House Speaker Confirms Legislative Branch Is Now Just A Prop

The book is now closed on the Republican effort to take from the poor to extend tax breaks to the rich, all while pretending that is not what they are doing. In a 218-214 mostly party line vote, House Republicans sent the bill to the President’s desk. It will gut Medicaid, add trillions to the national debt, funnel truly unheard of amounts of tax payer dollars into President Trump’s mass deportation effort and cut clean energy incentives while making Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy permanent.

The victory is Trump’s after all.

A handful of Senate and House Republicans have spent the better part of the past month doing performative belly-aching in public about how badly they did not want to pass the legislation that is now headed to White House. For what it is worth, some Senate Republicans like Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) did ultimately get changes they favored — like revising the waivers for SNAP cuts to include 10 states with the highest payment-error rates and increased spending on the rural hospital fund — shoved into the final version of the bill before voting for it.

House Republicans can claim no such dignity (and neither can Murkowski, who, after voting for the bill, played dumb about where it was headed).

The House ended up passing the Senate version of the reconciliation package — which included steeper cuts to Medicaid and clean energy incentives than the typically extreme House conference originally wrote — with no changes to the bill text. We heard murmurs that Trump, who has functioned as a Majority Whip this week, had convinced some of the House Republicans wary of adding trillions to the national debt with the promise of amorphous executive action to fix their concerns later on. It’s on par with a promise Trump has made repeatedly in negotiating with Republicans in Congress: do what I say now and I’ll reward you with some lawless impoundments later. Essentially.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) confirmed this constitutionally backwards strategy when speaking to reporters after the vote Thursday afternoon.

“I don’t think they exacted a lot of specific commitments or concessions or anything like that,” Johnson told reporters. But “a lot of the discussions were about what executive orders will be forthcoming as it relates to the new legislation, and how can we be involved as a House to codify that.”

Congressional Republicans have been on a fast track to forfeit their authority to the executive branch for months now. The capitulation is complete.

Retribution: EPA Employees Edition

Almost 140 staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have been placed on leave after signing a letter criticizing the department’s actions under the Trump administration and Administrator Lee Zeldin’s leadership, the Washington Post was first to report. You can read the letter that nearly 300 EPA staffers signed here.

The EPA workers said that changes implemented by the Trump administration “undermine the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” Some 170 staffers signed their actual names to the letter and by Thursday, many of them received communications saying they’d been placed on leave. Per WaPo:

Asked for comment Thursday, an EPA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters confirmed that 144 employees had received emails in connection with the letter and at least 139 had been placed on leave — and are now facing investigations — because they had signed using their official job titles. The letter, the EPA official said, misrepresented the agency and its work.

…

Two people familiar with the matter said some EPA employees were physically escorted out of their workplaces Thursday after getting a leave notice. The EPA did not answer a question asking how many staffers were escorted outside.

Jeffries Enters the History Books

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) got on the House floor and started his magic minute at 4:53 a.m. EST on Thursday. A whopping eight hours and 44 minutes later, at 1:37 p.m. ET, he got done, ending his speech by breaking the record for the longest floor speech in House history.

But Jeffries’ speech was more than just an attempt at breaking a record. It was one of the methods Democrats used to try to slow down the unavoidable floor vote that would come later that day when House Republicans approved the megabill that would make President Trump’s tax cuts permanent, slash the social safety net, add trillions to the national debt, cut clean energy incentives and substantially bolster the administration’s sweeping mass deportation agenda. 

— Emine Yücel

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