By hook or by crook

Senate Republicans led by South Carolina's Lindsey Graham are reportedly set to bypass the Senate parliamentarian and her expected ruling this week on whether they can use a legislative process – known as budget reconciliation – to pass President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

The process can be used only if such an initiative doesn't increase the federal deficit. Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has yet to decide, so the GOP is forging ahead, in an apparent effort not to appear to be overruling her.

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[Senate Republican leader John Thune] argued Graham has the authority to decide whether extending the tax cuts would add to the deficit and need for them to be offset by big spending cuts or revenue-raising proposals.

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If extending the 2017 cuts is found to be an extension of current policy, then they won’t be counted as officially adding to future deficits, which would allow Republicans to extend the tax cuts permanently.

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"Republicans are so hell-bent on giving these tax breaks to the billionaires that they’re willing to break any rules, norms and things they promised they wouldn’t do,” Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer said.

  Just the News

And water is wet.

Opening the country's purse to oligarch(s)

After seizing the [capitol] in a fast-moving late January coup and with universal control of government ministries now seemingly assured by a quiescent parliament, South African oligarch Elon Musk spent his third week in power dismantling the legal constraints that would stop him — already the world’s wealthiest man — from turning the US government into his personal piggy bank.

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Musk — already the world’s richest man — seems set to transform the nation checking account into his own business development fund. The country’s foreign ministry indicated that it planned to buy $400 million of unnecessary and ill-suited vehicles to help prop up Musk’s troubled car company, which has been struggling in recent years due to its shoddy quality. The bombastic Musk, who has god-like ambitions of colonizing space and also runs a large rocket company that does billions of dollars of work with the government, announced that in the coming days his junta DOGE forces would also take control of the nation’s civilian space agency.

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In some of her first moves at the nation’s top law enforcement officer, attorney general Pam Bondi moved to effectively decriminalize large swaths of crimes most commonly carried out by the country’s financial and power elites. Amid spreading signs that the US government would be remade as a kleptocracy at home, she disbanded a special justice ministry task force aimed at investigating foreign kleptocrats, announced prosecutors would no longer seek to punish elites who accepted secret payments from foreign governments nor US companies that paid bribes to do business overseas.

Trump himself moved to fully pardon one former provincial governor who had been previously imprisoned for soliciting bribes in exchange for gubernatorial appointments — a move that clearly will serve as an endorsement of such behavior going forward — and dropped pending criminal charges against two of his own personal staff who had abetted his efforts to thwart federal prosecution after he’d been previously removed from office in 2021. He also removed longstanding supports for government officials that he chose to fire, legally or not.

Perhaps most worrisome, he extended a weeks-long purge of prosecutors and law enforcement who had investigated white nationalist terrorist groups and militias loyal to him personally, further seeming to clear the way for those groups to take up violence in his name.

More broadly, the regime shuttered, disbanded, or disabled one watchdog agency after another.

[...]In a nod to the nation’s powerful class of oligarchs, the regime also indicated that in the coming days it would fire and neuter thousands of tax investigators who had been added in recent years in an attempt to improve compliance by the country’s wealthy, who largely ignore the country’s social contract to pay their share of tax receipts.

Musk personally announced his intention to “delete” the nation’s consumer protection bureau, which has stood in recent years as a roadblock for his own ambitions to force the nation’s citizens to use his website as a national payment system.

[...]

Trump declared that he intended to personally intervene in criminal cases, and apparently wasted little time doing so: Much of the week’s headlines in the capital focused on the regime’s ill-fated attempts to coerce the opposition mayor of the country’s largest city into cooperating with the regime’s politically driven crackdown on illegal immigrants.

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Most of the nation’s internal corruption watchdogs, known as inspectors general — who collectively had at least 32 active investigations underway into Musk’s sprawling business empire — were fired in the regime’s first days.

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While nearly all of the regime’s moves in recent weeks have been subject to court challenges, there were spreading signs that the regime planned to ignore contravening orders from the judiciary — powering through what has long stood as the country’s ultimate check-and-balance on corrupt uses of executive power.

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The bizarre executive power-sharing agreement — with Musk operating as an illegitimate head of government and the senile Trump content to serve out his ramblingly incoherent dotage as a ceremonial head of state — was highlighted it an eye-popping midweek press conference, where Musk, possibly high on narcotics and wearing a “Dark MAGA” hat that referenced the elected president’s neofacist supporters, held court at length in the oval-shaped presidential office while Trump sat near-silently at his desk.

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Together, the moves hung a giant sign that the US, which until now had been known for operating one of the cleanest and least corrupt business environments in the world — a series of structures, enforcement mechanisms, regulatory schemes, and legal practices that had made it the global headquarters for the world’s largest and most successful businesses — was now open to bribery and graft.

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Republicans, also cowed into silence and acquiescence by years of Trump bluster and MAGA threats, have made clear they will serve as a rubber-stamp. Opposition Democrats skirmished briefly on the floor of the Senate, but they quickly capitulated—deciding, for the third weekend since Musk took over, that it was important to not work through the weekend. In fact, senior Democratic officials quickly left town entirely — making the bizarre choice that it was more important to show up at the glitzy international confab known as the Munich Security Conference to reassure allies that they intended to defend democracy someday, than it was to actually do so at home.

  Dooomsday Scenario

The poor will remain poor - by design

Many Democrats want to pass President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief proposal, which includes $1,400 stimulus checks and aid to local governments. A group of Republican senators is pushing for a smaller plan that would provide $1,000 checks.

So Democratic leaders are preparing to use a process known as budget reconciliation, which would allow them to pass Biden's proposal without getting 60 votes in the Senate, which would require at least 10 Republicans.

But under the Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, known as PAYGO, new laws that raise the national debt automatically trigger offsetting cuts in some safety net programs.

The cuts can be avoided, budget experts say, only with 60 Senate votes — leaving Democrats back where they started, because it's unclear whether Republicans would vote to prevent the cuts after having opposed a partisan relief package.

"It's Medicare. It's farm subsidies," said Marc Goldwein, a budget expert at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "It's a bunch of programs that would be cut."

The size of the reductions in Medicare and other social safety net program would depend on the size of the package, but they'd be significant even if the price tag fell under $1 trillion. Social Security and low-income programs would be exempt.

"The cuts would be huge," said Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. "It's a critical issue, which, at some point, is going to have to be dealt with."

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[Bernie Sanders' spokesman, Keane Bhat] pointed to the last time budget reconciliation was used to make a big change — when Republicans passed a costly tax cut on a partisan vote, which triggered $25 billion in Medicare cuts. But Democrats joined Republicans to prevent the cuts from taking effect in a government funding measure that was passed subsequently.

"Trump and his Republican colleagues used deficit spending to pass $2 trillion in tax breaks overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthiest and large corporations and expanding a military budget with a Pentagon that has never been independently audited," Bhatt said. "When it comes to feeding children who are hungry or treating people who are sick in the middle of a pandemic, funding cuts due to supposed concerns over the deficit would be unacceptable and immoral."

  NBC

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.