By Mark Hosenball
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Capitol rioter nicknamed the "QAnon Shaman" is disappointed former President Donald Trump did not pardon him, his defense lawyer said on Friday after the man pleaded guilty to taking part in the Jan. 6 unrest.
Jacob Chansley, of Phoenix, Arizona, was photographed inside the Capitol shirtless, wearing a horned headdress and heavily tattooed. He has been held without bond since his arrest shortly after the riot, and on Friday entered a guilty plea to obstructing an official proceeding.
While in detention, Chansley underwent mental examinations and was diagnosed by prison officials with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety.
Nearly 600 people have been arrested over the attack on the Capitol where Congress was meeting to certify Joe Biden's November victory over Trump. Earlier Trump had given a fiery speech falsely claiming his defeat was the result of fraud.
While the felony charge Chansley pleaded guilty to carries both a maximum 20-year prison term and a fine of up to $250,000, prosecutor Kimberly Paschall indicated the maximum sentence the government was likely to request would be much shorter.
Chansley had been a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory that casts Trump as a savior figure and elite Democrats as a cabal of Satanist pedophiles and cannibals.
Although he did not get a pardon from Trump, Chansley's defense lawyer Albert Watkins said "there will always be a soft spot" for Trump in Chansley's heart.
At Friday's plea hearing, Watkins asked Judge Royce Lamberth to allow Chansley to be released from prison pending a sentencing hearing, scheduled for Nov. 17. The judge said he would consider this request.
Watkins noted that prosecutors had acknowledged Chansley was "not a planner or organizer" of the riot. Watkins later told reporters that Chansley had cooperated with Jan. 6 investigations and informed on a group he saw stealing classified materials from a Senate office.
(Reporting by Mark Hosenball; Editing by Howard Goller)
On Wednesday, that exact proposal became the law of the land in Texas.
“I pray that every other state will follow our lead in defense of life," Patrick said in a statement Thursday morning.
Texas' new near-total abortion ban, one of the most restrictive in the nation, punctuated a week that brought into stunning relief just how far the state's political pendulum has swung to the right since the 2020 election. Another law long sought by hardline conservatives, allowing Texans to carry handguns without a license or training, also went into effect Tuesday. A day later, lawmakers sent to Gov. Greg Abbott the elections bill that caused House Democrats to shut down the Legislature in protest for nearly six weeks, putting the state on the precipice of having the toughest voting laws in the country. All the while, a slew of other conservative proposals championed by state Republican leaders continued to advance in the Legislature, including a bill that nearly triples previous state spending on border security that will contribute to the building of a state-funded border wall.
A year ago, the state was in a much different place politically. Democrats were optimistic they were on the verge of a historic breakthrough in a Republican bastion, hopeful that President Joe Biden would flip the state, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn would lose reelection and that they would pick up multiple congressional seats and capture the state House majority. They came up woefully short on each front.
“It was a pretty rough election in 2020, but we won and we won pretty big, frankly, with the level of opposition that we faced, and now was the time to do what we said we were gonna do," said state Rep. Mayes Middleton, R-Wallisville, chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
There have been at least a few factors driving the hard right turn since November 2020. A new House speaker who let through bills that his predecessors resisted. A governor more eager than ever to appease his right flank. And Republicans in office everywhere who have been less encumbered with fears about the coming election than they were ahead of the 2020 election, when they used the session to prioritize bread-and-butter issues like public education and property taxes.
For Democrats, the barrage of conservative policy this year has been especially devastating considering what could have been.
“It is so deeply disappointing that, had we made gains [as Democrats], we might not see the worst of what is happening right now," said Joanna Cattanach, the Democrat who ran and lost in what was supposed to be one of the most flippable state House districts in Dallas last year. “This isn't the state that I recognize."
In another gut-punch to Democrats who spent a dramatic summer fighting the bill, Republicans ultimately prevailed in their effort to further tighten the voting rules in a state where they are already notorious for their strictness. The final bill, which Abbott is expected to sign in the coming days, would prohibit local efforts to expand access to the ballot, like drive-thru voting and the universal distribution of mail-in ballot applications.
The conservative crusade at the Capitol has played out while Texans grapple with issues that transcend politics, including the aftermath of the winter storm disaster that left millions without power and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Abbott has largely sought to put the state response to those two crises in the rearview mirror, declaring that the Legislature did all it needed to respond to the power outages during the regular session and insisting that Texas is “past the time of government mandates" when it comes to COVID-19.
Texans have been left “dour and divided," University of Texas pollsters said Thursday as they unveiled their latest survey. The University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll found 52% of Texans believe the state is headed in the wrong direction, the worst measure of that since the poll started in 2008. Abbott's approval rating was also at a record low in the poll, with 41% of voters approving of his job performance and 50% disapproving.
There was some good news for Republicans, though. On the top legislative issue of the summer — the elections bill — voters said they supported it by a margin of 14 percentage points and disapproved of Democratic quorum break over the legislation by an 11-point margin.
Rodney Ellis, a former Democratic state senator from Houston who is now a Harris County commissioner, said he has seen the erosion of a bipartisan tradition in the Legislature that stemmed from a “respect for the institution" which he thinks is lacking today.
