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Dear Group, In McMorris Rodgers we have a Representative in Congress who seems to have lost her voice. “Donald Trump was elected President” is her stock phrase when asked about her support for the leader of her Party. She is all about falling in line in order to advance the agenda. Instead of standing up for what she claims to believe, the values she claims to support, it is all about her “leadership” position in the Party. The disconnect is nowhere more apparent than in her stance on DACA. Below is a quote from an excellent article in The Inlander by Daniel Walters, one of several articles of his concerning McMorris Rodgers, all of which are well worth the time to click and read [the bold is mine]: One by one, the DACA students told their stories that evening. One says she didn’t know she wasn’t an American citizen until she applied for college. Another lost his legal status because of a clerical error. As McMorris Rodgers listens, according to several attendees, tears well up in her eyes. …”I have personally observed a journey of compassion and heart-shifting in Cathy,” McAuley [a church engagement director for Youth For Christ] says. “I can state that unequivocally.” At the DACA meeting, some of the pastors and DACA students push McMorris Rodgers to take a stronger stance beyond words uttered in private. Sponsor a bill. Let one go to the floor. Give a passionate speech. She doesn’t bite, attendees say. She talks about the political limitations. She says she doesn’t want to push a bill that Trump would veto. The sentiment of the last sentence was also on display at the Green Bluff mini town hall on May 29th. There she mentioned the discharge petition signed by all but one Democrat and twenty-three Republicans, a discharge petition to bring DACA to the House floor against the wishes of Republican leadership. McMorris Rodgers carefully avoids any mention she has not signed it. She said “we” are working on a compromise, not saying “we” probably means just Republicans. Finally, “I don’t believe the President will sign it without a path forward on the wall.” Asked if she would prefer a stand alone DACA bill, she answered, “I would have to look at it.” Really, Cathy? You have tears in your eyes listening to Dreamers tell their stories and you don’t know if you personally would prefer a stand alone bill? Suddenly you’re all about the practical details of legislation, not your values, not your heart. You don’t want to push a bill that doesn’t have a chance of passage? You prefer to use your “leadership” position to work behind the scenes in the dark, not make waves. The more I ponder that sentiment the more angry it makes me. You, McMorris Rodgers, say you don’t want to “push a bill” your President would veto. May I remind you that Barrack Obama was also “your President?” Do you wish to deny that accolade to a man who actually won the popular vote? While Barrack Obama was the duly elected President, “our” President, how many bills did you vote for, in your “leadership” position, that had no chance of passage in the Senate and, if they did, would certainly have faced a veto? How many times did you vote for your “Balanced Budget Amendment,” knowing full well it had zero chance of passage, knowing it was pure political theater? How many times during your period of “leadership” did you vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act knowing the bill was dead on arrival? How many times did you vote for bills constructed around the bogus term “Partial Birth Abortion?” How many times did you vote to support gag rules concerning information about abortion while you spoke out of the other side of your mouth about the importance of ‘free speech?” How many times did you vote to please the NRA, making a joke out of locally issued Concealed Carry Weapons Permits. How do you justify pushing a bill (co-sponsoring it) to remove silencers from weapons regulations that have been in existence since 1934? And now you have the unmitigated gall to tell us that you don’t want to “push a bill the President would veto?” You are so enamored of the ways in which THIS president can advance Republican goals that you refuse to notice, much less speak out against, the manifest horror of his bullying, pandering to white supremacists, scapegoating of immigrants, name-calling, and demeaning of the judiciary? Why can you not consider any legislation to curb this man’s autocratic tendencies? How can you stand by and listen to him demean mainstream media, media that actually still funds investigative research instead of thinly veiled propaganda? Spare me, McMorris Rodgers. Hypocrisy is not a leadership skill. You may shed a genuine tear over the plight of the Dreamers, but you have too much fealty to your rotting Party to stand up and actually offer the Dreamers any help unless you can extract money for Trump’s wall and avoid the threat of their becoming real citizens and able to cast a vote. Keep to the high ground, Jerry |
DaVita-Your Tax Dollars at Work
