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Senate Passes Defense Bill With No Block on Funding for Abortion Travel, Setting up Battle With House

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The Senate passed its own version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Thursday without adding an amendment to pull Pentagon funding for abortion travel, setting up a likely fight with the House.

The Senate’s NDAA was widely backed by both Republicans and Democrats, passing in an 86-11 vote.

“What’s happening in the Senate is a stark contrast to a bipartisan race to the bottom we saw in the House where House Republicans are pushing partisan legislation that has zero chance of passing,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “House Republicans should look to the Senate to see how things get done.”

The group of Republicans who voted against the bill included Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), and Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN). (Read more from “Senate Passes Defense Bill With No Block on Funding for Abortion Travel, Setting up Battle With House” HERE)

Photo credit: Flickr

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Bill Passes Senate Which Would Require Women To Register For The Draft

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Women may soon be required to register for the draft following approval Wednesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee to add language to its yearly defense bill which would compel women to register for selective service.

The committee approved the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which now includes language that “amends the Military Selective Service Act to require the registration of women for Selective Service,” according to a summary of the bill released on Thursday, The Hill reported.

Despite the U.S. not having used the draft since the Vietnam War, men ages 18 through 25 are required to register for the Selective Service System, and failure to register is considered a felony punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and 5 years imprisonment. Despite the requirements of selective service, Pentagon officials have regularly said that they expect to keep the military all-volunteer, according to The Hill.

(Read more from “Bill Passes Senate Which Would Require Women To Register For The Draft” HERE)

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Trump Urges Supporters Not to Boycott Georgia Senate Elections

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President Donald Trump urged his supporters not to boycott the upcoming runoff Senate elections in Georgia on Friday, saying a boycott would be “playing right into the hands” of Democrats.

Trump made the comment hours after announcing that he will travel to Georgia to campaign for Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who are seeking to defend their seats against challenging Democrats. Republicans currently hold 50 seats in the Senate, meaning both Perdue and Loeffler would have to lose for Democrats to match the party in the chamber. . .

Some of Trump’s supporters in Georgia and across the country have called for a boycott of the runoff elections as a protest over Trump’s accusations of widespread voter fraud. The Trump campaign has yet to put forward concrete evidence of fraud, and it’s legal challenges have been unsuccessful so far. (Read more from “Trump Urges Supporters Not to Boycott Georgia Senate Elections” HERE)

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Senate Has Uncovered NOTHING Linking Trump Campaign and Russia

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By NBC News. After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016 election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats and Republicans on the committee.

But investigators disagree along party lines when it comes to the implications of a pattern of contacts they have documented between Trump associates and Russians — contacts that occurred before, during and after Russian intelligence operatives were seeking to help Donald Trump by leaking hacked Democratic emails and attacking his opponent, Hillary Clinton, on social media.

“If we write a report based upon the facts that we have, then we don’t have anything that would suggest there was collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia,” said Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an interview with CBS News last week. . .

Sen. Mark Warner, D.-Va., ranking member of the committee, told reporters in the Capitol Tuesday that he disagrees with the way Burr characterized the evidence about collusion, but he declined to offer his own assessment.

“I’m not going to get into any conclusions I have,” he said, before adding that “there’s never been a campaign in American history … that people affiliated with the campaign had as many ties with Russia as the Trump campaign did.” (Read more from “Senate Has Uncovered NOTHING Linking Trump Campaign and Russia” HERE)

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Mueller Probe ‘Going to Get to Russian Conspiracy’

By Newsweek. Special counsel Robert Mueller will “get to Russian conspiracy” in the ongoing investigation into whether President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign conspired with Moscow, former federal prosecutor and legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said.

Trump campaign officials “could collude, they were colluding, and all of this is so nefarious,” Kirschner said in a Tuesday interview with MSNBC’s Deadline: White House news program. “It’s not reckless, it’s not happenstance, it’s not careless,” he said.

Kirshner discussed comments made by prosecutor Andrew Weissman, which were reported by The New York Times from a hearing for Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. In a redacted transcript of the hearing, Weissmann suggested that Manafort was supposed to be the spokesperson for an allegedly Kremlin-linked plan to split Ukraine, a move that would work in Russia’s favor. Weissmann was arguing before the judge that a plea deal with Manafort should be thrown out because he had violated its terms, as he allegedly continued to have contacts with an associate linked to Russian intelligence, and had lied to investigators.

