Congress is worse than worthless

 

Cutting waste and fraud; saving the country money

 

UPDATE 02/26/2025:  My district...

Hard to believe I'm agreeing with Steve Bannon

Steve Bannon roasted Musk over Neuralink and other issues in new interview: “Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiment and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, tradition or values.”

[...]

Bannon then said Musk is a fraud: "DOGE is sitting there with the budget, but where the fuck are the DOGE cuts? We are 30 days away from approving a budget for the entire year with $2 trillion already baked in, and not one penny of anything that DOGE found. It's ludicrous. Performative. There's hesitancy to take on the Pentagon. I want $100 billion cut from its $900 billion budget."

  Meidas Touch

Has he forgotten Kevin McCarthy's fate so soon?

Members of the hard-line conservative House Freedom Caucus have urged [Speaker Mike] Johnson to demand deep cuts in spending and scores of conservative policy changes — including tougher border security — as part of the two 2024 funding packages moving through Congress this month. Absent those provisions, they’ve pressed the Speaker to abandon the 2024 talks and pursue an alternate strategy to keep spending at current 2023 levels through the remainder of the fiscal year.

Johnson’s weekend endorsement of a “minibus” deal, which includes six bills that will fund a slew of agencies through September, essentially ignores the entreaties of his right flank.

The package excludes a number of the policy riders demanded by the conservatives while providing billions of dollars in funding over 2023 levels — an increase established by last summer’s debt ceiling deal between President Biden and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

[...]

[Johnson] can either forge deals with Democrats to keep the government open, or he can side with the hard-liners and demand steep cuts in spending, which would likely lead to a shutdown.

Time and time again, Johnson has chosen the former.

  The Hill

Better watch your back, pal.

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

Clown show extraordinaire

On a key vote, five Republicans voted with Democrats against their own party’s policy preferences, leading to a high-profile, embarrassing defeat. The failure of the vote makes it even more likely that the GOP will stumble into a government shutdown at the end of the month because it can’t figure out how to make a deal with itself.

[...]

Republican House members have lost touch with mechanisms of democratic accountability.

  Public Notice

They didn't lose touch, they took a hatchet to it.

The fact is that many GOP House members, and especially the far-right Freedom Caucus, have for some years taken any and every opportunity to buck leadership simply for the sake of bucking leadership. Conservatives forced their speaker, John Boehner, to resign prematurely in 2015. His successor, Paul Ryan, left Congress in 2018 after elaborately failing to unite his caucus. Kevin McCarthy then limped in as minority leader. When the GOP won a narrow majority in 2022, he was forced to endure 15 votes before his caucus reluctantly seated him as speaker.

The far-right representatives are fractious not because they have a consistent, principled agenda, but because they don’t.

[...]

It’s notable that even the mainstream Republicans are grandstanding to pass a bill that tries to use military appropriations to push anti-abortion messaging — this despite the fact that abortion bans are extremely unpopular and get more unpopular when they are actually passed into law. The backlash to the Dobbs anti-abortion Supreme Court decision is widely credited with winning Democrats the 2022 midterms. McCarthy’s GOP is pushing a ruinous messaging bill, and then, even more ruinously, torpedoing that bill for unrelated and unclear reasons while the entire conference runs about like decapitated farm fowl.

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

Every time

  

Once again.  Such drama.  You know they're going to come to an agreement, and you know that because they all want to go home for the holidays as soon as they can.

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

Budget ready for spin

The Senate passed a $1.5 trillion package Thursday night that funds the federal government through September and delivers $14 billion to help Ukraine, clearing the bill for President Joe Biden’s signature.

The package finally cements the fresh budgets Democrats have sought since former President Donald Trump left office and ends the string of spending patches that has kept federal agencies running on static funding levels since the new fiscal year kicked off in October.

Leaders in both parties have declared the legislation a win. Democrats boast of the almost 7 percent increase they secured for non-defense agencies, increasing that funding to $730 billion. Top Republicans tout the $782 billion they locked in for national defense, a 6 percent hike from current spending.

[...]

After a group of House Democrats revolted Wednesday against rerouting pandemic aid that was supposed to go to their states, tempers flared on the Senate floor once the upper chamber fielded the bill Thursday, complicating efforts to dispatch the measure to Biden’s desk.

[...]

But the Senate made relatively quick time for the usually deliberative body. To lock in an agreement to fast-track debate, the chamber voted Thursday night on three GOP amendments.

The Senate voted 50-49 to defeat a proposal by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) to end federal Covid vaccine mandates. The chamber also rejected 64-34 an amendment by Kennedy and his fellow Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy to provide extra assistance to aid recovery from several hurricanes that struck the Gulf Coast in recent years.

The chamber also voted 64-35 to shoot down an amendment from Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) that would bar earmarks, a practice Congress revived for the first time in more than a decade by including billions of dollars in special projects within the package.

[...]

Senate Appropriations Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) defended the return of earmarks, noting new reforms to prevent corruption in the process.

[...]

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) privately raised concerns with the wording of the bill’s revival of protections under the Violence Against Women Act, which expired in early 2019. And Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) sought earlier Thursday to separate out a vote on $14 billion in Ukraine aid, arguing that would help deliver the assistance more quickly.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) objected, leaving both legislators fuming afterward.

[...]

For months, Republicans refused to engage in negotiations unless Democrats buckled to their demands on controversial policy issues, like the Hyde amendment ban on federal funding for abortions. Democratic leaders largely agreed to those conditions in the end, including the abortion funding moratorium.

  Politico

Of course they did.

Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said he hoped that the two parties could resurrect a standalone Covid funding bill, though Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said Republicans would not allow it to pass if it increased the deficit.

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

Budgeting