’s unfazed. Indeed, he uses it to showcase his anti-Washington credentials. “I’m not serving in office because I desperately needed 99 new friends in the U.S. Senate,” he once said.

With all that in mind, perhaps Franken is using his celebrated wit to channel not just his own frustrations about Cruz but those that others have more quietly harbored all along.

“To get things done in the Senate, you’ve got to be able to get along with people. It’s like you’re living in a town of 100 people,” Franken told CNN on Wednesday. “You’ve got to be a good colleague.”

You know, it's hard to believe Ted Cruz has only been in the senate for four years. It seems like he's been around forever.

[formergothardite]

It seems like no one, even republicans, really like Ted Cruz. How did he get elected? 

[candygirl200413]

A while ago, there was a video of a young Ted Cruz and this was before I really knew who he was and after watching I knew he was the worst. Yes, he was 18, but he never matured and he still is that same jackass.

Spoiler

 

 

 

[VixenToast]

3 hours ago, formergothardite said:

It seems like no one, even republicans, really like Ted Cruz. How did he get elected? 

Jesus or some other conservative bullshit.

Is he up for reelection in 2018? 

[onekidanddone]

I always feel as if I need to shower after listening to or watching these Republicans.  I need to power scrub off the slime

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, VixenToast said:

Jesus or some other conservative bullshit.

Is he up for reelection in 2018? 

If he's been in the senate for four years, he would be up for reelection in 2018.

 

 

"Trump needs quick wins, but Congress not poised to deliver"

Spoiler

In a conference room near his office last Monday, House Speaker Paul Ryan gave conservative activists some unwelcome news: He wanted the Senate, House and White House on the same page before a tax reform bill was introduced, according to people present — and that would likely be after Labor Day.

Senate Republicans are also nowhere near a solution on health care legislation, according to senators and several people familiar with their talks. "I don't see a comprehensive health care plan this year," said Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, said Thursday in a local TV interview.

As for the promised $1 trillion infrastructure plan, the president's aides have begun talking about shaping a proposal, but that is "a ways off," one senior White House official said.

In other words, as the special prosecutor probe into potential Russian collusion heats up, White House officials fear it could be a long, hot summer — with little tangible to tout. And they worry how an antsy president, who wants things done immediately and has a rudimentary understanding of the legislative process, will handle it — particularly if the investigation dominates news media coverage.

“We’re going to do all these things by Sept. 30? Give me a break. We’re going to cut taxes, pass healthcare, set aside sequestration?” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican.

Trump has agreed in meetings with advisers to spend the summer focusing on the legislative agenda — traveling to push a health care agenda in June, and for tax reform in July and August, according to a senior White House official. This person said the campaign is slated for the "upper Midwest states."

In the meantime, Trump has grown impatient in recent days about the slow pace of accomplishments. And some Republicans believe the White House hasn’t gotten enough credit for what they have achieved so far. The senior White House official said the administration should have communicated better about rolling back regulations — and had spent much time on the Neil Gorsuch confirmation, a significant move for conservatives.

Senior Trump White House officials said Trump is heavily engaged on tax reform -- meeting several times a week with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, the president's chief economic adviser. Publicly, the administration is trying to push a feeling of momentum, with Trump claiming on Thursday that a tax bill is “moving along” and Cohn promising on Friday a tax plan by the end of summer.

And some lawmakers say the White House appears to have learned lessons from the health care push.

"This has been a more constructive process than health care," said Rep. Mark Sanford, a South Carolina Republican. "They've had any number of different listening sessions. They seem to be getting more orderly and finding their sea legs."

But the White House and lawmakers know that tax reform is likely to be even more complicated than health care, and they know Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will likely not take pressure well like Ryan did on rushing a vote, according to several administration officials. Most importantly, they are concerned about keeping focus on the legislative agenda for a week without distractions from the special prosecutor's Russia probe, the president's attention span, a splintered Republican Party and the president's Twitter account.

