#rosa delauro

[kp777]

"Once passed, the House must swiftly take up the bill and send it to the president's desk to avoid a shutdown—giving Americans the help and resources they deserve," said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

[madamspeaker]

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (25th May, 2023)

[plitnick]

Smotrich receives a cold American welcome

While fringe American Jewish elements like the Orthodox Union, the far-right Zionit Organization of America and Israel Bonds are welcoming the racist Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, most of the American Jewish community is shunning him. Some of those publicly denouncing him are people who have heretofore hewn to the mantra of never criticizing Israel no matter how horrible its…

[filosofablogger]

Finally!!!

Last night, the House of Representatives finally, after much game-playing and many shenanigans by the likes of Margie Greene and her cohorts, passed the aid bills to fund aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.  The vote for the Ukraine package was 311 to 112, with all those objecting coming from the most conservative wing of the Republican Party.  The Senate is expected to pass the measures early…

[govtshutdown]

Not a good sign when there are contradictions in the already agreed to sections

[autisticadvocacy]

ASAN welcomes the removal of Section 722 from the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. In June, some members of Congress introduced a rider to the act that would stop the FDA from banning electric shock devices for behavior modification, such as the devices used at the Judge Rotenberg Center. Section 722 said the FDA cannot ban a device that is used by court order. All of the electric shock devices used at the Judge Rotenberg Center are used because of a court order.

If this rider had passed, it would have taken away the FDA’s power to move forward with the proposed rule that ASAN and many grassroots advocates commented to support. Because of your powerful activism, this rider failed to make it into the final bill, and the FDA still has the power to #StopTheShock.

This was only possible thanks to the hard work of our grassroots. You called, emailed, and shared across social media to make your voices heard. Members of our community have fought to end the use of shock devices at the JRC for over a decade, and we will not be ignored. Your calls, along with the hundreds of public comments sent in support of the FDA’s proposed rule, have gotten us that much closer to ending this tortuous practice once and for all. 

We also thank the many members of the House Appropriations Committee who supported removing Section 722. At last night’s markup of the bill, Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro and Representatives Chellie Pingree and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz all used their opening remarks to point out the harm this rider would have caused, and the urgent need to remove it. Subcommittee Ranking Member Sanford Bishop spoke in his remarks about our community’s work to educate the Committee members on this issue. We are thrilled that the House Appropriations Committee listened to our community on this urgent issue and acted to protect disabled people from torture.

We are grateful that this rider did not make it into the current version of the bill, but the fight isn’t over yet. The full House of Representatives, and the Senate, still need to vote on this bill. Thanks to your efforts, we have built strong bipartisan opposition to Section 722. We will continue to work with Congress to make sure this rider stays out of the final bill. Meanwhile, the FDA still needs to do their part with the power our community fought for them to keep. ASAN calls upon the FDA to swiftly release the final version of their proposed rule “Banned Devices; Proposal to Ban Electrical Stimulation Devices for Self-Injurious or Aggressive Behavior.”

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network seeks to advance the principles of the disability rights movement with regard to autism. ASAN believes that the goal of autism advocacy should be a world in which autistic people enjoy equal access, rights, and opportunities. We work to empower autistic people across the world to take control of our own lives and the future of our common community, and seek to organize the autistic community to ensure our voices are heard in the national conversation about us. Nothing About Us, Without Us!

[odinsblog]

False Equivalence

Why does the mainstream media keep depicting lunatic-right Republicans and normal Democrats as equidistant from the center?

With the final passage of the debt ceiling deal, Democrats got off easier than one might have expected, given that it was a deal between a mainstream Democratic president and a Republican House in thrall to the lunatic far right. In drastic contrast to the scorched-earth budget bill initially passed by the Republican-controlled House, the cuts were about par for the course in a divided government; and they spare the country a repeat of this debt-hostage ordeal for two years.

However, much of the media played the agreement as a compromise between two equal extremes. The New York Times story about the House passage of the deal included this astonishing sentence: "With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks."