Dear Group, It has started. Any of you who watch television have repeatedly seen two ads in support of of McMorris Rodgers. First, there was the “Apple Stand” ad paid for out of CMR’s personal campaign coffer. Now we have the DaVita Corporation’s “Not All Heroes Wear Capes” Ad “Paid For By DaVita, Inc.” According to the 30 second ad, Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers is making “Heroic efforts in the halls of Congress to empower everyday heroes like nurses and doctors to provide better coordinated health care.” McMorris Rodgers smiling image appears twice. The words “Cathy McMorris Rodgers,” are enthusiastically intoned three times accompanied by dramatic music. The consumer of this propaganda is exhorted to support “The Patients Act,” no bill number, no detail…clearly, there is no expectation the viewer will scurry to their computer to look it up. The whole point is to embed CMR’s multi-syllabic name in the mind of the viewer. (If you’re curious enough to want to look at the “Patients Act” there is a link way below in the P.S.s.) First, recognize this ad as a product of the decades long push by the Republican Party to unleash the power of the wealthy to produce and market propaganda to the public. This ad is an “independent expenditure,” part of the “First Amendment Right of free speech” accorded to “corporate speech,” The “right” of corporations as “persons” to spend any amount at any time influencing elections comes to us courtesy of a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court with the Citizens United decision of 2010 and the cases that followed it. As long as the ad is “independent” of the candidate, i.e. the candidate’s campaign supposedly cannot coordinate the “independent” ads with the efforts of the campaign, such ads are now perfectly legal right up to the day of the election. Expect to see many more of them. DaVita’s “Not all heroes wear capes” ad is slick, but DaVita, Inc. certainly can afford it. DaVita, Inc. is a huge company with nearly 19 billion dollars in assets and 664 million dollars in net income in 2017. You can read about it here in Wikipedia. DaVita’s dialysis centers are everywhere. There are three in Spokane alone. Nationwide 70 percent of the dialysis market has been cornered by just two companies, DaVita and Fresenius. (Fresenius also has three dialysis clinics in Spokane.) YOUR TAX DOLLARS? McMorris Rodgers is all about the “free market,” right? McMorris Rodgers preaches about “freedom” and “transparency” when it comes to health insurance and health care every chance she gets. DaVita is a corporation competing in a “free market” for health care dollars, right? Well, not quite. This is very big business, big business paid for by you and me. Treating end stage kidney disease takes up one percent of the entire U.S. federal budget. The End Stage Renal Disease Program (ESRD), enacted in 1972 under Richard M. Nixon (remember he was a Republican before Republicans became Libertarians), extended Medicare benefits for renal dialysis to those under sixty-five. In 1972 there were about 10,000 people in the U.S. dependent on the new technology of dialysis to stay alive. Today there are nearly half a million (thanks mostly to renal disease associated with diabetes and high blood pressure). 90% percent of today’s dialysis patients have their dialysis paid for by ESRD under Medicare. DaVita is dependent on continued payment of our tax dollars through Medicare for its existence and profit. DaVita takes those tax dollars and uses them to shore up support for McMorris Rodgers with their inane “Not All Heroes Wear Capes” ad put before the electorate’s passive eyes on their television screens. The ad money is probably peanuts compared to the salary of Kent Thiry, DaVita’s CEO, or to the money DaVita spends on corporate entertainment, some of which has featured Thiry riding into a packed convention hall on a horse, or compared to the money made by holders of DaVita stock. So how do you feel about your tax dollars fueling inane ads for the electorate to passively ingest? Consider it a courtesy of the Republican Party’s unified efforts to trash campaign finance law. Remember these ads every time McMorris Rodgers speaks of “the ‘free’ market” and “transparency.” Keep to the high ground, Jerry P.S. If you enjoy John Oliver’s commentary and have 24 minutes to watch his monologue on DaVita, click here, for the youtube video. He delivers a well-deserved skewering. P.P.S. DaVita’s ad is just one more manifestation of corporations using money from your tax dollars to foist ads to you on TV. Think of the all the drug company ads for Viagra brought to you courtesy of your tax dollars funneled through Medicare, Part D (Part D is a product of the George W. Bush administration, no less) P.P.P.S If you really want to dig around in the weeds well beyond what DaVita’s ad actually wants you to remember you can delve into the what they call the “Patients Act.” If took some sleuthing for me to determine they were referring to H.R.4143 – Dialysis PATIENTS Demonstration Act of 2017. The bill itself makes some sense, but is, of course, financially to the benefit of DaVita by steering some more tax dollars its way. |
Cathy’s Trip to Pullman
