Your Bipartisan Congress

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee has approved $36.5 billion in emergency funding for relief and recovery from the recent devastating hurricanes and wildfires, a spokeswoman for the committee’s chairman said late on Tuesday.

The bill includes $7 billion more funding than the White House had sought last week, and included nearly $6 billion more for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) than the administration’s request.

The committee’s bill also includes $576.6 million for wildfire efforts, $16 billion for the National Flood Insurance program, and a provision enabling low-income Puerto Ricans to receive emergency nutrition assistance, said Jennifer Hing, spokeswoman for Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, the committee chairman.

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After President Donald Trump floated the idea that he may “wipe out” Puerto Rico’s debt, a closer look at the House’s disaster spending package reveals the government is likely to add to their $73 billion financial burden.

A report on the House Republicans’ $35.6 billion relief bill by The Intercept shows that of that total, $5 billion is earmarked for Puerto Rico specifically– in the form of yet another loan.

While the relief bill would allocate another $13.58 billion to restore FEMA’s disaster relief fund, that money will be split by Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands at FEMA’s discretion.

The bill does “wipe out” some debt, but not for Puerto Rico — it also cancel $16 billion owed by the National Flood Insurance Program that Trump infamously slashed prior to Hurricane Harvey’s landfall.

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Here’s the best one of all. Everybody has seen photo after photo of the devastation in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. 3.4 million Americans are without power. There’s no running water on the entire island. Hospitals don’t have medicine. Food is running out. Bridges are torn up, roads are impassable. Trump flies down. They take him out to some upper-income neighborhood of homes built out of concrete that didn’t get touched by the storm. He visits a relief center and throws paper towels to the crowd.

This man is the president of the United States. You know what he could have done? He could have stood there in that relief center and he could have looked at that crowd and said, these cans of chicken and flashlights and paper towels are not enough. I’m going back to Washington, and I’m going to push through an emergency appropriation of $10 billion for the island of Puerto Rico, and that money will be on its way by Friday, along with 10,000 more troops and 100 helicopters and 10 ships loaded down with generators, emergency cellphone towers, military water purification trucks and containers filled with food, clothing and construction materials.

And you know what? He’s the president of the United States, and the president can push through emergency appropriations bills, and the president can order the military to send troops and helicopters and water purification trucks, and the president can absolutely get it done because the president is the commander in chief, and the president can convince the Congress to act because the president has enormous powers of persuasion and because he occupies the most powerful office in the world.

Trump acts like he thinks his power comes from his “base.” That’s why he’s always jumping on Air Force One and flying out to an underattended rally in one of the states that already voted for him overwhelmingly once and really doesn’t need to hear anything else about the wall he hasn’t built or the health care program he hasn’t repealed and replaced. But that’s not where Trump’s power comes from. It comes from being the president of the United States. But that’s not who he is. He just plays one on TV.

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Here’s a novel strategy. When you get caught dead to rights insider trading and using your official position to enrich yourself (ALLEGEDLY), find a woman to blame!

She’s on a witch-hunt, she’s a despicable human being … You don’t go after another member with fabricated allegations like she did!

That’s the spirit, Congressman Chris Collins! The Office of Congressional Ethics just produced emails showing that you gave inside information to investors in your pet biotech project and tipped them off about upcoming sales, but this is obviously Congresswoman Louise Slaughter’s fault. The bitch set you up!

It all started back in 2005, when Chris Collins was just a guy who owned a medical supply company in Buffalo. One day he met a transplant doctor named Frank Gelder who had invented a revolutionary new immunotherapy treatment, which he was using on himself — always a good sign! And the two of them decided that this treatment was going to cure HIV and every other immune disease, and maybe cancer, too! But first they would cure multiple sclerosis, just as proof of concept. So Gelder set up a clinical trial in New Zealand, and Collins hit up his buddies in New York for money to finance the new venture, which they named Innate Immunotherapeutics.

Collins was a true believer. He bought shares for his kids, convinced his longtime employees to buy in, and eventually invested $6 million of his own money for an 18 percent stake in the company. So Gelder spent the next decade trying to make their drug work, while Collins found rich guys who had $25,000 or $100,000 to play with on a longshot Australian biotech startup. Things went even better after Collins got elected to the House of Representatives in 2013 and met a bunch of cool new bros with extra cash to invest. Three Congressmen including future (former) HHS Secretary Tom Price got in on Collins’s awesome startup action.

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JackLuis said:

Congressman Chris Collins: The Bitch Set Me Up!




Another Fucking Moron!

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The Republican chairmen of two U.S. House of Representative panels on Tuesday said they are investigating various Department of Justice actions from last year, including FBI decisions regarding former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

It’s 2016 decisions “led to a host of outstanding questions that must be answered,” including the FBI’s decision to announce its probe into “Clinton’s handling of classified information but not to publicly announce the investigation into campaign associates of then-candidate Donald Trump,” the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairmen said in a statement.

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JackLuis said:

US House panels open probe into Justice Department action during 2016 campaign

Has the FBI stepped on their own crank now? Would they be in trouble if they had announced that they were investigating "All The Fucking Candidates" for various deceptions?

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On Thursday, Republicans in the House of Representatives unveiled their much-anticipated tax plan — and it’s already wildly unpopular, according to Vanity Fair‘s Bess Levin.

“The ungracefully titled Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” Levin said, is “as ungainly and inequitable as the rushed process to write it.”

The proposed tax act is a last-ditch effort by the Trump administration and the GOP House to push through some kind of legislative achievement by the end of the year after their failure to repeal Obamacare, secure funding for Trump’s proposed border wall or fulfill any of the president’s other campaign promises.

However, like the failed Obamacare repeal attempts that came before it, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a slapdash effort, cobbled together hastily and in secret, then foisted on the public with an urgent deadline — and about as little support.

“Already, Republicans are clashing over the details of a bill that would dramatically cut taxes for corporations, boost the rich, hurt many members of the middle class, and blow out the budget deficit, potentially putting the kibosh on the president‘s wildly optimistic timeline,” said Levin.

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