Think about that for a moment. There is no doubt that Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar et al. are far-right by any definition, as white supremacists, Christian nationalists, election deniers, and nihilists on fiscal policy.

But no Democrats in the House can fairly be described as hard left. Those who voted against the deal included moderate liberals such as Joaquin Castro, mainstream progressives like Rosa DeLauro and Jan Schakowsky, as well as self-described democratic socialists including Cori Bush and AOC. But none of them are "hard left," which suggests anti-democratic, any more than Franklin Roosevelt was hard left.

The Times coverage reinforces a narrative of false equivalence that the media keeps repeating, with lazy catchphrases like "partisan bickering." It also plays into the hands of corrupt No Labels and Third Way types, who promote the idea that the best course for the republic is to split the difference between neofascists and a normal mainstream Democratic Party and president.

Big media, obsessed as it is with the appearance of fair and balanced coverage, took years to give itself permission to accurately describe Donald Trump with the impolite word "liar." But its treatment of the two parties as in any sense symmetrical is far more insidious than using euphemisms to characterize Trump’s lies.

Our friend Peter Dreier, whose observations inspired this post, points out that by any reasonable definition, "even the most left-oriented Democrats (AOC, Bush, Bowman, Raskin, Jayapal) are not extremists. They are shades of social democrats. They are pro-union, pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-LGBT equality, pro-Green New Deal, pro-progressive taxation. But the most right-wing Republicans are extremists and reactionaries."

(continue reading)

[mariacallous]

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Six U.S. House of Representatives Democrats returned from an Israel trip accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “utter disregard for Palestinian lives” and fearing that he is moving toward Gaza’s “total destruction.”

The Democrats — including the most senior Democrat on the House  appropriations committee, Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut — made the comments in a statement issued Friday. They represent the breadth of the party’s ideologies and include several with pro-Israel records.

The statement came as President Joe Biden said he would airdrop assistance into the Gaza Strip after more than 100 Gaza Palestinians died during a chaotic aid delivery under disputed circumstances on Thursday.

Speaking briefly Friday with reporters in the Oval Office, Biden called the event “tragic and  alarming.”

“We need to do more, and the United States will do more,” he said. “In the coming days, we’re going to join with our friends in Jordan and others who have provided air drops of additional food and supplies.”

The recommendations in the joint statement signed by DeLauro, Sean Casten of Illinois, Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, Becca Balint of Vermont, and Salud Carvajal and Mark Takano of California were in line with President Joe Biden’s policies, including a call for a six-week ceasefire to facilitate the release of all hostages held by Hamas and the entry of direly needed humanitarian assistance into the Gaza Strip.

But the tone was extraordinary, and could only be seen as a warning that Democrats in the House would continue to veer sharply away from Israel as long as Netanyahu is prime minister.

The six Democrats squarely blamed Netanyahu for the failure to get relief to the Palestinians.

“We are deeply worried that Prime Minister Netanyahu is moving toward the total destruction of Gaza and has demonstrated an utter disregard for Palestinian lives,” the statement said. “Nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been killed – with almost 70,000 more injured and thousands missing. He has shamefully been unwilling to allow humanitarian services in at the scale needed.”

Biden, too, seemed more ready than he has in the past to squarely place responsibility for aid delivery on Israel.

“We’re going to insist that Israel facilitate more trucks and more routes to give more and more people the help they need,” he said. “No excuses. Because the truth is aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough.”

Biden has been at pains to defend Israel from charges that it is committing genocide in Gaza, and has until now accepted, to a degree, Israel’s claims that it is not alone to blame for the failure of assistance to enter the strip. Israel says Hamas steals the aid and that it must also contend with a chaotic reality as the war drags on.

Biden’s envoys to the United Nations on Thursday blocked a Security Council resolution that would have blamed Israel for the deadly humanitarian aid debacle. Israel contends that the vast majority of deaths were caused by a stampede, while Hamas says Israeli gunfire was mostly to blame.

