After a brief moment of clarity in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress, Republican leaders have joined Donald Trump in obstructing the investigation of the attack at every turn. Despite the GOP attempt at coverup, the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack has persevered over the past 12 months, in as bipartisan a manner as it could manage when the minority leader doesn’t recognize the authority of the majority. On June 9, the committee started showing the receipts, which are devastating to Republican leadership who have bought into the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Trump. In fact, on election night Trump was told by top aides that he had lost and that his claims about voter fraud were “completely nuts,” according to the testimony of Trump’s aides to the committee.
Instead of listening to White House and campaign aides, the advisers testified that Trump sided with a “definitely intoxicated” Rudy Giuliani to claim the election was stolen, even after Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr said the election fraud claims were “bullsh*t.”
Trump launched a movement that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol, and he is responsible not only for the injuries and deaths and damage done to the Capitol on that day, but also incalculable damage to the people’s trust in democracy. But at least he got to raise $250 million from his rubes for his PAC. The Select Committee’s work continues.
REPUBLICANS WIELD INFLATION FEARS TO DISTRACT FROM JAN. 6 GUILT. Republicans would much rather talk about inflation than their role in spreading Donald Trump’s Big Lie. But all the talk on the Republican side is about blaming Joe Biden and the Democrats for failing to bring inflation under control, ignoring that it is part of a worldwide phenomenon as economies emerge from COVID-19 lockdowns.
Josh Bivens, director of research at the labor-leaning Economic Policy Institute, argues that profit margins account for the bulk of inflation. Overall prices in the nonfinancial corporate sector climbed at an annualized rate of 6.1% from the second quarter of 2020 to the end of 2021, he told Bloomberg News (5/19). Some 53.9% of that can be attributed to profit margins, with less than 8% from labor costs, he says.
Voters also feel large corporations are using the pandemic to raise prices and increase profits, according to a survey conducted earlier this month by the progressive think tank Data for Progress in partnership with Groundwork Collaborative, Molly Smith and Erick Wasson noted at Bloomberg.com. At least 60% suppor raising taxes on big companies as well as cracking down on those that raise prices unfairly.
Accordingly, House Democrats passed the Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act (HR 7688) to give the Federal Trade Commission the power to penalize oil companies if the government can prove they are inflating the price of gasoline. House Energy and Commerce Chair Frank Pallone, D-N.J., noted that Shell PLC made a record $9 billion in profits during the first quarter of 2022 and Exxon Mobil Corp. saw profits increase by $5.4 billion. “They are purposely keeping production low in order to keep prices and their profits high,” Pallone said.
Republicans dismiss the bill as a “socialist price fixing act,” but they offer no alternatives.
The Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act passed the House 217-207 May 19 without any Republican support.
Another bill to check price-gouging is the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act (HR 7061), sponsored by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., which has yet to get a hearing in the Ways & Means Committee. Under Khanna’s bill, which has a Senate sponsor in Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., “large oil companies that produce or import at least 300,000 barrels of oil per day (or did so in 2019) will owe a per-barrel tax equal to 50% of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the pre-pandemic average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019,” according to a press release.
Revenue from the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax would fund quarterly rebates to individuals making up to $75,000 annually or up to $150,000 for joint filers.
Both bills likely will be blocked by Republicans in the Senate, who hope unrest caused by inflation will put them back in control of the House and Senate after the midterm elections in November. Let your senators know if you’d like gas rebates.
BIPARTISAN GUN BILL IS A GOOD START, LIKE TYING YOUR SHOES. The Washington Post ran an altogether remarkable paragraph (6/13) to kick off its coverage of the bipartisan agreement on gun violence that emerged over the weekend, Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire.com (6/13). This was it:
A bipartisan group of senators announced Sunday that it had reached a tentative agreement on legislation that would pair modest new gun restrictions with significant new mental health and school security investments — a deal that could put Congress on a path to enacting the most significant national response in decades to acts of mass gun violence.
“It could do that,” Pierce noted. “It could also provide a lake of stew, and of whiskey, too, that you can paddle around in a big canoe. Even assuming that the plan passes the Senate at all, which is still not a mortal lock, to assume that this is some sort of stepping-stone toward more toothsome gun control regulations seems to be wildly optimistic. Remember those heady days when the Affordable Care Act was supposed to put us all on the road to universal healthcare and Medicare For All? All that’s actually happened is that the ACA has been fighting for its own life ever since. Republican governors even refused the FREE MONEY!!! available to them to expand Medicaid coverage, and then they bragged about it. Keep that part of the story in mind as we go along here.
