Tag Archives: GOP

national news

COVID relief stalled by obstructionist

1 Comment

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Ron Johnson has joined the Ted Cruz Caucus of GOP Kooks.

Yes, the Republican U.S. senator from Wisconsin is stalling the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package because … well, I don’t know what he is basing his objection.

I guess the senator thinks it’s too expensive. But is it? Really?

Ron Johnson grinds Senate to halt, irritating many (msn.com)

The pandemic that the relief bill attacks has claimed more than 520,000 American lives. It has put millions of Americans out of work. It has caused untold misery, grief and mourning.

Sen. Johnson is stalling the bill because he wants senators to read it aloud, word for word. Why? Beats the hell out of me!

This man is nuts. He is an obstructionist extraordinaire in the mold of Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas GOP moron who once stalled the government by reading “Green Eggs and Ham” on the floor of the Senate.

Oh, meanwhile, Americans continue to suffer. They continue to get sick. They keep dying. All the while, Ron Johnson is stalling a wildly popular relief bill that will put money in Americans’ pockets and ensure unemployment insurance for those Americans who need help while they seek new jobs.

Utterly disgraceful.

medical news

ACA gets new life

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

You might recall when Congress approved the Affordable Care Act. Then-Vice President Joe Biden warmed up the podium for President Obama and then whispered a remark got on a hot mic.

“This is a big fu**ing deal,” Biden said. Obama signed the bill into law and then commenced a decade-long fight with congressional Republicans who wanted to kill it. They never came up with an alternative. They never sought to improve the ACA. They wanted it wiped off the books. Why? Because the law had President Barack Obama’s name on it.

Donald Trump was the top GOP cheerleader, but he never had an alternative, either. Now he’s gone. Democrats control both legislative chambers. VP Biden is now the president.

And the ACA is still a big … deal.

Improvements to it are contained in a COVID relief bill that the House has approved. It’s now in the Senate and is likely to pass narrowly.

The New York Times reports: Now the Biden administration and a Democratic Congress hope to engineer the first major repair job and expansion of the Affordable Care Act since its passage. They plan to refashion regulations and spend billions through the stimulus bill to make Obamacare simpler, more generous and closer to what many of its architects wanted in the first place.

At Last, Democrats Get Chance to Engineer Obamacare 2.0 (msn.com)

The link I have attached to this blog post goes into detail what Democrats have in mind.

Suffice to say that the ACA isn’t perfect. Its rollout was a disaster. However, it has managed to provide health insurance to millions of Americans. Barack Obama always stated he would welcome improvements to the law.

Republicans who controlled the White House and Congress had their chance to produce an alternative to law they despised. They failed. Now it’s Democrats’ turn. Perhaps they can deliver the goods to Americans who continue to support the act, no matter how much venom is spewed by its foes.

Uncategorized

‘Unity’ still awaits POTUS

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden’s quest for national unity keeps finding speed bumps.

He’s hitting many of the right notes, but a month into the presidency he continues to encounter Republican resistance. GOP senators aren’t exactly embracing many of his selections for the Cabinet. One of them, budget director nominee Neera Tanden, is likely to be derailed.

National unity, though, isn’t entirely based on whether a president enjoys a full-blown honeymoon with Congress. It also reveals whether the POTUS enjoys widespread support among the population. That, too, seems to be a bit of a stretch, given polling that suggests some still dark impulses among GOP voters.

Most of the GOP voting public still seems to believe that President Biden “stole” the election from Donald Trump. That really troubles the daylights out of me. Trump continues to divide the nation by perpetuating The Big Lie about the integrity of the 2020 election and it undermines any serious effort to bridge the divide between the major political parties.

So, the search for unity goes on and on.

I am pulling for the president to find the common ground he seeks with Congress. Attaining that commonality will go a long way toward uniting the nation that all of them — President Biden and the 535 members of Congress — govern together.

Donald Trump once infamously proclaimed that “I, alone” can fix the nation’s problems. I don’t believe we will hear that kind of boastfulness from Joe Biden. He knows that teamwork requires giving and taking.

As for the nagging doubt that lingers in the minds of those who voted for Trump about the integrity of the election that Biden won — fairly and squarely — the president might just have to rely on the passage of time to let their fervor subside.

Meanwhile, the quest for unity continues.

Good luck, Mr. President. I am in your corner.

Uncategorized

Garland: an impressive presence

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Surely I am not the only red-blooded American patriot who watched U.S. Attorney General-designate Merrick Garland’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee to have this thought.

It was that he would make a terrific U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Oh, but wait … he could’ve gotten there had the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate not blocked his confirmation in 2016 after President Barack Obama nominated him to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Oh well. Garland will make a stellar AG by employing the same temperament that would have served him well as a SCOTUS justice.

Uncategorized

Is the ‘big tent’ folding?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Republicans are proud to proclaim their party as a “big tent” organization that welcomes all ideas, all points of view.

Why, then, are state GOP leaders rebuking some of the seven Republican U.S. senators who voted to convict Donald Trump of inciting an insurrection during the Senate trial that acquitted him of the allegations?

Sens. Richard Burr, Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey, Bill Cassidy and Ben Sasse have been censured by their states’ Republican Party. Sens. Mitt Romney and Susan Collins so far have avoided such a rebuke. So far!

Sen. John Thune has come to the defense of his GOP colleagues, chastising the state parties for their actions against the senators. He notes that the party prides itself on welcoming diverse opinions.

According to Newsweek: “There was a strong case made. People could come to different conclusions. If we’re going to criticize the media and the left for cancel culture, we can’t be doing that ourselves,” Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, told the Associated Press.

Republicans Hit Back at GOP Censures of Senators Who Voted to Convict Trump (msn.com)

There you go. Is the GOP a “big tent party” or not? If it is, then the tent appears to be collapsing over them.

This matter reminds me of the kind of thing you hear on university campuses when conservative thinkers are asked to give speeches to student bodies. How many times over the years have you heard about faculty senates and student council leaders demanding that their schools rescind the invitation because they don’t want to hear what the guest has to say.

I am compelled to ask when that rejection occurs: Aren’t colleges and universities supposed to welcome diversity of thought?

This intraparty squabble only exemplifies what many of us have thought for some time, that the GOP’s big tent is open only to those who adhere to a certain kind of thought, or are loyal only to certain individuals.

national news

Trump goes to ‘war’

1 Comment

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald John Trump no longer occupies the White House. He is the first-ever U.S. president to be twice impeached. He escaped conviction both times, but his reputation is scarred forever.

Does that silence the former president? Does it consign him to the back of the room where he would sit silently?

Hardly. He is now going after Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in a personal, insulting and denigrating way.

I guess the two no longer are the pals they became after Trump got elected in 2016. I mean, all McConnell did for Trump was delay a Supreme Court confirmation until after Trump took office in 2017, enabling him to nominate Neil Gorsuch to the seat that should have gone to Merrick Garland. If Trump had an ounce of gratitude in his overfed body, he would realize he owes McConnell bigly for that opportunity.

Trump, in Scorching Attack on McConnell, Urges G.O.P. to Replace Him (msn.com)

No, he’s angry now because McConnell managed to tell us what he should have said long ago, which is that Trump provoked the riot that damn near could have resulted in harm to Vice President Mike Pence. McConnell did cast a not guilty vote in the Senate trial, but then kinda/sorta walked it back by saying he voted that way on a technicality.

Hey, I am not going to shed any tears for McConnell. I figure he can hold his own against the numbskull ex-president. Besides, I think he’s acted in a detestable manner, just not for the reasons that Trump cited in his lengthy statement.

Donald Trump has just shown us — as if we needed reminding — that he is going to keep flapping his yapper.

education news, local news, national news, Sports news

GOP can’t face truth?

(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The TV cameras didn’t allow us to watch the members of the U.S. Senate jury that heard the arguments presented by the House of Reps’ managers prosecuting the case against Donald J. Trump.

The managers wrapped up their presentation today in the second impeachment trial of Trump, who is accused of inciting an insurrection. It occurred on Jan. 6. The mob stormed Capitol Hill seeking to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results.

Some reporting from the Senate, though, takes me back to something I witnessed in early 2019 in Amarillo, while covering a school board meeting. I’ll get to that in a second.

The Senate reporting tells us how Republican senators looked away from the hideous video of the riot presented by the House managers. They were seen doodling on note pads, leaving the Senate altogether, looking away, not paying attention to what senators were asked to watch. Why is that? They appear to be hiding from the reality of the ghastly insurrection for which Donald Trump stands accused of inciting.

In January 2019, my wife and I traveled back to Amarillo — where we lived for 23 years — to visit our son. The Amarillo public school district’s board was meeting one night. The board had just received a resignation letter from a high school girls volleyball coach, Kori Clements, who accused one of the school trustees of bullying her and of interfering in her coaching decisions. The trustee’s daughter played on the high school team and she believed the coach wasn’t giving her little darlin’ enough playing time.

The school board had a public hearing one evening. Residents were invited to speak to the board about the coach’s resignation, which caused quite an uproar in the community.

Every one of the residents who spoke to the board scolded them for the way the coach was treated. They admonished the trustee in question — Renee McCown, who has since resigned — for her conduct in pressuring the coach, forcing her to resign from a vaunted high school athletic program.

Where am I going with this? McCown never looked up from whatever she was looking at while her bosses — the taxpayers — were scolding her; nor did her board colleagues. They all should have looked them in the eye. I thought at the time it was a disgraceful display of arrogance. And I said so.

Trustees should have looked at those who scolded them | High Plains Blogger

The same sort of arrogance played out in the Senate as GOP senators didn’t bother to look at the horror that an ex-president wrought with his inciteful rhetoric.

national news

Lesson needs to be learned

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Well, my fellow Americans … we have been treated to a serious lesson on the fragility, yet sturdiness, of our democracy.

The first half of the Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial has concluded in the U.S. Senate. The House of Representatives prosecutors — members of the House, the managers — made, in my view, a compelling case for conviction. That Trump incited an insurrection against the government he took an oath to protect and defend.

He didn’t do either during his single term as president. He incited a riotous mob of terrorists on Jan. 6, exhorting them to march on Capitol Hill and intervene in Congress doing its job on that day, which was to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.

We saw in graphic terms how close the terrorists came to bringing physical harm to Congress, and to the system of government we cherish.

They didn’t succeed. Our democracy stands to this day. It stands strong and it will survive this horrendous episode.

Donald Trump’s legal team takes the Senate floor on Friday. They say they can make their case in a single day. I am going to go out on a limb here: Trump’s team will talk past the House managers. They will divert the argument, send it down another path.

They cannot argue against the constitutionality of the trial. The Senate has voted already that the trial met constitutional standards. Nor can they possibly defend what transpired on Jan. 6. I double-dog dare them to suggest that Donald Trump’s remarks on The Ellipse didn’t incite the mob to attack the Capitol Building, egg the mobsters to smash windows, to ransack offices, to injure and kill people.

They won’t go there. Instead, I am going to presume Trump’s lawyers might hang their defense on the First Amendment, suggesting that Trump merely was exercising his constitutional free-speech guarantees by declaring his opinion that the election was stolen from him. You know, though, that it wasn’t.

Sigh …

I am left then to salute the founders of this great nation for establishing a governing framework that can withstand the assault that developed on Jan. 6. It was a full-on frontal attack incited by a lame-duck president.

He is likely to get away with what he did; the Senate won’t convict him of the deed I happen to believe he committed. However, his hideous conduct is now on the record for history to judge. Americans have seen it unfold in real time. I don’t know about you, but I never will forget what we learned on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

We must not commit such a horrendous error — electing someone of this individual’s ilk — ever again.

Joe Biden, national news

Collegiality still MIA

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I must admit to a certain level of naivete.

My hope had been that with the election of Joe Biden as president of the United States that the nation would see a fairly rapid restoration of good manners among members of Congress and congressional interaction with the White House.

President Biden built a lengthy Senate career marked by the former senator’s long-standing and nearly legendary ability to work with Republicans. He calls himself a “proud Democrat” but he managed to forge friendships with colleagues from the other side of the room.

He served 36 years in the Senate before becoming vice president in the Obama administration. He worked hand-in-glove with GOP senators.

Then he ran for president against Donald Trump, whose term as president was marked by constant battles with Democrats. He took a lot of Republican members of Congress along with him in those fights.

What I never quite banked on was that the animosity would outlive Donald Trump’s departure from the White House. I am saddened to realize that the residue of that anger and animosity has infected many GOP House members and senators, even as the nation has sought to recover from the tempest, tumult and turmoil of the Trump years.

The nation’s divisions run deep. I am not going to concede that the divisions are deepening at this moment. I will cling to the belief that they have reached rock bottom. Until we are able to bind up those wounds, I fear that President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are in for a long slog through the morass.

I heard today that Merrick Garland, the president’s nominee to be attorney general, can’t get a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee to consider his confirmation. The current chair, Republican Lindsey Graham, won’t schedule a hearing.

There’s good news, though, on the horizon. Graham will hand the chairman’s gavel over to Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy soon and Leahy then will get the hearing scheduled.

What is remarkable about Graham’s intransigence is  that he once described Joe Biden as one of “the finest men God ever created.” The men’s friendship was long thought to be a model of bipartisan chumminess. Then Graham slipped into Donald Trump’s hip pocket and that all changed.

I use that example to illustrate the anger that continues to infect the governance of this country.

The lingering anger likely will be one of the many distasteful legacies that Donald Trump leaves behind.

national news

Count ’em: 11 GOP heroes emerge

1 Comment

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Eleven Republicans emerged this afternoon during a vote to kick a fellow GOP House member off two committees because of insanely offensive remarks she has made.

Just 11 of them. Out of more than 200 members of the GOP caucus. Sad. However, the number of Republicans with courage exceeded experts’ predictions.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene no longer serves on the Education and Budget committees. The House today voted her off the panels because she is a QAnon follower who has said some amazingly crass things about tragic events. Such as that the Sandy Hook and Parkland school massacres were made up; that 9/11 didn’t really occur; that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to hold elected office; that Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be assassinated.

It was a bipartisan vote today to remove her from any committee assignments. However, many of us with there would have been more Republican House members to join their Democratic colleagues in speaking out against the hate spewed by Rep. Greene.

I am sorry to say that no one in the Texas GOP congressional caucus rose up against Greene. They all stood with her. I intend to ask my congressman, Republican Van Taylor of Plano, why he voted “no” on removing her from Education and Budget panels. I hope he answers me directly instead of sending out a boiler-plate helping of platitudes.

For now I want to salute the 11 House Republicans who mustered up the decency to do the right thing by rebuking a colleague for the hatred she represents.