Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦

Nothing special, one post at a time since 2012

Category Archives: Politics

A Tax Break That Will Never Die

Posted on by

Democrats are on the verge of passing a major bill that will attack the climate crisis, expand healthcare, slow down inflation, reduce the deficit, and even deal with tax evasion. In order to get all fifty Democratic senators to support the bill, a piece of the bill that would have raised taxes on a small number of very wealthy people was dropped. It’s a classic example of the way money corrupts American politics. From The New York Times:

Once again, carried interest carried the day.

The last-minute removal by Senate Democrats of a provision in the climate and tax legislation that would narrow what is often referred to as the “carried interest loophole” represents the latest win for the private equity and hedge fund industries. For years, those businesses have successfully lobbied to kill bills that aimed to end or limit a quirk in the tax code that allows executives to pay lower tax rates than many of their salaried employees.

In recent weeks, it appeared that the benefit could be scaled back, but a last-minute intervention by Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat, eliminated what would have been a $14 billion tax increase targeting private equity.

Lawmakers’ inability to address a tax break that Democrats and some Republicans have called unfair underscores the influence of lobbyists for the finance industry and how difficult it can be to change the tax code….

On Friday, the private equity and hedge fund industries applauded the development, describing it as a win for small business [of course they did].

“The private equity industry directly employs over 11 million Americans, fuels thousands of small businesses and delivers the strongest returns for pensions,” said Drew Maloney, the chief executive of the American Investment Council, a lobbying group. “We encourage Congress to continue to support private capital investment in every state across our country”….

Carried interest is the percentage of an investment’s gains that a private equity partner or hedge fund manager takes as compensation. At most private equity firms and hedge funds, the share of profits paid to managers is about 20 percent [so the people who manage these small investment firms take around 20% of the firm’s investment profits as their salaries, not because they invested their own money but because they expect to be paid for their labor].

Under existing law, that money is taxed at a capital-gains rate of 20 percent for top earners. That’s about half the rate of the top individual income tax bracket, which is 37 percent….

An agreement reached last week by Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, would have [made it more harder for the managers of these firms] to take advantage of the lower 20 percent tax rate.

But Ms. Sinema, who has received political donations from wealthy financiers who usually donate to Republicans and who was cool to the idea of targeting carried interest last year, objected.

In the past five years, the senator has received $2.2 million in campaign contributions from investment industry executives and political action committees, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit group that tracks money in politics. The industry was second only to retired individuals in giving to Ms. Sinema and just ahead of the legal profession, which gave her $1.8 million. Executives of some of those firms have made campaign contributions to Ms. Sinema, including George Roberts, Henry Kravis and Joseph Bae at KKR and Sean Klimczak and Eli Nagler at Blackstone.

For years, carried interest has been a tax policy piñata that never cracks open.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, D____  J. T____ said, “We will eliminate the carried interest deduction, well-known deduction, and other special-interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors and for people like me but unfair to American workers.”

When President Biden ran for president in 2020, his campaign said he would “eliminate special tax breaks that reward special interests and get rid of the capital gains loophole for multimillionaires.” To do that, he said, he would tax long-term capital gains at the ordinary top income tax rate, essentially wiping away the special treatment of carried interest.

A similar proposal appeared in Mr. Biden’s budget last spring, but, as Democrats tried unsuccessfully to pass their Build Back Better legislation in the summer and fall, carried interest disappeared.

Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, lamented that outcome. “This is a loophole that absolutely should be closed,” Mr. Bernstein told CNBC last September. “When you go up to Capitol Hill and you start negotiating on taxes, there are more lobbyists in this town on taxes than there are members of Congress”….

Opinions on the carried interest tax treatment vary even within the financial industry. In posts on Twitter in late July, Bill Ackman, the founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, a New York hedge fund, said that while “favorable tax treatment” for the founders of new businesses was essential, people who manage funds that own many companies should not be entitled to the same benefit.

“The carried interest loophole is a stain on the tax code,” he wrote in one post. “It does not help small businesses, pension funds, other investors in hedge funds or private equity and everyone in the industry knows it. It is an embarrassment and it should end now.”

