The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has ruled that several key pieces of the massive bill to implement President Trump’s agenda run afoul of the Byrd Rule and must be taken out of the package to allow it to pass with a simple majority vote on a special procedural fast track.

The parliamentarian ruled against several provisions under the jurisdictions of the Senate committees on Banking, Environment and Public Works, and Armed Services.

These included a provision that would have placed a funding cap on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which would have cut $6.4 billion from the agency by reducing its maximum funding to zero percent of the Federal Reserve’s operating expenses. The funding cut would have eliminated the agency.

The creation of the CFPB was one of the central reforms of the Dodd-Frank Act that Democrats passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

She also ruled against language cutting $1.4 billion in costs by reducing the pay of Federal Reserve staff, cutting $293 million by reducing the Office of Financial Research funding and cutting $771 million by eliminating the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, touted the parliamentary rulings.

“The Senate Parliamentarian advised that certain provisions in the Republicans’ One Big, Beautiful Betrayal will be subject to the Byrd Rule – ultimately meaning they will need to be stripped from the bill to ensure it complies with the rules of reconciliation,” Merkley said. 

“As much as Senate Republicans would prefer to throw out the rule book and advance their families lose and billionaires win agenda, there are rules that must be followed and Democrats are making sure those rules are enforced,” he added.

Senate Republicans will need to remove the provisions from the bill or otherwise would have to muster 60 voters to overcome a point of order against the bill...

Had to really dig for some good news this morning, but at least the Senate Parliamentarian is doing her job (unlike certain institutionalist Senators who obstinately refuse to slow down the Senate).

The bad:

A mad king’s impulsive, unchecked decision on Saturday to send waves of U.S. B-2 bombers halfway around the globe to drop the world’s most powerful nonnuclear bombs on three targets inside Iran is indeed a perfect way to measure Trump’s success after just over five months back in the White House.

And by every measure, Trump 47 has been an abject failure.

One week after 5 million Americans flooded the streets for a massive “No Kings” protest, with his approval rating heading underwater faster than the next climate-fueled flash flood, with his masked-secret-police deportation drive starting to alienate his own voters, with gas prices and 20-something unemployment starting to soar, and almost zero legislation despite GOP control of Congress, Trump showed that even a POTUS who hates canines can still wag the dog.

It took another epic failure — the inability of any of America’s democratic institutions since World War II to constrain the war-making abilities of an “imperial president,” which is a polite euphemism for “emperor” — to give Trump this option: to try and reinvent his disastrous reign by picking up the phone and ordering death and destruction 6,500 miles away.  [snip]

The sober websites of elite mainstream news orgs like the New York Times and the Washington Post are already filling up with news analyses and commentary about what geopolitical strategy might have motivated this American president to bomb Iran — a strategy looked at and rejected by a half dozen predecessors — and to do so right now.

“U.S. Military Is Pulled Back Into Middle East Wars,” read the Times headline on one of the  worst examples of this genre; it was as if some occult hand had dragged the United States into yet another ambiguous foreign conflict, instead of Trump’s megalomania. My advice is to read today’s foreign-policy punditry with a jaundiced eye — or just not read it at all...

If you got the sense of deja vu from what you've been seeing and hearing over the past 24 hours that we're back in 2003 with a dullard Republican president who manufactured a rationale to attack a Middle Eastern country combined with a corporate media more interested in avoiding the underlying lies and pathologies than exposing them... you're not alone.

The ugly:

... ICE in just a few weeks has transformed itself into the closest thing that the US has ever had to a “secret police,” with more seemingly culturally in common with the Klan nightriders of Reconstruction than their federal agency brethren like the FBI or ATF. 

What really worries me about ICE’s collective actions nationwide, though, is bigger than any single raid or social media post — what worries me is that what we’re witnessing nationwide are not the actions of an agency that believes it will ever be subject to meaningful oversight or legal authority ever again.

This is not an agency that is treating members of Congress as if it will ever be held to account by the men and women who control its budget.

This is not an agency that believes that any of its actions on the streets will be subject to meaningful review by judicial authorities — or that any of its actions will be litigated in the courts.

This is not an agency that believes that any of its actions will be subject to meaningful review by the DHS inspector general, either for policy violations or criminal use-of-force abuses, nor reviewed by US attorneys or federal prosecutors at any level.

This is not an agency leadership that believes that anyone in government — at the Justice Department, the White House, or DHS — currently cares about public perception, misconduct, or violations of civil rights and civil liberties.

And this is not an agency that believes that Democrats will ever be back in charge.

That’s what should terrify us.

It does.  In their terrorist methods, their mindlessness, their threats, and their disregard for the humanity of their victims, these ICE/Border Patrol/DHS thugs are more akin to the KKK or a fascist secret police force than we've seen in this country since Reconstruction. They may think they're unaccountable, but we need to make sure they're not.