Senate Republicans have reached a deal among themselves on legislation for the third coronavirus funding package amid growing concerns about a widespread outbreak in the United States.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced the agreement on the Senate floor, noting that Republicans would begin negotiating with Democrats on Friday.
Sixty votes would be needed to pass a coronavirus bill, meaning it will have to be bipartisan. Continue reading.
Senate Republicans are finalizing their proposal for the third tranche of coronavirus aid, which is expected to be unveiled Thursday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), speaking from the Senate floor, outlined what will be included in the Republican package and said lawmakers must take “bold steps” amid the growing outbreak.
“It is critical that we move swiftly and boldly to begin to stabilize our economy, preserve Americans’ jobs, get money to workers and families and keep up our fight on the health front. That is exactly, exactly what our proposal will do,” McConnell said. Continue reading.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday defended a potential trillion dollar stimulus amid the raging COVID-19 outbreak, stating that “these are not ordinary times.”
However, back in 2009, when he was minority leader, McConnell repeatedly voiced opposition to the Recovery Act, which was proposed by President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders to help Americans suffering from the Great Recession.
During a press conference on Capitol Hill Tuesday, a reporter asked McConnell how “Republicans became okay with spending perhaps a good trillion dollars” to boost the economy. Continue reading.
The Senate majority leader has encouraged judges thinking about stepping down to do so soon to ensure that Republicans confirm their replacements this year.WASHINGTON — Running out of federal court vacancies to fill, Senate Republicans have been quietly making overtures to sitting Republican-nominated judges who are eligible to retire to urge them to step aside so they can be replaced while the party still holds the Senate and the White House.
Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who has used his position as majority leader to build a judicial confirmation juggernaut for President Trump over the past three years, has been personally reaching out to judges to sound them out on their plans and assure them that they would have a worthy successor if they gave up their seats soon, according to multiple people with knowledge of his actions.
It was not known how many judges were contacted or which of them Mr. McConnell had spoken to directly. One of his Republican colleagues said others had also initiated outreach in an effort to heighten awareness among judges nominated by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush that making the change now would be advantageous. Continue reading.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has addressed the great purge of intelligence officials who have warned about Russia’s ongoing efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on behalf of impeached president Donald Trump—leaving out the part, of course, that it’s Trump it’s trying to help. “Recent reports suggest that adversaries including Russia are likely continuing efforts aimed at dividing Americans,” he said, “sowing chaos in our politics, and undermining confidence in our elections.” Then he issued this bucketload of bullshit: ”Fortunately, in stark contrast to the failures of the Obama admin in 2016, the Trump admin once again appears to be doing the right thing—in this case, by promptly providing a specific counterintelligence briefing to the Democratic presidential candidate in question.” Like the briefing McConnell got in 2016, the one where he threatened the CIA under President Barack Obama with all-out partisan warfare if the public was warned that Russia was trying to help Trump win. Of course, the Trump campaign didn’t need to be briefed that Russia was intervening on Trumps’ behalf—the campaign leadership was in on it!
McConnell won’t do a damn thing now to try to stop Russia, so Democrats in the Senate are going over his head, or attempting to. Sens. Chuck Schumer, Robert Menendez, and Sherrod Brown are demanding that the Trump administration impose sanctions on Russia, an action that does not require Senate approval under existing authority. They’ve written to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin asking them “to immediately and forcefully impose sanctions on Russia’s government, any Russian actors determined to be responsible for such interference, and those acting on their behalf or providing material or financial support for these election interference efforts.”
The three write that “it is long past time for the administration to send a direct, powerful and unmistakable message to President Putin: the US will respond immediately and forcefully to continuing election interference by the government of the Russian Federation and its surrogates, to punish, deter and substantially increase the economic and political costs of such interference.” Continue reading.
After months of legislative inactivity, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has scheduled votes on two abortion-related bills. Democrats argue they are attacks on women’s reproductive rights.WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell is about to plunge the Senate into the nation’s culture wars with votes on bills to sharply restrict access to late-term abortions and threaten some doctors who perform them with criminal penalties, signaling that Republicans plan to make curbing a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy a central theme of their re-election campaigns this year.
After months of shunning legislative activity in favor of confirming President Trump’s judicial nominees — and a brief detour for the president’s impeachment trial — Mr. McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, is expected to bring the bills up for votes on Tuesday. Both lack the necessary 60-vote supermajority to advance, and the Senate has voted previously to reject them.
But by putting them on the floor again, Mr. McConnell hopes to energize the social conservatives who helped elect Mr. Trump and whose enthusiasm will be needed to help Republicans hold on to the Senate this year, while forcing vulnerable Democrats to take uncomfortable votes on bills that frame abortion as infanticide. The rhetoric around the measures is hot; Mr. Trump, for instance, has pointed to one of the bills to falsely assert that Democrats favor “executing babies AFTER birth.” Continue reading.
In the latest Daily Kos/Civiqs poll, fully 60% of Americans disapprove of how the U.S. Senate conducted Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. The behavior of
Senate Republicans following that trial probably won’t get many cheers, either. The three most closely watched Republicans during the trial, those who pretended to be open-minded and committed to doing their jobs, have all popped up in the last few days with slathering praise for the Trump administration which let loose all the money once the trial was done. It turns out the issue wasn’t the threat of heads on pikes at all. It was all about the bribes.
Retiring Sen. Lamar Alexander tweeted to thank Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and Trump for the investment of “$9 million in Tennessee to provide and improve high-speed broadband infrastructure projects for 3,744 rural households, 31 businesses and 41 farms.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski had Transportation Secretary and Moscow Mitch spouse Elaine Chao to thank for “a $20M Port Infrastructure Development Program grant to the Port of Alaska to help offset the 1st phase costs of the Port’s desperately-needed modernization program, enabling safe, cost-effective, & reliable Port operations.” That’s a whole 1% of the estimated cost for the port. Was it worth a vote to keep the worst president ever to sit in the Oval Office? Continue reading.
By a 15-point margin Americans say that, despite being acquitted in the Senate, Donald Trump has not been cleared of wrongdoing in the Ukraine matter. Fully 55% say Trump has not been exonerated by his acquittal while 40% believe he has, according a new Quinnipiac poll released Monday. The views of independents track almost perfectly with those findings, with 54% saying Trump has not been cleared and 40% saying he has.
What this means more broadly is that Americans weren’t fooled by Republicans’ sham trial one bit. In the poll, 51% still believe that Trump’s actions were serious enough to warrant impeachment, while 46% believe they didn’t reach the threshold. Independents are split on that question 49% to 49%. Perhaps even more telling are respondents’ views on whether the Senate trial was conducted fairly:
That finding is almost identical to Monmouth polling also released today, showing 58% say the trial was unfair, while 35% say it was fair. In effect, Senate Republicans’ sham trial only inspired confidence in GOP voters, 54% of whom called it fair, while Democrats (78%-18%) and independents (56%-39%) overwhelmingly found it unfair. View the post here.
The Senate leader has gone from admiring Henry Clay to packing the courts to guaranteeing the acquittal of a president caught cheating ahead of an election.WASHINGTON ― Years after professing admiration for the “Great Compromiser” Henry Clay but then engineering a dramatic remake of the federal judiciary, Mitch McConnell is now earning a different legacy: The guy who rigged a Senate trial to protect a president impeached for trying to cheat his way to reelection.
With even members of his own caucus agreeing that Donald Trump behaved badly by leveraging $391 million in taxpayer-funded foreign aid to damage a political rival, the Senate’s majority leader is on the brink of acquitting Trump without hearing from a single witness ― defying the three-quarters of Americans who say they want witnesses.
“Sadly, the constitutional travesty that he orchestrated here will serve as his legacy,” said George Conway, a prominent Republican Trump critic and husband of a top White House aide. “Not the legions of fine judges he has put on the bench, judges of the sort that would have been nominated by a President Pence even if Trump had been removed, as he rightly should have been.” Continue reading.