On Friday, the number of Palestinians killed since Israel launched counterstrikes topped 30,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between combatants and civilians. Israel says that more than a third of the dead are combatants.

Israel launched the counterstrikes after Hamas terrorists raided Israel on Oct. 7, massacring 1,200 people and abducting more than 250. The statement from the six Congress members condemns the massacres at the outset and called for the immediate release of the more than 130 hostages remaining captive, of whom about 100 are thought to remain alive.

Hamas said Friday that seven hostages, including three elderly men who appeared in a video it distributed some time ago, had been killed. The group has previously announced the death of a hostage who was later released alive.

The six lawmakers traveled to Israel as part of a delegation organized by J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group that has affiliated political action committees.

DeLauro, who led the delegation, stands out: In addition to being the top Democrat on the powerful Appropriations Committee, she is a member of the House Democratic leadership and has in the past been close to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the preeminent mainstream pro-Israel lobby. AIPAC’s affiliated political action committee has endorsed her. She is married to pollster Stanley Greenberg, who has been active in pro-Israel advocacy.

But the others are also significant: Casten in 2022 unseated Marie Newman in a primary, a victory propelled in part by pro-Israel anger at her policies. Carbajal is a member of Problem Solvers Caucus, which unites moderates of both parties. Balint is Jewish and a member of the Progressive Congressional Caucus. Dean’s Philadelphia-area district has a substantial Jewish population.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the J Street president who accompanied the delegation, said the lawmakers were moved by how officials across the spectrum — in Netanyahu’s government, in the opposition and in the Palestinian Authority — saw the U.S. role as “indispensable.”

“If the United States doesn’t lead some kind of a very large initiative to come out of this in a better place, nothing is going to happen,” Ben-Ami said.

He said the six saw up close the devastation wrought by the Oct. 7 attacks and their aftermath, staying in a hotel housing evacuees from Israel’s northern border, where Hezbollah is firing rockets into Israel in support of Hamas.

“The children are playing on the couches next to the members in the lobby as we’re getting ready to go on a tour,” he said. “It’s in the breakfast hall in the morning. The families are getting ready for school and the members are there, getting food right next to them.”

[kp777]

By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

July 6, 2024

One leading Democrat warned Republicans' spending proposals would "demolish public education" and "let corporate price gouging run rampant."

With much of the public's attention on the looming presidential election and high-stakes jockeying over who will take on Donald Trump in November, congressional Republicans in recent weeks have provided a stark look at their plans for federal spending should their party win back control of the presidency and the Senate.

The appropriations process for Fiscal Year 2025, which begins in October, is currently underway, with congressional committees engaging in government funding debates that are likely to continue beyond the November elections.

In keeping with their longstanding support for austerity for ordinary Americans, Republicans in the House and Senate have proposed steep cuts to a wide range of federal programs and agencies dealing with education, environmental protection, Social Security, election administration, national parks, nutrition assistance, antitrust enforcement, global health, and more—all while they pursue additional deficit-exploding tax giveaways for the rich.

"Some of the most concerning policy riders in the House Fiscal Year 2025 budget bills include mandates for new oil and gas leasing, prohibitions on the establishment of important protected areas for wildlife and natural ecosystems, and limitations that hinder federal agency ability to regulate polluters, putting water quality, air quality, and the climate at risk," the Surfrider Foundation noted in a statement earlier this week.

"Two of the key federal agencies that administer these programs are the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), yet the House budget bills call for a 20% funding cut to the EPA, and a 12% funding cut to NOAA," the group added.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, has been attempting to sound the alarm over the GOP's proposals, which she has warned would "demolish public education," endanger the health of women and children, gut mental health programs, "let corporate price gouging run rampant," and "expose children to dangerous products."

"I respectfully request that those on the other side of the aisle go back to the drawing board and come back with a new slate of workable subcommittee allocations across all 12 bills so that we can proceed with the important business of our 2025 appropriations work," DeLauro said during a markup hearing last month.

