Tag: US House of Representatives

Is This How They Support Our Veterans?

I personally think that this country does not give enough support to our veterans…..especially those that suffer damage because of our moronic wars.

The GOP always plays hard to the veteran and lies to them every election and when they are elected they stab the vets in the back…..almost every time.

The GOP controlled House has done that exact thing while playing the debt game…..

When the new House majority passed its grab bag of government spending cuts last month, setting up an on-going game of chicken with the White House over any federal debt limit increase, they also directed their fire at essential services for military veterans, a constituency long courted by their own party. Included in the “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023,” was a proposed 22% reduction in funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Right-wing Republicans scrambled to provide political cover for themselves by insisting that “our budget cutting plan doesn’t harm veterans.” Instead, claimed Mike Bost, a former Marine from Illinois who now chairs the House Veterans Affairs Committee, his  conservative colleagues were just trying to force a long-overdue discussion of whether VA funding is “actually helping veterans.”

Fortunately, a VA patient, elected to Congress last year, took the House floor to accuse the Republican majority of passing a “B.S. plan” that’s “an absolute betrayal and a disgrace.” As former Navy Officer Chris Deluzio (D-PA) noted, House Republicans are “threatening to blow up our economy and to push us into default unless we agree to cuts to the VA and veterans, and to so much else.  There is not a single protection, not a single one for veterans in their bill. …Millions of veterans are going to be screwed by this plan.  They won’t get the care they’ve earned, and they will have to wait longer for benefits.”

Deluzio’s fiery speech generated much media attention and set the tone for other Democrats, like Joe Biden and California Congressman Mark Takano, who have weighed in, with similar criticism of GOP hypocrisy. Democratic Party consultants and strategists are, no doubt, already sketching out the kind of attack adds—focusing on Republican support for VA benefit cuts—that will be aired to help the White House woo the “vet vote” away from right-wing candidates next year, who need to be defeated for myriad reasons.

Amid Debt Ceiling Debate: VA Cuts Passed by House Give Corporate Dems Political Cover

How f*cked up is that?

We have a Pentagon play war around the world that gets almost unlimited funds and our vets will have to deal with a possible 22% cut in need funds.

And yet this betrayal will be forgotten by 2024 vote…..now that is what is f*cked up!

Our vets deserve so much more than they get….thank you for your service is just a feel good tagline….if you really want to ‘thank them’ then make damn sure they are looked after as they should be.

On an unrelated note:  DeSantis announced Thursday that he would seek the presidency and in the first 24 hrs he has raised $8.2 million….that should scare any rational person into start looking closely at the candidates.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

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The ‘Parents Rights’ Bill

The GOP is trying an end run on society.

They have introduced a bill in the House to ‘protect’ parent’s rights….a cutesy name that smacks of total control over our educational standards.

House Republicans on Friday narrowly passed legislation that would fulfill a campaign promise to give parents a role in what’s taught in public schools. It has little chance in the Democrat-run Senate, and critics say it will propel a far-right movement that has led to book bans, restrictions aimed at transgender students, and raucous school board meetings across the country, per the AP. GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who made the Parents Bill of Rights Act a priority during the early weeks of his tenure, said Republicans were “keeping our promise, our commitment to America, that parents will have a say in their kids’ education.” “At the end of the day, these are our children, not the government’s,” Republican Rep. Julia Letlow of Louisiana, who wrote the bill, said Thursday, per the Washington Post.

The bill would require schools to publish course studies and a list of books kept in libraries, as well as affirm parents’ ability to meet with educators, speak at school board meetings, and examine school budgets. It would also mandate that administrators at elementary and middle schools get an OK from parents before addressing a child by a different name, pronouns, or gender designation. The bill passed 213-208, with five Republicans—mostly members of the House Freedom Caucus—voting against it. The Hill names those five as Reps. Andy Biggs, Matt Gaetz, Ken Buck, Matt Rosendale, and Mike Lawler. The first four objected on the basis of wanting the federal government to stay out of local schools’ business. Lawler, meanwhile, thought an amendment added by Rep. Lauren Boebert on transgender bathroom usage “went too far” and “unnecessarily targeted certain children.”

Advocates say the bill poses a threat to LGBTQ+ students by potentially forcing them to come out to their families, which can sometimes lead to abuse or abandonment, per the AP. “It’s part of a pattern of attempts we’re seeing where the right wing of the Republican Party is really trying to marginalize LGBTQ people,” says David Stacy, the government affairs director for Human Rights Campaign. Democrats are also opposed to the bill, noting that although they favor nurturing parents’ involvement in their children’s education, this bill has been designed to kowtow to a minority of parents who want to control and politicize classrooms, including via book bans in school libraries. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed that the bill would face a “dead end,” and that it was proof the House GOP has been taken over by “hard-right MAGA ideologues.”

