#senate republicans

[liberalsarecool]

Republicans want open borders. Their own rhetoric, not mine. Just like they did in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 when Trump was in office. It's all performance.

You want to never solve issues? Vote for the asinine fools in the Republican Party.

#VoteBlue

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The vast majority of the Senate Republican caucus united last week to introduce a bill that would permanently repeal the estate tax, targeting one of the few provisions in the U.S. tax code that solely affects the richest 0.1% of Americans.

Led by Sen. John Thune (South Dakota), the top Republican on the Senate Subcommittee on Taxation and Internal Revenue Service Oversight, 40 Republicans reintroduced their bill to ensure that ultra-rich individuals seeking to hand off tens of millions of dollars — or more — to their heirs can do so completely tax-free. The extremely regressive proposal has been a longtime goal of Republicans, who have already massively watered down the estate tax in past years.

Currently, the estate tax threshold is $12.9 million, and nearly $26 million for couples. Amounts under this are exempted from taxes. This is nearly triple the threshold from 2016 and earlier, as Republicans more than doubled the estate tax cutoff in their major tax overhaul in 2017. The threshold is now so high that it is estimated that less than 0.1% of Americans are subject to the tax.

Evidently, these tax cuts are still not enough for Republicans, who had tried to repeal the tax altogether in 2017. In a press release on the bill, Thune, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) attempted to couch their support of the repeal in efforts to supposedly support farmers — claims that reveal themselves to be a farce when more closely examined.

“For years I have fought to protect farm and ranch families from the onerous and unfair death tax,” Thune said. “Family-owned farms and ranches often bear the brunt of this tax, which makes it difficult and costly to pass these businesses down to future generations.”

Thune’s statement is a misrepresentation of the truth. The vast, vast majority of “family-owned farms” are not subject to the estate tax. In 2020, a mere 0.16% of farm estates owed the tax, according to data from the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This is an exceedingly small number of farms. As the Tax Policy Center estimated, only 50 farms total paid any estate tax in 2017, and this research was done before lawmakers doubled the threshold.

The criticism of the estate tax in defense of farmers is disingenuous for another reason, as Inequality.org pointed out in a blog post this week. The tax code “already has provisions that protect the very few families with farms and businesses subject to estate tax,” wrote Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow and senior adviser for Patriotic Millionaires Bob Lord. “If the bill sponsors truly cared about family farms, ranches, and businesses, they could have proposed legislation to expand these protections but leave the estate tax intact.”

In reality, deep-pocketed lobbyists with the Farm Bureau have long been pushing a repeal of the estate tax — and the group’s deep ties to big business and Wall Street are well documented.

Perhaps not coincidentally, repealing the estate tax would complete the loop of tax avoidance for the wealthiest Americans. The bill targets the “die” part of “buy borrow die,” a common tax dodging scheme used by the wealthy to avoid paying taxes; it is part of the reason that the wealthiest Americans are able to pay little to no taxes year over year.

In the practice of buying, borrowing, and dying, the rich first pour their wealth into assets like stocks, building up a large portfolio. Those assets are then used as collateral for taking out large loans with low interest rates — lower than, say, the income tax rate — that become a wealthy person’s spending money. Then, they die, and hand off their wealth to the next generation, maintaining their dynasty for decades to come.

At very few points do taxes come into the buy, borrow, die equation. Buying and keeping stocks doesn’t incur a tax bill. Taking out loans allows the wealthy to claim very low incomes to skirt income taxes. The estate tax is essentially the only guarantee, and even then, the wealthy have come up with extreme loopholes to dodge the estate tax, too. Republicans, then, are hoping to make tax avoidance even easier by legalizing it entirely; Lord has pointedly labeled the bill the “Billionaires Pay Zero Tax Act.”

