United States Congress of Fail - Part 4

[candygirl200413]

But Gowdy has SO much to show, all the wasted tax payer $ that he spent on a nothingburger regarding her emails (and isn't he trying to do another trial again?!). 

[Miranda]

Paul Ryan is not seeking reelection and will leave Congress in January. 

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/house-speaker-paul-ryan-not-run-election-sources-133706003--abc-news-topstories.html

[AmazonGrace]

 If only someone had told him at the time. 

[Cartmann99]

I know he's no longer in Congress, but....

Did not expect that!

[onekidanddone]

Quote from the WoPo

"Ryan said at a news conference that he sees a “very bright future” for his party and said his decision was driven by a desire to spend more time with his family".

That man's nose just grew exponentially 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[formergothardite]

Damn, the rats really are trying to jump off the sinking ship. 

[AmazonGrace]

Ryan got paid.

[onekidanddone]

2 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Ryan got paid.

Sources?

[fraurosena]

I think @AmazonGrace means the payment of 500.000 dollars (I think) the Koch brothers gave Ryan right after the Tax Bill was passed. We discussed it at the time in these threads if I remember correctly.

[onekidanddone]

22 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

I think @AmazonGrace means the payment of 500.000 dollars (I think) the Koch brothers gave Ryan right after the Tax Bill was passed. We discussed it at the time in these threads if I remember correctly.

Ah yes, makes sense.  But for somebody like Ryan 1/2 mill is pocket change. Ryan is a steaming pile of festering poop

[onekidanddone]

Oh shut the fuck up Bobby. You should have thought of that before you voted to bankrupt the country and line your own bank account. Coward

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

How true: "A scam of a party says goodbye to its top fraud"

Spoiler

The dream is over.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) announced this morning that he won’t be running for reelection, after nearly 20 years as a member of Congress. There are a lot of ways to look at this decision: what it says about Ryan personally, and about this particular moment in history.

But at a deeper level, it shows just how hollow the conservative project in America has become.

The proximate cause of Ryan stepping down is that his party looks increasingly likely to suffer an electoral disaster in November’s midterm elections. He is facing an unusually strong challenge from Randy Bryce, the likely Democratic nominee in his Wisconsin district, so he probably calculated that there were two realistic outcomes for him. The worse one would be that he is defeated while his party loses the majority, as happened to then-speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) in 1994. The better one would be that he holds on to his seat while Republicans lose the majority, which might not be better at all. Being speaker may have meant plenty of headaches for Ryan, but being House minority leader is a total drag; you still have to manage your unruly caucus, but you have no real power and can’t make any progress on your agenda.

Nevertheless, Ryan might have decided to stick around. He’s only 48 years old, and even if Republicans lose Congress this year, they’ll take it back eventually. And then he could get back to pursuing all those important conservative goals, right?

Ah, but there’s the problem, and the reason Ryan’s decision to bail out for what I assume will be an obscenely remunerated job with an investment firm is so revealing. After 15 months with total control of the government, Ryan and his colleagues achieved almost nothing, and he has now decided that there is nothing more to do.

During his news conference this morning, Ryan explained his departure this way: “I have accomplished much of what I came here to do, and my kids aren’t getting any younger.” So what did he accomplish?

For years, Ryan has presented himself as someone deeply concerned with fiscal discipline, committed to getting America’s books in order. As anyone with any sense realized, this was a scam: Like all Republicans, he used the deficit as a bludgeon against Democratic presidents, then forgot all about it while a Republican was in office.

At the same time, Ryan — a lifelong admirer of Ayn Rand, the philosopher of selfishness — dreamed of destroying the safety net, eviscerating Medicaid, privatizing Medicare, slashing food stamps, and generally making life in America more cruel and unpleasant for all those who aren’t wealthy.

But as Paul Krugman observed, Ryan failed at both his pretend goal and his real goal. He will leave office after setting the deficit on a path to exceed $1 trillion in 2020, and yet, he failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and didn’t even bother to wage an assault on Medicare, almost certainly because he knew how disastrous it would be for his party.

So what does he mean when he says “I have accomplished much of what I came here to do”? He can only mean the tax cut Republicans passed last year. In other words, engineering a giant giveaway to corporations and the wealthy was enough for Ryan to say “My work here is done.”

