The 2017 Republican Controlled U.S. Congress

I think we should have a thread that follows how the U.S. Congress responds to Trump and to the American people. Percy introduced The Trump Presidency today but we need to follow what these guys are doing also, since they seem focused on dismantling the federal government.Edited by Tanypteryx, : corrected the time warp.

Privatizing Medicare and Social Security and doing away with Medicaid and of course repealing the Affordable Care Act. Those are just to start. Repealing all regulation of banks and the financial sector, consumer protection, clean water and air protections, etc. Giving public lands to the states, who do not have the resources to manage them, so they will be sold to the 1%, who will lock the rest of us off them while they rape them. Oh, they will expect the big, bad, over-reaching federal government to take care of fighting any wildfires, but otherwise stay out. This might be a good time to start paying attention because the shit-storm is just starting.

Planned Parenthood would lose funding as part of Obamacare repeal, Ryan saysPlanned Parenthood prevents many thousands of abortions every year by providing birth control to women. The also provide basic health care to tens of thousands.They are the good guys and the GOP in congress clearly are not.

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Republicans plan to strip Planned Parenthood of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding as part of their rapid push to repeal President Obama’s health-care overhaul, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said Thursday.

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Ryan said a defunding measure would appear in a special fast-track bill that is expected to pass Congress as soon as next month. Planned Parenthood legislation would be in our reconciliation bill, he said at a news conference in response to a question about plans to defund the organization.

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Reconciliation is a special congressional procedure allowing legislation to bypass a Senate filibuster, meaning it would need only a simple majority of senators to pass rather than a 60-vote supermajority.

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U.S. House changes its rules to ease federal land transfers

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On the first day of its new session, the U.S. House passed a new rule designed to make it easier to transfer federal lands to states, local communities or Indian tribes by assuming that these transfers would not cost the federal government anything.

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The change was approved Tuesday 233 to 190 as part of a broader collection of rules which will govern how the House will operate during the 115th Congress ranging from budget guidelines to ethics standards. The lands transfer provision didn’t figure in the debate. Previously, when Congress wanted to transfer public lands managed by the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management or other federal agency, the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’ research arm, calculated the cost to the U.S. Treasury by computing what revenues the lands provide over 10 years, such as grazing fees or oil and gas royalties. Under House rules, before a bill approving a transfer could be adopted, budget cuts would have to be made in other federal programs equal to the value of that land. The rules change eliminates that budgetary barrier to land transfer bills.

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Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, who sponsored the change, is one of Congress’ strongest voices for giving federal lands to states and localities. Bishop, who chairs the House Resources Committee, argued that the Congressional Budget Office’s traditional accounting missed key benefits of land transfers.

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Allowing communities to actually manage and use these lands will generate not only state and local income tax, but also federal income tax revenues, Parish Braden, the committee’s communications director, said in an email. It also will reduce the federal government’s need to subsidize communities adjacent to federal lands with programs such as Payments in Lieu of Taxes or Secure Rural Schools, he added: Current budget practices do not fully recognize these benefits, making it very difficult for non-controversial land transfers between governmental entities for public use and other reasons to happen.

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This is all pure bullshit. Bishop is a strong supporter of the thieves who tried to steal Malheur National Wildlife Refuge last year.What is clear is the western states do not have the infrastructure or revenues to manage these lands and so they will either be degraded and mismanaged or sold to corporations and the wealthy to exploit.This land belongs to us, the citizens of the United States and future generations. This is an attempt by these traitors to steal our land and turn it into the kind of region that we see in the rest of the country where there is hardly any public land. Where you can't go out and walk anywhere without paying or getting permission.No one generation or group of corrupt politicians has the right to steal our heritage.Edited by Tanypteryx, : No reason given.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has scheduled a bunch of simultaneous confirmation hearings this week, before the background checks and financial disclosures are complete, as well as a huge vote-arama of amendments to bills before anyone could possibly read them all, let alone discuss them.What a scumbag hypocrite. The level of corruption we can expect from the GOP in Congress and the Whitehouse is unprecedented. A shit-storm and a cluster-fuck are cross-breeding and we are going to be truly screwed.

House votes to end rule that prevents people with mental illness from buying gunsThe Republican-controlled House voted 235-180 on Thursday 02-02-2017.

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The Republican-controlled House voted 235-180 in an apparent effort to improve gun ownership under President Trump. The rule affected nearly 75,000 Social Security recipients diagnosed with mental health conditions, such as extreme anxiety and schizophrenia, and are considered incapable of managing their own affairs.

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Republicans and gun-rights activists have argued that the rule stigmatises those with mental health issues and unfairly strips them of their Second Amendment rights.

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Well, criminal and insane people have taken over Congress and the Whitehouse and are in the process of stacking the deck on the Supreme Court with nutty religious zealots, so get ready for them to do anything they want to with absolute impunity.

Yep, I saw that idea over and over today on facebook. It's as if we not only somehow got an insane psychopathic narcissist in the Whitehouse, but he poisoned the entire GOP in Congress with something that made them insane also. There is so much nutty stuff going on right now, in Congress and the Whitehouse, that it is really hard to keep track of. There are conspiracy theories that some kind of major conspiracy is afoot and they are trying to distract us and their own supporters while they fuck us over, royally.Back before the orange nutjob was sworn in, I posted a few places on the web that a Shit-Storm and a Cluster-Fuck were about to mate and release a plague on humanity. The reality has been even worse than I feared and it is metastasizing.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ 4th District) on Monday introduced HJR 46, which would allow drilling in our national parks. Gosar also received $250K from Big Energy.This was posted this afternoon by altnps.org the Alt National Park Service.It is interesting to see the growing number of rogue career employees at federal agencies who have organized to resist the Trump agenda and publish data and reports and updates about what is happening within the agencies, disobeying various gag orders from the Whitehouse.It's the INTERNET baby! It worked during the various "Arab Spring Uprisings" and it will work for resistance to the evil Empire and the Dark Side.The only thing that could stop it is an EMP, but then Tweety wouldn't have anyone to read his childish tweets.

Yep, they scare the crap out of me, despite that some people claim that none of them are violent or dangerous. Christians with guns are the scariest of all.

Bill to Cut Forest Service and BLM Enforcement is a Poacher’s Dream, Sportsman’s Nightmare

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Most of the time, America’s 640 million acres of national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges are pretty peaceful places. But they are not immune to very real threats: drug runners, meth labs, pot farms and worse. Not to mention the growing population increases the frequency of less dramatic crime like vandalism, arson, poaching, illegal pot hunting and destruction of natural resources.
That is why H.R. 622, introduced by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, is such a menace. Chaffetz would do away with law enforcement officers on National Forests and Bureau of Land Managementmillions of acres where Americans hunt and fish.

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This is exactly the plan that the Bundy bunch were pushing when they tried to steal the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Constitutional sheriffs should be the only ones to enforce the law on public lands according to them. Of course since many of these western counties are sparsely populated they don't have enough tax revenues to pay for this so I guess we'll just have to sell some of the land to rich people (who should own it anyway).

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It’s time to get rid of the BLM and US Forest Service police. If there is a problem your local sheriff is the first and best line of defense, Chaffetz said in a press release. By restoring local control in law enforcement, we enable federal agencies and county sheriffs to each focus on their respective core missions.

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Nope, not Chaffetz. He is still a nutjob fellow traveler with the Bundys and a pawn of the wealthy who want to clearcut and stripmine America.A lot of these early bills are just distractions while the Senate, the House, and Whitehouse are testing how much the press and public are paying attention. They assume that the Democratic public will lose interest fairly fast and then they can grab America by the pussy and no one will be organized to protest. This has worked well for them since the Reagan years.

H.R.861 - To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency.This sounds like a great idea. The George Washington Bridge in heavy smog, photographed during the early 1970s before many of today's clean air protections were put in place. This photograph is part of the Environmental Protection Agency's series to "Photographically Document Subjects of Environmental Concern," compiled 1972-77. (The US National Archives/Flickr)

This has already begun. The oceans are becoming more acidified as they absorb excess CO2. I just finished reading The Sixth Extinction, An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert and it documents the extinction event that compares with the great extinction events that mark the major changes in the history of life. Humans have an impact on the planet that is unprecedented in the last 65 million years.The attempts by the Whitehouse and Congress the dismantle all the agencies that might be able to discover methods to stop or slow down the destruction of the ecosphere are perplexing and insane. It is like celebrating our own demise.

House committee votes to eliminate independent election commissionI realize this is just a committee vote right now, but we can expect to see red states pass all sorts of new voter registration laws that (Surprise, Surprise), purge the roles of poor, black, Latino, and other minority voters and making it more burdensome and difficult to register. They keep trying to make it difficult to vote in some areas, also.

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A Republican-led House committee voted on Tuesday to eliminate an independent election commission charged with helping states improve their voting systems as Donald Trump erroneously claims widespread voter fraud cost him the popular vote.

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The party-line vote came less than two days after the US president vowed to set up a White House commission helmed by the vice-president, Mike Pence, to pursue his accusations of election fraud.

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Trump and some of the Republicans think that millions of undocumented aliens, none citizens, care more about America than about half of the citizens, who are qualified to vote. That's 50% of qualified Americans didn't vote or are not even registered to vote. MILLIONS OF MEXICAN NON-CITIZENS ARE VOTING (what Trump says), WHILE 20 TIMES MORE AMERICAN CITIZENS REFUSED TO VOTE (what that would mean).So, Are Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Republican Congress going to protect the voting rights of millions of qualified voters who want to register and who want to vote or are they going to ignore or encourage the barriers to voting that red states have and plan to enact?Edited by Tanypteryx, : added title.