Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at jeffdanziger.com.
Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine critiquing Donald Trump for supporting isolationism. But for years, McConnell has enabled Trump’s political power, allowing the president-elect to isolate the country and back America’s adversaries.
McConnell endorsed Trump in the 2024 election, despite Trump’s open disdain for international cooperation and his opposition to NATO allies helping Ukraine resist attacks from Russia.
In his essay, McConnell praised Trump for using force against Syria in 2018, but added, “But Trump sometimes undermined these tough policies through his words and deeds. He courted Putin, he treated allies and alliance commitments erratically and sometimes with hostility, and in 2019 he withheld $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine. These public episodes raised doubts about whether the United States was committed to standing up to Russian aggression, even when it actually did so.”
The criticism of Trump’s longstanding openness to Putin is ironic considering McConnell’s own history on the topic of Russia.
During the 2016 election cycle, then-President Barack Obama’s administration sought to release a bipartisan statement alerting the public to Russia’s attempts to influence the result of that year’s presidential campaign. However, McConnell “dramatically watered down” the document, according to former White House chief of staff Denis McDonough. President Joe Biden, who was involved in those negotiations as vice president, said in a 2018 interview that McConnell “wanted no part of having a bipartisan commitment that we would say, essentially, ‘Russia’s doing this, stop.’”
When Trump was in office, McConnell was muted in response to Trump’s positive overtures to hostile nations.
In a 2018 interview, Trump said that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “understand each other,” despite decades of political oppression and brutality by the North Korean regime.
When journalists asked McConnell to comment on the statement, McConnell replied, “What I think is that it would be wonderful is if we ended up with a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and I hope that’s where this all ends.”
In April, McConnell complained that Trump’s influence delayed passage of funds to help Ukraine. “Our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all,” McConnell lamented. “That took months to work our way through it.”
Just a few months later, McConnell voted to send Trump back to the White House, where he will be free to pursue the foreign policy agenda that McConnell claims he is largely opposed to.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
Senate Republicans on Wednesday elected Sen. John Thune of South Dakota—a former corporate lobbyist and close ally of Sen. Mitch McConnell—as the leader of their conference for the upcoming term, when the GOP will have a 53-seat majority.
Republican lawmakers chose Thune over Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who was favored by allies of President-elect Donald Trump.
"Senators have received angry phone calls from constituents demanding to know how their representatives plan to vote, following MAGA world's embrace of Scott," The Washington Post reported. The leadership election was conducted via secret ballot.
In a statement Wednesday, Thune said he is "extremely honored to have earned the support" of the Senate GOP conference and stressed that "this Republican team is united behind President Trump's agenda."
"Our work starts today," Thune added.
Before winning election to the Senate in 2004, Thune worked as a lobbyist for several sectors including the railroad industry. The Lever reported last year that as part of his lobbying work for the Dakota, Minnesota, and Eastern (DM&E) Railroad, Thune "helped the company procure a $230 million loan from the Federal Railroad Administration."
"In 2015, Thune reprised his advocacy for the rail industry, leading an effort to repeal an Obama administration regulation requiring improved, electronic braking systems on some hazmat trains," the outlet added. "The following year, he received the first-ever 'Railroad Achievement Award' presented by the Association of American Railroads, the industry's main lobbying group."
Thune is also "one of the biggest recipients of oil and gas money in Congress," the youth-led Sunrise Movement noted Wednesday following his election as leader of the incoming GOP Senate.
Over the course of his Senate career, Thune has received more than $1.16 million in campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, according to the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets.
Thune's top contributor between 2019 and 2024 was the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the right-wing pro-Israel lobbying group.
"Thune has called for taking the debt limit hostage to force cuts to Social Security."
Thune will take the reins of the Senate GOP conference as the party readies another round of tax cuts for the rich and large corporations—one of Trump's top priorities. Thune is a leading advocate of repealing the estate tax, a move that would benefit a small number of wealthy Americans.
Congress is also barreling toward another potentially damaging fight over the debt ceiling, which is set to be reinstated on January 2, 2025.
Thune has previously expressed support for leveraging the debt limit—and the threat of a catastrophic default—to secure steep cuts to federal spending and possible changes to Social Security such as raising the retirement age, which would slash benefits across the board. Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, voiced alarm over Thune's debt ceiling stance following his election as Senate Republican leader on Wednesday.
"Thune has called for taking the debt limit hostage to force cuts to Social Security," Nancy Altman, the group's president, said in a statement.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
On a recent CNN panel, a Republican strategist cited a random article from last June about liberals having established a "resistance" to a Trump second term.
"Can we just have a couple of years of peace for the Republicans and President Trump to do what they promised to do because the American people are clearly asking for it?" Scott Jennings said in a beseeching voice.
A Democratic panelist shot back with "that's rich" as another noted the outrage in 2016, when Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to let the Senate even hold hearings on Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. McConnell insisted that the next president should make the pick when the next presidential election was almost eight months in the future.
Jennings further complained that Democrats are "working overtime to prevent the duly elected government from doing anything."
It happens that Democrats in Congress were also "duly elected." They have no obligation to prostrate themselves before Donald Trump, despite his convincing win.
But let me volunteer as referee. Democrats should pick and choose their battles. They should cooperate on matters of mutual interest. Obstructing for obstruction's sake would be bad for the party and bad for America.
They should not follow McConnell's toxic playbook from 2010, when he said, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." That is, he wanted to block legislation for purely partisan reasons.
Complicating matters, the president-elect has a solid record of going back on his promises. As a candidate in 2016, Trump vowed to replace the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, with "something terrific." He came out with nothing terrific or even acceptable. He pushed Congress to kill it.
In the recent campaign, Trump said that Obamacare "sort of sucks" but repeated that he wouldn't end it. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson let the cat out, saying "No Obamacare" and adding that there would be "massive" health care changes if Trump wins.
This time there won't be a John McCain to save the program with his deciding vote. And since Trump presumably wouldn't be running for president again, he would lack a political motive to protect the popular health benefit.
What he would do to the ACA is unclear. He might try a second time to simply bury the thing. Or he might get Congress to cannibalize it — to sharply reduce the subsidies but leave a near-corpse standing that Republicans could call "Obamacare."
There's about a 100 percent chance that he would not enhance the benefit. The expanded subsidies put into place during the pandemic are set to expire next year. If that happens, over 90 percent of the ACA exchange members would see their costs go up, according to KFF, a health care research group.
The money on Wall Street has voiced its opinion. "For firms offering plans in the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act ... as well as Medicaid plans, it (a second Trump term) could be bad news," according to The Wall Street Journal.
For example, the stock of Oscar Health, which gets most of its revenues from the Obamacare marketplaces, immediately fell eight percent the morning after the election. Shares of Centene, a major Medicaid operator, were down five percent.
If Democrats want to be truly diabolical, they'll step aside and let Republicans end the program that covers some 45 million Americans. Alternatively, they could come to the rescue and force "Republicans and Trump to do what they promised to do."
The Democrats' power to greatly influence the outcome, however, depends on whether they ultimately win a House majority. Right now, that doesn't look good.
We have interesting times ahead.
Froma Harrop has worked for Reuters, The New York Times News Service and the Providence Journal. She has written for such diverse publications as The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar and Institutional Investor.
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
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