thehustings.substack.com newsletter is taking the day off Memorial Day, and will return with Tuesday on The Hustings, June 1.
Today on The Hustings’ home page, audience members for this week’s Braver Angels National Coliseum Debate on Voting in America discuss HR 1, the For The People Act in the left- and right-columns. This home page post is the first step in making thehustings.news a new kind of civil social media site, where readers can comment for the left and right columns on political news items and on our contributing pundits’ commentaries. Please email your comments for publication (and your suggestions on how we can improve) to editors@thehustings.news.
Modest GOP Infrastructure Plan Extends Negotiations – The $928 billion Senate Republican infrastructure plan formally unveiled by Shelley Moore Capito – the other senator from West Virginia – includes $568 billion for bridges, rail and transit. Under the proposal, a good part of the five-year plan would be financed with redirected COVID-19 relief money, The Wall Street Journal says. That leaves about $257 billion in new funding over five years, which seems miniscule compared with the Biden Administration’s already discounted $1.7-trillion proposal.
Meanwhile, the White House’s total budget, including the American Jobs Plan infrastructure proposal, would come to a bottom line of $6 trillion, feeding Republicans’ criticism that the Biden Administration is fostering a “socialist” agenda. As negotiations over infrastructure move beyond Memorial Day Weekend, the original unofficial White House deadline, the argument of how to pay for all this remains unresolved. Republicans are strongly opposed to Biden’s plan to raise the corporate tax rate and income taxes for families making more than $400,000 per year.
Note: Elsewhere on the WSJ’s front-page Friday, the newspaper reports, “America’s Boost to Spending is Adding Fuel to Economic Growth.” It says the U.S. Commerce Department’s 0.5% hike in personal spending in April is proof that Americans are “going out again,” though the increase is small compared with March’s 4.7% increase, with Americans spending COVID-19 relief funds.
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McConnell Asks for a “Favor” He Hopes Republicans Can’t Refuse –Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who says a bi-partisan commission investigating the causes of the 1/6 attack on the Capitol would be “extraneous,” channeled Don Corleone, as he reportedly asked his Republican caucus to vote against the bill setting up the bi-partisan commission “as a personal favor to me.” NBC reports that several Republican senators said they were “startled” by McConnell’s comments. Also yesterday, Gladys Sicknick, mother of officer Brian Sicknick, who died from multiple strokes the day after he helped defend the Capitol, visited the offices of all 50 Republican senators urging them to vote for the bi-partisan commission. McConnell apparently is concerned Ms. Sicknick may have convinced 10 GOP senators necessary to get the bill passed. So far three of them, usual suspects Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah, are the only known sympathizers to Ms. Sicknick’s pleas.
Murkowski in fact pushed back on McConnell’s “personal favor” in comments to reporters Thursday night, The Hill reports: “To be making a decision for short-term political gain at the expense of understanding and acknowledging what was in front of us on January 6, I think we need to look at that critically.”
Johnson Goes for Overtime Pay – The Senate was all set to vote down the 1/6 commission passed by the House and then go home for the Memorial Day recess when Ron Johnson, R-WI, stuck his wrench in the works and kept the lights on in the Capitol, at least for Friday. Johnson objected to a “manager’s package” to revise the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, designed to fight China economically, because he didn’t have time to read the amendments, Punchbowl News reports. Sens. Mike Lee, R-UT, and Rick Scott, R-FL, joined Johnson in opposition. At this point, the Senate could work through the weekend, or go home for the week’s recess without voting on the bill. Several senators, including Richard Shelby, R-AL, left for their flights home anyway, Politico says.
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Ryan’s Veiled Remarks to Conservatives -- Paul Ryan, former Republican House speaker from Wisconsin, vice presidential candidate (2012), and P90X home workout system enthusiast, gave a speech last night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and, according to The Washington Post, provided “veiled criticism of former president Donald Trump.”
While he named Trump to praise him (e.g., for his “practical conservative policy”), what the Post interpreted to be objections to the former president (e.g., “If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality, or on second-rate imitations, then we’re not going anywhere”) went without specific identification.
Note: According to Ryan’s website, modestly named www.speakerryan.com, Ryan is on several boards, including the board of directors for Fox Corporation and SHINE Medical Technologies, and the advisory boards of Robert Bosch and CIS Credit Solutions. He is the chairman of the board of Executive Network Partnering Corp., and “Professor of the Practice” at the University of Notre Dame and. . . . The point is that this once-rising star in the once-existing Republican firmament is now basically doing the Ryan family’s work, not that of country or party. Which is undoubtedly a good thing for the Ryan family, a practical thing because the Republican Party he and Reagan were representatives of no longer exists, though not a good thing for the country because whether or not one agrees with his policies, at least they’re grounded in a shared reality.
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Brooklyn Gets in Line for the ‘Witch Hunt’ – Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have launched an investigation into whether current and former Ukrainian officials attempted to interfere in the 2020 presidential campaigns in favor of Donald Trump, including passing information regarding the Biden family to the former president’s erstwhile personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, The New York Times reports. Though just revealed by the newspaper, the investigation began at the tail end of the Trump Administration.
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Happy Memorial Day Weekend Travel – Reopening the economy after a year of coronavirus shut-down has filled restaurants, hotels and airports again. It has also pushed gas prices back up (remember last year when oil prices dropped below $0 per barrel?). The AAA says the average price of gas nationally as of Friday was $3.044 per gallon, highest since Memorial Day weekend 2014, when it hit $3.65 per gallon.
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Gary S. Vasilash
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