Tag: ron johnson
Ron Johnson

'It All Falls Apart': GOP Senate Lacks Majority To Pass Trump's Big Ugly Bill

In a rare admission of uncertainty, Republican senators are privately conceding that President Donald Trump’s "Big, Beautiful Bill" may “fall apart” before the self-imposed July 4 deadline, Semafor reported Thursday.

Trump is reportedly banking on his signature hardball tactics in trying to secure passage of the legislation by Independence Day. However, GOP lawmakers say that strategy is faltering in the Senate amid mounting procedural hurdles and internal dissent, per the report.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Semafor: “I like the president, I respect him, I certainly respect how difficult his job is. I don’t want to make it more difficult. But we can’t keep mortgaging our kids’ future. And he understands that about me."

Sen. Johnson is currently against the bill and is said to have banded with two fellow conservative senators as a bloc: “We all have to be a yes before any of us are a yes," he said.

According to the report, the bill is not only short of sufficient support right now, but is also boasting a hefty amount of blank space for now. That’s because Republicans are still hustling to win approval for provisions that their nonpartisan rules referee deemed ineligible for protection from a Democratic filibuster.

Since it’s difficult to estimate the costs or effects of passage anymore, senators are trying to slow the rush to finish a bill that will affect almost every American in some way.

Meanwhile, as lawmakers prepared to scrap their weekend and recess plans, Trump invited some Republicans to a Thursday event that amounted to what one called a “mass arm-twisting," per Semafor.

One person close to the White House, who was not identified in the report, told Semafor that the president needs to change the deadline.

“He has to shift the deadline, or it all falls apart,” the source said, per the report. “Procedurally, how would it get on his desk by July 4? They don’t have the votes and a bunch of it the parliamentarian gutted," they added.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Ron Johnson

GOP Senator Rejects Trump Plan To End Debt Limit

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said he will vote against President-elect Donald Trump's plan to eliminate or raise the debt limit.

During a Sunday interview on Sunday Morning Futures, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo noted that Trump planned to eliminate or raise the debt limit as part of a large bill that would include funding border security.

"President Trump wants eliminating or raising the debt ceiling in this first big package," Bartiromo told Johnson. "Will you vote for it?"

"No, we absolutely need a debt ceiling limit," Johnson insisted. "I'll negotiate in terms of how far we increase that. There are all kinds of things we could do, but it starts with, again, going back to a baseline spending this reasonable amount as part of the negotiation on increasing debt limit."

"But we absolutely need that debt limit, or there's no control over out-of-control government spending," he added.

"And therein lies the issue here," Bartiromo pointed out. "We are going to see battles ahead."

Watch the video below from Fox News or at the link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Ron Johnson

Ron Johnson Scoffs At 'Bribery' Attack On Biden As Mere 'Claims' (VIDEO)

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who has spent years promoting countless conspiracy theories on topics ranging from COVID-19 to climate change, apparently isn’t sold on House Republicans’ claim that when President Joe Biden was vice president, he took a $5 million bribe and there are taxes to prove it.

The claims, little more than a conspiracy theory based on a single FBI document used to record unverified statements made by third-parties, have been gobbled up and spewed across far-right media and social media by some of the most extreme Republicans in the House of Representatives, and even a few GOP Senators.

How far out there is Sen. Johnson?

“All told, when it comes to spewing dangerous drivel, Mr. Johnson has displayed a commitment and creativity rarely seen outside of QAnon gatherings or Trump family dinners,” The New York Times’ Michelle Cottle wrote in an opinion piece last year.

So it’s stunning that Sen. Johnson is now apparently walking back the unsubstantiated claims exploding on the right that President Biden took a $5 million bribe when he was President Barack Obama’s Vice President.

The latest twist of “evidence,” according to Republicans, is that there are now “tapes” allegedly proving the Biden bribe conspiracy theory.

But, in a Tuesday interview with a local Wisconsin right-wing talk radio show host, Johnson – whose outrageously wild claims in the past have crowned him the “Senate’s leading conspiracy theorist” a “bagman for Qanon,” and “Putin’s favorite Senator” – said the allegations he and other Republicans have been spreading now must be taken with a grain of salt.

“We don’t even know” if the tapes “exist,” Johnson said. “It’s a claim, it’s an allegation. We don’t know whether they really exist or not.”

Another GOP Senator who has been spreading the bribery conspiracy theory is Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the president pro tempore emeritus of the United States Senate who began serving in public elected office in 1959.

