United States Congress 5: Still Looking for a Spine

[GreyhoundFan]

Goodlatte is an ass. I'll be so glad to see the end of his tenure.

[GreyhoundFan]

A-freaking-men: "Good riddance, Paul Ryan"

Spoiler

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan will be leaving Congress soon, surely to glide into a Wall Street sinecure where his extraordinary service to America’s overclass can be properly rewarded. But before he goes, Ryan has some legacy-polishing to do.

Ryan’s office has released a six-part video series celebrating Ryan’s lifelong pursuit of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy as though it were a quest to cure cancer, and on Wednesday he delivered his farewell address to the House. No politician is going to get up and say, “I was mostly a failure, but it was all a big scam anyway,” but even so, Ryan’s attempt at self-hagiography is particularly galling, coming as it does from a man who spent so much time pursuing an agenda of comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, all while pretending to be something he most assuredly was not.

Paul Ryan had two great causes as a leader of Republicans: cutting taxes for the wealthy and undermining the American safety net. He succeeded on the first and largely failed — fortunately — on the second. And he oversaw a ballooning of the deficit yet somehow continued to convince people that he was an ardent deficit hawk.

Here's something important to keep in mind when considering how political figures approach the question of government spending: Anyone who calls themselves a "deficit hawk," but only wants to cut programs they don't like anyway, is absolutely full of it. This applies to almost the entire Republican Party, but no one more than Paul Ryan. Nobody talked more passionately about how the debt was endangering our grandchildren's future, but did he ever suggest cutting defense spending or increasing taxes to address this supposedly urgent crisis? Of course not. The "real" problem, he'd always say if you suggested such a thing, is liberal safety net programs.

And Ryan's perspective on the budget and the economy always depended on who was president. When George W. Bush was in office, Ryan lauded the idea of goosing the economy with government stimulus and supported large initiatives like the Medicare prescription drug benefit that were financed by deficit spending. As soon as Barack Obama took office, however, like other Republicans Ryan became a bitter opponent of government stimulus and deficit spending, even in the face of the worst economic crisis the country had seen in 80 years.

Through the Obama years, Ryan released a series of budget documents touted as plans for deficit reduction, but which were in fact blueprints to redistribute wealth upward. They invariably called for tax cuts for the wealthy combined with brutal cuts to social programs, and claimed to achieve balanced budgets even though they were filled with magic asterisks in which tough decisions about unspecified tax offsets would be figured out at some later date.

Invariably, liberal commentators would point out what a scam the whole thing was, yet mainstream reporters continued to describe Ryan as a serious policy wonk with the courage to say what others wouldn’t. Ryan’s slightly more clever version of the same swindle the rest of his party was pulling earned him adulation from a media desperate to describe budget debates as arguments between two equally meritorious perspectives. But as Paul Krugman put it, though there were no actual honest conservatives when it came to the budget, “the narrative required that the character Ryan played exist, so everyone pretended that he was the genuine article.”

In his farewell speech, Ryan expressed regret that his project of balancing the budget by eviscerating social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security ran into too much public opposition to succeed:

Ultimately, solving this problem will require a greater degree of political will than exists today. I regret that. But when the time comes to do this  —and it will — the path ahead will be based on the framework we have laid out to solve this problem. We can get there. We really can tackle this problem before it tackles us.

The “framework” he refers to — cutting taxes for the wealthy while cutting social programs for everyone else — is certainly as alive as ever in the GOP.

Right now the Trump administration is trying to expand work requirements for recipients of Medicaid and food stamps, which rather than help people earn an income are really about kicking as many people as possible off the program by forcing them to navigate a bureaucratic maze, with the slightest slip-up potentially resulting in a loss of benefits.

