Month: July 2022

Sinema weighs whether to destroy the Democratic party

Of course:

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) had a message for her Democratic colleagues before she flew home to Arizona for the weekend: She’s preserving her options.

Why it matters: Sinema has leverage and she knows it. Any potential modification to the Democrat’s climate and deficit reduction package — like knocking out the $14 billion provision on carried interest — could cause the fragile deal to collapse.

Her posture is causing something between angst and fear in the Democratic caucus as senators wait for her to render a verdict on the secret deal announced by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin last Thursday.

Driving the news: Sinema has given no assurances to colleagues that she’ll vote along party lines in the so-called “vote-a-rama” for the $740 billion bill next week, according to people familiar with the matter.

The vote-a-rama process allows lawmakers to offer an unlimited number of amendments, as long as they are ruled germane by the Senate parliamentarian. Senators — and reporters — expect a late night.

Republicans, steaming mad that Democrats have a chance to send a $280 billion China competition package and a massive climate and health care bill to President Biden, will use the vote-a-rama to force vulnerable Democrats to take politically difficult votes.

They’ll also attempt to kill the reconciliation package with poison pills — amendments that make it impossible for Schumer to find 50 votes for final passage.

The intrigue: Not only is Sinema indicating that she’s open to letting Republicans modify the bill, she has given no guarantees she’ll support a final “wrap-around” amendment, which would restore the original Schumer-Manchin deal.

The big picture: Schumer made a calculated decision to negotiate a package with Manchin in secrecy. He assumed that all of his other members, including Sinema, would fall into line and support the deal.

Now his caucus is digesting the specifics, with Sinema taking a printout of the 725-page bill back to Arizona on Friday for some dense in-flight reading.

Schumer will find out this week if his gamble in keeping Sinema in the dark will pay off.

What we’re watching: While Sinema supported the 15% minimum book tax back in December, which would raise more than $300 billion, Schumer never bothered to check if her position changed, given the darkening economic outlook.

Schumer and Manchin also inserted the language on taxing carried interest as regular income, which would raise approximately $14 billion, knowing full well that Sinema never agreed to it. That move blindsided Sinema.

Now the private equity industry, which has contributed heavily to Sinema, is hopeful that she’ll knock the provision out.

The intrigue: While Schumer and Manchin have a well-documented and tumultuous relationship — replete with private fence-mending Italian dinners — Schumer and Sinema do not regularly engage.

Flashback: The Schumer-Sinema relationship took a big blow back in February when Schumer declined to endorse Sinema for her 2024 re-election when directly asked by CNN.

She didn’t attend her party’s caucus meeting on Thursday.

Between the lines: Sinema and Manchin always agreed that President Biden’s initial $3.5 billion Build Back Better plan needed to be trimmed down.

They are also on the same page on the need to act on climate change.

If Manchin has been primarily concerned with inflation, her guiding principles have always been economic growth and new jobs in Arizona.

The bottom line: Sinema isn’t terribly pleased with how Schumer has foisted this package upon her. She reserves the right to modify it.

But she also knows that a progressive challenger, like Rep. Rueben Gallego, is all but guaranteed in 2024 if she’s held responsible for killing the Democrats best shot at a climate bill in years.

No one can be surprised by this. And I have to wonder if they didn’t put that carried interest provision in there so she could take it out. If they didn’t then both Schumer and Manchin are more naive than we thought. Sinema was always going top have to put her stamp on this thing.

July 28, 2022, via @AP: pic.twitter.com/jplFI5udaA

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) July 28, 2022

Not that he cares, because he believes he is still the legitimate president but still:

Former president Donald Trump was spotted using the presidential seal on multiple items during the LIV Golf tournament at his Bedminster, N.J., golf course.

The seal was plastered on towels, golf carts and other items as the former president participated in the pro-am event of the Saudi-sponsored tournament Thursday.

It is against federal law to use the presidential and vice-presidential seals in ways that could convey “a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States.”

While violating this law could result in imprisonment of “not more than six months,” a fine or both, these punishments are rarely doled out.

This is not the first time the display of the seal has been reported at Trump properties. The logo appeared on a marker at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla., in an Instagram post earlier this year, according to Forbes. WNYC and ProPublica reported in 2018 that the Trump Organization ordered golf course tee markers with the emblem on them.