Grassley has been a consistent partner with House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Comer on the Biden bribery conspiracy theory, despite having no official Senate function or role that would allow him to pursue an investigation.

Comer, who has admitted his purpose as that powerful committee’s chief is to attack Biden and help Trump get elected, has repeatedly suggested or implied the FBI document, officially called an FD-1023, is proof (it is not).

“The FBI’s 6/30/20 FD-1023 record stands on its own and contains information from a trusted confidential human source who had conversations with the foreign national who claimed to have bribed Biden,” Comer’s Oversight Committee tweeted over the weekend.

Last month Comer’s Oversight Committee posted a nearly ten-minute video of a press conference with him making various wild allegations about Biden and the Biden family.

Newsweek on Tuesday notes that “The Washington Post reported last week that the allegations contained in the FD-1023 document being sought by Republican lawmakers were reviewed by the FBI under former Attorney General William Barr, only for the agency to conclude the allegations were found not to be supported by facts. The investigation was later dropped, a fact confirmed by several outlets.”

Stunningly, it’s not only Sen. Johnson, but Rep. Comer himself on Tuesday, under pressure by a Newsmax host pressing him to either say the tapes are legitimate or say when he will be able to confirm their legitimacy, confessed on live TV: “We don’t know if they’re legit or not.”

Also on Tuesday, even Sen,. Grassley himself stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate and poured cold water on his previous claims.

“The foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden, allegedly has audio recordings, of his conversation with them,” Grassley declared, relying on the word “allegedly” frequently.

“Seventeen such recordings,” he claimed. “These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy in case that he got into a tight spot.”

All this comes after Comer breathlessly claimed he had a star whistleblower witness who could prove his allegations, only to be forced to admit he had “lost” that witness, somehow.

Later it turned out that witnesses who did show up for Comer’s hearing had been paid by a former Trump administration official and current Trump advisor.

Since Comer has been very careful to not reveal who his sources are, some believe them to be among the four Russia-linked individuals the Trump administration’s own Treasury Dept. sanctioned in 2020 “for attempting to influence the U.S. electoral process,” as it announced in a press release.

NCRM has no knowledge of who Comer’s alleged sources are.

The Trump Treasury Department in 2020 reported, “From at least late 2019 through mid-2020, [Andrii] Derkach waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election, spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United States designed to culminate prior to election day. Derkach’s unsubstantiated narratives were pushed in Western media through coverage of press conferences and other news events, including interviews and statements.”

Treasury’s statement adds:

“Between May and July 2020, Derkach released edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials, and he levied unsubstantiated allegations against U.S. and international political figures. Derkach almost certainly targeted the U.S. voting populace, prominent U.S. persons, and members of the U.S. government, based on his reliance on U.S. platforms, English-language documents and videos, and pro-Russian lobbyists in the United States used to propagate his claims.”

And yet despite all this mountainous lack of substantive evidence or proof, some Republicans are speaking as if it were a proven, indisputable matter of tangible fact that Joe Biden should be impeached, or indicted.

Perhaps one of the loudest voices among the traitor claimers is Rep. Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who just recently won a few pats on the back from liberal politics watchers after she mocked some in her own party.

That’s changed.

On Tuesday, Mace went on Fox News and in a lengthy interview with Maria Bartiromo, discussed the alleged bribery claims and concluded that the 37-criminal felony count indictment against Donald Trump is just a “distraction” from Biden’s actions and an attempt to jail his top political enemy.

“Make no mistake,” Mace falsely declared on Twitter the same day, “at today’s arraignment you are watching a sitting President use his DOJ to put his top political rival in jail.”

Another of the loudest voices insisting that the Biden conspiracy theory is true: U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee.

Even Wednesday, a day after the conspiracy theory leaders walked back and poured cold water on their allegations, Sen. Blackburn had no problem appearing on Fox News to promote the highly-questionable claims — this time couching it in terms of “feelings” and “ifs.”

The Intercept’s D.C. Bureau Chief Ryan Grim, in a lengthy explainer he published on Substack, concludes, “even if everything in the document is true, there is still an interpretation that would stop short of implicating Joe Biden: Hunter Biden could have been lying in order to extract more money from Burisma.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Abortion May Help Democrats To Oust Ron Johnson From Senate

Abortion May Help Democrats To Oust Ron Johnson From Senate

By James Oliphant

GREEN BAY, Wis. (Reuters) - Nicole Slavin was a reliable Democratic voter in a conservative region of Wisconsin, but she realized casting a ballot was no longer enough after the state's abortion access vanished almost overnight.