The proposal stands in sharp contrast to progressives’ views on taxation. Pointing to extreme and growing wealth inequality, progressives have been calling for increasing taxes on the rich and specifically targeting their wealth and stock portfolios, rather than endlessly allowing the “buy” and “borrow” portions of the cycle.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune :: @Patbagley

* * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 11, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

DEC 12, 2023

As is sometimes the case in American politics, a bill that many people are likely not paying a great deal of attention to is likely to have enormous impact on the nation’s future. 

That $110.5 billion national security supplemental package was designed to provide additional funding for Ukraine in its war to fight off Russia’s invasion; security assistance to Israel, primarily for missile defense systems; humanitarian assistance to citizens in Gaza and the West Bank, Ukraine, and elsewhere; funding to replenish U.S. weapon stockpiles; assistance to regional partners in the Indo-Pacific; investments in efforts to stop illegal fentanyl from coming into the U.S. and to dismantle international drug cartels; and investment in U.S. Customs and Border Protection to enhance border security and speed up migrant processing. 

President Joe Biden asked for the supplemental funding in late October. Such a package is broadly popular among lawmakers of both parties who like that Ukraine is holding back Russian expansion that would threaten countries that make up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). If Russia attacks a NATO country, all NATO members, including the U.S., are required to respond. 

Since supplying Ukraine with weapons to maintain its fight essentially means sending Ukraine outdated weapons while paying U.S. workers to build new ones, creating jobs largely in Republican-dominated states, and since Ukraine is weakening Russia for about 5% of the U.S. defense budget, it would seem to be a program both parties would want to maintain. Today, even Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “If Ukraine loses, the cost to America will be far greater than the aid we have given Ukraine. The least costly way to move forward is to provide Ukraine with the weapons needed to win and end the war.”

But now that former president Trump has made immigration a leading part of his campaign and a Trump loyalist, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is House speaker, Republican extremists are demanding their own immigration policies be added to the package. 

Those demands amount to a so-called poison pill for the measure. The House Republicans' own immigration bill significantly narrows the right to apply for asylum in the U.S.—which is a right recognized in both domestic and international law—and prevents the federal government from permitting blanket asylum in emergency cases, such as for Afghan and Ukrainian refugees. It ends the asylum program that permits people to enter the U.S. with a sponsor, a program that has reduced illegal entry by up to 95%. 

It requires the government to build Trump’s wall and allows the seizure of private land to do it. 

When the House passed its immigration measure in May 2023, the administration responded that it “strongly supports productive efforts to reform the Nation’s immigration system” but opposed this measure, “which makes elements of our immigration system worse.”

And yet House Republicans are so determined to force the country to accept their extreme anti-immigration policies, they are willing to kill the aid to Ukraine that even their own lawmakers want, leaving that country undersupplied as it goes into the winter. 

When he brought the supplemental bill up last week, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) promised the Republicans that he would let them make whatever immigration amendments they wanted to the bill to be voted on, if only they would let the bill get to the floor. But all Senate Republicans refused, essentially threatening to use the filibuster to keep the measure from the floor until it includes the House Republicans' demands.

This unwillingness to fund a crucial partner in its fight against Russia has resurrected concerns that the Trump-supporting MAGA Republicans are working not for the United States but for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who badly needs the U.S. to abandon Ukraine in order to help him win his war. 

Media outlets in Moscow reinforced this sense when they celebrated the Senate vote, gloating that Ukraine is now in “agony” and that it was “difficult to imagine a bigger humiliation.” One analyst said: “The downfall of Ukraine means the downfall of Biden! Two birds with one stone!” Another: “Well done, Republicans! They’re standing firm! That’s good for us.”

Today, allies of Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán were in Washington, D.C., where they are participating in an effort to derail further military support for Ukraine (an effort that in itself suggests Putin is concerned about how the war is going). Flora Garamvolgyi and David Smith of The Guardian explained that the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank, which leads Project 2025—the far-right blueprint for a MAGA administration—and which strongly opposes aid to Ukraine, is hosting a two-day event about the war and about “transatlantic culture wars.”

