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Tag: john barrasso
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell receives the COVID-19 vaccine.

Spooked By Negative Polls, Republican Politicians Now Push Vaccination

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Vaccinated Americans are pretty damn upset about the lagging vaccination rates—mainly among white GOP voters—that have led to a nationwide surge in COVID-19 cases, particularly in red states.

Now Senate Republicans want Americans to know who to blame for the low vaccination rates of GOP voters: Democrats.

In case you missed it, Republicans are now pro-vaccine, and the sudden surge of the Delta variant is all President Joe Biden's fault. At least, that's the bridge Senate Republicans and some GOP governors are selling.

Before we go any further, let's be clear about what the GOP's latest gaslighting effort represents: an all-hands-on-deck clean-up on aisle COVID-19.

"When it comes to COVID, there should only be one message to the American people and that should be: Vaccines work," Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming told reporters Tuesday in the ultimate Johnny-come-lately of pandemic statements. Barrasso then went on to accuse the White House and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) of "medical malpractice" for having chaotic messages on masking, lockdowns, and other coronavirus mitigation efforts. Never mind the fact that the red-state surge is what has landed the country back in masking territory.

Now that Republicans have driven the country back into a COVID-19 ditch, they're planting the keys on President Joe Biden. Indeed, anti-masker and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is pinning the Sunshine State's deadly outbreak on Biden's border policies. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida is suddenly a huge promoter of "VACCINATIONS!" And Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—who's 'perplexed' by the vaccine hesitancy mostly coursing through red America—is now funding radio ads urging residents of Kentucky to get vaccinated. Just eight of the state's more than 120 counties have reported vaccination rates above 50 percent, according to recent CDC data.

Here's one thing we can all be assured of: Mitch McConnell doesn't lavish campaign funds on public health for the sake of public health. His campaign expenditure is a sure sign that Republicans—particularly those in swing states and swing districts—don't like what they are seeing in the polling.

In fact, a newly released Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index is offering a window into the motivations behind the GOP's latest blame-shifting campaign. Of the roughly 70 percent of vaccinated Americans, nearly eight in 10 blame unvaccinated Americans for the latest wave of infections. Beyond faulting the unvaccinated, 36 percent of those who are vaccinated blame Donald Trump, 33 percent blame conservative media, and 30 percent blame people from other countries traveling to the United States. In other words, the vaccinated among us overwhelmingly blame Republicans, Trump, and right-wing media for erasing the gains made by the Biden administration's speedy vaccination program. That's exactly why Republicans are so desperate to recast Biden as responsible for the delta uptick.

Congressional Democrats are reportedly seeing something similar in their own polling, according to Washington Post's Greg Sargent. Internal polling by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has shown that "56 percent of likely voters in four dozen battleground districts have serious doubts about Republicans after hearing that they are spreading lies about vaccines to further conspiracy theories." The DCCC is now pushing its candidates to emphasize Republican disinformation on both the vaccine and the January 6 insurrection at their campaign events. In fact, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been offering a master class in how to highlight the radicalization of the Republican Party.

The vaccine message is also a natural for Democrats since the public widely trusts Democrats over Republicans on health care issues. The fact that Republicans are now trying flip public perception of GOP extremism on a public health issue is also telling—they simply cannot afford to chart a new course on the Jan. 6 insurrection, since many of their voters now support the terrorist siege and most adamantly believe the election was stolen from Trump.

But Republicans will have to stage a massive cover-up in order to retroactively recast themselves as part of the solution on taming COVID-19 spread. Rewriting history would be a cinch among Trump cultists and avid Fox News watchers. But the people Republicans need to convince of their rationality are actually rational people—those who still believe in facts and science and might be willing to vote Republican if the party wasn't overrun by extremists.

That's going to be a much tougher sell after congressional Republicans led the charge in sowing doubt and confusion about the vaccines. Republicans comparing the White House vaccination campaign to tactics used by the Nazis wasn't exactly helpful. Neither was Republicans smearing localized vaccination campaigns as "door-to-door" spying. Some Republicans hyped the idea that President Biden's vaccination effort was really a ploy to raid people's homes for their Bibles and guns.