Some analysts were skeptical all along that lawmakers would actually change the carried interest tax treatment in the final bill. While it has become a high-profile target, the change Democrats were seeking would have raised little tax revenue compared with other provisions in the legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act….

“The proposal that was in the bill until last night made a technical adjustment [regarding] assets that qualified for carried interest treatment,” said Jean Ross, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group in Washington. “A better approach would tackle the issue head-on and say that compensation for services managing an investment fund should be taxed like work and subject to ordinary tax rates”….

Ms. Sinema herself has said little about why she considered it so important to preserve the carried interest tax treatment [could that possibly mean she has no good reason for doing that?]. She has said that she plans to work on legislation with Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, to address the loophole. But if the legislation is not included in the current package, which is being fast-tracked under an arcane budget process, any reform will require support from at least 10 Republicans [which everyone, including Sinema, knows will mean nothing is done, since Republican politicians don’t like rich people to be taxed].

“I think we reached agreement that there are areas where there’s been abuse,” Mr. Warner said in an interview, adding, “I’m disappointed it didn’t get in this bill, but I’m looking forward to working with Senator Sinema — and others — to see if we can address this [news flash: you can’t and you won’t address it].

Unquote.

To summarize, if you’re an accountant that works at one of these firms, you get a salary and pay income tax at the rate for regular income. If you’re a customer at one of these firms and your investment did well, the profits you get are taxed at the lower rate for capital gains. If you run the firm, you take some of the profits from your customers’ investments as your compensation, but the government taxes your compensation as if you made the investment with your own money, so you get to pay significantly less income tax. If Democrats try to fix this absurdity, Republicans and even some Democrats will stand in the way, while you claim that your compensation should be taxed at the lower rate because, well, because your customers get the lower rate and the investments you make help other businesses (while sometimes destroying others).

Which shows once again that too many politicians work for their donors, not the people they represent.

Let’s Review the History of the Party Since Around 1994 (in 1,600 Words)

Posted on by

Dana Milbank of The Washington Post shares some of his new book, The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party (although he says the crack-up  started closer to 30 years ago). This is an excerpt from his excerpt:

“We have become in danger of losing our own civilization,” Newt Gingrich warned.

Americans had seldom heard a politician talk this way, and certainly not a speaker of the House. But that’s what Gingrich became after the GOP’s landslide victory in the 1994 election. The Contract With America made little headway — only three minor provisions (paperwork reduction!) became law — but the rise of Gingrich and his shock troops set the nation on a course toward the ruinous politics of today.

Much has been made of the ensuing polarization in our politics, and it’s true that moderates are a vanishing breed. But the problem isn’t primarily polarization. The problem is that one of our two major political parties has ceased good-faith participation in the democratic process. Of course, there are instances of violence, disinformation, racism and corruption among Democrats and the political left, but the scale isn’t at all comparable. Only one party fomented a bloody insurrection and even after that voted in large numbers (139 House Republicans, a two-thirds majority) to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 election. Only one party promotes a web of conspiracy theories in place of facts. Only one party is trying to restrict voting and discredit elections. Only one party is stoking fear of minorities and immigrants….

Republicans and their allied donors, media outlets, interest groups and fellow travelers have been yanking on the threads of democracy and civil society for the past quarter-century; that’s a long time, and the unraveling is considerable. You can measure it in the triumph of lies and disinformation, in the mainstreaming of racism and white supremacy, in the erosion of institutions and norms of government, and in the dehumanizing of opponents and stoking of violence. In the process, Republicans became Destructionists: They destroyed truth, they destroyed decency, they destroyed patriotism, they destroyed national unity, they destroyed racial progress, they destroyed their own party, and they are well on their way to destroying the world’s oldest democracy.

