Politics

Reconciliation redux Build Back Better is back! Well, not quite. But Punchbowl reports that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will submit a reconciliation bill to the Parliamentarian today. The bill would allow the federal government to negotiate prescription drug prices for Medicare. On its own, the measure is popular and would give the president and Democratic leaders something to point to as an example of ways in which they are working to lower the cost of living. But Schumer and co. hope it will be more than that. If the measure passes the Byrd Rule test and the Parliamentarian deems it to be something that needs just fifty votes, Democrats plan on making drug pricing one piece of a broader package that they can pass before the midterms. But what would be in a bigger package?

Biden stuck in no-man’s land on Ukraine How long should Americans expect to pay sky-high prices at the gas station, Joe Biden was asked at the NATO summit in Madrid last week. “As long as it takes so Russia cannot, in fact, defeat Ukraine,” the president replied. With the economic situation deteriorating, even if gas prices have eased somewhat, Americans are not likely to find that answer especially encouraging. By Saturday, the scapegoat had changed, with Big Oil in the president’s crosshairs. “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now,” Biden demanded on Twitter, prompting a sharp rebuke from Jeff Bezos.

Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) authority to proceed with President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is much more significant than the narrow grounds on which it was decided. The Clean Power Plan was already dead. It had been repealed and replaced by the Trump administration, decisions that were later struck down by a court of appeals. Moreover, there is history between the EPA and the Supreme Court. In 2014, the Court ruled against the EPA’s rewriting of the Clean Air Act to facilitate its use as a tool of climate policy, which was already seen as “poor and probably unworkable” by officials in the Obama administration.

Now that America’s focus has zeroed in (for the time being) on the Supreme Court’s controversial decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Democrats are hoping the predictions of a midterm red wave will dissipate. It’s possible. But it’s worth noting that whenever Democrats think they have a winning hand, they almost always overplay it. Will this time be any different? On Thursday, President Biden — who clearly does not abide by Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s aphorism about politics stopping at the water’s edge — blasted the Supreme Court’s “mistake” while speaking at a NATO summit in Madrid.

Liz Cheney made two interesting moves last week. One, she was among the fourteen House Republican who voted to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that her Wyoming colleagues in the Senate, John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, refused to support. Two, she offered publicly to instruct her Democratic constituents in the state of Wyoming how to register to vote in the Republican primary election on August 16, thus allowing them to support her against Harriet Hageman, her Trump-endorsed opponent. For decades Wyoming Democrats have taken advantage of the Wyoming Republican Party’s idiotic policy of allowing cross-over voting in the primaries, thus virtually guaranteeing that the most conservative candidate will be eliminated at the beginning of any electoral proceeding.

The January 6 Committee geared up to deliver a potential bombshell on Tuesday with emergency testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows. But like most of the attempts to take down former president Donald Trump — from Russian collusion hoaxes to slimy porn lawyers — Hutchinson's testimony quickly revealed itself as too good to be true. It quickly became clear that one of Hutchinson's most shocking claims was either misremembered or an outright lie. She claimed that Tony Ornato, White House deputy chief of staff for operations, and Bobby Engel, who headed Trump's security detail, told her that Trump had attempted to grab the steering wheel of a Secret Service vehicle to redirect it to the Capitol on January 6.

The debate over President Joe Biden's immigration policies exploded again on Monday after news broke that more than forty migrants had been found dead in the back of a truck in Texas. Texas governor Greg Abbott blamed the deaths on Biden, tweeting, "These deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequence of his refusal to enforce the law." https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/status/1541596214705135617 Thousands of Twitter users piled on Governor Abbott's tweet, arguing that if the border is really "open," then why did these migrants need to be smuggled across the border in the back of a truck?