Thursday, June 1
By Jonathan Larsen
House Votes to Suspend Debt Ceiling
More than two-thirds of House Republicans voted Wednesday night to let America take on more debt – which they previously said will end life on Earth – in exchange for a package of austerity (except the military) measures including freezing spending (except the military) next year. Seventy-one Republicans voted against it.
On the Democratic side, 165 voted for the measure, while only 46 broke ranks to oppose it. (Here’s the full list.)
Now it goes to the Senate, which is expected to vote on it by Friday. You’ll hear a lot about amendments senators want to add … which, if successful, would require another vote in the House, thereby potentially pushing passage back beyond Monday, the earliest day Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the U.S. may run out of money and default on some of its debt.
In one sense, it’s not surprising that two out of three Republicans voted not just to raise the debt ceiling, but suspend it altogether until January 2025 – after all, they vote to raise the debt ceiling en masse, no muss no fuss, all the time when Republicans are in the White House. When there’s a Democratic president, of course, debt magically morphs into a far greater future threat than the seas literally rising. So why’d they vote yes this time?
One thing I keep forgetting is what sheep they are. Yes, they bickered and squabbled and had to vote to vote 15 times to choose Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as speaker. But now he’s speaker. And just like they let Republican presidents hoist the debt ceiling, they let Republican speakers do so, too.
Hell, even the Republican Study [sic] Committee didn’t take a position on the bill. And the Republican Party leader, disgraced, indicted, sex abuser former Pres. Donald Trump? The guy who urged killing the deal? “It is what it is,” he whimpered.
Now, is it possible that some or one of the 71 GOP rebels (or pretend rebels; remember, some of them get permission to break ranks if it helps them with voters back home) will circle back on McCarthy with a leadership challenge? Maybe. Who knows?
And, of course, the bill would have failed without Democrats making up the votes McCarthy lacked. When it became clear the GOP would fall short, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) signaled Democrats to make up the difference.
“Once again, House Democrats to the rescue to avoid a dangerous default,” Jeffries said. “What does that say about this extreme MAGA Republican majority?”
Well, one thing it says is that Democrats will fill in for them when McCarthy wants something. And another thing it says is that Democrats have failed to capitalize on McCarthy’s supposed weakness – we kept hearing how Democrats could peel away GOP “centrists” from weak McCarthy…but what future vote would be more important than this one to do so?
Literally more Democrats than Republicans voted for this thing!
(Hypothetical counter-argument: The threat of House Dems letting McCarthy dangle helped Pres. Joe Biden get a better deal.)
THE PIPELINE Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee, was one of the Democrats who voted no on the deal. Grijalva has been the leading voice against the proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP).
Apparently without Grijalva or other Dems knowing about it, Biden signed off on including the MVP’s mandatory completion – overriding the permitting and legal processes and community opposition – in the final bill. As TYT Washington Correspondent Candice Cole first reported, there’s considerable suspicion on Capitol Hill that the MVP was included as promised payback to its biggest Democratic proponent, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), for helping Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) pass the Inflation Reduction Act last year.
Orgs React to Details of Debt-Ceiling Bill
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler praised the deal, saying, “President [Joe] Biden has met the moment in the face of extraordinary opposition and pulled us back from what could have been an intractable circumstance. Under his leadership and bipartisan approach, we will avoid the loss of millions of jobs and the decimation of retirement savings, while protecting working people against draconian cuts to public safety and education.”
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put out a whole report on the deal’s changes to federal relief for the poor through TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. CBPP calls the bill “a marked improvement” over Republican proposals, but says it could “lead some states to reduce access to assistance.”
On the bright side, the bill will also mean TANF launches a pilot program to see whether it can drop rigid requirements for an outcomes-based approach that might help more families get out of poverty. With, y’know, money.