And so it is for the GOP as a whole. Not that they don’t have some other things they’re hoping for, and that the Trump administration is working to carry out. For instance, they’re gutting the Environmental Protection Agency, completely stopping enforcement of rules meant to protect consumers from rapacious financial corporations, attacking reproductive rights and bringing back the war on drugs. But when it comes to legislation, the Republicans’ time in power has pretty much consisted of trying and failing to repeal the ACA, cutting taxes, and calling it a day. They waited ten years for this opportunity, since the Democrats took control of Congress in the 2006 elections, and that’s all they could come up with. They’ve made quite clear there will be no more major legislation between now and November’s midterms. And if they lose the House (and perhaps the Senate), there will be no more at all.

Conservatives will have a few things to show for this period of absolute control of the federal government, especially a large group of federal judges President Trump has appointed. But given how high their hopes were for a legislative revolution, it’s a pathetic record. Don’t forget that all during 2016, Republicans — none more so than Ryan — said that despite the fact that their voters nominated a vulgar, infantile, corrupt buffoon to lead their party, they simply had to stand by him because they wanted the chance to pass all that conservative legislation and have it signed by a Republican president.

But now that corporations got their tax cut, it was all worth it, right?

Paul Ryan was always a fraud. He pretended to be a wonk’s wonk, but his budget and policy plans were full of sleight-of-hand and magic asterisks that fell apart on the most superficial examination. He pretended to be terribly worried about the deficit, but he happily jacked it up when he got the chance. He pretended to care deeply about the poor, but would have made their lives impossibly more miserable had doing so been politically tenable.

And he pretended to be scandalized by Trump’s repugnant words and actions but, after a few regretful words and a furrowing of his brow, would always go right back to supporting the president. So while he will surely be remembered as one of the least effective speakers we’ve ever had, you can’t say Ryan didn’t faithfully represent his party.

 

[fraurosena]

Do tell us what you really think, Congressman. Don't hold back now!

Unnamed Republican congressman goes off in profane rant: 'We might as well impeach the *******'

Quote

Conservative blogger Erik Erickson is reporting that during his trip to Washington, D.C., he met up with an as-of-yet-unnamed Republican congressman, one who has publicly been very supportive of Donald Trump, and during their clandestine walk through the aisles of a grocery store outside of D.C. (they didn’t want to be seen), this Republican congressman absolutely went off on Trump and his disastrous leadership. From Erickson's report:

"I read you writing about this, about wanting to say nice things when you can and criticize when you need to. He may be an idiot, but he's still the President and leader of my party and he is capable of doing some things right," he says before conceding it's usually other people doing the right things in the President's name. "But dammit he's taking us all down with him. We are well and truly f**ked in November. Kevin [McCarthy] is already circling like a green fly circling sh*t trying to take Paul's [Ryan] job because nobody thinks he's sticking around for Nancy [Pelosi]. She's going to f**k up the cafeteria again too. [Lord's name in vain], at least I'll probably lose too and won't have to put up with that sh*t." He won't lose. His district is very Republican.

Hours after publishing this, news began to circulate that Paul Ryan is retiring from Congress. But, let’s get back to the rant, because this is incredible.

"It's like Forrest Gump won the presidency, but an evil, really f*cking stupid Forrest Gump. He can't help himself. He's just a f**king idiot who thinks he's winning when people are b*tching about him. He really does see the world as ratings and attention. I hate Forrest Gump. I listen to your podcast and heard you hate it too. What an overrated piece of sh*t movie. Can you believe it beat the Shawshank Redemption?"

Oh, my. Please continue, congressman. 

"I say a lot of shit on TV defending him, even over this. But honestly, I wish the motherf*cker would just go away. We're going to lose the House, lose the Senate, and lose a bunch of states because of him. All his supporters will blame us for what we have or have not done, but he hasn't led. He wakes up in the morning, sh*ts all over Twitter, sh*ts all over us, sh*ts all over his staff, then hits golf balls. F*ck him. Of course, I can't say that in public or I'd get run out of town."

The congressman went on to explain that if key members of the House Judiciary Committee are facing primary battles for their seats, they’ll stick with Trump because they are so fearful of the deplorable base. If they get through the primaries, there is a chance they could get on board with impeachment because Trump is dragging the entire party down. 