"The U.S. Senate should switch to 51 votes, immediately, and get Healthcare and TAX CUTS approved, fast and easy. Dems would do it, no doubt!" Trump tweeted on Tuesday. The post drew laughs from aides on the Hill and some lawmakers. "No one had any clue what that tweet meant," one senior GOP aide said.

Trump has also indicated, like he did earlier this week, that the tax bill was already in Congress -- puzzling legislators. "How is he saying the bill is making progress?" one Capitol Hill aide asked. "There is no bill!"

An effort from some in the White House — particularly chief strategist Steve Bannon -- to link health care and some tax cuts to secure Senate votes is "going nowhere," in the words of one White House official.

"That's the question," another White House official said, when asked if Trump can focus to push an agenda. And, according to several people in the administration, there is widespread disagreement on what a final tax plan will look like. Administration officials continue to make conflicting public statements — and the administration could be hobbled by a difficult spending and shutdown fight that will likely come to a head on Capitol Hill late this summer or in early fall.

Conservatives meanwhile are quickly lowering their expectations on the robust accomplishments they had predicted before Trump took office — with a Republican House and Senate in his corner. And they see time ticking off the clock before the midterm elections, particularly with the president's low approval ratings.

"People are anxious and worried things won't get done," said Matt Schlapp, a conservative activist. "The agenda needs to get done this year. I don't see how it gets any easier. It's kind of put-up-or-shut-up time."

Ryan made clear to the conservatives at last Monday’s meeting that substantive legislation needed to move this year, according to one person present, or it would be difficult to make it happen.

"It's the most disappointing nothingness that anyone could have imagined," said one conservative activist close to the administration. "Everyone expected a flurry of activity, and there's nothing anyone can point to."

Several conservative activists said that Republicans on Capitol Hill initially believed that the Russia investigation was overblown — and that the news media was over-hyping the revelations. But now, with several investigations and new revelations almost every day, Republicans have begun to worry more, these activists said.

"When you talk to a member or their staff these days, you hear about Russia," the activist said. "The Russia stuff is really starting to distract people. I didn't think that two or three months ago. Before, I think everyone thought this was the less version of Benghazi. They don't feel that way anymore."

David McIntosh, the president of Club for Growth, said most everyone could stand fewer distractions in Washington. But he said members should ignore Trump's controversies and focus on writing laws — and that much of the blame comes from "a lack of discipline on Capitol Hill and an ineffective Congress the last few years.”

"They just need to buckle down and do their job," McIntosh said. "If they don't pass Obamacare repeal and if they don't pass tax cuts, Republicans could lose the majority in 2018."

I love the underlined passage. Yeah, I don't think a week will go by without one or many of those distractions happening.

[onekidanddone]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

If he's been in the senate for four years, he would be up for reelection in 2018.

<snip>

"Trump needs quick wins, but Congress not poised to deliver"

I love the underlined passage. Yeah, I don't think a week will go by without one or many of those distractions happening.

They can say tax and health care won't make it through the Senate before labor day, but isn't that what was said about the House health care when it crashed in March? Maybe I just have no hope or faith anymore maybe I'm still living up to my old nick name "worst case scenario girl". I'm just sad, angry and well you know...

[fraurosena]

12 hours ago, formergothardite said:

It seems like no one, even republicans, really like Ted Cruz. How did he get elected? 

One word:

Gerrymandering.

[Cartmann99]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

One word:

Gerrymandering.

US Senators are elected by the voters of an entire state, so gerrymandering isn't an issue in Ted Cruz's case.   

A good chunk of Ted Cruz's supporters like him because he infuriates the people they hate. His fans are a lot like Sarah Palin's in that regard, and she was one of the nutters who endorsed him when he ran in 2012.

Ted Cruz already has a Democratic challenger for 2018. Please meet Representative Beto O’Rourke of El Paso:

Spoiler

Turning Texas blue is a persistent Democratic fantasy. And giving Ted Cruz a sound thrashing amounts to a bipartisan passion, although Republicans might prefer that he keep his Senate seat. In 2018, these hopes will collide, supplying an irresistible political drama. Cruz, for several reasons, has a dangerously low approval rating in Texas—38 percent—and the Democrats have a young, charismatic challenger named Beto O’Rourke, who’s running a campaign similar to Jon Ossoff’s in Georgia, positioning himself as a politician for all Texans. He’s looking to pick up the voters that Cruz has alienated with his relentless rightward tacking, his absence from the state as he focused on his presidential campaign, his acrobatic flip-flops on Donald Trump, and his notorious unlikeability.