“I do not in any way mean to disparage the hard work done by Senator Chris Murphy and the others to pry the agreement they got out of the Republican morass that is the Senate minority caucus. The provisions of the bill are certainly helpful with regard to a number of the country’s problems. The difficulty comes when one realizes that one of the problems being addressed is decidedly not Too Many Damn Guns, and also, that there are a number of self-destruct mechanisms built in to the agreement.”
Under the tentative deal, a federal grant program would encourage states to implement red-flag laws that allow authorities to keep guns away from people found by a judge to represent a potential threat to themselves or others, while federal criminal background checks for gun buyers younger than 21 would include a mandatory search of juvenile justice and mental health records for the first time.
Other provisions would prevent gun sales to a broader group of domestic violence offenders, closing what is often called the “boyfriend loophole”; clarify which gun sellers are required to register as federal firearms dealers and, thus, run background checks on customers; and establish new federal offenses related to gun trafficking.
Pierce noted, “I trust that I don’t have to explain the problem with a program to ‘encourage’ states to do things, especially when those states are run by conservative Republican governors and conservative Republican legislatures. Generally, history tells us, this money, assuming the state even accepts it, ends up in the general budget, and/or someone’s cousin’s concrete and asphalt business. Hell, just light that money on fire on Main Street and shoot it full of holes.”
Pierce also noted that the flying monkeys went predictably ballistic. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), the former White House physician who claimed the former president* was the Slenderman, leaped to the electric Twitter machine.
“I WILL NOT support the horrendous anti 2nd Amendment bill that’s being proposed in the Senate. It’s AWFUL! This is a MASSIVE violation of your Constitutional rights, and it MUST be rejected!”
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) chimed in with the customary paranoia:
“The House’s recently passed gun control legislation would not have prevented the Uvalde or Buffalo mass shootings. This legislation is part of a broader goal to take all of our guns and erode the Second Amendment.”
And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) gabble-gooble-red-flags-gobble:
“There should be ZERO votes for red flag laws in the @HouseGOP. Stop helping Joe Biden and the Democrats hurt Americans. The people will not forget.”
And so on.
Pierce concluded, “I hope the thing passes. But I’m not going to fall for the alleged magical powers of the word ‘bipartisan’ to turn chickensh*t into chicken salad. This is a good start in the same way that making sure your shoes are tied is a good start to a marathon.”
SANDERS, WARREN TARGET RICH TO EXPAND SOCIAL SECURITY. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren led a group of lawmakers in unveiling legislation that would expand Social Security’s modest annual benefits by $2,400 and ensure the program is fully funded for the next 75 years, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (6/9).
The benefit boost under the Social Security Expansion Act would be funded by lifting the cap on the maximum amount of income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. This year the cap was $147,000—meaning millionaires stopped paying into the program in late February.
If passed, the expansion bill would apply the payroll tax to all income, including capital gains, above $250,000 a year, a change that would only raise taxes on around 7% of US households.
“At a time when half of older Americans have no retirement savings and millions of senior citizens are living in poverty, our job is not to cut Social Security,” Sanders (I-VT), head of the Senate Budget Committee and a co-chair of the Expand Social Security Caucus, said in a statement.
“Our job must be to expand Social Security so that every senior citizen in America can retire with the dignity they deserve and every person with a disability can live with the security they need,” the senator continued. “And we will do that by demanding that the wealthiest people in America finally pay their fair share of taxes. It is absurd that a billionaire in America today pays the same amount of Social Security taxes as someone making $147,000 a year. It is time to scrap the cap, expand benefits, and fully fund Social Security.”
The legislation comes a week after the annual Social Security trustees report showed that—contrary to Republicans’ claims that it is barreling toward insolvency—the program is positioned to fully fund benefits until 2035. Thereafter, even if Congress takes no action, the program is projected to be 90% funded for the next 25 years and 81% funded for the next 75 years.
“Social Security is an economic lifeline for millions of Americans, but many seniors are struggling with rising costs,” said Warren (D-MA). “As Republicans try to phase out Social Security and raise taxes on more than 70 million hardworking Americans, I’m working with Senator Sanders to expand Social Security and extend its solvency by making the wealthy pay their fair share, so everyone can retire with dignity.”
Sanders announced the new bill during a Senate Budget Committee hearing, at which Republicans—including Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who has previously voiced support for privatizing Social Security—made clear they would oppose the legislation, which has been endorsed by more than 50 advocacy organizations and labor unions.
In addition to increasing annual benefits and lifting the tax cap, the Social Security Expansion Act would also boost the program’s cost-of-living adjustments by switching to a more accurate measure of inflation. According to the Social Security Administration, the average monthly Social Security benefit payment was around $1,540 as of April 2022.
