Lazy Caturday Reads

Sleeping Cat, by Guzel Min, 2021

Happy Caturday!!

The folks in DC are still arguing about whether the U.S. government should pay its bills or not. Republicans think it’s much more important to make poor, disabled, and elderly Americans, as well as federal employees–including the military–suffer than to simply write those checks and then sit down and work on the next budget. If Congress doesn’t get its act together, millions of people in those categories will be unable to pay their rent and bills and buy food. I suppose this will go down to the wire and then be worked out, but I think the whole mess is getting dangerous.

Here’s what’s happening as of this morning.

NBC News: The U.S. now has until June 5 to act on the debt ceiling, Yellen says.

The United States has a few more days than expected before it runs out of money, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a letter Friday afternoon.

The new deadline to act or risk breaching the debt ceiling is June 5, Yellen said, setting a hard deadline for the first time. She had previously been less specific, saying the breach could occur “potentially as early as June 1.”

The Treasury Department hit the statutory borrowing limit in January and has since been using “extraordinary measures” to pay the country’s bills.

“Based on the most recent available data, we now estimate that Treasury will have insufficient resources to satisfy the government’s obligations if Congress has not raised or suspended the debt limit by June 5,” Yellen wrote to congressional leaders.

This is just about paying the bills that we’ve already run up, but Republicans want hold the funds hostage so they can punish people who need help from the government.

The two parties have been sorting through their differences on spending levels. But a major hangup is the Republican demand to impose tougher work requirements for Americans to receive federal benefits like SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, two sources familiar with the talks said.

Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana, who is leading negotiations for House Republicans, said it’s “totally appropriate” for an older group of able-bodied Americans without dependents to be subject to work requirements in order to get federal aid….

Democrats say work requirements already exist for federal programs and argue that stricter policies would create more red tape and throw eligible Americans who don’t complete the paperwork correctly off the rolls, and that work requirements have little impact on unemployment.

Painting by Quint Bucholz

Republicans know they’d never win this argument without holding the full faith and credit of our country hostage, so that is what they are doing. If only Democrats had listened to Yellen when they still held a majority in both houses for a brief time after the midterms, this wouldn’t be happening now.

The New York Times: Yellen’s Debt Limit Warnings Went Unheeded, Leaving Her to Face Fallout.

In the days after November’s midterm elections, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen was feeling upbeat about the fact that Democrats had performed better than expected and maintained control of the Senate.

But as she traveled to the Group of 20 leaders summit in Indonesia that month, she said Republicans taking control of the House posed a new threat to the U.S. economy.

“I always worry about the debt ceiling,” Ms. Yellen told The New York Times in an interview on her flight from New Delhi to Bali, Indonesia, in which she urged Democrats to use their remaining time in control of Washington to lift the debt limit beyond the 2024 elections. “Any way that Congress can find to get it done, I’m all for.”

Democrats did not heed Ms. Yellen’s advice. Instead, the United States has spent most of this year inching toward the brink of default as Republicans refused to raise or suspend the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing limit without capping spending and rolling back parts of President Biden’s agenda.

So what will Yellen do in the worst case scenario?

Ms. Yellen has held her contingency plans close to the vest but signaled this week that she had been thinking about how to prepare for the worst. Speaking at a WSJ CEO Council event, the Treasury secretary laid out the difficult decisions she would face if the Treasury was forced to choose which bills to prioritize.

Most market watchers expect that the Treasury Department would opt to make interest and principal payments to bondholders before paying other bills, yet Ms. Yellen would say only that she would face “very tough choices.”

White House officials have refused to say if any contingency planning is underway. Early this year, Biden administration officials said they were not planning for how to prioritize payments. As the U.S. edges closer to default, the Treasury Department declined to say whether that has changed.

Yet former Treasury and Federal Reserve officials said it was nearly certain that emergency plans were being devised.

Read more at the NYT.

Cat on a windowsill, artist unknown

My eyes bugged out when I read this one at Axios: Scoop: Sinema enters debt ceiling negotiations. Just what we don’t need.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) has inserted herself into the debt ceiling negotiations, working with both sides to try to bridge differences on permitting reform, according to people familiar with the matter.

Why it matters: Her late entrance is a sign that negotiators are willing to explore new avenues to resolve thorny issues before June 5, the new deadline from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen for when the U.S. government will run out of money.

 — Permitting reform — a catch-all category that includes both Republican and Democratic plans to improve energy production and transmission — is emerging as a tough-to-resolve disagreement between the White House and congressional negotiators.

