House approves spending bill in effort to avoid government shutdown during pandemic

 

The House easily passed a temporary government-wide funding bill Tuesday evening in a bipartisan effort to keep the government running through the beginning of December.

The House voted 359-57 to approve the stop gap measure that will keep the government open through December 11. 56 Republicans and Rep. Justin Amash, I-Mich. voted against the measure, while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., voted present.

Agreement on the bill came after considerable behind-the-scenes battling over proposed add-ons. The final agreement gives the administration continued immediate authority to dole out Agriculture Department subsidies in the run-up to Election Day. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., retreated from an initial draft that sparked a furor with Republicans and farm-state Democrats.

Instead, in talks Tuesday, Pelosi restored a farm aid funding patch sought by the administration, which has sparked the ire of Democrats who said it plays political favorites as it gives out bailout money to farmers and ranchers.

In return, Pelosi won COVID-related food aid for the poor, including a higher food benefit for families whose children are unable to receive free or reduced lunches because schools are closed over the coronavirus. Another add-on would permit states to remove hurdles to food stamps and nutrition aid to low-income mothers that are more difficult to clear during the pandemic.

The deal permitted the measure to speed through the House after a swift debate that should ensure smooth sailing in the GOP-held Senate before next Wednesday's deadline. There's no appetite on either side for a government shutdown.

The measure is the bare minimum accomplishment for Capitol Hill's powerful Appropriations committees, who pride themselves on their deal-making abilities despite gridlock in other corners of Congress. It came after bipartisan negotiations on a huge COVID-19 relief package imploded and appear unlikely to be rekindled — especially since the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has upended U.S. politics.

“We need to keep the government open but we also need additional COVID relief for the American people," said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.

The legislation — called a continuing resolution, or CR, in Washington-speak — would keep every federal agency running at current funding levels through Dec. 11, which will keep the government afloat past an election that could reshuffle Washington’s balance of power.

The measure also extends many programs whose funding or authorizations lapse on Sept. 30, including the federal flood insurance program, highway and transit programs, and a long set of extensions of various health programs, such as a provision to prevent Medicaid cuts to hospitals that serve many poor people.

It also finances the possible transition to a new administration if Joe Biden wins the White House and would stave off an unwelcome COVID-caused increase in Medicare Part B premiums for outpatient doctor visits.

The underlying stopgap measure deals with the 30% of the federal government's day-to-day budget that goes to Cabinet agency operations funded by Congress each year. The annual appropriations process broke down in the Senate this year and it's unclear but probably unlikely that the $1.3 trillion in agency spending bills will be enacted this year, even in a post-election lame duck session, especially if Biden is elected to replace Trump.

In the past, both Democrats and Republicans have sought to use government funding deadlines and must-past temporary funding bills as leverage to try to win concessions elsewhere on Washington's agenda. Such efforts invariably fail.

Republicans in 2013 used it in a failed attempt to prevent implementation of the so-called Obamacare health law, and Senate Democrats returned the favor in 2018 in a futile effort to force debate on permitting immigrants brought into the country illegally as children to remain in the U.S.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Seattle City Council overrides mayor's veto of police cuts

Seattle’s City Council voted 7-2 Tuesday evening to override Mayor Jenny Durkan's veto of a bill that would cut police funding by around $3 million.

"We cannot look away from this and we can no longer accept the status quo if we truly believe that Black lives matter," Council President Lorena Gonzalez said, according to MyNorthwest.com.

The bill would also remove as many as 100 officers from various police units and limit staff pay to $150,000, The Seattle Times reported.

The council said the bill was a "downpayment" toward its effort to ultimately defund the department by 50%, which would likely happen next year.

Council members Debora Juarez and Alex Pedersen cast the dissenting votes, Seattle's KING-TV reported.

The council had approved the cuts by 7-1 in August. The move prompted police Chief Carmen Best to retire, effective Sept. 2, claiming the planned cuts had placed her in a "position destined to fail."

Best, the city's first Black police chief, had been with the department for nearly three decades.

The council overrode the mayor’s veto on a total of three bills, which included reallocating $14 million to community safety programs, according to KING.

