US Politics: What's a couple hundred billion between friends?

[Fez]

Looks like Senate Republicans are unexpectedly scrambling tonight to save the tax bill.

For there to be such an effort to satisfy Corker (and Flake, I think). There must be a third definite no vote somewhere that McConnell considers impossible to get. The only options I think are Johnson (who almost voted for that Democratic procedural move) or Collins.

Question is, does whatever that needs to happen to get Corker and Flake cause anyone else to defect. And does any of this cause McCain to decide this bill is no longer following "regular order."

[DMC]

22 minutes ago, Fez said:

For there to be such an effort to satisfy Corker (and Flake, I think). There must be a third definite no vote somewhere that McConnell considers impossible to get. The only options I think are Johnson (who almost voted for that Democratic procedural move) or Collins.

Question is, does whatever that needs to happen to get Corker and Flake cause anyone else to defect. And does any of this cause McCain to decide this bill is no longer following "regular order."

Yeah sounds like it's going to be another crazy night.  Damnit, I gotta get up at 6 tomorrow.  Hm...

Anyway, responding to your comment last thread:

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That's the rumor. Not confirmed yet. And Cotton for CIA, assuming he's okay with it (Which is a stupid move politically; if an Alabama special election can be as close as it currently is, an Arkansas special election next year would be even more favorable for a Democrat).

I don't think Trump should be too concerned about this (although no comment on trying to gauge whether he is or not).  Even competent and successful presidents rarely get any major legislative proposals through Congress after the midterms.  Off the top of my head I can't think of an example.  So even in a worst case scenario, it's very unlikely to have much of an affect Trump's agenda.  I suppose he maybe should worry about losing the Senate, but one would assume if the GOP is losing Arkansas next November they're already going to be in a lot of trouble.

[Fez]

7 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

Yeah sounds like it's going to be another crazy night.  Damnit, I gotta get up at 6 tomorrow.  Hm...

Anyway, responding to your comment last thread:

I don't think Trump should be too concerned about this (although no comment on trying to gauge whether he is or not).  Even competent and successful presidents rarely get any major legislative proposals through Congress after the midterms.  Off the top of my head I can't think of an example.  So even in a worst case scenario, it's very unlikely to have much of an affect Trump's agenda.  I suppose he maybe should worry about losing the Senate, but one would assume if the GOP is losing Arkansas next November they're already going to be in a lot of trouble.

Arkansas law requires a special election within 120 days of a senate vacancy. The special election wouldn't be at the midterms, it'd be sometime next spring, before the summer recess even.

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Fez said:

Arkansas law requires a special election within 120 days of a senate vacancy. The special election wouldn't be at the midterms, it'd be sometime next spring, before the summer recess even.

That's not what NCSL says, but they could be wrong:

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In the following 36 states, the governor makes an appointment to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy, and the appointee serves until the next regularly-scheduled, statewide general election. The person elected at that next regularly-held general election serves for the remainder of the unexpired term, if any.  If the term was set to expire at that general election, the person elected serves a full six-year term.

 

[Fez]

Just now, dmc515 said:

That's not what NCSL says, but they could be wrong:

 

Ballotpedia says 120 days. https://ballotpedia.org/Filling_vacancies_in_the_U.S._Senate

Arkansas

Yes (1)

Not more than 120 days after vacancy occurs

Though they could also be wrong.

[Ormond]

5 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

That's not what NCSL says, but they could be wrong:

 

On the above page linked to, the very latest thing under "recent legislative action" refers to Arkansas:

In 2017, Arkansas enacted HB 1279 which gives the governor the responsibility to appoint the replacement.

[DMC]

Yeah, looking into it, ballotpedia is out of date.  They changed the law (as the NCSL notes) earlier this year - and Cotton being appointed to the Trump administration was the reason.

[Kalbear]

It is incredibly remarkable how chaotic and drama-rich a tax bill is. 

I hope that one day the US can figure out how to pass bills in something resembling thoughtfulness. 

[Martell Spy]

Republicans rewriting tax bill — and won’t vote tonight
Senate GOP leaders are still making major changes to the plan in order to win over several hold-outs.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/30/mccain-to-vote-for-gop-tax-bill-270511

 

Just heard on the radio, the Senate parliamentarian did not allow the deficit trigger. So, it sounds like they are going to just cut taxes less.

No vote, tonight. Go to sleep @dmc515.

