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Arizona’s GOP congressional caucus votes to aid and abet Trump’s violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution

January 30, 2017 by AZ BlueMeanie

I previously posted about the lawsuit against Trump under the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. The legal team intends to use the lawsuit to try to get a copy of Trump’s federal tax returns, which are needed to properly assess what income or other payments or loans Trump has received from foreign governments.

As I pointed out at the end of the post:

Sen. Ron Wyden (OR), the top Democrat on the Senate’s tax-writing committee, along with Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA), introduced legislation earlier this month to require all sitting presidents and nominated presidential candidates to release their tax returns for the past three years. Want President Trump to release his tax returns? There’s a bill for that.

Will Tea-Publicans in Congress pass this bill? Or will they enable Trump by aiding and abetting his display of contempt for the public’s right to know and possible violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution?

This past week we learned the answer: aiding and abetting Trump’s display of contempt for the public’s right to know and possible violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution it is!

ACA repeal is a tax windfall to the wealthy – and you will pay for it

January 19, 2017 by AZ BlueMeanie

I have previously explained that the GOP’s headlong rush to repeal the Affordable Care Act aka “ObamaCare” is actually about repealing the taxes on the very wealthy that help pay for the program. The “blue-collar working class voters” who elected these Tea-Publicans to office will not only lose their health care coverage, they will wind up paying higher taxes as the wealthy receive a huge tax windfall. These voters got played, and the best part is, they did it to themselves.

Jared Bernstein fleshes this out today with new data in How Republican-style health-care reform quickly becomes a tax cut for the richest of the rich:

The election of Donald Trump with a Republican-majority Congress is proving once again that conservative economic policy largely reduces to cutting taxes, mostly for the rich.

But wait a second, aren’t they also wading into health-care reform?

They are, and it proves my point. While much attention is reasonably focused on how they’re all repeal with no replace — and how that’s likely to reverse the coverage gains we’ve seen and undermine insurance markets — there’s something else going on here. And that is — you guessed it — a big tax cut for the rich.

Update: The post-election plot for Tea-Publican tyranny

November 4, 2016 by AZ BlueMeanie

Arizona Senator Jeff Flake was startled a few months ago when a constituent pressed him on whether he was willing to hold up any Supreme Court nominee chosen by Hillary Clinton if she was elected president. The New York Times reports, That Supreme Court Stonewall May Not Crumble Anytime Soon:

“I asked for how long, and he said for four years,” Mr. Flake, an Arizona Republican, recounted in an interview. “I said no, of course not. That is not what I came to Washington to do.”

Sen. Flake had better have a talk with his seat mate, “Senator Obstruction,” John McCain. McCain: Republicans must stop Supreme Court from ‘tilting to the left’:

Speaking at a modest get-out-the-vote rally at the spring training ballpark of the Chicago Cubs, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) revisited an idea he’d walked back last month — that a Republican majority in the Senate would be ready to fight any Hillary Clinton nominee to the Supreme Court.

“There could be as many as three Supreme Court justices that will be chosen in the next four years,” McCain said. “We have to have a Senate who will prevent that four-to-four split from tilting to the left and making decisions that will harm this nation for decades to come.”

That was all McCain said about the court, at a rally headlined by Mitt Romney and covered by MSNBC, CNN and Showtime. But it resembled a remark McCain gave to a Philadelphia radio station last month, promising that Republicans would “be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up.”

The Times report continues:

[This is] precisely what some of [Flake’s] Republican colleagues are considering. Having already blocked President Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia since March, they contend that Republicans should indefinitely stall any nomination by Mrs. Clinton to prevent an ideological shift in the court. Such a blockade would represent a major escalation in the judicial wars that have been waged in the Senate since the 1980s.

Mr. Flake and other Republicans say that would be a terrible mistake. “You just can’t do that,” Mr. Flake said. “You shouldn’t and you can’t. People expect to have a full court.”

The plot for post-election Tea-Publican tyranny

October 31, 2016 by AZ BlueMeanie

Most Americans are of the opinion that they cannot wait for this ugly election to be over on election day. Little do they know that election day is not the end, but only just the beginning.

The radical Neo-Confederate Tea-Publican insurrectionists who have held the federal government hostage for the past six years are plotting against their own GOP leadership, and to engage in Tea-Publican tyranny against the federal government after election day. The Washington Post reported over the weekend:

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan is on the verge of a reckoning with House conservatives that threatens to end his speakership and extinguish his future as a national political leader.

The intraparty fight is set to begin in the days after the Nov. 8 election, when Ryan (R-Wis.) will be under immediate pressure from approximately 40 hard-line House conservatives [House Freedom Caucus] frustrated with his handling of spending fights and his shifting position on GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. The conservatives are eyeing a November leadership election and December spending deadline to determine how Ryan can lead Republicans — or if he can lead them at all.

Conservatives have no plans to compromise next year with Hillary Clinton if she wins the White House and Democrats capture the Senate. They are pushing Ryan to hold the line on spending and other matters, even if it means continued partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill. Some members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus have crafted a list of demands — including deep spending cuts, changes to House rules and a promise to vote only on bills that have majority Republican backing — in exchange for their support.

“If the speaker can’t answer yes to those on paper, I’m going to someone who can,” said Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.). “From now on it needs to be on paper, in writing, with a blood oath of some sort pledging your house and mortgage on the line, too.”

Meanwhile, some mainstream conservatives who constitute the bulk of the House GOP — a group that has largely been pleased with Ryan — are starting to openly contemplate whether he will want to continue as speaker.

Hysterical media misleads on ‘ObamaCare’ premium increases

October 26, 2016 by AZ BlueMeanie

The media is once again engaged in its annual hysteria over headline rate increases in the Affordable Care Act aka “ObamaCare” ahead of the federal health insurance marketplace enrollment period beginning November 1.

Simon Malloy at Salon explains, Obamacare’s 2017 rate hike coverage has been simplistic and possibly misleading:

In keeping with the now-familiar pattern of Affordable Care Act coverage, we find ourselves having to balance substantial progress with not-so-great setbacks. The good news came last month with reports that the national uninsured rate had been cut nearly in half since 2010 to 8.6 percent of the population – the first time it had ever dropped below 9 percent. That’s a massive reduction, and tangible proof that the ACA is doing some real good.

Now for the not-so-great stuff. The Department of Health and Human Services released a report this week stating that it expects premiums for benchmark “silver” health plans in the state-based exchanges to rise by an average of 22 percent in 2017. That news is predictably becoming a talking point for anti-Obamacare Republicans on the campaign trail, so let’s add some context to get a clearer picture of what’s going on.