The Progressive Wing

White House officials have discussed invoking the 14th Amendment to dodge the limit, but they see it as highly risky. https://t.co/OEgSoFkHEZ
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 8, 2023

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/biden-prepares-to-take-debt-ceiling-battle-to-vulnerable-gop-lawmakers/ar-AA1aT5hg

Instead, this is Biden’s plan.

As President Joe Biden meets with the top Republican leaders in Congress this week to discuss the debt ceiling in an effort to avoid a catastrophic default on the nation’s debt, he’s also preparing to take the fight directly to some of the rank-and-file GOP lawmakers whose votes could become crucial.
Biden’s planned campaign-style trip to suburban New York on Wednesday — a day after he meets with congressional leaders — is the latest move in a White House strategy to pressure House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., in the spending battle in the soft underbelly of his fragile majority: GOP House members in competitive districts Biden carried in November.
Biden is traveling to the Hudson River Valley district represented by Mike Lawler, a freshman Republican who defeated Democratic incumbent Sean Patrick Maloney in November. Lawler was one of five New York Republicans who managed to flip their seats in the midterm elections by zeroing in on inflation and crime, two key issues that hurt Democrats in the polls.
Lawler joined Republicans last month in rallying behind his party’s debt package, the McCarthy bill dubbed the Limit, Save, Grow Act, which would raise the debt limit, curb spending and repeal key pieces of Biden’s agenda.
“House Republicans that brand themselves as moderate lined up with the most extreme MAGA members on this vote, and we are making sure their constituents are aware of the true nature of their priorities,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt said. “It’s up to them whether they will continue to side with MAGA extremists or come together to ensure that the country avoids default.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/us/politics/biden-mccarthy-debt-limit-meeting.html

President Biden is set to welcome Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other top congressional leaders to the White House on Tuesday for a pivotal round of discussions about the nation’s taxes, spending and debt as a potentially catastrophic government default rapidly approaches.
The talks come just weeks before the United States is expected to run out of cash to pay its bills unless the nation’s borrowing cap is lifted. Like previous moments of brinkmanship, the discussions have echoes of 2011 and 2013, when congressional Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling unless a Democratic president agreed to curb federal spending and reduce budget deficits. The same dynamic is at play now, but with a crucial difference: The parties share almost no common ground on tax and spending proposals that are meant to reduce the growth of the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt.
The meeting is not expected to produce anything close to final agreement on a fiscal plan that could include raising the debt limit. But even small points of consensus could be hard to come by.
Mr. Biden wants to expand federal spending and reduce future debt, largely by raising taxes on high earners and large companies. Republicans have passed a bill to cut federal discretionary spending — a category that includes national parks, education and more — and cancel tax breaks for certain low-emission energy sources that were part of Mr. Biden’s signature climate law. Republicans have promised to extend the 2017 tax cuts that were approved by President Donald J. Trump and are set to expire at the end of 2025.
While both sides say they want to reduce the nation’s future debt burden, there is almost no overlap in how they aim to achieve that outcome. The only point of agreement so far is on the one thing Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy consider off limits in budget talks: Social Security and Medicare, the primary sources of projected federal spending growth in the decades to come.
The limit has been hit. What now? America hit its technical debt limit on Jan. 19. The Treasury Department will now begin using “extraordinary measures” to continue paying the government’s obligations. These measures are essentially fiscal accounting tools that curb certain government investments so that the bills continue to be paid. Those options could be exhausted by June.
What is at stake? Once the government exhausts its extraordinary measures and runs out of cash, it would be unable to issue new debt and pay its bills. The government could wind up defaulting on its debt if it is unable to make required payments to its bondholders. Such a scenario would be economically devastating and could plunge the globe into a financial crisis.
Can the government do anything to forestall disaster? There is no official playbook for what Washington can do. But options do exist. The Treasury could try to prioritize payments, such as paying bondholders first. If the United States does default on its debt, which would rattle the markets, the Federal Reserve could theoretically step in to buy some of those Treasury bonds.
Why is there a limit on U.S. borrowing? According to the Constitution, Congress must authorize borrowing. The debt limit was instituted in the early 20th century so that the Treasury would not need to ask for permission each time it had to issue debt to pay bills.
The gulf on fiscal issues is one of several complicating factors in discussions over the debt limit, which the government technically hit earlier this year. Officials have been employing what are essentially accounting maneuvers to keep paying all the government’s bills on time without going over the current $31.4 trillion limit. But Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, warned in a letter last week that those efforts will no longer be possible as soon as June 1, risking a debt default that economists warn could spawn a financial crisis and recession.
Mr. Biden has refused to negotiate directly over the limit, saying Republicans must vote to raise it without conditions, given that it simply allows the government to pay for spending that lawmakers in both parties have already approved. But he invited Mr. McCarthy and other congressional leaders to come to the White House on Tuesday for what he called a separate negotiation on fiscal policy — even though it is effectively linked to the debt limit drama.
Republicans say they will not raise the limit without significant curbs in spending. That is the same position they took in 2011 and 2013, under President Barack Obama, when Mr. Biden was vice president. They did not make similar demands to raise the limit when they controlled Congress at the start of Mr. Trump’s term and Republican votes helped to effectively raise the limit.
In 2011, Mr. Obama entered debt limit negotiations with a set of proposed spending cuts. They included a five-year freeze on discretionary spending not related to national security, a separate freeze on federal workers’ salaries for two years and the elimination of an air-to-air missile program and a fighting vehicle for the Marine Corps. Republicans countered with a budget that featured deep cuts to federal health care spending, privatizing Medicare for future beneficiaries and new tax cuts.
Republicans ultimately agreed to raise the debt limit in exchange for budget changes centered on caps on discretionary spending — essentially modifying and expanding the spending freeze Mr. Obama had proposed in his budget.
Unlike Mr. Obama more than a decade ago, Mr. Biden has never agreed with Republicans’ argument that federal spending has grown too large. He has proposed to scale back the growth in government debt, but his aides reject the Republican contention that the current path of the debt poses a significant threat to economic growth.
Mr. Biden’s most recent budget included $3 trillion in proposals to reduce future deficits. The savings would come largely from tax increases on the wealthy and big corporations, along with cutting government spending on health care by broadening Medicare’s ability to negotiate prescription drug prices.

