Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Senate Republicans May Block Another Trump Shutdown

While Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, remains bellicose about his "border wall" despite the fact that polls indicate that 71% of voters do not want it and/or do not believe it is worth a government shutdown,.  Senate Republicans - in contrast to the misnamed "Freedom Caucus" in the House of Representatives which might just as easily be called the KKK Caucus - seem to have gotten the message that Trump's monument to himself might prove costly in the 2020 Senate elections where the GOP will face a far more challenging map than in 2018. Thus, as Politico reports, some Senate Republicans are even talking about a bi-partisan agreement that might be veto proof and which could end Trump's delusions about a border wall for good despite the lingering anti-immigrant hatred that binds his base to him.  Here are highlights that reflect how Trump may yet see his delusions of grandeur dashed (Joni Ernst is, in my view, a certifiable nut case and hopefully not representative of even semi-delusional Republicans): 

Senate Republicans can’t stomach another shutdown.  After weathering 35 days of a partial government closure, the Senate GOP is dreading the possibility another one will hit in less than three weeks — a sentiment that could prevent President Donald Trump from closing the government again.

Though House Republicans aren’t ruling out supporting the president should he choose another confrontation over his border wall, the Republican Senate majority — which actually has governing power — has another view.

Most GOP lawmakers dutifully stuck with Trump in public as the partial government shutdown dragged on. But privately, Republican support began to crack as their polling and the economy both suffered. After a half-dozen GOP senators defected last week, Trump dropped his demands for border wall money before a full-scale revolt unfolded.

[W]hile White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that Trump “doesn’t want to go through another shutdown,” she declined to rule it out if Congress doesn’t come up with a border security plan to Trump’s liking. Neither did House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a close Trump confidant.

Senators are already making calls to gauge what their fellow conference committee members might support ahead of their first meeting Wednesday. And Republicans writ large are touting the panel as a possible solution for the problem.

But if that committee fails, as many on the Hill privately believe is likely, Trump has touted two paths to again try to build his wall: a shutdown or a national emergency on the border. . . . Senate Republicans loathe both options, but for now, they’d choose almost anything over another funding lapse.

The Republican retreat from the border wall confrontation was evident on Monday not just among the rank and file.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) barely mentioned the standoff over the border, other than to ding Democrats for voting against a Middle East policy bill during the shutdown.

It seemed few Republicans had any desire to rehash the episode. “There is little or no appetite for it,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “Those who thought that shutdowns were a good idea have been disabused by that.” Some Republican centrists are even suggesting that a bipartisan border agreement could withstand a veto threat.

“I think the committee will come up with a deal ... If they come up with something that isn’t crazy, I think it’ll have enough votes to override a veto in the House and Senate,” Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho said Monday. . . . “Because we’ve all learned, hopefully, that shutdowns don’t work, and they’re stupid.”

But even as some Republicans look to use their influence with Trump to nudge him away from another self-destructive shutdown, others are just as queasy about being at odds with the president.

Take Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is up for reelection in 2020 and could face a tough Democratic challenge. She disliked the shutdown and said it made everyone in Congress look bad, but she was not among those thinking about bolting from Trump’s position last week before the president himself caved.

Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), who was among the few Republicans to support Democratic funding bills to reopen the government this month, acknowledged that nobody wants another shutdown. But he said Democrats — specifically, Pelosi — would take the heat this time if the border security talks collapsed, despite polls consistently showing the public sided with Democrats.

McHenry warned not to read too much into polls showing Trump was hurt by the shutdown: “So to say that is going to have some lasting impact is not commensurate with the last two years of experience.”

Senate Republicans would disagree. They face a more difficult Senate map in 2020 than they did last year and could be dragged into the minority if Trump's popularity collapses. And if in two weeks the conference committee isn't going anywhere, they're the ones that will have to put a bill on the floor to fund the government — and potentially shirk Trump’s demands for the wall.

With luck, Senate Republicans will have learned a lesson and will put self-preservation ahead of boot licking and politico fellatio of Trump.  With luck, some apparently brain dead government employees who voted for Trump and/or the GOP  in 2016 and 2018 will also have learned a lesson and will vote Democrat in 2020.