The only good spot in this attempt to control everything is that he will probably stall and possibly die in the US Senate.

This is what we get when idiots vote.

On a side note….an Utah parent is fighting back in the book banning craze…..

Frustrated that titles like The Bluest Eye from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison have been removed from schools as a result of Utah’s new book-banning law, one parent is pushing to have the Bible banned. “You’ll no doubt find that the Bible … has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition,” the parent wrote in a request to the Davis County School District, which was obtained by the Salt Lake Tribune with names redacted. It cites Utah’s book-banning law, passed last year with backing from conservative parents groups, which blocks books containing “explicit sexual arousal, stimulation, masturbation, intercourse, sodomy or fondling” from classrooms and school libraries.

Among the books targeted by the groups is The Bluest Eye, in which a young girl suffers sexual abuse by her father. But “Utah Parents United left off one of the most sex-ridden books around: the Bible,” reads the request, per Fox News. It lists the book’s topics of concern as “incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide.” It also includes several Bible quotes, including one from Genesis 19:8 in which a father asks that men do “as you wish” to his virgin daughters. The request was submitted Dec. 11. A review process usually takes 60 days. However, a district rep tells the Tribune that the case has been delayed due to a backlog.

A school policy states religious books can’t be banned but may be subject to restrictions, per Fox. However, there’s debate about how this would mesh with the law. “If the books that have been banned so far are any indication for way lesser offenses, this should be a slam dunk,” according to the request, which questions the targeting of texts by and about LGBTQ people and those of color in a school district that’s been “under investigation for being racist.” A 2021 Justice Department report found Davis had intentionally ignored “serious and widespread” racial harassment, per the Tribune. The district also settled a lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union in 2012 after removing a book about a child with same-sex parents, KUTV reports.

This is a bit extreme but I also understand why they are doing it.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Far Right Demands

Let’s start the week with some outrageous Right wing demands.

These are the demands being made by House far righters, the Freedom Caucus, (love the name it is anything but about freedom)….

The debt ceiling debate is about to begin and these are the demands from the far right for that debate.

A cadre of far-right Republicans announced Friday that they may only vote to raise the debt ceiling if Congress agrees to cut hundreds of billions of dollars in social spending, limit federal agencies’ future budgets, and abandon progressive elements of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda.

Since Washington’s arbitrary and arguably unconstitutional borrowing limit was breached in January, the Treasury Department has implemented “extraordinary measures” enabling the U.S. government to meet its obligations for a few additional months. Unless the Biden administration takes unilateral action to disarm the debt ceiling, Congress has until sometime between July and September to increase or suspend the nation’s borrowing cap. If Republicans refuse to do so, the U.S. is poised to suffer a catastrophic default.

Led by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), the House Freedom Caucus said Friday in a statement that its 45 members would “consider voting” to raise the debt limit if their colleagues in the House and Senate agree to:

  • Eliminate Biden’s $400 billion student debt cancellation plan;
  • Rescind unspent Covid-19 relief funds;
  • Nix nearly $400 billion worth of clean energy investments approved in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA);
  • Repeal the IRA’s roughly $80 billion funding boost for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS);
  • Restore Clinton-era work requirements on welfare recipients;
  • Require congressional approval before any major federal regulations can take effect;
  • Cap future federal spending at 2022 levels for the next 10 years; and
  • Find “every dollar spent by Democrats that can be reclaimed for the American taxpayer.”

This is the official release from the Caucus…

Image

I see lots that will effect the common voter and very little about actually decreasing the “reach” of government.

I love these ‘small government’ conservatives and their alt-right blowhards.

What crap!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Debt Ceiling–Right On Cue

A new Congress with Repubs in charge in the House and right on cue these people are fixated on the debt ceiling and will not vote to up it unless some of their demands are met.

We will hear from the lard ass, big mouths in the House go on and on about the debt and will spread crap on what it means to us mere peasants.

To help the average person understand this I found an interesting bit that could explain this complex issue…..

Republicans in Congress are threatening once again to force the US to default because they lack the votes to enact their preferred fiscal vision.