“I am not smart enough, and I haven't hired, you know, the political consultants or pollsters who are smart enough—or think they are smart enough—to have some grand strategy on how to exploit this issue or that person or micro-target this population or the other,” O’Rourke said in an interview with the Hive. “I’m just going everywhere, listening and talking with everyone . . . I want to know what is on their minds, what they care about and what they expect from their next senator. Then I want to make sure I can deliver on that.”

The 44-year-old El Paso congressman is a former punk rocker who played in a band called Foss. He has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and started his own technology company. He speaks fluent Spanish and took his wife, Amy, across the U.S.-Mexico border into Juarez for their first date. And as Austin-based political strategist Brendan Steinhauser put it, it doesn’t hurt that O'Rourke “looks like a damn Kennedy.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/beto-orourke-ted-cruz-texas-senate-2018

[nvmbr02]

13 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

Ted Cruz already has a Democratic challenger for 2018. Please meet Representative Beto O’Rourke of El Paso

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/beto-orourke-ted-cruz-texas-senate-2018

I recently started following him on twitter.

I've also been following Paul Ryan's challenger, David Yankovich

https://davidyankovich.com/

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, Cartmann99 said:

US Senators are elected by the voters of an entire state, so gerrymandering isn't an issue in Ted Cruz's case.   

A good chunk of Ted Cruz's supporters like him because he infuriates the people they hate. His fans are a lot like Sarah Palin's in that regard, and she was one of the nutters who endorsed him when he ran in 2012.

Ted Cruz already has a Democratic challenger for 2018. Please meet Representative Beto O’Rourke of El Paso:

  Reveal hidden contents

Turning Texas blue is a persistent Democratic fantasy. And giving Ted Cruz a sound thrashing amounts to a bipartisan passion, although Republicans might prefer that he keep his Senate seat. In 2018, these hopes will collide, supplying an irresistible political drama. Cruz, for several reasons, has a dangerously low approval rating in Texas—38 percent—and the Democrats have a young, charismatic challenger named Beto O’Rourke, who’s running a campaign similar to Jon Ossoff’s in Georgia, positioning himself as a politician for all Texans. He’s looking to pick up the voters that Cruz has alienated with his relentless rightward tacking, his absence from the state as he focused on his presidential campaign, his acrobatic flip-flops on Donald Trump, and his notorious unlikeability.

“I am not smart enough, and I haven't hired, you know, the political consultants or pollsters who are smart enough—or think they are smart enough—to have some grand strategy on how to exploit this issue or that person or micro-target this population or the other,” O’Rourke said in an interview with the Hive. “I’m just going everywhere, listening and talking with everyone . . . I want to know what is on their minds, what they care about and what they expect from their next senator. Then I want to make sure I can deliver on that.”

The 44-year-old El Paso congressman is a former punk rocker who played in a band called Foss. He has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and started his own technology company. He speaks fluent Spanish and took his wife, Amy, across the U.S.-Mexico border into Juarez for their first date. And as Austin-based political strategist Brendan Steinhauser put it, it doesn’t hurt that O'Rourke “looks like a damn Kennedy.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/beto-orourke-ted-cruz-texas-senate-2018

Ah, thanks for the info @Cartmann99. I've learnt so much about the American political/governmental system these past few months on FJ.  This is one more thing i can add to that list. 

I hope these challengers stand a chance! I would just love to see the tangerine toddler's tantrum tweets if the up till now unthinkable happens and Texas turns blue... (rigged, the elections were so rigged... busloads of Mexicans...)

[formergothardite]

It would just bless my heart if Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan lost to a democrat. Hell if they lost to a republican I would be happy. Just them losing would make my day.