Jerrold Nadler Idiot Democrat Cartoons

House Judiciary Committee passes impeachment rules to expand scope of inquiry

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., leads his panel to approve guidelines for impeachment investigation hearings on President Donald Trump, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

“Some call this process an impeachment inquiry, some call it an impeachment investigation — there’s no legal difference between these terms and I no longer care to argue about their nomenclature.”

— Rep. Jerry Nadler, (D) Chairman – Judiciary Committee

The House Judiciary Committee has approved an apparent impeachment inquiry into President Trump. On Thursday, the panel passed a resolution in a 24-to-17 vote.
The resolution gave the committee power to deem meetings as impeachment hearings,which provides them the ability to question witnesses after members conclude hearings among other procedural functions.
Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler tried to clarify the confusion surrounding the intentions of the meeting and claimed terminology regarding impeachment inquiry is insignificant.
Ranking member Doug Collins blasted Nadler, saying he intended to use the pointless meeting to appeal to Democrat colleagues and to fool the general public into believing there is progress with an impeachment inquiry.
Collins also had this to say:

“I’ve wanted for a long time to be able to say this: welcome to fantasy island because we’re here…it may all look good. The unfortunate part is when the screen goes down, you just see a simple procedure issue…that doesn’t deal with impeachment, that doesn’t do anything else. It just simply gives another press release for whatever were doing now.”

The first committee hearing that will utilize the resolution is set for September 17th. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has been called to testify.

Debate descends into melee over health care, Obama, socialism as Dems struggle to show unity

Idiots

Long-simmering policy disputes between Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and a slew of other candidates exploded into the open during Thursday night's Democratic primary debate, as the candidates -- often with raised voices -- laid bare their fundamental disagreements on "Medicare-for-all," immigration and more.
Intermittent efforts by some candidates to show unity and keep the heat on President Trump repeatedly failed, with most striving instead to score an aggressive debate "moment" onstage in Houston.
Amid the melee, Pete Buttigieg offered an exit ramp from the feuding as he criticized the Democrats for "scoring points against each other" -- prompting Julian Castro to interject, "That's called an election!"
"Yeah, but a house divided cannot stand," Amy Klobuchar retorted, to no avail.
The economy, which has performed well by virtually all major metrics in the past year, went largely undiscussed during the raucous three-hour debate. And, even as House Democrats made a push towards potentially impeaching the president this week, that topic conspicuously did not come up either.

Setting the tone

The brouhaha at the ABC News-hosted debate began from the outset, when Biden set the tone by going after Warren directly.
"I know the senator says she's for Bernie," Biden said. "Well, I'm for Barack."
"For a socialist, you've got a lot more confidence in corporate America than I do," Biden shot back at Sanders shortly afterward, after the U.S. senator from Vermont suggested corporations would return the money they currently make on high insurance premiums if his sweeping plan were implemented.
Sanders responded by referring to cancer treatment, leading Biden to sharply reply, "I know a lot about cancer — it's personal to me." Brain cancer killed Biden's son Beau four years ago.
The clashes settled any questions about whether the top-tier candidates – meeting onstage for the first time, with the addition of Warren – would hold back. To the contrary, Biden was clearly mindful that Warren has been surging in recent weeks and was ready to fight to hold his frontrunner status, while several candidates continued to pile on Biden as they have at past debates.

Heated clashes

But the most heated clashes of the night came between Biden and fellow Obama administration member Castro, who tangled at length in direct and seemingly personal terms.
"I'm fulfilling the legacy of Barack Obama, and you're not," Castro said, referring to the millions of Americans who lack health coverage -- leading Biden to respond, "That'll be a surprise to him."
Castro hammered Biden for claiming that individuals would not be required to buy into his health care plan in order to receive coverage.
"You just said two minutes ago they would have to buy in. Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?" Castro asked. Some commentators said Castro's jab was an improper, thinly veiled reference to Biden's age.
However, Biden did not say during the debate that individuals would have to buy in. Instead, Biden said that individuals would automatically be enrolled if they lost their jobs.
"Anyone who can't afford it gets automatically enrolled in the Medicare-type option we have," Biden had said. "If you lose the job from your insurance company, from your employer, you automatically can buy into this."
Biden responded correctly, as the crowd roared in support of Castro, that he had said that people would be "automatically enrolled" under his plan.
Later on, during a discussion on immigration, Castro hit Biden for distancing himself from Barack Obama's record when it suited him, only to emphasize his tenure as vice president when it was beneficial.
"He wants to take credit for Obama's work, but not have to answer any questions!" Castro charged.
"I stand with Barack Obama all eight years — good, bad and indifferent," Biden said. "I did not say, 'I did not stand with him.'"
Biden, meanwhile, drilled Warren and Sanders for refusing to directly answer whether taxes would go up under their preferred Medicare-for-all proposal.
"The only question here in terms of difference is where to send the bill," Warren eventually offered.
She added: "We all owe a huge debt to President Obama, who fundamentally transformed health care in America, and committed this country to health care for every human being. And now the question is, how best can we improve on it?"
Warren maintained that she had "never actually never met anybody who likes their health insurance company ... what they want is access to health care."
Sanders, his voice rising, repeated a familiar line in defense of his "Medicare-for-all" plan against supposed distortions by his opponents, saying, "I wrote the damn bill."
"Maybe you have run into people who love their premiums," Sanders barked. "I haven't."

