Tag: senate
Why House Republicans May Still Tank Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill'

Why House Republicans May Still Tank Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill'

As the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate mulls changes to President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," one House Republican is warning his Senate counterparts against tweaking one particular section.

During a Sunday interview with CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) cautioned Senate Republicans against making any changes to the state and local tax (SALT) deduction he and others negotiated with House Republican leadership. The SALT deduction cap is currently at $10,000, but House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA.) agreed to raise the cap to $40,000 in order to convince House's SALT caucus to support the legislation.

"This is an issue that not just impacts blue states, it impacts nearly every state in the country," Lawler said. "29 states blew through the $10,000 cap over the last seven years. And so lifting the cap on SALT is critically important. It provides middle-class tax relief. And that's exactly what we did here."

"I've been very clear with leadership all this past week that if the Senate changes the SALT deduction in any way, I will be a no," he continued. "And I'm not going to buckle on that. And I've spoken to my other colleagues, they will be a no as well."

Lawler's remarks come as Senate Republicans have spoken openly about slashing the SALT deduction, which they say is overwhelmingly beneficial to Americans in blue states (which typically have higher state and local tax rates). Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said last week that senators are likely to nix the SALT deal in the package they intend to send back to the House of Representatives.

"There’s not a single [Republican] senator from New York or New Jersey or California, and so there’s not a strong mood in the Senate Republican caucus right now to do $353 billion for states that basically the other states subsidize," Crapo said on Wednesday.

The House only narrowly passed the massive 1,037-page budget bill by a 215-214 margin in May, and only did so with the help of the SALT caucus, which includes representatives like Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), Young Kim (R-CA) and Nick LaLota (R-NY, as well as Lawler. Should they withhold their support from a final bill that cuts the SALT deduction, the legislation would likely fail to pass.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Ken Paxton

Under New Bill, Texas Women Will Face Prosecution For Abortion

Late in April, the Texas Senate passed a new anti-abortion bill that opens the door to women being criminally prosecuted for obtaining an abortion — even in a different state.

Authored by Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Menola Republican, Senate Bill 2880 — titled the “Women and Child Protection Act” — ushers in a currently dormant 1925 abortion ban, and would be the first law in the country to allow pregnant women to be prosecuted for receiving abortion care.

“The most egregious point of SB 2880 is that it quietly revives Texas’s pre-Roe abortion ban by explicitly incorporating the 1925 law into the bill’s definition of criminal abortion law,” Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat, said during Senate debate over the bill on April 30.

“The 1925 law does not exclude women from prosecution and explicitly criminalizes ‘furnishing the means’ for an abortion — a vague clause that could be used to target those who assist abortion-related travel,” Alvarado added. “This bill will open the door to the criminalization of women seeking out-of-state abortions. The threat is not theoretical — it is written clearly into the text. This clause appears in no other abortion law currently on the books in Texas.”

In fact, the 1925 abortion ban is specifically referenced twice in SB 2880, Alvarado said.

Under SB 2880, for example, every one of the 35,000 Texas women who fled the state in 2023 to receive abortions in states where the care is legal could have been prosecuted.

Punishment for anyone breaking the 1925 abortion ban law is prison time of two to five years.

At a hearing for a similar bill — House Bill 44 from Rep. Charlie Geren, a Republican from Fort Worth — Texas attorney Elizabeth Myers testified that, “By explicitly referencing and defining Texas’s criminal abortion laws to include what has been called the 1925 ban, SB 2880 and (its companion House Bill) HB 5510 potentially re-animates a century-old abortion law that is currently void and unenforceable, as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held in 2004.”

“The 1925 ban does not exempt pregnant Texans from prosecution for obtaining an abortion,” Myers said. “The 1925 ban also prohibits ‘furnishing the means’ for abortions. Multiple state actors, including the Texas attorney general, claim that vague phrase makes it a crime to help a pregnant woman leave the state to get an abortion.”

Attorney General Ken Paxton appeared to support this idea in 2022, after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Paxton wrote on X that the pre-Roe anti abortion statutes in Texas, which would include the 1925 law, were once again enforceable.

“Texas’s pre-Roe statutes criminalizing abortion is 100% good law, and I’ll ensure they’re enforceable,” Paxton wrote in the post. “Thankful for SCOTUS’s Dobbs decision paving the way to make Texas fully pro-life!”