Consider just a few of the milestones along this path of destruction — all of which, we can now see, made T____ possible, if not inevitable:

Long before T____ promulgated more than 30,000 falsehoods during his presidency, including disinformation about the covid-19 pandemic that contributed to countless deaths:

  • House Republicans encouraged the conspiracy theory that Vincent Foster, a lawyer in the Clinton White House, had been murdered — possibly, in the belief’s craziest formulation, by Hillary Clinton. After four separate, independent investigations concluded it was suicide, Gingrich said, “I just don’t accept it,” and one of his committee chairmen, Dan Burton, shot a melon in his backyard to reenact the “murder.”
  • The George W. Bush administration, to make the case for war, distorted the available intelligence to suggest that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, that it was on the cusp of obtaining nuclear weapons and that U.S. troops would be “greeted as liberators.” When a former diplomat publicly disputed Bush’s false claims, aides retaliated by disclosing the identity of his wife, a CIA operative.
  • Sarah Palin, the party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2008, falsely proclaimed in 2009 the existence of “death panels” in Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Republican lawmakers lined up to make the false claim a centerpiece of their attempt to defeat Obamacare. About a third of Americans came to believe the falsehood.

Long before T____ spoke of immigrants as rapists and murderers coming from “shithole countries” and told Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to other countries:

  • Patrick J. Buchanan, who ran insurgent bids for the GOP presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996, offered generous words for Hitler, lamented the treatment of “European-Americans” and “non-Jewish whites,” warned of a migrant “invasion,” and ran on a promise to “put America first.”
  • Conservative radio giant Rush Limbaugh aired the song “Barack the Magic Negro,” Fox News’s Glenn Beck claimed President Obama had a “deep-seated hatred for White people,” and tea party activists chanted the n-word at Black members of Congress outside the Capitol.
  • Fox News in 2011 served as the forum for T____ and others to perpetrate the “birther” libel asserting that Obama, the first Black president, was not American-born. Palin told Obama to stop his “shuck and jive shtick.”
  • Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said in 2013 of the “dreamers” (those brought illegally to the United States as children): “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
Long before T____ told the violent Proud Boys to “stand by” instead of condemning them:
  • Conservative radio host G. Gordon Liddy in 1994 told listeners that if federal agents try to disarm them, “go for a head shot” and “kill the sons of bitches.” Other hosts, and GOP members of Congress, warned of federal agents in “black helicopters” planning “a paramilitary style attack against Americans” and the need for an “armed revolution” to resist a “New World Order,” and Gingrich and other Republicans spoke supportively of antigovernment militias.
  • Thousands of Tea Party activists, on the eve of final passage of Obamacare in the House in 2010, got to within 50 feet of the Capitol. Democrats worried about violence, and police officers struggled to maintain security, but GOP lawmakers inflamed the crowd, waving signs and leading chants of “Kill the bill.”
  • Palin, urging supporters “don’t retreat, instead — RELOAD!,” in 2010 promoted a map of 20 Democratic-held congressional districts in target crosshairs. A GOP Senate nominee spoke of using “Second Amendment remedies.” Threats and vandalism against Democratic lawmakers spread, and, in 2011, Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.), one of those listed in Palin’s map, was shot in the head by a gunman who killed six others….

Long before T____ discredited democratic institutions with his “big lie” about election fraud:

  • Republican operatives intimidated the Miami-Dade County Elections Department into stopping the recount of the 2000 election results. A partisan crowd flooded into the elections office, chanting “Stop the fraud!” “Stop the count!” and “Cheaters!” Democratic officials were kicked, pushed and punched.
  • John Ashcroft, who became attorney general after the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore handed the presidency to George W. Bush, falsely claimed in 2001 that dead people had voted and that “votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed.”
  • House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2003, trying to create a “permanent majority,” forced through a Texas redistricting that shifted six House seats to Republicans — and when Democratic legislators left the state to block the scheme, DeLay attempted to use the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration to track them down.
  • The Supreme Court’s conservative majority stacked the deck for Republicans with its 2010 Citizens United decision, which made it possible for wealthy interests to flood elections with unlimited, unregulated “dark money,” and its 2013 gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which invited GOP-led states to restrict voting in ways that disproportionately affect voters of color. Republican senators cemented the high court’s reputation as an arm of the GOP when from 2016 into 2017 they blocked Obama for 11 months from filling the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