Last year, a D.C.-based watchdog group accused his Bedminster golf club of profiting from using images of the presidential seal.

“Unlawful use of the presidential seal for commercial purposes is no trivial matter, especially when it involves a former president who is actively challenging the legitimacy of the current president,” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said when it filed the 2021 complaint.

Yeah, whatever. The law doesn’t apply to Donald Trump.

By the way:

Trump has faced criticism from the survivors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and their family members for hosting the Saudi-backed golf tournament at his New Jersey resort — 50 miles from Ground Zero.

In an ad released this week, family members of those who lost their lives in the attacks hold up photos of their deceased loved ones while sharing the pain they still endure more than 20 years later.

“How much money to turn your back on your own country?” one woman asks.

The golf tour is funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, whose chairman is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. U.S. intelligence has deemed him responsible for the murder of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

On Thursday, Trump dismissed criticism that he is being too friendly to Saudi Arabia.

“Nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11, unfortunately,” Trump told ESPN.

Actually, the US Government did get to the bottom of 9/11. But Trump is fine with it. They have money and he wants some of it.

Apparently, he’s closer to Trump than we knew

The Wapo reports:

As Roger Stone prepared to stand trial in 2019,complaining he was under pressure from federal prosecutors to incriminate Donald Trump, a close ally of the president repeatedly assured Stone that “the boss” would likely grant himclemency if he were convicted, a recording shows.

Atan event at a Trump property that October, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) predicted that Stone would be found guilty at his trial in Washington the following month but would not “do a day” in prison. Gaetz was apparently unaware they were being recorded by documentary filmmakers following Stone, who special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had charged with obstruction of a congressional investigation.

“The boss still has a very favorable view of you,” said Gaetz, stressing that the president had “said it directly.” He also said, “I don’t think the big guy can let you go down for this.”

Gaetz at one point told Stone he was working on getting him a pardon but was hesitant to say more backstage at the event, in which speakers were being filmed for online broadcast. “Since there are many, many recording devices around right now, I do not feel in a position to speak freely about the work I’ve already done on that subject,” Gaetz said.

The lawmaker also told Stone during their conversation that Stone was mentioned “a lot” in redacted portions of Mueller’s report, appearing to refer to portions that the Justice Department had shown to select members of Congress confidentially in a secure room. “They’re going to do you, because you’re not gonna have a defense,” Gaetz told Stone.

The 25-minute recording was captured by a microphone that Stone was wearing on his lapel for a Danish film crew, which was making a feature-length documentary on the veteran Republican operative. The filmmakers allowed Washington Post reporters to review their footage in advance of the release of their film, “A Storm Foretold,” which is expected later this year.

The recording gives a rare unguarded view of Trump confidants candidly discussing legal peril away from public eyes. Mueller’s report said it was possible that Trump had both lied to investigators about his contacts with Stone and was aware Stone might provide damaging testimony against him if he chose to cooperate with prosecutors.

Gaetz is a member of the House Judiciary Committee. At the time of the conversation, the committee was investigating whether Trump might have obstructed justice by floating possible pardons to Stone and other allies who were swept up in Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

In a statement to The Post, Gaetz’s office said he was not speaking on Trump’s behalf during the pardon discussion with Stone. His remarks about secret portions of the Mueller report were not specific enough to violate the terms under which he had been permitted to view them, the statement said.

It also said the conversation was “illegally recorded.” Under Florida law, each participant in a discussion must consent for it to be recorded, provided they have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Christoffer Guldbrandsen, the film’s director, said the congressman’s remark about recording devices suggested he had no such expectation. “There is nothing illegal about this recording,” Guldbrandsen told The Post.

In response to an email seeking comment, Stone complained about The Post’s past coverage of his case and Mueller’s report. He did not address questions about the conversation with Gaetz.

Stone, a friend and adviser to Trump since the 1980s, was charged by Mueller with lying to Congress about his communications with Trump’s campaign regarding WikiLeaks’ 2016 release of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign. U.S. authorities determined that the emails were hacked by Russian operatives seeking to boost Trump’s candidacy. Trump and Stone denied to Mueller that they had discussed WikiLeaks, but testimony from other Trump aides contradicted their accounts.