Yes, it’s debt ceiling season once again. For those not following along at home, US law imposes an arbitrary limit on the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow. Historically, this was intended to make borrowing easier. Today, it is a tool for brinksmanship, with Republicans threatening to block paying the bills they already voted to incur unless GOPdemands for unspecific spending cuts are met.

…

The last time a real debt ceiling face-off happened in 2011, the US had its sovereign debt rating downgraded and incurred more than a billion dollars in economic losses. So let’s set aside the hypocrisy and political posturing and ask a simpler question: Is there a debt crisis that would justify holding the economy hostage?

And the answer is no. Markets are not worried about the US paying its debts, and there are no bond vigilantes appearing out of the woodwork.

…

Absent the specter of the European debt crisis or a Republican party united on fiscal issues, the politics of debt reduction sit differently. Some Republican politicians, like Trump and Senate leader Mitch McConnell, are already warning that the cuts for popular but expensive programs such as Social Security and Medicare implied by a debt default aren’t going to help the party gain power in the next election. Republican member of Congresthoughts on the debt issues Nancy Mace told NBC over the weekend spending must be cut but couldn’t name a single target for reductions. Instead of cuts, conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is pushing to lift the limit on taxable Social Security wages.

https://qz.com/there-is-no-us-debt-crisis-1850013109

I am sure there is a troll in weeds waiting for his/her opportunity to offer up their spurious thoughts on the debt issue.

One question….how will the debt ceiling effect you?  (I do not want to hear what some politician thinks….I want your belief).

What about the proposal to eliminate the IRS and income tax?

Stay tuned for I shall cover this issue soon.

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The ‘Freedom Caucus’

Ever notice that these people give their BS all these patriotic sounding titles….like the ‘Fair Tax Act’, Freedom Caucus and none of them have anything patriotic attached to it in reality.

For this post I want to write about the ultra-conserv caucus within the House of Representatives, the Freedom Caucus……

The group, which includes many veterans of the Tea Party movement, was formed in January with the declared aim of pushing the House GOP leadership rightward on certain fiscal and social issues. More broadly, the caucus wants power shifted away from the leadership to the rank-and-file (by, for instance, giving committees more leeway on which bills to move forward and allowing more amendments to come to floor votes).

Unlike the plethora of caucuses and committees – which range from the Ad Hoc Congressional Committee for Irish Affairs to the House GOP Study Group – the Freedom Caucus does not officially disclose who belongs to it (aside from its nine founding members), though various unofficial lists have circulated. Membership is by invitation only, and meetings are not public.

The caucus originated during the mid-January 2015 Republican congressional retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania.  According to founding member Mick Mulvaney, “that was the first time we got together and decided we were a group, and not just a bunch of pissed-off guys”.  Nine conservative Republican members of the House began planning a new congressional caucus separate from the Republican Study Committee and apart from the House Republican Conference. The founding members who constituted the first board of directors for the new caucus were Republican representatives Scott Garrett of New Jersey, Jim Jordan of Ohio, John Fleming of Louisiana, Matt Salmon of Arizona, Justin Amash of Michigan, Raúl Labrador of Idaho, Mulvaney of South Carolina, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Mark Meadows of North Carolina.

(wikipedia.org)

Like the forerunner of the group, the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus never intended to lead only to disrupt.

At the beginning of this month, the House endured the longest contest to elect a speaker in 164 years. Rep. Kevin McCarthy ultimately was elected speaker, but only after he made several concessions to a small but influential faction of dissenting conservative Republicans. Though not every member of the Freedom Caucus — a far-right coalition of Republican lawmakers — voted against McCarthy, nearly every member who did oppose him was a member of the Freedom Caucus.

That commonality has drawn renewed attention to the Freedom Caucus and its role within Congress. Despite being a minority in the House, the Freedom Caucus has repeatedly punched above its weight and effected genuine change in the chamber. Powerful political factions are as old as American politics, and in most ways, the Freedom Caucus is just a continuation of that tradition. But in a few key ways, its members are doing something different: voting as a bloc, willing to go against their own party’s leadership and to gum up the works to make a statement. Those differences have allowed the Freedom Caucus to exercise influence over the better part of the past decade — and are why it’s only just getting started.

Modern congressional caucuses emerged in the last century, though less formal organizations of like-minded members have existed in Congress since the start, according to Ruth Bloch Rubin, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and the author of “Building the Bloc: Intraparty Organization in the U.S. Congress.” During the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, a group of insurgent Republicans worked alongside Democrats to strip away some of the powers that had been consolidated by the speaker. In the 1960s and ’70s, the left-leaning Democratic Study Group worked to push through civil rights legislation (along with, later, the Congressional Black Caucus), against bitter opposition from conservative Southern Democrats.

