Opposition: Choke on it, biyatch!

<On Tuesday, April 1, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) unsuccessfully pushed back against a bipartisan bill allowing lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives to vote remotely while on maternal leave. Johnson did everything he could to block the bill, but it came up for a vote anyway when nine Republicans joined Democrats in voting to bring it to the floor. And the bill passed.

In a scathing article published on April 3, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that Johnson's vehement opposition to the bill underscores the severe Christian fundamentalist ideology that he embraces.

"After it passed," Marcotte observes, "Johnson was so irate he canceled all congressional activity for the week and sent members home…. As many critics pointed out, Johnson himself voted by proxy multiple times during the pandemic, but somehow has decided it's 'unconstitutional' to give the same right to people who have parenting duties that physically pull them away from Congress. But it's not quite right to attribute this to hypocrisy."

Marcotte continues, "Johnson's behavior is perfectly consistent with the renewed Republican enthusiasm for pushing women out of public life and back into the kitchen. As David Graham at The Atlantic wrote in a recent article on how Republicans are implementing Project 2025, the party under Trump has made the 'effort to restore traditional families' a priority. 'In this vision, men are breadwinners and women are mothers,' he writes, pointing out how the Project 2025 blueprint spells out different policy ideas to force women out of the workplace and into roles as stay-at-home wives."

The Salon journalist stresses that "most Republicans oppose" the policy at issue in the maternity leave/remote voting bill" — including Johnson — "because they don't value women's voices in politics."

"Especially for the Religious Right, which most Republicans are aligned with, the goal is getting women out of the dirty business of politics, so they can focus their energies on tending home and hearth," Marcotte explains. "From that vantage point, there is no reason to create accommodations for parents of young children in Congress. Mothers are expected to stay at home and not work. Fathers are expected to come to work, no matter what is going on at home, as domestic labor is left to women."

Marcotte notes that some "MAGA influencers" are now "openly saying" that "women shouldn't be in leadership" in the Republican Party.

"Johnson's tantrum is more of the same," Marcotte warns. "Republican men really mean all this talk about strict gender roles, and women in their party are starting to pay a personal price.">

<The Republican majority in the U.S. Senate is now apparently poised to circumvent the body's primary interpreter of rules in order to ram through its agenda, according to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)

Huffpost reporter Igor Bobic tweeted Tuesday that during Sen. Cory Booker's (D-N.J.) record-breaking speech on the Senate floor, Schumer interrupted him to announce that Senate Republicans are aiming to ignore the Senate parliamentarian (who serves at the pleasure of the Senate's majority leader). The parliamentarian's official role is to advise the chamber on standing rules and parliamentary procedure, and alert the majority leader if and when rules are being violated.

"It shows how hell-bent they are on giving tax breaks to the rich, even if it means going nuclear, even if it violates all the norms that they have had, even if it breaks all the promises they have made," Schumer said in his own mini-floor speech.

"This is a -- just a move that is so, so against what the traditions of the Senate have been about," he continued. "They're afraid to debate them. They're afraid to defend tax cuts for billionaires. They're afraid to admit they're taking away Medicaid from so many Americans. And so they come up with this nuclear option."

Booker responded that Schumer's news was "stunning" and that he couldn't "even think about how to respond." He then asked the Democratic leader to "explain it a little bit more," saying that it seemed as if Republicans were determined to "obscure the incredible tax cuts, the cost of trillions of dollars to our economy [and] blowing up our debt ... so-called fiscal hawks are going to blow it up."

"It shows the people on the other side are only interested not in playing decent, not in playing fair, not in being honest with the American people, but taking money out of the pockets of working people and the middle class and putting it in the hands of billionaires," Schumer said. "Does it not show what our colleagues are really like and what they're after?"

Booker called the news "a further breaking of the Senate in a severe way." He warned Republicans that "when the pendulum swings" that Democrats could similarly ignore the parliamentarian's interpretations of rules to best suit them, should Democrats reclaim the majority in the next election cycle, saying there's "no going back now." He added: "America will regret this day.">

<The Trump administration’s tariffs are, by every reasonable account, an economic catastrophe in the making. So why are they happening?

One explanation is that this is simply democracy at work. President Donald Trump campaigned on doing more or less exactly what he’s just done, and the voting public elected him. So here we are.

That’s at best a partial story. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to see Trump’s tariffs as a symptom of democratic decay — of America transitioning into a kind of strange hybrid system that combines both authoritarian and democratic features.

Were America’s democracy functioning properly, Trump wouldn’t have the power to impose such broad tariffs unilaterally. Congress, not the presidency, has the constitutional authority to raise taxes — and tariffs are, of course, a tax on imports.

Yet the basic design of the American system has broken down, allowing the president to usurp far more authority than is healthy. In many policy areas, the presidency functions less like a democratic chief executive who operates under constraint and more like an elected dictatorship.

And historically, dictatorships — elected or otherwise — suffer from a fatal flaw: they have no ability to stop the people at the top from acting on their policy whims and, in the process, producing national disasters. This tendency is why democracy tends to produce superior policy outcomes over the long run; why America, and not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, won the 20th century.

The tariffs, in short, show the true stakes of democratic decline. It’s not just a matter of abstract principle, but the difference between stability and disaster.

When Donald Trump and Elon Musk began laying waste to the federal government in February, the political scientist Adam Przeworski declared himself “at a loss.” Though Przeworski is one of the world’s most eminent scholars of comparative democracy, author of many defining pieces in the field, he could not find the right vocabulary to describe what was happening in the United States.

Though “Trump was elected in fair elections,” his subsequent policy agenda amounted to “revolutionary change of the relation between the state and society” — one that attempts to replace the rules and norms that define democratic politics with something very different.

Understanding America in this more textured sense, as a country under a new and confusing regime that is both democratic and not, helps us make better sense out of the Trump tariff debacle.

On the one hand, an electorate that picked Trump is getting one of Trump’s signature policies. Sometimes, in democracies, demagogues win elections — a problem so old that you can find a discussion of it in Plato’s Republic.

On the other hand, democracies rely on legal rules constraining the executive to prevent any such demagogue from becoming a dictator. In the American system, that means a complex system of constitutional checks and balances — one of which is the Constitution granting taxation powers to Congress and Congress alone. Yet instead of asking for statutory authorization to raise tariffs, Trump is exploiting broadly worded emergency legislation to do an end-run around the legislative branch.

This is what a hybrid political system looks like in practice. The United States still has free and fair elections at all levels of government, and is in that sense democratic. But elections don’t matter in the way that they’re supposed to, because the people’s representatives in Congress are not playing their constitutionally assigned policymaking role. This is the autocratic component of the current American system, one that enables the president to sabotage the global economy if he so wishes.

The transformation of America, from democracy to Frankensteinian amalgam, has been in the works for decades.

The primary culprit is Congress, which has — due to a combination of partisanship and political cowardice — become both unable and unwilling to act as the supreme lawmaking body. Instead, it began delegating significant amounts of its own authority to the executive.

Sometimes, this was intentional — authorizing the president to make policy through executive agencies, creating the “administrative state” conservatives decry. Sometimes, it was unintentional: Congress giving the president vague emergency powers that were supposed to function in narrow circumstances, but in practice allowed the president to act unilaterally in all sorts of “normal” policy debates. And sometimes, Congress simply did nothing on crucial policy issues — forcing the president to try to address them with dubiously broad interpretations of their own powers....>

<....The judicial branch deserves some blame too. While the Supreme Court has occasionally stepped in to address presidential overreach, it has done so in a haphazard and partisan way. Moreover, it has long deferred to the president on key issues like immigration, trade, and war.

Observers on both the liberal left and the libertarian right warned for decades that growing executive power posed a problem for democracy and good policymaking. Obviously, they were right to do so in hindsight. Yet part of the reason that they were ignored is that there were other checks on the president that seemed to keep the executive in line.

Some of these were internal executive branch checks. The White House relied on the Office of Legal Counsel — a group of senior executive branch attorneys — to provide independent opinions on the legality of various policy options. Internal policy shops like the Council of Economic Advisers provided informed expert opinions that would steer presidents toward more evidence-based policymaking. In dire cases, the Justice Department would probe potentially criminal activity by executive branch staff.

Other checks were more informal. Fear of losing the war for public opinion might prevent a president from taking a particularly radical stance. The president’s own moral code, a sense that there are just certain things one shouldn’t do even if you can, also provided a kind of soft check on the abuse of power.

But what’s clear now is that all of these internal mechanisms were voluntary. Trump has neutered executive branch checks on his authority and (clearly!) does not possess the judgment we expect from people in the highest office.

It turns out that the rest of the political system — and especially Congress — had created the conditions for our descent into a hybrid political system. The only barriers remaining were norms about how the executive branch should work, ones that a determined president like Trump could smash through with ease.

Sometimes, the stakes in this kind of conversation can feel a little fuzzy. Why does it matter if we are living in a hybrid system rather than a full democracy? Sure, the president may be powerful, but if we’ve still got elections, then isn’t everything going to be fine in the end?

The tariffs provide one of the clearest examples of why this matters for everyone: without democracy, the quality of our policymaking gets dangerously worse.

Political scientists have long found that, on average, democracies produce better outcomes for citizens than authoritarian states. They produce higher rates of economic growth, superior technological innovation, better public health services, and are even more likely to win wars.

One of the key reasons for democracy’s success has been its formalized policymaking process. Because laws are changed through legal and transparent processes, ones subject to public debate and legal oversight, they are more likely to both be well-informed by the best available evidence and corrected if something goes badly.

Authoritarian and hybrid regimes ditch these constraints, which allows them to make policy changes a lot faster. But it also enables one person, or a small group of people, to make radical decisions on a whim with disastrous consequences.

Think about Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China, a direct product of the leader’s adherence to a Communist ideology that was out of touch with reality. While Trump’s tariffs are nowhere near as evil — the Great Leap Forward killed somewhere between 18 and 32 million people — the same formal problem contributed to both mistakes.

For a more recent example, look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The disaster began with Putin’s personal obsession with the idea that Ukrainian nationhood was fake and that the territory was rightfully Russian. This notion went from Putin’s personal obsession to actual war because no one could stop him.

Trump’s tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn’t have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes. The fact that America isn’t functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin.

Now, it’s still possible that Trump steps back from the brink. But even if he does, and the worst outcome is avoided, the lesson should be clear: the long decay of America’s democratic system means that we are all living under an axe.

And if this isn’t the moment it falls, there will surely be another.>

<[Event "19th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1991.07.??"]
[EventDate "1991"]
[Round "3"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Friedman, Aviv"]
[Black "Rohwer, Paul"]
[ECO "A42"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "Harvard Futurity"] [Site "Cambridge Mass"]
[Date "1987.11.16"]
[EventDate "1987"]
[Round "6"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Shaw, Alan"]
[Black "Wang, Frank"]
[ECO "E46"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<The entire staff of a $4.1 billion program that helps millions of low-income households pay for heating during the winter have now been laid off by The Trump administration. The move has already upset state officials, who have been left not knowing whether they will receive their expected millions of dollars in federal payments.

According to Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, around two dozen workers who ran the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program have been let go by the administration.

It comes after Trump had a mental collapse in a senile moment' while speaking for almost an hour on Wednesday, sparking health fears after yet another strange moment.

The layoffs come as part of a dramatic restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services that saw a further 10,000 fired.

Several of the program's senior employees told Wolfe they were locked out of their building after arriving to work Monday, according to an ABC report.

13 U.S. senators, including two Republicans, sent a letter on Thursday to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asking the administration to reverse its decision to cut the LIHEAP staff.

The senators warned the cuts would undermine the agency's ability to provide a “crucial lifeline” for low-income seniors and families and around 6.2 million households annually could be affected.

It’s not just the cold months the program provides assistance for, In the warmer months it also helps households pay for the cost of air conditioning.

While the program has already delivered the majority of its aid for this fiscal year, $378 million is yet to be distributed.

Emily Hilliard, deputy press secretary for HHS, said in a statement that “HHS will continue to comply with statutory requirements, and as a result of the reorganization, will be better positioned to execute on Congress’s statutory intent.”

While the restructuring takes place and with no staff currently, states have been left wondering how and if they will get the rest of their money, especially for the Summer. State officials involved in distributing aid are also worried that LIHEAP will collapse without federal support.

Peter Hadler, deputy director of the Connecticut Department of Social Services, told ABC, “Emails bounce back from people that we have worked with for many years, who are deeply knowledgeable of the program,” and said his state is still owed $8 million.

For example, in the northern part of Minnesota which received a foot of snow Wednesday, it is predicted that it will run out of money to help new applicants seeking help with heating and electric bills by mid-April this year.

It had been expecting an already approved additional $12 million to $13 million in federal funding, which would help more than 10,000 households pay their utility bills and prevent any shut-offs of power. Around 130,000 households receive assistance each year through LIHEAP in Minnesota.

With winter still going on in the state, low-income families remain in need of help to heat their homes.

Eligibility can vary, and specific services differ between each state. The program has received congressional support for decades, and overall it assists families in covering utility bills or the cost of paying for home heating oil.

The two Republicans who signed the letter to JFK urging him to reverse staffing cuts were Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.>

<The fight between two of the most fanatical supporters of President Donald Trump in the House of Representatives has taken an ugly turn.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has taken heat from fellow Republicans after she voted with Democrats to advance a resolution that would allow new parents in Congress to vote by proxy on Tuesday.

The battle, which has played out over this week, reached a nasty new height on Friday when MAGA firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene fired off a string of petty insults and called on Luna to resign.

“Poor Anna, you are being used by the Democrats to bring back proxy voting when you are clearly, in your own words, against people receiving taxpayer funded paychecks working from home,” Greene wrote on X. “In the 117th Congress (you weren’t with us yet because you had lost your election) Speaker Pelosi allowed proxy voting. And it became the Democrats [sic] greatest tool to accomplish their agenda.”

Greene compared Luna’s resolution to “Pandora’s box,” suggesting that “members of Congress will want more reasons to proxy vote like sick leave, family occasions, and on and on.”

“Serving in Congress is a privilege, not a career choice,” Greene added. “If you need a job with better perks like maternity leave, then step down and allow someone else to serve in your place.”

Greene included a screenshot of a post Luna made in December in which she criticized the number of federal workers working remotely: “This is ABSURD,” Luna wrote.

Greene countered that Luna’s push for proxy voting is what was, in fact, “ABSURD.”

Greene’s post was a rejoinder after Luna pointed out that Greene was one of more than 200 representatives who had voted by proxy amid the pandemic in December 2022. Luna has maintained that her bill would only allow proxy voting for new parents—not for any of the other reasons suggested by Greene.

Eight other Republicans joined Lune [sic] to vote with Democrats in a push that saw Speaker Mike Johnson’s aggressive attempt to squash the resolution defeated on Tuesday. Over the past few days, Luna has continued to fight for proxy voting, while Johnson has continued to search for ways to kill it. It remains at an impasse.

Earlier this week, Luna resigned as a member of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, of which Johnson is a member, over the dispute.

Trump, for his part, has thrown his support behind Luna, breaking with Johnson. The president admitted that he likes the idea and doesn’t “know why it’s controversial.” However, he said that it was Johnson’s decision.>

<House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is once again under the gun after multiple members of his caucus put him on notice they have no plans to go along with a budget plan a budget plan approved by their GOP counterparts in the Senate Saturday morning.

According to a report from Politico's Benjamin Guggenheim, it didn't take long after the GOP-controlled Senate passed a "a budget resolution that unlocks their ability to pass a party-line bill later this year," before Republican fiscal hawks began making it known that what they have seen is a non-starter for them.

With Johnson holding a slim margin in the House, a loss of three votes could kill the deal with a deadline fast approaching. –– and it now appears Johnson will have to attempt to put down yet another "rebellion" among his fellow Republicans.

Hard-liner Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) made his feelings known on X by writing, "If the Senate’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ budget is put on the House floor, I will vote no. Failure is not an option. And the Senate’s budget is a path to failure.”

Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland added he, “...can’t support House passage of the Senate changes to our budget resolution until I see the actual spending and deficit reduction plans to enact President Trump’s America First agenda.”

Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA) was ahead of curve, announcing on Thursday night he "...certainly can’t support it as written.”

According to Politico's Guggenheim, "Several other deficit hawks in the House criticized the plan, including House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), who called it 'unserious and disappointing' Saturday morning but did not explicitly say he would oppose it should it be brought up for a vote as planned next week. Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) reposted Arrington’s statement and said the Senate plan offered only 'measly' spending cuts."

Johnson and his leadership team pushed back on Friday with a letter pleading, "...time is of the essence."

The report notes it remains to be seen if Trump will be able to rein in the recalcitrant Republicans as he has done previously.>

<New York state officials have told the Trump administration that they will not comply with its demands to end diversity, equity and inclusion practices in public schools, despite the administration's threats to terminate federal education funding.

Daniel Morton-Bentley, counsel and deputy commissioner of the state Department of Education, said in a letter dated Friday to the federal Education Department that state officials do not believe the federal agency has the authority to make such demands.

“We understand that the current administration seeks to censor anything it deems ‘diversity, equity & inclusion,’” he wrote. “But there are no federal or State laws prohibiting the principles of DEI.”

Morton-Bentley also wrote state officials were “unaware” of any authority the federal Department of Education has to demand that states agree with its interpretation of court decisions or to terminate funding without a formal administrative process.

The U.S. Department of Education did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.

The Trump administration on Thursday ordered K-12 schools nationwide to certify within 10 days that they are following federal civil rights laws and ending any discriminatory DEI practices, as a condition for receiving federal money. Federal funding comprises about 6% of the total funding for New York K-12 schools.

“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement when the demand was made. He said many schools have flouted their legal obligations, “including by using DEI programs to discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another.”

The certification demand asked state and school leaders to sign a “reminder of legal obligations” acknowledging their federal money is conditioned on compliance with federal civil rights laws. It also demands compliance with several pages of legal analysis written by the administration.

The demand specifically threatens Title I funding, which sends billions of dollars a year to America’s schools and targets low-income areas.

Morton-Bentley wrote that the state Education Department has already certified to the federal government on multiple occasions that it is complying with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, most recently in January. He said the federal department is basing its demands to end DEI programs on a faulty legal interpretation.

“Given the fact that you are already in possession of guarantees by NYSED that it has and will comply with Title VI, no further certification will be forthcoming,” he wrote.

He also said the administration's stance is an “abrupt shift” from the one taken by the first Trump administration, citing comments in 2020 made by then-U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that diversity and inclusion were “cornerstones of high organizational performance." He wrote the administration has provided no explanation of why it changed positions.

Critics of the certification demand said it conflicted with Trump's promise to return education to schools and states.

The threat of financial sanctions is similar to ones the Trump administration has been leveraging against colleges in its effort to crack down on protests against Israel that it deems antisemitic.

New York state has similarly refused to comply with a demand by the Trump administration to shut down a program to fund mass transit in New York City with high tolls on cars that drive into Manhattan.>

<[Event "19th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1991.07.??"]
[EventDate "1991"]
[Round "3"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Rogers, Norman"]
[Black "Roush, John Everett"]
[ECO "C16"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]