The 119th Congress starts tomorrow, the rules package has been released. One key change: It now takes 9 butt hurt Republicans to file a motion to vacate the speaker, not just 1.
Predictions: Who will be Speaker? How many votes will it take?
Priorities: The rules package lists the first 12 bills the Republicans want to vote on. Without peeking, can you guess the topics of those 12 bills?
Iâm going to go with Johnson in 4, and have peeked at the list so wonât guess.
Johnson
Not many.
Probably something stupid maybe involving bathrooms.
Letâs see:
Bathrooms
Hunter biden
The same bipartisan immigration bill that Trump killed last summer
Something protecting religion
Something cutting spending on vaccines
Something anti- education
Something anti-dei
Trump holiday.
I couldnât find a list of 12, but i missed an obvious one.
Martial law.
Trump as dictator for life.
No further session.
Something sexual that wasnât supposed to be learned about - excluding what we already know, e.g. Gaetz - will come to light about someone. (and that person will probably be an R)
I agree with 11 of the 12 bills. The one I disagree with is the one relating to the ICC - but maybe I donât understand all the terms.
âThe bill (H.R. ____) to impose sanctions with respect to the International Criminal Court engaged in any effort to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute any protected person of the United States and its allies.â
Would this be mandatory? What if the US fully believes that someone should be tried by the ICC? Are they allowed to assist with detaining such a person?
There needs to be some mechanism to allow bypassing the sanctions when appropriate. The term Iâm not clear on is âany protected personâ - what constitutes âprotectedâ?
Iâm good with the other 11.
I donât like requiring 9 members of the majority party to oust a speaker. I get that not having a speaker means that things grind to a halt, so address that instead. Have a backup speaker, defined by the rules, who automatically assumes the role should the speaker be removed, until a new speaker is elected. That way business can continue.
Itâs to protect the Israeli war criminals. The incoming American administration is perfectly fine with genocide.
Johnson if he agrees to be on a short leash.
The list:
Also the USA has a lot of UN Security Council unapproved activities eg Iraq invasion and the association of the contractors with the then VP.
Also the drone killings have been a problem for a long time. If you recall the reason we count all men over 16 as militants is because thatâs what the USA said when it killed people indiscriminately with the drones. The USA hasnât admitted to killing civilians even though there is extensive documentation of that. So using the Israeli issue to squash a latent issue is really smart especially when most wonât associate it with USAâs own needs.
To be honest, Bush Jr and his VP were just as bad as Bibi.
Massie, Norman, and Self all voted for 3rd parties, so first vote is going down.
2nd time is the charm. When Johnson only had 3 ânoâ votes on the 1st ballot, he was likely to get one of them to flip quickly; what was surprising is that there were only 3 voting no to begin with.
With a GOP majority in the Senate and Trump in the WH, and the GOP hell-bent on vengeance throughout Congress, I donât expect him to get the boot. If Democrats can villify him the way the GOP has done with Pelosi, ⌠ah, who the hell are we kidding, they wonât do that.
A lot of that is, âWhat do I get out of this?â
I thought I read that 2 of the 3 changed their votes on the first vote and so technically he only had 1 ballot and won with no need to go to a 2nd ballot.
Yeah, Kind of a ballot 1.1.
The bathroom rule didnât make the rules package after all. The 12 Republican priorities that did make it in, in reverse order, are:
12. Prohibit a moratorium on fracking. There has never been a national moratorium on fracking, and should Congress ever pass one they would overturn this, so it is purely symbolic.
11. Amend Controlled Substances Act to reschedule fentanyl, presumably meaning move fentanyl from Schedule 2 to Schedule 1, that is eliminate the 60 years of medical uses for it. My impression is that the fentanyl crisis comes from the fact that it is cheap to make and is being manufactured in industrial quantities in other countries then imported. I havenât heard much about misuse of medical fentanyl, so it isnât clear that this bill does anything but nibble at the edges of the fentanyl crisis while taking away a legitimate medical application.
10. Require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. I wouldnât be opposed to this (or even voter id) if there was a good system already in place for proving citizenship, but as the colossal mess of the Real ID rollout has showed, we donât have that. So this creates a big mess without solving anything other than making voter registration drives harder to organize.
9. Adjust tax code for certain individuals who live in Taiwan. Donât know the details.
8. Sanction ICC if they have the temerity to investigate Americans or allies. Discussed previously.
7. âprohibit a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion.â Does this mean requiring NICU level support? Who would pay for that? Wasnât abortion supposed to be a state thing now?
2-6. Make deportation the result for a bunch of things, take federal money away from âsanctuaryâ cities. Some parts seem reasonable, some are things that I already thought were deportable offenses.
1. Single most important issue for the Republican conference: There are < 10 trans NCAA athletes, out of > 500,000. Some of whom are trans men. Bill wants to ban them. Language of bill doesnât realize that intersex people exist, and that if athlete populations mirror general populations, there are 2-3,000 female NCAA athletes who do not have XX chromosomes.