Hey hey! The United States federal government continues to function, at least for 48 more days. Yesterday Speaker Kevin McCarthy reversed himself, agreed with the Democrats in the House to pass a mostly clean stopgap spending bill that continues funding the federal government through November 17. The House needed a two-thirds vote to suspend the rules and pass this last-minute measure; the roll call vote cleared three quarters, with 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans, including South Dakota’s problem-solving Congressman Dusty Johnson, agreeing with Dusty’s statement earlier this week that lawmakers should be “mature” and “responsible” and avoid a “stupid” and wasteful shutdown.
But the money quote comes from Nebraska Republican Congressman Don Bacon, who says the sudden deal came from folks getting tired of malarkey:
“There was an outcry from rank-and-file that want a [continuing resolution]. We’re tired of f***ing around with these whack jobs. They voted against it yesterday, so let’s just put up a clean CR,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), among those who had repeatedly pushed for the speaker to ignore his right flank [Sarah Ferris and Jordain Carney, “House GOP Stunner: Spending Patch Passes with Mostly Dem Votes,” Politico, 2023.09.30 ].
Let’s hope Bacon’s Schoenbeckian sensibility persists and he and his fellow Republicans continue to work with Democrats to shut out the destructive shouts of the extremist Trumpist fringe of their party.
The stopgap spending bill includes $16 billion in federal disaster assistance that the White House requested but not the President’s $6 billion aid package to Ukraine. That omission was the reason for the sole Democratic vote against the spending bill. President Joe Biden signed the bill last night. He said yay for keeping government workers on the job and fully paid and for getting back to the deal the Speaker agreed to months ago:
Tonight, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans. This bill ensures that active-duty troops will continue to get paid, travelers will be spared airport delays, millions of women and children will continue to have access to vital nutrition assistance, and so much more. This is good news for the American people.
But I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place. Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis. For weeks, extreme House Republicans tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans. They failed [President Joe Biden, press release, 2023.09.30].
And the President and members of Congress from both parties are signaling their intent to advance that Ukraine aid soon:
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made assurances that funding for Ukraine aid remains a priority.
“We will not stop fighting for more economic and security assistance for Ukraine. Majorities in both parties support Ukraine aid, and doing more is vital for America’s security and for democracy around the world,” he said after the Senate’s passage.
There is certainly some Republican appetite to see that happen, too.
“Most Senate Republicans remain committed to helping our friends on the front lines,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said earlier in the night. And Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he expected Ukraine aid to be included in the full year appropriations that Congress is set to complete later this year.
…As the bill headed to the Senate floor Saturday evening, there were widespread expectations on Capitol Hill that a Ukraine-related vote would occur next week, given deep support in the Senate.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, when asked about the lack of fresh Ukraine money in the bill, said “we have to get to work on this issue” and suggested there would be a vote as soon as Monday.
“House Republicans will have a choice in the next few days when we reconvene on Monday [Jennifer Haberkorn, Jonathan Lemire, and Sam Stein, “Shutdown Averted, White House Prepares to Fight for Ukraine Aid,” Politico, 2023.09.30].
As with shutting down the government, letting Putin roll unchecked into Eastern Europe to destroy democracies is the agenda of a few whack jobs around with whom we ought no longer f***. Speaker McCarthy should take advantage of the bipartisan problem-solving momentum that averted a government shutdown and put Ukraine aid and maybe a few other bipartisan ideas up for clean votes before the whack jobs float the motion to vacate the chair that Congressman Matt Gaetz promised.
Of course, if you want government to keep operating reliably, you could stop depending on the last-minute conversions of a Republican speaker and just elect more Democrats to run things.
Another war, another Dem president.
When does it all end?
Billions of aid unaccounted for and you want to give them a blank check?
Let Europe fight this border war.
Let America fight our own border war.
The United States is not at war with anyone on its borders. Ukraine is fighting for its survival.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, Republican President George HW Bush mobilized an international coalition and put American pilots in the air and boots on the ground to expel the invader and preserve the principle of national sovereignty. President Joe Biden is properly upholding the same principle with far less American investment and no U.S. troops on the ground or in Ukrainian or Russian airspace.
The billions of aid is well accounted for. Look at the map: Ukraine continues to exist as an independent nation, and Russian troops are being held to a slowly but steadily shrinking portion of eastern Ukraine.
Let’s keep working to defend Ukrainian democracy and turn back Russian aggression against the West. Putin is a far greater threat to American national security than the numerous young able-bodied workers crossing the Mexican border to help the American economy.
We are being invaded. Period
The United States Constitution is the finest instrument ever created by the human hand. The Preamble is the body, the Bill of Rights is the neck, the Amendments are the strings. It is a fluid universal execution of human and civil rights.
It’s time for all Americans to enjoy the protection of law by being part of one nation: erase the artificial borders and grant Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to all the people of North America…Mexico, Central America, Canada, even the Caribbean if they’ll have us.
I’m not a New World Order guy, don’t support the North American Union (god bless you. please, mr. roddenberry) and I believe the US Constitution is a big enough canvas in order to paint a more perfect masterpiece, a big enough score for all to sing. No violence. No more drug wars.
Read Alaska’s constitution some time. The last states ratified are the most egalitarian. Let’s debate it then draft a dream referendum to be delivered by and for the people of Mexico to dissolve their constitution and petition for Statehood as our 52nd State. Quebec could be the 53rd and Cuba, the 54th.
The United States is the Hamiltonian Empire Thomas Jefferson warned us about. Resistance is futile.
Sí, se puede.
Trump worshipping outlaw motorcycle gangs traffic the bulk of fentanyl and meth in the US. Hells Angels, Bandidos, Sons of Silence and other OMGs own property in the Black Hills area to serve as bases of operation for sex and meth trafficking much of it through what appear to be legitimate businesses but New Mexico is hardly immune from gang activity. Albuquerque is the very definition of free market trickle down economics where the Trump supporters trade firearms to the cartels and splay vengeance on the rank and file thugs on the streets when profits lag.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, Republican President George HW Bush assured Hussein the US didn’t care if Iraq inaded Kuwait and then later hired a PR firm to get a Kuwaiti woman to swear Iraqi soldiers were throwing babies out of incubators to rile up American support.
I cant wait for an outerspace alien invasion, rendering all human contrived borders useless.
Putin won. The GQP is the party of the Kremlin.
“Had the great Maya Angelou been alive to witness Saturday’s climax of the omnishambolic dog’s breakfast of a misbegotten legislative process that took place in the U.S. House of Representatives, surely she would have said, “When a political party tells you over and over again that they have no higher priority than serving Vladimir Putin, believe them.”
Then, again, it didn’t take the genius of Ms. Angelou to get the message. At the critical moment at which they had one last chance to avert a government shutdown, when Republicans in the House were forced to abandon all of their legislative priorities but one, the one they chose to ditch was the vital U.S. aid to Ukraine. In so doing, they sent the world an unmistakable signal once again that the first and guiding loyalty of Donald Trump’s GOP is as it always has been to the Kremlin.”
. . .
“But something had to be given to the far right. The GOP needed some concession to make it seem as though their childish games had all been worth it. What did they choose? What was the one thing they said would be the last hill they would die on, the one issue so important to them that they would turn out the lights of the U.S. government to defend their position? It was to defund Ukraine aid. It was to settle for, in the words of progressive commentator Josh Marshall, “one sloppy kiss with Vladimir Putin.” ”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/all-that-drama-and-house-republicans-only-win-was-for-the-kremlin?ref=home
LCJ forgets about Ike. With Eisenhower at the helm, we got the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and Iran. All of these still are with us today. Naw, you must remember the coup’s and the Vietnam War that was put on JFK’s lap along with the Iranian Coup. What about Ronnie? Yeah, we got Iran Contra and drugs, a whole lot of drugs.
LCJ is the Putin wing of a party that knows little or anything about US history. They only know they hate brown people unless they are Saudi’s.
LCJ makes a good point about borders. ‘We’ pick and choose which ones are more important. I have been reading that rape (rape of immigrants by immigrants) is a problem at the border.
I personally think all of north america, US, Canada and central anerican down to panama should be one big country, but good luck getting that organized, and keeping it organized.
LCJ sounds off like a fool who can’t read a demographic pyramid. The US is short 400,000 employees and college students, annually. The shortages become worse every year until about 2034 when the worker shortage is 900,000 annually. Since LCJ cannot create 20-40 year olds out of thin air, immigration is the only means to address the worker shortfall.
Nations like Japan, S Korea, Germany, China are in a demographic hole that they likely will not recover from. LCJ would have the US similarly decline.
In Spain, “America” is all of North America, Central America and South America combined. “Waldseemüller labeled the part of the world that he envisioned as explored by Vespucci, America, feminizing the Latin form of Vespucci’s given name, Americus. He chose the feminine form to be consistent with the Latinized names of other countries at the time, such as Europa and Asia. It was geographer Gerardus Mercator who extended the name America to include all of the Western Hemisphere.”
LCJ – YOU are being outworked. That’s your problem.
It was the cowardly LCJ isolationist ideas that created
the conditions for WW2.
Liz Cheney brings a historical point. “The issue of funding for Ukraine is not a small one. Former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) noted that it was on September 30, 1938, that British prime minister Neville Chamberlain announced he would not stand in the way of Adolf Hitler’s annexation of the Sudentenland, a key move in Hitler’s rise. “Members of the House and Senate who are voting to deny Ukraine assistance on the 85th anniversary of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 “peace in our time” speech should read some history,” she wrote. “Appeasement didn’t work then. It won’t work now.””
To putin lovers like LCJ, appeasement is their orgasim and white supremacy is their whore.
Thanks be for Mr. Dusty.
Mr. Dusty’s main drawback is is Republican denotation: it puts the crazies who share that denotation into the “majority,” and forces him to lean into that dangerous craziness get along. Mr Dusty (and many more Republicans) have to either take back their party and push out the crazies, or abandon the party to the crazies. Governance has no place with the political terrorists he aligns with now. So I agree with grudznick in this moment and am thankful a few Republicans interested in governing swapped over to the Democrat party that is also interested in governing for this vote. One will need to ask the big question at some point: why must I always align wit the “opposition” party anytime anything needs to get done?
How about let’s fund the people of the US to improve our society by maintaining a dynamic free market?
Ukraine should be vacated.
It only helps China agitate their biggest geopolitical adversary.
Our country has carried water for China for over 100 years and through 5 (or more) wars, all of which benefitted China in ways that could not have been anticipated by the meat-head leadership of the time.
Thanks to AJ et al, the collective IQ of our nation’s strongest and most dedicated citizens has gone up (iodine, nutrition, consuming non-fluoridated water).
larry kurtz, you are correct!!!! I lived in San Bernardino in the late 70’s to the early 90s. My bro was a SB county deputy (the largest land wise in the U.S.) and meth was made in the mountains, desert, and anywhere you can imagine. Easy to pack while traveling by bike so I’m sure they still bring it. Our governor thinks it all comes from Mexico however gangs make their own. I taught 2nd grade in Colton and we saw a huge increase in “meth kids”, those who were conceived while parent/parents were on meth. High increase in ADD, neurological issues, delayed learning, and a host of other issues. Similar to FAS.
The Hells Angels, Bandidos, Diablos, and others lived all over the area. They made their annual pilgrimage to the hills where they could wear their colors in public and do things they could not get away with in California. Many had dual residency, and unfortunately fathered many children, some used in sex trafficking.
Makes me sick that our governor promotes “the rally” as a Christian and family event.
Send immigrant families to Mobridge like they did for Huron years ago.
I was served a meal at the local Moose Lodge and the server/cook/buslady just turned 92 years old. She was struggling to move the cart and I so wanted to help her. This is the best we have to offer.
Lumberyard was closed Friday and Saturday because the owners wife was sick. Is this anyway to run a business?
Restaurants all closed on Sunday and many on Monday for lack of workers. That really bothers the church crowd off, they were good business.
Our school is combined with Pollock but we still had fewer students last year and had to lay off staff.
Send immigrant families!!!!
I don’t understand how the natural movement of people, which has occurred throughout human history, constitutes war. Humans are mobile animals who migrate. Our species migrated out of various lands and into various lands as a result of our biology and environmental factors. Did the Germans who moved to Pennsylvania and the Midwest declare “war” on the US? No. Same with the Irish, the Swedes, the Norwegians. Yes, I understand that there was an invasion and a war. It was waged by certain European peoples who colonized what was land occupied by indigenous peoples. When I look at the people who are coming across the southern border, they look like they have indigenous traits. Yes, they speak Spanish, because they were colonized down South, too, and rape and ilove and ntermixing happened there as in the northern colonies Get the hell over it. Grow up.
I agree we need to have better control over the migration. What’s happening now is partly due to climate factors and economic distress, but it is also driven by crime and gangs. But saying it’s “a war” just shows how stupid some people are.
You know, Benjamin Franklin, a prominent founder of our nation, thought the Germans were a problem. He wanted them gone, or limited, in Pennsylvania, but he also encouraged the slave trade through purchasing slaves for his household. Franklin lived long enough to become wise enough to discard his prejudices and to free his slaves. Will the Trumpettes who blare out their stupidity and their racism on Dakota Free Fress ever be able to find wisdom?
A feather in the cap of Rep. Johnson who serves as a Junior Whip for McCarthy. He and other McCarthy operatives limited the Freedom Caucus vote to less than 5% of the House. Now…we must find Ukraine!!!
Hello V! The Ozarks in Missouri are experiencing a xylazine epidemic driven by the Pagan Motorcycle Club territory overlapping with HAMC and the State Police are bracing for violence.
Fund Ukraine. 91 Republicans voted against keeping the Government open and functioning…24 associated closely with the Freedom Caucus, others mostly Sun Belt Whack O’s joined by fellow tin hat wearers from the Mountain and Mid West. The Boom has busted. Saner heads are prevailing. The Wrestling Coach who’s “investigating” President Biden on the losing side of this one as well.
REMEMBER ALL Germans from Russia
are UKRAINIANS !
John Dale, Vacating Ukraine does not = freedom of any sort. Surrendering one’s resources to a bully is not how a free market works.
Too bad the pundits here supporting open immigration aren’t using their vast knowledge to run New York State and New York City whose Democrat governor and mayor are both crying to do something about the border.
Mark, thank you for joining our celebration of Republicans’ accession to Democratic good sense and keeping the government open.
The problems New York is having taking care of an influx of immigrants would be largely solved if we had a more open immigration policy that made it easier to enter the country legally and obtain work permits. Expand the federal government: hire more immigration officers, establish more legal border crossings, process entry applications more quickly. If we handed work visas to all those new arrivals in New York City, most of them would go out and get the jobs they came to find and disappear from the shelters and public assistance rolls.
Even conservative Mark agrees that the solution to our problem is more action by the big federal government. He just doesn’t recognize the right action to solve the real problem.
Hey, Abbott. – Send more free busloads of workers to Colorado. We’ve got work to do, you damn fool.
Should the US have a rational immigration policy? Of course. But try getting a rational immigration policy through Tiny Johnson’s magarats in congress. So, absent a rational policy, a border free-for-all is as good as it gets.
Glimpse at China to begin understanding the cascading social and economic effects of a declining population. The effects transcend China because its economy is the world’s 2d largest. One can view the ‘Cliff Notes’ version from Peter Zeihan’s work. Here is a more specific version from the Aussie broadcaster and Cold Fusion.
Remember that history moves slowly, then suddenly all at once. It’s impossible to forecast the tipping point time or event. Rest assured the tipping point is coming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meJItedDm2Y and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qDIkbCTf8A
Can we also pound another nail in the NAFTA coffin? Not only did this TERRIBLE plan destroy US manufacturing, it did not fulfill the promise of making the countries that took those jobs stable to the point that it would stop economic refugees flooding north. Business is not the answer to social problems; greed and wealthy grabbing of money does not make life better as a whole.