That's a Paul Ryan special, driven by the idea that the rich have proven their moral superiority by being rich and should therefore be larded with all the help the government can muster, while the poor are lazy and corrupt, and can only be helped by a healthy dose of punishment and shaming. Ryan grew up an admirer of Ayn Rand's philosophy of selfishness and contempt for the lower classes; he said in 2003 that "I give out 'Atlas Shrugged' as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it." As a precocious young man he fantasized about taking health insurance away from poor Americans: "Medicaid, sending it back to the states, capping its growth rate, we've been dreaming of this since I've been around — since you and I were drinking at a keg," he said last year.

Can't I say anything nice about Ryan? Sure. I'll grant that though he may have been as partisan as anyone else, he was usually uninterested in tossing about nasty attacks on his opponents; rhetorically speaking, he was polite and well-mannered, at least most of the time (though one does recall the time in 2016 he said Barack Obama "degrades the presidency" because Obama criticized Donald Trump's racist attacks on immigrants). And it's true that what he really cared about was policy.

The problem, though, is that his policy agenda was unceasingly vicious and cruel. Had he succeeded in full, the amount of human suffering he would have caused would have been positively monumental: millions more without health coverage, millions more without the ability to feed their families, millions more without retirement security, all with nothing to comfort them but some stern lectures about the value of personal responsibility and vigorous bootstrap-pulling.

The wealthy and corporations, on the other hand, never had a truer friend. Even apart from his deficit flimflammery, that is Paul Ryan’s true legacy.

 

[AmazonGrace]

I mean, same difference. 

 

[fraurosena]

So there'll be a shutdown then. Right before Christmas. Way to go, GOP. What a legacy, Ryan. Good form, presidunce, high lighting your ignorance and foolishness, like a bright shining star for all to see in this holiday season.

 

[Audrey2]

2 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

I mean, same difference. 

 

Um... Manafort's children aren't going to be housed in tents near the border? Just a thought. Separation from an incarcerated parent is inevitable, however, the children are not incarcerated at the same time.

[GreyhoundFan]

Fuck you, Meadows: "Rep. Meadows tells federal employees who won’t get paid during shutdown: You signed up for this"

Spoiler

To the hundreds of thousands of federal employees who will work without pay or be furloughed over the holidays if there is a government shutdown, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) says it is just part of the risk of working in public service.

Meadows, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus and a leading conservative voice urging President Trump not to accept a short-term spending bill absent funding for a border wall, was responding to reporters who asked about Transportation Security Administration and Border Patrol agents who would be required to continue working on Christmas without getting a paycheck.

“It’s actually part of what you do when you sign up for any public service position," Meadows said. "And it’s not lost on me in terms of, you know, the potential hardship. At the same time, they know they would be required to work and even in preparation for a potential shutdown those groups within the agencies have been instructed to show up.”

This is probably news to the 6,200 or so federal employees who live in Meadows’s North Carolina district.

Rep. Ryan Costello (R-Pa.), who decided not to seek re-election this year and has been increasingly critical of Trump, blasted Meadow’s comments in a tweet:

Meadows also justified the shutdown by saying Border Patrol agents support Trump holding out for border wall money.

It is difficult to say whether all border agents feel that way, but it is true that Brandon Judd, the president of the National Border Patrol Council, told The Washington Post on Monday that his group would “support the president 100 percent if he were to force the government to shut down over wall funding.”

Meadows, whose name had been floated for Trump’s chief of staff, was at the White House on Thursday afternoon to convince the president that conceding on the wall would be terrible for his relationship with his base.

On the other hand, if the government does shut down, Meadows, unlike more than 800,000 federal workers, would still receive his pay on time. In past years, lawmakers in the Senate and the House have introduced “No Budget, No Pay" legislation, which would withhold lawmakers' salary if they didn’t get a budget resolution and all 12 appropriations bills finished on time.

It passed once in 2013 as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling, but it only applied for one year and wasn’t brought for a vote in subsequent years.

Like Doug Phillips, Mark Meadows is a tool.

[AnywhereButHere]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-lawmaker-doubts-government-workers-live-paycheck-to-paycheck/ar-BBRfjcz?ocid=ientp

Quote

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said a government shutdown would not truly impact employees and scoffed at the idea that a federal worker would need their next paycheck to make ends meet.

