Politics Random, Random

[ponchi101]

Serious question again. What is the role of the famous SARGENT AT ARMS, and the CAPITOL POLICE? Are these people nothing more than glorified eunuchs?

[ti-amie]

Ten Senate Republicans propose compromise covid relief package, posing challenge for Biden
Move by GOP senators led by Susan Collins comes as Democrats prepare to go forward quickly with Biden package without Republican support

By
Erica Werner,
Jeff Stein and
Seung Min Kim
Jan. 31, 2021 at 1:22 p.m. EST

Ten Republican senators announced plans Sunday to release an approximately $600 billion coronavirus relief package as a counterproposal to President Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan, posing a test for the new president who campaigned as a bipartisan dealmaker.

The senators, led by Susan Collins (R-Maine), said they would formally unveil the package on Monday. In a letter to Biden, they requested to meet with him and said they were offering their proposal in recognition of his “calls for unity.”

“We want to work in good faith with you and your administration to meet the health, economic and societal challenges of the covid crisis,” they wrote.

Their move comes as Democrats prepare to move forward on Monday to set up a partisan path forward for Biden’s relief bill, which Republicans have dismissed as overly costly given some $4 trillion Congress has already committed to fighting the pandemic, including $900 billion in December.

The GOP proposal jettisons certain elements that have drawn Republican opposition, such as increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.

It would also reduce the size of a new round of checks Biden wants to send to Americans, from $1,400 per individual to $1,000 — while significantly reducing the income limits that determine eligibility for the stimulus payments.

A $600 billion plan that is a fraction of the size of Biden’s proposal is unlikely to draw much if any Democratic support. However, the GOP offer presents a challenge for Biden, who campaigned on promises to unify Congress and the country and must decide whether to ignore the GOP overture or make a genuine effort to find common ground across the aisle.

Top Biden economic adviser Brian Deese said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the White House had received the Republicans’ letter and would review it. But he emphasized that speed was of the essence, and refused to say whether Biden was open to entertaining a smaller overall price tag.

“The president is uncompromising when it comes to the speed that we need to act at to address this crisis,” Deese said.

“The provisions of the president’s plan, the American Rescue Plan, are calibrated to the economic crisis that we face,” Deese said.

The White House is pushing its plan amid signs of a broader economic slowdown and a continued wave of enormously high unemployment claims of close to 1 million a week. The emergence in the United States of highly transmissible coronavirus variants has also intensified fears that another wave of shutdowns will be necessary.

Because the Senate is split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, it is significant that Republicans assembled 10 lawmakers to get behind the proposal. That means that, if Democrats were to join them, they could reach the 60-vote threshold necessary to pass legislation under regular Senate procedures.

Democrats are planning to skirt the 60-vote requirement using special budget rules that would allow the Biden package to pass with a simple majority vote. Democrats control the Senate because Vice President Harris can cast tie-breaking votes.

Democratic aides said the GOP proposal would not change their plans to move forward with the budget bill this week that would set the stage for party-line passage of Biden’s plan.

“The key to getting robust job opportunities is to cease any delay, any inaction, any wait-and-see around this rescue plan,” Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“The American people could not care less about budget process. … They need relief and they need it now,” Bernstein said.

Biden’s plan would send $1,400 payments to individuals with incomes up to $75,000 per year, and couples making up to $150,000.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), one of the signers of the letter, said the GOP plan would lower those thresholds to $50,000 for individuals and $100,000 for couples. Instead of $1,400 checks, the GOP plan would propose $1,000 checks, according to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), another member of the group.

The GOP plan would also reduce Biden’s proposal for extending emergency federal unemployment benefits, which are set at $300 a week and will expire in mid-March. The Biden plan would increase those benefits to $400 weekly and extend them through September. The GOP plan would keep the payments at $300 per week and extend them through June, according to three people with knowledge of the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of an official announcement.

Portman criticized Democrats for their plans to go it alone, saying this approach would “jam Republicans and really jam the country.”

The signers of the letter include eight Republican senators who are part of a bipartisan group that has conferred with Biden administration officials about the relief bill. In addition to Collins, Portman, and Cassidy, these are Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah), Todd C. Young (Ind.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) and Jerry Moran (Kan.). Also signing were Mike Rounds (S.D.) and Thom Tillis (N.C.).

Cassidy strongly criticized Biden for not soliciting broader input from senators in both parties. Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Cassidy said the Republican package amounted to $600 billion and was “targeted to the needs of the American people.”