Slavin, a business development director, called upon her network of contacts to mobilize a group of women across party lines in support of U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes, a Democrat who backs abortion rights. She knocked on doors for Barnes and organized an event for him last week that drew more than 100 women to a Green Bay brewery.

"There's no option of staying quiet and sitting down anymore," said Slavin, 48.

Evidence is building that a wave of women voters might make the difference if Democrats are to keep their Senate majority and stem their expected losses in the House of Representatives in the November 8 midterm elections.

Wisconsin is one of several states where voter registrations among women have surged since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. That decision gutted national protections for abortion and left an 1849 law outlawing most abortions in Wisconsin on the books, prompting the state's four abortion clinics to end the procedure.

Women have outpaced men in new registrations in Wisconsin by almost 10 percent, according to an analysis by the Democratic data firm TargetSmart. Women vote at a greater rate than men in presidential elections, but that gap usually narrows in midterms.

The battleground state is critical to Democrats' hopes of holding onto their slim majority in the Senate. If Barnes can defeat incumbent Republican Senator Ron Johnson, it would provide a cushion should the party lose a seat in a state such as Nevada or Georgia.

The Senate Majority PAC, an outside group that supports Democratic candidates, made Johnson the target of the first abortion-centered TV ad it aired after the Supreme Court's ruling. On Friday, the group launched a new abortion ad aimed at Johnson as part of a $1.6 million buy. The ad will run in Green Bay, among other markets.

Tom Bonier, chief executive officer of TargetSmart, theorizes many new registrants are young women who took abortion rights for granted.

"We are seeing these voters now pivoting to some level of action," Bonier said.

Adrianna Pokela, 23, said she cried after Roe's overturn. She will vote in her first midterm election this November and is trying to convince others of her generation to do the same.

In July, she helped plan a protest march in Green Bay that drew several hundred people.

"I am working my butt off to find ways to express the importance of this election," Pokela said.

Motivated Voters

Opinion surveys show the issue of abortion is rising in importance for Democratic voters in an election cycle dominated by concerns over inflation.

A Wall Street Journal poll released last week found support for legal abortion had grown nationwide since the court's decision and that more than half of voters surveyed said the issue had made them more motivated to vote in November.

After voters in Kansas last month defeated Republican efforts to ban abortion in that state, Democrats have zeroed in on women as the voters most likely to help prevent a Republican takeover of Congress.

The advocacy group Galvanize Action released nine digital ads about abortion rights in Wisconsin aimed at moderate white women, one of the state's largest voting blocs. The group has survey data that says those women, many of whom are not traditional Democratic voters, can be persuaded to vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights.

Jackie Payne, the group's executive director, said the ads' messages revolve around compassion for women and keeping government out of personal healthcare decisions.

"You have to connect to voters at their values," Payne said. "And then get them to turn out."

Another group, Democratic Messaging Project, has posted a billboard off a major highway in downtown Milwaukee that reads, "ABORTION GONE, IS BIRTH CONTROL NEXT?," one of 10 billboards the group will have in the state by week's end.

Nationally, Priorities USA Action, which targets swing voters in battleground states, said half the ads it's running in states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania mention abortion rights.

'Fired Up'

Barnes, Wisconsin's lieutenant governor, released a TV ad in which his mother spoke of having an abortion due to medical complications that put her health at risk.

"It's about personal freedom that has been taken away by the Supreme Court," Barnes said in an interview. "People are fired up."

His campaign believes Johnson, a two-term incumbent, is vulnerable on the issue.

Johnson has said he supports making abortion illegal, with exceptions for rape, incest, and to protect the mother's health. He has said he does not favor a federal abortion ban.

But Johnson's campaign rarely talks about abortion. Instead, it has tried to pin Barnes to the high crime rate in Milwaukee, branding him a supporter of liberal criminal justice policies.

Analysts say Johnson may be more in danger than in past years because of his support for former President Donald Trump's bogus election fraud claims, which could alienate moderate voters. Polls show a tight race.

Peggy Phillips, 66, who came out to see Barnes in Green Bay and described herself as an independent, said she was leaning toward backing the Democratic candidate. The main reason, she said, was abortion.

"I believe very strongly that it's an individual issue," Phillips said.

(Reporting by James Oliphant; editing by Colleen Jenkins and Daniel Wallis)


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