A Texas House committee is now considering SB 2880. A companion bill in the House, HB 5510, had a hearing on April 25. HB 5510 already has support from more than a third of Republicans — all of whom have signed on as co-sponsors.

1925 abortion ban may be the end goal

The inclusion of two references to the 1925 ban in SB 2880 is especially noteworthy, according to experts, since the Texas Senate ended a bruising battle over the “Life of the Mother Act” — also known as SB 31 — one day before passing SB 2880.

SB 31 unanimously passed on April 29, with both Democratic and Republican support after language was inserted into the bill aiming to clarify when health care professionals can use an abortion to save a patient’s life.

Rep. Donna Howard, an Austin Democrat, told Courier Texas that she supports SB 31 because it could clear up confusion that doctors and hospital administrators have had about when they can legally perform abortions in medical emergencies.

Since the passage of the “Texas Heartbeat Act” in 2021, maternal mortality in Texas has skyrocketed by 56 percent, deadly sepsis cases among pregnant women have soared by 50 percent, infant mortality has increased by almost 13 percent and three miscarrying women have been documented to have died when they were denied timely treatment in hospital emergency rooms in Texas.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘happy’ to describe my feelings,” Howard said about the Senate approving SB 31. ”This is not a ‘choice’ bill. It doesn’t address rape, incest, and fatal fetal abnormalities. I would love to do more, but we don’t have the votes.”

Texas voters have elected a Republican trifecta — GOP majorities in the state House and Senate, and a Republican governor — for the past 23 years.

“But it does clear up the confusion so that mothers can be saved,” Howard said about the bill. “We can’t let the perfect get in the way of the good…if this allows me to save the lives of Texas moms, I’m going to do that.”

The battle over the inclusion of the 1925 abortion law in SB 31 received public attention after several of the women who sued Texas in the Zurawski v. Texas lawsuit publicly lobbied against the possibility of women being criminalized and prosecuted for getting abortions as a result of passing the bill.

Amanda Zurawski, the lead plaintiff in the Zurawski case — which also sought to clarify medical exemptions — said that she was “grateful” that the eventual amendments to SB 31 included language noting that the bill was not intended to affirm that the 1925 ban could be used to prosecute pregnant women.

“This is a step in the right direction,” Zurawski said. “I’m grateful that our electeds listened to our concerns and worked on this bill. There’s a lot of bad legislation on the table and we have to be vigilant about it.”

One of the other Zurawski plaintiffs — Kaitlyn Kash, who lobbied lawmakers alongside Zurawski to amend SB 31 — said that she appreciated that Hughes, the bill’s author, listened to the women’s concerns.

“I like that there is now hard text saying that the bill is not meant for women to be prosecuted,” Kash said. “I feel comfortable no longer standing in the way of the bill.”

She, Zurawski and other fellow plaintiffs have formed advocacy group Free & Just, and plan to continue to warn women about bills that threaten their reproductive health care.

“Women wake up, this is your lives,” Kash said.

But neither she, Zurawski, or other members of Free & Just could have predicted that just one day after successfully removing some impediments for Texas women to receive medically necessary abortions, Hughes would refuse to take references to the 1925 ban out of SB 2880.

Alvarado told the Senate that her request to Hughes to remove the references to the 1925 abortion ban in SB 2880 had been “ignored.” She called SB 2880 a “backdoor effort” to fully reinstate the 1925 law, adding that the bipartisan passage of the amended SB 31 now “rings hollow.”

Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, a Democrat from Austin, told the Senate that while the changes in SB 31 were “a tiny step forward,” they were “followed immediately by this staggering hurdle backwards.”

What looms if the Texas Legislature passes SB 2880?

In addition to SB 2880 opening the door to pregnant women being prosecuted for getting abortions out of state or taking medication abortion pills, the bill also establishes a bounty allowing any private citizen in the country to civilly sue a person they suspect of helping a Texas woman leave the state to get an abortion.

The bill is also targeted at manufacturers and distributors of abortion pills and the doctors who prescribe them, even if they are located in states where abortion is legal.

Eckhardt accused Hughes and Republican supporters of SB 2880 of designing it to “isolate pregnant women and to threaten family friends, the organizations, lawyers and even judges that they might turn to for help, driving women into hiding, into secrecy and into another state where individual rights to self determination are still recognized.”