"Who's living that they're not going to make it to the next paycheck?" he asked Politico reporter Sarah Ferris.

And here we have the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette. "Let them eat cake" or not - since living paycheck to paycheck is apparently "Fake News".

[GreyhoundFan]

How appropriate for a small, sad man: "Paul Ryan’s small, sad goodbye"

Spoiler

Paul D. Ryan ended his congressional career in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, beneath a stained-glass vaulted ceiling whose grandiosity emphasized the smallness of the ceremony below.

It was small in a good way, as in intimate and humble. The retiring House speaker made his goodbye speech Wednesday to fewer than 200 family members, congressional staffers and public officials — “all my friends and colleagues,” he said.

And it was small in a less good way, as a reminder of Ryan’s vanishing power over the past two years. Once hailed as the intellectual leader of his party and the fiscal savior of a debt-ridden United States, he became speaker in 2015 only to see his party and country fall into the hands of President Trump, as the debt swelled and Democrats seized the House in the midterm elections.

Ryan is hardly the first politician whose grand ideas were snuffed out by reality. But few have been so synonymous with their intellectual reputation — with so little left over once that reputation ran dry.

His farewell speech was a thematic and tonal potpourri. Parts of it resembled a State of the Union address in defense of his speakership. “I’m darn proud,” the 48-year-old Wisconsinite said after rattling off a list of legislative accomplishments during his brief speakership, chief among them a $1.9 trillion tax cut.

In other places, it sounded more like a college commencement speech, as Ryan laid out a daunting future that will be his audience’s responsibility, more than his own.

“If we do these three things — make progress on poverty, fix our immigration system, confront this debt crisis — we can make this another great century for our country,” he said. “I acknowledge these challenges are ones we haven’t made much progress on in recent years.”

This was not a Paul Ryan speech anyone would have predicted at the beginning of the decade, when he rose to national fame as the “ideas man” of the Republican Party.

His legend then was of an earnest Midwestern intellectual who disdained the trappings of politics — the boy genius who first won office in his 20s and had spent the time since studying the country’s economic health. By the 2010s, he had convinced the core of his party that the United States would imminently collapse under the weight of its own debt unless it made radical cuts to taxes and social welfare systems.

It’s hard to remember now, through the fog of a Trump administration that dreams of military parades and a 1,000-mile border wall, but the specter of Ryan’s fiscal apocalypse was so vivid that conservatives greeted his addition to the 2012 presidential ticket as if Mitt Romney had chosen the messiah as his running mate.

“In this generation, a defining responsibility of government is to steer our nation clear of a debt crisis while there is still time,” Ryan said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that summer. And the immense crowd that stood and screamed and cheered him on could have swallowed his farewell gathering at the Library of Congress many times over.

Romney lost that election, of course. But Ryan’s prestige kept rising until he became House speaker in 2015 — he was practically begged to take the job — and “started an effort to carve the Republican Party in his own image,” as The Washington Post wrote. What was needed, he said in a speech at the time, was a Republican president. And then he got one in Trump a year later.

But now, after two years of Republican-dominated government left the debt swollen near levels not seen since 1950, Ryan finds himself in the awkward position of talking around a still-impending apocalypse.

“I acknowledge plainly that my ambitions for entitlement reform have outpaced the political reality,” Ryan said in the Great Hall on Tuesday, the back of his teleprompter screen reflecting details from the ceiling mural — winged angelic figures and the names of Aristotle and Dante.

“We all know what needs to be done,” Ryan continued, as young staffers in the middle rows watched, expressionless. He sounded vaguely confident that someone would come along to do them, since he was quitting before his 50th birthday.

Ryan’s sanguinity in the face of retirement had thrown a few people — especially those most invested in the unrealized ideas he’d spent his career espousing.

“I don’t want to be an empty nester, only being a weekend dad,” Ryan told the conservative Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes after making the announcement this spring. “But the other big reason I felt comfortable retiring is we got a lot done that I came to do.”