Idiots

"While Bernie wrote the bill, I read the bill," Klobuchar snapped back later, to applause. Klobuchar, who does not support Medicare-for-all, maintained that millions would lose their private coverage.
Sen. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, insisted she had "always" supported Sanders' health care plan, even as she has publicly waffled as to what would happen to private insurance plans if she were elected. She has said all private health care plans would be eliminated, as Sanders prefers, only to quickly walk back that idea.

Protesters interrupt

Tensions were evident both on and off the stage. Toward the end of the debate, a group of protesters interrupted Biden for nearly a minute -- just before he began speaking about personal tragedies in his life, including the death of his first wife and daughter in 1972.
Biden also repeated the inaccurate claim that children were not kept in cages under the Obama administration. The most widely circulated photo of children in cages in immigration detention centers, though falsely attributed to the Trump era, was in fact taken during Obama's presidency.

"Nobody should be in jail for a non-violent crime."
— Joe Biden, during the debate

The former vice president also seemingly made a bungled and anachronistic appeal to technology, urging attendees, "Play the radio. Make sure the television, excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone..."
That response came after a question about what Americans can do to help roll back the legacy of slavery. Biden was suggesting that children need to "hear words" outside of the school environment to improve their vocabulary. Then, when a moderator tried to cut off his lengthy answer, Biden fired back, "No, I'm gonna go like the rest of them do -- twice over."
In another head-turning moment, during a discussion on criminal justice reform, Biden suggested that nonviolent crimes should never result in prison time.
"Nobody should be in jail for a non-violent crime," Biden said. "When we were in the White House, we  released 36,000 people from the federal prison system."

