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Tag: spending bill
Former President Trump, left, watches Sen. Mitch McConnell speak in 2019.

'Primary McConnell!' Angry Trump Demands Revenge On Senate GOP Leader

Days after talking up House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and the ultra-right lawmakers pulling his strings, former President Donald Trump called on Republicans to primary Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and any Senate Republicans who vote with him.

In a Monday post to Truth Social, a barely moderated Twitter clone for his extremist cult, the ex-president congratulated McCarthy on clinching the gavel — for which he has since taken credit — and laid into McConnell and other GOP Senators who voted to pass the $1.7 omnibus spending package late December in time to avert a partial government shutdown.

Central to Trump’s fury over the package’s passage is that it happened just before the GOP-controlled House of the 118th Congress convened, barring the GOP caucus, which would later strongarm veto power over McCarthy’s speakership, netting President Biden and the Democrats a political victory.

“We must now stop Mitch McConnell,” Trump wrote, the latest in the fusillade of attacks he has directed at the Minority Leader, who criticized him for provoking a mob of his supporters into storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to overturn the official certification of his loss.

“It’s as though he just doesn’t care anymore, he pushes through anything the Democrats want. The $1.7 TRILLION quickly approved Bill of the week before was HORRIBLE,” Trump said in his Truth Social post. “Zero for USA Border Security. If he waited just ten days, the now ‘United Republican Congress’ could have made it MUCH BETTER, or KILLED IT.”

Trump added, “Something is wrong with McConnell, and those Republican Senators that Vote with him. PRIMARY THEM ALL!!!”

The sprawling package comprised increased funding for the military; additional Ukraine aid; increased spending for college access, childcare, disaster aid, protections for pregnant workers, and more: a provision to repeal the 1887 Electoral Count Act, the 135-year old law that Trump and his attorneys tried to exploit to overturn Biden’s 2020 election triumph.

Eighteen GOP Senators — and later, nine House Republicans — some of whom are vocal critics of their counterparts across the aisle, voted with Democrats to pass the package, rebuffing a cascade of threats from prominent entities within the Republican Party.

Hours before the Senate passed the package, Trump attacked supposed “radical Democrats” for “[ramming] through this monstrosity in the dark of night” and accused McConnell of being “more of a Democrat than a Republican.”

In Monday’s Truth Social rant, Trump again referred to Elaine Chao, McConnell’s wife and his former transportation secretary, as “Coco Chow,” a racial slur.

"[Trump] is trying to get a rise out of us. He says all sorts of outrageous things, and I don't make a point of answering any one of them," Chao, who was born in Taiwan, said in December, according to Newsweek.

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House Republicans Block Their Own Spending Bill Because of LGBT Protection Amendment

House Republicans Block Their Own Spending Bill Because of LGBT Protection Amendment

A domestic energy and water spending bill was defeated last Thursday over an amendment that would prevent the U.S. government from hiring contractors that discriminate based on gender identity and sexual orientation. The amendment, which would enforce a 2014 executive order from President Obama, was sponsored by Rep. Sean Maloney and added by the full House on Wednesday night with a vote of 223-195. 43 Republicans sided with Democrats and voted to add the amendment and bar LGBT discrimination by federal contractors.

But when the House voted on the spending measure the next day, it ended up failing with a vote of 305-112, with House Democrats screaming “Shame! Shame!” as some Republicans changed their votes and blocked their own bill. According to the Democrats, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy stepped in and pressured seven GOP members to switch sides.

Minority Leader Nansy Pelosi said the bill’s blockage was a product of “House Republicans’ discrimination against the LGBT community,” adding that “they are willing to vote down their own appropriations bill in order to prevent progress over bigotry.”

Republicans argued, as they usually do when fighting anti discrimination legislation, that the amendment was an attack on religious liberties. “I could not, in good conscience, vote for the appropriations bill with this damaging amendment included,” said Rep. Diane Black of Tennessee. CNN reported that a Georgia Republican opened a morning meeting with a prayer warning colleagues that any Republican who voted for the LGBT provision “was going to hell.”

This isn’t the first time that Republicans hold the U.S. budget hostage. Last year, the appropriations process was delayed over a fight about flying the Confederate flag on federal ground. Last week, GOP leaders blocked another Maloney-sponsored LGBT amendment by keeping the vote open and convincing members to switch their vote. The amendment was meant to protect federal LGBT workers under a spending bill for military construction and veterans program.

The $37 billion spending measure is one of twelve annual appropriations bills that Congress must pass — and that are often used as vehicles for other proposals. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan blamed Democrats of this, accusing them of “looking to sabotage the appropriations process” by attaching anti-discrimination language to it.

Maloney, who is new York’s first openly gay congressman, plans to revive the amendment by adding it to other bills, and said that “the only way discrimination is going to win is if Kevin McCarthy keeps rigging the votes.”
Photo: Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., May 25, 2016.      REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Citigroup Becomes Its Own Self-Serving Lawmaker

Citigroup Becomes Its Own Self-Serving Lawmaker

Congress, which has long been so tied up in a partisan knot by right-wing extremists that it has been unable to move, suddenly sprang loose at the end of the year and put on a phenomenal show of acrobatic lawmaking.

In one big, bipartisan spending bill, our legislative gymnasts pulled off a breathtaking, flat-footed backflip for Wall Street, and then set a dizzying new height record for the amount of money deep-pocketed donors can give to the two major political parties. It was the best scratch-my-back performance you never saw. You and I didn’t see it — because it happened in secret.