But Republican lawmakers have made clear that they are bent on pursuing steep cuts across the federal government, proposing spending levels well below the caps implemented by the Fiscal Responsibility Act, legislation that suspended the debt limit through January 1, 2025.

"House Republicans now intend to fund 2025 non-defense appropriations bills 6% below the 2024 level rather than provide the 1% increase" negotiated in 2023, noted David Reich, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Republicans in the Senate have also pushed for damaging cuts to non-military spending as the upper chamber prepares to hold markup hearings for its appropriations bills next week.

The Food Research & Action Center warned in a recent statement that legislation put forth by the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee would slash Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits by $30 billion over the next decade, jeopardizing critical food aid for tens of millions of people as hunger rises.

According to a May report by Feeding America, "the extra amount of money that people facing hunger said they need to have enough food" has "reached its highest point in the last 20 years."

Congressional Republicans' spending proposals for next fiscal year are in line with the draconian cuts pushed by Project 2025, a sweeping far-right agenda from which Trump—the presumptive GOP presidential nominee—is attempting to distance himself as horror grows over the initiative's vision for the country.

Project 2025's 922-page policy document calls for more punitive work requirements for SNAP recipients, massive cuts to Medicaid, the abolition of the Department of Education, the elimination of major clean energy programs, and the gutting of key Wall Street regulations.

"Despite Trump's claims to have 'nothing to do with' Project 2025, his administration and campaign personnel contributed to the project," The Intercept's Shawn Musgrave wrote Friday. "Former Trump administration officials wrote and edited massive chunks of the manifesto. One of its two primary editors, Paul Dans, who directs the Heritage Foundation's 2025 Presidential Transition Project, served as the White House liaison for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, among other positions."

"Rick Dearborn, who was briefly Trump's deputy chief of staff, wrote the White House chapter," Musgrave added. "Russ Vought, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the chapter on OMB and similar executive offices."

[madamspeaker]

Nancy and Rosa

[bighermie]

Democrat Rep. Rosa DeLauro Comes Unglued During Committee Hearing, Says Republicans Are "Terrorists" For Disagreeing with Her (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit | by Cristina Laila

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

House Republicans are making clear that they intend to seek cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare with their new majority in the 118th Congress.

Their plans to target health care programs follow demands from a group of conservatives that helped elect House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over the weekend. Those far-right lawmakers have sought across-the-board spending cuts in order to tackle the growing national debt.

But the narrow House GOP majority ― McCarthy can afford to lose just four votes on any bill ― is far more divided on cuts to defense spending than for entitlement programs.

“I’m all for a balanced budget, but we’re not going to do it on the backs of our troops and our military,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), a former Army Green Beret, said Monday during an interview on Fox Business. “If we really want to talk about the debt and spending, it’s the entitlements programs.”

As part of his list of concessions to conservatives, McCarthy reportedly agreed to cap spending for the next year at fiscal 2022 levels, which would amount to over $130 billion in cuts from last month’s $1.7 trillion government funding bill.

Republicans don’t plan to alter benefits for current Social Security and Medicare recipients, according to Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).

“What we have been very clear about is, we’re not going to touch the benefits that are going to people relying on the benefits under Social Security and Medicare,” Roy said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But we all have to be honest about sitting at the table and figuring out how we’re going to make those work, how we’re going to deal with defense spending and how we’re going to deal with nondefense discretionary spending.”

The Republican Study Committee proposed a budget for fiscal 2023 that would gradually increase the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare, and change the Social Security benefit formula for people 54 and younger, while not changing it for people closer to receiving benefits.

Democrats are likely to oppose those changes, as well as any cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and an ensuing standoff could result in another government shutdown. The 2018-2019 lapse in federal funding lasted 35 days after a fight over former President Donald Trump’s border policies and immigration.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, warned last week that Republicans were “all but guaranteeing a shutdown” by demanding to cap spending at fiscal 2022 levels.

“These types of cuts would harm communities and families across the United States who are already struggling with inflation and the rising cost of living,” DeLauro said in a statement. “They put support for our Veterans, law enforcement, small businesses, and military families at risk.”