wi65

God forbid they use the constitution to solve this. The idiots in the house wont even consider a stand alone bill.

Why Joe Biden Needs a Primary Challenger

To understand why progressives should challenge Joe Biden in the upcoming Democratic presidential primary, remember what happened during the last one.
When Bernie Sanders exited the 2020 race — after winning more than 1,000 delegates — he cashed in his votes for public policy clout. Mr. Sanders’s supporters joined Mr. Biden’s allies in working groups that crafted a common agenda on the economy, education, health care, criminal justice, immigration and climate change. From those task forces came what Barack Obama called “the most progressive platform of any major-party nominee in history.” And that progressivism continued into Mr. Biden’s presidency. One hundred days after he took office, The New York Times concluded that he had “moved leftward with his party, and early in his tenure is driving the biggest expansion of American government in decades.”
By challenging him from the left, Mr. Sanders didn’t only change Mr. Biden’s candidacy. He also made him a better president. But only on domestic policy. There was no joint working group specifically devoted to foreign affairs — and it shows. With rare exceptions, Mr. Biden hasn’t challenged the hawkish conventional wisdom that permeates Washington; he’s embodied it. He’s largely ignored progressives, who, polls suggest, want a fundamentally different approach to the world. And he’ll keep ignoring them until a challenger turns progressive discontent into votes.
Take China. America’s new cold war against Beijing may enjoy bipartisan support in Washington, but it doesn’t enjoy bipartisan support in the United States. According to an April Pew Research Center poll, only 27 percent of Democrats see China as an enemy — roughly half the figure among Republicans. In a December 2021 Chicago Council survey, two-thirds of Republicans — but less than four in 10 Democrats — described limiting China’s global influence as a very important foreign policy goal.
Grass-roots Democratic voters dislike the government in Beijing. But they oppose a new cold war for two key reasons. First, their top foreign policy priorities — according to an April Morning Consult poll — are combating climate change and preventing another pandemic. Treating China as an enemy undermines both. Second, they oppose higher military spending, which a new cold war makes all but inevitable.
But the Biden administration isn’t listening. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined the administration’s China policy in a speech last May, it took him 38 minutes to even mention climate or public health. As the Brookings Institution detailed last November, the growing animosity between the United States and China “pushes solutions to global challenges such as climate change, pandemic crises and nuclear proliferation farther out of reach.”
Mr. Biden isn’t listening to ordinary Democrats on military spending, either. In March, he proposed lavishing more on defense, adjusted for inflation, than the United States did at the height of the last Cold War.
China is not the only place where Mr. Biden’s policies more closely resemble Donald Trump’s than those desired by his party’s base. Despite polls early in Mr. Biden’s presidency showing that almost three-quarters of Democrats wanted him to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal that Mr. Trump exited, Mr. Biden refused to sign an executive order doing that. He instead made additional demands on Tehran, which prompted negotiations that squandered the final months of President Hassan Rouhani’s relatively moderate government. By the summer of 2021, Iran had a hard-line president, which made reviving the deal nearly impossible. Now Tehran is on the verge of being able to build a nuclear bomb.