Cassidy also said Biden’s push to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour would cost millions of jobs.

“You don’t want bipartisanship. You want the patina of bipartisanship. … The president’s team did not reach out to anybody in our group, either Democrat or Republican, when they fashioned their proposal,” Cassidy said. “They’ve never reached out to us — that’s the beginning of the bad faith.”

The $900 billion relief bill Congress passed in December included $600 stimulus payments to individuals. Biden’s plan to issue a new round of $1,400 checks would bring that figure to $2,000 — making good on promises he and other Democrats made that helped the party win two Senate seats in Georgia in early January. Those victories gave Democrats the majority in the Senate, and Democrats including the two new senators from Georgia have insisted they must make good on those promises.

“The entire Democratic Party came together behind the candidates in Georgia — we made promises to the American people,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on ABC. “If politics means anything — if you’re going to have any degree of credibility — you can’t campaign on a series of issues … and then change your mind. That’s not how it works. We made promises to the American people; we’re going to keep those promises.”

In addition to a new round of checks, a higher minimum wage and increased unemployment benefits, Biden’s plan includes rental assistance and eviction forbearance, an increased child tax credit, some $130 billion to help schools reopen, hundreds of billions of dollars for cities and states, and $160 billion for a national vaccination plan, more testing and public health jobs.

Money for vaccinations — which Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said recently was key to helping the economy — has emerged as the one real area of bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill. The GOP plan would match Biden’s call to devote $160 billion to vaccines, testing and related health-care spending.

“With your support, we believe Congress can once again craft a relief package that will provide meaningful, effective assistance to the American people and set us on a path to recovery,” the GOP senators wrote.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-polic ... ompromise/

[ti-amie]

I remember all the attempts made by the GOP to reach out to Democrats when they passed their tax cuts for the .01%. And of course SC justices.

/sarcasm

[ti-amie]

After Record Turnout, Republicans Are Trying to Make It Harder to Vote
The presidential election results are settled. But the battle over new voting rules, especially for mail-in ballots, has just begun.

By Michael Wines
Jan. 30, 2021

WASHINGTON — In Georgia, Arizona and other states won by President Biden, some leading Republicans stood up in November to make what, in any other year, would be an unremarkable statement: The race is over. And we lost, fair and square.

But that was then. Now, in statehouses nationwide, Republicans who echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of rampant fraud are proposing to make it harder to vote next time — ostensibly to convince the very voters who believed them that elections can be trusted again. And even some colleagues who defended the legitimacy of the November vote are joining them.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, state legislators have filed 106 bills to tighten election rules, generally making it harder to cast a ballot — triple the number at this time last year. In short, Republicans who for more than a decade have used wildly inflated allegations of voter fraud to justify making it harder to vote, are now doing so again, this time seizing on Mr. Trump’s thoroughly debunked charges of a stolen election to push back at Democratic-leaning voters who flocked to mail-in ballots last year.

In Georgia, where the State House of Representatives has set up a special committee on election integrity, legislators are pushing to roll back no-excuse absentee voting. Republicans in Pennsylvania plan 14 hearings to revisit complaints they raised last year about the election and to propose limitations on voting.

Arizona Republicans have subpoenaed November’s ballots and vote tabulation equipment in Maricopa County, a Democratic stronghold that includes Phoenix. Legislators are taking aim at an election system in which four in five ballots are mailed or delivered to drop boxes.

Those and other proposals underscore the continuing power of Mr. Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the November election, even as some of his administration’s top election experts call the vote the most secure in history. And they reflect longstanding Republican efforts to push back against efforts to expand the ability to vote.

Democrats have their own agenda: 406 bills in 35 states, according to the Brennan Center, that run the gamut from giving former felons the vote to automatically registering visitors to motor vehicle bureaus and other state offices. And Democrats in the Senate will soon unveil a large proposal to undergird much of the election process with what they call pro-democracy reforms, with lowering barriers to voting as the centerpiece. Near-identical legislation has been filed in the House.

“There’s going to be a rush in the next year to legislate certain types of election reforms,” said Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor and co-director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project. “The jury is still out on whether the lesson from this election will be that we need to make voting as convenient as possible, or whether there will be a serious retrenchment that makes voting less accessible.”

In truth, who controls a given legislature will largely decide what chances a bill has.

In the 23 states wholly run by Republicans, Democratic bills expanding ballot access are largely dead on arrival. The same is true of Republican proposals to restrict ballot access in the 15 states completely controlled by Democrats.