 — Republicans want to change the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) with the goal of cutting red tape for oil and gas companies when they develop new projects. Democrats want to make it easier for solar and wind farms to access transmission lines.

Negotiators also are at an impasse on a demand from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to add new work requirements to welfare benefits, according to Biden administration officials.

 — But the two sides are making progress on overall spending levels, with the goal of capping spending for two years at lower levels. In exchange, the debt ceiling would be raised past the 2024 elections.

Ugh!

Here’s a bit of dark humor on the debt ceiling crisis by Dana Millbank at The Washington Post: Save the world economy or his own job? McCarthy can’t decide.

After a debt limit negotiating session at the White House this week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy returned to the Capitol and offered reporters an update.

“Let me be very clear,” he said. “From the first day I sat with the president, there’s two criterias I told him,” McCarthy said, raising two fingers. “We’re not going to raise taxes because we bring in more money than we ever have. And we’re not going to pass a clean debt ceiling. And we’ve got to spend less than we spent this year.”

Let me be very clear, Mr. Speaker. Those are three, er, “criterias.”

Filippo Corelli, Cat in a Doorway, early 20th century

This might be the most worrying aspect of the default standoff: The full faith and credit of the United States hangs in the balance, and the man sitting across the negotiating table from the president seems to be genuinely off-kilter.

Whipsawed by public pressure from the far-right House Freedom Caucus and from former president Donald Trump, McCarthy has at one moment praised the “honesty” and “professionalism” of White House negotiators and the next moment attacked the other side as “socialist.” He gives daily (sometimes hourly) updates packed with fake statistics, nonsense anecdotes and malapropisms. His negotiators have walked out of talks only to resume them hours later. This week, at a meeting of the House Republican Conference during the height of negotiations, he decided it was the right moment to auction off a stick of his used lip balm as a fundraiser for House Republicans’ political campaigns. (Rep. Marjorie Taylor “Jewish Space Lasers” Greene won the bidding at $100,000.)

The speaker’s erraticism has an obvious origin. As usual, he isn’t leading. He’s being buffeted by crosscurrents. If he bends too much in talks, he’ll lose his GOP hardliners and could therefore lose his job. If he pleases the hardliners, he keeps his job but throws the country and perhaps the world into economic calamity. His job security or the world economy? McCarthy just can’t decide.

Read the rest at the WaPo.

Moving on to other topics….

CBS has a tidbit about the criminal case against Trump in Manhattan: Prosecutors in Trump’s criminal case say they have recording of Trump and a witness.

Prosecutors in former President Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal case have released to his attorneys a recording of Trump and a witness, whose identity was not disclosed, according to a document the office made public Friday.

The document, called an automatic discovery form, describes the nature of the charges against a defendant and a broad overview of the evidence that prosecutors will present at Trump’s preliminary hearing or at trial. Trump’s attorneys and media organizations, including CBS News, had repeatedly requested that such a form be made public in the weeks since Trump’s arrest on April 4….

The document lists the dates of 34 instances between Feb. 14, 2017 and Dec. 5, 2017 when he allegedly falsified records.

In a section devoted to electronic evidence that will be turned over, a prosecutor for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office indicated they have disclosed to the defense a “recording of a conversation between defendant and a witness.”

The section also indicates prosecutors intend to disclose recordings of calls between witnesses and others.

That could be interesting.

Three Cats, by Ann Hewson

“National experts” are responding to the treatment of Indiana doctor Caitlin Bernard who treated a 10-year-old Ohio girl who had been impregnated through rape. Indy Star: ‘Chilling effect’: National experts decry decision against abortion doctor Caitlin Bernard.

Dressed in white coats, Drs. Tracey Wilkinson and Caroline Rouse were among the first to arrive at Caitlin Bernard’s Thursday hearing in front of the Indiana medical licensing board. When the hearing ended nearly 15 hours later, they were among the last to leave.

Six months after Indiana’s Republican attorney general filed a complaint against the Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, the board voted to reprimand and fine Bernard on Thursday, finding that she violated privacy laws in giving a reporter information about a 10-year-old rape victim.

But representatives of the medical community nationwide – from individual doctors to the American Medical Association to an author of HIPAA – don’t think Bernard did anything wrong. Further, they say, the decision will have a chilling effect on those involved with patient care.

“This sends a message to all doctors everywhere that political persecution can be happening to you next for providing health care to your patients,” Wilkinson said.