“With the cost of living at an all-time high, Social Security has never been more important, yet congressional Republicans continue to play games with its funding,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), the lead sponsor of a companion bill in the House.
MASS SHOOTINGS ‘SOMETHING WE HAVE TO LIVE WITH,’ 44% of REPUBLICANS SAY. A survey found nearly half of Republican voters in the US believe mass shootings are “unfortunately something we have to accept as part of a free society,” Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (6/6)
The CBS/YouGov poll conducted June 1-3, 44% of GOP voters feel frequent mass shootings are an inescapable reality in the US, where there are more guns than people.
But 72% of US adults overall believe mass shootings are “something we can prevent and stop if we really tried.”
See more Dispatches at Populist.com.
More specifically, the poll found that 62% of US adults support a nationwide ban on AR-15s. But despite the proposal’s popularity, it is not even on the table in the latest round of congressional gun control negotiations due to overwhelming GOP opposition.
In response to the survey results, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA)—chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—described the view that nothing can be done to stop mass shootings as “a radical and disgusting stance.”
“I cannot accept children being gunned down in classrooms and mass shootings in grocery stores, salons, and places of worship,” Jayapal wrote in a Twitter post.
An estimated 33 mass shootings occurred across the US after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on May 24 through June 6.
JAN. 6 COMMITTEE HEARING REACHED MORE THAN 20 MILLION. Nielsen estimates nine channels that carried the opening prime-time hearing about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress reached more than 20 million viewers (6/9), but Nielsen doesn’t count PBS, CSPAN or most web streaming, so the true total is larger.
Though the figure pales next to presidential debates (63 million to 73 million) or this year’s State of the Union address (38 million), it’s still much larger than the audience that would normally watch a daytime congressional hearing. And it’s in the ballpark of television events like a big “Sunday Night Football” game or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, John Koblin noted at the New York Times (6/10).
ABC attracted the biggest audience, with 5.2 million viewers. NBC and CBS each had an audience of more than three million. MSNBC averaged more than four million, and CNN drew 2.7 million. Fox “News” chose to play video of the hearing in the background while hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity spent two hours belittling the committee’s efforts. Fox Business carried the hearing live for roughly 223,000 people.
SOUTH DAKOTANS CRUSH GOP EFFORT TO SABOTAGE MEDICAID EXPANSION, South Dakotans (6/7) resoundingly defeated a Republican-authored constitutional amendment that would have raised the threshold for passage of most ballot initiatives from a simple majority to 60%, an effort motivated by GOP lawmakers’ desire to head off a Medicaid expansion vote set for November, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (6/8).
Voters rejected the proposal, known as Amendment C, by a margin of 67.4% to 32.6%, dealing a decisive blow to state-level Republicans’ latest attempt to weaken the ballot initiative process.
“The people of South Dakota have preserved their right to use direct democracy,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, a national group that worked to defeat the South Dakota amendment. “This victory will benefit tens of thousands of South Dakotans who will choose to use the ballot measure process to increase access to healthcare for their families and neighbors, raise wages, and more policies that improve lives.”
“We look forward to what’s next in South Dakota: an aggressive campaign to expand Medicaid in the state,” Hall added.
If passed, Amendment C would have required a 60% supermajority to approve any voter-initiated referendum that would “increase taxes or fees or that would require the state to appropriate $10 million or more in the first five fiscal years.” The proposal was endorsed by South Dakota’s Republican Gov. Kristi Noem and the powerful Koch network, which spent big on pro-Amendment C ads and mailers.
Republican sponsors and supporters of the amendment readily admitted that their expedited campaign to get Amendment C on the primary election ballot was fueled at least in part by opposition to the Medicaid referendum, which would make South Dakota the seventh state since 2017 to approve an expansion of the healthcare program through the voter initiative process.
Only Idaho’s 2018 Medicaid expansion initiative received more than 60% of the vote, an indication that Amendment C would likely have spelled doom for the South Dakota referendum.
As Daniel Nichanian of Bolts noted late Tuesday, “GOP lawmakers in South Dakota were not able to increase the threshold of passage for initiatives on their own, without consulting voters, since the change would have affected the state constitution.”
“And South Dakotans’ refusal to go along with this stands out as reaffirming the state’s historical legacy,” Nichanian observed. “South Dakota was the first in the nation to adopt a process for citizens to initiate ballot measures. In 1898, voters approved a constitutional amendment to that effect that was pushed by local populist leaders—a legacy that voters reaffirmed on Tuesday.”
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2022
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