Stone was convicted on seven felony counts that November and sentenced to 40 months in prison. But Trump, who publicly praised Stone for not “flipping” on him, commuted his prison sentence before it began and eventually pardoned him.

This is disgusting:

Four major corporate landlords filed thousands of evictions while federal moratorium orders were still standing, using aggressive tactics to force out tenants at the height of the pandemic, according to a new investigation by a House subcommittee. 

Together the four companies — Ventron Management, the Siegel Group, Invitation Homes and Pretium Partners — filed nearly 15,000 evictions between March 15, 2020, and July 29, 2021, three times as many as previously known. Even as the companies moved to dislodge tenants who fell behind on rent after the economy cratered during lockdowns, they themselves suffered few financial setbacks, according to the report released Thursday from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

Pretium expanded its rental portfolio, Invitation recorded record profits and boosted rents, and Ventron and Siegel each received more than $2 million in federal loans since forgiven by the Paycheck Protection Program. Still, all four companies allowed evictions to be filed, even going after tenants who were waiting for emergency rental assistance funds to hit their accounts.

“As countless Americans acted admirably to support their communities during the coronavirus crisis, the four landlord companies investigated by the Select Subcommittee evicted aggressively to pad their profits,” Representative James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and the subcommittee chair, said in a statement. “While the abusive eviction practices documented in this report would be condemnable under any circumstances, they are unconscionable during a once-in-a-century economic and public health crisis.”

Some of the abuses outlined in the report may have violated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moratorium, which carried penalties for landlords, or otherwise flouted state and federal policies, according to the report. The select subcommittee passed on some findings about Siegel and Invitation Homes to certain agencies for potential enforcement actions, including the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Fannie Mae.

In a quarterly earnings call on July 28, Dallas B. Tanner, the CEO of Invitation Homes, addressed the subcommittee’s report. “The report clearly states that we did not engage in practices that were unlawful,” he said. “We work hard to follow all the laws within our markets.” A statement from the company added that “we responded transparently and in good faith to the Subcommittee’s multiple requests over the past year. In a time when the focus should be on adding much-needed supply to the country’s housing market, it’s disappointing that the committee chose instead to pursue a fault-finding mission.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Pretium Partners said: “We have always complied with the CDC moratorium — no resident covered by a valid CDC declaration has ever been evicted from our homes for non-payment of rent. In fact, we had voluntarily extended the CDC moratorium for residents covered by valid CDC declarations beyond its expiration. Nothing in today’s report takes issue with either of these facts.”

The subcommittee’s year-long investigation yielded unprecedented findings on practices and policies by executives and managers from all four companies, which together hold properties across 28 states. Using data supplied by the firms, for example, the subcommittee discovered that they were responsible for a total of 14,744 eviction filings — almost triple the 5,433 filings tabulated by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project before the congressional investigation began. Two of the companies, Invitation and Siegel, did not maintain complete records on their eviction practices, meaning the total number could be even greater.

The investigation reveals a rare view of the chain of command that steered pandemic evictions, from corporate executives to regional directors and property managers. An email from an executive at Siegel, for example, advised a property manager and regional manager in San Antonio to harass a tenant by towing her car, replacing her air conditioning unit with a nonworking unit, knocking on her door “at least twice a night” and even calling child protective services on the tenant if any children were present. (The committee referred its findings to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.)

In other documents obtained by the subcommittee, a Siegel executive instructed subordinates to post and distribute misleading copies of a court judgment on the CDC order after 5 p.m. on a Friday, so apartment residents would have little recourse to verify the memo with court officials.

That executive followed up with other regional managers, noting that “properties have been using this order to bluff people out.” In an email to a regional manager and executive at Siegel, one property manager wrote to that he “love[d] getting to say that this means the eviction may happen sooner than expected and seeing the look on their faces,” adding a smiley face emoji.

The report also details several inquiries made by Fannie Mae into eviction practices at Invitation, the single-family landlord that was taken public by Blackstone Inc. in 2017. In March 2021, Invitation told a Fannie Mae representative that only 6% of the company’s eviction filings over the prior six months resulted in eviction. The company was only counting formal evictions, as some 27% of tenants who were subject to eviction filings over that six-month span either left or were evicted.

Over the full span of the federal eviction moratorium, 29% of Invitation Homes residents who received notices — thousands of tenants — were displaced.