 

Anti-Gay Republicans Threaten to Kill Trump's New NAFTA Deal Over LGBT Protections

I still get ask at times by former Republican colleagues when I am going to return to the GOP.  A case in point was earlier in the year at a friend's funeral when I encountered another former City Committee member who was always gracious to me.  I politely said "no time soon" given the GOP's never ending homophobia and efforts to limit or take away my rights.  In addition to supporting discredited "conversion therapy," Virginia Republicans killing every gay friendly bill in the last session of the General Assembly, 40 anti- gay Republican members of Congress are now threatening to vote against Trump's new NAFTA trade agreement if LGBT non-discrimination provisions are not removed.   A copy of their letter to Trump is set out at the end of this post.  Politico looks at the efforts of these bigots to in effect give Christofascists special rights to discriminate against others.  Here are article highlights:

Protections in the new North American trade pact for LGBTQ people are roiling conservative lawmakers in the House, who are urging President Donald Trump to rescind them.

They are displeased that the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement contains requirements that workers be protected from discrimination on the basis of sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity.

“A trade agreement is no place for the adoption of social policy,” reads the letter, which carries the names of 40 lawmakers and was sent Friday. “It is especially inappropriate and insulting to our sovereignty to needlessly submit to social policies which the United States Congress has so far explicitly refused to accept.”

It’s one more landmine in the path of Trump’s biggest trade achievement. Already, labor groups have expressed some concern that mechanisms to enforce new worker protections aren’t sufficiently strong and hinted that the incoming Democratic House might seek changes.

Now the conservatives, including House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), are hoping to revise the deal before it gets signed. 

"This is language that is going to cause a lot of people to reconsider their support of the trade agreement, and to the point that it may endanger the passage of the trade agreement unless something is done," [GOP] Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) told POLITICO in an interview.

Adjusting the deal is a tall order.

The countries are expected to sign the agreement on Nov. 30 at a G-20 summit in Argentina, the day before the current Mexican administration leaves office. The easiest way for the administration to address the conservatives’ concerns is to persuade Canada and Mexico to change the language before the agreement is signed. If those countries balk and the administration is concerned about having enough Republican votes to win approval, it could attempt to negate the language through the implementing bill. But that would be highly unusual and give many Democrats another reason to vote against the legislation.

Tweaks can be made through so-called side letters. But this particular demand is certain to leave Canada especially cold.

The LGBT provisions were a Canadian priority — part of the so-called progressive trade agenda championed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and described as a “big win” by his government. And the Trudeau government already is less than enthusiastic about entering the agreement while steel tariffs remain in place.

But it’s unprecedented language in a U.S. trade agreement. . . . The conservatives say this would undo other administration policies.

The letter argues that USMCA contradicts other administration work on sexual orientation and gender identity, and would also make it impossible to end a pair of executive actions from the Obama administration forbidding workplace discrimination.

It accuses the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative of working against administration policies.

In reality, the federal government is somewhat divided about whether employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a question that turns on how judges interpret the word “sex” (one of the law’s protected classes, along with race, religion, and national origin).

[T]he Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which continues to retain a Democratic majority, still adheres to the Obama policy that the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Federal appeals courts are split on the question, and the Supreme Court has never taken up the matter.

GOP Freedom Caucus’s Plan Could Hand the House to Democrats

One phenomenon I have noted over the years both during my time in the GOP and since is that it is nearly impossible to reason with ultra-conservatives and Christofascists.  Tellingly, both groups cannot seem to grasp that their views/beliefs are NOT mainstream and that outside of the bubble of Fox News and batshit crazy evangelical churches, the majority of Americans do not subscribe to their beliefs.  Indeed, I suspect the majority of Americans find them frightening if not repulsive.  Now the infamous GOP "Freedom Caucus" in the U.S. House of Representatives wants to withhold campaign funding from moderate Republicans ("moderate being a relative term) as punishment for supporting a discharge petition that might get immigration reform acceptable to all but the Trump base passed by Congress.  It's a case of cutting off one's nose to spite their face.  But, such is the irrationality of the far right.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the idiocy - which I frankly hope prevails - roiling the GOP conference.  Here are highlights:

For years the ultra conservative House Freedom Caucus has been a thorn in the side of the GOP leadership. Now, in a twist, GOP moderates have banded together in an effort to force votes on immigration, including a bill that would provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers. The Freedom Caucus will not stand for a vote on so-called “amnesty,” so they’re calling for harsh punishments for moderates who dare to defy party leaders – though that could make it even likelier that Democrats win control of of the House in November.

The moderate Republicans have banded together with House Democrats to support a discharge petition, a rare maneuver that would allow them to circumvent Speaker Paul Ryan and force a vote on four immigration measures. This would include a measure that protects young undocumented immigrants in exchange for border security funding, without provisions from Representative Bob Goodlatte’s conservative immigration bill, like legal-immigration cuts and money for Trump’s border wall.

