United States Congress 5: Still Looking for a Spine

[AmazonGrace]

Build that school! Build that school!

[onekidanddone]

2 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

Build that school! Build that school!

Does he really believe this bull shit or is he just orange nosing Trump? Either way he is a total wanker.

[thoughtful]

Ted, you shmuck, it's "rein in" not "reign in." I've seen a picture of you riding a horse - you must know what reins are. Maybe trying so hard to pretend Obama was acting like a monarch confused you.

Or maybe you just need to read this book:

Spoiler

Oh, and I agree that Cruz seems to have forgotten this opinion now that Trump is going Full Dictator on us.

[GreyhoundFan]

From Jennifer Rubin: "The feeble Republicans will not fulfill their oaths'

Spoiler

Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller’s disastrous appearance on Fox News rightfully got most of the media attention on Sunday. Here was the architect of the emergency declaration unprepared and unable to defend President Trump’s actions as much to do about nothing. We are unsurprised, however, that Trump’s most loyal and dogged anti-immigrant advocate, once outside the cocoon of a White House populated by yes men, should find it hard to present factual answers to legitimate questions.

What was more depressing was the pathetic conduct of Republican senators who seem thoroughly incapable of defending their power of the purse. Here was the cringeworthy exchange between Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and NBC’s Chuck Todd:

CHUCK TODD:

So you believe his use of the National Emergency Act, I want to clarify this, is constitutional? You believe it will be upheld in the court? Do you want the courts to uphold this power?

SENATOR RON JOHNSON:

Listen, I regret that past Congresses have given the president, any president, a lot of its, Congress’s constitutional authority. It’s done it on tariffs, it’s done in this case. It’s done in many cases. We should have three coequal branches. Right now, the presidency is probably the most powerful, and then the court. And Congress is really diminished. And we should start taking back that congressional authority. It’d be, it’d return that balance. But that’s the way it is. And again, particularly when Congress has given —

CHUCK TODD:

Right.

SENATOR RON JOHNSON:

— the president authority, it's really when that president's authority is even stronger than just what's written in the Constitution.

CHUCK TODD:

Are you going to vote to disapprove of the president's use of this, of the National Emergency Act when it comes to the Senate? The House is likely to vote on a resolution of disapproval. It'll come to the Senate. Where would you vote on that?

SENATOR RON JOHNSON:

I'm going to take a look at the case the president makes. And I'm also going to take a look at how quickly this money is actually going to be spent, versus what he's going to use. If he's not going to be spending it this fiscal year or very early in the next fiscal year, I would have my doubts. So again, I'm going to take a look at it and I’ll, you know, I'll decide when I actually have to vote on it.

CHUCK TODD:

Do you share the concern that other conservatives have that, if this is allowed to become precedent, where a president, thwarted by a Congress that he disagreed with, can end-run Congress this way and declare a national emergency to take appropriated money and spend it anywhere, climate change, guns, you name it?

SENATOR RON JOHNSON:

Absolutely, I share those concerns, which is why we're going to take a very careful look at what he's doing here in this instance. But again, I have to stress, this president has been thwarted for keep — you know, in his attempt to keep this nation safe and secure, to secure, to secure our borders. Let's face it. If this president can claim a mandate on anything he ran on, it's exactly this issue, better barriers and securing our border. And Congress, and Democrats in Congress have supported this in the past. They just won't support it now because it's President Trump.

CHUCK TODD:

But Senator--

SENATOR RON JOHNSON:

I think it's very regrettable. An easy solution--

CHUCK TODD:

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Senator —

SENATOR RON JOHNSON:

Just have them stop being hypocrites.

I wouldn’t bring up hypocrisy if I were he. Republicans had a meltdown when President Barack Obama issued an executive order to protect “dreamers." Now, they are copacetic with an even larger power grab, one that preempts Congress’s spending power. And though Johnson is “concerned,” the good people of Wisconsin don’t send him to Congress to be concerned; they send him to defend the Constitution, not roll over out of fear that Trump will dash off an angry tweet.

No one bests Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), however, in the boot-licking department. The man who excoriated Obama for executive overreach has no problem, of course, with Trump. On "Face the Nation," he unfortunately did not receive the Chris Wallace treatment. Instead, he filibustered:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Do— don’t you think Congress has ceded too much power to the executive branch?  Do you think that you need to more sharply define what constitutes a national emergency so that future presidents can’t interpret it as they like?