Long before the dysfunction of the T____ era:

  • Gingrich in 1995 announced that he forced a shutdown of the federal government in part because he was asked to exit Air Force One via the rear stairway after a trip to Israel with President Bill Clinton. Republicans debuted a new era of manufactured crises over debt-limit deadlines, and repeated government shutdowns, whenever Democrats held the White House.
  • The Republican National Committee drafted an “autopsy” in 2013 after Mitt Romney lost to Obama, calling for more outreach to Black, Hispanic, Asian and gay Americans. GOP lawmakers in the House swiftly abandoned the idea, killing a comprehensive immigration reform bill that had sailed through the Senate by a bipartisan 68-32.
  • House Speaker John A. Boehner announced his retirement in 2015, later saying he was disgusted with the growing “circle of crazy” inside his party. Republicans “couldn’t govern at all,” Boehner wrote. “Incrementalism? Compromise? That wasn’t their thing,” Boehner wrote of the insurgents. “A lot of them wanted to blow up Washington. … They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.” Boehner concluded that he was “living in Crazytown. … Every second of every day since Barack Obama became president, I was fighting one bats–t idea after another.”

Against that quarter-century of ruin, what we are living through today is just a continuation of the GOP’s direction for the past 30 years: the appeals to white nationalism, the sabotage of the functions of government, the routine embrace of disinformation, stoking the fiction of election fraud and the “big lie,” and the steady degradation of democracy.

Now, it seems, that degradation is accelerating….

As they avert their gaze from the cascading horrors of the failed coup, Republicans are instead looking to a familiar guide: Gingrich. The former speaker, now a board member of the pro-T____ America First Policy Institute, announced this year that he is serving as a consultant to House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and his team.

No sooner had this been disclosed than Gingrich, on Fox News, threatened the imprisonment of lawmakers serving on the Jan. 6 committee, saying they’re “going to face a real risk of jail” after Republicans take over Congress. Throwing political opponents in jail for investigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol and a coup against the U.S. government?

Replied Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee: “This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels.” But Gingrich knows that. He’s the one who first started tugging at the threads.

One Way to Dilute the Senate’s Filibuster Rule

Posted on by

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post suggests a way to get around the Senate filibuster that I’ve never heard before. It’s probably too rational for “Democratic” filibuster fans like Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Krysten Sinema to accept, but it’s interesting just the same:

… Democrats are close to pulling off something that has eluded them for the past year and a half: passing legislation to address climate change and the costs of health care [note: while reducing the deficit and moderating inflation], and doing it without any Republican votes,” The Post reports. “This has been one of President Biden’s top goals since he took office, so much so that he and Democratic leadership have reserved their one legislative tool to get it done: reconciliation.” Pretty impressive, huh?

Now, imagine telling [Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat] he would need 60 votes to pass the package. Even he would likely agree that would be an outrageous hurdle to overcome.

As Manchin explained on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Republicans have refused to engage in any reasonable discussion on the deal. “I think it’s a great piece of legislation and on normal times, my Republican colleagues would be for something such as this,” he said. He pointed out that their opposition is irrational and driven by rank partisanship. “We’ve basically paid down debt, [which] is what they want. We’ve accelerated [issuing drilling permits], which is what they want,” he said. “And we’ve increased production of energy, which is what they want. We’ve done things that we should be doing together.”

But since Republicans won’t cooperate, Democrats must move ahead with the reconciliation process — a gigantic loophole in the allegedly sacrosanct filibuster rules. Huge policy goals can be achieved even though the other side willfully obstructs progress.

Why, then, do Manchin and others cling so tightly to the filibuster rules when equally important — if not more important — policy goals are up for discussion, such as on abortion rights, voting rights and reforming the Supreme Court? It’s tautology to say that the reconciliation process applies only to tax and spending rules under limited circumstances. Why should items not directly tied to spending have to be stripped out of legislation?

