WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 7: Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) holds a telephone conference with reporters in his office on Capitol Hill on January 7, 2015 in Washington, DC. (Andrew Harnik/For The Washington Post)
“Hold on a minute,” I hear someone objecting. “I seem to recall that last winter featured the dreaded polar vortex, which brought frigid arctic air to much of the United States. Some warming!”
Is that you, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), new chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee and the Senate’s point man on climate change? Let me try to put this in a way you might understand: The planet we live on is really, really big — so big that when it’s cold in our country, which covers only a small percentage of Earth’s surface, it can be hot in other places. At the very same time!
Okay, I’m being somewhat unfair. Inhofe actually reacted to the news of 2014’s record heat by calling the reported increase tiny and meaningless. But his long-held position is not that climate change is overblown or misinterpreted or poorly understood but that it is actually a “hoax” and a “conspiracy.” He wrote a book taking this stance. At times, he has claimed that global warming, if it were indeed taking place, would be a good thing. And he has scoffed at the notion that humans could ever have such a massive impact on God’s immense creation.
Let me repeat: This is the man whose task is to lead the U.S. Senate in setting environmental policy.
King said: “This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.” …
King explained the shift in his focus: “Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”
WASHINGTON — More than six years after the financial crisis struck, the House is moving toward softening a post-crisis law that brought the strictest rules for banks and Wall Street since the 1930s.
McConnell hailed the contributions of senators from Henry Clay to Robert Byrd, but his self-aggrandizing claim about the economy brought to mind Byrd’s withering criticism of Republicans as pygmies who “stride like colossuses while marveling like Aesop’s fly, sitting on the axle of a chariot, ‘My, what a dust I do raise.’?”
McConnell, when he wasn’t taking credit for things that preceded his ascent, gave a remarkably angry and ungracious first speech to the body he now leads. It was an 18-minute snarl, dripping with contempt and packed with campaign-style barbs for the president. He didn’t even offer an expression of condolences to the French after the terrorist attack Wednesday in Paris. (He mentioned the carnage to reporters later, after lunch.)
If this opening speech was a sign of McConnell’s leadership, it’s going to be a long and unproductive session.
Ah, democracy in action. At least one Republican proposes eliminating direct election of senators. After all, that was Original Intent. Similarly, at least one other favors the original intent of only allowing property owners the vote (or does he mean white guys?).
The people spoke all right—and they gave the 46 Senate Democrats now in office 20 million more votes than the 54 Republicans who are currently running the show, reports Dylan Matthews at Vox.
But here’s a crazy fact: those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote, “the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes.”
Part of this discrepancy is due to the fact that most of the GOP’s senators come from less populated states.
The problem isn’t that the deck is stacked in favor of Republicans. The problem is that the deck is stacked in favor of small states, which receive equal representation in the Senate despite dramatic variance in population.
But it still means that the Democratic minority garnered 20 million more votes from U.S. citizens overall than the GOP majority.
Money is poisoning our deteriorating democracy and the Republicans are making it worse. How do these crooks get elected? Oh, yeah, with a boatload of cash. Your vote is losing value. Cash is all that matters in AmeriCo.
Under a spending bill introduced in the Republican-led House, each superrich donor would be allowed to give almost $1.6 million per election cycle to political parties and their campaign committees. The comparable limit for 2014’s elections was $194,400.
The campaign finance proposal was tucked into an unrelated measure to keep most of the government open through the coming September.
The effort is the latest bid to weaken campaign finance rules passed after the Watergate scandal in the 1970s and updated a decade ago. It follows three Supreme Court rulings that gave rise to free-spending super PACs, which can accept unlimited contributions from people and corporations alike, and an increased role for outside groups to shape the outcome of elections.
EPA SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD: Voting 229 for and 191 against, the House on Nov. 18 passed a Republican bill (HR 1422) to reshape the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board to make it more industry-friendly.
The board provides independent evaluations of the scientific analyses upon which the EPA bases its regulations. Its 52 members are chosen by the EPA administrator and serve without pay.
This bill would diminish academic representation on the board while expanding corporate membership; permit experts with financial ties to EPA-regulated industries to serve if they disclose their conflicts of interest; give state, local and tribal governments a guaranteed number of seats on the board; and require the board to gather more public comments, among other provisions.
A yes vote was to send the bill to the Senate, where it is expected to die.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST: Voting 195 for and 225 against, the House on Nov. 18 refused to amend HR 1422 (above) in a way that would to deny membership on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board to representatives of companies or trade associations having a financial interest in decisions that result from the board’s recommendations.