SEN. GRAHAM: Good question. I think that every member of Congress has watched three presidents send troops to the border. Bush, Obama, now Trump. Not one of us have complained about deploying forces to the border to secure the border. It’s pretty hard for me to understand the legal difference between sending troops and having them build a barrier. What disappoints me is on President Obama’s watch as a Republican, I voted for a $44 billion border security package, $9 billion of which included barriers. 2006 all of us voted for the Secure [Fence] Act. And we’re talking about steel barriers not a concrete wall. And unfortunately when it comes to Trump, the Congress is locked down and will not give him what we’ve given past presidents. So unfortunately, he’s got to do it on his own, and I support his decision to go that route.

It is incumbent on every interviewer who questions a Republican to have the politician’s previous statements about executive overreach at the ready, grill them on their hypocrisy and ask three basic questions: 1) Isn’t Trump’s overreach the most egregious of all because it aims to supplant Congress’s Article I role? 2) What evidence of an emergency is there, if even Trump says he “didn’t need to do this”? 3.) When President Warren or President Harris declares an emergency, takes money from the military and uses it for measures necessary to protect the country from the cataclysmic effects of global warming, will you give her your approval?

At times such as this, one really misses the principled, consistent voice of the late senator John McCain. He didn’t undergo torturous confinement for five years to see Graham and the rest trample on the rule of law and give license to an authoritarian bully. Unfortunately, the GOP is the party of Trump and his sycophants, not of constitutional conservatism, limited government or any other defining principle. And it’s certainly not McCain’s GOP.

 

[apple1]

Quote

... We are unsurprised, however, that (Stephen Miller) Trump’s most loyal and dogged anti-immigrant advocate...

I like Jennifer Rubin. However - She is wrong on the above quoted statement. Miller is NOT the advocate. He is the engineer and driving force behind it. And, in my opinion, the puppeteer pulling Trump's strings. It is terrifying how much actual control I believe he has.

Quote

Unfortunately, the GOP is the party of Trump and his sycophants, not of constitutional conservatism, limited government or any other defining principle. And it’s certainly not McCain’s GOP.

THAT. So much that.

[AmazonGrace]

 Young love is so cute

 

[onekidanddone]

On 2/17/2019 at 3:11 PM, AmazonGrace said:

Build that school! Build that school!

Lindsey Graham, just another shmuck in the wall because he don't need no education.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

It's ok now to quote a fascist dictator to prove a Repugliklan point. Before you know it, they'll be quoting Hitler.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Lindsey O. Graham explains his pro-Trump conversion — and it’s not because he thinks Trump is great"

Spoiler

It’s time to stop asking what happened with Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s complete 180 on President Trump, because Graham has now made it abundantly clear: political expediency.

But that, in and of itself, suggests his view of Trump remains about as dim as it was before.

This is a question that has stalked Graham for some time. How could he go from calling Trump a “kook” who is “unfit for office” in 2016 to the guy who, in 2017, infamously attacked others for labeling Trump a “kook not fit to be president?” And it is a fair question; Washington is not a place chock-full of principled stands and consistency, but even here the disconnect between 2016 Graham and 2017-19 Graham is remarkable.

Mark Leibovich got answers out of Graham in a new New York Times Magazine profile:

What did happen to Lindsey Graham? I raised the question directly to him the following afternoon in his Senate office in Washington. Graham was collapsed behind a cluttered desk, sipping a Coke Zero and complaining of exhaustion.

“Well, O.K., from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it’d be odd not to do this,” he said.

I asked what “this” was. “ ‘This,’ ” Graham said, “is to try to be relevant.” Politics, he explained, was the art of what works and what brings desired outcomes. “I’ve got an opportunity up here working with the president to get some really good outcomes for the country,” he told me.

Graham goes on to recount how his close friend and fellow sometimes-maverick in the Senate, the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), beat back a 2010 primary challenge by reinventing himself as “the most conservative member of the U.S. Senate.” Graham, who is up himself in 2020 and has faced his own primaries, added to Leibovich: “If you don’t want to get reelected, you’re in the wrong business.”

