First: Norman Lear (1922-2023) died yesterday.
Second: It seems Kevin McCarthy is retiring from the House. Just as well. I understand he’s leaving at the end of this year.
Third: Republicans in both the Senate and the House are blocking Ukraine funding.
The White House is seeking nearly $106 billion, but the bill has gotten bogged down in negotiations over border security and because of increasing reluctance from Republican lawmakers to approve significant spending on the Ukraine war. GOP lawmakers are insisting on policy changes to halt the flow of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border as a condition for the assistance.
The latest weapons package will be provided through presidential drawdown authority, or PDA, which pulls weapons from existing U.S. stockpiles and sends them quickly to the war front, said U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the aid has not yet been publicly announced.
Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said Tuesday there is about $1.1 billion left in funding to replenish U.S. military stockpiles for weapons and equipment sent to Ukraine. And he said there is roughly $4.8 billion in drawdown authority still available.
The entire immigration system needs to be overhauled and streamlined, but that’s something Congress has to do. And Republicans don’t want to do that. This is what Senate Republicans want:
Senate Republicans have released a sweeping set of U.S. border security proposals as a condition for sending more aid to Ukraine, laying out a draft plan to resume construction on parts of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, curtail humanitarian parole for people who cross into the United States and make it more difficult for migrants to qualify for asylum.
As I understand it, the flood of migrants at the southern border is likely to just keep getting bigger and bigger unless conditions in Central America change a lot.
Fourth: About three weeks ago, Speaker Mike Johnson announced he was releasing all of the security footage of January 6. Some of it was released fairly quickly. But yesterday Johnson apologized for not releasing more, saying that faces had to be blurred first so the feds couldn’t identify people.
Johnson: We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ pic.twitter.com/pQ6fSlAp9W
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 5, 2023
This is odd, to say the least. One, part of the reason for this exercise was so that Marjorie Taylor Greene could go through the videos and identify all the people who she imagines are federal agents or Antifa or other not-MAGAs who caused all the violence, because the MAGAs were just having a peaceful demonstration.. Two, the feds have had access to these tapes all along. Three, Johnson seems to be aiding and abetting criminal activity here. Hmm. He’s taken it back since, I understand.
But I’m also wondering if his delaying might have to do with videos that show a whole lot more violence than he realized was there, and that it’s obvious it’s MAGAs who are the perpetrators?
Fifth: In case you haven’t heard, Tuberville has mostly ended his block on military propmotions.
Sixth: Jack Smith is preparing to hoist Trump by his own petard.
Seventh: Interesting read — “This Is the Final Compromise”: Donald Trump and the Implosion of the American Evangelical Movement