“[Lt. Gov.] Bill Hobby, [Lt. Gov.] Bob Bullock, Gov. [George W.] Bush had a healthy respect for the institutions and I think what's happening now is people are being driven by blind ambition," he said. “People let their personal ambition get ahead of the institution."
If there are two issues that epitomize Texas Republicans' rightward tack this year, they are abortion and guns. For multiple legislative sessions, GOP lawmakers had been chipping away at abortion access in Texas, but one of the most extreme proposals had not gained traction: a bill that would ban abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy.
That changed this spring, when the Legislature easily passed the ban on the procedure that made no exception for rape or incest.
Republicans had on their side something they did not the last time they met: a newly solidified conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court with last year's addition of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The new 6-3 makeup meant that Texas' anti-abortion laws, which often are the subject of extensive legal battles, would have a decisively more receptive audience with the highest court in the land.
John Seago, legislative director of the anti-abortion Texas Right to Life, said the new Supreme Court composition removed the last justification that many reluctant lawmakers had for not supporting the abortion restriction — that it would face a certain fate in the courts. Their faith in the newly expanded conservative majority was affirmed this week when the court declined to block the abortion law for now.
“They ran out of excuses," Seago said, “and so they knew they had to do something big and bold."
The change in the House speaker, however, was “really the most important shift politically," Seago said, referring to Beaumont Republican Dade Phelan's ascension to the job in January. Phelan, a Catholic, had supported restrictions on abortion in the past, including efforts to defund groups like Planned Parenthood for providing abortions and bills penalizing doctors who fail to care for infants born after abortions — an extremely rare circumstance.
Phelan also has been cited as a decisive factor behind the success of a law allowing permitless carry of handguns which, like the abortion legislation, stalled for multiple sessions before a breakthrough this year. Phelan supported permitless carry as a member, appointed another supporter of it to chair the committee it would go through and allowed it to come up for a vote on the floor. It passed with even several Democrats voting for it and put pressure to act on the Senate, where Patrick overcame his longtime antipathy toward the proposal and was able to fashion a version that satisfied some concerns from law enforcement groups.
Jerry Patterson, a Republican who served in the Senate from 1993 to 1999 and authored the state's law allowing concealed carry of firearms, said a law allowing the permitless carry of a handgun would have been “virtually impossible" before today.
“There would have been absolutely no way that we would have passed constitutional carry in the '90s or the 2000s," said Patterson, who also served as land commissioner from 2003 to 2015. “Today's a different day."
Not content with the staunchly conservative regular session that ran from January to May, GOP lawmakers have continued to push right in the two special sessions that followed. The governor alone gets to set the agenda for the special sessions — and Abbott has seized the opportunity to tackle unfinished business from the regular session and add on conservative issues of the day that have cropped up since then.
More than at any point in his governorship, Abbott appears most responsive to criticism on his right, whether it be from Patrick — long an animating conservative force — or the fellow Republicans challenging him for reelection. He has attracted at least three primary challengers, including former state Sen. Don Huffines of Dallas and Allen West, the former chairman of the Republican Party of Texas — both of whom have cast Abbott as lacking conservative bonafides.
Weeks after Huffines began campaigning on Texas building its own border wall, Abbott announced the state would do so. After some conservatives complained the ban on teaching “critical race theory" that passed during the regular session was watered down, Abbott told lawmakers to make it tougher in the special sessions. And amid persistent criticism from primary challengers that he was not cracking down on gender-affirming care for transgender Texas children, Abbott took it on, getting the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to deem the treatment child abuse.
One of the more recent pressure points on Abbott has been a proposed audit of the 2020 election in Texas, even though Trump comfortably won the state and Abbott's own secretary of state at the time said it was a smooth affair. The Senate jumped to life on the idea this week, hastily passing legislation Thursday that would open the door to county audits of the 2020 election.
To Democrats, it is just the latest example of Republicans going all out to address baseless concerns that the election was stolen.
“I'm just somewhat amazed at the length that somebody will go to continue to clog up the system and create doubt on our elections because someone has concerns, someone believes this, someone believes that," said state Sen. Juan “Chuy" Hinojosa, D-McAllen, during the Senate debate. “We cannot be changing the law every time someone or some person thinks, 'Well, I don't feel confident in our elections.'"
Abbott has not said where he is on the audit bill, but at least one primary challenger has been agitating for it.
“I have always been in favor of election audits," Huffines tweeted Thursday afternoon.
In another sign of the kind of pressures that Abbott is up against on his right, his three best-known primary challengers have all RSVP'd for a November town hall hosted by a Texas secessionist group, the Texas Nationalist Movement. The group says Abbott has declined.
Republicans are brimming with confidence as they approach the 2022 election. They control the redistricting process, giving them the power to draw more favorable state and federal legislative districts. It will be the first midterm election under a new president, which historically favors the party out of power. And they are newly playing offense in South Texas, where Biden underperformed last year.
“I am extremely confident that we're gonna gain seats in the … Texas House," the new Texas GOP Chairman, Matt Rinaldi, said in a recent interview. “I'm extremely confident we're gonna gain seats in the U.S. Congress. I'm extremely confident it's gonna be a great election for Republicans all around."
Democrats are still missing a serious candidate for governor, an absence that became more glaring this week with all eyes on Texas Republicans. Many are waiting to see whether former El Paso congressman Beto O'Rourke runs, though he has suggested he will not make that decision until he sees through the current voting rights battle in Washington, D.C., an ambiguous timeline. In the meantime, he has stayed politically active, raising money for the state Democrats who were fighting the elections bill and registering voters across the state.
“I don't know what Beto is doing but that sure as heck looks like a campaign to me," Cattanach said.
Beyond O'Rourke, the bench of potential Abbott challengers is thin.
One Democrat who has already stepped up to run statewide is Mike Collier, who is challenging Patrick for lieutenant governor after coming within 5 percentage points of him four years ago. Once O'Rourke makes up his mind, Collier said, he is “highly confident we'll have a very strong governor candidate in a timely manner," whether it is O'Rourke or somebody else.
Collier said the odds of a Democrat winning statewide next year have “gone up dramatically in just the last two weeks."
“They don't feel like they have any competition, so they just keep lurching rightward, rightward, rightward," Collier said of Texas Republicans. “I've always known the day would come that they would go so far to the right that they couldn't come back and win a general election."
Join us Sept. 20-25 at the 2021 Texas Tribune Festival. Tickets are on sale now for this multi-day celebration of big, bold ideas about politics, public policy and the day's news, curated by The Texas Tribune's award-winning journalists. Learn more.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/03/texas-abortion-bill-guns-elections-republicans/.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
Former Trump White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway is getting blasted for gloating over a disappointing jobs report.
235,000 new jobs were created, and unemployment fell to 5.2%, the lowest in 18 months. President Joe Biden spoke about the report Friday morning, saying it "means that we have been adding an average of 750,000 jobs per month, on average, during the past three months."
"And in the three months before I became President? Well, we were adding 60,000 jobs a month," he noted, calling the "total job creation in the first seven months of my administration ... nearly double — double any prior first-year President."
But to Conway, it was all bad news – which appeared to delight her.
"Read it and weep," she tweeted, along with other remarks.
Many were angered by what they saw as her rooting for the economy to fail in order to prop up her former boss's horrific record.
In a rare moment of apparent anger MSNBC host Chris Hayes unleashed his fury on Conway's comments, saying she worked in a White House "that was objectively pro Covid and helped get many many people killed unnecessarily."
"I hope," he added sardonically, she is "not spiritually haunted by the mass death and misery she so blithely facilitated."
Hayes was responding to Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell, who noted that "this is a strange thing to gloat about. the slowdown in hiring is driven by people refusing to get vaccinated and thereby enabling delta to spread (and kill people) faster."
Those "people refusing to get vaccinated" are in large part almost entirely Trump supporters.
I hope she's enjoying her life after the White House, making lots of money and scheming to get back into power and not spiritually haunted by the mass death and misery she so blithely facilitated.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 3, 2021
Hayes and Rampell were far from the only ones angered or perplexed by Conway's remarks.
Your periodic reminder that Kellyanne Conway is your basic sociopath. https://t.co/1QvGM8ZXhk
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) September 3, 2021
Never bothered her before.
— Jim O'Neill (@jimonei22758628) September 3, 2021
Two things: 1 Gee, I wonder why? Perhaps because YOU people are science denying anti-vaxxers. 2 Giddy about bad job numbers? WTF is wrong with you?
— Nicole Sandler (@nicolesandler) September 3, 2021
lol kellyanne thinking history will remember her for anything other than a degenerate that helped enable the most destructive President in the American modern era is fun
— This Is Not Normal🍦 (@NetworkJunkyz) September 3, 2021
Wow! You're really rooting for...unemployment!😱 Then you weep, because pic.twitter.com/ifJ4tgnxHa
— Edgeoforever 🖖 🐝 (@edgeoforever) September 3, 2021
Cruella DeVille is here to brighten our day, gang. pic.twitter.com/rKevsAj3Vh
— Mark Kitterman (@kanesays23) September 3, 2021
We aren't even coming back from a pandemic. We are in the midst of a serious surge. Because the GQP has politicized the vaccine and common sense safety measures. No helping ending the pandemic, then taking glee in companies having a hard time staffing. Totally on brand.
— Kristen 💙🇺🇸💙 (@GreenKristenL) September 3, 2021
You could go by the December 2020 jobs report since that was Trumps last *full* month. That month the economy lost 140K jobshttps://t.co/9tPT0su2VF
— Anti-Tribalist (@cincinnato) September 3, 2021
Can you imagine being this happy that people are struggling? https://t.co/VITMKXW806
— PoliticOhMyGawd (@PoliticOhMyGawd) September 3, 2021
You seem happy our jobs are going down. Weird flex.
— Reeling It In (@247gonefishing) September 3, 2021
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Friday publicly urged congressional Democrats to join her in impeaching President Joe Biden.
The first-term member of Congress, who is so controversial she was stripped of committee assignments only a month after being sworn in, linked to an analysis by CNN's Chris Cillizza.
"Joe Biden has done so much damage so fast that Democrats in close districts are going to be wiped out," she predicted. "Plus redistricting will clean up more seats."
"Their only chance at keeping their seats in '22 is to #ImpeachBiden. Easing public rage might help them," she added menacingly.
On Friday, during an interview with far-right talk radio host Mark Levin, California Republican gubernatorial recall candidate Larry Elder openly gloated about the possibility that, were he to win the recall, he would be able to replace Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) — one of the oldest senators currently in Washington — were she to die in office.
"Nobody's seen her in weeks," said Elder. "I'm told it's an even worse mental condition than Joe Biden ... They're afraid I'm going to replace her with a Republican — which I most certainly would do and that would be an earthquake in Washington D.C."
If this were to happen, Democrats would lose majority control of the U.S. Senate even before the midterm elections are scheduled to take place.
California is among a majority of states without a so-called "same-party law," or a legal requirement that an appointed replacement to a Senate vacancy be the same party voters last elected. Democrats theoretically have the votes in the California legislature to pass such a law if it were necessary — Republicans in the Kentucky General Assembly recently did the same to ensure Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear cannot replace Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell with a Democrat.
Although Republicans' electoral standing in the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom currently look weak, Elder, a longtime right-wing talk show host, has emerged as the clear favorite. He has drawn controversy for his past remarks about women, domestic abuse and sexual harassment allegations, and his pledge to wipe out COVID-19 health guidelines in the state of California.
Listen to the full interview here.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has always been a very conservative senator -- but one former Wisconsin county GOP chairman says he's shocked by the senator's recent turn toward spouting conspiracy theories.
Mark Becker, the former chairman of the Brown County Republican Party, told CNN that he supported Johnson in his past campaigns, but now says he doesn't recognize what Johnson has become.
"Everything that he's done since Donald Trump, it's been so devoid of reality," he explained.
Becker then told CNN that he called Johnson shortly after the election and asked him why he wouldn't publicly state that President Joe Biden was the legitimate winner.
"Yes, but 1.5 million people [in Wisconsin] voted for Donald Trump," Johnson said. "I'm not stupid... I'm not going to make those people mad."
Johnson earlier this week was caught in a secretly recorded video breaking down the exact reasons why he believed Trump lost Wisconsin, despite the fact that Trump has continued to insist that he won the state.
Watch the video below.
'Devoid of reality': Former Ron Johnson campaign staffer stunned by senator's MAGA transformation www.youtube.com
This week, the Supreme Court functionally overturned Roe v. Wade, rolling out the red carpet for every GOP-controlled state in the country to pass similarly dystopian laws that rely on self-appointed misogynistic bounty hunters to police women's bodies. Tellingly, they did it in the most cowardly fashion possible, by using the "shadow docket" to issue an unsigned ruling in the dead of night. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her very-much-signed dissent, the court's decision was "unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend."
The lily-livered nature of the Roe overturn suggests that the conservative justices know full well that abortion rights are broadly popular with everyone who isn't a bug-eyed, Bible-thumping lady hater. A 2019 Perry Undem poll showed 73% of Americans do not want Roe overturned, which fits into a larger trend of growing support for reproductive rights. As Dan Pfeiffer notes in his Message Box newsletter, abortion rights are especially popular with the "influx of college-educated voters to suburban areas" that are "one of the main factors making Texas a battleground state."
Republicans understand that being openly anti-abortion is bad politics. That's why both Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh pretended, during their confirmation hearings, that they had no intention of overturning Roe — and why shifty Republican politicians like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine pretended to believe them. And it's why GOP pundits have resorted to gaslighting the public about this decision.
The "it's not technically a Roe overturn" lament is flatly contradicted by the multitudes of patients who had abortions scheduled this week and were just told they can't have them because the procedure is banned in Texas.
As Roy Edroso wrote on his Substack, "today's conservatives are loud and proud about nearly all of their insane and vicious beliefs," but on the Roe overturn, "they're staying so quiet about it — and, to the extent they acknowledge that it's happening, trying to make it look like something else." Fox News largely ignored the court order, and when Tucker Carlson finally talked about it, he lied, denying that it's a "radical" imposition on women's rights.
Republicans don't like talking about their unpopular views on reproductive rights. But the party leaders also did nothing to stop Texas from implementing this radical abortion ban. On the contrary, the party has done everything in its power to make this happen, from stacking the courts with right wing ideologues who don't care about law or precedent, to backing the theocratic politicians who are passing these laws. Republicans aren't worried about a voter backlash in 2022 or 2024. They believe that they've successfully engineered it so that the will of the voters doesn't matter anymore.
And they're right to believe it, because they are being helped by two Democratic senators who, either out of stubborn ignorance or trollish spite, are the best possible friends Republicans could have in their quest to wind down democracy: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Whatever their motivations, both senators have refused to vote to end or even reform the archaic and anti-democratic Senate filibuster. And with the Senate as closely divided as it is, unless those two holdouts change their minds, almost no Democratic legislation can get past Republican obstruction.
That the filibuster is the problem is obvious in the most immediate sense.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has already promised a vote this month — which will pass — on the Women's Health Protection Act. The bill would fulfill President Joe Biden's promise to sign a law to codify Roe v. Wade and make the Texas law illegal. But Republicans in the Senate will simply use the filibuster to keep that bill from ever getting a debate, much less a vote, on the Senate floor.
But really, the problem is much broader than that, because Senate Republicans are using the filibuster to block necessary voting protections and democracy reforms. Unless Manchin and Sinema wise up really fast, and allow bills like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to pass, Republicans on the state level will be able to use tactics like gerrymandering, voter suppression, and outright election tampering to make sure that the will of the American majority has no impact on who is actually holding power in this country.
Texas has been trending bluer in recent years, but Republicans in that state have already found their fix for the "problem" of voters being able to choose their leaders. On the same day that the state's abortion ban kicked into action, the Texas state legislature passed a draconian anti-voting law that targets urban voters, especially voters of color, making it much harder to cast a ballot. The Democrats in the Texas legislature put up a hell of a fight, even fleeing for weeks to deny Republicans quorum, but ultimately their message was aimed at Manchin and Sinema: We need an end to the filibuster, so that voting rights can be protected. Manchin took a meeting with the Texas group, but continued to defend the filibuster, before jetting off to a fundraiser hosted by GOP-linked energy interests.
Republicans believe, with good reason, America is easing into a post-democracy state, where the will of the majority will be overruled by a right wing minority that has successfully destroyed any avenue of democratic accountability. First, they captured the federal courts. Now the Supreme Court is using the "shadow docket" to pass a far-right agenda — including this abortion ban — without answering to the public at all. And while Democrats technically control the federal government right now, with the help of Sinema and Manchin, that will soon be over. Republicans will be able to manipulate elections so they "win" the White House and Congress without actually persuading a majority to vote for them.
This abortion ban is the first taste of what life under the GOP's permanent minority rule will be like. It's a reminder that the people who stand to gain the most are fundamentalist Christians who are rapidly declining in number, but nonetheless feel entitled to force their patriarchal, bigoted, joyless worldview on the rest of the country. Secularism and freedom of religion are directly in their rifle sights. Banning abortion, which is absolutely about forcing a theocratic view of reproductive rights on the public, is likely just the first move. LGBTQ rights, birth control, and other secular freedoms we've come to enjoy are also on the chopping block, once democratic accountability stops being an obstacle for the right. And, as this abortion ban shows, fundamentalists are so close they can taste it. And all because Democratic dum-dums like Manchin and Sinema are going to stand by and let the right steal our democracy.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) earlier this week falsely claimed to CNN's Jake Tapper that President Joe Biden had never thanked the troops who had fought for the United States in the war against terrorism.
While Tapper called out Ernst for making a false claim in real time, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale did some more digging and found out that Ernst's claim "is not even close to true."
Among other things, Dale flagged a speech from this past April in which Biden said he was "immensely grateful for the bravery and backbone that [American soldiers] have shown through nearly two decades of combat deployments."
During a Memorial Day speech, meanwhile Biden directly addressed veterans who fought in the war against terrorism and said, "Over the past 20 years, our volunteer force and our military families have made incredible sacrifices for this country."
Dale emailed Ernst's office to see if they would retract the senator's claim that Biden never thanked or expressed appreciation for American troops.
However, a spokesperon for Ernst told Dale that all of Biden's statements were mere "platitudes" and were not genuine expressions of gratitude.
"Ernst and her office are entitled to argue that Biden's words about the troops have been insufficient or insincere; that's a subjective claim beyond the scope of a fact check," writes Dale. "But on CNN, Ernst asserted something else: that Biden had never uttered such words at all. And that's plain false."
Determined to shield its surging pandemic profits, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is ramping up its campaign to stop congressional Democrats from enacting reforms to curb sky-high drug prices—a broadly popular legislative effort that one Big Pharma spokesperson dismissed as "too good to be true."
"Members of Congress can either vote with these drug companies or vote for reforms that lower the price of drugs for patients. Lives are on the line."
—Leslie Dach, Protect Our Care
Politico reported Thursday that in recent private discussions with lawmakers, pharmaceutical lobbyists have explicitly invoked the industry's role in the rapid development of coronavirus vaccines as an argument against proposed fixes for out-of-control prescription drug costs and other regulations. Any government attempt to intervene in pharmaceutical companies' price-setting, industry lobbyists claim, would stifle innovation and prolong the fight against Covid-19.
"For years, politicians have been saying that the federal government can interfere in the price of medicines and patients won't suffer any harm," said Brian Newell, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a trade group that represents some of the largest drug companies in the nation, including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly.
"In countries where this already happens, people experience fewer choices and less access to prescription medicines," Newell declared. "Patients know if something sounds too good to be true, then it usually is."
Progressive advocates for lower drug prices adamantly reject that argument, characterizing it as a disingenuous narrative concocted by pharmaceutical companies looking to protect their bottom lines and uphold a status quo that has left the U.S. with by far the highest drug prices of any rich country.
David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, told Politico that "this is the best chance that we have seen in a couple of decades to enact meaningful reforms to drug pricing policy in the United States that will lower the prices of prescription drugs, and it's very clear that the drug companies are going all out to stop it."
As part of their emerging budget reconciliation package, Democrats are pushing to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies—a proposal that President Joe Biden has endorsed.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee and a leading advocate of the reform, estimates it would save the federal government around $450 billion over the next decade, funds that could be used to expand Medicare's benefits. Recent research has also found that the policy change could save individual patients thousands of dollars on crucial prescription medications.
But for the for-profit pharmaceutical industry, said Mitchell, the ability of Medicare to negotiate lower prices would amount to "Armageddon."
In a tweet Thursday, Mitchell countered the pharmaceutical industry's attempt to tout successful vaccine development as an argument against government action to lower drug prices.
"Sorry PhRMA, drug corps didn't make vaccines possible: taxpayers did," he wrote. "The government spent billions on research pre-pandemic and $18 billion more on trials, production, and purchase. Drug corps are reaping record profits and execs are becoming billionaires. Thanks to us."
A report (pdf) released last week by the advocacy group Protect Our Care estimates that the pharmaceutical industry is currently financing at least eight ad campaigns attacking Democrats' push to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, which it is currently barred from doing under federal law.
"By delivering on these promises, Democrats can take a major step forward in ending Big Pharma's monopoly control over drug pricing."
—Margarida Jorge, Lower Drug Prices Now
One campaign spotlighted in the report is the American Action Network's (AAN) $5 million ad blitz falsely warning that the Medicare price-negotiation proposal is "a socialist prescription drug plan that would limit patients' access to lifesaving medications." Protect Our Care notes that AAN has received nearly $15 million from PhRMA between 2016 and 2019.
"Members of Congress can either vote with these drug companies or vote for reforms that lower the price of drugs for patients," Leslie Dach, chair of Protect Our Care, said in a statement. "Lives are on the line."
According to Patients for Affordable Drugs, Big Pharma-backed groups have spent more than $18 million this year on advertisements against proposed reforms aimed at lowering prescription medicine prices. Patients for Affordable Drugs released a document last week refuting some of the pharmaceutical industry's arguments against Medicare negotiation.
"Big Pharma will stop at nothing to maintain its unfettered pricing power at the expense of patients who are struggling to afford their prescription drugs," said Mitchell. "The industry is doing what it has done for decades—using front groups to push lies and misleading claims to scare patients and lawmakers from passing any drug pricing reform into law. This time, patients and elected officials aren't buying the lies, and we are not going to let them get away with it."
Aggressive lobbying from the pharmaceutical industry and other powerful healthcare interest groups comes as House and Senate Democrats are racing to assemble a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation package covering an array of priorities, from climate action to paid family leave to Medicare expansion.
With conservative Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) threatening to oppose the $3.5 trillion price tag agreed upon by the party's leadership, the rest of the Democratic caucus and Biden are facing pressure from grassroots groups to hold their ground and ensure that drug-cost reforms remain in the final reconciliation package.
"This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Congress and President Biden to keep their promise to lower costs and improve healthcare for families and seniors," Margarida Jorge, campaign director for Lower Drug Prices Now, said in a statement. "We can't Build Back Better without affordable prescription medicines for everyone who needs them."
"By giving Medicare the power to negotiate, capping out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries, and holding drug corporations accountable for price-gouging, we can ensure that no American gets priced-out of access to life-saving medications," Jorge added. "By delivering on these promises, Democrats can take a major step forward in ending Big Pharma's monopoly control over drug pricing and finally put patients before profit."
A top military adviser who served under Donald Trump praised President Joe Biden for carrying out the Afghanistan withdrawal his predecessor set in motion -- but now criticizes from the sidelines.
The twice-impeached one-term president handpicked a team in his final months in the White House committed to a complete U.S. military withdrawal, such as retired Col. Douglas MacGregor, who Trump tapped as a senior adviser after seeing him frequently make the case for leaving Afghanistan in Fox News appearances, reported ABC News.
"He made very clear to me that he shared my views," MacGregor said, "and he said, 'I've got to get you in here because I agree with you. We need to get out of these places. There's no reason to be in any of them.'"
MacGregor, on the day he was appointed in April 2020, was handed a sheet of paper the day by director of presidential personnel Johnny McEntee that described his job as senior adviser to the defense secretary.
"Get out us out of Afghanistan," read the first of four bullet points on that memo from the president, MacGregor said.
"Donald Trump wanted out," MacGregor said. "It was no secret plan, no misleading agenda. He wanted out."
MacGregor drafted a one-page presidential order on his first day at the Defense Department calling on the military to withdraw all uniformed personnel by Jan. 12, 2021 -- before Inauguration Day -- which Trump signed on Nov. 11, 2020, but agreed under pressure from his top military leaders to revise to a more gradual withdrawal.
"I did exactly what he wanted me to do and then he buckled," MacGregor said.
MacGregor believes Trump's original timeline would have been less dangerous because it wouldn't have been carried out during Afghanistan's fighting season, but he still believes the current president made the right call to leave.
"I am not critical of President Biden's decision," MacGregor said, "and if you listen to his speech, he said, 'I ended the war.' Bravo! Well done! Get out! This has been an enormous waste of time, money, resources and blood, so the president is 100 percent correct."
Millions of jobless workers are set to lose critical unemployment benefits in roughly 72 hours—and neither Congress nor the Biden administration seem prepared to do anything about it.
"Around 35 million people (10% of the U.S. population) live in households that are scheduled to lose unemployment income."
—Matt Bruenig, People's Policy Project
Despite the ongoing threat posed by the highly transmissible Delta variant, the White House and Democratic lawmakers have provided no indication that they plan to prevent several pandemic-related unemployment programs from expiring on September 6, which—in a cruel irony—happens to be Labor Day.
The consequences of government inaction in the face of what one analyst recently described as "the largest cutoff of unemployment benefits in history" could be massive, both for those directly impacted by the cuts and the still-ailing U.S. economy.
As Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project noted Thursday, the Labor Department's latest weekly unemployment insurance (UI) report shows that "9.2 million people are currently receiving benefits from either the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program or the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program," which were implemented last year to extend the duration of jobless aid and provide assistance to those who are typically ineligible for UI, such as gig workers.
"According to the Census Household Pulse Survey, the average household that is receiving UI benefits has 3.8 members in it," Bruenig observed. "This means that around 35 million people (10% of the U.S. population) live in households that are scheduled to lose unemployment income."
"These are not small cuts either," he continued. "Based on what happened in the states that already cut these benefits, we know that around half of those on UI will see their benefits drop to $0 while the remaining half will see their benefits cut by $300 per week, which is equivalent to $15,200 per year. Those formerly on UI will also cut their spending by about $145 per week ($7,540 annually), which will have negative effects on the revenue and employment of the businesses they patronize."
But even amid such dire warnings, the possibility of a UI extension has been virtually absent from discussions on Capitol Hill as Democratic lawmakers work to assemble a $3.5 trillion spending package aimed at achieving a range of longstanding policy goals, from major climate investments to Medicare expansion.
"The Biden administration has not made it a priority, and outside of Ron Wyden, you haven't heard too many people in the Senate be willing to push on that," Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told Vox, referring to the Democratic senator from Oregon, a key architect of the soon-to-expire UI programs.
"The unwillingness to extend emergency benefits—or even debate it—shows how inured we've become to plight of the unemployed."
—Andrew Stettner, Century Foundation
"It doesn't seem like right now there would even be 50 votes in the Senate" for an extension, Stettner observed.
Last week, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that President Joe Biden believes it is "appropriate" for the $300-per-week federal UI boost to expire as scheduled. Twenty-six states—each led by a Republican governor except Louisiana—have already ended the emergency UI aid, and the Biden administration did not try to stop them.
Subsequent research has vindicated economists who warned that—contrary to the claims and predictions of Republican leaders—ending the benefits prematurely would do little to boost hiring. A Wall Street Journal analysis released Wednesday found that "states that ended enhanced federal unemployment benefits early have so far seen about the same job growth as states that continued offering the pandemic-related extra aid."
While Republicans have insisted that the emergency UI programs are dissuading people from returning to the workforce, analysts have pointed to the myriad other factors at play, including lack of child care and pandemic-related health concerns.
Dr. Rakeen Mabud, the chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, warned in a statement earlier this week that "amid increasing uncertainty in the trajectory of the pandemic, Monday's unemployment cliff could not come at a worse time."
"Millions will suffer as they lose this critical source of income and the loss of spending will suppress job growth, setting us back yet again in our efforts for an inclusive and equitable recovery," Mabud said.
Painful enough in itself, the benefit cut-off will come just days after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration's nationwide eviction moratorium, putting millions of people at imminent risk of losing their homes amid a deadly pandemic. The U.S. is currently averaging around 164,000 new coronavirus infections and 1,500 deaths per day.
"It's going to be a perfect storm for a lot of folks," Jordan Dewbre, a staff attorney for the New York-based community organization BronxWorks, said of the confluence of UI expirations and the end of the eviction moratorium. "We are still in the middle of a pandemic."
In a series of tweets on Thursday, Stettner of the Century Foundation warned that "this cliff dwarfs anything we have seen before." If the federal programs expire, jobless workers will be left with often-paltry state-level UI benefits or—if they've exhausted their eligibility for such assistance—nothing at all.
"The unwillingness to extend emergency benefits—or even debate it—shows how inured we've become to plight of the unemployed," Stettner wrote. "With eviction protections ending at the same time, long-term unemployed workers are now vulnerable to lasting economic damage. Black and Latino workers have the least in savings built up to navigate this transitional period."
"Congress should have the courage to reinstate benefits, especially in high unemployment states, if the Delta surge slows the recovery," Stettner added, "and make permanent changes to UI benefits so that we won't have to rely on emergency programs during the next economic crisis."
Although Donald Trump Jr. and former coal baron Don Blankenship have a lot in common — both are far-right bullies, both are extremists, and both are aggressive defenders of fossil fuels — there is a considerable amount of bad blood between the two of them. And in West Virginia, a 95-year-old federal judge has refused to throw out Blankenship's defamation lawsuit against Trump Jr., according to Law & Crime.
The lawsuit stems from comments that Trump Jr., the son of former President Donald Trump, made about Blankenship during West Virginia's 2018 U.S. Senate race, which found Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin being reelected.
The 71-year-old Blankenship is the former CEO of the coal company Massey Energy, and he served a year behind bars because of his role in a 2010 coal mining disaster. In his lawsuit, Blankenship argues Trump Jr. wrongly defamed him by describing him as a convicted "felon"; Blankenship was incarcerated because of a misdemeanor conviction, not a felony conviction.
In one of his anti-Blankenship tweets, Trump Jr. said of Manchin, "He's probably never run against a felon." That tweet, according to Law & Crime Elura Nanos, appears to have been deleted.
U.S. District Court John T. Copenhaver, Jr., who was appointed by President Gerald Ford back in the mid-1970s and is now 95, ruled that Blankenship's lawsuit can move forward.
Copenhaver wrote, "Based on this article that Trump Jr. himself cites within his own quote tweet, there is a plausible inference that he had knowledge of the plaintiff's conviction history in association with the mine explosion, and in particular that the conviction was a misdemeanor, not a felony."
The bitter rivalry between Trump Jr. and Blankenship started in 2018, when Blankenship ran for the U.S. Senate in West Virginia and Trump Jr. — pointing out that Blankenship had been incarcerated — predicted that centrist Democrat Manchin would crush Blankenship in the general election if Blankenship received the GOP nomination. Although West Virginia Republicans rejected Blankenship in the primary as Trump Jr. hoped and Republican Patrick Morrisey won the nomination, Manchin won the general election. The centrist and relatively conservative Manchin, like Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, has often been a source of frustration among more progressive Democrats. But he is popular in West Virginia, a deep red state.
Blankenship, who left the Republican Party in 2018, is now a member of the right-wing Constitution Party — and in 2020's presidential election, he received the Constitution Party's nomination and ran against then-President Donald Trump, now-President Joe Biden, Libertarian Party nominee Jo Jorgensen and Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins.
North Carolina Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn is doubling down on his recent defense of Capitol insurrectionists — saying they were mostly "normal people" who were just "wandering in" to the Capitol.
Days after Cawthorn referred to jailed insurrectionists as "political hostages" and said he wanted to "try and bust them out of jail," Cawthorn told the Smoky Mountain News, for an exclusive interview published Thursday, that "a small minority" of rioters "got very aggressive" and "endangered people's lives."
"Those people, I believe are dangerous individuals, but the overwhelming majority of the people of the Jan. 6 thing were just normal people, there for a normal protest to redress their government," Cawthorn said. "And then they saw an open door at the top of the Capitol, and they were just kind of wandering in. I will admit they were trespassing and that was wrong."
But Cawthorn suggested that rioters charged with relatively minor offenses are being denied their due process rights by the Department of Justice for political reasons, because prosecutors wanted to create "shock and awe" in advance of President Joe Biden's inauguration. He told the newspaper he was basing his comments about the prosecution of low-level rioters on reports from Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.
The newspaper didn't ask Cawthorn specifically about his call for "bloodshed" over what he falsely claims is a "rigged" electoral system — comments that made national headlines and drew widespread condemnation. But Cawthorn insisted he was not encouraging supporters to return to Washington for another insurrection — even though he appeared to suggest he was "actively working on that one," in video of his recent remarks.
"We have no plans, and no one is trying to start any form of a protest or anything in Washington," Cawthorn told the newspaper. "When I said I was actively working on it, I meant I was actually working on getting answers about the political prisoners following Jan. 6. By no means is anyone actively that I know of trying to plan some political protest going on in Washington. My office has no plans of that at all."
Cawthorn also denied that he was speaking literally when he said wanted to "bust" insurrectionists "out" of jail.
"If anybody interpreted what I said, 'bust them out,' as me getting out of my wheelchair and going Rambo mode and getting these guys out through some kind of illegal action – that's by no means what I meant," he said. "I just want normal due process. Our entire Justice Department is supposed to be blind to political affiliation, but I feel like these people are being targeted specifically because their affiliation. I want due process under the law."
Finally, Cawthorn oddly invoked QAnon when asked about rumors that he is part of a "shadow cabinet" acting on behalf of former president Donald Trump — which the reporter described as "some sort of cabal."
"The first time I ever heard about QAnon was from, I think it might have actually been from you, asking how I felt about it, and I really didn't know anything about it," Cawthorn said. "But when we start using the terms like 'shadow cabinet' and 'cabal,' I mean, that starts to sound really Q-ish. I can assure you we're a part of no shadow cabinet. I do consider myself a close confidant of President Trump, who I know quite well. We get to talk, and converse regularly. I'm very interested in the 2020 election audits. I want those to be done everywhere. I'm more than happy to have my election results audited. I think it would just mean that I won by more votes."
Copyright © 2026 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 |
Masthead
|
Privacy Policy
|
Manage Preferences
|
Debug Logs
For corrections contact
corrections@rawstory.com
, for support contact
support@rawstory.com
.
