Tag Archives: House of Representatives

The House Hit A New Low, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on February 28, 2019 | 1 comment

Raúl Ilargi Meijer reviews the circus that was Michael Cohen’s House of Representatives testimony. From Miejer at theautomaticearth.com:

Perhaps against better judgment, I just can’t keep silent about the Michael Cohen’s in da House show performed on February 27. I was watching it and increasingly fearing for the future of America. We had all been able to read his prepared statement before he opened the party with it, and therefore we all knew there was nothing there. So why did this thing take place, and why were all the cameras and reporters there? Do we live in split realities these days?

Both before and after the gruelling -for the viewer- session, words like ‘explosive’ and bombshell’ were all over, so I thought I’d watch, since I might have missed something, but no, there was nothing, there wasn’t even a there there. Apparently, US House members are by now immune to being revealed as nutcases frantically phishing for evidence of accusations they formerly made but could never prove.

A phishing expedition with a willing whale in the center who sort of volunteered to be harpooned, and still came up with absolutely nothing but blubber. And then like 4 hours of that. There’s never been a more convincing picture of what US politics and media have become. But they’re all entirely impervious to it. They’re discussing nothing for hours on end with millions watching, and they see it as normal.

Now, I’ve been following the decay of the American press ever since Trump entered politics stage right, and I’ve written a hundred thousand words about it, but it really hit home during the Cohen session. Tellingly, the Republican House members were exclusively focusing on Cohen credibility, since he had been caught lying to Congress before, and the Supreme Court just days ago disbarred him.

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Impeachment Will Be Good for Trump, by William L. Gensert

Posted on January 21, 2019 | 2 comments

Is Trump keeping his powder dry for possible impeachment proceedings? From William L. Gensert at americanthinker.com:

Since Trump’s election, the dream uniting all Democrats is to impeach the president.  Having won the House and with a mere majority necessary to initiate Articles of Impeachment, that dream will finally come true – never mind that chances of conviction in the Senate are near nil, with 67 votes required to sustain and Republicans still in the majority.  They will impeach because, as with the scorpion, it’s their nature.

It doesn’t matter that after more than two years of investigation, President Trump has not been found to have committed any crime.  Impeachment is not a criminal proceeding; it is a political proceeding, and in the “People’s House,” the majority decides what constitutes “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Articles of Impeachment will soon pass in the House because Democrats will want the Senate trial to play out during the 2020 presidential election.

Democrats are prone to overreach.  When Obama was elected with a majority in the House and a filibuster-proof Senate, they ran amok.  Convinced they would never lose again, their rule was uncompromising.

Forgetting that nothing lasts forever, and the aphorism stating that if something can’t go on forever, it will eventually end, Obamacare was rammed through Congress using legislative trickery and claims of saving money and keeping doctors and health plans.

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Is the End of the Brutal War in Yemen Finally at Hand? by Gareth Porter

Posted on January 2, 2019 | Leave a comment

Dare we hope? From Gareth Porter at antiwar.com:

When the new Congress convenes Jan. 3, it is expected to pass a House resolution upholding congressional war powers and ending all direct U.S. involvement in the Saudi coalition’s war in Yemen. But hopes remain high that H. Con. Res. 138 will help to end the Yemen war itself. Congressional strategists and activists who have been working on the issue believe passage of the war powers measure will force Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the negotiating table.

Together, they are challenging the position of some former Obama administration officials who have warned the war powers resolution alone cannot bring the conflict to a close. Those former officials, led by Brookings Institution fellow Bruce Riedel, say that cutting off the Saudi pipeline of spare parts is the only way to prevent further airstrikes, which have been central to the Saudi war strategy.

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Trump Warns Shutdown Will Last “For A Very Long Time” If Dems Vote ‘No’ On The Wall, by Tyler Durden

Posted on December 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

The real reason government types worry about shutting down government is that people would discover how unessential it really is. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Update: 

*U.S. DEMOCRATIC LEADER SCHUMER SAYS SENATE DOES NOT HAVE VOTES TO APPROVE TRUMP’S BORDER WALL REQUEST

*TRUMP SAYS VERY GOOD CHANCE HOUSE FUNDING BILL WILL NOT PASS IN THE SENATE, WE’RE VERY PREPARED FOR A LONG SHUTDOWN

***

One day after the House passed a spending bill that included $5.7 billion in funding for the president’s border wall (over the objections of Nancy Pelosi, who famously declared during last week’s contentious meeting with the president that the votes simply weren’t there), President Trump, who is insisting that he won’t sign a spending bill unless it includes funding for his border wall (after briefly ‘caving’ on the wall fightearlier this week), tweeted this morning to urge Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to fight for the border wall “as hard as he fought for anything”.