Hughes was not moved by pleas to delete references to the 1925 ban. He insisted that SB 2880, including its mentions of the 1925 abortion ban, was necessary in order to protect every “innocent and helpless” “unborn baby sleeping in their mother’s womb,” and also to “protect” Texas women from taking “poisonous” abortion pills from out of state.

Eckhardt mocked Hughes for purporting to “protect us little ladies.”

“I don’t feel protected, I feel attacked,” she said.

Sen. Molly Cook, a Democrat from Houston, urged Republicans to “stop trying to punish anyone who tries to help anyone assisting women trying to obtain autonomy over their bodies. And instead we should be doing everything to make pregnancy safe in Texas and to care for babies and children.”

With pregnant women in Texas having a 155% higher risk of dying than pregnant women in California, Cook asserted that “it is so unsafe to be pregnant in Texas.”

“They (Republican lawmakers) are trying to stop pregnant people from getting the care they need and they don’t care how they hurt people, even if that isolates people and prevents out-of-state physicians and clinics from providing care to Texans,” added Blake Rocap, legislative counsel for Avow, a nonprofit fighting for abortion access across Texas.

Rocap called the reference to the 1925 abortion ban in SB 2880 a “flashing red warning light about the anti-abortion movement’s plans.” Rocap warned of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s likely support of “ex-abusive partners” attempting to control pregnant Texans who need abortions through the civil bounty part of the law.

Reprinted with permission from Courier Texas.

Irritated Senators Ask Clueless Director Patel: Where's The FBI Budget?

Irritated Senators Ask Clueless Director Patel: Where's The FBI Budget?

If you thought FBI Director Kash Patel had any competence whatsoever, think again.

Appearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday, Patel was unable to provide a timeline for when his department’s budget—which was required by law to be submitted more than a week ago—would finally be delivered to Congress.

Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland noted that the hearing was essentially pointless, since Patel failed to provide critical spending and budget documents.

“How do we, as Congress, do our budget and our work without that request and without the spend plan?” Murray said, calling Patel’s lack of preparedness “insufficient and deeply disturbing.”

Patel’s signature dunderheaded combativeness was on full display during a tense exchange with Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who asked whether people deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 have the constitutional right to due process under the Fifth Amendment.

“It’s not for me to call the balls and strikes on it,” Patel responded.

“You haven't read the Constitution?” Merkley asked, citing the Supreme Court ruling in Reno v. Flores as part of the settled law on the matter.

“It concerns me that you're not familiar with the core concept of due process applying to all persons as written in black and white in the Constitution,” Merkley added.

After the hearing, Murray called out Patel’s incompetence and the threat it poses to the United States.

“Kash Patel, the conspiracy theorist that Republicans made FBI Director, came to a Senate hearing on the budget—with NO budget, NO timeline, and NO clue. It's downright incompetent, and it's making America less safe. We need serious leadership at the FBI,” she wrote on Bluesky.

No budget? Check! Equivocating statements about the Constitution? Check! Seems like Patel’s competence is perfectly in line with the rest of the Trump administration.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Bobby Lied: Violating Senate Commitments, RFK Jr. Seeks To Thwart Vaccines

Bobby Lied: Violating Senate Commitments, RFK Jr. Seeks To Thwart Vaccines

One week after being sworn into office, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is reportedly preparing to make significant changes to the vaccine approval process—actions that critics say violate the “commitment” he made to several Republican senators. These assurances, senators claim, were key conditions for their votes to confirm the Kennedy, an attorney known for his “role in legitimizing anti-vaccine activism.”

Secretary Kennedy “is preparing to remove members of the outside committees that advise the federal government on vaccine approvals and other key public health decisions, according to two people familiar with the planning,” Politico reported Thursday. “Kennedy plans to replace members who he perceives to have conflicts of interest, as part of a widespread effort to minimize what he’s criticized as undue industry influence over the nation’s health agencies.”

The apparent most likely target is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which “plays a key role in setting vaccine policy. Kennedy and his top aides are also scrutinizing a host of other outside panels, including those that advise the Food and Drug Administration,” according to Politico.

In anticipation of this possibility, before leaving office, President Joe Biden and his HHS Secretary, Xavier Becerra, “approved the appointments of eight new candidates” to ACIP, STAT News reported in January. The medical news outlet called it “a burst of activity within a matter of a few months that could, in theory, make it more difficult for the Trump administration to shape the panel with its own appointees.”

But experts believe that “any attempt to protect the status quo at the ACIP will prove to have been futile. People who sit on this committee have at-will appointments,” they noted.