“It’s terrible,” Rouse said. They’d just spent hours “listening to our friend and our colleague be put on trial for taking care of her patient and providing evidence-based health care, and that is incredibly demoralizing as a physician.”

Guess what? Republicans don’t care.

Ron DeSantis has been announcing some of the things he would do if he were elected president in 2024.

The Hill: DeSantis says he’ll consider pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, including Trump.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Thursday that if elected president, he will consider pardoning all the Jan. 6 defendants — including former President Trump — on his first day in office.

“On day one, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who people are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive in issuing pardons,” DeSantis said on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” podcast when asked about whether he will consider pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, including Trump, who is currently facing a federal investigation over his role on Jan. 6.

Nineteenth Century cat in doorway, Boston School, artist unknown

“I would say any example of disfavored treatment based on politics, or weaponization would be included in that review, no matter how small or how big,” he added.

DeSantis also accused the Justice Department and the FBI of weaponizing its authority by pursuing ongoing investigations into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The Justice Department said earlier this month that 1,033 arrests have been made in connection to the Capitol attacks and about 485 people have been sentenced due to criminal activity conducted that day.

DeSantis also claimed that the FBI is targeting anti-abortion groups, as well as parents who want to attend school board meetings. He said that if elected, his administration would determine on a “case-by-case” basis if the government was weaponized against certain groups.

“We’re going to find examples where the government’s been weaponized against disfavored groups, and we will apply relief as appropriate, but it will be done on a case-by-case basis,” he said.

Also from The Hill: DeSantis says he would push to repeal Trump criminal justice reform if elected.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Friday that if elected president, he would call on Congress to repeal the criminal justice reform bill signed into law by then-President Trump, his latest attack on Trump from the right.

DeSantis, appearing on “The Ben Shapiro Show,” criticized the First Step Act, a bipartisan bill passed in 2018 that reduced mandatory minimum sentences, expanded credits for well-behaved prisoners looking for shorter sentences and aimed to reduce recidivism.

The Florida governor, who officially entered the 2024 White House race on Wednesday, called the legislation “basically a jailbreak bill.”

“So one of the things I would want to do as president is go to Congress and seek the repeal of the First Step Act,” he said. “If you are in jail, you should serve your time. And the idea that they’re releasing people who have not been rehabilitated early, so that they can prey on people in our society is a huge, huge mistake.”

DeSantis voted for the initial House version of the bill while serving as a congressman in 2018, something Trump’s team has highlighted.

If you didn’t already know that DeSantis is corrupt, there’s this from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: GOP officials: Top aides in governor’s office asked lawmakers to endorse DeSantis.

Top aides to Gov. Ron DeSantis were involved in rounding up endorsements for his presidential campaign from members of the Florida Legislature during a time when lawmaker’s bills and budget priorities were at the mercy of the governor’s office, according to three GOP sources with knowledge of the conversations.

A Republican lawmaker says DeSantis’ top budget official called earlier this month to discuss the lawmaker endorsing DeSantis’ presidential campaign.

The lawmaker and a GOP consultant who was told about the endorsement conversation with DeSantis’ budget chief Chris Spencer immediately after it happened said the call was inappropriate and raised ethical questions.

Blinking in the Sun, by Ralph Hedley, 1881

Having state employees in the governor’s office, instead of staff on the governor’s political team, asking for endorsements raises concerns about whether the governor’s staff was improperly leveraging state resources to help his campaign.

That includes using taxpayer-funded employees for political purposes, which is allowed if it’s not during work hours but still inappropriate in this circumstance in the mind of the lawmaker contacted by Spencer. It also relates to what some saw as an implied threat that lawmakers’ bills and state budget items could be vetoed if they didn’t back DeSantis.

The lawmaker who spoke to Spencer said budget priorities didn’t come up during the call, but the fact that DeSantis’ budget director was calling about an endorsement implicitly tied the budget items to the political ask….

Another top DeSantis aide — legislative affairs director Stephanie Kopelousos — did discuss budget items during calls with multiple lawmakers that included Kopelousos asking them to endorse DeSantis, according to the GOP lawmaker who spoke with Spencer.

That lawmaker later spoke with at least five legislators who were asked by Kopelousos to endorse DeSantis. Another prominent GOP leader in Florida said he spoke to a lawmaker who relayed that he repeatedly was contacted by Kopelousos about endorsing DeSantis.

This guy should never get anywhere near the presidency.

That’s it for me today. What stories have captured your interest lately?