Bizarre moment

But before all the battles got underway, the debate immediately brought about a bizarre moment early on, when longshot candidate Andrew Yang revealed he would randomly give 10 families that registered on his website $1,000 per month -- what he called a "freedom dividend."
The plan prompted a sustained moment of silence from Buttigieg, who took several seconds to begin his own opening statement once Yang finished, and eventually said, "That's original, I'll give it that."
Some suggested the plan might even violate campaign-finance laws.
Yang has advanced a plan to give every American at least $1,000 per month if elected -- via taxpayer funds.
For the other candidates, the evening offered an opportunity for an electric moment and a potential momentum boost. Harris' sustained attack on Biden's decades-old opposition to federally required busing during the June primary debate gained her the nation's attention, even as critics said she had mischaracterized the former senator's position.
Harris' numbers have fallen since that moment, and big-money donors reportedly said this week they would abandon her candidacy if she didn't have a strong performance on Thursday.
"Kamala will take on Donald Trump directly," Harris press secretary Ian Sams promised.
In her opening statement, Harris did just that. She dubiously claimed that the only reason Trump has not been indicted is that Justice Department guidelines prohibit the indictment of a sitting president -- a proposition former Special Counsel Robert Mueller has explicitly denied.
For his part, Trump's campaign was visible during the debate in Houston -- overhead. His campaign was using a plane to fly a banner that reads “Socialism will kill Houston’s economy."
O'Rourke, meanwhile, continued to refocus his campaign on pushing unprecedented gun-control measures -- including mandatory buybacks of legal firearms. O'Rourke, when he was running for the Senate in Texas just last year, explicitly said that he opposed confiscating legally purchased AR-15s.
In his opening statement, O'Rourke urged Americans to be "bigger" than petty politics -- just after he stated that the recent mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, was inspired by the president. In his manifesto, the shooter explicitly said Trump had not done so.
O'Rourke doubled down on his mandatory gun-buyback program later on: "We have a white supremacist in the White House, and he poses a mortal threat to people of color all across this country." He said "hell yes" when asked if guns needed to be confiscated.
O'Rourke added: "When we see that being used against children. ... Hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We're not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore."
His campaign, in a riff on Warren's virtual slogan, later tweeted, "Beto has a ban for that," next to a photo of a gun.
After the debate, a Texas state representative tweeted, "My AR is ready for you Robert Francis," using O'Rourke's birth name. Twitter quickly took down the post from Republican state Rep. Briscoe Cain.
O'Rourke responded on Twitter: "This is a death threat, Representative. Clearly, you shouldn't own an AR-15—and neither should anyone else."
Other candidates onstage largely agreed although they stopped short of endorsing O'Rourke's gun confiscation plan.
"A few weeks ago, a shooter drove ten hours, inspired by this president, to kill people who look like me," Castro said. "White supremacy is a growing threat to this country, and we have to root it out."
For her part, Harris implicitly blamed Trump for the violence.
"Well, look," Harris said. "Obviously he didn't pull the trigger, but he's certainly been tweeting out the ammunition."
Harris then took aim at Biden, and advanced her plan to unilaterally take executive action on guns if necessary, bypassing Congress.
"Hey Joe — instead of saying, 'No we can't,' let's say, 'Yes we can," Harris said, referring mockingly to Obama's campaign slogan.
"Let's be constitutional," Biden responded.
Concerning climate change, Warren sounded an apocalyptic note, saying flatly that "every living thing" could die. She noted that experts have warned that there is little time left to avert catastrophe. United Nations scientists have claimed the world has 10 years to get global warming under control since at least 1989.
On trade, the candidates largely agreed that China was acting improperly -- "they steal our intellectual property," Harris said -- but all asserted that Trump's approach of ever-increasing tariffs was reckless.

‘You’re a child,’ Texas state lawmaker tells Beto O’Rourke after Dem calls his Twitter message ‘a death threat’

Briscoe Cain

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke responded late Thursday to what he claimed was a “death threat” from a Texas state lawmaker.
Briscoe Cain, a member of the Texas House of Representatives, had posted a Twitter message during Thursday’s Democratic debate in Houston, after O’Rourke said he planned to take away high-powered weapons from civilians if elected president.
“Hell yes, we’re gonna take your AR-15,” O’Rourke, a former congressman from El Paso, Texas, tweeted during the debate.
“My AR is ready for you Robert Francis,” Cain responded, using O’Rourke’s birth name.

Texas state Rep. Briscoe Cain. (Facebook/Briscoe Cain)

At that point, O’Rourke made it clear he didn’t interpret Cain’s tweet to be a joke.
“This is a death threat, Representative,” O’Rourke wrote. “Clearly, you shouldn’t own an AR-15—and neither should anyone else.”
Cain replied: “You’re a child Robert Francis.”
Such weapons have become a topic of debate nationally after recent mass shootings – but particularly in Texas, where 22 people were fatally shot at a Walmart store in O’Rourke’s home city of El Paso on Aug. 3 and eight people were fatally shot in a suspect’s shooting spree in the Midland-Odessa area on Aug. 31.
O’Rourke, 46, served in Congress from January 2013 until earlier this year. He launched his 2020 presidential bid after generating national name recognition during a high-profile but failed U.S. Senate run against incumbent Ted Cruz, a Republican.
O’Rourke has argued for a mandatory buyback of assault weapons, among other gun control measures.
Cain, 34, is a Republican from Baytown who represents Texas’ 128th District, covering part of Harris County.
The website VoteSmart.org shows that Cain’s pro-Second Amendment votes this year have included support for allowing handguns at places of worship; allowing the storage and transportation of firearms in school parking areas; and authorizing law enforcement officers to carry weapons on school property.

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke speaks during a candidates forum at the 110th NAACP National Convention in Detroit, July 24, 2019. (Associated Press)

In March, Cain drew attention to a class assignment at a Texas school that he argued was trying to promote a teacher’s anti-Trump agenda.
In February, Cain was among a group of state lawmakers who proposed using state money to help build a U.S.-Mexico border wall amid stalled federal efforts.
Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser contributed to this story.