After the spending bill passed the House, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer insisted that it wouldn’t pass the Senate. Trump wants McConnell to change that.

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The Hitlergate Hearings, by C. J. Hopkins

Posted on November 20, 2018 | Leave a comment

One thing we can be sure of over the next two years. Trump will be investigated, and investigated, and investigated by various House of Representative committees and subcommittees. From C. J. Hopkins at unz.com:

OK, so, that was a close one. For a moment there, I was starting to worry that the Democrats weren’t going to take back the House and rescue us from “the brink of fascism.” Which, if that had happened, in addition to having to attend all those horrible stadium rallies and help the government mass murder the Jews, we would have been denied the next two years of Donald Trump-related congressional hearings and investigations that we can now look forward to … I’m going to go ahead and call them the Hitlergate Hearings.

Staging these hearings has always been a crucial part of the Resistance’s strategy. As history has proved, time and time again, when literal fascists take over your democracy, outlaw opposing political parties, and start shipping people off to concentration camps and revoking journalists’ White House access, the only effective way to defeat them is to form a whole buttload of congressional committees and investigate the living Hitler out of them. This is especially the case when the literal fascists who have commandeered your democracy are conspiring with a shifty-eyed Slavic dictator whose country you have essentially surrounded with your full-spectrum dominant military forces, and who your media have thoroughly demonized, but who is nevertheless able to brainwash your citizens into electing his fascist puppet president with a few thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads.

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3 Key Takeaways From The Disastrous Strzok Hearing, by Jon Hall

Posted on July 17, 2018 | Leave a comment

If you drill down into Peter Strzok’s testimony from his hearing before Congress, there are at least three issues of potential criminality that must be further investigated. From Jon Hall at fmshooter.com:

Last Thursday, embattled FBI agent Peter Strzok testified and was questioned by members of the House during a publicly broadcast hearing that spanned for more than ten hours.

Largely, the hearing was partisan posturing from both sides – with the Republicans grilling Strzok over his text messages to and from FBI mistress Lisa Page and the Democrats widely supporting and applauding Strzok’s fiery defiance.

Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) even went so far as to suggest Strzok deserved a purple heart for enduring the GOP’s treatment of him at the hearing. 

Despite the limitless posturing – a few key questions were answered in the lengthy ten hours…

How Clinton’s charge of using a private home e-mail server went from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless”?

Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) inquired how the wording of a statement condemning Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server was changed before it was even issued.

Strzok, who led the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of her personal e-mail server, rephrased the charge of Clinton’s actions from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless” in a draft of the FBI’s statement that was publicly issued by then-FBI Director, James Comey.

However, Strzok argued that the revision was introduced by the FBI’s legal counsel, who noted that “gross negligence” carried a specific legal meaning with specific legal implications.

When Sensenbrenner asked why the change had been made, Strzok explained:

With regard to that decision, there was concern within the perspective of a legal definition of that term that people would draw an inference based on that use that it was necessarily talking a specific subset of a statute…

Sensenbrenner’s reply? “That rates four Pinocchios”.  

Were Clinton’s e-mails sent to a “foreign entity”?

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) revealed that virtually all of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails were sent to a foreign entity and the FBI didn’t bother to follow-up on the finding.

Gohmert detailed:

The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) Chuck McCullough sent his investigator Frank Rucker… to brief you [Strzok]… about an anomaly they had found with Hillary Clinton’s e-mails… When they had done the forensic analysis, they found that her emails – every single one except four – over 30,000, were going to an address that was not on the distribution list… To an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia…

To continue reading: 3 Key Takeaways From The Disastrous Strzok Hearing

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Republicans Have Four Easy Ways to #ReleaseTheMemo — and the Evidence for It. Not Doing So Will Prove Them to Be Shameless Frauds. by Glenn Greenwald and Jon Schwarz

Posted on January 20, 2018 | 2 comments

After all the ruckus the Republicans have  raised about their report on FISA court irregularities by the FBI and Department of Justice, they’d better make the report public. From Glenn Greenwald and Jon Schwarz at theintercept.com:

ONE OF THE gravest and most damaging abuses of state power is to misuse surveillance authorities for political purposes. For that reason, The Intercept, from its inception, has focused extensively on these issues.

We therefore regard as inherently serious strident warnings from public officials alleging that the FBI and Department of Justice have abused their spying power for political purposes. Social media last night and today have been flooded with inflammatory and quite dramatic claims now being made by congressional Republicans about a four-page memo alleging abuses of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act spying processes during the 2016 election. This memo, which remains secret, was reportedly written under the direction of the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, and has been read by dozens of members of Congress after the committee voted to make the memo available to all members of the House of Representatives to examine in a room specially designated for reviewing classified material.