As of mid-May, 100 percent of congressional Democrats reported being vaccinated while a meager 45 percent of House Republicans said they had gotten the shot. And last week, House Republicans spent much of the week railing against mask mandates in the lower chamber—even as their own caucus poses a primary threat to the health of everyone else in the Capitol.

Whatever whopper congressional Republicans and GOP governors are trying to sell now, they carried the mantle on hamstringing Biden's extraordinary vaccination push. Based on the polling, vaccinated Americans seem to both know that and resent it.

Sen. John Barrasso

Republicans Oppose More IRS Audits Of Super-Rich Tax Evaders

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

A provision in the bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill announced on June 24 would provide for investing more money in enforcement of laws targeting top earners who evade payment of taxes. Republican senators are furious.

Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the third-ranking member of the minority party leadership, told Axios on Wednesday that "spending $40 billion to super-size the IRS is very concerning." "Law-abiding Americans deserve better from their government than an army of bureaucrats snooping through their bank statements," he said.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn warned of "a huge potential for abuse": "Bigger government results in more waste, fraud, and abuse."

"Throwing billions more taxpayer dollars at the IRS will only hurt Americans struggling to recover after waves of devastating lockdowns," said Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. "Instead of increasing funding for the IRS, we should abolish the damn place."

Even South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who backed the bipartisan framework, complained, "There's some people on our side who don't like empowering the IRS; I don't mind empowering the IRS if it's a reasonable thing to do. But I mean, how much uncollected taxes can you gather with $40 billion?"

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley tweeted on May 17, this year's Tax Day, "Im all for catching tax cheats +closing tax gap BUT Biden plan 2pump more $ into IRS & expand bank reporting is ripe for overreach + imposes more burdens on small biz/family farms."

Earlier in the year, Biden introduced the American Jobs Plan, a $2.25 trillion transportation, climate, water, broadband, child care, and caregiving infrastructure package, and the American Families Plan, a $1.8 trillion package investment in paid leave, free preschool and community college, and affordable health care. He proposed funding the plans by raising tax rates on corporations and those earning $400,000 or more and by spending $80 million more to enforce existing tax laws.

Republicans unanimously opposed the plans, drawing what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called a "red line" against any tax increases for wealthy Americans or businesses.

Instead, a group of 10 Republican and Democratic senators agreed on a plan to boost enforcement by half of Biden's initial request to help fund $567 billion in new transportation, broadband, and water system infrastructure spending. They proposed that the rest of the funding would come from sources that would include petroleum sales, wireless spectrum auctions, and unused 2020 relief funds.

The White House says $40 billion in spending to improve tax law enforcement would more than pay for itself, bringing in $140 billion. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says it would bring in $103 billion over a decade. All of this is money already owed to the government under existing tax law.

"There's just a ton of money out there that we're not collecting," former IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti told the Washington Post on Friday. "Why don't we collect some of that before we raise taxes on the people that are already paying?"

In recent years, the IRS has had to cut back on enforcing the law due to massive budget reductions. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, between 2010 and 2018, the budget for enforcement dropped 24%, the number of enforcement personnel drop 31%, and the audit rate for millionaires dropped 61%.

"The steep decline in audits for high-income individuals stemming from IRS underfunding means that low- and moderate-income households claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) are now audited at roughly the same rate as the top 1 percent of filers," Chye-Ching Huang — then the senior director of economic policy with the Center — told the House Ways and Means Committee in February 2020.

An April report by the Center for American Progress noted that while recent official estimates suggest the United States loses about $600 billion a year in unpaid revenue "on April 13, 2021, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told Congress that he believes the United States is losing much more revenue—possibly $1 trillion or more every year."

Seth Hanlon, one of the report's authors, told The American Independent Foundation in May that smarter IRS enforcement would mean more compliance for the richest Americans — but fewer audits for everyone else.

"The whole point is it will let the IRS target audits in a smarter way, so honest people are gonna be less likely to be audited. People earning under $400,000 — as long as they're tax compliant — are gonna be less likely to be audited. The audit rate for those earning under $400,000 won't go up," he said.