 

[Martell Spy]

Undocumented Immigrant Acquitted in Death of “Beautiful Kate,” a Case Trump Used as Anti-Immigration Rallying Cry

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/11/30/undocumented_immigrant_acquitted_for_killing_beautiful_kate.html

How the GOP’s Contempt for Democracy Will Pass Trump’s Tax Cuts

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/how-gops-contempt-for-democracy-will-pass-trumps-tax-cuts.html
 

[OldGimletEye]

Louie Gohmert has to be one of the dumbest fuckers alive. To wit:

23 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/30/mccain-to-vote-for-gop-tax-bill-270511

 

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Other members of the group said they opposed amendments that would raise the proposed corporate income tax rate above 20 percent, and bristled at the idea of a delayed cut, which the Senate's bill does largely due to budgetary rules.

"It's a great strategy if you’re looking to put the Democrats in the majority and give them credit for what we did," Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said of the Senate's proposed one-year delay to a corporate tax cut.

Now why would any sane person want to take credit for that garbage bill?

[Martell Spy]

And of course in the Trump Era, Mr. Torture is a shoo in for the job. If we had a federal agency to protect goats, Trump would put a goat rapist in charge. In fact, I'm pretty sure Senator Cotton blows goats.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2017/11/do_not_let_tom_cotton_anywhere_near_the_cia.html

Do Not Let Tom Cotton Anywhere Near the CIA
The senator is an extreme ideologue with the exact wrong temperament for the job.

[OldGimletEye]

On 11/30/2017 at 9:55 PM, Martell Spy said:

How the GOP’s Contempt for Democracy Will Pass Trump’s Tax Cuts

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/how-gops-contempt-for-democracy-will-pass-trumps-tax-cuts.html
 

Yes, you got to love Pinochet Libertarians.

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Ryan is a man of principle,

Tax cuts uber alles.

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n 2003, Grover Norquist described the estate tax as “the morality of the Holocaust. ‘Well, it’s only a small percentage,’ you know. ‘I mean, it’s not you, it’s somebody else.’… arguing that it’s OK to loot some group because it’s them, or kill some group because it’s them and because it’s a small number, that has no place in a democratic society that treats people equally.” In 2010, Stephen Schwarzman described a proposal to raise taxes on private equity firms as “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” In 2014, Ken Langone remarked on plans to raise taxes on the rich, “If you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany.” That same year, Tom Perkins said, “The parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.””

Interestingly enough, it would seem most of these, if not all, of these sorry asses have little say about real Nazi's or the alt right and the president that enables these cretins. Calling them sorry asses is probably being too kind.

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For hard-core economic libertarians, this absolute right to property supersedes all other rights.

There is reason to compare libertarianism to feudalism. Libertarians should love feudalism since at its heart it’s a system of contract rights. In fact here is an example of libertarian dipshittery:

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Economics-Politics-Perspectives-Democratic/dp/0765808684

Now libertarians like to profess how much they love America. But sometimes I wonder if they have a problem with the American Revolution. After all it seems to me, it was a violation of the King of England's property rights. Now libertarians might retort, but , but “taxes”. But, hey you know, it’s his land, his rules. If you are a tenant, then move some where else, if you don't like it, libertarian jackoffs.

And interestingly enough, its not surprising that many from a really nasty sect of alt right creepers, the neo reactionaries, got their start reading libertarian screeds.

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 It is not only Ayn Rand who disdained democracy as “a social system in which one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.” 

Interesting enough, perhaps one of the best take downs of Ayn Rand was actually done Whitaker Chambers who was no friend of liberalism.

He writes around 1957:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/213298/big-sister-watching-you-whittaker-chambers

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Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.

 

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In Atlas Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as “looters.” This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares her the playguy business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation. 

 

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That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand’s ideas that the good life is one which “has resolved personal worth into exchange value,” “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous “cash-payment.”

 

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The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.

 

Quote

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. 

 

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Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. 

 

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Wilkinson argues that economic libertarianism has contributed to the Republican Party’s contempt for democratic norms. “The traces of libertarianism that survive in contemporary fusionism,” he writes, “have left many conservatives with a Jacobin’s indifference to the norms and institutions of successful liberal-democratic polities, and an unpopular vision of prosperity as freedom from redistribution.”

Absolute property rights libertarianism is a fine example of how starting with a mistake a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam. And it's the reason many so called libertarians were against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

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like Ryan to cooperate with Trump’s repeated violations of democratic norms. Why violate a core ideal like the sanctity of the republican form of government, they wonder, for a meager reward like tax cuts?

From the standpoint of a Paul Ryan, however, he is not selling out. He is advancing his highest ideals of public service. The tax bill, protecting the makers from the predations of the takers, represents one of the great triumphs of freedom of his adult life.

Maybe Trump will replace Pinochet as "the libertarian's dictator".