Typically, such influential intraparty factions emerge only when parties find themselves especially divided, Bloch Rubin said. “It’s usually because there’s enough of a cleavage within the party that these sort of factions have enough members and the distance between one faction and a competitor faction within the same party is enough that it warrants this kind of organizational work,” she said.

The Freedom Caucus Was Designed To Disrupt

This caucus was designed to be a distraction from the silliness of the GOP….they are there to disrupt and play political games not to govern.

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House Sets It’s Priorities

A new Congress, a new GOP lead House and a new speaker…..and now the majority, GOP, sets its priorities for the new Congress session……

Is it fiscal policies….nope

It mostly centers around the Orange man from Florida….Donald Trump.

Republicans knew better than to make their biggest messaging bill a public display of affection for moneyed criminals. But Trump currently faces both legal and political trouble from his long and storied history of tax fraud. Shortly after the House vote, the Trump Organization’s former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, was sentenced to prison time for his role in Trump’s tax evasion schemes. While Weisselberg’s stiff sentence likely reflects his willingness to take the fall for Trump’s crimes, as Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center lawyer Steven Rosenthal told Mother Jones this week, the Trump tax returns released by House Democrats in December make clear that’s not the only tax trouble Trump still faces. He’s never gotten nailed for any of his likely tax cheating because Trump “overwhelmed” the under-resourced IRS. In other words, the Biden law is designed to catch lawbreakers of precisely the Trump variety. So consider this first bill of the House GOP majority — which will thankfully go nowhere — as a love letter to their favorite crooked ex-president. 

For instance, one of the first changes McCarthy pushed through the House involved a series of rules meant to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent body empowered to investigate complaints about members of Congress. It’s no mystery why this is a top priority for so many Republicans in Congress. Multiple GOP members have been under suspicion for the role they played in the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, and four were referred to the (now also defanged) House Ethics Committee by the Jan. 6 select committee last year. The Office of Congressional Ethics isn’t under Republican control, which means there’s a very real chance it could have found evidence of sedition-related crimes. Now, effectively disempowered, it may not get the chance.

(salon.com)

Then there are those impeachments of Trump and McCarthy has made it known his thoughts.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on Thursday that he would consider expunging one or both of former President Trump’s impeachments.

“I would understand why members would want to bring that forward,” McCarthy said in response to a question at a press conference on Thursday, before listing off several other key priorities for House Republicans. 

“But I understand why individuals want to do it, and we’d look at it,” he added.

In the last Congress, a group of more than 30 House Republicans led by Rep. Markwayne Mullin (Okla.) put forward a resolution to expunge Trump’s impeachment in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The resolution was supported by the fourth-ranking Republican in the House, Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (N.Y.).

A smaller group, again led by Mullin, also introduced a resolution to expunge Trump’s December 2019 impeachment for allegedly attempting to withhold military aid from Ukraine in an effort to pressure the country to investigate the business dealings of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

The Senate ultimately acquitted Trump in both impeachments, after failing to reach the two-thirds majority required to convict him.

(thehill.com)

Was there any doubt in the direction that McCarthy and the rest of the slugs in the GOP would travel?

Not for me

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“lego ergo scribo”

And So It Begins

WE have a new GOP controlled House and that means we will hear all about the deficit and the need for a smaller government….they will use the tighten the belt attitude….

So let’s look at the first few days of the Repub controlled House on monetary issues

While the House was deciding to choose a speaker and the drama that came…..money was wasted.

Members of Congress collected more than $800,000 in salary during the chamber’s protracted speaker fight — during a period when they technically were not members.

The pols officially become members of Congress — leaving behind the title of Rep.-Elect — when they are sworn in by the Speaker of the House. The event usually takes place on Jan. 3, the Constitutionally mandated start of each new Congress.

Even re-elected incumbents must be sworn back in every two years for their “member” status to be current.

But because Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) failed to clinch the votes to become Speaker until the early morning hours of Jan. 7 — a delay not seen since before the Civil War — members of Congress swiped four days of payment before they were actually sworn-in as members.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/14/congress-pocketed-813k-during-freedom-caucus-speaker-revolt/

So since they were not officially employed why would they get paid?

Just wondering.

Then there is the ‘secretive’ pay raise…..

In one of their final acts in power, House Democrats secretly passed through a rule change that will see lawmakers in the lower chamber get a $34,000 pay raise. 