Democrats can leave the filibuster in place if they must but can simply alter the Senate’s “Byrd rules” governing reconciliation bills so that measures pertaining to the restoration or protection of fundamental rights can be included. An infrastructure bill could also include “democracy infrastructure” that protects voting rights. The same limit on reconciliation legislation (once or twice per fiscal year) could still apply.

Manchin’s current legislative effort highlights just how hypocritical he is for opposing filibuster fixes. Indeed, he has relied on demonstrably false premises to defend his position.

For example, he often argues that Democrats and Republicans can always negotiate things together. Not so in the era of petulant obstruction from MAGA Republicans. In the case of his own mammoth bill, Manchin has realized that Democrats should not allow Republican opposition to deter them.

Manchin also frequently insists that if Democrats take steps to weaken the filibuster, Republicans will do the same when they are in power. Well, Republicans have already weakened Senate rules by lowering the votes needed to confirm Supreme Court justices to a simple majority. Republicans have also already used the reconciliation process in an attempt to pass bills such as the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. That failed because their extreme measures were so unpopular that they could not get even a majority for that.

I don’t expect Manchin to acknowledge his intellectual dishonesty and blatant inconsistency. But that doesn’t mean the rest of his party has to go along. If voters send two more Democrats to the Senate and somehow hold the House (if not in 2022, then win it back in 2024), they should consider using [no, absolutely use] their power to secure fundamental constitutional rights that the Supreme Court has stripped away.

How Forced Births Will Affect Women’s Healthcare

Posted on by

From Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo:

… The Supreme Court has not only let red states flip the calendar pages back to pre-1973 America. In many ways, it’s worse than that.

Abortion has become a foundational pillar to all kinds of health care procedures. Ripping it out [reduces their availability].

America now faces a reality that will be like returning to the early ‘70s, but with half a century of medical and technological advances that health care providers in certain states can no longer use. Since Roe, abortion care became drastically safer and more efficient, and the medical procedures involved in abortion have become indelibly embedded in the wider health care landscape. They’ve become a key aspect of all kinds of other health care, from miscarriage management to cancer treatment.

Now, in states from Texas to Ohio, we’re already seeing how abortion — or procedures that can be construed as abortion — are deeply intertwined with health care more broadly, and what it means for them to be taken away.

It’s easier, and convenient for the anti-abortion movement, to imagine abortion as a siloed-off procedure, under the auspices of Planned Parenthood and only relevant to young women seeking to end their unwanted pregnancies. But for decades, that hasn’t been the case.

After Roe, Abortion Becomes Safe

After the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide, researchers and physicians could finally learn how to get better at it.

“If the procedure is illegal, you can’t do clinical studies and you can’t develop new procedures because you’re doing it secretly,” Johanna Schoen, a professor of history at Rutgers University told TPM. “Most people providing abortions were not clinicians and not able to do it in a medical setting.”

“After Roe, clinicians made it not only the safest out-patient procedure in the country, but also much safer than pregnancy and delivering a baby,” she added. “All of that has to do both with the improvement of abortion procedures and development of new ones.”

In addition to the procedure improvements, after Roe, physicians started receiving more training in how to perform abortions and manage potential complications. Mortality rates associated with abortion started to plummet. And the number of women hospitalized for abortion-related complications dropped between 1970 and 1977, with a steep dip after 1973. By 1995, fewer than 0.3 percent of abortion patients were hospitalized with complications from the procedure.

Abortion Is Now Woven Throughout Today’s Medical Landscape 

While abortion care developed apace, other related medical technologies improved too. By the late 1970s, ultrasounds were being used widely in American hospitals, helping to advance detection of fetal abnormalities.

As the technology continued to improve over the next few decades, physicians became better able to identify abnormality markers. Under Roe, in states that hadn’t impinged on the abortion right with gestational bans (many diagnoses occur in the second trimester, though advances are pushing some earlier), women could opt for an abortion once abnormalities were detected rather than carrying the pregnancy to term.

Now, after Dobbs, experts are certain that women in states with draconian abortion bans will have to go through labor and give birth to babies that cannot survive.