But in some states where legislators’ control and interests align, the changes could be consequential.

In Arizona, where Democrats captured a second Senate seat and Mr. Biden eked out a 10,500-vote victory, lawmakers are taking aim at an election system in which absentee ballots have long been dominant.

One bill would repeal the state’s no-excuse absentee ballot law. Others would pare back automatic mailings of absentee ballots to the 3.2 million voters who have signed up for the service. One ardent advocate of the stolen-election conspiracy theory, State Representative Kevin Payne of Maricopa County, would require that signatures on all mail ballots be notarized, creating an impossibly high bar for most voters. Yet another bill, paradoxically, would require early ballots that are mailed to voters to be delivered by hand.

In Georgia, where Mr. Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, both Republicans, have repeatedly defended the election results. The two are nevertheless supporting stricter voting requirements.

A proposal by Republicans in the State Senate to eliminate no-excuse absentee ballots — a quarter of the five million votes cast in November — has drawn opposition even before it has been filed. But Republicans broadly support a bill to require submitting a photocopied identification card such as a driver’s license with both applications for absentee ballots and the ballots themselves. Mr. Raffensperger has said he supports that measure and another to make it easier to challenge a voter’s legitimacy at the polls.

Brian Robinson, a Republican political consultant in Atlanta, said, “The overall purpose of these reforms is to restore faith in our election systems.” He added, “That’s not to say that it was a giant failure; that’s to say that faith has been diminished.”

He allowed that Mr. Trump’s false charges of fraud “drives a lot of the loss of faith among Republicans,” but he also took aim at Democrats, noting that the Democrat who lost the 2018 governor’s race, Stacey Abrams, also had refused to concede, saying voter suppression had caused an “erosion of our democracy.”

“Both sides have dipped their toes in those waters,” he said.

But it’s clear that Republicans are now dipping much more than their toes. Democrats and some voting-rights advocates say the Republican agenda on voting is less about lost trust than lost elections. A Republican election official in suburban Atlanta said as much this month, arguing for tougher voting laws that reduce turnout after Democratic candidates won both of the state’s Senate seats in runoffs.

“They don’t have to change all of them,” said Alice O’Lenick, who heads the Gwinnett County Board of Registrations and Elections, “but they have got to change the major parts of them so we at least have a shot at winning.”

Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who led legal battles against restrictive voting rules last year, said the reason for the state’s voting-law crackdown was transparent. “These were elections that withstood the scrutiny of two recounts, an audit and a whole lot of attention in the political arena and the courts,” he said. “The only reason they’re doing this is to make voting harder because they didn’t like the results. And that’s shameful.”

Indeed, a handful of bills seem to make no bones about their partisan goals. One Arizona proposal would give the Legislature the power to decide presidential elections by overriding the secretary of state’s certification of electoral votes.

Bills in Arizona, Mississippi and Wisconsin would end the practice of awarding all electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the statewide vote. Instead, they would be allotted according to votes in congressional districts — which in Republican states are generally gerrymandered to favor Republicans. In Arizona, the Legislature also would choose two electors.

In the last election, the moves would have reduced Mr. Biden’s electoral vote total by 11 votes.

Nebraska, on the other hand, would do the reverse with a similar partisan outcome: The state now awards presidential electors by congressional district, but legislation would move the state to the winner-take-all system. One of Nebraska’s three House districts voted for Mr. Biden in November.

Even Republicans in states where the November election was not close are proposing to tighten voting laws. In Texas, a state with perhaps the nation’s strictest voting rules and one of the lowest levels of turnout, the state party has declared “election integrity” the top legislative priority. Among other proposals, legislators want to cut the time allotted for early voting, limit outsiders’ ability to help voters fill out ballots and require new voters to prove they are citizens.

Republicans who control the Pennsylvania Legislature have mounted one of the most aggressive campaigns, even though any laws they enact probably would have to weather a veto by the state’s Democratic governor.

A handful of Republican state lawmakers want to abolish no-excuse absentee voting only 15 months after the Legislature approved it in an election-law package backed by all but two of its 134 G.O.P. members who cast votes. The main supporter of the bill, State Senator Doug Mastriano, has claimed that Mr. Biden’s victory in the state is illegitimate, and spent thousands of dollars to bus protesters to the Jan. 6 demonstration that ended in the assault on the Capitol.