A similar pattern characterizes Mr. Biden’s policy toward Cuba. When President Obama opened relations with the island, ordinary Democrats applauded. Then Mr. Trump reimposed sanctions, many of which Mr. Biden has kept. In so doing, according to Ben Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, Mr. Biden has chosen to “legitimize what Trump did by continuing it.”
Mr. Biden has mimicked his predecessor on Israel, too. Mr. Trump closed America’s consulate in East Jerusalem, which served the largely Palestinian half of the city. It remains closed. Mr. Trump shuttered the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington, the closest thing that Palestinians had to an embassy. It’s still shut. And despite polls showing that more Democrats now sympathize with the Palestinians than with Israel, the Biden administration will not even investigate whether Israel’s use of American weapons to abuse Palestinian human rights violates U.S. law.
There are exceptions to this pattern. Grass-roots Democrats generally support the administration’s Ukraine policy, which has twinned support for Kyiv with efforts to avoid direct confrontation with Moscow. And Mr. Biden fulfilled a progressive demand by withdrawing troops from Afghanistan — although that commendable decision now looks less like an effort to restrain American militarism than to redirect it toward China.
Overall, however, Mr. Biden’s foreign policy has been more hawkish than Mr. Obama’s, even as his domestic policy has been more progressive. Only a 2024 primary challenge offers any hope of changing that.
Long before Bernie Sanders ran for president, progressives had a long history of using primary challenges to convey their frustration with Democratic Party elites. By winning 42 percent of the vote in the 1968 New Hampshire primary, Eugene McCarthy exposed dissatisfaction with Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. In 2004, Howard Dean did something similar when he almost upset a Democratic field composed largely of legislators who had voted to invade Iraq. And although they both lost, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Dean each laid the groundwork for antiwar candidates — George McGovern in 1972 and Barack Obama in 2008 — who won the Democratic nomination four years later.
Foreign policy doesn’t motivate voters today in the way it did when American troops were dying in Vietnam and Iraq. But an outsider candidate need not do as well as Mr. McCarthy or Mr. Dean to show the Biden foreign policy team that it’s out of step with the party’s base.
And that challenger would enjoy other advantages. Close to half of Democratic voters think Mr. Biden should not run again, which makes him vulnerable to a challenger who mobilizes ideological discontent. That doesn’t mean a challenger would undermine Mr. Biden’s chances in the general election. Democrats — including supporters of Mr. Sanders’s insurgency — turned out for him in November 2020 because they were terrified of a Republican in the White House. They remain terrified today. Given the disillusionment with American military intervention coursing through the Trump-era G.O.P., a less confrontational foreign policy might even attract some on the political right.
A primary opponent would risk the Democratic establishment’s wrath. But he or she could put into circulation ideas that won’t otherwise get a hearing in official Washington: a joint U.S.-China initiative to support green energy in the developing world, a ban on U.S. policymakers cashing in with weapons makers and foreign governments once they leave office, the repeal of sanctions that immiserate ordinary people while entrenching rather than dislodging repressive regimes.
Mr. Biden’s presidency has a split personality. On domestic policy, he’s been the most progressive president since Lyndon Johnson. But on Israel, Cuba and Iran, he’s continued some of Mr. Trump’s dumbest and cruelest policies. On China, he’s leading the United States into a cold war that imperils public health, ecological survival and global peace. Next year’s election offers the best chance to make him change course. But only if some enterprising progressive puts foreign policy on the ballot.