The Freedom Caucus already derailed passage of the Farm Bill last week over Ryan’s failure to meet their demand for a vote on the Goodlatte bill, and now the immigration issue is plunging the House GOP deeper into chaos. Though by definition, a discharge petition means members are acting without the leadership’s consent, conservatives are holding Ryan responsible for the moderates’ efforts, claiming he and other party leaders could be doing more to stop them.
 So the conservatives are suggesting that months before an election in which Republicans may lose control of the House by just a few seats, the leadership should punish their weakest members by withholding campaign money.

In general, threatening engaging more intra-party squabbling isn’t a smart strategy for the midterms. During a closed-door meeting on Tuesday morning, Ryan told members of the caucus that they need to remain united and act like they’re the majority party . . .

For now it’s unclear whether Republicans will be voting on one, two, or four immigration proposals in the coming weeks, and in the meantime they’re engaging in yet another form of self-destructive behavior: floating the idea of replacing Ryan as speaker prematurely.

But there’s little evidence that ousting Ryan is the solution to the caucus’s problems. While Ryan has endorsed McCarthy and he’s the frontrunner for the job, many aides and lawmakers told the Washington Post on Tuesday that there currently isn’t anyone who could easily win a race for speaker.

“If we have a speaker’s race, then it takes everyone’s eye off the ball of what’s most important, and that is keeping the majority,” said Representative Rodney Davis, chair of the centrist Republican Main Street Caucus. “It would be the most short-lived time in the speaker’s chair that anyone could have asked for.”

Let the insanity continue!

The Russia Investigation’s Spectacular Accumulation of Lies

Several news outlets have scrutinized Donald Trump's statements for truth and veracity and over 3/4th are untrue or largely untrue.  Stated more directly, Trump lies roughly three quarters of the time. As the Russiagate investigation continues, it is quickly becoming apparent that most of those in the Trump campaign and now the Trump/Pence regime have similar problems with telling the truth be it Jeff Sessions who is either a complete liar or so wracked with dementia that he is unfit for office to Sarah Huckabee Sanders who lies daily at White House Press conferences (being raised by a Baptist preacher, she learned to lie from a master).   Conservative columnist Michael Gerson - who was a member of the George W. Bush White House staff - looks at the huge accumulation of lies that the Russiagate investigation has exposed to date.  There is every expectation that even more will follow.  Here are column highlights which also contain an indictment of evangelical Christians supporting Trump (and Roy Moore):

I spent part of my convalescence from a recent illness reading some of the comprehensive timelines of the Russia investigation (which indicates, I suppose, a sickness of another sort). One, compiled by Politico, runs to nearly 12,000 words — an almost book-length account of stupidity, cynicism, hubris and corruption at the highest levels of American politics.

The cumulative effect on the reader is a kind of nausea no pill can cure. Most recently, we learned about Donald Trump Jr.’s direct communications with WikiLeaks — which CIA Director Mike Pompeo has called “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia” — during its efforts to produce incriminating material on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. But this is one sentence in an epic of corruption. There is the narrative of a campaign in which high-level operatives believed that Russian espionage could help secure the American presidency, and acted on that belief. There is the narrative of deception to conceal the nature and extent of Russian ties. And there is the narrative of a president attempting to prevent or shut down the investigation of those ties and soliciting others for help in that task.

In all of this, there is a spectacular accumulation of lies. Lies on disclosure forms. Lies at confirmation hearings. Lies on Twitter. Lies in the White House briefing room. Lies to the FBI. Self-protective lies by the attorney general. Blocking and tackling lies by Vice President Pence. This is, with a few exceptions, a group of people for whom truth, political honor, ethics and integrity mean nothing.

What are the implications? President Trump and others in his administration are about to be hit by a legal tidal wave. We look at the Russia scandal and see lies. A skilled prosecutor sees leverage. People caught in criminal violations make more cooperative witnesses. Robert S. Mueller III and his A-team of investigators have plenty of stupidity and venality to work with. They are investigating an administration riven by internal hatreds — also the prosecutor’s friend. And Trump has already alienated many potential allies in a public contest between himself and Mueller. 

But the implications of all this are not only legal and political. We are witnessing what happens when right-wing politics becomes untethered from morality . . . . What does public life look like without the constraining internal force of character — without the firm ethical commitments.

It looks like a presidential campaign unable to determine right from wrong and loyalty from disloyalty. It looks like an administration engaged in a daily assault on truth and convinced that might makes right. It looks like the residual scum left from retreating political principle — the worship of money, power and self-promoted fame. The Trumpian trinity.

It looks like Breitbart News’s racial transgressiveness, providing permission and legitimacy to the alt-right. It looks like the cruelty and dehumanization practiced by Dinesh D’Souza, dismissing the tears and trauma of one Roy Moore accuser as a “performance.” And it looks like the Christian defense of Moore, which has ceased to be recognizably Christian.