(Read more from “Mueller Probe ‘Going to Get to Russian Conspiracy'” HERE)

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GOP Senate Candidate John James Calls on Black Americans to Leave Democratic Party With Pro-America Message

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With all the talk about race in politics, the #WalkAway movement, and Turning Point USA’s 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit trending last week, why isn’t Michigan Republican candidate for U.S. Senate John James the talk of conservative media?

James released a short but powerful ad Thursday highlighting his father’s experience in the Jim Crow south and how his perseverance taught him to stand for America.

“My dad grew up in the Jim Crow south, but he persevered. And he taught me faith, service, and love of country,” James says. “I took those lessons from West Point to the battlefield, and I believe America’s still worth fighting for. That’s why I stand for the anthem. I stand for the fallen. And I stand for the forgotten.”

“Despite America’s challenges, we shall overcome,” he closes.

James, a graduate of West Point, decorated combat veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and businessman, is challenging incumbent Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. He is running on an inspirational pro-America message that calls on black Americans to realize “the Democratic business model is reliant on keeping black folks dependent on the government,” as he says in an ad released last week.

“Countless people have died for our right to think and to vote for ourselves, yet Democratic leadership asks us to outsource our voice on a straight-ticket ballot to a godless party that neither represents our values nor our economic best interests,” James says.

“The Democratic Party leadership cares more about the black vote than the back people, and it’s time to wake up.”

James is running as a pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, and pro-business conservative. On Tuesday, he was interviewed by LevinTV host Mark Levin.

Listen:

If elected, James told Levin, he would be the first African-American Republican senator from the state of Michigan. Democratic candidates like Georgia’s Stacey Abrams or Florida’s Andrew Gillum have captured national media attention. But James, a black Republican running as a conservative in Michigan, hasn’t had nearly the media attention those progressives get for free. (For more from the author of “GOP Senate Candidate John James Calls on Black Americans to Leave Democratic Party With Pro-America Message” please click HERE)

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Stockholm Syndrome: Senate Republicans Kiss up to the Media, but Don’t Have Time to Keep Their Promises to Their Voters

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Let me share something sublime with you.

Someone with the Twitter handle “Razor” penned the troll to end all trolls earlier this week when he confirmed well beyond a reasonable doubt that journalism is magical and not at all broken.

“Christian bakers would get less negative news coverage,” said Razor, “if they trained children at a compound how to commit school shootings.”

That one tiny, brilliant sentence filled me with great hope for a bit. Perhaps, if such ruthless wit and wisdom were still there among the people in sufficient quantities, civilization might still have a chance. Because if reason is still a thing in America, that was a kill shot from Razor’s Twitter gun.

But kill shots are in very short supply these days. Except when it comes to innocent babies and cake bakers. Those we’ve got covered.

And in the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, well, there was indeed a kill shot recently, but it can most accurately be described as a suicide: A resolution passed by unanimous consent — and just the day after “Razor” threw journalism to the ground and gave it the hazing it deserved — that “affirms that the press is not the enemy of the people” and “reaffirms the vital and indispensable role that the free press serves” and “condemns the attacks on the institution of the free press.”

I’m not sure why I have to say this, but just because President Trump goes overboard in one direction doesn’t mean you have to overcompensate in the other direction by genuflecting to an institution that has shown you nothing but hostility and contempt for decades. Are Senate Republicans really so far gone that they read the 300-plus editorials issued Thursday by newspapers begging Trump to stop being mean to them and then thought this would improve their standing in any fundamental way?

I mean, the New York Times just hired a documented bigot named Sarah Jeong to write for it. Remember her? And now Republicans are in essence apologizing to her. Stockholm syndrome called and said, dude, that’s a little pathetic, don’t you think?

And as if on cue, to hammer that point home, the same Twitter that just banned one of my CRTV colleagues also just gave Jeong the coveted blue verification check mark to signal the validity of her unique presence on its platform. Translation: Twitter, with a wink and a nod, wanted to make sure you know it has Jeong’s back and that if you don’t, you suck.

