Canada Shows How Public-Private Partnerships Work

By Ken Zino

Canada, with its abundant material resources and its advanced automotive industry with extensive production and qualified workforces, is ideally positioned to thrive in the inevitable electric vehicle industrial revolution. The entire EV universe can only grow as the devastating effects of climate change from fossil-fuel use intensifies. Canada’s federal government not only recognizes this, but is actively pursuing an industrial policy that is beneficial for its constituents as well as for the environment. 

Free market ideologues, many of them backed by fossil-fuel-providers, disdain such progressive thinking. They are in my direct experience positively scornful of a federally directed industrial policy such as the one established in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act*. Not a single Republican ideologue -- idiotologue? -- voted for it. This, arguably, is the United States’ first significant climate law since congressional hearings were first conducted on the environment 40 years ago. Such anti-government ideology reminds me of my experience over the years with Republican-led governments, which are demonstrably harmful in innumerable ways to all but the ultra-rich. 

More importantly, in my view, the Inflation Reduction Act also represents significant change in political philosophy toward rational thinking over ideology and sundry idiots. As I understand it, this policy change soundly reasons that the U.S. shouldn’t let the misleadingly labeled free market move, say, all semiconductor production offshore to areas that are hostile to U.S. interests, or let it mock and abandon trade agreements or vital international alliances.

On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz discussed expanding Canada’s and Germany’s deep and long-standing partnership in areas of common interest, including trade and investment, clean energy and clean technology, and global climate leadership. The leaders and ministers expressed their resolve to address the impacts of climate change, including the importance of expanding the international coverage of carbon pricing in the lead-up to COP27, according to an official government readout of the meeting. 

To read Zino’s entire commentary, click on The Gray Area.

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184 Sensitive Documents at Mar-a-Lago

(MON 8/29/22)

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board somewhat famously flipped on its support of ex-President Donald J. Trump in July over his complicity in the January 6 Capitol insurrection < https://thehustings.news/reactions-to-the-1-6-hearings-season-finale/?fbclid=IwAR1jufdXpDcuU4mtlT7FLd-Jc7oGSXD7eGtuyceoQ2CumdJ4Ma2K7_X3LDc&loggedout=true>. But after the Department of Justice released 38 heavily redacted pages of affidavit in support of the FBI’s August 8 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and private golf club, the WSJ’s opinion pages led off with, “Is that all there is?”

About half the 38 pages were redacted, with some pages completely blacked out in what the Justice Department said is an ongoing criminal investigation. The document includes “sensitive details about human intelligence sources or how spy agencies intercept the electronic communications of foreign targets,” according to The Washington Post. The Justice Department “is suspicious of obstruction by Trump or his allies,” WaPo says, and “(i)t’s possible Trump allies were talking to the FBI about all this.”

The affidavit counts 25 top secret documents, 92 secret documents and 67 confidential documents among the 184 documents the Justice Department says Trump kept, unsecured, at Mar-a-Lago.

--Todd Lassa

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Judge Orders Release of Redacted Affidavit (FRI, 8/26/22)

Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhardt has ordered the U.S. Justice Department to unseal its redacted affidavit that lays out the evidence used for the FBI’s August 8 search of Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago for sensitive government documents the ex-president allegedly mishandled after he left the White House, according to Politico. Reinhardt has accepted the DOJ redactions that were due at noon Eastern time Thursday, while the Justice Department warns that the heavy redactions would render the documents incomprehensible. 

It is unclear whether the Justice Department will appeal, Politico reports.

In his ruling, Reinhardt emphasized the Justice Department’s “good cause” in redacting elements that would have revealed “identities of witnesses, law enforcement agents and uncharged parties,” as well as “strategy, direction, scope, sources and methods,” and information about the grand jury. 

Meanwhile: Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon has given Trump’s attorneys until Friday to better explain why the former president wants a “special master” to review the Justice Department’s evidence in the case, CNN reports.

--Todd Lassa

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

EV Incentives and Requirements

Pundit-on-the-left Ken Zino makes his case in the column on the other side (full commentary in The Gray Area) for Canada’s effective public-private partnership intending to foster a quick move from gas- and diesel-powered vehicles to electric cars and trucks. Zino compares Canada’s initiative with the Inflation Reduction Act recently signed by President Biden, and argues that congressional Republicans will oppose it at any cost.  

