WED 12/8/21
•A homeless man has been charged with arson for allegedly setting fire to the 50-foot “All-American Christmas Tree” on Fox News’ New York City headquarters early Wednesday, Politico says.
•After 16 years leading Germany, Angela Merkel has handed over control of the nation’s parliament to Olaf Scholz, who leads a three-party coalition.
•Pfizer says its two-shot vaccination appears to be less effective against the omicron variant of COVID-19, based on studies by South African scientists and Pfizer, but a third shot may be more effective (WaPo). Meanwhile, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, says the omicron variant may spread more quickly but is likely less severe.
•Instagram chief Adam Mosseri faces the Senate Commerce Committee’s consumer protection panel today over possible harm to teens from its photo-sharing social media app (NPR).
Convoluted Procedures Look to Avoid Federal Shutdown – Congress is on its way to a debt-limit increase over the current $28.9 trillion, to an amount to be determined later, presumably after a confusing set of procedures moves the legislation on to the Senate Thursday. This is from reports in The Hill as well as Roll Call. The procedural trick is that the Senate will be limited to 10 hours debate on raising the debt limit, thus allowing Democrats to pass the increase with a simple majority vote.
Congress has until December 15, one week from today, to raise the debt limit in order to avoid a government shutdown, based on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin’s estimates.
Republicans, remember, are resistant to taking on additional federal debt (see the next item on the 2022 defense bill, which will reach the Senate $25 billion higher than President Biden’s budget request). Under this compromise on the debt limit, 10 Republican senators will help advance a bill that blocks Medicare cuts.
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House Passes Defense Bill – The House passed a compromise version of the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act Tuesday with a price tag of $768.1 billion, $25 billion more than President Biden had proposed, according to The Hill. As a result, 51 Democrats joined 19 Republicans in voting against the bill, with 363 House members from both parties voting in favor. The defense bill, which is expected to head to the Senate next week, includes a $740 billion base budget, $27.8 billion for nuclear weaponry and $368 million for defense-related spending in other federal departments.
Note: Now go home for the holidays. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-WV) does not want to take up Build Back Better legislation until next year, so there’s no reason for Democrats to insist on lingering around the Capitol until the Senate takes it up again.
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Biden in Video Faceoff with Putin – President Biden spent more than two hours in a video conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin Tuesday, warning him of economic and political sanctions if his military’s troops continue to move aggressively on Ukraine. Putin says the Russian troops are assembling on his country’s own land, and he wants to prevent NATO from moving east and recruiting Ukraine as a member. Some experts doubt Putin is being so obvious as to signal moves to repeat Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014.
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As the Insurrection Turns – Latest on the House select committee’s investigation into the January 6 Capitol insurrection is that Roger Stone, former political consultant to Donald J. Trump, plans to plead the 5th Amendment in his testimony, while fellow former Trump associate Stephen K. Bannon’s contempt of Congress trial is set for July.
Prosecutors had proposed “swift justice” in the form of a one-day trial in April for Bannon’s two contempt charges. Bannon’s defense attorneys countered by asking for a 10-day trial in October, just in time for the provocateur to rally pro-Trump voters for the November mid-terms.
Note: Bannon’s antics and Stone’s unusual choice not to talk about himself may be moot. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), as one of nine Congress members on the committee, says the panel has amassed a lot of useful written material to move forward (per MSNBC’s The Eleventh Hour).
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Charles Dervarics
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TUE 12/7/21
•Former President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has rescinded his decision to cooperate with the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Meadows’ attorney, George Terwilliger, objected to the committee’s issuing of “wide ranging subpoenas of information from a third party communications provider,” in a letter to the panel obtained by CNN.
•President Biden will warn President Vladimir Putin in a special videoconference between the two leaders today that if Russia moves to invade Ukraine it will face serious sanctions (NPR).
•The U.S. will hold a diplomatic boycott against China over human rights violations, for the Beijing Winter Olympics in February. American athletes will be permitted to attend the games (WaPo).