And if the veto override wasn’t successful, Gonzalez planned an alternate budget proposal that would limit cuts to the department and cut proposed community funding, MyNorthwest.com reported.

During an hour of public comments most speakers urged the council to override the veto in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, The Times reported.

“Everyone deserves to feel safe … Countless videos of Black and brown lives lost here in Seattle and across the country shows us that not everyone feels safe,” González added, according to the TImes. “We need public safety that’s centered on harm reduction, not the status quo. … “When I look back in this moment of time, I want to be able to tell my daughter, who I’m currently holding in my arms, that I did the right thing and that I voted on the right side of history.”

The mayor, at the urging of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, business leaders and some residents, has called for the council to slow down on defunding the department.

The city also faces a budget struggle because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Durkan is set to reveal her budget plan next week The Times reported.

Both Durkan and Councilmember Kshama Sawant are facing recall attempts – Durkan over the police department’s use of force during protests and Sawant for allowing protesters inside City Hall during the pandemic.

 

Gaetz calls for election bribery probe of Bloomberg over pledge to pay Florida felons' fines

 

House Judiciary Committee member Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., told "Hannity" Tuesday that he has spoken with Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody about potentially launching a bribery investigation into former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"I believe there may be a criminal investigation already underway of the Bloomberg-connected activities in Florida," Gaetz told host Sean Hannity.

Bloomberg, who briefly joined the race for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year, has reportedly raised more than $16 million for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.

Under the Florida state constitution, convicted felons can regain their voting rights after having served their time. However, a law enacted by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis states that felons must pay all fines, restitution, and other legal financial obligations before their sentences could be considered fully served.

"[Under Florida law] it’s a third-degree felony for someone to either directly or indirectly provide something of value to impact whether or not someone votes," Gaetz explained. "So the question is whether or not paying off someone’s fines and legal obligations counts as something of value, and it clearly does.

"If Michael Bloomberg was offering to pay off people's credit card debt," Gaetz added, "you would obviously see the value in that.

"[W]hen you improve someone’s net worth by eliminating their financial liabilities, that’s something of value," he went on. "Normally, it would be very difficult to prove that that was directly linked to impacting whether or not someone was going to vote. But they literally wrote their own admission."

A Bloomberg memo first reported by the Washington Post read: “We know to win Florida we will need to persuade, motivate and add new votes to the Biden column. This means we need to explore all avenues for finding the needed votes when so many votes are already determined.”

“The data shows that in Florida, Black voters are a unique universe unlike any other voting bloc, where the Democratic support rate tends to be 90%-95%," the memo continued.

"The law is clear this is something of value," Gaetz reiterated, "and I am encouraged after my conversation with the attorney general. I hope we have good law enforcement all over the country looking for the cheating and the tricks that these Democrats are going to try in this election."

Fox News' Vandana Rambaran contributed to this report.

Congress Week Ahead: Gov’t funding bill, hearings, environmental legislation

 

FILE – In this May 3, 2020, file photo, light shines from inside the U.S. Capitol dome at dusk on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 1:18 PM PT – Monday, September 21, 2020

As lawmakers are rattled by the shockwave of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing Friday, they still face a laundry list of duties before the November election. Congress is preparing for a busy week ahead with multiple legislative hurdles along the way.

With a September 30 deadline quickly approaching, lawmakers are racing to pass the annual federal funding bill. The threat of a potential government shutdown has led the House to push for a stopgap spending bill that would keep federal agencies funded through December.

This legislation is expected to be introduced in the lower chamber Monday. Democrats are optimistic the will vote on the spending bill early this week, so the Senate can hold their own vote before the impending due date.

Some lawmakers have raised the question of whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could use the threat of government shutdown without a spending bill as leverage in the fight over filling Ginsburg’s seat in the Supreme Court. While Pelosi implied she’s considering various options to combat a nomination before the election, she does not consider a government shutdown to be among those possibilities.

“None of us has any interest in shutting down government,” she told a reporter. “That has such a harmful and painful impact on so many people in our country, so I would hope that we can just proceed with that.”

