Remember when W said to CNN's Candy Crowley in December 2008 that he had abandoned free market principles in order to save the free market system?
We got Obama, a foreclosure crisis for six million, banks failed by the hundreds, and jobs didn't recover for six years and five months.
Why is it always the Republicans with these paraprosdokians?
I am sick of TSA's illegal searches and seizures, and of DHS' deadly incompetence in Minneapolis and at Barksdale AFB.
The author below lists four recent incidents of terrorism in the United States in support of funding DHS outside the filibuster so that this incompetence can continue!
They're not keeping us safe!
Millions of illegals remain in America who were supposed to Remain in Mexico!
Fire them all! These post-911 innovations aren't working.
Terrorism trumps America again:
In the Senate, Thune resurrects idea of reconciliation
... Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, posted, “It’s hard to imagine how the SAVE America Act could be passed through reconciliation. And by ‘hard’ I mean ‘essentially impossible.’”
Lee, a member of the Budget Committee, has led the push for the chamber to debate SAVE and even pursue a so-called talking filibuster to pass the bill via a simple majority. ...
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said that “I don’t see any way that any part of the SAVE America Act [with] any teeth gets included in a reconciliation package.”
“On top of that, I think it’s very difficult to pass a reconciliation package. We don’t have big tax cuts coming. That’s really what got the last one done,” Scott said. “I think it’s going to be very difficult to get you know 50 of us to agree on something.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who opposed last year’s reconciliation measure, said, “It would seem on its face, because there’s so much policy involved, that it would be difficult to do.”
“It’s kind of interesting to see if they’re just going to be pushing maybe some of the funding that could fit within reconciliation. But I don’t know how the policy fits in there.”
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, who has been part of hashing out the agreement between Democrats and the White House to reopen DHS, also declined to support reconciliation, saying “I don’t think that’s a good approach.” ...
The chamber’s conservative House Freedom Caucus called the idea “gaslighting” from Senate Republican leadership. ...
Now they want to make everything fall under reconciliation in order to make an end run around the filibuster.
The Byrd Rule codified in 1990 makes legislation extraneous to the budget process, like the Save Act, ineligible for the process.
Trump is convinced illegal aliens vote in large enough numbers to prevent Republicans from winning even though he and the Republicans swept into office in 2024 and control the executive and legislative branches of government.
Trump-backed SAVE America Act will get a Senate vote next week, Thune says
The legislation is expected to fail unless a change is made to the filibuster, which requires 60 votes on most measures considered by the Senate. ...
For months Trump, GOP hardliners and online influencers like Elon Musk have railed against opponents of the bill and called repeatedly for a change to the Senate filibuster rule to ensure passage in the upper chamber. Thune supports the legislation but has rejected those calls, saying changing Senate procedure could have unintended consequences. Speaking from the Senate floor Thursday, he made no mention of changing the chamber’s rules, all but assuring the proposal will not pass. ...
Anticipating the bill’s failure in the Senate, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who introduced the legislation, and other proponents have engaged in a pressure campaign to revert back to a “standing filibuster,” which requires dissenting members to actively hold the Senate floor to block legislation and could, in theory, allow for the passage of the bill with a simple 50-vote majority. ...
Sen. John Cornyn flips on the filibuster to pass SAVE America Act as Trump weighs endorsement
Cornyn, who spent years defending the filibuster, is locked in a competitive GOP runoff in Texas against Ken Paxton, who has aligned with Trump on the issue. ...
James also believes in 6 genders and abortion rights for trannies, among other lunatic things.
Trump did not win a mandate in 2024, otherwise we wouldn't have this constant recourse to gimmicks to pass things by razor thin margins.
It's as obvious as the nose on your face to everyone except Trumpist dunderheads.
Thune declares ‘talking filibuster’ dead
"Do unto others before they do unto you".
Imagine the ten worst things either side would pass with a simple majority as soon as it got it.
Republicans could repeal Obamacare right now without the filibuster, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In the future Democrats could easily pass Medicare For All without it, and close the Department of Defense.
Elections would become even more desperate contests for power than they already are, and a deeply divided America would plunge into chaos.
Everything would become far less predictable, which would poison the economy.
Americans and their employers would become even more vulnerable to the federal pickpockets who populate the halls of Congress.
Just say No to Mad King Ludwig.
In the first column are 30 Democrats who infamously voted to abolish the filibuster late in the evening on Jan 19, 2022, which failed 48-52 because of Sinema and Manchin, but happily tried to mount one last week.
The roll call vote in the US Senate is here (the Wikipedia entry is wrong on this, citing a CBS story and dating the vote to Jan 20).
In column two are 7 Democrats who campaigned to abolish the filibuster but who also happily tried to mount one last week.
The 2017 letter
to Mitch McConnell in the last column references the names of 19 Democrats
who then said they were for the filibuster, but last week 5 of them weren't lol.
The irony of all this of course is that Joe Biden's spending for fiscal 2025 was just passed with little modification by Republicans with the help of 10 Democrats (1 Independent) and the Democrats are beating themselves up over it.
But it's kind of hard to crow about Joe Biden's success after you just forced him out of power.