•New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has issued a strict COVID-19 vaccine mandate affecting all employers in Manhattan. But the mandate does not take effect until December 27, four days before Mayor-elect Eric Adams replaces de Blasio. A spokesperson for Adams says he “would evaluate the measure once he is mayor.” (NYT)
•Former Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS), who died Sunday, will lie in state Thursday in the Capitol Rotunda (Roll Call). Further funeral arrangements are yet to be announced.
Tweet This: Nunes to Leave House – Donald J. Trump acolyte Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is retiring from the House of Representatives next month, leaving a whole year on his current term to become CEO of the former president’s new SPAC-funded media and technology group, NPR’s Morning Edition reports. The Trump Media & Technology Group plans a rival to social media such as Twitter – from which Trump has been banned since before he left the White House – thus allowing him to spew out various covfefe on an hourly basis again, but this time without critical responses from Democrats and never-Trumper conservatives.
Note: The former president has allegedly raised more than $1 billion for his new venture through a “special purpose acquisition company” publicly created to merge with another company for a quicker stock exchange listing versus an IPO. The Securities & Exchange Commission is looking into whether the SPAC’s managers had any material discussions with Trump Media, which is a no-no, according to public radio’s Marketplace.
Comment of the Day: In his statement about leaving Congress (suddenly, it seems), a place he’s been since 2002, Nunes wrote:
“The time has come to reopen the Internet and allow for the free flow of ideas and expression without censorship.” (Per Politico.)
Apparently Nunes is referring to the fact that Trump had his social media privileges lifted by the like of Twitter and Facebook for, well, lying.
There are some 221.6 million U.S. Facebook users. There are some 77.75 million Twitter users.
Seems like (a) the Internet isn’t closed (didn’t we just all shop on CyberMonday?) and (b) there is a hell of a lot of flow coursing through the cloud.
Nunes continued, “The United States of American made the dream of the Internet a reality and it will be an American company that restores the dream.”
While we know he is referring to TM&TG, given the former president’s epic fails social-media-wise since being banned, Nunes may be dreaming.
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Justice Dept. to Texas: About Those Electoral Maps – The Justice Department is suing Texas over electoral maps that were drawn in the wake of the 2020 U.S. Census, in which the state gains two Congressional districts, but with no consideration of Black or Latino voters, minorities that account for 95% of Texas’ population growth in the last decade (per The Guardian).
Vanita Gupta, the third-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Justice, says some of Texas’ districts were drawn with “discriminatory intent.”
That’s important because the Justice Department must show such intent in striking down the new maps. Gerrymandering is allowed, so such intent won’t do. The new maps give the GOP hold on 25 of 38 U.S. Congressional districts and on a majority of the state legislature’s seats, The Guardian says.
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Tesla CEO Slams Biden EV Incentives – Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, criticized President Biden’s plans to spur electric vehicle adoption, including provisions in the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan providing incentives for consumers’ purchases of EVs, in a video interview for The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit Monday. Musk also said federal funding in the bipartisan infrastructure bill for EV infrastructure recharging is “unnecessary.”
“Do we need support for gas stations? We don’t. Delete it,” Musk said.
Note: Not enough time to get into how much the federal government has done for Big Oil over the last 125 years or so, but Musk has some interest in EV recharging, as Tesla has dotted the North American landscape with Super Chargers, which are recharging stations with connectors that work on its own cars, but not any other brand of EV. Tesla also has made much of its revenue over the last decade from selling California zero-emissions vehicle credits to major automakers in exchange for selling internal combustion-powered vehicles in the state.
--Edited by Todd Lassa, Gary S. Vasilash and Nic Woods
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MON 12/6/21
•Congress is scheduled to take up the budget for national defense, and the debt limit this week (Punchbowl News). Treasury Sec. Janet Yellin says the government has until next week Wednesday to lift the debt limit to avoid default, but if all goes right (heh) both chambers are scheduled to begin holiday recess after Friday.