This comes as the California Air Resources Board releases the state's plan to ban sales of gas- and diesel-powered cars and trucks by 2035. Sixteen other states, mostly on the East and West Coasts, are expected to comply with the latest incarnation of the California Waiver to EPA rules, which would result in electric vehicle market share of roughly 40% in 13 years.

Agree or disagree. Right or left. Here’s your chance to voice your opinion. Hit the Comment box in this column below or email us at editors@thehustings.news.

We are also following the Justice Department’s affidavit for the FBI’s search of former President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on August 8 (48th anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation). A federal magistrate has ordered the Justice Department to release its heavily redacted affidavit on Friday, same day another judge has ordered Trump’s attorneys to explain his request for a “special master” to oversee the official explanation of the search.

--TL

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On the Left

Donald J. Trump’s “offer” to the Justice Department to “do whatever I can to help the country” in lowering tensions among his MAGA supporters over the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home for sensitive government documents is being seen as a “threat” by some directed to Attorney Gen. Merrick Garland. (Some conservative media outlets still call the FBI search a “raid.”) Trump made the offer in an "exclusive" interview with Fox News Digital.

Meanwhile, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has announced he will retire in December. 

Opine on these or any other recent issues covered here in the Comment box below, or email editors@thehustings.news.

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Florida, New York, Oklahoma Primaries

(WED 8/24/22)

Florida: And so, a former Republican governor challenges incumbent Republican governor and presumed 2024 challenger to Donald J. Trump for the GOP presidential nomination Ron DeSantis. Rep. Charlie Crist (pictured), now a Democrat from Florida’s 13thDistrict, won his party’s gubernatorial primary Tuesday, 59.8% to agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried’s 35.3% (per Ballotpedia). Fried is the only Democrat holding a statewide office in Florida, which now counts more registered Republican voters.

Rep. Val Demings easily won the Democratic Party’s primary, with 84% of the vote, to take on incumbent Republican Sen. Marco Rubio for his seat in the November 8 midterms. 

New York: Rep. Jerrold Nadler easily beat Rep. Carolyn Maloney, 56.3% to 24.2%, for the state’s redrawn U.S. House 12thDistrict, which pitted two 30-year incumbents for the seat covering the East Side of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Challenger Suraj Patel took 18.3% of the Democratic primary vote. 

A special election to replace former Democratic Rep. Antonio Delgado for his 19th District congressional district seat is seen as a bellwether for the midterms in general. If so, count it as good news for Democrats, with Pat Ryan taking 51.1% to Republican Marc Molinaro’s 48.8% -- decisive, though hardly commanding in a district that encompasses the mid-Hudson Valley and New York Catskills region, which NBC News' Steve Kornacki describes as a "classic swing district." Ryan will serve the remainder of Delgado’s term, to January 3. Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul selected Delgado as her lieutenant governor after replacing former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

In the Democratic race for the House 10th District seat, 17th District incumbent Mondaire Jones came in third with 18.2%. Daniel Goldman, with 25.7%, edged out Yuh-Line Niou at 23.7% for the win.

Oklahoma: U.S. Rep. Markwayne Mullin, who represents the 2nd congressional district, won the Republican Party’s runoff for a special election in November to replace Republican Sen. James Inhoffe, who is retiring with four years left in his term. Mullin will face the winner of the Democratic runoff, cybersecurity professional Madison Horn. 

•••

On the 31st Anniversary of Ukraine's independence ... The White House has announced a new $2.98-billion "security package" for Ukraine in its fight for sovereignty against Russia's invasion. The package is for weapons and assistance as provided by the Ukrainian Security Assistance Initiative, Politico reports.

--TL

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Primaries Tuesday (TUE 8/23/22)

Florida: In the Democratic gubernatorial primary to challenge 2024 GOP presidential candidate and incumbent Gov. Ron DeSantis, progressive candidate Nikki Fried, commissioner of agricultural and consumer services, has been gaining in the polls against moderate Democratic Rep. Charlie Crist. Fried since 2019 has been the state’s commissioner of agriculture and consumer services. Crist was Florida’s Republican governor from 2007 to 2011, and since 2017 has served as the state’s Democratic representative for the 13th District. Crist has been considered the stronger candidate to take on populist cultural warrior DeSantis, though Fried has been hammering Crist on his prior history regarding abortion rights when he was a Republican, according to NPR’s Morning Edition. 