Graham has hinted at such a transparently political calculus before, but here he seems to lean into it even more. Leibovich writes Graham delivered that last quote while making clear he was “speaking to me as a fellow creature of Washington, fully versed in the election-year ‘showcasing’ he is now engaged in.”

One might say Graham admitting exactly what game he is playing is a refreshing bit of honesty. But the subtext is almost unmistakable: Graham is basically admitting his view of Trump has not changed appreciably. He is just doing this, after all, for his own political capital and reelection prospects.

And what’s more, it is telling that he feels the need to rationalize it. If he truly thought Trump was a great president and person, that would be a pretty simple answer to questions like Leibovich’s. I thought Trump was bad, but I was totally wrong, and now I support him. That would seem to be even better for his reelection prospects, because it would suggest his pro-Trump evolution was more heartfelt. Yet that is not what Graham’s saying; he is basically saying he is trying to make lemonade out of lemons.

Having read the Leibovich profile, I kept thinking back to then-Sen. Arlen Specter — another moderate-ish GOP senator from Pennsylvania — explaining his switch in 2010 to the Democrats. “My change in party will enable me to be reelected,” Specter said. The quote was featured in an ad by his primary opponent, who defeated Specter for the Democratic nomination.

Specter’s admission was more ham-handed than Graham’s, but they are of the same ilk. Both men are copping to doing things they may not truly believe in because it increases their chances of self-preservation and, by extension, accomplishing things. But just as Specter was tacitly admitting his evolution was not really one of conviction, so, too, is Graham.

The fact that Graham feels the need to admit to anything is what’s most conspicuous. It is almost as if he does not totally want to associate himself with Trump.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Seems to me that fawning on Trump while knowing he's bad makes it worse, not better 

They voted on that huge tax bill without reading it

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

Seems to me that fawning on Trump while knowing he's bad makes it worse, not better 

They voted on that huge tax bill without reading it

Translated: FOX hasn't told us what to think (because they don't want us to pass this bill), so we can't review it.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

Does anyone know when we might hear about the results of the vote on resolution?

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

Gun deaths are great

[HerNameIsBuffy]

3 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Gun deaths are great

I’ve kicked people off my audit team for making up their minds before having all the facts.

nice to know these fuckers aren’t held to the same standards /s

[AmazonGrace]

Here's my newest congress crush 

 

[47of74]

"Lindsey O. Graham explains his pro-Trump conversion — and it’s not because he thinks Trump is great"
Spoiler It’s time to stop asking what happened with Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s complete 180 on President Trump, because Graham has now made it abundantly clear: political expediency.
But that, in and of itself, suggests his view of Trump remains about as dim as it was before.
This is a question that has stalked Graham for some time. How could he go from calling Trump a “kook” who is “unfit for office” in 2016 to the guy who, in 2017, infamously attacked others for labeling Trump a “kook not fit to be president?” And it is a fair question; Washington is not a place chock-full of principled stands and consistency, but even here the disconnect between 2016 Graham and 2017-19 Graham is remarkable.
Mark Leibovich got answers out of Graham in a new New York Times Magazine profile:
What did happen to Lindsey Graham? I raised the question directly to him the following afternoon in his Senate office in Washington. Graham was collapsed behind a cluttered desk, sipping a Coke Zero and complaining of exhaustion.
“Well, O.K., from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it’d be odd not to do this,” he said.
I asked what “this” was. “ ‘This,’ ” Graham said, “is to try to be relevant.” Politics, he explained, was the art of what works and what brings desired outcomes. “I’ve got an opportunity up here working with the president to get some really good outcomes for the country,” he told me.
Graham goes on to recount how his close friend and fellow sometimes-maverick in the Senate, the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), beat back a 2010 primary challenge by reinventing himself as “the most conservative member of the U.S. Senate.” Graham, who is up himself in 2020 and has faced his own primaries, added to Leibovich: “If you don’t want to get reelected, you’re in the wrong business.”
Graham has hinted at such a transparently political calculus before, but here he seems to lean into it even more. Leibovich writes Graham delivered that last quote while making clear he was “speaking to me as a fellow creature of Washington, fully versed in the election-year ‘showcasing’ he is now engaged in.”
One might say Graham admitting exactly what game he is playing is a refreshing bit of honesty. But the subtext is almost unmistakable: Graham is basically admitting his view of Trump has not changed appreciably. He is just doing this, after all, for his own political capital and reelection prospects.
And what’s more, it is telling that he feels the need to rationalize it. If he truly thought Trump was a great president and person, that would be a pretty simple answer to questions like Leibovich’s. I thought Trump was bad, but I was totally wrong, and now I support him. That would seem to be even better for his reelection prospects, because it would suggest his pro-Trump evolution was more heartfelt. Yet that is not what Graham’s saying; he is basically saying he is trying to make lemonade out of lemons.
Having read the Leibovich profile, I kept thinking back to then-Sen. Arlen Specter — another moderate-ish GOP senator from Pennsylvania — explaining his switch in 2010 to the Democrats. “My change in party will enable me to be reelected,” Specter said. The quote was featured in an ad by his primary opponent, who defeated Specter for the Democratic nomination.
Specter’s admission was more ham-handed than Graham’s, but they are of the same ilk. Both men are copping to doing things they may not truly believe in because it increases their chances of self-preservation and, by extension, accomplishing things. But just as Specter was tacitly admitting his evolution was not really one of conviction, so, too, is Graham.
The fact that Graham feels the need to admit to anything is what’s most conspicuous. It is almost as if he does not totally want to associate himself with Trump.
 

