Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries eggs on Republicans in their civil war

Posted on January 30, 2024 by Joan McCarter

Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is having some fun at Republicans’ expense, stirring one of the pots simmering away in their civil war.

The GOP Tax Scam in 2017 obliterated the State and Local Tax deduction and hurt middle class families. House Republicans in New York promised to fix it. They lied.
— Hakeem Jeffries (@hakeemjeffries) January 30, 2024

Jeffries is needling the so-called “moderates” in the Republican conference who are taking on leadership in what should be a no-brainer tax bill. The bill would extend the child tax credit to help more working families and reduce some business taxes. What more could you want in an election-year tax bill?

It’s not enough for some of the members of the Biden 17, the group of Republicans in districts that voted Democratic in the 2020 presidential election. They want their specific, parochial tax break for their constituents—increasing the federal deduction for state and local taxes—to be included in the bill. And they’re threatening to take a page out of the Freedom Caucus playbook and shut the House down if they don’t get it.

SALT FRAY: LaLota suggests unrelated rules could get knocked down and slowing House floor business if they aren’t heard out on SALT for the tax bill. D'Esposito, asked if he’d also consider joining: Absolutely. Perhaps it's time that us rational become the radical.
— Chris Cioffi (@ReporterCioffi) January 30, 2024

“Do it! Do it!” Jeffries seems to be urging them, in a masterful bit of trolling. He’s reinforcing just how vulnerable these members sitting in swing districts are. He’s also poking some fun at just how ineffectual they’ve been in accomplishing anything in the majority.

But Jeffries is also putting just that much more pressure on House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has a very, very tenuous hold on the majority right now and absolutely can’t afford to lose any votes on any bills. Another masterful troller—Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern—pointed out that the GOP’s ranks were so thin Monday that Democrats had the majority. "My Republican friends barely—barely—control the House of Representatives,” McGovern ribbed. “In fact, yesterday there were more Democrats voting than Republicans."

There’s a bipartisan plan to ease child poverty—if the GOP will let it happen

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House GOP wages war with itself, the Senate, and reality

Posted on January 29, 2024 by Joan McCarter

The government-funding can that Congress kicked down the road earlier this month is inexorably rolling toward the new deadlines in early March, and so far, none of the 12 appropriations bills that have to be completed have made it through both the House and the Senate. But that doesn’t seem to be a priority this week, because the House Republican majority is once more at war with itself, the Senate, and reality. The agenda for this week includes fighting over the border policy bill the Senate is preparing, fighting over a tax bill that should be a no-brainer for every member of Congress, and impeaching a cabinet secretary over nothing.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is working hard to appease both Donald Trump and the MAGA crowd in the House on the border legislation that a bipartisan group in the Senate has been working on. That’s the immigration policy changes Republicans insisted be included in a national-security supplemental funding package with aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Now that a deal on immigration—which Republicans have been claiming to be the most important policy issue of the day—is within reach, the House is rejecting it. They would rather have the issue to run on in this election than to actually do something to solve it.

That’s putting Johnson at loggerheads with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is pushing hard for some sort of deal in order to salvage assistance to Ukraine—a top priority for the Kentucky senator. Last week, Johnson said the deal is “dead on arrival,” without even seeing legislative language. And the fight has spilled over into the Senate, where hard-line MAGA members—like Ohio’s J.D. Vance, who is opposed to Ukraine aid—are lining up against McConnell.

“If you’re going to take a tough vote, you take one but you want to accomplish something. The worst of all possible worlds is you take a vote, you put a lot of political pressure on the House and you don’t get any policy accomplished,” Vance told Politico. The Senate could vote on the legislation as soon as this week.

Back in the House, there’s what should be a no-brainer tax bill on tap. But it’s got both the hard-liners and the moderates up in arms. The bill would extend the child tax credit to help more working families and reduce some business taxes. What more could you want in an election-year tax bill? Republicans are turning on each other along familiar breaklines: MAGA vs. everyone else.

The Freedom Caucus is pushing a lie that the tax credits would go to “illegal foreign nationals.” Of course, that’s not true, and even Americans for Tax Reform, a right-wing lobbying group, is saying so. They point out that anyone receiving the tax credit has to have a Social Security number, and that “There are no ‘anchor baby bonuses’ in this bill as one organization alleged.”

Meanwhile, the so-called “moderates” in the GOP conference—largely a group of New York Republicans representing swing districts—are hopping mad that their No. 1 issue isn’t included in the bill. That’s raising the SALT cap, the limit on federal deductions for state and local taxes. “There is real anger about the process,” one GOP lawmaker in the SALT Caucus told The Hill.

House moderates might unite on the other big issue in the House Homeland Security Committee: impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over nothing. Back in November, eight of them originally voted to defuse a motion from Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to impeach Mayorkas by instead sending it to committee. The group argued that if it was going to happen, it needed to happen through the committee process. Now that it has, they’ll probably be on board, never mind that there is absolutely no foundation for the action, and that the Senate will not vote to convict Mayorkas. It seems like this bunch of moderates figure they’ll have better luck getting reelected in their Biden districts on taxes than on bucking MAGA leadership.

There’s a bipartisan plan to ease child poverty—if the GOP will let it happen

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Joe Manchin seems to think he’s going to be forced to wear shorts on the Senate floor

Posted on September 19, 2023 by Laura Clawson

The Senate has relaxed its dress code, prompting Republican complaints against Sen. John Fetterman’s notably informal attire. But it’s not just Republicans springing to the defense of mandatory suit-wearing. Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is also upset … and maybe a little confused.