That’s the press. That’s social media. That’s progressivism. It wants nothing more than to make you grovel for not hating God, your country, or crazy concepts like having only two genders, and boy does it succeed a lot at that.

I know I’ve said the Senate will likely stay Republican in 2018 and that the House is the chamber most likely to flip, but the Democrats may as well have the Senate, too, since the fools currently running that place really thought that awkward makeout session with the press was important in any way. It was a move made by losers for losers. Senators apparently have time to swap spit with an industry that has forsaken bias for flat-out malfeasance, but they don’t have time to defund baby-killers, repeal Obamacare, or secure the border.

It is intolerable.

In baseball, the intolerable is handled, more than in any other sport, by a set of unwritten rules that do not exist anywhere, but are known by the time you get to the end of Little League. No showboating on a home run, no stealing when up by a certain number of runs, no bunting to break up a no-hitter, etc.

Since these rules cannot be governed by the umpires, it is up to the players to police themselves. When these rules are broken, the other team responds, often by the pitcher hitting the next batter. And that, too, is governed by unwritten rules. You can throw the ball at a batter’s hip or arm, say, but not at his head. If the rules are broken, the benches will clear.

But the Republican team is perpetually filled with betas who allow the other team to steal and showboat without retaliation. The conservative base grew to hate this so much that one day it looked in the bullpen and saw Trump warming up with 100 mph fastballs that he could hardly control. And when he came in to pitch and put one of those fastballs into the ear of the very first batter he faced, the crowd went nuts. He fights!

It’s also grown into chaos because Trump so rarely gets one over the plate, or he just flat-out decides to throw nothing but beanballs. That means it’s not really baseball any more.

Yet that’s America for you these days, and this week it’s feckless Republicans in the Senate whom you have to thank for not doing anything at all to turn that situation around. In fact, they only further encouraged both Trump and the propaganda-obsessed press to keep offering even more obscene chapters of this twisted show we are watching.

Because they never offer a sane and principled alternative. (For more from the author of “Stockholm Syndrome: Senate Republicans Kiss up to the Media, but Don’t Have Time to Keep Their Promises to Their Voters” please click HERE)

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Senate Admits to Paying $1.5 Million for Harassment

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The Senate quietly released a bare-bones report late Thursday on what a statement called “harassment settlement” data, showing that nearly $1.5 million in taxpayers’ money has been spent over the past two decades to cover claims against lawmakers and other Senate offices.

The two-page release contained no names of senators or victims. It said $599,000 was for 13 settlements involving “member-led” Senate offices, while the remaining $853,000 was for 10 settlements involving “other” Senate offices.

The Senate’s Rules and Appropriations committees released the information on the evening of Congress’ final work day this year. It came during a period that has seen several lawmakers resign or announce their retirements following sexual harassment accusations, and growing condemnation for the secrecy with which Congress has guarded information about such cases.

While the release called the information “harassment settlement data,” none of the terse descriptions of each case used those words. Four of the cases involved sex discrimination, including two that also involved “reprisal,” while most of the rest were for race, age or disability discrimination. (Read more from “Senate Admits to Paying $1.5 Million for Harassment” HERE)

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Female Senator Rips ‘Fat’ Male Colleague

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Following a Senate Committee of Appropriations Meeting Tuesday, Senator Susan Collins was caught talking with Senator Jack Reed about Rep. Blake Farenthold, calling him “so unattractive.”

Senator Collins delivered a statement in the hearing before sitting down next Reed, where they start talking to each other about budget and healthcare. The conversation turns towards Farenthold when Collins says, “Did you see the one that challenged me to a duel?”

The senator responded, “Trust me, do you know why he challenged you to a duel? Because you could beat the sh*t out of him.”

The audio gets fuzzy here, but Collins is heard saying “fat guy,” “he’s huge,” and “he is so unattractive it’s unbelievable.” (Read more from “Female Senator Rips ‘Fat’ Male Colleague” HERE)

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‘Caitlyn’ Jenner Weighs Senate Run

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Olympic gold medalist and transgender activist Caitlyn Jenner is the latest celebrity to reveal [he] has considered launching a run for Senate, telling radio host John Catsimatidis [he] is in the process of determining [his] future in activism and politics.

