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We’re almost two months into the new House GOP majority and what do they have to show for it? A lot of sham investigations, vengeful symbolic votes, and pretending to work.
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Showcasing their extremely intelligent plan of calling anything they don’t like “woke,” the House GOP has recently taken aim at a Department of Labor regulation that allows retirement plans to consider environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) factors when investing on behalf of the plan’s participants. To be clear: it doesn’t tell fiduciaries that they must prioritize ESG investments, just that they can. Even that is offensive to the baby-brained Republicans of 2023, because it overturns a Trump rule that explicitly tried to prohibit those kinds of investments.
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They’re bringing that foolproof strategy to their ongoing debt-limit extortion scheme.For instance: House GOP appropriators are planning to potentially bar local projects entirely from the fiscal year 2024 omnibus spending bill to fund government operations if they are deemed “woke.” I wish I were kidding, but I am not. The government-funding and debt-limit bills are distinct from one another, but Republicans intend to use the threat of forcing the United States into artificial bankruptcy to try to extort Democrats into voting for an annual budget that they’d never otherwise vote for.
- The Labor-Health and Human Services-Education appropriations bill as well as a smaller Financial Services measure are on the chopping block, and sources attributed that move at least in part over “concern” regarding earmarks including several LGBTQ and transgender service-related projects targeted by Republicans and conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, though House Appropriations Chair Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX) did not respond for comment.
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But has the House GOP done any, you know, legislating? Hahahaha.
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House Republicans still haven’t passed two of their “first week” priorities regarding abortion and immigration, because they can’t get the votes. Can I get a “Republicans in Disarray” anyone? Because the Republican Party is inherently antagonistic to the very idea of government, it’s no surprise that they have used their new razor-thin majority to put federal-government employees in their crosshairs. Congressional Republicans have begun a push to increase scrutiny of civil servants who keep the government running. Since House Speaker Kevin McCarthy took the gavel, House Republicans have been on a mission to slash and burn various federal agencies and even made a rule granting themselves the power to reduce the salaries of individual employees with a single vote. But since they only control one half of Congress, and only barely, this kind of aggrieved pseudo legislation has gone nowhere.
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Now, with all of their histrionic whining, has the GOP House majority managed to pass any substantive legislation? A single law at all? No! Of course not. Despite their laughable protests to the contrary, Republicans haven’t “delivered” anything. But the newly-formed House Judiciary Committee chaired by über clown Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has started issuing subpoenas to agency heads and mid-level career employees of the federal government. Republican leaders have told nearly all of their committees to draft plans by March to slash spending and increase oversight of federal agencies within their jurisdiction.
If there were any doubts that the Republican Party is deeply committed only to an agenda of grievance-based investigations and defunding essential public services, the House GOP has eliminated them.
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Roughly 84 million Americans are covered by Medicaid, and the program now covers 20 million more people than it did before the pandemic. As states begin checking their residents’ eligibility for Medicaid for the first time in three years, as many as 14 million people could lose access to that vital coverage. At the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government prohibited states from kicking people off Medicaid even if their eligibility had lapsed, but that program is coming to an end. More than half of U.S children receive healthcare through Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Their eligibility retention remains more secure, between 80 and 90 percent of children will still receive care through those programs, even if their parent is no longer Medicaid-eligible. Nine states, almost all of which are GOP-led, will begin the process of purging people from the Medicaid rolls as soon as next month. This includes Arkansas, under the brilliant leadership of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR), despite the fact that over one-third of her state is on Medicaid. Republican governors and state legislatures are working to boot as many people from the program as quickly as possible, because cruelty is a cornerstone of their ideology!
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Let’s move across the pond to the country whose government has been so dysfunctional lately it almost (almost) makes us feel better about how things are going in the U.S. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak struck a deal with the European Union today regarding post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland, saying it will pave the way for a new chapter in the U.K.’s relationship with the bloc. The Republic of Ireland remains a member of the European Union. Sunak said the two sides have agreed to remove “any sense of a border” between Britain and its province, which is making a lot of people mad on all sides. The deal seeks to resolve the tensions caused by the Northern Ireland protocol, a complex agreement that set the trading rules for the British-ruled region that Britain agreed to before it left the European Union. Sunak rushed to iron out the terms of the new deal ahead of the 25th anniversary of the landmark Good Friday Agreement. There is speculation that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson could oppose the deal within Parliament. But if the deal succeeds, it will strengthen Sunak and the Conservative Party’s control over the government.
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