[Dr. Pepper]

1 hour ago, Martell Spy said:

Undocumented Immigrant Acquitted in Death of “Beautiful Kate,” a Case Trump Used as Anti-Immigration Rallying Cry

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/11/30/undocumented_immigrant_acquitted_for_killing_beautiful_kate.html

 

Amid all of the GOP's plan to fuck America with their tax bill, I have a feeling this will the major thing Trump will be tweeting about tonight or in the morning and what the news cycle will focus on.  It totally compromises one of his political rallying cries, but he'll use it as proof that sanctuary cities are all sorts of wrong. 

This verdict, as right as it may be (I haven't studied the case), deeply concerns me due to how Trump and his deplorable base might use it.  We're going into the weekend.  Trump's shitbag voters could coordinate some pretty terrifying protests and cause some damage.

[S John]

7 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

Amid all of the GOP's plan to fuck America with their tax bill, I have a feeling this will the major thing Trump will be tweeting about tonight or in the morning and what the news cycle will focus on.  It totally compromises one of his political rallying cries, but he'll use it as proof that sanctuary cities are all sorts of wrong. 

This verdict, as right as it may be (I haven't studied the case), deeply concerns me due to how Trump and his deplorable base might use it.  We're going into the weekend.  Trump's shitbag voters could coordinate some pretty terrifying protests and cause some damage.

Reading the con boards I go to, this is already happening.

[Martell Spy]

7 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

Amid all of the GOP's plan to fuck America with their tax bill, I have a feeling this will the major thing Trump will be tweeting about tonight or in the morning and what the news cycle will focus on.  It totally compromises one of his political rallying cries, but he'll use it as proof that sanctuary cities are all sorts of wrong. 

This verdict, as right as it may be (I haven't studied the case), deeply concerns me due to how Trump and his deplorable base might use it.  We're going into the weekend.  Trump's shitbag voters could coordinate some pretty terrifying protests and cause some damage.

The right is all worked up about DACA right now, as well. It's what is possibly causing a government shut down soon.

[Martell Spy]

Here's an idea: Just pass a bill to transfer 200 billion in wealth to Trump's kids, then go home. We can save a lot on the deficit. Our government is now basically already a system for transferring wealth from the commoners directly to the pockets of the royal family, anyway.

Daily Tax Chat 4: Is There $350 Billion Under the Couch Cushion?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/11/30/daily_tax_chat_4_is_there_350_billion_under_the_couch_cushion.html

[DMC]

Trump Pressured Senate Republicans to End Russia Inquiry

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“It was something along the lines of, ‘I hope you can conclude this as quickly as possible,’” Mr. Burr said. He said he replied to Mr. Trump that “when we have exhausted everybody we need to talk to, we will finish.”

In addition, according to lawmakers and aides, Mr. Trump told Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri and a member of the intelligence committee, to end the investigation swiftly. [...]

Mr. Burr said he did not feel pressured by the president’s appeal, portraying it as the action of someone who has “never been in government.” But he acknowledged other members of his committee have had similar discussions with Mr. Trump. “Everybody has promptly shared any conversations that they’ve had,” Mr. Burr said.

One of them was Mr. Blunt, who was flying on Air Force One with Mr. Trump to Springfield, Mo., in August when he found himself being lobbied by the president “to wrap up this investigation,” according to a Republican official familiar with the conversation.

This guy...  So how long does Trump get the "never been in government" excuse?  The report states these approaches were from over the summer - in August.

[Morpheus]

22 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

Trump Pressured Senate Republicans to End Russia Inquiry

This guy...  So how long does Trump get the "never been in government" excuse?  The report states these approaches were from over the summer - in August.

He gets that excuse forever, Paul Ryan used it to explain away his obvious obstruction after Comey testified.

[Fez]

First concrete news from the overnight senate discussions.

Which increases the deficit and therefore pushes Corker and Flake further away. I guess Daines was still pretty squishy too, hence the need for this. I wonder if it's enough for Johnson. Also, apparently Lankford is with Corker and Flake. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-01/senate-republicans-work-to-salvage-tax-bill-tax-debate-update

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Two of the three Republican holdouts over a procedural vote -- Bob Corker of Tennessee and Jeff Flake of Arizona -- had tied their support to a complex mechanism that would trigger tax increases if government revenue targets weren’t met. James Lankford of Oklahoma has also said he has deficit concerns. The third holdout -- Ron Johnson of Wisconsin -- has argued that pass-through businesses aren’t getting deep enough tax cuts.

Supposedly the vote series will start at 11am. If it does, I assume the votes are there (although, in the failed ACA repeal, McConnell did force the failed votes to happen); and if it doesn't, there's no telling what happens next.*

*Except that it further increases the chances of a shutdown since Republicans aren't going to want to put this aside next week to deal with spending.