Multiple news outlets on Thursday reported that ACIP’s first scheduled meeting of the year, slated for next week, has now been postposed, a development raising concerns.

Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a noted virologist, responded on social media to the rescheduling, remarking: “This is how RFK Jr will administratively destroy vaccination programs.”

U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy is a Louisiana Republican and a medical doctor who “co-founded the Greater Baton Rouge Community Clinic, a clinic providing free dental and health care to the working uninsured,” his Senate bio reads. “Bill also created a private-public partnership to vaccinate 36,000 greater Baton Rouge area children against Hepatitis B at no cost to the schools or parents. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Bill led a group of health care volunteers to convert an abandoned K-Mart building into an emergency health care facility, providing basic health care to hurricane evacuees.”

Politico reports that the assurances RFK Jr. “provided helped clinch his confirmation, after Senate HELP Committee Chair Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said he received commitments that changes would not be made to the CDC’s vaccine committee.”

On February 4, standing on the floor of the Senate, Dr. Cassidy delivered a speech detailing those commitments.

“After seeing patients die from vaccine preventable diseases, I dedicated much of my time to vaccine research and immunization programs. Personally witnessing the safety monitoring, and the effectiveness of immunization. But simply, vaccines save lives,” Cassidy said (archived).

“This is the context that informed me when considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr as the nominee to be Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services,” Cassidy continued, explaining why he was choosing to vote to confirm RFK Jr. “Regarding vaccines, Mr. Kennedy has been insistent that he just wants good science and to ensure safety. But on this topic, the science is good, the science is credible. Vaccines save lives. They are safe. They do not cause autism. There are multiple studies that show this. They are a crucial part of our nation’s public health response.”

Crucially, Senator Cassidy said that Kennedy “committed that he would work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems, and not establish parallel systems. If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices [ACIP] without changes.”

Cassidy was not the only Republican who voted to confirm Kennedy based on commitments he personally made to them.

Defending her vote to confirm Kennedy, widely recognized as one of the least qualified among all of President Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) issued a lengthy statement repeatedly explaining that RFK Jr. had made “commitments” to her, personally, that were sufficiently satisfying to earn her vote — despite his lengthy reported history of anti-vaccine activism, his statement that, in his opinion, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” and what has been recorded as his documented history of promoting conspiracy theories.

“I continue to have concerns about Mr. Kennedy’s views on vaccines and his selective interpretation of scientific studies, which initially caused my misgivings about his nomination,” declared Senator Murkowski. “Vaccines have saved millions of lives, and I sought assurance that, as HHS Secretary, he would do nothing to make it difficult for people to take vaccines or discourage vaccination efforts. He has made numerous commitments to me and my colleagues, promising to work with Congress to ensure public access to information and to base vaccine recommendations on data-driven, evidence-based, and medically sound research. These commitments are important to me and, on balance, provide assurance for my vote.”

One week ago CNN’s Manu Raju reported, “Asked Lisa Murkowski if she trusts RFK Jr on vaccines, and she said: ‘We are going to hold him accountable and that’s how we will get the trust.'”

Thursday afternoon, the nonprofit Protect Our Care, issued a statement strongly criticizing Senator Cassidy.

“Just one week in, RFK Jr. has already begun enacting some of the most radical parts of his conspiracy theory-filled agenda, breaking promises he made to on-the-fence Senators during his confirmation process. Coverage confirms that RFK Jr. will be removing members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee after canceling a critical meeting on vaccine approvals,” the group charged.

“RFK Jr. played Bill Cassidy like a fiddle,” the group’s president, Brad Woodhouse, added. “It hasn’t even been a week and he is already breaking his promises. After saying anything to on-the-fence senators to get confirmed, RFK Jr. is now showing his true colors as the anti-science, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist he always has been. The consequences of RFK Jr.’s broken promises, which were always bull—, will be more sick and dead Americans, including children, and Senator Cassidy and his colleagues who bought what Kennedy was selling will bear responsibility.”

Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported on another commitment RFK Jr. made to Senator Cassidy, one he appears to be preparing to rescind.

“To earn the vote he needed to become the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a special promise to a U.S. senator: He would not change the nation’s current vaccination schedule,” the AP reported. “But on Tuesday, speaking for the first time to thousands of U.S. Health and Human Services agency employees, he vowed to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule that prevents measles, polio and other dangerous diseases.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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