The development of ultrasound technology has also enabled physicians to more accurately diagnose unruptured ectopic pregnancies in a way that was not possible pre-Roe. In these pregnancies, the fertilized egg implants outside of the uterus where it cannot survive but can pose a deadly threat to the woman if it’s allowed to grow.

The improvement in mortality rates associated with ectopic pregnancies followed: a more than 70 percent decrease in deaths-to-cases from 1970 to 1978.

Already, stories are emerging about the demise of Roe throwing ectopic pregnancy care into chaos. Doctors report feeling unsure about whether abortion bans — which are often written using broad political messaging language rather than medical — include ending ectopic pregnancies, which are not viable. Various lawmakers and anti-abortion activists have proven themselves to be particularly unlearned on the subject, some suggesting that terminating ectopic pregnancies is not medically necessary, while others have offered up a supposed solution — just moving the ectopic pregnancy inside of the uterus — technology for which does not currently exist.

Another medical success story already under threat is in-vitro fertilization, or IVF. The first IVF baby was born in 1978; since then, initial single-digit success rates have blossomed to nearly 50 percent for cases where the woman is under 35 years old. One to two percent of births in the United States annually result from IVF.

Fertility clinics have already been flooded with calls by people panicked about what abortion bans mean for their procedures. During IVF, clinicians usually implant one or two embryos in the uterus and store the rest for potential future use. It’s unclear whether bans would stop people from discarding the unneeded embryos, perhaps forcing them to pay to keep them frozen forever. Genetic testing of the embryos could become illegal. And if some embryos don’t survive the implantation process — or are nonviable and discarded — clinics could potentially be liable.

Some states are already contemplating granting personhood to the embryos, which could put IVF clinics out of business and leave the people who depend on them without options.

Far-Reaching Consequences

Even cancer treatment, a seemingly far cry from reproductive care, depends on abortion to afford its patients the right to treat their illnesses without worrying about the oftentimes toxic effect those treatments have on fetuses.

Cancer occurs in about one in every 1,000 pregnancies annually, leaving the women with few options even while Roe’s protections were the law of the land. Many treatments can cause miscarriages or birth defects in the developing fetuses, especially at the beginning of the pregnancy. The CEO of the American Cancer Society said that radiation therapy is never given to pregnant patients at all.

Ending their pregnancies, for these patients, can become a matter of literal life and death — the only way for women to receive the full gamut of treatment to cure their cancer. Now, in some states, women may have to choose: lifesaving treatment that will harm the developing fetus, or leaving their cancer untreated.

Some pharmacists are already restricting patients’ access to methotrexate, a therapy for certain kinds of cancer that can induce abortions. Methotrexate is also used in treating ectopic pregnancies and, since the 1980s, soothing chronic inflammation and pain, making it a mainstay in treating diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. The Arthritis Foundation has stood up a hotline amid reports of patients struggling to obtain the drug.

Two other pills — mifepristone and misoprostol, the collective “abortion pill” approved by the Food and Drug administration for combined used through 49 days of gestation in 2000, and for longer now — are already being acutely targeted by anti-abortion lawmakers. There’s a long history of animosity towards mifepristone in particular, with the FDA baselessly categorizing it as dangerous for years.

Those medications are indispensable in treating miscarriages, which at least one in four American women will have by age 45. Even before the Dobbs ruling, women have had to rely on abortion clinics for miscarriage treatment, often because of arbitrary limitations on who can distribute mifepristone. That problem has been compounded since the ruling by sparking confusion among some hospitals about whether other aspects of miscarriage care will be misconstrued by authorities as an elective abortion.

“Management of miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies are things that were not really possible when abortion was illegal,” Schoen said. “Women in the middle of miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies were up shit’s creek — and people died as a result of that.”

Abortion is a medical success story. Bringing the procedure out of the shadows allowed clinicians to make it safe and humane, and to weave it into other medical treatments. Procedures that are related to, or can be construed as abortion, are now integral parts of an astoundingly wide range of medical care. All of it is under threat.

The Supreme Court is not sending large swaths of the country back to the relative ignorance of pre-Roe America. It’s sending us back in time armed with prodigious knowledge and then-undreamed-of technology that lessen women’s suffering, and uncomplicate and alleviate illnesses where pregnancy is not an option — but forbidding health care workers to use that knowledge.

Women will suffer and they will die, even while doctors have 50 years of medical advancements at their backs….

We Should Believe It When We See It

Posted on by

Minutes after passing a bipartisan bill to increase US production of semiconductors, Senate Democrats announced that, believe it or not, conservative “Democratic” Senator Joe Manchin has agreed to pass a Democrats-only budget reconciliation bill that addresses some of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.

One cool thing about this is that evil Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said he wouldn’t support the semiconductor bill if Democrats tried to do any good Build Back Better stuff. So it appears the Democrats waited until right after the semiconductor bill passed to announce they were doing something Build Back Better-ish (i.e. good) after all. Maybe this will work out, assuming erratic “Democratic” Senator Krysten Sinema goes along, giving Senate Democrats the 50 votes they need (with Vice President Harris breaking the tie in the 50-50 Senate):

From Crooked Media’s free, informative, daily newsletter:

Dear readers, have we ever told you how wise and handsome we’ve always found Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to be? No? Well it’s totally true, and senator, if you’re reading this, you would look especially good allowing the passage of climate legislation that will prevent our country from simultaneously burning and drowning. 

In a surprise turn of events, Manchin and Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced today that they struck a deal on a domestic-spending package that includes climate and energy programs and tax increases on the wealthy. This is a breakthrough after more than a year of negotiations that looked all but dead two weeks ago when Manchin abruptly announced he would not support any new climate spending, because he was just too concerned about inflation, you guys!!! 

Manchin has been a thorn in the side of his Democratic colleagues, the main holdout on most of the progressive social policies the Biden administration had hoped to enact. In his somewhat-opaque statement, Manchin signaled support for climate and energy programs, as well as “adopting a tax policy that protects small businesses and working-class Americans while ensuring that large corporations and the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.” Is this the same Joe Manchin we have come to know and mostly-disdain? Could it be?  

Well yes, it still mostly is the same old Joe. The bill agreed upon was titled the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 [eyes roll out of my head] and Manchin in his statement made sure to include a jab at the much more comprehensive Build Back Better, which he can now brag to his pals across the aisle about helping to kill. His statement also focuses mostly on inflation, and not the climate emergency or the many ills that Build Back Better was trying to treat. But for once I will resist dragging Joe’s ass too hard, because this bill is much better than the extremely-narrow drug-pricing package Dems were prepared to accept when it looked like Manchin was ready to walk away entirely last month.

And now that Fossil Fuel Joe is on board, the bill is much more likely to actually become law, and the bill is actually good [although we don’t know all the details yet].  

The climate provisions in the proposed bill are the largest fiscal piece of it, to the tune of $369 billion, which is good. All aspects of the bill—the reduction in energy and health care costs, and the deficit reduction—are anti-inflationary, which is also good. The bill allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices and lowers ACA premiums, and closes a whole host of tax loopholes with increased funding to the IRS, all without any regressive, shit-eating spending cuts you’d normally expect Congress to include in a big budget bill. We’re not sure where his change of heart came from (was he visited by three ghosts when he had covid this week?) but we’re not questioning it.  

Assuming Dems can pass the bill in the House and the Senate parliamentarian allows it to be approved with 51 votes (or 50 and a tie break from VP Harris) through the budget reconciliation process, this has a serious chance of becoming law as early as August. This would be a huge win for Democrats going into midterms, who will need every single win they can get. It will give them a concrete answer to voters rightly asking, “What have you done for me lately?” 

The bill faces a number of hurdles before it can become law, but White House Joe has signed off on it in a statement, so we thank you, Senate Joe, for your begrudging cooperation at last. Kyrsten Sinema don’t even FUCKING think about it.

An initial summary of the compromise bill.