Along the lines of funding, the House Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing for Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday. The hearing will focus on the need for further financial aid amid the economic fallout of the coronavirus. Both chambers of Congress have been pessimistic about passing a fifth relief package as time is running out before the November elections.

The House is also looking to take up substantial energy legislation to minimize environmental damage and create clean energy jobs. The package is more than 900 pages long. It seeks to allocate funding for research and development on clean energy in the U.S. The matter of environmental change is among several issues on Congress’s priority list and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said action must be taken just last week.

“It’s something we ought to address, I guess the key to it is how do you address it?” he asked. “I think most Republicans have a lot more confidence in technology to address the problem of climate change.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., walks to the chamber to speak about the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, Sept. 21, 2020. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The lower chamber will also potentially take up multiple bills targeting forced labor in trade with China. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act seeks to prevent certain imports from Xin-Jiang and impose sanctions on those in the region responsible for human rights violations.

The second of the bills, the Uyghur Forced Labor Disclosure Act, requires publicly traded companies doing business with the Xin-Jiang region to disclose information on their supply chains, including whether forced labor was involved in the making of these products.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are gearing up to release a report on the GOP probe into Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden by the end of the week. The probe is centered on Obama-era policies and will likely draw negative attention to the former vice president just weeks before voters are set to cast their ballot in the presidential election.

Finally, the Senate is continuing their nomination process for lower level courts with three judicial nominations scheduled this week.

The stakes on each of these matters are especially high as both chambers are in their last working period before November 3 with just a couple weeks left until they return to their home districts to focus on campaigning.

Press pounds Republicans on court vacancy, but hypocrisy is widespread

 

The media love nothing better than to pounce on hypocrisy.

Especially when it comes from the Republican side.

Within moments after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many journalists, not just commentators, were ripping Mitch McConnell and his colleagues for vowing to push through a Trump nominee as her replacement.

I expect hypocrisy from politicians of all stripes, and I’m rarely disappointed. They are very practiced in the art of intellectually justifying whatever it is they want to do in the exercise of raw political power. And if the circumstances change, they just conjure up new talking points that may be totally at odds with what they did before. Journalists care about consistency, and politicians care about getting through the current battle or the current election and worrying about the future some other time.

What’s gotten far less attention, though, is the way that many Democrats have also flip-flopped since what happened in 2016.

First, the Republicans. Nine months before the last election, when Ginsburg’s friend Antonin Scalia died, Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the seat. The Senate majority leader, who is remarkably immune to what the elite media says about him, announced that the chamber would not even consider Garland because it was an election year. The next president should pick Scalia’s replacement, McConnell said. He wouldn’t give Garland so much as a hearing.

But with Ginsburg’s death just over six weeks before the election, McConnell said he’d go full steam ahead for President Trump, as he had signaled he would do.

Many Senate Republicans were on record as saying they wanted to follow the 2016 precedent, none more prominently than Lindsey Graham, now the Judiciary Committee chairman. And television has been busy replaying the clips.

During the 2016 battle, the senator said: “I want you to use my words against me. If there's a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let's let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.”

And in a 2018 interview with Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Graham said: “I really don't care if an opening comes in the last year of President Trump's term. And the primary process has started. We'll wait for the next election.” He noted that he was on tape.

Graham, who’s in a tight reelection race, now says the way the Democrats treated Brett Kavanaugh changed his mind, but the hearings had already happened before the Atlantic interview.

The press has been laser-focused on Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who oppose a vote during the election, and keeping the heat on other potential Republican defectors, given that McConnell can only lose one more. Trump says he’ll announce his pick Friday or Saturday, after ceremonies honoring Ginsburg.

Now for the Democrats. Back in 2016, Biden of course backed Obama in insisting that McConnell allow a vote for Merrick Garland.

Now, however, the former vice president says there should be no vote, and the winner of the election--perhaps him--should get to fill the seat.

There are always details--this is literally on the eve of the election, while McConnell says the Senate and White House are now controlled by the same party--to rationalize situational ethics. But the press, by and large, isn’t casting this as Biden doing a 180.

When Harry Reid abolished the filibuster for judicial nominations below the high court level, Republicans went crazy; the media, not so much. Had a Republican majority leader done that, the media criticism would have been intense.