Polling show strong popular support for making sure richer Americans pay their fair share. An April Monmouth University poll found 65% support for funding Biden's spending proposals with increased revenue from those making more than $400,000, compared to 33% opposition.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

President Biden meeting with members of Congress to discuss the American Jobs Plan.

The Press Keeps Chasing — And Never Finding — Those ‘Moderate Republicans’

Reprinted with permission from Press Run

Busy pursuing the mythical creature known as the Republican "moderate" — that rare species of conservative who's willing to work with Democrats— the Beltway press recently announced a key sighting. A gaggle of influential "moderates" were willing to work with President Joe Biden to pass a sweeping infrastructure bill.

Those handful of GOP senators include Shelly Capito (R-WV), Patrick Toomey (R-PA), John Barrasso (R-WY), and Roger Wicker (R-MS), and they've been eagerly portrayed in the press as middle-of-the-road deal-makers in search of bipartisan compromise. Slight problem, there's nothing "moderate" about these Republicans, all of whom were Trump loyalists for four years and served as his lapdogs in the Senate. Also, the comically small infrastructure "compromise" they offered up last week was deeply unserious.

This kind of misleading coverage has been a long-running staple of the Beltway media, which loves the idea of "moderate" Republicans stepping forward, in part because journalists have been ceaselessly harping on the idea that all legislation in the Biden era needs to be bipartisan because the Democrat had promised to "unite" the country during the campaign. Also, because the press embraces the narrative that there's a group of thoughtful centrists at the heart of today's GOP — pragmatic do-gooders, happy to occupy the middle ground.

The media bar is set so low for Republicans that apparently the simple act of being willing to discuss a pressing piece of lawmaking with a Democratic White House makes GOP senators "moderates." But are the Republicans actually "moderates"? Do they hold a worldview that places them in the middle of the political spectrum, and do they often work with both sides of the aisle?

No, no, and no. In fact, it's not even close. The so-called moderates spent the last four years voting with Trump 80 and 90 percent of the time. There's nothing centrist about their views, not when they were in bed with the most radical player in modern American politics. Still, the press loves to tell a pleasing tale about Republicans.

Just look at how the press treated Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) when he announced in February that he's retiring from the Senate. A Republican who served as a reliable rubber stamp during four years of Trump insanity, voting with the White House nearly 90 percent of the time, Portman was lauded in the press at the time of his retirement announcement as being "pragmatic," "serious," and a man who privately bristled at Trump's dangerous behavior.

Yet just days after announcing his looming retirement, and without facing the political pressures of running for re-election, Portman voted to acquit Trump of inciting a deadly insurrectionist mob at the U.S. Capitol, because he said the Senate impeachment trial was "unconstitutional." (It clearly was not.) So that's how "moderate" Rob Portman actually is.

Speaking of impeachment, during Trump's first Senate trial, the New York Times tried to present Rep. Peter King (R-NY), as a "moderate" while he ferociously defended Trump's attempt to help a foreign country interfere with a U.S. election.

If the current infrastructure "compromise" looks familiar, it's because we just saw this same off-base coverage surrounding the Covid relief bill. When ten Republican senators reached out to the Biden White House this winter to discuss a possible compromise on the Democrats' proposed $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, the media quickly identified the players as "moderates," and pushed the idea about a possible bipartisan deal. The Associated Press singled out Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) as a key "moderate" who hoped for a bipartisan deal — Katko sided with Trump eight out of ten times in the House.

Over the winter, the Times stressed that, "Moderate Republicans in competitive districts are navigating a careful balance in addressing the coronavirus crisis, eager to put some distance between themselves and a president whose response has been criticized." That's simply not true — not one Republican member of the House voted for Covid relief.

And the "compromise" they offered was laughable, just like the recent GOP "compromise" proposal on infrastructure was laughable. On Covid, the so-called moderates backed a $600 billion relief package, compared to the $1.9 trillion pandemic bill Biden signed into the law. Being the party out of power and urging the president to strip away 70 percent of his Covid and infrastructure bills simply did not represent a sincere negotiating position. And that's why Biden ignores Republican offers. (On infrastructure, Biden wants to spend $2.3 trillion; Republicans are backing a $568 billion proposal.)