🤷
8 Democrats: "See, we voted against it!"
The Senate filibuster is indeed a magical, wonderful, horrible, no good thing. It makes you collect 60 votes to end debate, but then you can vote to make yourself look good right after you betrayed your friends.
Senate passes GOP funding bill to avert a government shutdown
The Senate passed a six-month funding bill Friday to avert a government shutdown hours ahead of the midnight deadline, sending it to President Donald Trump to sign into law.
The vote was 54-46, with two Democrats joining all but one Republican in voting yes. Earlier Friday, the bill cleared a key procedural hurdle with the help of 10 Democrats in a 62-38 vote. Sixty votes were needed to defeat a Democratic filibuster.
The votes came after a dramatic 48-hour period during which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., broke with most House and Senate Democrats, announcing he would support moving forward on the bill one day after he declared it didn’t have the votes. Schumer ultimately voted no on final passage of the legislation.
The cloture motion roll call 62-38 is here showing the nine Democrats and one Independent vote Yea to defeat their own filibuster.
The final passage roll call 54-46 is here showing eight of the ten, all Democrats, voting their phony Nays: Cortez Masto, Durbin, Fetterman, Gillibrand and Schumer, Hassan, Peters, and Schatz.
Peters, who voted Yea and then Nay, isn't running again next year, and neither is Shaheen, who really didn't care and voted Yea both times with King the Independent.
Rand Paul voted Nay Nay!
Nay Nay is good.
If you're not changing the tax code, you're simply extending current policy—you are not increasing the deficit. The bottom line here is that it's a $4.3 trillion tax increase, not a $4.3 trillion deficit increase.
-- Mike Crapo
Most of the tax cuts passed by Republicans during President Donald Trump’s first term, in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), which raised deficits by $1.7tn, are set to expire at the end of 2025. ... Without new legislation, current law requires tax rates to return to their pre-TCJA levels. Maintaining the current policy would cost nearly $5tn in lost revenue over the next 10 years.
-- Oren Cass
Passing economic legislation through the US Senate can by-pass the 60-vote rule if the legislation does not increase deficits beyond 10 years.
The total public debt has ballooned by over $16 trillion under the Trump tax cuts.
Johnson added conservative sweeteners to the CR, which isn’t “clean” (i.e., a simple extension of current funding levels for everything) as advertised, but instead adds immediate money for defense and mass deportation, and cuts domestic spending by $13 billion. House Democrats already inclined to vote “no” on the CR because it contains no language forcing the executive branch to actually spend the money appropriated (which would restrict the power of DOGE or OMB to unilaterally “freeze” spending, cancel grants or contracts, or fire personnel) now have even less motivation to keep the government open. ...
To kill the CR, Democrats would have to launch a filibuster, and in that
circumstance it would be much easier for Republicans to blame the
Donkey Party for shutting down the federal government, despite the clear
intention of the Trump administration to keep gutting the government if
it remains open. If just seven Senate Democrats choose to join
Republicans (or all but Rand Paul, who is demanding deeper cuts; he’s
effectively matched with Democrat John Fetterman, who’s vowed to vote to avoid a shutdown), the CR will pass.
If Senate Democrats are put to the challenge and subsequently cave, they will have more than likely forfeited any real Democratic leverage for the remainder of 2025 beyond stirring up public unhappiness with Trump 2.0. Appropriations aside, most of Trump’s legislative agenda will be enacted via a gigantic budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered. So the decision not to deploy a filibuster on the one crucial occasion it is available will represent an admission of powerlessness that won’t make rank-and-file Democrats happy. ...
More.
Honest to God, these people are clowns.
Republicans consider major budget change to obscure deficit impact of extending Trump’s tax cuts
... Extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed into law in 2017, would cost $4.6 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the official nonpartisan scorekeeper.
That’s under the “current law” metric that has traditionally been used, as the tax cuts are slated to expire at the end of this year. But Senate Republicans want to use a different scoring method called the “current policy” baseline, which would assume that extending tax cuts costs $0 because they’re already law.
The chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, endorsed the “current policy” approach, telling reporters that it “recognizes that extending current law does not change the tax policy, does not reduce tax revenue.”
Congressional GOP aides say the idea could have a huge impact on what they’re able to pass in the budget bill. If they use the current accounting process, they have no chance of making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, because that would require paying for it. And this process would also be key to unlocking Trump’s other tax proposals, like slashing taxes on tips and overtime pay. ...
Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., said it would set a “terrible” precedent if Republicans adopt that budgeting approach.
He said it would be a backdoor way to nuke the filibuster and take an anything-goes approach to the reconciliation process, which Congress can use once per fiscal year to evade the 60-vote rule in the Senate for changes to spending and taxes. The process imposes significant constraints, like needing to pay for long-term laws that add to the U.S. debt.
“My advice is: If they adopt that policy, we should advise the American people to forget about their credit card debt,” Neal said. “You wouldn’t have to analyze revenue and expenditure.” ...
The budget framework passed this week by the GOP House is guaranteed to raise the national debt by $19 trillion in 10 years, which means we'll be $60 trillion in the hole by 2035.
All the shenanigans and pretending and make believe used over the years to get us to the current point of $36 trillion in debt, trotted out yet one more time aren't going to stop us from a date with $60 trillion in debt.
WE ARE NOT A SERIOUS COUNTRY.