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Dear Group, Thursday, May 31, McMorris Rodgers held a town hall in Pullman, WA. In spite of its middle-of-a-work-day timing (3-4PM) and minimal advertising (a Facebook post the prior Saturday and a posting in an obscure corner of her website), about forty people attended. She experienced some stiff questioning but stuck to her now familiar talking points. McMorris Rodgers must feel her seat in jeopardy and time is short, so she must make the most of a trip like this. A poorly advertised hour long town hall will add to the tally she will later tout as evidence of her constituent outreach. Overheard in the hall was reference to McMorris Rodgers’ un-advertised visit to a Pullman company, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) SEL a far more important constituent of McMorris Rodgers and the Republican/Libertarian Party than the forty people at the town hall. Why? It is going to cost a lot of money for McMorris Rodgers to try to keep her seat in the upcoming election. The money directly under her control, the Cathy McMorris Rodgers For Congress coffer, will not cover it. She will need major backing from the Republican national apparatus. Thanks to concerted efforts by the Republican/Libertarian machine to subvert campaign finance law, extremely wealthy donors are much freer to fill the national coffers than they were prior to 2010 and Citizens United. The flow of a lot of that money is opaque to us (through “non-profits”), but, thanks to remnants of campaign finance law that have so far survived from the early 1970s, we still have a small window through which to see how it all works. Why look at McMorris Rodgers and her visit to Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL)? The founder, technically a Schweitzer “employee,” and, probably, a holder of a large portion of the “employee ownership,” Edmund O. Schweitzer III, happens to share his name with his company. That fact makes personal campaign contributions easier to associate with the company. Furthermore, unlike many in the Koch donor group, Mr. Schweitzer and his wife choose to make at least some of their political contributions to candidates and PACs whose donors must be disclosed on the Federal Elections Commission website to comply with still extant campaign finance law. On December 19, 2017, Mr. Schweitzer and his wife wrote checks totaling $594,600, all to various Republican interests you can see by clicking the link. Is it a coincidence that the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act the same day? You tell me. Of course, we have no way of knowing the net worth or annual income of the Schweitzers, but the financial benefit to them from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act must have been substantial. They have been major Republican contributors for many election cycles, but their donations usually have come earlier in the year. Were they withholding their contributions contingent on passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act? The Republican/Libertarian legal attack on campaign finance law removed the cap on total political donations a wealthy person can give. (See McCutcheon v. FEC, 2014) At least so far, though, they have not succeeded in trashing some important remnants of campaign finance law from the 1970s. As a bizarre result the mega-rich can only only give $5400 per person per election cycle directly to the candidate ($2700 for the Primary and $2700 for the General Election, $10,800 grand total for a couple like the Schweitzers). The record of the Schweitzers’ contributions at FEC.gov shows that, although $320,800 of the $594,800 flowed through entities attached to McMorris Rodgers’ name (CMR, Cathy), only $10,800 went to her personal campaign coffer, Cathy McMorris Rodgers for Congress, the only one she directly controls. Think about that for a moment. Since Citizens United in 2010 and its subsequent well-orchestrated kin, the Republican Party apparatus has been able to consolidate far more monetary power at the top, while candidates remain limited, currying favor with the national machine by appealing to the big donors in their districts, but able to keep only a small part of the proceeds under their own control. It should come as no surprise that Republican Congresspeople toe the Republican Party line unless they are secure in a gerrymandered voting district. (To be sure, Democrats do this, too. They have no choice. The Republicans used the courts to change the rules in favor of the Party with the wealthier donors…themselves.) So as McMorris Rodgers visits Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories hat in hand she is begging for only a relative pittance that can accrue to her personal campaign fund ($10,800)…and a massive cash infusion for the Republican/Libertarian Party. The vast Party apparatus will use that money to further its agenda of deregulation, privatization, tax cuts for the rich, cuts to “entitlements,” and mind-bending propaganda and gerrymandering to keep the whole enterprise on track. What is McMorris Rodgers role here? I imagine she is sincere about her positions and her rhetoric. She has lasted this long because she is actually convinced of the righteousness of the Republican/Libertarian credo AND she projects warmth, sincerity, and motherliness to her constituents. With so much money sloshing around at the top of the Republican Party and relatively little in individual campaign coffers it is no surprise there are very few mavericks among Republican members of the House. Any hint of individual thought or lack of fealty and in two years such a maverick will be weeded out by a well-funded challenger from the right more dedicated to the party line. This is how McMorris Rodgers can sincerely tear up about the plight of the Dreamers, claim she is fighting for them, refuse to sign the discharge petition, and concoct a bill that won’t offer them eventual citizenship, while using the excuse she will work only on a bill that has a chance to become law. (One might ask her to explain, then, why she votes session after session for gun and abortion legislation, repeals of the Affordable Care Act and bills like the REINS Act and the Balanced Budget Amendment that have no chance in the Senate.) She may hold a sparsely advertised town hall, but Cathy’s trip to Pullman was more to worship at a local shrine of the Republican/Libertarian wealth machine. Keep to the high ground, Jerry P.S. Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories is a part of small family dynasty. Edmund O. Schweitzer III is the son of Edmund O. Schweitzer, Jr. who founded E. O. Schweitzer Manufacturing in 1949. The original Edmund O. Schweitzer, was a co-founder of S&C Electric in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Do you suppose the recent near doubling of the estate tax exemption from 5.5 million to 11.12 million (part of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”) further enriched this dynasty? Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories is in many ways a benign example of private enterprise (far more benign than the fossil fuel industry, for instance). I pick on it here only as a traceable example of the corrosiveness of money in politics. P.P.S. It seems likely the Schweitzers are major Republican donors based on traditional Republican fiscal prudence and “free market” advocacy. It is unlikely they are passionate about free access to guns, limiting gay marriage, limiting access to birth control or abortion, keeping transgender students in the “right” bathroom, or deporting the Dreamers. Nonetheless, their money will push these issues in order to keep the Republican/Libertarians in power to further dismantle campaign finance law, reduce any and all regulation, privatize and limit social programs, and generally enrich Ayn Rand’s captains of industry. P.P.P.S. I am not aware of any national Republican efforts to remove the $2700/person/election cap on campaign contributions to individual candidates. Is that because they’ve run out of legal tricks or is it because the national party is happy with the money, and therefore the power, at the top? |
CMR’s DACA Bait and Switch
Dear Group,
Trump has whipped up a storm of anti-immigrant fervor (with the considerable assistance of Steve Bannon). He seems to delight in firing up his base with tales of MS-13 gang member activities and then avoiding any distinction between gang members and immigrants in general. His crowds eat it up. To be sure, in his mercurial way he did once throw out a lifeline to DACA recipients, but only after making a show of putting their lives in jeopardy by announcing he would cancel DACA this spring. (So far, that is mostly stalled in the courts, but DACA recipients live lives of ongoing insecurity.)
I was surprised at the Green Bluff Town Closet to hear McMorris Rodgers say they were working hard on a “deal” in the House that would give relief to DACA recipients, the very people that her President has been threatening with deportation and using as a bargaining chip since last fall. It seems clear that if offering DACA recipients a path to citizenship were to come to a clean vote it would pass both the House and Senate. So when she spoke of a “discharge petition” around DACA I briefly dared to hope.
If an absolute majority of the House sign a discharge petition a bill or bills will be “discharged” from committee and voted on the House floor. In this particular case a successful discharge petition would bring to a vote on the House floor four competing DACA “solution” bills. The one that gets the most votes would go to the Senate (only if the approval vote of the winning bill is a majority). The parliamentary details are laid out in an article from the this highly right-biased publication RedState. An “absolute majority” of the House (for a discharge petition) is 218. 192 of 193 Democrats have signed on, as have 23 Republicans, making 213. Obviously, Republican leadership (Ryan/McConnell) would not be happy if this reaches 218. It is a black-eye for them.
Here’s where it gets interesting: McMorris Rodgers is NOT a signatory to the discharge petition. I suppose it would be bad form for her, since she is most often seen behind Paul Ryan’s right shoulder. To hear her speak on Tuesday you would be forgiven if you thought she had a lot of sympathy for the Dreamers (DACA recipients) and she were actively “working” on coming to their aid.
She did discuss one “solution:” funding for the wall in exchange for “a path to ‘permanent residency status.'” I asked for clarification: “That is, NOT a path to citizenship, is that right?” I had heard correctly. Her excuse was to claim that “it wouldn’t become law” implying, I guess, that Trump wouldn’t sign it. But who knows what Trump might do on any given day?
Here’s the crux: The Republicans really, really don’t want any more brown skinned voters in their future, especially brown-skinned people whom they have threatened and bullied.
So in summary, Trump riles up the anti-immigrant, racist base of the far right. Trump threatens the Dreamers with deportation claiming DACA was unconstitutional and knowing the Democrats can always be counted on to be sympathetic. Trump sets a time line and bangs the drum for money for his wall. McMorris Rodgers and company offer themselves as saviors who will broker a tough deal the President just might sign, but they are careful NOT to offer citizenship as even an eventual goal. Meanwhile she pretends sympathy but refuses to sign the discharge petition. Her goal: we leave Green Bluff thinking her heart is in the right place and she’s working hard to make things right for the Dreamers. Pretty slick. Is anyone paying attention?
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry