Yiannis Damellos
An autocratic president has been gifted a 747 for his personal toy collection, while his sons roam the Middle East to bolster their father's account by making deals with murderous kings and tyrants. Back home, his party's hardliners play good cop, bad cop with the most gullible crowd to have ever lived on this Earth. This is the state of affairs in the United States today, and, astonishingly, this once-admired country has not yet imploded into smithereens in bombastic Hollywood fashion.
Yet, some mainstream American journalists want you to believe that President Donald Trump’s agenda has been thrown into chaos after a group of GOP hardliners blocked a bill in a key committee vote on Friday, implying that they dealt a major embarrassment to House Republican leaders and Trump himself. What a load of misinformation we are subjected to these days!
These self-proclaimed journalists are trying to convince you that the outcome of the vote does not spell the end for the bill, but rather marks a significant setback for GOP leaders, who must now find a way forward to win over holdouts. A way, as if there are multiple alternatives to pass a fascist agenda... It almost makes you feel sympathy for poor House Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team, who were warned by the bad cops of the GOP, both privately and publicly, that they planned to oppose the vote in the House budget panel meeting on Friday.
Nonetheless, remember the names of the five Republican hardliners who opposed the bill: Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Chip Roy of Texas, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, and Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania. These GOP hardliners signaled on Friday that they would refuse to pass the bill unless Johnson agreed to stricter overhauls for Medicaid and deeper cuts to a clean energy tax program, enough to sink the bill in that critical committee vote.
We are told that negotiations between the bad cops and the leadership are still ongoing, as any changes to the bill could upset Johnson’s fragile coalition in the House, where he cannot afford any significant alterations that would anger the GOP’s good cops. The autocrat himself, who is closely monitoring any changes to Medicaid, also needs to approve any modifications.
Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise are working furiously to appease the conservatives, which would bring Trump’s agenda one step closer to a floor vote. The next steps for the House budget panel are not yet clear, says Scalise, but he has a pretty clear idea of what the final pieces are. He knows. Otherwise, he wouldn’t explain that they’re all in agreement about the changes they want to make but are working through the timing of implementation. For example, work requirements for able-bodied adults enrolled in Medicaid would not go into effect until 2029, after Trump leaves office. Some of the clean energy subsidies, which were enacted under Biden, would not be phased out for years after that.
One of the worst members of the GOP holdout team, Clyde, had another issue with the bill: its failure to remove gun suppressors, also known as silencers, from regulation under the National Firearms Act.
I guess this is what it all comes down to: silencers. Like democracy silencers, healthcare suppressors, and clean energy restrictors.
Once a model country, the United States of America is now a spectacle to behold.
No comments:
Post a Comment