September 11th 2019

House Freedom Caucus elects Biggs to succeed Meadows as chairman

Change is coming to an influential group on Capitol Hill following a vote Tuesday.
U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., was elected the next chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, and will succeed U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C.
“I’m grateful for the trust of my colleagues in selecting me to serve as the next chairman of the House Freedom Caucus,” Biggs said in a statement from the caucus. “The Freedom Caucus has revolutionized Capitol Hill because our members have shown that they will stand for principle over politics – every time.”
Meadows, a key ally of President Trump, will step down as chairman Oct. 1 but will remain a member of the group’s board, the statement said.
“I’ve been honored and humbled to serve as chairman of the Freedom Caucus for the last two and a half years, and I can’t think of a better person to pass the torch to than Andy Biggs,” Meadows said, according to the statement.
“Rep. Biggs is an outstanding public servant, a strong conservative, and a steady voice with the right experience to build on the tremendous strides our caucus has made since 2015 in fighting for open, limited, and accountable government,” Meadows added. “He’ll be a phenomenal leader for our group.”
Biggs, 60, a native of Tucson, represents Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, which mostly covers suburbs east of Phoenix.
A member of Congress since 2017 after serving as a state lawmaker, Biggs has been a staunch backer of President Trump’s plans to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Meadows, also 60, represents North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, in the western part of the state, and has been serving in Congress since 2013.
Meadows became chairman of the House Freedom Caucus in January 2017, succeeding U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who remains chairman emeritus of the group.
The Freedom Caucus has struggled to advance its agenda since Democrats took control of the House following the 2018 midterms.

Trump signs executive order canceling student loan debt for disabled veterans

President Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that forgives all student loan debt for any permanently disabled U.S. military veterans.
The order, which Trump signed following a speech at the American Veterans National Convention in Louisville, Ky., also clears those eligible veterans from having to pay any federal income tax on the loans. Trump added that he is pressuring individual states to follow suit.
“The debt of these disabled veterans will be completely erased,” Trump said. “That’s hundreds of millions of dollars of student loans debt for our disabled veterans that will be completely erased.”
The memo Trump signed directs the government to develop an "expedited" process so veterans can have their federal student loan debt discharged "with minimal burdens." Currently, just half of the roughly 50,000 disabled veterans who are qualified to have their federal student loan debt forgiven have received the benefit because of a burdensome application process.
Under the current process, disabled veterans can have their debt forgiven under a loan forgiveness program, called Total and Permanent Disability Discharge, or TPD, as long as they have a VA service-connected disability rating of 100 percent. As of July, however, only about 20 percent of the eligible pool of veterans had taken advantage of the program due to the complicated nature of the application and other factors.
Trump’s announcement comes days after the administration hired a longtime student loan industry executive to be the federal government's top watchdog for the student loan market. Robert Cameron will serve as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's new student loan ombudsman, the bureau said Friday.
It's a job designed to protect student loan borrowers from poor practices in the student loan industry and one of the few positions explicitly named in the Dodd-Frank Act, the law passed after the 2008 financial crisis that created the bureau. It's considered the go-to office for borrowers who have complaints about their loans. Cameron most recently worked at the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, better known as FedLoan Servicing, as its head of compliance and risk mitigation.
PHEAA has been cited for poor industry practices, most notably for how it has handled the troubled Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, a program designed to allow student loan borrowers who work in public service jobs to get part of their loan balances forgiven.
The executive order also comes as student loan forgiveness has become a major talking point among the 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidates, with contenders like Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts pushing plans to completely wipe out student loan debt nationwide.
Currently, Americans hold around $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Trump-shaped 9th Circuit hands White House major win on asylum policy

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals -- long a liberal bastion that has been aggressively reshaped into a more moderate court by the Trump administration -- handed the president a major win late Monday, lifting a nationwide injunction on his asylum policy.
Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in California on Monday had reinstated a nationwide halt on the Trump administration's plan to prevent most migrants from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, if they first crossed through another country on the way.
But in an administrative order first obtained by Politico, the 9th Circuit rolled Tigar's ruling right back, saying it should only apply to the confines of the 9th Circuit for now -- which encompasses California, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, Nevada, Idaho, Guam, Oregon, and Washington.
The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit now has seven Trump-appointed federal judges -- more than any other federal appellate bench. The radical transformation of the court, which has 29 seats, is largely the result of Trump's push to nominate conservative judges and bypass traditional consultations with Senate Democrats.
Thirteen of the 29 seats are now occupied by GOP-appointed judges. Last year, that number stood at six.
"Thanks to Trump, the liberal 9th Circuit is no longer liberal," The Washington Post noted earlier this year.