In the race for U.S. Senate, Rep. Val Demings (10th District) is very likely to beat three other Democrats to take on incumbent Republican Marco Rubio November 8. Like Crist, Demmings, a former police officer, is currently serving her second term in the House of Representatives.

New York: Redistricting has forced Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of the 10th District to compete with Rep. Carolyn Maloney for Maloney’s 12th District seat. Both are powerful representatives, with Maloney chairing the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and Nadler chairing its Judiciary Committee. 

Oklahoma: Both major parties have runoffs Tuesday for the November midterm to replace Republican Sen. James Inhoffe, 87, who is retiring next January with four years left on his current term. In the Republican runoff, it’s Markwayne Mullin v. T.W. Shannon while on the Democratic side it’s Jason Bollinger v. Madison Horn to replace the conservative five-term senator (per Ballotpedia).

•••

Up for discussion … Donald J. Trump is suing the U.S. Justice Department over its FBI search of Mar-a-Lago for White House documents. The former president’s attorneys argue the government provided no reason for its search of Trump’s Florida residence and that the search raised questions about Fourth Amendment rights, Newsweek explains. ... Meanwhile ... The New York Times reports that Trump had taken more than 300 classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago. Federal officials “became alarmed” after the National Archives found more than 150 sensitive papers among the first batch received from the former president in January. … A federal judge has given Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) attorneys to Wednesday to provide a list of questions they think a grand jury can and cannot ask a sitting senator, Yahoo! News reports. Graham’s testimony before the Fulton County, Georgia grand jury investigating Trump’s alleged attempt to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results was temporarily halted by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has to next Monday to respond to Graham’s list of questions. … Dr. Anthony Fauci has announced his retirement in December, after 38 years as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He also serves as chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation and as chief medical advisor to President Biden. 

--Todd Lassa

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

On the Right

Should Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) be compelled to testify before Fulton County, Georgia’s special grand jury investigating the 2020 presidential election? What are your thoughts on pro-MAGA treatment of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is retiring as the nation’s lead infectious disease expert?

Also, national security attorney Bradley P. Moss called the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago “justified,” in an op-ed for Fox News Digital [https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-mar-a-lago-search-justified].

Opine on these or any other recent issues covered here in the Comment box below, or email editors@thehustings.news.

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From Left 

On Fox and Friends, co-host Steve Doocy recently warned against threats of violence on the FBI for serving a warrant to search for government documents at Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. They were just doing their job, he noted, a point-of-view later echoed by former Vice President Mike Pence. Neither Doocy nor Pence defended Attorney Gen. Merrick Garland, who ordered the FBI search.

We want to learn your thoughts on this and other recent political news. Please enter your opinions in the Comment box in this column, or the right column, or email editors@thehustings.news.

Scroll the trackbar on the far-right to read, in this column, contributing pundit Jim McCraw’s comments on the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago; “The Documents Were There. Really. The FBI Took Them Back.”

Click on The Gray Area to read contributing pundit Ken Zino’s commentary, “The Forgotten Obvious” on Kansas voters’ rejection of an amendment on the ballot that would have opened the state to strict abortion laws. 

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…meanwhile…

(THU 8/18/22)

Judge may allow release of affidavit… U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart on Thursday gave U.S. Justice Department prosecutors one week to submit the affidavit, with proposed redactions, used to issue an FBI warrant to search Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, the AP reports. The order indicated the judge is amenable to making at least part of the affidavit supporting the search warrant public. 

The former president’s attorneys requested the affidavit’s release, but the Justice Department argues its release could hamper its ongoing investigation, which it says is “in its early stages.”

•••

Weisselberg’s plea deal… Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to 15 felonies in a Manhattan court Thursday in exchange for a reduced sentence for conspiring with his employer of nearly 50 years, the Trump Organization, to carry out a long-running tax avoidance scheme, The New York Times reports. Under the plea agreement with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Weisselberg, 75, is required to testify at the Trump Organization’s criminal trial scheduled for this October if prosecutors call him to the stand to admit his role to carry out the tax avoidance scheme. 