The rhetoric issuing from GOP members who read the memo is notably extreme. North Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Meadows, chair of the House Freedom Caucus, called the memo “troubling” and “shocking” and said, “Part of me wishes that I didn’t read it because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much.” GOP Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania stated: “You think about, ‘Is this happening in America or is this the KGB?’ That’s how alarming it is.”

This has led to a ferocious outcry on the right to “release the memo” – and presumably thereby prove that the Obama administration conducted unlawful surveillance on the Trump campaign and transition. On Thursday night, Fox News host and stalwart Trump ally Sean Hannity claimed that the memo described “the systematic abuse of power, the weaponizing of those powerful tools of intelligence and the shredding of our Fourth Amendment constitutional rights.”

Given the significance of this issue, it is absolutely true that the memo should be declassified and released to the public — and not just the memo itself. The House Intelligence Committee generally and Nunes specifically have a history of making unreliable and untrue claims (its report about Edward Snowden was full of falsehoods, as Bart Gellman amply documented, and prior claims from Nunes about “unmasking” have been discredited). Thus, mere assertions from Nunes — or anyone else — are largely worthless; Republicans should provide American citizens not merely with the memo they claim reveals pervasive criminality and abuse of power, but also with all of the evidence underlying its conclusions.

To continue reading: Republicans Have Four Easy Ways to #ReleaseTheMemo — and the Evidence for It. Not Doing So Will Prove Them to Be Shameless Frauds

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A Bombshell House Intelligence report exposing extensive FISA abuse could lead to the removal of senior government officials, by Sara Carter

Posted on January 19, 2018 | 4 comments

It remains to be seen if the intelligence report matches the billing in the headline, because it’s only been released to House members. So take it with a grain of salt until it’s released to the public, if it is released to the public. From Sara Carter at saracarter.com:

A review of a classified document outlining what is described as extensive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse was made available to all House members Thursday and the revelations could lead to the removal of senior officials in the FBI and Department of Justice, several sources with knowledge of the document stated. These sources say the report is “explosive,” stating they would not be surprised if it leads to the end of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation into President Trump and his associates.

The House Intelligence Committee passed the motion along party lines Thursday to make the classified report alleging extensive ‘FISA Abuse’ related to the controversial dossier available to all House members. The report contains information regarding the dossier that alleges President Trump and members of his team colluded with the Russians in the 2016 presidential election. Some members of the House viewed the document in a secure room Thursday.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., offered the motion on Thursday to make the Republican majority-authored report available to the members.

“The document shows a troubling course of conduct and we need to make the document available, so the public can see it,” said a senior government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the document. “Once the public sees it, we can hold the people involved accountable in a number of ways.”

The government official said that after reading the document “some of these people should no longer be in the government.”

The document also apparently outlines “several problematic” issues with how FISA warrants were “packaged, and used” state several sources with knowledge of the report.

Over the past year, whistleblowers in the law enforcement and intelligence community have revealed to Congress what they believe to be extensive abuse with regard to FISA surveillance, as previously reported. 

To continue reading: A Bombshell House Intelligence report exposing extensive FISA abuse could lead to the removal of senior government officials

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The House of Representatives Endorses Obamacare, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on May 11, 2017 | Leave a comment

The House of Representatives’ Obamacare replacement tinkers around the edges, but works not meaningful change, because it accepts Obamacare’s premises. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives crafted a partisan compromise bill that endorsed and reinforced the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. This was done notwithstanding claims to the contrary by President Donald Trump and the House Republican leadership, who want us to believe that this bill, if it becomes law, will effectively repeal and replace Obamacare.

Obamacare is a stool with four problematic legs. The constitutional leg is the premise that the federal government has the lawful power to regulate the delivery of health care. The legal leg is the premise that the federal government is obliged to provide health insurance to everyone in America. The economic leg commands that everyone in the U.S. purchase and maintain health insurance. And the Orwellian leg says that every physician in the U.S. shall retain all patient records digitally and that federal bureaucrats shall have access to all those records.

None of that is changed in the House-passed bill. Here is the back story.

The original Obamacare proposal had the taxpayers foot everyone’s medical bills through a series of taxes, regulations and controls. That is the so-called single-payer system that former President Barack Obama dreamed of. It would have been much like the systems in place today in Great Britain, Canada and Australia, where one waits for months to see government-employed physicians who are stingy with government-owned medications and mired in red tape and long lines over government-financed medical procedures.

Even many of the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress during Obama’s first two years in office were unable to accept that idea. In its place, they produced a 2,700-page piece of legislation, which candidate Trump vowed to dismantle — saying he favored a market-based, state-regulated system with no federal involvement, the kind we knew in the pre-Obamacare era.

To continue reading: The House of Representatives Endorses Obamacare

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