Regulatory strip-mining

I haven’t heard that Congress is back from its August recess. When they come back they have only until the end of the month to fund the government for the next fiscal year. More than a week ago Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported that the House Freedom Caucus will disrupt it any way they can. One way they might disrupt the month is to try to force a vote on the impeachment of Biden. An impeachment report was issued in mid August. Of course, whatever charges it might hold are bogus. Speaker Johnson hoped it would be ignored – thank the report’s authors and move on. But the Freedom Caucus said, nope. We must have a vote. And they have ways to force one.

The rest of the GOP accepts reality: Forcing a vote would be a distraction at best, and would more likely piss off voters. It could very well motivate progressive voters to turn out for downballot Democrats running against vulnerable Republicans, and would make MAGA voters mad at any GOP representatives who vote against it. It is absolutely a lose-lose scenario for Republicans, and Democrats are totally here for it. ... Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida has one message for the House hard-liners: Bring it on. "Call the vote. They should do that. That vote is a paved road to the minority," Moskowitz said, noting that there are plenty of Republicans who "have never wanted to do the vote." But if GOP House members do vote for impeachment, he continued, Senate Democrats should “call their bluff” and have a trial. “We should make them own it, every day on TV.” "If they want to show that their top issue is impeaching Joe Biden, a lame-duck president, then we should make them own it. We're not going to go on the defense, we're going to go on the offense," Moskowitz said.

Also from last week Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about another playbook for the next Republican administration that isn’t getting much coverage but is at least as bad as Project 2025. This one is put out by the America First Policy Institute. It’s goal is to crush Biden’s regulations and executive orders to erase almost everything he did. As expected, the biggest beneficiary of these efforts would be Big Oil. And they want to overturn regulations even though under Biden America has reached record production of both gas and oil, producing more crude than any country in history.

To make this regulatory strip-mining happen as quickly as possible, AFPI is reportedly preparing over 100 executive orders for Trump that would blow away much of the work done under Biden. And to make sure that there are no holdouts actually concerned with protecting the environment, safety, or labor, the plan overlaps Project 2025 in efforts aimed at replacing current officials and experts with industry lobbyists. Just think of when Trump named coal-industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to run the Environment Protection Agency. Times a thousand.

Project 2025 is about the federal government. This AFPI plan also has components to wreck regulations at the state level. This state focus is what makes it worse than Project 2025. AFPI says it is all about putting “the interests of the American people first.” That’s the kind of misdirection Republicans like to use a lot. They try to get us to believe “the American people” means only the Big Oil companies. In a third article from a week ago Kos of Kos wrote that big media is playing by rules from decades ago. They assume politicians are boring and small slips should be treated as important. Infidelity used to be a big story (See Gary Hart in 1988) and ended campaigns. The nasty guy changed both of those. He also changed the dignity of the presidency by treating it as a source of grift, He frequently doesn’t speak intelligently and is in mental decline from age. Media would report every detail if a Democrat did it (and did for Biden’s age), but ignore it for the nasty guy. In addition, news outlets are supposed to be good at fact checking. But Kos showed several recent incidents where fact checking failed and outlets published false and misleading statements.

Republicans and independents have long soured on the media, but liberals have finally been s--- on enough to give up defending it. According to Gallup data released in early 2024, the share of Democrats rate “the honesty and ethical standards of journalists” highly or very highly has plummeted from over 50% in 2018, to just 34% recently—and the trend is down, down, down. ... On Thursday [last week], Harris and Walz will hold a sit-down interview with CNN. But that’s unlikely to stop the media’s demand for undue deference. And the sooner liberals surrender giving that power to the Beltway media, the better we’ll all be.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary. One item:

"We're nine weeks away from election day, and things are looking up for Kamala Harris. In the latest USA Today-Suffolk University Nerds Gummy Clusters poll, Harris leads Trump 48 percent to 43 percent. Forty-eight percent—that really restores my faith in almost half of humanity. But because of the electoral college, the election might come down to just seven states: Michigan, Wisconsin, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance." —Stephen Colbert