The favor was huge — allowing Wall Street’s most reckless speculators to have their losses on risky derivative deals insured by us taxpayers. Yes, such losses were a central cause of the 2008 financial crash and subsequent unholy bank bailout, which led to passage of the Dodd-Frank reform law, including a provision sparing taxpayers from covering future losses. But with one, compact, 85-line provision inserted deep inside the 1,600-page, trillion-dollar spending bill, Congress did a dazzling flip-flop on that regulation, putting us taxpayers back on the hook for the banksters’ high-risk speculation.

In this same spending bill, Congress also used its legislative athleticism to free rich donors (such as Wall Street bankers) from a limit of under $100,000 on the donation that any one of them can give to political parties. In a spectacular gravity-defying stunt, lawmakers flung the limit on these donations to a record-setting 15 times higher than before. So now bankers who are grateful to either party for being able to make a killing on taxpayer-backed deals can give $1.5 million each to the parties.

Perhaps you recall from your high school civics class that neat, one-page flow chart showing the perfectly logical, beautifully democratic process that Congress must go through to pass our laws.

What a bunch of kidders those chart makers were! To see how the sausage is really made, let’s take a look at that trillion-dollar budget bill that Congress squeezed out just before Christmas. It was crammed with special corporate favors, such as: reinstating a Bush rule allowing mining giants to explode the tops off ancient Appalachian mountains and then bulldoze the rubble down into the valley below, destroying pristine mountain streams; another letting long-haul trucking outfits require their drivers to be on the road more than 11 hours a day and up to 82 hours per week, filling our highways with highballing, sleep-deprived truckers; and cutting $60 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency, freeing up polluters to go unpunished for polluting.

None of these favors had anything to do with that “how a bill becomes law” flow chart in our civics textbook. No bill was filed, no public hearings, no debate, no vote. Just — BAM! — there they were, a thicket of benefits secretly slipped into the 1,600-page budget bill by … well, by whom? Largely by corporate lobbyists, though they get one of their for-hire congresscritters to do the actual dirty deed.

The taxpayer subsidy for Wall Street, for example, was written by Citigroup. The bank’s lobbyists then handed the provision to Kansas Republican Kevin Yoder, who slipped it into the bill. Thus, the Wall Street conglomerate that took a $50 billion bailout from us taxpayers just seven years ago to save itself from its own bad deals essentially was allowed to become an unelected, self-serving, do-it-yourself, backroom “lawmaker” to make sure that your and my tax dollars will be there to cover its next mess-up.

And that, boys and girls, is the real flow chart for making our laws. It’s always an amazing sight when Wall Street and Congress get together — especially when they get together out of sight.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Matt Buck via Flickr

Unzipping The Elizabeth Warren Package

Unzipping The Elizabeth Warren Package

They like her style. Many liberals adore Elizabeth Warren’s populist passion for denouncing predatory conduct by Wall Street — and her linking it to growing income inequality.

Though the senator from Massachusetts insists she’s not running for president, her fan base has set up camp in Iowa, fueling the fires for a Warren candidacy. They want her to challenge Hillary Clinton, a likely contender viewed as more lenient toward the captains of finance.

Style goes a long way, but not all the way. So let’s unzip the Warren package and evaluate the components. When you do that, you find a strange thing. The stands that have anointed Warren as the “soul of the Democratic Party” are not particularly liberal. Some are profoundly conservative, in the traditional sense of “conservative” — that is, letting markets determine winners and losers in business.

We only think of these Wall Street critiques as liberal because Republicans — helped by no few Democrats — have confused the public into thinking that whatever aids in the building of private fortunes is somehow conservative and pro-market. That would include taxpayer subsidies, which they try to keep hidden by complexity.

The truth is that the Wall Street formula for success is not so much taking risks and reaping the rewards if one is clever. It’s by cleverly moving the risks onto the taxpayers’ shoulders. Recall how government guarantees on junky mortgages let the financial industry reap upfront profits while leaving taxpayers with the cleanup when the real estate bubble splattered.

The Dodd-Frank reforms attempted to shield taxpayers from such bailouts in the future. Congress is now undermining them. We refer to the recently passed spending bill, which lets federally insured banks engage in certain risky derivatives trading. Just its name — the “swaps push-out” provision — is enough to make the average eye glaze, which is exactly what the authors want.

Warren led the protest against this meddling with market forces, which, in our bizarro world of political discourse, makes her a liberal lioness. Conservatives are the ones who’ve argued that we don’t need many regulations. The markets, they say, will discipline speculators placing bad bets. But what the “conservatives” have just done is protect banks from such punishment — and, should a deal go south, punish the taxpayers instead.

The “swaps push-out” provision comes courtesy of Rep. Kevin Yoder. The Kansas Republican didn’t personally compose this weakening of the Dodd-Frank rule, called “Prohibition Against Federal Government Bailouts of Swaps Entities.” He let Citigroup do it and simply transferred the banking giant’s handiwork into the spending bill.

As Yoder framed the issue, “this is about the farmer in your district who wants to get a loan.”

Aw, shucks. Yep, oil companies and agribusiness save money on their hedging activities when taxpayers take on the risks. How naive of us to think the cost of managing their risks should be their business expense.

A less useful part of the Warren package is the senator’s tendency to blame Wall Street for demanding favors from Congress. Of course the financial industry tries to get what it can from Washington. It should be the business of Congress to say, “Sorry. You can’t have.”

There are principled conservatives, including Federal Reserve officials, who have seen the provision as the ruse it is to keep taxpayers on the hook for speculators’ mistakes. But most of the Republican-controlled Congress is neither principled nor conservative.

That leaves liberals to speak the obvious truth that — in Sen. Sherrod Brown’s words — the provision will “open the door to future bailouts funded by American taxpayers.” Funny how liberals like Warren (and Brown) have become the taxpayers’ real defenders and so few people get it.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Senate Democrats via Flickr