This conference appears explicitly to tie the themes of the far right to an attack on Ukraine aid. Orbán has dismantled democracy in his own country, charging that the equality before the law established in democracies weakens a nation both by allowing immigration and by accepting that women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people should have the same rights as heterosexual white men, principles that he maintains undermine Christianity. In Hungary, Orbán has cracked down on immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and women’s rights while gathering power into his own hands. 

In the U.S. the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and its allies—including former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson and Arizona representative Paul Gosar—openly admire Orbán’s Hungary as a model for the U.S. Indeed, some of the anti-LGBTQ+ laws Florida governor Ron DeSantis has pushed through the Florida legislature appear to have been patterned directly on Hungarian laws.

Orbán—a close ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who embraces the same “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” Orbán does—is currently working to stop the European Union from funding Ukraine. Now Orbán’s allies are openly urging their right-wing counterparts in the U.S. to join him in backing Putin. A diplomatic source close to the Hungarian embassy told Garamvolgyi and Smith: “Orbán is confident that the Ukraine aid will not pass in Congress. That is why he is trying to block assistance from the EU as well.”

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul today noted that even the delay in funding has hurt the U.S. “Delaying a vote on aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan will do great damage to America's reputation as a reliable global leader in a very dangerous world. Delay is a gift to Putin, Xi, and the mullahs in Iran,” he wrote. “The stakes are very high.” 

Republican determination to push their own immigration plan seems in part to be an attempt to come up with an issue to compete with abortion as the central concern of the 2024 election. As soon as he took office, Biden asked for funding to increase border security and process asylum seekers, and he has repeatedly said he wants to modernize the immigration system. To pass the national security supplemental appropriation, he has emphasized that he is willing to compromise on immigration, but the Republicans are insisting instead on a policy that echoes Trump’s extreme policies.

Immigration, on which Orbán rose to power, has the potential to outweigh abortion, which is hurting Republicans quite badly.

We’ll see. The story out of Texas, where 31-year-old Kate Cox has been unable to get an abortion despite the fact that the fetus she is carrying has a fatal condition and the pregnancy is endangering her health and her ability to carry another child in the future, illuminates just how dangerous the Republicans’ abortion bans are. Under Texas’s abortion ban, doctors would not perform an abortion, so Cox went to a state court for permission to obtain one. 

The state court ruled in Cox’s favor, but Texas attorney general Ken Paxton immediately  threatened any doctor who performed the abortion, and appealed to the Texas Supreme Court to block the lower court’s order, saying that allowing Cox to obtain an abortion would irreparably harm the people of Texas. All nine of the justices on the state supreme court are Republicans. 

Late Friday night the Texas Supreme Court blocked the lower court’s order, pending review, and today, Cox’s lawyers said she had left the state to obtain urgently needed health care. This evening the Texas Supreme Court ruled against Cox, saying she was not entitled to a medical exception from the state’s abortion ban. 

The image of a woman forced by the state to carry a fetus with a fatal condition at the risk of her own health and future fertility until finally she has to flee her state for medical care is one that will not be erased easily.

Meanwhile, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has disappeared. His lawyer says he was told Navalny was “no longer listed” in the files of the prison where he was being held, and Navalny’s associates have not been able to contact him for six days. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[meandmybigmouth]

LMAO! “FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE’? THESE MOFO’S CONSISTENTLY PISS AWAY TRILLIONS  WHILE AT THE SAME TIME REFUSES TO DISCLOSE THEIR DARK MONEY DONORS?. THIS SOB WOULD LET YOUR CHILD DIE IN A HEARTBEAT IF HE COULD PROFIT PERSONALLY OR POLITICALLY FROM IT ! 

[stljedi]

Sexist Star Wars Fans - Sith

[notyouraveragebozo]

Questions that have not been answered.

From Business Insider: Senators struggle without their phones at Trump's impeachment trial, where all electronics are banned

Rosie Perper 

Jan 23, 2020, 3:14 PM EST...