The new rule, proposed by Democrats on the House Administration Committee, allows House members to be reimbursed for the cost of lodging, food and travel while on official business in Washington DC.

It was tucked into the House’s internal rules, rather than in annual spending bills, and therefore was not debated on the House floor, according to the New York Times. 

In fact many rank-and-file House members did not even find out about the change until Tuesday, just two weeks after former Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a similar pay raise for House staffers.

Advocates say the new raise is necessary to increase the pool of people who could afford to serve in Congress, but Republicans say the ‘clandestine’ rule should have been up for public debate.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11630687/Secret-rule-change-House-lawmakers-34-000-PAY-BUMP.html

Good start to address the deficit….but not to worry they plan to send even more cash to Ukraine…..

Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine less than one year ago, Congress has approved more than $113 billion of aid and military assistance to support the Ukrainian government and allied nations. The Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 omnibus appropriations package included an additional $47.3 billion of emergency funding to provide humanitarian, military, and economic assistance to Ukraine on top of the $65.8 billion of funding already approved in three other emergency funding packages enacted by Congress.

Of the $113 billion approved in 2022, about three-fifths ($67 billion) has been allocated toward defense needs and the remaining two-fifths ($46 billion) to nondefense concerns such as general Ukrainian government aid, economic support, and aid for refugee resettlement. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) provided cost estimates of the four funding packages at the time each was passed. In total, CBO estimated that $6.6 billion of the $113 billion would be spent in FY 2022 and another $37.7 billion in FY 2023. Furthermore, CBO estimated more than half of the approved funds would be spent by the end of FY 2024 and more than three-fourths by the end of FY 2026.

To date, the Biden Administration has sent Ukraine roughly $26 billion of direct military aid, mainly in the form of military hardware, training, and supplies.

https://www.crfb.org/blogs/congress-approved-113-billion-aid-ukraine-2022

A good start to help lessen the deficit….a typical start once the GOP has control.

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“lego eergo scribo”

Seriously? A Bust?

I have been writing about what I think is overkill when it comes to Ukraine. Americans have a blind spot for some reason.

The newest attempt to deify Ukraine’s president is a bit too far….

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) introduced a bill this week that would place a bust of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the House wing of the US Capitol building, an idea that was strongly criticized by more conservative GOP members.

The resolution reads: “Resolved, That the House of Representatives directs the Fine Arts Board to obtain a bust of the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for display in a suitable, permanent location in the House of Representatives wing of the United States Capitol.”

On Twitter, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) posted a picture of the resolution and wrote: “Absolutely NOT! We serve AMERICA NOT UKRAINE!”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) wrote on Twitter that he wanted to believe the resolution was “satire” and linked to an article from the conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks giving five reasons to oppose the bust.

The five reasons FreedomWorks listed are:

  1. Ukraine is NOT the 51st US State
  2. The US doesn’t own the conflict or is obligated to continue funding it
  3. Further payments would encourage US taxpayer-funded reconstruction of Ukraine
  4. Ukraine is corrupt and this conflict is not about “defending democracy”
  5. Zero oversight of taxpayer aid to Ukraine

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) also ripped the resolution on Twitter. “There is now a House resolution that seeks to put a display of Zelenskyy’s head in the US Capitol. Was the $100+ billion to Ukraine not enough?” he wrote.

While Zelensky mostly received a hero’s welcome when he visited Washington DC and was given many rounds of applause when addressing Congress, only 86 out of 213 House Republicans attended his speech, although some of the absences could be explained by the lawmakers getting a head start on Christmas travel.

For now, GOP leadership is incredibly supportive of arming Ukraine and is critical of President Biden for not sending longer-range and more advanced weapons. But there is opposition to the policy among a small but notable number of Republicans, and that opposition will likely grow as the war drags on.

(antiwar.com)

Just what is it that this person deserves a place of honor in the Capital building other than being another global freeloader with his hand out?

When will the American people wake up to this insanity?

How much further will these warmongers push the limits of acceptance?

This Ukraine thing is a f*cked up mess….period!

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Closing Thought–13Jan23

GOP has taken control of the House and they promised to do many things and so far they have done nothing that would indicate they have any concern for this country and its people.

They have removed the metal detectors in and around the House and their most recent ‘improvement’ was to allow smoking…..

There’s a lot of history repeating itself in Congress this year — the House is in GOP hands, Democrats control the White House and Senate and there’s an inescapable stench of tobacco smoke in the Capitol’s hallways.

The smoke evokes memories of the old guard of Republican House leadership. Former House Speaker John Boehner smoked so many cigarettes that new carpets, a fresh coat of paint and an ozone machine were required when Paul Ryan took over his office.