•Anyone traveling to the U.S. beginning today, including American citizens, must show a negative coronavirus test taken within a day of travel to enter the country (WaPo).
•Scroll down to read our home page debate on Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and their fight with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and his campaign to become House speaker after the 2022 midterms. Send your comments to editors@thehustings.news.
Georgia’s Political Mind – Much has been made about the political divide between blue cities and red countryside in Texas and California, but for the November 2022 elections, Georgia will be front and center again. Former President Trump is “primarying” incumbent Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, R, with former senator David Perdue -- cousin of the former president’s Agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue -- who has announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, NPR’s Morning Edition reports. If Perdue beats Kemp, he likely will face Stacey Abrams, who late last week announced her candidacy for the governor’s race as a Democrat – consider her a shoo-in for her party’s nod next year.
Abrams narrowly lost the 2018 race against Kemp – he’s the incumbent, remember – and went on to lead the runoff campaigns of Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who won in January to give the party its veep-tie-breaker-thin majority over the GOP in the Senate. Ossoff, in fact, beat David Perdue in part because Trump, defeated two months earlier in his re-election bid, told his MAGA followers not to bother with a “fixed” runoff anyway.
Last February David Perdue filed papers to run against Sen. Warnock in 2022, as his seat filled in the final two years of Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson’s term. Isakson stepped down due to health issues. Gov. Kemp appointed Kelly Loeffler, former owner of the Atlanta Dream, of the Women’s National Basketball Association, as Isakson’s replacement. Loeffler claimed a “100%” pro-Trump voting record for the year she served as Georgia’s junior senator.
Anyway, after filing paperwork to challenge Warnock, the first Black U.S. senator from Georgia, he decided not to run for the seat. Trump’s man for that midterm primary is 1982 Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker. Still with us?
Challenging All the Best People: What seems like a golden opportunity for Abrams and the Democratic Party also is yet the latest, probably biggest, test of Trump v. what remains of the traditional wing of the GOP. It’s also a test of strict new state voters’ laws implemented by the state’s legislatures over trumped-up allegations of “voter irregularities” after the ex-president’s loss of Georgia’s Electoral College votes to Joe Biden.
Could come down to 11,780 votes, again.
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Rising Inflation Fears Push Fed Policy – Federal Reserve officials are making plans to accelerate the wind-down of its bond-buying stimulus program to begin raising interest rates by next spring, The Wall Street Journal reports. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell had previously indicated bond-buying would end next June, but the supply v. demand balance clearly isn’t balancing out as delta and omicron variants of the coronavirus rage on.
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Predictable Outcome – Counties in the U.S. in which a majority voted for Donald J. Trump for president last November are nearly three-times as likely to die from COVID-19 than counties that voted for Joe Biden, NPR reports in an investigation based on election data. The bigger the margin for ex-president Trump, the higher the death rate, according to NPR’s Morning Edition.
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Former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole Has Died – Former Sen. Bob Dole, Republican from Kansas who became the only candidate to lose campaigns for both president, in 1996, and vice president, in 1976, has died, age 98. Dole served as both majority leader, and minority leader of the Senate for 11 years combined, until his retirement in 1996 following his loss to Bill Clinton.
Dole was the last presidential candidate who was a World War II veteran. He was “left for dead” on a WWII battlefield, and lost the use of his right arm as an Army soldier, according to The New York Times’ obituary.
President Biden, whose senate career overlapped Dole’s over 23 years, called him “An American statesman like few in our history. A war hero and among the greatest of the Greatest Generation.”
Known for bi-partisan comity, though with a fierce and sometimes cutting sense of humor, Dole served in the House from 1961 to 1969, and the Senate from 1969 to 1996. He became a Capitol Hill lobbyist following his Senate retirement.
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Gary S. Vasilash