“Your argument was that this was a crisis, it’s an urgent crisis,” Hayes reminded him.

“I know,” said Ryan.

“Is it still a crisis?” Hayes asked a minute later.

“Oh, absolutely,” said Ryan.

But the apparent debt crisis did not much intrude on Ryan’s goodbye celebrations. It was barely mentioned in a triumphant six-part retrospective his House office released on YouTube this week — “the story of Paul Ryan and his relentless drive to pass the first tax reform law in a generation.”

Narrated by Ryan’s brother and some of his closest allies, the videos chronicled his career, from his early days “deep in the wilderness” until his crowning achievement, last year’s tax cut bill.

Excised from this epic were all his talk about debt burdens and runaway spending and the existential future of the country.

But how much, really, can one ideas man be expected to do? Ryan had some ideas. He had talked about them until he became one of the most powerful people in U.S. politics. Then he retired and went back to Wisconsin.

“Good ideas, they just take time,” Ryan said toward the end of his speech, as if his bid to avert fiscal calamity were a loaf of bread he had left in the oven.

When he was finished, the audience stood and applauded for as long as it took Ryan to shake a few hands and disappear through a side door. Then they collected their coats and cleared the Great Hall almost immediately, as if leaving a staff meeting.

“That was amazing. Great guy. We’re really going to miss him,” a man in a suit told another as he passed beneath two sculptured cherubs on his way to the door.

“Yep, yep,” said the other man. There was really nothing to add.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

Rand Paul being a dick for Christmas: 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I like Senator Schatz' response to Dumpy's bitching and moaning on twitter:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

They only murdered two kids which is close to zero amirite 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Good grief: "House GOP releases findings from probe of FBI, Justice Department"

Spoiler

The outgoing Republican committee chairmen in charge of a year-long probe of how the FBI and Justice Department handled investigations into the Trump campaign’s alleged Russia ties and Hillary Clinton’s emails once again called for a second special counsel to look into such matters in a letter to top administration and congressional officials summing up their work.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) sent their letter to acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). In it, they encouraged them to pick up where the House panels left off and “continue to identify and eliminate bias” at the federal law enforcement agencies “so the public can trust the institutions to make decisions solely on the facts and the law and totally devoid of political bias or consideration.”

“Our 2016 presidential candidates were not treated equally,” Goodlatte and Gowdy wrote in a statement accompanying the release of the letter. “The investigators in both investigations were biased against President Trump.”

The House GOP leaned heavily on details in an inspector general report released earlier this year to make their arguments about bias having infected the FBI and DOJ’s proceedings. The inspector general’s report found that while certain individuals, such as former top FBI counterintelligence officer Peter Strzok, displayed clear personal bias against Trump, there was no evidence that the conclusions of the investigations themselves were biased.

Nonetheless, Republicans and Democrats have openly warred over the implications of the inspector general report and their own investigation for months. Democrats have frequently charged that the GOP used the congressional investigation as a means of discrediting the work that provided the foundation for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s ongoing probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Republican leaders denied that charge in their letter, arguing that “whatever product is produced by the Special Counsel must be trusted by Americans and that requires asking tough but fair questions about investigative techniques both employed and not employed.”

But after dozens of mostly closed-door interviews and months of high-profile partisan clashes, the seven-page letter comes as a remarkably quiet ending — with lawmakers offering no discernibly new insights or recommendations for how the federal law enforcement agencies erred or might improve their work.

Alongside the call for a second special counsel — which Goodlatte and Gowdy first formally called for back in March — the panel leaders recommended that others take a closer look at the process of securing warrants to conduct surveillance on individuals, as well as how much detail investigators are required to provide the secret court that approves such warrants about “informant or source issues and the divulging of bias information.” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has already told reporters that he plans to take up this issue.

In the letter, GOP panel leaders criticize the decisions several of the witnesses testified to making during the investigations. In particular, they focus on those of former FBI director James B. Comey, pitting his testimony against that of former FBI general counsel James Baker, whose comments, they said, suggested that Comey possibly erred in deciding not to prosecute Clinton over her use of a private email server.