“I said ‘John, I think it’s wrong & there's no way I can comply with that,’” Manchin told Politico's Ursula Perano. “Wanted to tell him directly that I totally oppose it & I will do everything I can to try to hold the decorum of the Senate.”

There’s no way he can comply? Does Manchin think there’s a strict new dress code that will force him to wear gym shorts and a hoodie, and that wearing a suit will be an act of defiance?

Manchin’s limited view of what constitutes decorum for the Senate was recently highlighted when the U.S. Census Bureau announced that child poverty has more than doubled since the expanded child tax credit expired. Manchin’s opposition to extending the credit, as well as the opposition of all Republicans, killed the expanded credit. And children across the country have suffered ever since—but at least until this week, senators had to wear suits to work.

Causing child poverty is decorum. Blocking Senate rule changes to preserve minority control is decorum. Informal attire is a breach of decorum to resist fiercely.

Sign and send the petition: NO to MAGA impeachment. Focus on what matters.

What do you do if you're associated with one of the biggest election fraud scandals in recent memory? If you're Republican Mark Harris, you try running for office again! On this week's episode of "The Downballot," we revisit the absolutely wild story of Harris' 2018 campaign for Congress, when one of his consultants orchestrated a conspiracy to illegally collect blank absentee ballots from voters and then had his team fill them out before "casting" them. Officials wound up tossing the results of this almost-stolen election, but now Harris is back with a new bid for the House—and he won't shut up about his last race, even blaming Democrats for the debacle.

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Child poverty skyrocketed last year, thanks to GOP and Joe Manchin

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Hunter

The U.S. Census Bureau says that child poverty in this nation skyrocketed last year. Child poverty rates in 2021 had reached an all-time low of 5.2%. In 2022, however, that number soared to 12.4%.

The reasons child poverty in the United States more than doubled in a single year are not disputed. It’s because of the expiration of the Republican-hated expanded child tax credit and the shift away from providing direct monthly payments to at-risk families.

The Washington Post:

“By far this is the largest annual increase in U.S. history for both children and the overall population in terms of poverty, going back to 1967,” said Zachary Parolin, a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. “In 2021 we had the lowest child poverty rate on record, largely due to the expansion of the child tax credit. It worked in reducing poverty; it worked in making life better for people. Then it expired, and Congress did not renew it. And now we are seeing the largest increase in child poverty in U.S. history. We are back to around where we were pre-pandemic.”

Also The Washington Post, same story:

Tuesday’s Census release is “a story of what could have been,” said Arloc Sherman, vice president for data analysis and research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The pandemic showed that we could stand up policies that could help families. These numbers underscore how much poverty is a policy choice.”

So there you go. We discovered a way to slash the number of children in poverty by over half, quick and simple. Then we stopped because Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin demanded we stop. It won’t be enacted again so long as the same pro-coup Republicans are in control of the House and can stop it.

It’s because they don't care. There's no larger story there. We know how to lift children out of poverty. It's cheap and straightforward. But the people huffing and puffing for fossil fuel companies to get better tax treatment and for rich people to always pay less in tax each year than they did the year before do. Not. Care. They’ve never cared. They pride themselves on not caring. They go to church and quote from Bibles and will tell you up, down, and sideways how truly offensive it would be to feed children when the nation’s richest people could instead buy slightly larger private jets.

In a statement, President Joe Biden said, "Today's Census report shows the dire consequences of congressional Republicans' refusal to extend the enhanced Child Tax Credit, even as they advance costly corporate tax cuts. ... The rise reported today in child poverty is no accident—it is the result of a deliberate policy choice congressional Republicans made." That statement ignores Manchin's role in sabotaging the program, but it's true Manchin wouldn't be in that position if there were any Republicans in the Senate who have a flying damn about anything but the lobbyist class.

We can't spoil grade-schoolers by letting them eat, not when there are new defense contracts to be had and oil companies are practically withering away with the expense of having to pay a pittance to drill on public land.

"I will continue to fight to restore the expanded Child Tax Credits to give tens of millions of families the tax relief and breathing room they deserve," said Biden. This is the sort of statement that should make decent people curl up and die, because having to "fight" for a relatively cheap, obviously helpful program makes us sound like a garbage country filled with dirtbags rather than whomever your average flag-waver imagines themselves to be when they're watching Fox News or attending their little Trump rallies.

We could fix this tomorrow if we wanted. A couple of votes and a signature are all it takes. Republicans aren't going to do that, because they don't give a shit. They’d rather impeach Biden in retaliation for their guy getting indicted. They’d rather strip federal funds from those investigating Donald Trump. And then these assholes, almost every one of them, strolls into church on Sunday and claims to be better than everyone else.

We have seen this too many times, and we know exactly how it plays out. The cruelty is the point, and it's always been the point, and it's not going to change anytime soon because the more vicious politicians can be toward poor children, the more the conservative base giggles and waves their cheap imported flags.

Sign the petition: Child poverty has doubled. Bring back the child tax credit

Kerry talks with Drew Linzer, director of the online polling company Civiqs. Drew tells us what the polls say about voters’ feelings toward President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and what the results would be if the two men were to, say … run against each other for president in 2024. Oh yeah, Drew polled to find out who thinks Donald Trump is guilty of the crimes he’s been indicted for, and whether or not he should see the inside of a jail cell.

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