Graham is a fuckstick. I dislike him almost as much as Mitch McFuckstick.

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

Does anyone know when we might hear about the results of the vote on resolution?

 

As far as I can gather, the vote in the House is today. It's a forgone conclusion that the majority of the votes will be for the resolution, as the Dems have the majority and there are also a couple of R's that are going to vote for it as well. So it's already assured that the resolution will have to be taken up by the Senate. By law the Senate will then have to vote on it within 18 days. It's not clear how that vote will go. It will depend on how many R senators are willing to agree with the national emergency or not. 

[47of74]

Someone else who is too fucking stoopid to realize there’s such a thing as witness tampering

[47of74]

Ted has the perfect comeback.

[Howl]

On 2/19/2019 at 11:13 AM, apple1 said:

I like Jennifer Rubin. However - She is wrong on the above quoted statement. Miller is NOT the advocate. He is the engineer and driving force behind it. And, in my opinion, the puppeteer pulling Trump's strings. It is terrifying how much actual control I believe he has.

This! A thousand times this! What Miller whispers in Trump's ear becomes policy.  He has a simply horrifying amount of power in the White House. 

[GreyhoundFan]

I truly despise Bitch McTurtle: "Mitch McConnell finds a novel villain after North Carolina’s fraud-riddled election: Democrats"

Spoiler

What we know happened in North Carolina last fall isn’t that complicated.

The campaign of Mark Harris, the Republican running for Congress in the state’s 9th Congressional District, was aided by a consultant named Leslie McCrae Dowless, despite warnings from Harris’s own son that Dowless’s tactics were questionable. There are suggestions that for years, working for both Democrats and Republicans, Dowless had hired people to encourage people in southern North Carolina to vote by absentee ballot. His team then allegedly either destroyed or altered those ballots before dropping them off to be counted — violating the law in a variety of ways.

We often hear, including from President Trump, about allegations of rampant fraud involving people going to polling places and pretending to be someone else. (Sometimes, Trump alleged, they leave a polling place, put on a different hat and come back in to vote again — something that probably happens each time Halley’s comet swings by.) That’s in-person voter fraud, which has never been found to have happened to any significant degree in recent years. What happened in North Carolina involved absentee ballots and has often been described as election fraud since it wasn’t the voters themselves who are alleged to have broken the law.

None of this, though, is how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described it in a speech from the Senate floor Tuesday.

“Anyone who’s been attentive to the news these past few days has learned about the complete debacle that unfolded in last November’s election for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District,” McConnell (R-Ky.) said. “Soon after Election Day, allegations of illegal ballot harvesting and vote tampering clouded a close result.”

With you so far.

“The wrongdoing seemed to have benefited the Republican candidate over the Democrat,” he continued. “Just last week we saw the state Board of Elections unanimously call for a new election.”