If Weisselberg testifies truthfully in the trial, he will receive a five-month sentence and serve as few as 100 days with time credited for good behavior, according to the NYT. Though the criminal case involves the real estate development company run by Donald J. Trump and his family, the plea deal does not require Weisselberg to cooperate with the Manhattan D.A. on its broader criminal investigation and his admissions will not implicate the ex-president. But Weisselberg will be required to pay nearly $2 million in taxes, penalties and interest for receiving tax-free perqs, including leased Mercedes-Benzes, an apartment on New York’s Upper West Side and private school tuition for his grandchildren.

Upshot: Weisselberg’s plea deal is something of a consolation to Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg, whose criminal investigation appeared to be falling apart early in the year. Two lead prosecutors abruptly quit the case in February because Bragg had told them he had “doubts about moving forward with a case against Mr. Trump.” The investigation was initiated by Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., who chose not to run for re-election last year. 

--Todd Lassa

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

To Right

Pundit-at-large Stephen Macaulay writes about the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search in two commentaries in this column; “Of Scanners, Stars and Boxes,” and in “Donald Trump and the Art of the Flush.” 

We want to learn your thoughts on this and other recent political news. Please enter your opinions in the Comment box in this column, or the right column, or email editors@thehustings.news.

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About the Timing

As the FBI receives heightened threats from the radical right over its search of Mar-a-Lago last week, liberal and never-Trump conservative pundits warn the serving of the warrant will inspire a heavy pro-MAGA vote in the midterms, and possibly boost Donald J. Trump’s own chances for the 2024 presidential election. But Democrat strategists also are hopeful that Trump will announce for ’24 this fall and re-invigorate the party’s own chances in the midterms. 

Voice your opinions on which party gains most from the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, whether you are left or right, in the Comment box in the left or right columns, or email editors@thehustings.news. Be sure to read Pundit-at-Large Stephen Macaulay’s take on the ex-prez’s use of his Florida estate as a repository for classified White House papers in the right column.

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Liz Cheney and The Great Task

(WED 8/17/22)

Expected defeat…Trump-endorsed House candidate Harriet Hageman beat incumbent Liz Cheney, 65.8% to 29.5% in Tuesday’s Wyoming GOP primary election. That’s 106,322 votes for Hageman to Cheney’s 47,615 in a state with about 580,000 residents. 

Cheney will continue to fight to keep former President Donald J. Trump from retaking the White House by running for the 2024 nomination for president, Politico, which reported those numbers above, speculates Wednesday. The three-term congresswoman, who now leaves the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection by January whether Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) becomes speaker and gets a chance to dismantle and investigate it or not, has launched The Great Task, a political action committee devoted to keeping Trump out of office, NPR reports. 

“Two years ago, I won this primary with 75% of the vote,” Cheney said in her concession speech Tuesday night (per The Guardian video). “I could easily have done the same again. The path was clear. But it would have required that I go along with President Trump’s lie about the 2020 election. …

“It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundation of our republic. That is a path I could not and would not take.

“No House seat, no office in this land is more important than the principles we were all sworn to protect and I well understood the political consequences of abiding by my duty. The primary election is over. But now the real work begins.”

Irony alert: Hageman, for her part, also nationalized the Wyoming primary for the House seat (as recorded by NBC News). 

“Wyoming has spoken on behalf of everyone across this great country who believes in the American Dream … who believes in liberty and recognizes that our natural rights; Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal protection and due process come from God.” 

They do not come from politicians, she said, “and the government cannot take them away."

“Wyoming has spoken on behalf of everyone who is concerned that the game is becoming more and more rigged against them," she continued. "And what Wyoming has shown today is that while it cannot be easy, we can dislodge entrenched politicians who believe they have risen above the people they are supposed to represent.”

Meanwhile, in Georgia: Former Trump attorney and America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani is scheduled to testify Wednesday before a Fulton County grand jury investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results there. Giuliani is a target of the investigation.

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire: Attending a “Politics and Eggs” breakfast in the state holding the first presidential primary again in 2024, ex-Vice President Mike Pence said he would testify before the House Select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection, MSNBC’s Morning Joe reports Wednesday. His statement came in the form of an answer to a question posed at the event. 