T and R x 2, Ms. Benny!! 🙂 I’ll be damned if we aren’t on the same wavelength. Telepathy? I was getting set to open the Nest, and give you and jcb breathers. 🙂 In fact, the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/opinion/joe-biden-primary-challenger-foreign-policy.html, I was going to put in my opening statement. 🙂 Yeah, Beinart supported the Iraq Forever oil War, but this piece is worthy food-for-thought. You oughta check out the commentariat. The Gray Lady is getting lazy cos it’s the usual take on Progressives courtesy of non-paid interns and an algorithm.

He might need one but it’s extremely doubtful he will get one (at least a serious one).

Not voting for him. Only way I would change my mind is if the halfwit put a Progressive in as VP. Fat chance. 💩🤮

Israel demolishes Palestinian West Bank school

Israeli authorities demolished a Palestinian school in the occupied West Bank on Sunday, drawing harsh condemnation from the European Union.
COGAT, a branch of the Israeli military, said in a statement that the building, located about 2 km from Bethlehem, had been constructed illegally and “was found to be dangerous to the safety of anyone studying or otherwise visiting there,” and thus an Israeli court “had ordered it demolished.”
The European Union Delegation to the Palestinians, on its official Twitter account, said it was “appalled” by the school’s demolition, which it said would affect 60 Palestinian children. The demolition was “illegal under international law” and would “only increase the suffering of the Palestinian population and further escalate an already tense environment,” the EU delegation said.
COGAT said the building’s owner had refused several attempts by Israeli authorities to engage in dialogue over the status of the structure before the enforcement of the demolition.
Students and witnesses said the building had been brought to rubble with no trace of the school that once stood there.
“We got ready to come to school and when we arrived we didn’t find the school,” student Mohammed Ibrahim told Reuters. “We want a school today! We want to study, if they (Israeli forces) will keep demolishing, we will keep building.”
Witnesses also said the contents of the building had been confiscated.
“They demolished the school and they took everything with them,” a nearby resident and witness whose grandson was a student at the school Ismael Salah told Reuters. “All the furniture, they put them in trucks and took them.”
Israel has often cited a lack of building permits, which Palestinians and rights groups say are nearly impossible to obtain, in destroying Palestinian structures in the West Bank, an area it captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

Here’s what happens when you have crooked-to-the-max FRight politicos (Netanyaboob) linking up with Fundie (Judaism) religious kooks. Sound familiar? Why is my country still propping up this bad joke with my tax dollars?

wi65

Its the very same mindset that put cult-45 into office, Hopefully history wont repeat itself in 24.

https://www.pressherald.com/2023/05/08/lawsuit-yellen-should-ignore-unconstitutional-debt-limit/