“I have considered it. I like the political side of it,” Jenner, who is a Republican, told Catsimatidis on AM 970 in New York.

“The political side of it has always been very intriguing to me. Over the next six months or so, I gotta find out where I can do a better job. Can I do a better job from the outside? Kind of working the perimeter of the political scene, being open to talking to anybody? Or are you better from the inside, and we are in the process of determining that,” she said.
“Yeah but I would look for a senatorial run,” [he] continued.

Jenner told CNN’s Don Lemon in April [he] would “seriously look at a run for office.” (Read more from “‘Caitlyn’ Jenner Weighs Senate Run” HERE)

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Dismantling Obama Regulations Will Require Resolve in the Senate

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In just eight years, the Obama administration was responsible for creating 22,700 new burdensome regulations on the American people.

During this time, federal agencies seized more power than ever in creating laws on their own, going largely unchecked by Congress.

Regulatory overreach became a hot-button issue during the 2016 election as the American people grew tired of unelected bureaucrats regulating their lives from Washington.

That’s when Donald Trump hit the campaign trail with a message that resonated. Trump told his supporters in September 2016, “I will eliminate all needless and job-killing regulations now on the books.”

Four months later, Trump followed through with his promise. In January, the Trump administration put a freeze on “new and pending” regulations and issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to get rid of two regulations for every new one issued.

A president willing to work toward ending the modern administrative state is a breath of fresh air in Washington. Trump has done his part. Now, it is time for Congress to contribute by utilizing the Congressional Review Act.

Passed into law in 1996, the Congressional Review Act allows Congress to invalidate an agency rule by passing a joint resolution of disapproval, not subject to a Senate filibuster, that the president signs into law.

Many conservatives see the Congressional Review Act as Congress’ most valuable tool in dismantling costly regulations dating back to the mid-1990s.

However, in the four weeks Republicans have controlled both the executive and legislative branches, the House of Representatives has introduced only 24 joint resolutions and passed just six of them over to the Senate for approval.

Of those six, the Senate has only passed three to be signed into law by Trump. He has signed all three.

>>>See Paul Larkin’s full explanation of the reach of the Congressional Review Act.

The question begging to be answered here is, what’s the hold up?

For what it’s worth, the Senate has been brought to a grinding halt due to the unprecedented obstruction Senate Democrats have imposed on Trump’s Cabinet nominees. But that should not detract Senate leadership from making deregulation a legislative priority in 2017.

As soon confirmation battles are finished, Congress should move swiftly to begin regulatory reform, a $120 billion yearly expense on the taxpayer.

Due to the Congressional Review Act’s unique structure and ability to evade obstruction, there are a few steps the Senate should take to start voting on these joint resolutions at a more consistent rate.

Perhaps one of the most important components of the Senate is time. Time is allocated to both the minority and majority party to debate legislation. The minority party often uses debate time to drag out the legislative process in order to slow down the opposition’s agenda.

Thankfully, the Congressional Review Act removes the filibuster from being used to block regulations from being overturned. Instead, debate is limited to 10 hours, and then the resolution overturning the rule can be passed with only a majority vote.

However, a little-noticed provision in the statute allows for those 10 hours to be even further reduced—again, only with a majority vote. Assuming all Senate Republicans voted together, that means the Senate could pass resolutions disproving troves of Obama-era regulations, with minimal debate and only a simple majority vote.

In addition, the Senate has yet to take up the Midnight Rules Relief Act, which passed the House with bipartisan support on Jan. 4, 2017. This legislation would allow the House to batch up several of the Obama administration’s “midnight regulations” to be repealed in one resolution.

If passed and signed into law, the House would be able to speed up the process exponentially.

The House has already shown it is willing to do its part. It is simply waiting on the Senate to take action.

For a Congress looking to undo the damaging regulatory legacy of President Barack Obama, the Congressional Review Act is a gift. It just needs to be used. (For more from the author of “Dismantling Obama Regulations Will Require Resolve in the Senate” please click HERE)

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