The count, so far: Of 10 House Republicans who voted for then-President Trump’s second impeachment after the January 6 Capitol attacks, four have lost their primaries this season to pro-Trump candidates and two have won, according to the Associated Press. Three, including Cheney’s only fellow Republican on the House Select Committee, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, chose not to run for re-election. One primary race is still to be determined; Rep. John Katko’s New York seat.

•••

Alaska’s non-partisan ranked-preference primary … Preternatural MAGA politician and former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s shot at the state’s single, at-large House seat remains alive. Palin came in second with 32.2%, to Democrat Mary Peltola’s 34.5% and ahead of Republican Nicholas Begich’s 27.1%. A third Republican, Tara Sweeney, also advances to the general election, with her 3.2% of the vote.

Because of the ranked-preference vote, a candidate who gets more second-place votes could beat the first-place candidate. 

Alaska will determine the winner among these three for the special election to serve out the remainder of Republican Don Young’s seat, by the end of August, NPR says. (Young died in office earlier this year). Peltola, Palin, Begich and Sweeney face off in the ranked-preference general election November 8.

For U.S. Senate: Moderate Republican incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski edged Trump-endorsed Republican Kelly Tshibaka, 42.% to 41.8%, and Democrat Patricia Chesbro at 6.2%, and Republican Buzz Kelley at 2.3% to advance to the general election. The four beat 15 other candidates for the chance to compete in another ranked-preference race for the Senate seat November 8.

--Todd Lassa

...meanwhile... (TUE 8/16/22)

Tuesday’s primaries… Wyoming’s and Alaska’s primaries are quite probably Donald J. Trump’s most important so far and coincide with a resurgence of support for the former president coming a week after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. Politico calls the Wyoming primary “Liz Cheney’s day of reckoning” as she faces Trump-endorsed challenger Harriet Hageman for the state’s at-large House seat. Cheney is about 30 points behind in the polls thanks to her voting for ex-President Trump’s second impeachment and sitting as vice chairwoman of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection, though there has been some hope that she would make up that deficit with sympathetic Democratic and independent voters in the open primary. There will not be enough.

In Alaska, preternatural Trumpian Republican Sarah Palin faces Democrat Mary Petola and Republican scion of prominent state Democratic family Nicholas Begich in a special election to replace Don Young, who died in office earlier this year. Alaska has a new ranked-preference system, which means that if no candidate gets at least 50% of the vote for the at-large House seat, the second and third rounds are counted. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski also faces Democratic and Republican challengers in the non-partisan primary for her seat (per Ballotpedia).

Upshot: Cheney could flip Tuesday’s likely loss into a serious challenge to Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

•••

Biden to sign Inflation Reduction Act… President Biden is scheduled to sign the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the sweeping climate change, health care and tax bill at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday. While the Congressional Budget Office estimates no effect on inflation – why should it? – for 2022 and ’23, its scoring says the reconciliation bill will reduce the federal deficit by $300 billion, NPR reports.

•••

Giuliani a ‘target’ in Georgia probe… Prosecutors in Georgia have informed former America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani he is a ‘target’ in its “wide-ranging” criminal investigation into election interference involving his former client as attorney, ex-President Trump, in the 2020 presidential election, The New York Times reports. A federal judge in Atlanta also has rejected Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) efforts to avoid testifying in the investigation being led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis. Graham’s attorneys say the senator has been informed he is a witness, not a target.

--Todd Lassa

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

Of Scanners, Stars and Boxes

By Stephen Macaulay

For about $100 you can buy a computer scanner.

In a matter of moments even documents that are labeled “top secret/sensitive compartmented information” could be deposited on a hard drive for quick email distribution or stuck on a thumb drive.

Donald Trump, not a man known for his dynamic reading capability (or even for, well, reading), took 26 boxes of documents to Mar-a-Lago, which is described on its website as “the only private club world-wide to attain the prestigious 6-Star Diamond Award from the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences.”

The what?

Well, according to a May 2016 AP story, “when it comes to Trump, the academy isn't an independent observer.

“The organization is run by Joseph Cinque, a longtime Trump acquaintance who goes by the nickname "Joey No Socks" and has a felony conviction for possessing stolen property.”