Now some Democrats, and liberal pundits, are urging that if Democrats win power they should pack the court next year, to neutralize the impact of Trump’s newest justice. That didn’t work out so well for FDR, but I’m not seeing much media criticism over that (a stance that Biden has rejected).

In fact, CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin said yesterday that Democrats don’t have the “guts” to add seats to the court because they are “wimps” and “weak.”

Again, I’m all for blowing the whistle on Washington hypocrisy. But the double standard here isn’t limited to political parties.

DOJ rejects Nadler request for testimony from senior officials after Barr treatment

 

 

The Justice Department on Monday refused a request from Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, for top officials to testify on several issues, citing a recent appearance by Attorney General William Barr that the letter called an attempt by committee members to “air grievances.”

The letter, which was signed by Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd, said that committee members spent most of Barr’s July 28 appearance at an oversight hearing to scold and insult the country’s top prosecutor. The letter even pointed to how an article in the New York Times described the hearing.

“Democrat after Democrat posed questions to Mr. Barr only to cut him off when he tried to reply, substituting their own replies for his,” the Times wrote.

Boyd’s letter was in response to Nadler’s request for Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband, Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal and U.S. Marshals Service Director Donald Washington to appear before its Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. One of the meetings was scheduled for Sept. 24.

Nadler’s office did not immediately respond to an email from Fox News seeking comment.

The July 28 hearing with Barr was seen by Trump supporters as an all-out Democrat assault on the attorney general many of whom accuse him of having too close a relationship with Trump.

Much of the testimony focused on George Floyd’s death in police custody and the subsequent protests that have swept across the U.S.

Nadler later accused Barr of using federal forces to provide Trump with footage for campaign ads. When Barr tried to respond and say that he was not using federal law enforcement to help Trump's campaign, Nadler spoke over him.

At another point in the hearing, Barr lamented that only one political party seemed to be sticking up for federal property and condemning mobs.

"What makes me concerned for the country is this is the first time in my memory that the leaders of one of our two great political parties, the Democratic party are not coming out and condemning mob violence and the attack on federal courts," Barr said. "Why can't we just say, you know, violence against federal courts has to stop? Could we hear something like that?"

The department’s letter said that Barr was in front of the committee to address topics that will be revisited in the upcoming hearings.

“Although the Department is not in position to provide witnesses for these hearings at this time, should the Committee nonetheless continue to have particular interest in obtaining information from the  Department, and should the Committee commit to doing so in an appropriate and productive manner, the Department would be happy to work with you regarding the scheduling of additional oversight hearings in the future,” the letter read.

Fox News' Ronn Blitzer, Jake Gibson and the Associated Press contributed to this report

GOP House candidate Kim Klacik claims voters with ‘Trump syndrome’ won’t admit support for her ‘out loud’

 

Maryland GOP congressional candidate Kim Klacik’s campaign has caught fire with the help of her viral ads, but many of her would-be constituents are reluctant to outwardly show their support, she told “Hannity” Monday night.

“It’s like, you know, a little bit of the Trump syndrome," Klaick told host Sean Hannity. "We have some people that don’t want to admit it out loud and we understand that because of the backlash.”

Klacik added that her campaign to represent Maryland's 7th district has made strides by canvassing and registering voters in “dangerous” neighborhoods like West Baltimore.

“We’re telling them, you’ve got to be involved in this process,” she said. “Your future, your children’s future all depend on it.”

Klacik is running against Democrat Kweisi Mfume, who represented the 7th District from 1987 to 1996 before resigning to become president of the NAACP. This past April, Mfume defeated Klacik by 48 percentage points in a special election to serve out the term of the late Rep. Elijah Cummings.

If she pulls off an upset win, Klacik wants to implement the president’s opportunity zones and promote school choice in Baltimore, where data indicates that nine out of 10 Black male students do not read at grade level.

“We have a problem with our education,” she said. “That’s why I’m a proponent for school choice. We have a problem with career opportunities ... That’s why I’m really pushing for President Trump’s opportunity zones.

“There are these simple things that we can do to drive down the crime and violence and get people economic opportunities,” she added. “And that’s what we need to do.”

George Stephanopoulos Cartoons