The Republican chairmen also cite Baker’s testimony to reiterate a criticism of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who they say should have returned to Capitol Hill for a closed-door interview about his reported comments that he suggested recording Trump and then trying to invoke constitutional procedure to remove him from office. Such an interview was scheduled with panel leaders in late October but abruptly canceled amid an outcry from rank-and-file panel Republicans, who felt they too should be allowed to pepper Rosenstein with questions. Some of those panel members, led by Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), also sought to have Rosenstein impeached.

Jordan will take over as the top Republican on the Oversight and Government Reform panel in just a few days, at which point the Democrats taking over House leadership — and the chairmanship of the panels — are expected to dramatically alter, if not formally shutter, the probe.

The letter from Gowdy and Goodlatte was not accompanied by the release of any transcripts from interviews that have not yet been made public. A classified version of the panels’ findings is being made available to members.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Ted Lieu:

 

[onekidanddone]

57 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I love Ted Lieu:

 

Stopping crime and the military? So in other words he wants the military stopped.

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

Stopping crime and the military? So in other words he wants the military stopped.

Yeah, I saw that. "Very smart" idiot doesn't know how to communicate in English.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

It's a shame that Lindsey can't seem to grow a backbone: "After lunch with Trump, Lindsey Graham shifts course on Syria: ‘I think the president’s taking this really seriously’"

Spoiler

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday abruptly walked back his criticism of President Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria, a move that he had previously derided as “an Obama-like mistake.”

Graham, a onetime Trump critic who has become one of the president’s most ardent supporters on Capitol Hill, made the remarks to reporters after lunch with Trump at the White House on Sunday afternoon.

“We had a great lunch. We talked about Syria. He told me some things I didn’t know that made me feel a lot better about where we’re headed in Syria,” Graham said.

He described Trump’s decision as “a pause situation” rather than a withdrawal, telling reporters, “I think the president’s taking this really seriously.”

Earlier this month, the White House announced that the United States will move quickly to withdraw its 2,000 troops from Syria, a decision that defied the warnings of Trump’s top advisers.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” Trump tweeted at the time, referring to the Islamic State militant group.

In the wake of the announcement, Graham issued a scathing statement in which he denounced the decision as “an Obama-like mistake made by the Trump Administration.”

“While American patience in confronting radical Islam may wane, the radical Islamists’ passion to kill Americans and our allies never wavers,” Graham said.

He went even further in a Senate floor speech, saying Trump’s decision went “against sound military advice” and calling the president’s claim about the defeat of the Islamic State “fake news.”

“To those who say we have defeated ISIS in Syria, that is an inaccurate statement,” Graham said. He added that Americans would be less safe in the wake of a U.S. withdrawal from Syria and that he did not support efforts to “outsource our national security to any foreign power.”

Ahead of Sunday’s lunch, Graham told CNN that one goal of his meeting with Trump would be to try to persuade the president to reconsider his withdrawal decision.

“I’m going to ask him to sit down with his generals and reconsider how to do this,” Graham said. “Slow this down. Make sure that we get it right. Make sure ISIS never comes back. Don’t turn Syria over to the Iranians. That’s a nightmare for Israel.”

But upon emerging from the White House, Graham appeared to have come around to Trump’s point of view, although he maintained that ISIS had yet to be defeated.

“He promised to destroy ISIS,” Graham said. “He’s going to keep that promise. We’re not there yet. But as I said today, we’re inside the 10-yard line, and the president understands the need to finish the job.”

I wonder if Lindsey could get his head further up Dumpy's backside?

[fraurosena]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Sweet Rufus. He’s referring to the president of the US. In public, in his capacity as a US senator. To the media.

The only other president someone may have said this about is Reagan, and only then in the very last years of his presidency. And only in hushed tones, amongst themselves.

Graham saying this about the presidunce illustrates just how unfit the current occupant of the White House is. And that’s putting it mildly.

[AmazonGrace]