A union of government employees on Monday sued Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and President Biden to try to stop them from complying with the law that limits the government’s total debt, which the lawsuit contends is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit comes just weeks before the government could default on the federal debt if Congress fails to raise the borrowing limit. Financial markets have become increasingly nervous about the potential for default, with economists warning that a failure to raise the debt limit could trigger a global financial crisis.
On Tuesday, Biden will meet with the top Republicans and Democrats in Congress to seek a potential breakthrough. The two sides remain far apart. Republicans have demanded steep spending cuts as the price of agreeing to raise the debt limit. Biden has argued that the debt ceiling, which applies to borrowing the government has already done, shouldn’t be used as leverage in budget talks.
The lawsuit, filed by the National Association of Government Employees, says that if Yellen abides by the debt limit once it becomes binding, possibly next month, she would have to choose which federal obligations to actually pay. Some analysts have argued that the government could prioritize interest payments on Treasury securities. That would ensure that the United States wouldn’t default on its securities, which have long been regarded as the safest investments in the world and are vital to global financial transactions.
But under the Constitution, the lawsuit argues, the president and Treasury secretary have no authority to decide which payments to make because the Constitution grants spending power to Congress. Doing so, it contends, would violate the Constitution’s separation of powers.
“Nothing in the Constitution or any judicial decision interpreting the Constitution,” the lawsuit states, “allows Congress to leave unchecked discretion to the President to exercise the spending power vested in the legislative branch by canceling, suspending, or refusing to carry out spending already approved by Congress.”
White House and Treasury Department spokespeople declined to comment on the lawsuit Monday.
The NAGE represents about 75,000 government employees who it says are at risk of being laid off or losing pay and benefits should Congress fail to raise the debt ceiling. The debt limit, currently $31.4 trillion, was reached in January. But Yellen has since used various accounting measures to avoid breaching it.
Last week, Yellen warned that the debt limit would become binding as early as June 1, much earlier than many analyses had previously predicted, because tax receipts have come in lower than projected.
Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard University, suggested that “it is possible that the Treasury Department would welcome the suit” because it expresses the view that “the ceiling is not a permissible bargaining tool for Congress to employ because it simply threatens to destroy the economy and hold the president hostage.”
Tribe has written a column in the New York Times expressing support for the idea that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. White House aides have explored the notion of having the president invoke the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says the “validity” of the public debt “shall not be questioned.”
How fast the lawsuit may advance through the legal system depends, in part, on the judge, Tribe noted. ”It could move extremely quickly,” he said. “It’s quite hard to predict.”
Richard Stearns, a federal judge who was nominated by President Bill Clinton, has been assigned to the case.
Norm Eisen, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, suggested that it may be “up to the Supreme Court to determine whether there is a constitutional option to resolve this hostage crisis.”
“If Congress is going to demonstrate this propensity for hostage taking,” Eisen said, then “a reallocation of authority in this dimension away from Congress” may be called for.
On Sunday, Yellen said there were “no good options” for the United States to avoid an economic “calamity” if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. Economists say the standoff has distorted financial markets. Since Yellen warned a week ago that the government could default on its debt as early as June 1, interest rates on one-month Treasury bills have been shooting higher. They reached 5.35% Monday, up from 4.12% a week earlier – an unusually sharp move.
That suggested that investors were shunning the one-month bills out of concern that they could suffer from a default. The one-month yield, in an unusual move, now exceeds the rates on all longer-dated Treasuries, including 10-year notes, which yield 3.49%. Typically, borrowers demand higher rates to lock up their money for longer periods. Rates on the 10-year have fallen because investors expect a recession later this year that would force the Federal Reserve to cut its benchmark rate.
“Markets are beginning to aggressively price in a potential default,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at tax advisory firm RSM. “The timing of an economic and financial crisis caused by the political authority could not be any worse.”
In the wake of three large bank failures in the past two months, Brusuelas, like many economists, thinks many banks are pulling back on lending to bolster their finances, a trend that could weaken the economy.
“A partial or full default would exacerbate those trends and result in a pullback in spending and investment by households and firms, as well as an increase in unemployment,” Brusuelas said. “It would almost surely tip the economy into a full-blown recession.”

Thank you, you beat me to it!

This is the usual FRightwingnut game vs. the DINOs. The House Repukes have no budget as usual. The whole debt ceiling BS got started around 1900. The Constitution doesn’t even have a debt ceiling plus the US. coins its own currency. Reliable sources are reporting that these jokers have already backed off on SS, Medicare, and the War/MICC cuts. Shame the MSM is too corrupted to point it out. 💩💩💩💩💩

wi65

The only 2 plans they(GQP) have is to take the $$$ from the National Russia(NRA) Assc and preserve the billionaire tax cuts, Other wise their as useless as screen doors on a submarine (to be polite)

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/03/illinois-to-become-first-state-to-prohibit-book-bans-00095151

Illinois is poised to become the first state to punish public institutions that ban books.
Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has said he supports a House bill that would withhold state funding from any of the state’s 1,600 public or school libraries that remove books from their shelves. It passed in the Illinois Senate on Wednesday, and Pritzker is expected to sign the legislation.
“In Illinois, we don’t hide from the truth, we embrace it and lead with it,” the governor said when the bill was first presented. “Banning books is a devastating attempt to erase our history and the authentic stories of many.”
The final version of House Bill 2789 passed the state Senate 39 to 19 after it was approved in March by the House on a 66 to 39 vote.
The impetus for the legislation came from newly elected Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, whose office oversees library systems and their funding. Giannoulias, a Democrat, said he couldn’t fathom that book banning is happening in 2023.
“It is so blatant, and so dangerous. I was blown away,” he told POLITICO.
Efforts to curb reading materials are “about restricting the freedom of ideas that certain individuals disagree with and that certain individuals think others should have access to,” he said.
Giannoulias says this legislation is the only one of its kind.
Illinois doles out some $62 million to libraries around the state each year, according to Giannoulias’ office.
“All these efforts to curb reading materials have absolutely nothing to do with books. They are about restricting the freedom of ideas that certain individuals disagree with and that certain individuals think others should have access to,” Giannoulias told POLITICO.
Republican lawmakers who oppose the legislation have argued that their goal is to make sure books distributed in public schools and libraries are age appropriate.
Republican state Sen. Jason Plummer on Wednesday called the legislation an example of Democrats “pushing an ideology on Illinois citizens, regardless of where they live or what they believe.”
He said it was “offensive to take away public funds from people whose taxes paid for these grants.”
Other Republicans raised questions about the bill possibly allowing libraries that don’t allow drag shows to reserve library meeting rooms to be penalized, which sponsors say are decisions that should be decided by librarians, not community members who oppose such groups.
Giannoulias disagrees with the idea that locals would lose control, saying local librarians “have the educational and professional experience to determine what’s in circulation. Let them decide.”
The bill says that in order for public libraries, including in public schools and universities, to remain eligible for grant funding, they must adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights or adopt their own written statement prohibiting the banning of books.
A library that doesn’t certify either of the statements, or takes the next step of banning a book, will not be eligible for grant funding from the secretary of state, according to the secretary’s office.
Giannoulias proposed the idea of banning book bans during his campaign last year and then approached Democratic state Rep. Anne Stava-Murray about following through with legislation. She had a special interest because a group of parents at a high school in her district demanded a book about a nonbinary person coming out — “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” by Maia Kobabe — be banned from the school district’s shelves. The parents called the book pornographic.
Members of the Proud Boys attended a school board meeting on the issue. After much debate, the book stayed, but the concerns lingered for Stava-Murray.
“The kids luckily stood up for the book. That community rallied around the kids,” Stava-Murray told POLITICO.

Question is will other states follow suit? American Library Association’s HQ is in Chicago, so they are working their state lobbyists. There is a downside to this, libraries in Southern Illinois may start disappearing, thus the librarians are stuck in the middle. But this gives them more license for decisions on which books to collect to engage readers and promote literacy too.

It’s already going down here thanks to Gov. Showboating/ mini-stupid Fascist and his Tallahassee goon squad. These books will spread cos of the psychological Forbidden Fruit aspect.
Let me tell ya, DeShitface doesn’t have much longer. 💩💩

There aren’t enough people in the US Senate who live like, think like and look like the people they’re supposed to represent. My Great-Grandma told me, “if you don’t like something, go farther and do better.” I’m proud to say I’m running for the Senate. Let’s go farther together. pic.twitter.com/uIyO9ARbck
— Angela Alsobrooks (@AlsobrooksForMD) May 9, 2023

Very sad. So young.

This is awful, awful news. I had the opportunity once to interview David and see and hear his passion and I hope he rests in power. My condolences to Glenn and their kids. https://t.co/DpDplzKMy8
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 9, 2023

Man, 38 years young. I bet it was the Big C. Makes oldies like me stop and reflect. 😔