Defending the Dignity of Dishwashers and Other Congressional Priorities

Detente on the Hill for the GOP doesn’t mean the performative bullshit season is over.

UPDATED - It would appear that the Republican uprising in the House of Representatives is over, at least for a few months. Speaker Mike Johnson and “Moscow” Marjorie Taylor Greene have agreed to “keep the team together,” for now. A edict from on high (Mar a Lago) to put this feud on hold, lest it tar the Republican plans for the general election, led to a series of meetings with Speaker Mike Johnson aimed at providing the congresswoman from Georgia a face-saving off-ramp..

MTG Greene tried for a vote to bump the speaker and saw a bipartisan supermajority vote to table the motion. Poor Marge.

This is possible because, thanks to Democrats, almost (the FAA authorization is in limbo)  all must-pass legislation has made it to the finish line and there was a bipartisan effort to keep the status quo, leader-wise. 

Part of the pause was to involve publicizing demands Greene supposedly presented, including the following:

• No further aid for Ukraine;

• A return to the “Hastert Rule,” meaning no legislation is brought to a vote without support from a majority of the House majority;

• Defunding the special counsel probes into Donald Trump in upcoming appropriations; 

• Enforcement of the “Massie Rule,” whereby government funding is automatically cut across the board if no superseding agreement is reached before a set deadline.

 

There is no evidence that they will be granted, and to be truthful, not a lot of people care.

Via Axios:

• Some Democrats see Johnson as just doing what he needs to do.

• "What I saw that I liked is he put bills in front of the House to vote on ... if he keeps doing that, my only complaints will be policy," said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.).

• "The concessions that I've heard about, they're meaningless ... I don't think she's a threat to anyone," said Rep. Annie Kuster (D-N.H.).

Looking at the House’s floor schedule, four measures are set for consideration pursuant to a rule (passes with a simple majority) and thirteen are on suspension (2/3rds majority, needing some Dem support).

On Tuesday, the H.R. 6192: Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act (Sponsor: Debbie Lesko R-AZ) passed and will be sent to the Senate where it will die. This legislation is the first in a series designed to give Congressional Republicans something to talk about other Trump’s trevails in their fall campaigns. They’re reminiscent of the gas stove hysteria or Trump’s war on low-flush toilets and light bulbs.“

Lined up behind the “Home Appliances” legislation are:

• “Liberty in Laundry Act” (H.R. 7673), 

• “Clothes Dryers Reliability Act (H.R. 7645), 

• “Refrigerator Freedom Act” (H.R. 7637), 

• “Affordable Air Conditioning Act” (H.R. 7626), and

• “Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards Act” (H.R. 7700).

The long and the short of these bills is Republican opposition to regulations concerning increased standards for energy efficiency. Since, according to GOP theology, climate change isn’t a serious problem –at least not as serious as short term profits– these rules are just Biden administration intrusions into ordinary Americans' lives. Following this logic down the rabbit hole leads to the Green New Deal, which everybody knows is part of the globalist plan for world domination.

The House will be considering legislation and resolutions right until Memorial Day weekend. Let’s take a look at some of the hard work they’re facing.

Republican majorities in legislative bodies are obliged (I think it’s a Ferengi Rule of Acquisition) to promote bills proving their dedication to Keeping America White. 

The H.R. 7109: Equal Representation Act (Charles Edwards, R-NC) is all about keeping the dark folks and commies out. It starts by requiring a citizenship question on the decennial census and ends by changing the apportionment of House seats to be based on United States citizens instead of all persons.

In case you missed it, the founders wanted everybody represented in the House of Representatives (including ⅗ of the slave population) because that chamber of concerns itself with appropriations for things like roads and airports. The thinking here is that, since Red states are often unattractive to immigrants due to nasty people and laws, Blue states welcoming immigrants will lose influence and be punished for being nicer. Therefore, they’ll have less roads and unsafe airports.  

Representation in Congress as opposed to voting in elections is often conflated by more openly racist politicians as a tactic to get their base energized.   And it works. That’s why the Heritage Action people (you might have heard of them in connection with the 2025 plan) call this a KEY VOTE. Needless to say, organizations that believe in civil rights are universally opposed.

H.R. 8146: Police Our Border Act (Anthony D’Esposito, R-NY) seems simple enough; it requires the Attorney General to report to the Congress on the impact the border crisis is having on law enforcement at the Federal, State, local, and Tribal level.

But if you read it down, its rationale is based on the “Biden Border Crisis”; the same words Republicans are using in all their campaign materials. And, you might Remember that it was Republican legislators who killed a bill strengthening border protections. So if one was to amend the language of H.R. 8146 to say Trump Border Crisis it might sound better. 

It’s just a resolution so Darrell Issa-types can strut around and say they did something.

Other candidates for future consideration are

H.R. 79: WHO Withdrawal Act (Andy Biggs R-AZ) - Tell the President that the Congress wants the United States out of the World Health Organization because Measles Are Back, Baby!

H.R. 374: Abolish the ATF Act (Matt Gatz R-FL) Soon to be indicted (probably) Gatz wants free guns for everybody. America!

H.R. 99: To Terminate the Department of Education (Thomas Massie R-KY) Because an educated voter is more likely to vote Democratic? Reading Isn’t Fundamental? 

H.R. 25: FairTax Act of 2023 (Earl Carter. R-GA) To promote freedom, fairness, and economic opportunity by repealing the income tax and other taxes, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, and enacting a national sales tax to be administered primarily by the States. GovTrack says it has a 0% chance of passing.

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Wednesday News to Peruse

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When Conservative Parents Revolt by Mike Hixenbaugh in The Atlantic

• Rooted in 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment thinking, secular humanism, as it was originally understood, refers to a belief system that rejects religion as the basis for morality and emphasizes the need to test dogma with science, to pursue justice by opposing discrimination, and to focus on improving conditions here on Earth rather than looking to the afterlife. But in the 1970s and ’80s, it was redefined by white Christian conservatives—much like the term critical race theory, decades later—as a catchall to describe any lesson or book they found objectionable. If a text mentioned the struggle for women’s rights, it was secular humanist; if it mentioned the racism of the Jim Crow era, it was secular humanist.

• Also much as in today’s fights, the battles over secular humanism, which occurred in the years immediately following the civil-rights movement, were a response to evolving social norms around gender, race, and sexuality. And just as the protests for racial justice following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 incited school-board conflicts in communities with rapidly changing demographics, many of the battles a generation ago emanated from predominantly white but diversifying suburbs, where angry parents formed groups with such names as Young Parents Alert and Guardians of Education. Portraying teachers, textbook writers, and school bureaucrats as liberal foot soldiers in a shadowy scheme to indoctrinate their children, these citizen activists described their cause as one of good versus evil, a framing that stoked passions—and sometimes violence.

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Meat, Freedom and Ron DeSantis by Paul Krugman in New York Times Opinion. (Florida banned lab grown meat)

• Sure enough, eating or claiming to eat lots of meat has become a badge of allegiance on the right, especially among the MAGA crowd. Donald Trump Jr. once tweeted, “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday,” improbable for someone who isn’t a sumo wrestler.

• But even if you’re someone who insists that “real” Americans eat lots of meat, why must the meat be supplied by killing animals if an alternative becomes available? Opponents of lab-grown meat like to talk about the industrial look of cultured meat production, but what do they imagine many modern meat processing facilities look like?

• And then there are the conspiracy theories. It’s a fact that getting protein from beef involves a lot more greenhouse gas emissions than getting it from other sources. It’s also a fact that under President Biden, the United States has finally been taking serious action on climate change. But in the fever swamp of the right, which these days is a pretty sizable bloc of Republican commentators and politicians, opposition to Biden’s eminently reasonable climate policy has resulted in an assortment of wild claims, including one that Biden was going to put limits on Americans’ burger consumption.

• And have you heard about how global elites are going to force us to start eating insects?

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How to prepare your phone for a protest via CalMatters

• Before going to a protest, demonstrators or observers should note that their cellphones may subject them to surveillance tactics by law enforcement. If your cellphone is on and unsecured, your location can be tracked and your unencrypted communications, such as text messages, may be intercepted. Additionally, police may retrieve your messages and the content of your phone if they take custody of your phone, or later by warrant or subpoena.

• Your proximity to organizers of a protest, your immigration status (there are higher stakes for international students—here’s what to know if you’re asked about your immigration status at a protest), and other factors mean there is no one-size-fits-all privacy advice for whether to bring your mobile phone to a protest. 

• “All protesting and all marches are a series of balancing acts of different priorities and acceptable risks,” said Mason Donahue, a member of Lucy Parsons Labs, a Chicago-based group of technologists and activists that run digital security training classes and have investigated the Chicago Police Department’s use of surveillance technology. “There is a lot of communication ability that goes away if you don’t bring a phone period,” he said.