The landlords were quick to file for evictions, even as federal authorities worked to pause them in order to distribute some $47 billion in emergency rent relief authorized by Congress. According to the House subcommittee report, more than 9 out of 10 evictions filed by Ventron were over just one month of late rent. Eviction actions taken by Ventron and Pretium followed lapses in payment of as little as $500. These actions continued even after tenants applied for federal relief.

Federal agencies warned that major national landlords who forced out tenants or deprived them of their rights under eviction orders risked running afoul of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act.

“Evicting tenants in violation of the CDC, state, or local moratoria, or evicting or threatening to evict them without apprising them of their legal rights under such moratoria, may violate prohibitions against deceptive and unfair practices,” reads a joint statement from the FTC and CFPB in March 2021.

Nothing less than evil.

So many Republican traditions in D.C.

Those deleted Secret Service text messages are not necessarily unrecoverable. People who might simply don’t want them recovered (Washington Post):

The Department of Homeland Security’s chief watchdog scrapped its investigative team’s effort to collect agency phones to try to recover deleted Secret Service texts this year, according to four people with knowledge of the decision and internal records reviewed by The Washington Post.

In early February, after learning that the Secret Service’s text messages had been erased as part of a migration to new devices, staff at Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari’s office planned to contact all DHS agencies offering to have data specialists help retrieve messages from their phones, according to two government whistleblowers who provided reports to Congress.

But later that month, Cuffari’s office decided it would not collect or review any agency phones, according to three people briefed on the decision.

In a letter to House investigators this month, Cuffari admitted the messages had been erased without acknowlwdging his section knew of the deletion in December and did not alert Congress. A Cuffari spokesperson declined comment Friday night.

A senior forensics analyst in the inspector general’s office took steps to collect the Federal Protective Service phones, the people said. But late on the night of Friday, Feb. 18, one of several deputies who report to Cuffari’s management team wrote an email to investigators instructing them not to take the phones and not to seek any data from them, according to a copy of an internal record that was shared with The Post.

The Secret Service denies erasing the texts maliciously.

“It’s déjà vu all over again,” says the Project On Government Oversight. Those are not the only texts missing from Jan. 6 (Mother Jones):

Key text messages for top Department of Homeland Security officials during the period leading up to January 6 riot at the capitol are missing, according to reports from the Washington Post and the Project On Government Oversight. The messages were on phones belonging to former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli, and former Secret Service director Randolph “Tex” Alles. The missing texts could have provided crucial information about what happened in the lead up to January 6, as well as how DHS responded to the attack that day.

Has anyone from Congress taken a trip to Bluffdale to see what the NSA has rattling around in its 100,000 square feet of hard drives? Or was that search cancelled too?

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The Affordable Care Act bugaboo is back. This time for real.

We are going to discuss — again — the medical impacts of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision reversing 50 years of abortion rights in a moment, but first….

Remember death panels? During debate over the Affordable Care Act, Republicans insisted that buried somewhere in the bill was a provision under which bureaucrats would make calculating, life-and-death decisions for older patients, maybe you. Government-mandated euthanasia of the elderly! Oooooh, be afraid!

Jon Stewart invited Betsy McCaughey onto The Daily Show in August 2009. The former New York lieutenant governor and proponent of the death panel nonsense came armed with a thick copy of the bill as a prop. Oooooh, thick, scary!

When Stewart urged McCaughey to flip to and read the death panel section in the bill, she could not.

In a twitter thread last night, Stewart did the same with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

Senate Republicans on Friday gleefully killed the veterans’ health PACT Act they’d recently supported over a supposed “$400B blank check,” a “budgetary trick” Democrats somehow slipped into the bill. Anyway, that’s their talking point and they are sticking to it rather than admit Republican no votes are over their picque at being outmaneuvered by Democrats on an unrelated bill. Republicans got played and took it out on veterans.

Stewart insisted Cruz point to the provision in legislation he’d voted against after voting for it on June 16. Show everyone, Ted, Stewart chided, “where in the Pact Act is this 400 billion dollars blank check or unrelated spending that was added/snuck in…OR show section 805 c of the actual bill that explicitly states what the Toxic Exposure Fund can be used for.”

Crickets.

Actively dying

Now, about those horrendous, mythical death panels. Dobbs made them real.