"Judiciary is stacked with a bunch of people who can win re-election so long as they don't piss off Trump voters in the primary. But if we get to summer and most of the primaries are over, they just might pull the trigger if the President fires Mueller. The sh*t will hit the fan if that happens and I'd vote to impeach him myself. Most of us would, I think. Hell, all the Democrats would and you only need a majority in the House. If we're going to lose because of him, we might as well impeach the motherf**ker. Take him out with us and let Mike [Pence] take over. At least then we could sleep well at night," he said before going off on a tangent about how the situations with Russia and China scare him. Then, "You know having Mike as President would really piss off all the right people, too. They think they hate Trump. Mike is competent," at which point he sighs and laments that there were, in his mind, more than a dozen competent choices in 2016.

The unnamed Congressman is right to be scared. Just this morning, Donald Trump has taken to Twitter to threaten Russia. 

Congressman, find your courage. Do the right thing. Donald Trump is a danger to our national security and our democracy as a whole. Come out of the shadows and stand up. 

 

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Do tell us what you really think, Congressman. Don't hold back now!

Unnamed Republican congressman goes off in profane rant: 'We might as well impeach the *******'

 

I'm going to drive myself batty trying to figure out who the unnamed Republican Congressman is.

[Howl]

[Howl]

Rick Wilson has unleashed another post, this time about Ryan's upcoming "retirement". 

Donald Trump Takes Out Paul Ryan, and ‘It’s Going to Be a Civil War’

Some Wilsonian goodness: 

Quote

Ryan pulled the ripcord today after a 19-year career in Congress, declaring he would leave Washington at the end of his current term to spend more time with his existential angst over what he let Donald Trump do to our country.

and this: 

Quote

The idea, popular among the House leadership, that a diet of ass-kissing and deference would make Trump into a normal President who didn't need the political equivalent of Depends was always a strategic mistake.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"GOP proposes stricter work requirements for food stamp recipients, a step toward a major overhaul of the social safety net"

Spoiler

House Republicans took their first step Thursday toward overhauling the federal safety net, pushing for new work requirements in the food-stamp program used by 42 million Americans.

The plan, introduced as part of the 2018 Farm Bill over objections of Democrats, would dramatically expand mandatory state workfare programs in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps.

Under the proposal, most adults between 18 and 59 will be required to work part-time or enroll in 20 hours a week of workforce training to receive assistance. The plan budgets $1 billion per year to fund the training program expansion.

Preliminary Congressional Budget Office estimates suggest the requirements would cut SNAP participation by as many as 1 million people over the next 10 years.

The bill, slated for markup in the House Agriculture Committee on April 18, launches the first major skirmish in Republicans’ push to overhaul welfare and nudge recipients closer to self-sufficiency through work.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and President Donald Trump have vowed to tighten work requirements in a range of welfare programs, with the president directing federal agencies on Tuesday to conduct a broad review of welfare work rules.

The campaign has outraged Democrats who argue such changes hurt the poor. They also said the proposals in the Farm Bill lack the votes to advance to the Senate.

In a Thursday news conference, House Agriculture Committee Chairman K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.) defended the bill as a practical plan to protect the needy while also helping them become self-sufficient. “We believe breaking the poverty cycle is the only way forward,” he said.

The Republicans’ proposed plan functions in two parts: First, it introduces a new, unified work requirement for all SNAP participants. Second, it mandates and massively expands the state training programs available to unemployed participants who cannot find jobs.

Under current law, adults ages 18 to 59 who are not pregnant, disabled or otherwise exempt are required to work at least a part-time job or agree to take a job if it is offered to them. An additional set of work requirements applies to unemployed childless adults, who lose benefits if they are unable to find a job in three months. The Agriculture Department estimates that in 2017 there were 2.9 million unemployed, childless SNAP recipients.

But Republicans have long complained that the current rules are unenforceable, particularly for adults with children. The Farm Bill proposal would establish a single work standard for adults ages 18 to 59, requiring them to hold at least a part-time job within a month of receiving benefits. As many as 7 million adults will be subject to the new rules, according to Republican staff.

In addition, the proposal would fund a massive expansion of state education and training or “workfare” programs and mandate, for the first time, that unemployed, working-age SNAP recipients enroll. States will be required to offer a slot to every adult who is eligible, up from the 700,000 slots currently in use. Exceptions are made for pregnant women, people with disabilities and parents with children younger than 6.