McConnell is not one to misspeak, particularly when reading from prepared remarks. His “seemed to have benefited” here is intentional, an effort not to withhold judgment but to cast doubt.

There’s no evidence at all that the Democratic candidate in the race, Dan McCready, benefited from any illegal activity. There’s no evidence that any illegal absentee ballot collection or alteration was conducted by anyone beside Dowless and his employees. And Dowless wasn’t just a volunteer, randomly picking his targets: He was being paid by the Harris campaign. The way his efforts came to light was that results in one county, Bladen County, seemed way out of whack from other counties — to Harris’s benefit.

Here, at this moment, the point of McConnell’s speech is clear. After his party was broadly silent about what happened in North Carolina despite its energetic stance on voter fraud for years, McConnell decided to flip the script.

“Now Madame President,” he continued, speaking to the senator overseeing the morning’s proceedings, “for years and years, every Republican who dared to call for common-sense safeguards for Americans’ ballots was demonized by Democrats and their allies. We were hit with left-wing talking points insisting that voter fraud wasn’t real. Never happens, they said. That fraud just didn’t happen. That modest efforts to ensure that voters are who they say they are and are voting in a proper place were really some sinister right-wing plot to prevent people from voting.”

This is simply dishonest. McConnell is intentionally conflating in-person, change-your-hat fraud with what happened in North Carolina, which wasn’t that.

It’s as though McConnell and his party had been complaining for years about burglars using crowbars to break into houses and then claiming validation when someone created a master key to unlock every front door on a block. The result is the same: The house has been violated. But the thing that the Republicans were warning about isn’t the thing that actually happened.

It’s also like burglars only broke into houses with crowbars a couple of times a year but to keep that from happening Republicans wanted anyone buying a tool to bring a birth certificate with them to Home Depot. And, just to strain this metaphor to the breaking point, that people who buy crowbars for legitimate purposes are mostly Democrats.

After all, the Republican solution to in-person voter fraud — which, again, isn’t what happened in North Carolina and, again, which happens only rarely — is to mandate that voters bring ID with them to the polling place. If people don’t have ID, they need to get one, often involving fees, visits to government offices and digging up missing documentation. It’s an encumbrance that falls more heavily on poorer Americans, who often overlap with groups that tend to vote Democratic.

A Government Accountability Office study completed in 2014 found that voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee probably dropped 2012 turnout in those states by 100,000 people. Those most heavily affected were younger people of color.

As for the voter ID laws being a “right-wing plot to prevent people from voting,” we’ll note that Republicans themselves have frequently said that a point or benefit of the laws is tamping down Democratic voting. It’s often framed by allegations that Democrats commit in-person fraud — again, there’s no evidence of fraud happening to a significant degree — but the effect is the same.

“So now as you might expect,” McConnell continued, “now that an incident of very real voter fraud has become national news and the Republican candidate seems — seems — to have benefited, these long-standing Democratic talking points have been really quiet. Haven’t heard much lately from Democrats about how fraud never happens. They’ve gone silent."

That repeated “seems” makes clear that McConnell wants us to believe that not only would his party’s jeremiad against voter fraud have prevented what happened in North Carolina but that somehow maybe the Democrats were also involved in dirty play.

He’s also again conflating the different kinds of fraud. Democrats have been far more vocal about what happened in North Carolina than Republicans, often — accurately — noting that Republicans themselves suddenly went quiet on the issue. They simply hadn’t found the sweet spot that McConnell did: pretending that the type of fraud that allegedly happened in North Carolina was the thing they’d been talking about all along. That all that talk about crowbars was proved by the existence of a skeleton key.

“Now some are singing a different tune,” McConnell went on. “Now there’s a new interest in ensuring the sanctity of American elections.”

I thought they’d gone silent?

“I’ve been focused for decades on protecting the integrity of elections,” McConnell concluded with a smile. “So I’d like to welcome my friends on the left to their new realization — they’ve just discovered! — that this subject really matters.”

The real irony here is that the futility of focusing on in-person fraud instead of absentee-ballot fraud has been known for years. In 2014, I spoke with someone from the Brennan Center for Justice who noted that the latter should be cause for broader concern even while Republicans focused on the former.

Why bother when you can instead simply reshape reality with a speech from the Senate floor?

 

[47of74]

LOL