Tigar first blocked the asylum policy in July after a lawsuit by groups that help asylum seekers. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals then partially limited the impact of Tigar's injunction.
That meant the policy was blocked in the border states of California and Arizona but not in New Mexico and Texas.
In his ruling Monday, Tigar circled back, and stressed a "need to maintain uniform immigration policy" and found that nonprofit organizations such as Al Otro Lado don't know where asylum seekers who enter the U.S. will end up living and making their case to remain in the country.
Tiger, citing new evidence, on Monday issued a second nationwide injunction.
"The court recognized there is grave danger facing asylum-seekers along the entire stretch of the southern border," Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Trump said he disagreed with the judge's ruling, hours before the 9th Circuit backed him up late Tuesday and again limited the injunction.
"I think it's very unfair that he does that," Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for a trip to North Carolina. "I don't think it should be allowed."
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement that a sole judge shouldn't have the ability to exert such a broad impact on immigration policy, and noted the administration's request to the Supreme Court to set aside the injunction is still pending.

FILE - In this July 17, 2019, file photo, three migrants who had managed to evade the Mexican National Guard and cross the Rio Grande onto U.S. territory walk along a border wall set back from the geographical border, in El Paso, Texas. (AP Photo/Christian Chavez, File)

"This ruling is a gift to human smugglers and traffickers and undermines the rule of law," she said.
The courts have halted some of Trump's key policy shifts on immigration, including an earlier version of an asylum ban. The president has prevailed on several fronts after initial legal setbacks, for example, when the Supreme Court recently lifted a freeze on using Pentagon money to build border walls.
The rules issued by the Trump administration in July apply to most migrants who pass through another country before reaching the United States. They target tens of thousands of Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty who cross Mexico each month to seek asylum and would affect asylum seekers from Africa, Asia and South America who arrive regularly at the southern border.
The shift reversed decades of U.S. policy in what Trump administration officials said was an attempt to close the gap between an initial asylum screening that most people pass and a final decision on asylum that most people do not win.
U.S. law allows refugees to request asylum when they get to the U.S. regardless of how they arrive or cross. The crucial exception is for those who have come through a country considered to be "safe," but the law is vague on how a country is determined to be safe. It says pursuant to a bilateral or multilateral agreement.
People are generally eligible for asylum in the U.S. if they credibly fear return to their home country because they would be persecuted based on race, religion, nationality or membership in a particular social group.
The vast majority of asylum claims are denied, however, and the administration has said the system is being abused as a means of economic and humanitarian relief when it was intended to be used for limited and extraordinary cases.
Asylum claims have spiked since 2010, and there is currently a backlog of more than 800,000 cases pending in immigration court. Most asylum claims often fail to meet this high legal standard after they are reviewed by asylum judges, and only about 20 percent of applicants are approved.
The Border Patrol apprehended about 50,000 people at the southern border in August, a 30 percent drop in arrests from July amid summer heat and an aggressive crackdown on both sides of the border to deter migrants.
The drop was more significant than it was during the same period last year, however, in what officials called a clear sign that its recent agreement with Mexico to curb illegal immigration was working.
The 64,006 migrants apprehended or deemed inadmissible represents a 22 percent drop from July, when 82,055 were apprehended, and a 56 percent drop from the peak of the crisis in May, when more than 144,000 migrants were caught or deemed inadmissible. While the numbers typically drop in the summer, the plummet is steeper than typical seasonal declines.
Meanwhile, the number of caravans has also dropped. In May, 48 caravans of migrants were recorded coming to the U.S. In August, the tally was six. Border Patrol now has fewer than 5,000 migrants in custody, down from 19,000 at the peak in the spring.
“That international effort is making an impact. Mexican operational interdiction is certainly [the] highlight of that effort, but the shared responsibility we’re seeing in the region, governments stepping up and saying we also own this,” Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan told Fox News on Monday.
A senior administration official also said, "the tariff threat with Mexico changed the dynamic significantly with our partners."
Fox News' Adam Shaw and The Associated Press contributed to this report.