Mark Joseph Stern explains at Slate:

When Elizabeth Weller’s water broke during the 18th week of her pregnancy, the prognosis was bleak: With almost no amniotic fluid left, the fetus could not survive. If Weller did not terminate immediately, she would be at risk of a potentially lethal uterine infection. She requested an abortion, but the hospital’s ethics committee refused. The committee feared that if doctors terminated Weller’s pregnancy before she was actively dying, they would face liability under Texas’ six-week abortion ban. So the committee forced her to wait until she had a high fever and “foul” discharge—symptoms of a serious infection in her uterus—to terminate.

Weller’s story, documented by Carrie Feibel in a wrenching NPR report, reflects a growing crisis in a post–Roe v. Wade America. Many states have banned or severely restricted abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roeon June 24, enacting laws with extremely vague and narrow exceptions for the life of the mother. Health care providers have legitimate concerns that they will face civil and criminal liability if they terminate a pregnancy under any circumstances. They worry that judges, juries, and prosecutors will disagree that the patient had a true medical emergency. And so the decision shifts from the patient to the hospital, which frequently places these delicate considerations in the hands of ethics committees.

These committees reveal little about their work to the public, and their membership is usually kept secret; as a rule, they do not talk to the press. They have long functioned in the background, a mostly obscure feature of hospital administration. Now that’s all changed: In our post-Roe nation, the ethics committee may decide whether pregnant patients live or die.

Get it wrong in the eyes of a prosecutor and a Texas doctor could face up to life in prison under S.B. 8, the bill now being copied in other states.

Ethics committees are not new, Stern explains. But their involvement in abortion decisions is “a throwback to the 1960s and early 1970s” when America was great before (WAGB, I suppose).

The fundamental problem facing these committees is that the current crop of abortion bans were written with the most cramped and ambiguous health exceptions imaginable. Many of these laws allow termination only in the case of a genuine medical emergency—a term that is not defined, but suggests the patient’s life must be in imminent peril.

Just when is that?

Hospitals are thus left to interpret draconian laws that ban abortion except when necessary to “save the life” or “prevent the death” of a pregnant woman. But when is a patient sufficiently close to death to justify termination? When her pregnancy has a 10 percent chance of killing her? 50 percent? 90? That, increasingly, is a question for the hospital ethics committee.

For example:

As Stat’s Olivia Goldhill has reported, at least one patient with an ectopic pregnancy has been denied care under Missouri’s law. When she arrived at the hospital, her fallopian tubes could have burst at any moment, causing internal bleeding and possible death. Yet she still had to wait for the ethics committee to decide whether an abortion was legally permissible. The panel took half a day to decide that the patient was, indeed, in enough danger to terminate.

Death panels, then. They are not found in Dobbs itself. Nor are they in state abortion ban laws that kicked in after Dobbs either. But here they are anyway.

And from Republicans? Crickets.

A Message to and from Mister Senator Ted Cruz…Attorney at Law#PassthePactact pic.twitter.com/QjGRGdPmq4

— Jon Stewart (@jonstewart) July 29, 2022

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Chinchilla pups!

Congratulations to Charley, one of Trevor Zoo’s long-tailed chinchillas. On June 25, she gave birth to two male babies. Waffles is their father. Trevor Zoo is in Millbrook, NY. The Trevor Zoo is an Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) accredited facility which provides Millbrook students a unique opportunity to work directly with wildlife. The zoo has a collection of more than 180 individual animals representing 80 species, ten of which are endangered, and participates in numerous Species Survival Plan (SSP) programs. Zoo community service students (zooies) are assigned to teams where they rotate through the zoo during the year to get a broad-based view of the zoo in its entirety. This encourages students to have a variety of experiences in animal husbandry, diet preparation, and veterinary medicine. Students who show exemplary work and passion are selected to be leaders, called student curators, and assist in training and working with their peers. Student curators and zooies assist zoo staff with all levels of caring for the animals at the Trevor Zoo. This is truly a one-of-a-kind opportunity and can be an extremely rewarding experience.