Rolling back the law appears a long shot. But there seems to be strong Republican support for other measures, including eliminating drop boxes for absentee ballots, discarding mail-in ballots with technical errors and ending a grace period for receiving ballots mailed by Election Day.

State Representative Seth Grove, the Republican chair of the committee holding 14 hearings into election practices, said at the initial gathering on Jan. 21 that he was not interested in dwelling on the 2020 election. “We want a better process going forward, and we’re committed to that,’’ Mr. Grove said.

But at that hearing, legislators grilled Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, for three hours on her emailed guidance to county election officials before the Nov. 3 vote.

In an interview, Ms. Boockvar said the purpose of the hearings was to further undermine voters’ confidence in democracy and to “lay the groundwork for disenfranchisement.’’

“We are at a watershed, and we have a choice to make right now,” she said. “Acknowledge the truth — have public, vocal, strong support for the strength and resilience of our democracy. Or we can continue to perpetuate the lies.”

In Washington, a Democratic agenda can be seen in the latest version of a far-ranging elections and voting bill that passed the House last year but died in the Republican-controlled Senate.

This time, the Democrat-controlled Senate will file its own version, with committee hearings expected in February.

Its voting provisions include allowing automatic and same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting, no-excuse voting by mail, and online voter registration, as well as the restoration of voting rights nationwide to felons who complete their sentences. In one fell swoop, it would set minimum standards for American federal elections that would erase a host of procedural barriers to casting a ballot.

It also would require the states to appoint independent and nonpartisan commissions to draw political boundaries, eliminating the profusion of gerrymanders that the Supreme Court said in 2019 were beyond its authority to control.

Few expect much chance of passage in a deeply divided Senate, but the Democratic leaders in both houses have made it the first bill of the new congressional session, a statement that — symbolically, at least — it is the first priority of the new Democratic majority.

Whether any of it goes beyond symbolism remains to be seen.

Trip Gabriel contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/us/r ... izona.html

[ponchi101]

These are the same people that then go and claim that the USA is "The greatest democracy on Earth".
What a joke.

[the Moz]

These are the same people that then go and claim that the USA is "The greatest democracy on Earth".
What a joke.

Absolutely, but the joke really really really really really isn't funny anymore

[JazzNU]

Tip of the iceberg, but in case you're unaware of how deranged the thinking of Q is, a little detail on what they believe. There's been a lot of reporting on it in the last few days on their crazy ideas, in addition to what we heard after the insurrection.

[ponchi101]

Silly thought.
Can the REST of the USA go like "even crazier" and start spreading even weirder news about the GOP, to the most extreme, to see if the Q Anon people start seeing how insane their positions are? You know, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
"Mitch McConnell went to the bathroom and he crapped a fully alive, 20 feet long python"
"Lindsey Graham every day eats one fully homosexual baby, and then he has shoes made from his skin".
"Marjorie Taylor Greene brushes her teeth with gunpowder, and uses a special Preparation H that is loaded with Polonium 182"
"You know that story about Richard Geere and the gerbils? Well, Ted Cruz does it too but with a Gila monster!"
"You know this new kid Hawley? He is an Alien from outer space with two anuses that survives eating live chihuahuas he can swallow with his dislocating jaw!"

I don't know, see if they can see how lunatic their ideas are when they start looking at even crazier ones.

[ti-amie]

It's a cult. They start off with things that "seem" as if they could be true and then drag you over the cliff. The whole thing should've ended when the pizza place they claimed had a basement where kidnapped children were being held was shown to not have a basement. I saw some ravings from another one last night and you really do have to wonder what kind of mental illness they're suffering from.

[JazzNU]

It's a cult. They start off with things that "seem" as if they could be true and then drag you over the cliff. The whole thing should've ended when the pizza place they claimed had a basement where kidnapped children were being held was shown to not have a basement. I saw some ravings from another one last night and you really do have to wonder what kind of mental illness they're suffering from.

For real. I've been saying for weeks if you have any money to invest in a business, I'd look into deprogramming centers like the ones that used to exist in the 70s and 80s. Like rehab for cult ideology instead of a drug addiction. Even more potential patients now than then, and they were hardly empty back in the day.

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

Uh, phrasing is everything?

[ti-amie]

And here's Mitch trying to act as if he's still in charge and trying to define the parameters of the conversation.

[ponchi101]

If it were a $1.9 trillion package to bail out banks, insurance companies and the NRA it would not pass because the GOP would ask for $3.8. That would be the sole reason.