This may be the greatest shame of a shameful time. . . . . A hint: It is the institution that is currently — in some visible expressions — overlooking, for political reasons, credible accusations of child molestation. Some religious leaders are willing to call good evil, and evil good, in service to a different faith — a faith defined by their political identity. This is heresy at best; idolatry at worst.

Many of the people who should be supplying the moral values required by self-government have corrupted themselves. The Trump administration will be remembered for many things. The widespread, infectious corruption of institutions and individuals may be its most damning legacy.

Perhaps the biggest loser in all of this - assuming Trump doesn't trigger a nuclear war that kills countless millions - is Christianity which through the actions of evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians have shown the faith to be morally bankrupt.  They have, of course, had plenty of assistance from the Roman Catholic Church which still has not been honest about its worldwide sex abuse scandal. Combined, the net effect is that fewer and fewer want any connection to organized Christianity.  Hence why one-third of those under 30 years of age have walked away.  Expect the trend to accelerate and spread to older generations. 

GOP Senators May Yet Kill Obamacare Repeal

Word around Washington is that the fractious House Republicans may be able to cobble together a new bill to "repeal and replace" Obamacare.  Like its predecessor, this concoction would likely throw millions off of health insurance and allow premiums to soar for many even as disingenuous House members bloviate (read lie) about reducing costs, etc., etc.  Frankly, only a total fool would believe the claims since the number one goal in the House is a massive tax cut for the wealthy.  That said, anything that does manage to pass the House - likely on a pure party line vote - still faces sever obstacles in the Senate and not just from Democrats.  As a piece in Politico reports, a number of Republican Senators may be the bill's biggest obstacle.  Here are article highlights:

The House may finally be on its way to scrapping Obamacare, but don’t expect the Senate to go along: Any plan sent over will undergo major surgery — and survival is far from assured.

The hurdles in the upper chamber were on vivid display Wednesday as House Republicans celebrated their breakthrough on the stalled repeal effort. The compromise cut with House Freedom Caucus members won over the right flank, but the changes will almost surely make it harder to pick up votes in the more moderate-minded Senate.

“The Freedom Caucus has done a good job of trying to make the bill less bad,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of the lead Senate agitators against the House health care push, said Wednesday. “For me, it’s a big stumbling block still that there’s taxpayer money that’s being given to insurance companies, and I am just not in favor of taxpayer money going to insurance companies.”

Phil Novack, a spokesman for Sen. Ted Cruz , also indicated that the conservative Texas firebrand isn't sold, saying “significant work remains” in the Senate, “specifically to address Obamacare’s insurance mandates and enact major patient-centered reforms that will further reduce the cost of health care.”

Sources say it may take more than a month for any House health care bill to run through the traps in the Senate, including internal party discussions and an analysis of how the measure would affect the deficit and insurance rolls. No committee hearings are planned because Republicans don’t want to give Democrats a public forum to bash an effort they are not involved in. And similar to the Senate's dim view of the House's proposal, the lower chamber may not ultimately be able to pass whatever the Senate is able to produce on Obamacare.

Weeks after the spectacular collapse of Obamacare repeal efforts last month, MacArthur and Meadows struck a deal with new language that would allow states to opt out of several key Obamacare provisions, such as its ban on charging sick people higher premiums and the so-called essential health benefits mandate that requires insurers to provide a set of minimum benefits.

The new language was enough to earn the formal endorsement of the Freedom Caucus, but House moderates who were opposed to the previous plan remain wary of backing a proposal that could cause constituents with pre-existing conditions to lose affordable health care coverage. In fact, the new plan may be having the reverse effect on some centrists: Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) had supported the initial Obamacare replacement but now says he’s a “maybe.”

Influential Senate Republicans also raised doubts about whether the new House proposal is workable. . . . Senators are likely to make Medicaid cuts less severe, deliver more money for opioid funding, make tax credits for the middle class more generous and rework the House’s waivers from Obamacare’s requirements.

In interviews with senators across a broad ideological range, there was growing irritation with attempts to ram complicated legislative language through the House and expect the Senate to clean it up. Some GOP senators suggested that a bipartisan bill may be the only way to overhaul the health care system in a lasting manner.

“I don’t know if this bill is better … the worst thing we can do is replace it with a Republican-only alternative that doesn’t drive down costs, that doesn’t improve access to care,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). 

Republicans in the House are desperate to pass a bill.  The fact that it would harm many seems to be irrelevant as long as they can say they passed something - and, of course, delivered a big tax cut to the most wealthy.