That red tsunami is receding a bit

Nate Silver had this in his newsletter today:

As was the case when we launched the forecast a month ago, the Deluxe version of FiveThirtyEight’s midterm model still rates the battle for control of the Senate as a “tossup.” But within that category there’s been modest, but consistent movement toward Democrats. Their chances of winning the Senate now stand at 55 percent. That’s up from 47 percent from forecast launch on June 30. It’s also up from 40 percent in a retroactive forecast dated back to June 1.

This is matched by Democrats’ improved position on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they would support in a congressional election. Democrats are now essentially tied with Republicans in our generic ballot polling average, after having trailed by 2 to 3 percentage points over most of the late spring and early summer.

In the Classic version of our forecast — which doesn’t use the race ratings published by the Cook Political Report and other expert groups — the movement toward Democrats has also been steady. There, their chances sit at 67 percent, up from 56 percent at launch on June 30 and 52 percent in the June 1 retroactive forecast. (We discussed some of the differences between our Classic and Deluxe versions of the forecast on this week’s podcast, and it’s a theme we’ll revisit in coming weeks.)

It’s always hard to know how much to emphasize relatively modest movement in the forecast. Sure, the difference between a 47 percent chance and a 55 percent chance might matter to a poker player (raises hand) or an options trader. But in practical terms, the story is the same, which is that the battle for Senate control is highly competitive with neither party having a clear advantage.

In this case, though, I think the shift is worth discussing. One reason, as I’ve discussed previously, is that our model is designed to be pretty conservative — at least at this relatively early stage of the race. It takes a fair amount of data to get the model to change its opinion in July, more so than in October. So although the shift may be modest, it probably isn’t just statistical noise.

The other reason is that there are plenty of news developments to help explain the shift; the political climate would appear to be getting better for Democrats.

The most important of these is probably the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Democrats have made a fairly clear improvement in the polls since then. And although abortion may not be as important to voters as the economy, it did rank as the second most important issue in this week’s Suffolk/USA Today poll.

That’s not the only factor working in Democrats’ favor, though. Consider:

-Congress has been surprisingly productive, with bipartisan bills on gun safety and semiconductor manufacturing passing, a possible breakthrough on a Democratic spending and climate bill and movement toward bills to codify same-sex marriage and to reform how presidential elections are certified.

-It’s not clear how much the Jan. 6 hearings have changed public opinion, but they have highlighted an issue where the public is relatively sympathetic toward Democrats, with 79 percent of voters saying former President Donald Trump acted either unethically or illegally in a new CNN poll.

-COVID-19 — an issue that was something of a no-win for President Biden — is on the backburner for most voters. In the aforementioned Suffolk/USA Today poll, so few voters mentioned COVID-19 as their most important issue that it wasn’t broken out as one of the 25 issues respondents named. Cases remain high, but deaths are low compared to earlier stages of the pandemic.

-Granted, the economic news hasn’t been good for Democrats. Most voters think the economy is in a recession, even though the bureau that determines recessions in the U.S. hasn’t declared one yet and may never do so. But at the same time, some highly visible indicators have improved: Gas prices are down and the stock market has been in a rebound over the past five to six weeks.

There are a lot of “ifs” here. Economists are unsure about what to expect with inflation going forward; the next COVID-19 variant could be more deadly; there are still a lot of hurdles to clear in the Democratic legislative progress (*cough* Sen. Kyrsten Sinema *cough*); and Democrats may not be able to sustain the same level of attention currently given to abortion and the Jan. 6 hearings. Plus, Biden’s approval rating remains terrible to the point where even most Democrats want a new nominee in 2024. But ultimately Democrats have a lot of outs to a winning hand in the Senate, even if they’re drawing thin in the House.

I am very hesitant about even sharing this stuff because it’s an awfully steep hill to climb, but this is a weird time in politics and, as we’ve seen, many of the usual rules don’t apply. The Democrats have broken the gridlock for the moment and are passing some significant legislation, much of it bipartisan, which is important. And the right is as batshit crazy as ever. So who knows?

The current state of DC is Biden and Dems touting a bill they say would reduce inflation, expand health care and protect the climate and Republicans responding by voting against a burn pit bill they previously voted for & a microchip bill they say is critical to national security

— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) July 28, 2022

WTF????

Blindsided veterans erupted in anger and indignation Thursday after Senate Republicans suddenly tanked a widely supported bipartisan measure that would have expanded medical coverage for millions of combatants exposed to toxic burn pits during their service. 