Evergreen Action Executive Director Lena Moffitt said in a statement, “It is heartening that the attempts by the House GOP to gut the [Inflation Reduction Act] IRA’s clean energy investments have been unsuccessful. These investments are crucial to meeting our climate and environmental justice commitments, and are already delivering huge economic benefits across the country—particularly in the very districts of the Republicans now trying to repeal them.”
Sunrise Movement Executive Director Varshini Prakash was less sanguine. Here’s the entirety of her statement on the debt-ceiling deal:
“When we’re knocking on doors and on college campuses, we constantly hear young people in our generation feel like the government doesn’t work for them. This debt ceiling deal tells these young people that the US will keep polluting our air and water by approving the Mountain Valley Pipeline, that our government will make life harder for working people, and that our system values billionaires over students.
“President Biden and the Democratic party should know the passage of this negotiation is the type of harmful decision that makes our generation feel disillusioned and defeated about the state of our politics. Building new fossil fuel infrastructure right after the approval of the Willow Project is politically and morally dangerous, but it’s not too late to fix this. Democrats must stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline and achieve their climate goals if they want to energize Gen Z to get out and vote in 2024."
Senate Advances Bill to Kill Student-Debt Relief
Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV), Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), and Jon Tester (D-MT) on Wednesday joined Republicans in a successful procedural vote to advance a GOP bill to kill Pres. Joe Biden’s student-debt relief program.
That was just a procedural vote, the real thing comes today. And, yes, since the margin was only 51-46, you can reasonably argue that Democrats could filibuster this thing (which is also making its way through the Republican-controlled House).
However, Republicans lack the votes to override Biden’s promised veto, so there’s actually no need and for all I know it serves some larger political purpose to let Manchin, Sinema, and Tester move forward with this.
Tech Leaders Issue AI Warning
I didn’t write up Tuesday’s dramatic warning about artificial intelligence yesterday because I felt I needed a little more info. So I looked up Gizmodo’s coverage of the warning, and I’m glad I did. First, the background.
More than 350 tech leaders on Tuesday issued a statement via the Center for AI Safety consisting of a single sentence: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Here’s how Gizmodo’s Thomas Germain kicked off his report on the statement: “Over 350 AI executives, researchers, and industry leaders signed a one-sentence warning released Tuesday, saying that we should try to stop their technology from destroying the world.”
Which is pretty much how I hope I’d have written it if I’d known what I was talking about on Wednesday.
Here’s the wild part: Those 350 geniuses? They issued a one-sentence warning because they couldn’t agree on the second sentence. I don’t mean that literally – but they did actually lack consensus about what else to say. Specifically, they don’t even agree on what the threat IS.
Is it misinformation? Well, no one needed that warning. I’ve been laughing my ass off at Tom Cruise deepfakes for years. But beyond that…how exactly could AI extinguish the human race in a way the human race isn’t already racing to do with organic intelligence?
We’ve got nukes all over the place pointed at each other. We’ve spent more than a century gradually eating away the astronomically rare phenomenon of an atmosphere that permits matter to become animate. We hate vaccines and masks. What the hell’s AI got?
Well, as Gizmodo suggests, one of the threats AI poses is “a large number of jobs will likely be automated into oblivion.”
Um. I’ll take it from here, Gizmodo…
Because this threat about jobs is actually the utopia that economists a century ago dreamt of for humanity.
Machines labor. Humans live. This is literally the techno-paradise that has beckoned since the Industrial Revolution. And we’re afraid of it?!? WHY?!?
Well, because Calvinism predates the Industrial Revolution. And is just as pervasive.
In terms of our economy, AI should be one of the most wonderful things ever to bless humanity. And it would be…if we had a sane economy and political systems. In a world where everyone was guaranteed housing, food, education, childcare, and health (yes even preventive!) care… the benefits of robots and AI’s intellectual labor could be spread equitably through the economy.
Boop: Everyone retires younger.
Boop: Shorter workdays.
Boop: Four-day workweek.
The only reason we’re terrified of AI taking our jobs is because we’ve decided to let people die if they don’t have jobs. And that’s convinced us that jobs are good things…rather than things we’re forced to do not to die.