The plan budgets $1 billion per year to fund the expansion, after a two-year phase-in period. States will have wide flexibility in administering the program, Republicans said, offering everything from subsidized employment to far cheaper supervised job search and literacy classes.

“Insufficient, vague and unenforceable work requirements … dissuade employment and restrict opportunities for recipients,” Republican staffers wrote in a briefing document for reporters. “Instead, the farm bill proposes realistic, supportive and simplified work requirements paired with funding for states to provide guaranteed, improved and constructive options to move participants toward improved wages, higher-quality employment and independence.”

The proposal would also change the way states and counties qualify for work-requirement waivers at times of high unemployment, effectively shrinking the geographic areas allowed to suspend those rules.

And it would impose stricter eligibility guidelines for low-income families who qualify for SNAP through other welfare programs, a practice known as Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility. In single-parent families, it would  link parents’ benefit amounts to payment of child support and cooperation with child support agencies.

The bill did not include the controversial proposal from President Trump's 2018 budget, which would have cut SNAP benefits to many households and replaced them with a box of non-perishable goods. It also did not mention drug-testing SNAP recipients,  though Rep. Conaway said that would likely be debated during next week's markup.

According to preliminary estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the changes to the work requirements alone would cut SNAP rolls by as many as 1 million people over the next 10 years. But it is unclear how many participants will leave because their incomes have risen to a point where they no longer need help, and how many will leave because they cannot complete the work requirements.

Supporters of the proposal said it could reduce poverty and hunger among low-income families. Because SNAP benefits are not sufficient to cover the full cost of a households' meals -- the average benefit is $125.80 per month -- it is particularly important that households have earned incomes, said Robert Doar, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who previously administered the food-stamp programs of both New York City and the state of New York.

“I think when it's explained to the vast majority of the American people, that this is a proposal intended to help move people into jobs where they'll have higher incomes and are less likely to be poor, most people will agree that's something we should be doing,” Doar said.

But many Democrats and anti-hunger advocates harbor deep reservations about the proposal — even if they have supported employment and training programs in the past. Most agree that these programs are a valuable and effective way to get people into well-paid jobs and out of poverty, particularly when they consist of more intensive services, such as apprenticeships or subsidized employment.

Experts expressed concerns, however, that the proposal would force SNAP participants into these programs without providing enough funding for them. High-quality training programs such as subsidized employment can range upward of $10,000 per year per participant. A Thursday analysis from the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimated it would cost $15 billion per year to fully fund a national employment and training program.

“There’s a kernel of a good idea here,” said Kermit Kaleba, federal policy director at the National Skills Coalition, which advocates for workforce development programs. “There is a lot of evidence that high-quality employment and training programs help people with relatively low basic skills move out of minimum wage jobs and into family-supporting careers. The challenge is that these programs are not cheap to run. And our concern, based on what we’ve heard so far, is that it isn’t clear [the Republican proposal] will make a sufficient investment.”

Democrats say they are also puzzled by Republicans' move to expand training programs before USDA has finished evaluating 10 state pilot programs authorized by the last farm bill. Those pilots were intended to identify best practices for future training programs, as well as to surface and address funding and implementation challenges.

Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), a member of the House Agriculture Committee who previously implemented SNAP training programs in Delaware, said many SNAP recipients face legitimate obstacles to enrolling in these programs, such as unreliable transportation, low housing security, and shifting child care and medical schedules.

“In our pilot program, it was a significant challenge just reaching out to families to get them in the door,” Rochester said. “If our goal is to fill the millions of jobs we have in our country, then investing in people is the right way to go. The question is, is the investment sufficient for this population?” 

The Republican proposal -- and by extension, the entire Farm Bill --  faces a tough uphill battle in the House, where it's due for markup in the Agriculture Committee next week. In a statement Thursday afternoon, Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, slammed the majority's SNAP proposal as a means to "force people off of SNAP to pay for massive state bureaucracies that won’t work and are a waste of money."

But the Republican campaign to overhaul welfare programs is likely to continue. On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to strengthen their existing work requirements, and potentially introduce new ones, for low-income Americans receiving SNAP, Medicaid, public housing subsidies and other forms of assistance.

In February, the USDA, announced it will begin reviewing ways to tighten work requirements in SNAP, particularly in high-unemployment areas that have been exempted from them.