Supporters of the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act — or PACT Act — overwhelmingly expected the House-passed bill to sail through to the president’s desk for signature.

But in a move that shocked and confused veteran groups Wednesday night, 41 Senate Republicans blocked the bill’s passage, including 25 who had supported it a month ago.

“We really expected yesterday to be a procedural vote that would go with easy passage,” said Jeremy Butler, CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonprofit veterans’ organization. “That was the absolute expectation.”

The PACT Act would have expanded VA health care eligibility to more than 3.5 million post-9/11 combat veterans who were exposed to toxins while serving in the military. 

The Senate passed the original legislation 84-14 in June. It underwent minor changes when it moved to the House, where it passed 342-88. When the bill returned to the Senate, the bill had not changed much but the view — and vote — of 25 senators did.

While it’s unclear what prompted the flip, veterans believe the move was political.

We know why they did it. It was a temper tantrum over the Democrats outmaneuvering McConnell with the big Inflation Reduction Act. This is what it’s come to. The “why do you hate the troops so much” Republicans impulsively voted against funding for wounded Veterans out of pique.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn said overnight that he expects the bill will ultimately pass “in some form or another.” For the sake of veterans and their families, we can certainly hope so.

But for today, it looks like a whole lot of GOP lawmakers turned a cold shoulder — for no good reason — to veterans who deserved better. As the editorial board of The Kansas City Star put it, Republicans “betrayed sick veterans” with a move that “boggles the mind.”

It shouldn’t boggle the mind. The entire Republican Party has the emotional maturity of a nine year old.

Alito’s speech is an embarrassment to America

Is he the most partisan Supreme Court Justice in US history? I don’t know. But he’s got to be in the top five.:

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in a speech in Rome dismissed criticism from foreign officials who he said “lambasted” his opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that provided a constitutional right to abortion.

Speaking last week at a conference promoting religious liberty, Alito for the first time publicly spoke about the decision he wrote in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which he characterized during his remarks as the case “whose name may not be spoken.”

“I had the honor this term of writing I think the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders who felt perfectly fine commenting on American law,” Alito said.

“One of these was former [United Kingdom] prime minister Boris Johnson. But he paid the price,” Alito joked, to applause from the crowd. Johnson has been embroiled in scandal and this month announced plans to step down.

Alito spoke July 21 at the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit, sponsored by the Religious Liberty Initiative at the university’s law school. It was established in 2020 to promote “religious freedom for people of all faiths through scholarship, events, and the Law School’s Religious Liberty Clinic,” which files briefs at the Supreme Court.

Justices often do not divulge their speaking engagements in advance, and Alito’s became known Thursday after the law school issued a news release and posted a video of the speech on YouTube.

Alito said he was resisting listing examples from other countries whose defense of religious liberty he found insufficient even though he said foreign leaders — he also mentioned French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — criticized the court’s decision eliminating the federal right to abortion.

The decision sent the regulation of abortion back to the states, and since then a number have greatly restricted the procedure and 11 states have limited abortion after six weeks or effectively banned it, according to abortion rights groups.

The audience laughed at what Alito sarcastically said was the most hurtful criticism, from Britain’s Prince Harry.

“But what really wounded me — what really wounded me — was when the Duke of Sussex addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare the decision whose name may not be spoken with the Russian attack on Ukraine,” Alito said.

Isn’t he just adorable?

For the record, Alito is a snotty little bitch and Prince Harry was right when he said:

This has been a painful year in a painful decade. We’re living through a pandemic that continues to ravage communities in every corner of the globe. Climate change wreaking havoc on our planet, with the most vulnerable suffering most of all. The few weaponizing lies and disinformation at the expense of the many. And from a horrific war in Ukraine, to the rolling back of constitutional rights here in the United States, we are witnessing a global assault on democracy and freedom, the cause of Mandela’s life.

We are witnessing a global attack on democracy and freedom and one of those attacks came from the poison pen of Samuel Alito when he decided that misogynist yahoos who want to force little girls to bear their fathers’ children are perfectly within their rights to do so.

The fact that Alito feels the need to make such a bitchy remark in a speech in Europe shows that he knows exactly what a throwback he is and is proud of it. And this one isn’t on Trump, it’s on George W. Bush. This Court is a GOP group effort.