But for news consumers, the story presented by the media is that there's an honest back-and-forth negotiation going on, because "moderates" have offered a "compromise." The press constantly plays along with the charade. Weeks ago, Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) signaled Republicans would support a comically small $800 billion infrastructure plan, compared to the $2.3 trillion one Biden supports. Yet the Wall Street Journal, among many, treated the offer as being legitimate, claiming the minuscule counter-proposal underscored the "GOP interest in a bipartisan fix for the nation's aging roads and patchy broadband service," and that "Republicans are seeking a compromise on infrastructure."

Spoiler: They're not. A serious, GOP counter-proposal for Biden's $2.3 trillion proposal would be in the $1.6 billion range.

This media trend isn't new. When Jeb Bush ran for president in 2016 and was a contender before the arrival of Trump in the GOP primary field, the campaign press worked overtime positioning him as a "moderate" — a pragmatic label Bush embraced as he eyed a general election against a Democrat. Yet when he served as governor of Florida, the Sunshine State became one of the nation's most pro-gun states, with a variety of laws that lessened restrictions on ownership. After leaving office, Bush remained a far-right politician regardingtaxes, climate change, abortion, repealing Obamacare (it's "clearly a job killer"), civil rights, right-to-die, gun control, relations with Cuba, and legalizing marijuana.

Why on earth was the press touting him as a "moderate" in 2016? Same reason they're scrambling today to describe some Republicans who voted with Trump 95 percent of the time as "moderates." In the hands of the Beltway press, it's become a meaningless compliment.

Graham Openly Vows ‘Republican’ Senate Probes Of Trump Critics

Graham Openly Vows ‘Republican’ Senate Probes Of Trump Critics

After speeding through Donald Trump’s impeachment trial without calling a single witness, Senate Republicans are now vowing to launch investigations into the Bidens and the whistleblower who alerted Congress to Donald Trump’s Ukraine quid pro quo.

Nearly every Senate Republican voted on Friday not to hear from former Trump national security adviser John Bolton or other fact witnesses, claiming they had to “get back to work.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox Business on Sunday that “in the coming weeks” the Senate Intelligence Committee “will call the whistleblower” and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, who is currently running for president.

“Why is it important? I want to find out how this crap started. If the whistleblower is a former employee of, associate of, Joe Biden, I think that would be important. If the whistleblower was working with people on [House Intelligence chair Adam] Schiff’s staff that wanted to take Trump down a year and a half ago, I think that would be important,” Graham said, suggesting unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

“If the Schiff staff people helped write the complaint, that would be important. We’re going to get to the bottom of all of this to make sure this never happens again,” Graham added.

Graham’s message to all the “Republicans out there” was that they should “expect us to do this. If we don’t do it, we’re letting you down.”

The South Carolina Republican — who once called witnesses essential to an impeachment trial — had pushed to end Trump’s impeachment trial quickly, saying “the sooner this trial is over, the better for the American people.”

The Senate Republican Conference said last month they were “ready to proceed to trial” and would “then get back to work and focus on policy issues important to the American people.”

The conference’s chair, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) agreed, saying after the trial, Republicans would “focus on policy issues important to the American people. These include lowering health care costs, securing our borders, fixing roads and bridges and growing the economy.”

Once it began, Republicans repeatedly portrayed it as a waste of their time. Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) called the impeachment trial “the ultimate government shutdown right” last week.

His colleague, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) said impeachment was “an impediment” and urged the Senate to instead be “thinking about how to lower the cost of insulin for a diabetic or how to do positive things for veterans in the US, because as long as we are focusing on impeachment, we aren’t doing anything else.”

Now, as the trial comes to an end, it appears that at least some members of the  Senate GOP are more interested in retaliation. And even before Trump’s attempt to get Ukraine to investigate his political rivals became public, the Senate was largely a legislative graveyard.

Over the course of 2019, its work consisted almost entirely of confirming Trump’s nominees for government jobs and lifetime judgeships.

More than 400 pieces of legislation passed the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives in 2019, but have been obstructed by McConnell in the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had previously suggested, falsely, that impeachment was the reason nothing was getting done.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore