John McCain once again has the stones (and character) to defy his party to do what he feels is best for his constituents, announcing he “cannot in good conscience” vote for the half-baked Cassidy-Graham health care bill (zombie TrumpCare 3.0) that will jeopardize health care for the elderly, the ill, and women, and has been denounced by a growing number of Republican governors (as well as the bipartisan Medicaid directors from all 50 states, the American Medical Association, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, AARP, the American Academy of Pediatrics, Kaiser Permanente, the American Heart Association, the Alzheimer’s Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the American Cancer Society). The battle isn’t yet won, though—the GOP could still muster 50 votes if there are no more defections from the party line, and in that case Mike Pence would cast the tie-breaking vote. (And we can all imagine which way that would go down.) Keep calling and showing up at your senators’ offices!
Despite Donald John’s federal ban on sanctuary cities, California—lately serving as America’s conscience in lieu of any guidance in that arena from the White House—voted to make itself an entire sanctuary state. If passed, this legislation will prevent already overburdened state and local law enforcement from being pressed into service as an ad hoc ICE force, and keep communities safer by preventing racial profiling and residents too afraid of being deported to report crimes and help in prosecutions.
Don John’s superfluous election commission, his vanity project whose real goal is to suppress Democrat votes, shake the country’s faith in our election process, and manufacture justification (and perhaps an ego salve) for his baseless claims of massive voter fraud in the 2016 election he lost by more than 3 million popular votes, is running into rough road. First an email came to light from one of the most conservative members of Donald’s vanity project in which the committee’s intent to exclude moderate Republicans and Democrats was spelled out; followed by a fact-free op-ed by chairman Kris Kobach in alt-right news site Breitbart calling into question—with no evidence—the results of New Hampshire’s most recent U.S. Senate race; and then another committee member feuded on Twitter with a journalist whose academic credentials he claimed she’d fabricated (she hadn’t). Now even some Republicans are beginning to question the purpose, motives, and methods of the spurious committee.
Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is developing interesting tentacles. His techniques—including aggressively pursuing Donald intimates Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn—are consistent with other investigations that attempt to find the weak link in a chain of illegalities and pull hard on it to yield the big fish (to mix metaphors). For now the White House seems to have deemed it wiser to cooperate—or at least appear to—than to continue dismissing the investigation as a “witch-hunt” and attack Mueller (despite some Keystone Kops-type public vacillating by two of Donald’s lawyers, overheard by the NY Times’s top political reporter). A great rundown on both these stories can be heard on the New York Times’s excellent Daily podcast from September 19, here. Meanwhile, Mueller stepped things up yet again this past week with a request to the White House for 13 categories of extensive records and email correspondence. Seems like he’s circling in on something pretty juicy…. If I were somehow involved in activities on the end of these ever-escalating investigations, I think I might be sweating pretty hard at this point. Maybe trying like hell to distract attention with, say, world-ending threats to a nuke-happy adversary, or recklessly conceived health care legislation, or a complete 180-degree flip on a key campaign issue along with unprecedented bipartisan outreach. Or something like that.
In a delightfully ironic way of drawing attention to the United States’ abnegation of our moral standards under the “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” (thanks, Kim Jong Un) in shutting out so many seeking asylum here (including Donald’s suppression of reports from his own Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees contribute more than $261 billion to our economy…unlike Donald, whose taxes seem to contribute zero), during the UN General Assembly in New York global aid organization Oxfam rented Donald’s childhood home in Queens to house refugees.