And it goes on to report:

“As recently as last May, Trump himself was listed on the group's website as its "ambassador extraordinaire," and he appeared in a 2009 tribute video to Cinque in which he said: "There's nobody like him. He's a special guy."

“But Trump told The Associated Press on Friday that he doesn't know Cinque well and was unaware of Cinque's criminal conviction.”

All of this sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Now anyone who has moved house, even if it isn’t from one of the most legendary houses in the world to a prestigious 6-Star Diamond manse, knows that when you pack boxes often things go awry. Somehow no matter how carefully you mark things, there is a nearly metaphysical impossibility that all of the forks disappear. And sometimes upon unpacking there is the discovery of something that was long thought to be lost.

So let’s give Trump a benefit of a doubt. Certainly something in that move—a move that he still argues shouldn’t have occurred because the election was stolen, rigged or otherwise stacked against him (and let’s not forget, he, too, is a special guy)—probably got misplaced. After all, he had to be in a bit of a rush.

Maybe it just so happened that some documents that are top, top secret just happened to get snagged on a paper clip on the stack of love letters (his adjective) to Kim Jong-un and was shipped to his swank (six diamonds!) digs purely by accident.

But then there is that little matter of him taking things he had no legal right to. Boxes and boxes.

On Meet the Press August 14, Andrea Mitchell put it to presidential historian Michael Beschloss that Trump tweeted, “President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents much of them classified. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots.”

Beschloss responded, surprisingly, “Well, President Trump is absolutely right. Barack Obama has tens of millions of documents. . .” YIKES! but the shoe drops. . .”and they are in a National Archives installation, Hoffman Estates, Illinois, under armed guard with heavy surveillance, using the procedures that are supposed to be used for a former president. We have never in history seen a former president take ultra-classified documents, stick them in his basement, loosely watched by government standards, and with the shadow of we still don't know what his motive was.”

Well, it is the basement of that venue that won that coveted award.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Trump Tower got one of those plaques, too.

But I wonder about that scanner.

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

Congress Takes Recess

After Friday’s House vote on the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, Congress is on its scheduled summer recess until after Labor Day. The House Select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack will continue its investigation, though with no plans for public hearings before September. The Hustings is taking a break, too, though with news updates, including coverage of the Wyoming Republican primary Tuesday, August 16, in which Rep. Liz Cheney, vice chair of the House Select committee, faces challenges from pro-Trump candidates. 

Scroll down to read our aggregate coverage of the FBI’s search of Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and the fallout, with commentary in the left and right columns. Contributing pundit Jim McCraw’s commentary, “The Documents Were There. Really. The FBI Took Them Back,” is below in the left column.

COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news.

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House Passes Inflation Reduction Act

The vote … in the House of Representatives was 220-207 Friday with unanimous Republican opposition to the bill. Approximately $370 billion for curbing harmful emissions and subsidizing green technology counts as the federal government’s “largest-ever investment” in climate change mitigation, according to The Washington Post, and relies on tax law revisions, including a 15% minimum tax on billion-dollar corporations that now pay nothing, plus a new tax on corporate tax buybacks and new funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Democrats claim a $300-billion reduction in the federal deficit, although the fiscal analysis is not yet final, according to WaPo. 

The Senate passed the bill last weekend along party lines, 51-50, with Vice President Harris breaking the tie.

Upshot: Though progressive Democrats will have to get over, or hide, their disappointment that their party’s majority in Congress could not pass the much larger Build Back Better bill, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 now stands as the latest and best argument for stanching a Republican wave in November 8th’s midterm elections. Republican candidates are countering with arguments that small businesses and the middle class will be subject to greater harassment by the IRS and inflationary effects from the federal spending.

--Todd Lassa

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

Contact Us

Although we’re joining Congress in taking recess through Labor Day, this is a good opportunity to voice your thoughts for the right or the left columns. Write your opinions down in the Comments box in this column or the left column, or email us at editors@thehustings.news and please include your political leanings (conservative or liberal) in the subject line.

Scroll down to read our aggregate coverage of the FBI’s search of Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and the fallout, with commentary in the left and right columns. Pundit-at-large Stephen Macaulay’s commentary, “Donald Trump and the Art of the Flush” is below in the right column.

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