Campaign Watch
PRESIDENT Former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) is expected to announce his 2024 presidential campaign in New Hampshire on Tuesday as if this were 2012 or something.
The day after that, former Vice President Mike Pence reportedly will announce his own presidential campaign in Iowa, as if this were any time before Jan. 6, 2021.
And on the day after that, no one will give a shit and the media will resume trying to make Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) vs. disgraced, indicted, sex abuser former Pres. Donald Trump a thing.
Crime Watch
“NATIONAL SECURITY” Federal prosecutors have tape of former Pres. Donald Trump talking in July 2021 about how he still had classified documents after he left the White House. Which is a crime.
The documents concern a potential U.S. military attack on Iran (which would also be a crime). And Trump wanted to share some of the info with unnamed other people. Crime!
Trump’s comments undermine his defense in the ongoing investigation into his alleged/now admitted/so we can drop “alleged” theft of U.S. documents. One, it proves he knew he had the docs. Two, it proves he was lying when he said they were all declassified because he says he knows these were classified. Three, it shows he knew he was legally bound about what information he could share.
I would add, since I’m the one making the list, that it also shows how overblown America's document-secrecy regimen is. Whistleblowers (and disgraced former presidents) keep getting their hands on these things, and yet Iran has yet to march into Washington. Perhaps more than any specific military/spy shit being exposed in all these cases, what’s really being exposed is how harmless it actually is when most of them go public.
STALKING International criminal mastermind Jeff Bezos agreed on Wednesday to pay $30 million (aka, lunch money) to settle charges that he and two accomplices stalked and spied on children and families around the world. The accomplices were named Alexa and Ring.
Specifically, Alexa stored recordings of children and their locations for years, even after parents told Alexa to delete it and she lied and said, “Okay.”
Bezos’s lawyers said they were just stealing, I mean using, children’s voices to help Alexa understand them better. Y’know, so it could be friends with children. Close friends.
Bezos’s other accomplice, Ring, gave hundreds of Bezos employees and contractors access to Ring videos for years. And, Ring was so lax about security that hackers gained control of some accounts. Feel safer with that Ring yet?
WHITE-COLLAR CRIME Y’know how poor kids who might’ve stolen a candy bar get tackled to the ground (if they’re lucky), handcuffed, and bundled into a cop car while rich white guys especially ex-presidents get to saunter in of their own accord and skip all that gauche “criminal” stuff like mug shots? Well, it turns out not all white-collar crime gets the soft touch!
In hot pursuit of the alleged perpetrators of charity fraud, multiple cops, some of them apparently from a tactical unit, with guns out and at the ready (video), converged on the private home of… can you guess? What if I told you this was Georgia?
That’s right, it was three organizers – sorry, alleged organizers – of a charity fund to bail out protesters and activists who’ve been arrested for standing up against Cop City, the planned and very controversial militarize-the-police complex planned for Atlanta police.
Civil Liberties Defense Center Executive Director Lauren Regan told The Intercept, “This is the first bail fund to be attacked in this way…And there is absolutely not a scintilla of fact or evidence that anything illegal has ever transpired with regard to Atlanta fundraising for bail support.”
In their defense, the cops might have had good reason to be afraid, given that earlier this year they killed a Cop City protester who had their gun-powder-free hands up.
Correction
In Wednesday’s ProgRep I got it wrong when talking about when increased work requirements for food aid will expire. The GOP pushed to raise the age for work requirements to 54. I wrote that Democrats won a provision to have that increase expire in 2010.
Obviously that’s a typo and I meant to write 1910. Kidding! It expires in 2030.
Your Report
Lemme know how we're doing by finding me on Twitter. Or, if you found a typo you think I'm not already beating myself up about, email us at newsletters@tyt.com.
And if you've got friends who might enjoy some daily ProgRepping, please share this email with them!
Go get 'em, kids.
