Tag: filibuster
Russ Vought

Senate Democrats Will Filibuster Christian Nationalist Vought's Nomination

Senate Democrats are uniting to block — or at least delay — the confirmation process for Russ Vought, the self-describedChristian nationalist” architect of Project 2025, as President Donald Trump’s nominee for Director of the Office of Management and Budget. To push back against his confirmation, they plan to hold the Senate floor starting Wednesday afternoon, vowing to speak “all night.”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), who has urged Democrats use their power to stall Trump’s agenda, announced that “more than 35 United States senators on the Democratic side” will “take the floor for 30 hours.”

“Russ Vought is the main author of Project 2025,” Schatz said. “He’s the guy that established this federal funding freeze. He is the architect of the dismantling of our federal government, harming us with Medicaid portals shut down, with Head Start shut down, with agencies illegally stormed and the servers being seized. We’ve got to fight back and we’re united, all 47 Democrats in opposition to Russ Vought’s nomination.”

“If confirmed, Russ Vought may be the most important man that no one’s ever heard of,” declared Senator Schatz on the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon.

Vought has been getting some attention in the press.

“In times past, Vought — who famously asked ‘Is There Anything Actually Wrong With ‘Christian Nationalism?’’ in Newsweek in 2021 — would have been seen, and dismissed, as an over-the-top extremist well outside the boundaries of mainstream politics,” wrote Thomas B. Edsall in a New York Times opinion column on Tuesday. “Today, he is a lauded Trump loyalist on the verge of his second tour of duty with the president, in one of the most powerful posts in the federal government.”

“In Vought’s vision of the apocalyptic battle for the soul of America,” Edsall continued, “Democrats are ‘increasingly evil.’ The federal work force, in turn, is the enemy that must be forced into submission. ‘When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,’ Vought, who is 48, declared last year. ‘We want to put them in trauma.’ ”

Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune plans to have Vought confirmed this week.

Last month during Vought’s confirmation hearing, Senate Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI) told him that when he ran OMB during President Trump’s first term, “you consistently ignored laws passed by Congress that directed how taxpayer dollars should be spent.”

“In 2020, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that OMB, under your leadership, broke the law eight times.”

Peters said Vought “inappropriately delayed disaster relief funding for Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Maria,” and “knowingly delayed getting critical resources to communities following a disaster even after Congress passed a law specifically requiring the funds be disbursed on time.”

He also, Peters charged, “pushed for” replacing “nearly 50,000 nonpartisan, career civil servants with appointees whose only qualification was their political loyalty.”

Senate Democratic Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray has called Vought “incredibly alarming,” and one of Trump’s “anti-abortion extremists.” She noted that Vought was “the lead author of Project 2025, which called for ripping away birth control, allowing states to nigh women, lifesaving emergency care, and effectively banning all abortion nationwide.”

“He has said he wants abolition of abortion in the United States,” Murray added. “In other words, a national abortion ban without any exceptions, even in the cases of rape or when a mother’s life is at risk.”

“Vought has called to outlaw medication abortion, block funding, for Planned Parenthood, and advocated for President Trump to appoint a new special assistant in the White House to coordinate anti-abortion policies across government.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

Fearful Senate Republicans Will Filibuster To Stop Capitol Riot Commission

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

The odds that the Senate will pass a bipartisan commission to study the origins of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol are growing increasingly slim, as Senate Republicans are coming out one by one to say they do not support the probe.

Even Republicans who voted to convict Donald Trump for inciting the violent insurrection say they do not support the commission, twisting themselves in pretzels to justify their decision.

And that makes it increasingly likely that the commission will be the first thing Republicans filibuster during President Joe Biden's tenure. Current filibuster rules say that legislation in the Senate must garner 60 votes in order to proceed. Given that the Senate is split 50-50 along partisan lines, that means Democrats need 10 GOP votes to pass bills.

"I don't think there will be 10 votes on our side for it," Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN), told Politico. "At this stage, I'd be surprised if you're gonna get even a handful."

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he will bring the commission up for a vote, whether or not it has enough GOP support to avoid a filibuster — meaning that if 10 Republicans do not vote in favor of the commission, it will be officially blocked.

"Senate Republicans can show everyone if they want to pursue the truth about January 6th or just want to cover up for Donald Trump and insurrectionists," Schumer tweeted on Thursday. "I will bring the House-passed legislation for the January 6th Commission to the Senate floor for a vote."

Republicans who have come out against the commission have falsely claimed it's not bipartisan and will be used as a witch hunt by Democrats.

"The current commission proposed by Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats appears to be a platform to score partisan political points," Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said in a statement about why he opposes the commission.

The framework of the commission, however, was brokered by the Democratic chair of the House Homeland Security Committee and the GOP ranking member on that same body.

The members of the commission would be equally appointed by Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress, according to the agreement. And any subpoenas would require a majority vote, meaning there would need to be buy-in from the GOP-appointed members.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who came out against the commission on Wednesday, said the arrests by federal law enforcement are sufficient, even though the arrests will not lead to a comprehensive report about what went wrong and how to prevent future attacks like the Jan. 6 insurrection again. That's something a commission would explicitly do.

Even Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), one of the seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump of inciting the insurrection, came out against the commission.

Burr told Politico that part of his opposition to the commission is that it would drag into the midterm elections.

Multiple GOP lawmakers have said that they believe the commission could hamper Republican chances of taking back the House and Senate in November 2022, with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) saying that a probe could uncover that some Republican lawmakers played a role in the attack.

"I want our midterm message to be on the kinds of things that the American people are dealing with: That's jobs and wages and the economy and national security, safe streets and strong borders — not relitigating the 2020 elections," Sen. John Thune (R-SD) told CNN.

Republicans filibustering a bipartisan commission to probe a deadly attack on democracy gives progressive Democrats who have been railing against the arcane Senate procedure more fuel to their argument that the filibuster must go.

"Filibustering a bipartisan Commission regarding the January 6 insurrection is a three dimensional way to make the point that the filibuster is primarily a destructive force in American politics," Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) tweeted.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Sinema Stabs Biden -- And Her Own Party -- In The Back In Floor Speech

Sinema Stabs Biden -- And Her Own Party -- In The Back In Floor Speech

Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema gave a floor speech in the Senate Thursday that has been unequaled in cringeworthiness since Sen. Susan Collins stood there and told the nation that she was going to vote for Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court because he deeply revered precedent, especially when it came to abortion rights. We all know how that turned out.

Sinema’s floor remarks were a stab in the back to President Joe Biden (and all her Democratic colleagues) moments before Biden was scheduled to meet with her. She insisted that she really does support the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights bills, but that they “treat the symptoms of the disease, but they do not fully address the diseases and while I continue to support these bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division affecting our country.” Meaning she would not help Republicans break the filibuster in order to pass these bills she supports. Because both sides. Literally. She both-sides-ed Jan. 6 and the Big Lie. She doubled down on that, literally blaming Democratic leadership for not working harder to get Republicans to work with them.

“I wish there had been a more serious effort on the part of Democratic Party lines to sit down with the other party and genuinely discuss how to reforge common ground on these issues,” she said. Never mind that the Freedom to Vote Act was entirely rewritten by Joe Manchin to get Republicans on board and every single one of them refused. And when Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to bring the bill to the floor, Republicans filibustered the motion to proceed to it—they didn’t even allow the Senate to debate it.

She might as well have announced her defection to the Republicans in that speech, because in practicality that’s what she did. She’s supporting Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s veto of these bills and everything else in Biden’s legislative agenda, essentially. She’s trying to call it principle about the sanctity of the filibuster, but she had no problem voting just last month to break the filibuster to raise the debt ceiling. Which makes her pretty much a Republican. She’s got the lying and the trolling down pat.

Really, what Gabe Ortiz tweeted:

This, plus Thursday’s announcement by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) that he has COVID and the absence of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to an undisclosed illness means that the plan to expedite the voting rights bills on the Senate floor will have to be delayed, at the least. Schumer can still force a debate on the bills through the procedure Democrats crafted, but it can’t succeed.

All that said, we need a palate cleanser after Sinema. Here is Arizona Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego speaking on the House floor immediately following Sinema’s Senate speech.

On January 6 we witnessed a violent coup attempt in our Capitol fueled by the Big Lie. Our country continues to face a slow-moving coup in the form of voter suppression. I’ve seen first hand in my home state of Arizona voter suppression laws targeting people of color and a state senate that would rather waste taxpayer money on a sham audit instead of upholding our most sacred democratic right, the right to vote.The Freedom to Vote/John Lewis Voting Rights Act is critical to protecting the vote in my state and states across the country where restrictive laws are being put into place to strip people of the right to vote. Arizona will stand strong together this weekend. Thousands will gather this Saturday in Phoenix for democracy and voting rights. Passing this bill today answers their call by guaranteeing access to democracy to every Arizonan.
Today, the House showed where it stands. We won’t shrink from protecting our democracy and the voting rights of all Americans. It’s past time for the U.S Senate, and Senator Sinema to do the same.

Thank you, Gallego. That kind of honesty and clarity is what Arizona—not to mention the nation—needs from its elected officials.

Article reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

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