[picture of cellphone bin] A storage unit for phone stands next to the entrance of the Senate chamber on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020.Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Some US senators seemed to have a hard time following the strict no-phone policy while listening in on 12-hour days of arguments during the impeachment trial.

The Senate prohibits members from bringing cell phones into the chamber, and the decorum guidelines for the trial specifically said all electronic devices were banned.

It was previously reported that Sen. Ted Cruz had his phone on the Senate floor, but his communications director later clarified that he did not.

_____________________ The following video clip was made in the minutes before the Vote to Impeach Trump was taken in the Senate, on February 5th, 2020. The cellphone ban was in place - the trial had not been taken to its conclusion, when, as Senate Majority leader McConnell was talking,... Senator Richard C. Shelby, of Alabama, seated behind McConnell, pulls a phone out from his shirt pocket on the floor of the Senate,... makes 5, rapid, sideways swipes on his phone, puts phone back in his shirt, then presses his palms together as if praying, then quickly rubbing palms, presses his fingers into his chin. He then looks across isle in front of him, as he palms one fist, then after a seeming knuckle-crack gesture, he raises his right hand, assisted by his left, raises up, to point his index finger, with an upward, moving fashion, along the right side of his nose,... then palms a fist again, and then lightly adjusts the collar of his shirt at his tie, (with a slight sideways index finger gesture at his throat) as he displays a wry smile, and a sideways face-pull,... palms his fist again, and follows it with both hands fingers pressing on his lower lip, as he forms a scowl, and scans the room, after which he seems 'resigned', then, makes to close up his jacket so the cloth covers his shirt pocket which contains the illegal cell phone. This happened, here is the clip. @arimelber and @msnbc adding your names because you are the news folk I have shared most. I think this was forgotten, on that day.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked efforts by Senate Democrats to pass an assault weapons ban and universal background checks legislation after the United States over the weekend broke the record for the most mass shootings in a single year.

Republican Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) objected to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) request for unanimous consent to pass the assault weapons ban, despite the pleas of Democratic senators who took to the Senate floor to cite the harrowing statistics of gun violence in America.

“The scourge of gun violence in America is a national crisis. The American people are sick and tired of enduring one mass shooting after another. They’re sick and tired of vigil and moments of silence for family, friends, classmates, coworkers,” Schumer argued on the Senate floor.

The assault weapons ban, originally sponsored by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), would ban semiautomatic rifles with pistol grips, forward grips and folding or telescoping stocks, as well as rifles outfitted with grenade launchers, barrel shrouds or threaded barrels to allow for noise and flash suppressors to be attached.

But Barrasso argued that the Democratic-drafted bill would infringe on the Second Amendment and deprive law-abiding gun owners of an important liberty.

“Americans have a constitutional right to own a firearm. Every day, people across Wyoming responsibly use their Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms,” he said. “Democrats are demanding that the American people give up their liberty.”

He said that Democrats are trying to ban many types of semiautomatic firearms “because of the way they look.”

He asserted that popular rifles such as AR-15s “work the same way as popular shotguns and other rifles used for hunting and personal protection.”

“The Second Amendment is freedom’s essential safeguard. Without it, there can be no liberty and there can be no security. So Mr. President, I object.”

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.) later stood up on the floor to ask for unanimous consent to pass legislation to require universal background checks for firearms purchases.

“We don’t have more mental illness in this country, we don’t spend less money on law enforcement, we don’t have angrier people, we have more guns, and we are much more permissive in this country about allowing felons, dangerous people, to get their hands on guns,” he said.

A Gallup poll conducted in June 2022 found that 92% of Americans favor requiring background checks for all firearm sales.

“This just feels like a test of democracy. It really does. Like, how does democracy survive if 90% of Americans, 90% of Republicans, 90% of Democrats want something, and we can’t deliver it?” Murphy asked before he asked for unanimous consent to pass the background checks bill.

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee took to the floor immediately to object.

“I want to note at the outset we’re not asked to vote in this chamber on polling questions. We vote on legislation,” he said.

