Here’s a new story that manages to be both absurd and silly and also pretty outrageous. As part of her 2024 presidential ambitions South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is deploying elements of the state national guard to the Texas boarder to combat the “border crisis” which is mainly an element of the Republican campaign agenda for 2022. And the money to do it is coming from a private donor.
This is an issue I first mentioned on Friday. While Senate Republicans are going full performance art drama about whether they can still support the proposal they already agreed to support, there’s another element of the drama in some ways just as interesting.
The bill – or rather outline proposal, there’s no bill – could not include any new taxes and had to be paid for. Republicans insisted on those conditions. The bill includes a number of “payfors” meant to accomplish this. But they are at least half phony. Some are more real than others. In some cases there’s legitimate debate about how much revenue they could yield – stepped up tax enforcement on the super wealthy is an example of that. But the core issue is that a lot of it is pretend. Now the Post has talked to experts about the list of payfors and it confirms in detail what was pretty clear in general: a mix of wishful thinking and hocum. In other words, the negotiation over the bipartisan mini-bill was largely a process of finding notional ‘payfors’ that Republicans could pretend were real.
Here’s the Holocaust humor from a guy named Nick Fuentes, a far-right holocaust denier and white supremacist commentator who is holding a fundraiser July 1st with Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona. Classic joking, smiling denial of the death of six million Jews and being endorsed by a Republican member of Congress in good standing – committee membership, campaign support, the whole deal. Video after the jump.
There’s been a lot of fretting over the last couple days about whether a group of Republicans who had not actually committed to support the bipartisan mini-bill were no longer going to support it, thus putting in doubt President Biden’s entire infrastructure agenda. But that’s the wrong way to look at this. This has always been and remains an issue in Democrats’ hands – especially Joe Manchin’s hands. Republicans are just players on a chess board in which Democrats are making the moves. And Joe Manchin made this pretty clear this morning.
The Colorado gun congresswoman is now allowed to block critics on Twitter.