“Long-term dependency has never been part of the American Dream,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement at the time. “Everyone who receives SNAP deserves an opportunity to become self-sufficient and build a productive, independent life.”

 

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus.

The R's have become so pathetic that it's cringeworthy. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Who needs ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ when you’ve got the Senate?'

Spoiler

The second season of Hulu’s adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale” premieres April 25. But never fear, viewers who can’t wait that long for a story about a world where men reign supreme and women have to find a way to work around the rules they’ve established: You’ve got the U.S. Senate to read about. The tales of cluelessness and entitlement coming out of the legislative body are, of course, nowhere near as awful or terrifying as Margaret Atwood’s story of sexual chattel slavery. Still, they speak to a huge gap in the imaginations of the people who are supposed to represent Americans — male and female alike — in Congress.

Let’s start with Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.). This month, she became the first member of the Senate to give birth to a child while serving in office. She joined a small but illustrious club, becoming only the 10th woman to have a child during her time in Congress. That relatively few women have had this experience highlights not merely how male Congress is, but how old members of Congress generally are; Duckworth herself is 50.

And that isn’t the only thing that Duckworth’s pregnancy reveals. Senate leadership, it seems, never bothered to even imagine a future in which the body might not be dominated by men. Earlier this year, Duckworth told Politico’s Anna Palmer and Reena Flores that, though she would be taking leave, she was still working on figuring out how that leave would be structured and how it would affect her ability to do her job. Would she be able to take votes on important pieces of legislation that came up for approval during her time off? Would she be able to introduce new bills if necessary? What happens if she is breastfeeding and an important vote comes up, and she has to choose between feeding her daughter and appearing on the Senate floor, which bans children?

It is stunning that these questions have never been answered before. And while it’s nice, if insanely overdue, that Duckworth’s pregnancy is finally forcing the issue, the situation speaks to the sclerosis and lack of creativity in what’s supposed to be America’s foremost legislative body. (Memo to Senate leadership: Someday, you may find that even male senators want to take parental leave, or even the possibility that a gay male senator and his husband might adopt a child and want to take leave to establish their new family dynamic. Family leave! It’s not just for those who actually give birth!)

Duckworth’s predicament isn’t even the craziest vestige of Senate sexism to be reported in 2018. Over the weekend, a group of female senators reflected on their experiences at an event at the New York Times. Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported this particular jaw-dropping tidbit:

When then-Senator Kay Hagan, the North Carolina Democrat, arrived in the Senate in 2009, she wanted to swim [in a pool located at the men’s gym], only to be greeted with a sign on the door that said “men only.” There was a reason for the sign, [Sen. Susan] Collins [(R-Maine)] said. There were at least two male senators — she would not name them — who enjoyed swimming in the nude. Today, women can use the pool, and the sign says “Proper Attire Required.”

The idea that the Senate was enough of a boy’s club — I am not sure the unnamed Senators in question deserve to be treated as gentlemen — that two of them believed their right to swim in the buff superseded the right of a woman to use the pool as recently as 2009 is a detail that I might reject in a work of fiction. This sort of behavior is an assumption not merely of privilege, but of the idea that things will never, ever change such that a man might have to discomfit himself so far as to don a pair of swim trunks.

I simply cannot imagine what it would be like to be catered to in this fashion, or even what I would ask for if I could expect this level of deference. A luxury breast-pumping lounge? A women’s-only Senate spa, staffed by only the most gifted nail artists and finest masseuses? A year of paid maternity leave? Free child care for life? Even as I’m making this list, I recognize that three-quarters of the ideas I’ve come up with are actually about making it more convenient for women to care for someone else, rather than something as self-centered and indulgent as the right to swim naked no matter what it cost someone else.

Maybe the lesson of these two stories is that male senators past have found it far too hard to imagine acting for the convenience of others, even the most vulnerable among us, and far too easy to catalogue their own needs. That’s a bad baseline for the people who make critically important policy decisions for most Americans. But at least they haven’t started forcing us into those red robes and white bonnets.

I didn't know about the pool. That's crazy.

[Cartmann99]

McConnell is another jackass whose date with karma keeps getting postponed.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

He is deaf, right? Right?? 

 

 

[candygirl200413]

It's disgusting how much the GOP tries to gaslight.