He said the legislation to expand background checks “has some real problems with it.”

“This is not solely about transactions involving guns at gun stores. This is about the father who wishes to pass down a hunting rifle to his son or the friend who wants to lend a shotgun to his neighbor who is in need of protection at the time,” Lee said before objecting to Murphy’s request.

[govtshutdown]

I was hoping for a Christmas break, but no.

[thenewdemocratus]

New York Daily News: S.E. Cupp: 'State of The Union a Window Into Obama's Mind'

Source:New York Daily News What I don’t think that S.E. Cupp gets that is of course President Obama was taking a victory lap last night. Which is his right, because the economy is finally moving and moving well. No longer are we talking about one-percent economic growth and creating somewhere around a hundred-thousand jobs per month, with unemployment still well over seven-percent. We are seeing…

[basharmidhat-blog]

Senate Republicans seek drastic asylum limits in emergency funding package

Senate Republicans seek drastic asylum limits in emergency funding package

Washington — Senate Republicans are seeking drastic limits on asylum and other immigration programs in an emergency funding package requested by President Biden that includes billions of dollars for Ukraine, Israel and other national security priorities, according to an outline of the senators’ priorities released Monday. A memo by Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and James Lankford…

[ttpd-chair]

(Article written on 10/27/2023) Don’t let Republican Senators fool you, they’re just as bigoted as House Republicans - case in point, they want to allow schools to deny lunches to LGBTQ+ kids.

[headlinehorizon]

Bipartisan Unity to Protect School Hunting and Archery Programs: Latest News on the Headline Horizon

Senate Republicans and Democrats come together in a show of rare unity to oppose the Biden administration's crackdown on school hunting education and archery programs. Find out more about their fight to restore funding for these vital enrichment activities.

[worldofwardcraft]

Dumb as a bag of hair.

May 18, 2023

The competition to be named the most brainless person in the US Senate is always tight because it's generally confined to Republicans. And, after all, stupidity is now one of the major planks in the GOP platform. Which explains why you have Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee proposing that grandparents be armed to guard schools. Or Missouri's Josh Hawley demanding that additional tariffs on China be part of the ransom for raising the debt ceiling. Or Utah's Mike Lee routinely declaring that every policy, statute and government agency he doesn't like is unconstitutional.

But one senator who has turned weak mindedness into a distinctive art form is Alabama's Tommy Tuberville (pictured above deep in thought). A former college football coach, Tuberville holds a Bachelor's degree in physical education from Southern Arkansas University (known far and wide as "the Harvard of southern Arkansas"). Add to this his total lack of any governmental experience, and you can see why Alabama Republicans would think ol' Tommy had all the right qualifications for public office.

Amazingly, in less than three years as a Senator, Tuberville has taken right-wing idiocy to new heights (or, possibly, depths). Even before he got elected, he flaunted his jaw-dropping ignorance. In an interview in 2020, he apparently forgot we have a Supreme Court when he told the Alabama Daily News,

Our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government — wasn’t set up that way. You know, the House, the Senate, and the executive.

Tuberville recently criticized the military for trying to cleanse its ranks of white nationalists. “I look at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican. That’s what we’re called all the time." Wonder why .

He once excused Vlad Putin's desire to annex Ukraine because “It’s a communist country, so he can’t feed his people, so they need more farmland.” Maybe he was busy drawing up plays when the Soviet Union collapsed.

With last week's release of the nothing-burger Durham report on the FBI's investigation into the Trump-Russia election collusion, Tuberville tried to sell it as the smoking gun proving the Bureau's malice against MAGA.

If people don’t go to jail for this, the American people should just stand up and say, "Listen, enough’s enough. Let’s don’t have elections anymore."

How did this dimwit ever become a US senator? Political activist Jeff Tiedrich has a likely explanation.

Perhaps the good people of Alabama were concerned that the stupidest Republicans were all in the House and that the Senate needed more idiots of their own to balance things out.