Going further back, David Dreier, a GOP chairman of the House Rules Committee in the late 1990s and early 2000s, was fond of cigars. Today it’s another Rules chairman — Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma — who can often be found smoking in the committee’s space on the third floor of the Capitol.

This makes the US Capitol one of a handful of places in Washington, DC, and among the few remaining office buildings in the country where smoking is still allowed inside. Despite efforts going back more than 150 years to prohibit tobacco from the building, smoking is still allowed in members’ offices.

The Capitol, and the surrounding congressional office buildings, are federal property but operate independently of other government buildings and many rules — including those about smoking and pandemic procedures — are at the discretion of House and Senate leadership.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-11/a-blast-from-the-past-tobacco-smoke-again-wafts-through-capitol

This makes the old image of the ‘fat cat’ lighting his cigar with 100 dollar bills….

I can hardly wait to see what is the next move to improve government the GOP has on tap.

I did not have to wait long…..it seems if they have their way they will get a $34,000 raise.

In one of their final acts in power, House Democrats secretly passed through a rule change that will see lawmakers in the lower chamber get a $34,000 pay raise. 

The new rule, proposed by Democrats on the House Administration Committee, allows House members to be reimbursed for the cost of lodging, food and travel while on official business in Washington DC.

It was tucked into the House’s internal rules, rather than in annual spending bills, and therefore was not debated on the House floor, according to the New York Times. 

Under the new rule, House members could be subsidized about $34,000 for their expenses in DC, where they live for weeks on end. That means that if all 440 current members and delegates requested the maximum amount, the reimbursements would total around $15.1 million. 

Members of the House already earn an annual salary of $174,000, an amount set in 2009, which has not changed since even as the cost of living increased.

Additionally, House members get annual allowances averaging $1.27 million to staff and manage their offices as they see fit, and while members of Congress are required to purchase insurance under the Affordable Care Act, they receive a subsidy amounting to 72 percent of their premiums, according to Axios.

The federal lawmakers are also eligible for lifetime health insurance under the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program.

And depending on the member’s age and length of service, he or she could also receive a lifetime pension of 80 percent of his or her salary — amounting to $139,200 a year.

Not bad salary and benefits for a group that are basically part-time help.

Have a good weekend my friends.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

McCarthy’s Genital Massages

This is not a post on some political perversion….nope it is about what hoops McCarty had to jump through to secure his Speakership from the GOP hold-outs.

It appears that the negotiations were a bit of a secret….

A private document that only some House Republicans have seen and others refuse to talk about could play an outsized role in the governance of the chamber over the next two years.

Why it matters: The document contains concessions — not included in the rules package passed on Monday night — that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made to rebellious Freedom Caucus members to secure the speaker’s gavel.

  • Those members have threatened to kill McCarthy’s speakership as swiftly as they acquiesced to it if he reneges on their handshake agreements.

Driving the news: The existence of a “secret three-page addendum” containing “the most controversial concessions” that McCarthy made in order to get elected was first reported by Punchbowl News on Monday and confirmed to Axios by multiple GOP aides and members.

  • One of those concessions is three seats set aside for conservatives on the Rules Committee, as well as representation for them on the powerful Appropriations Committee.
  • Other McCarthy giveaways include votes on congressional term limits and a select committee on the weaponization of the federal government, a debt limit strategy and a more open amendment process on appropriations bills.
  • One thing the document doesn’t contain, according to NRCC Chair Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), who said he’s seen it, is promised committee chairmanships for specific members: “No names, just representation [on panels].”

https://www.axios.com/2023/01/10/republicans-mccarthy-house-rules-addendum

What did McCarthy promise?

Rep. Kevin McCarthy finally seized the House speaker’s gavel in the early hours of Saturday morning, capping off a chaotic week of voting and heated floor confrontations that were nationally televised and closely documented by reporters stationed at the U.S. Capitol.

What remains less clear, though, is how much McCarthy (R-Calif.) conceded to his far-right detractors behind closed doors to win enough support to prevail on the 15th ballot—raising urgent questions and warnings about the havoc the House GOP could wreak in the coming months.

“What did McCarthy promise to get the collaboration of extremists?” Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) asked over the weekend. “The future of Social Security and Medicare? Our nation’s full faith and credit? Keeping our government open?”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/mccarthy-backroom-deals-gop

Why was this a secret that he could not share with the rest of the GOP members?

This is so typical of the ‘backroom deals’….

But for the lazy

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