[progressivepower]

Democrats Fear GOP Plans For Deeper Spending Cuts Could Lead To Government Shutdown. “It is a prelude to a shutdown — what they are engineering,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) following an announcement from GOP leadership. http://ow.ly/MGKA104KVwa

[jordanianroyals]

21 September 2023: Crown Prince Hussein held separate meetings with US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy and members of US Congress committees.

At the meeting with the House speaker, he stressed the deep-rooted ties between Jordan and the United States and keenness to advance them, while expanding cooperation across various sectors and maintaining coordination on issues of mutual concern.

Meeting with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and US Representative Rosa DeLauro, the Democrat Ranking Member on the House Appropriations Committee, Crown Prince Hussein highlighted the importance of the strategic partnership between Jordan and the United States, expressing keenness on expanding cooperation and maintaining coordination on several issues and regional challenges.

At another meeting with Senator Mike Rounds, who heads the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity affiliated with the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, the Crown Prince expressed appreciation for Congress committees’ continuous support to Jordan, especially in economic cooperation, as well as defence and cybersecurity.

HRH said Jordan is moving forward with investing in ICT, as a major driver in the Kingdom’s digital future.

While meeting with senior members of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Senators Alex Carnes and Paul Grove, the Crown Prince highlighted the importance of the “fruitful” and “valuable” meetings in Washington, DC, to communicate with Jordan’s friends in Congress.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Christopher Weyant, The Boston Globe

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Members of the House of Representatives returned to work today after their summer break. They came back to a fierce fight over funding the government before the September 30 deadline, with only 12 days of legislative work on the calendar. That fight is also tangled up with Republican extremists’ demands to impeach President Joe Biden—although even members of their own caucus admit there are no grounds for such an impeachment—and threats to the continued position of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as speaker of the House.

It’s an omnishambles, a word coined in 2009 by the writers of the BBC political satire The Thick of It, meaning “a situation, especially in politics, in which poor judgment results in disorder or chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.” 

It fits. 

In August, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed 12 spending bills covering discretionary funding—about 27% of the budget—by bipartisan votes, within limits set as part of the deal Speaker McCarthy made with President Biden to prevent the U.S. defaulting for the first time in history. 

But the House left for summer break without being able to pass more than one of the 12 necessary bills. The extremists in the House Freedom Caucus oppose the spending levels Biden and McCarthy negotiated, insisting they amount to “socialism,” although with the exception of the Covid-19 blip, discretionary federal spending has stayed level at about 20% of the nation’s gross domestic product since 1954. 

The Republican-dominated House Appropriations Committee has reneged on the deal McCarthy struck, producing bills that impose cuts far beyond those McCarthy agreed to. In particular, it cut Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding for programs to address climate change and the Internal Revenue Service, which has been badly underfunded since at least 2010, leaving wealthy tax cheats unaudited. The cuts are ideological: the bills have cut funding for food assistance programs for pregnant mothers and children, grants to school districts serving impoverished communities, the Environmental Protection Agency, agencies that protect workers’ rights, federal agencies’ civil rights offices, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the IRS (on top of clawing back funding in the IRA), and so on.

Although appropriations bills are generally kept clean, the extremists have loaded the must-pass bills with demands unrelated to the bill itself. They have put measures restricting abortion and gender-affirming care in at least 8 of the 12 bills. Even if such measures could make it through the Democrat-dominated Senate—and they can’t—President Biden has vowed to veto them. 

Even fellow Republicans are balking at the attempt of the extremists to get their ideological wish list by holding the government hostage. Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters she doesn’t see how the Republicans are going to get the bills out of the committee, let alone pass them. “Overall, I think it's going to be very, very hard to get these bills forward,” she said.

Far from negotiating with McCarthy over the break, Freedom Caucus members appear to be increasing their demands as a shutdown looms. In August, the caucus announced it would not support even a short-term funding bill unless it also included their own demands for border policy, an end to what they call “woke” policies in the Department of Defense, and what they call the “unprecedented weaponization” of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They also oppose funding for Ukraine to enable it to fight off Russia’s invasion.

They have hinted they will use procedural votes to prevent any large spending bill from getting to the floor at all. One of the tools at their disposal is a challenge to McCarthy’s leadership, which thanks to the deal he struck to get the speakership in the first place, a single member can bring. Today, Florida representative Matt Gaetz threatened to “lead the resistance” if McCarthy worked with Democrats to fund the government. 

They have offered McCarthy a way to avoid that showdown: impeach President Joe Biden, although there is no evidence the president has committed any “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for an impeachment. 

Today, McCarthy availed himself of that escape clause. On the first day back from a 45-day August break, rather than tackling the budget crises, he endorsed an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. 

This is a fascinating moment, as the Republicans have opened an impeachment inquiry into Biden with no evidence of wrongdoing. For all their breathless statements before the TV cameras, they have not managed to produce any evidence. Trump's own Department of Justice opened an investigation into Biden four years ago and found nothing to charge. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, Biden’s taxes are public, and a U.S. attorney has been scrutinizing Biden’s son Hunter for years; red flags should have been apparent long ago, if there were any.

Just yesterday, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tore apart the talking points far-right Republicans have been using to smear the president. He noted that none of the bank records Representative James Comer (R-KY) has referenced show any payments to President Biden, none of the suspicious activity reports the Oversight Committee has reviewed suggest any potential misconduct by Biden, none of the witness accounts to the Oversight Committee show any wrongdoing by Biden, Hunter Biden’s former business associates explicitly stated they had no reason to think President Biden was involved in his son’s business ventures, and so on. 

This inquiry is not actually about wrongdoing; it is a reiteration of the same plan Trump tried to execute in 2019 when he asked Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Biden before the 2020 presidential election. By launching an inquiry, Republicans can count on their false accusations spreading through the media, tainting their opponents even without evidence of wrongdoing. See, for example, Clinton, Hillary: emails. 

McCarthy insisted to reporters that an impeachment inquiry would simply give House committees leverage to subpoena officials from the White House, but during the Trump administration, the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the House must take a formal vote to validate an impeachment inquiry. It did so in reaction to then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s launch of an impeachment inquiry without such a vote, and the decision invalidated subpoenas issued as part of that inquiry. Pelosi went on to hold a vote and to launch an official inquiry.

It will not be so easy for McCarthy. He has not wanted to hold a vote because outside of the Freedom Caucus, even Republicans don’t want to launch an impeachment inquiry when there is no evidence for one. Senate Republicans today were quick to tell reporters they were skeptical that McCarthy could get enough votes in the House for an article of impeachment, and they were clear that a Senate trial was not an option. Representative Ken Buck (R-CO), himself a member of the Freedom Caucus, said: “The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence linking President Biden—if there’s evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor. That doesn’t exist right now.” 

The attack on Biden is a transparent attempt to defend former president Trump from his own legal troubles by suggesting that Biden is just as bad. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin today also defended Trump, saying that his prosecutions show that the United States is fundamentally corrupt. His comment made former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) seem to wash her hands of the modern incarnation of her political party. “Putin has now officially endorsed the Putin-wing of the Republican Party,” she wrote. “Putin Republicans & their enablers will end up on the ash heap of history. Patriotic Americans in both parties who believe in the values of liberal democracy will make sure of it.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) summed up the day: “So let me get this straight: Republicans are threatening to remove their own Speaker, impeach the President, and shut down the government on September 30th—disrupting everyday people’s paychecks and general public operations. For what? I don’t think even they know.”

The center-right think tank American Action Forum’s vice president for economic policy, Gordon Gray, had an answer. Ever since the debt ceiling fight was resolved, he told Joan E. Greve of The Guardian, “there’s a big chunk of House Republicans who just want to break something. That’s just how some of these folks define governing. It’s how their constituents define success.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON