Monday News & Notes
DECEMBER 6, 2021 -- 13TH AMENDMENT RATIFIED, OFFICIALLY ENDING SLAVERY, 1865
•Congress is scheduled to take up the budget for national defense, and the debt limit this week (Punchbowl News). Treasury Sec. Janet Yellin says the government has until next week Wednesday to lift the debt limit to avoid default, but if all goes right (heh) both chambers are scheduled to begin holiday recess after Friday.
•Anyone traveling to the U.S. beginning today, including American citizens, must show a negative coronavirus test taken within a day of travel to enter the country (WaPo).
•Read our home page debate on Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and their fight with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and his campaign to become House speaker after the 2022 midterms. Send your comments to editors@thehustings.news.
Georgia’s Political Mind – Much has been made about the political divide between blue cities and red countryside in Texas and California, but for the November 2022 elections, Georgia will be front and center again. Former President Trump is “primarying” incumbent Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, R, with former senator David Perdue -- cousin of the former president’s Agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue -- who has announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, NPR’s Morning Edition reports. If Perdue beats Kemp, he likely will face Stacey Abrams, who late last week announced her candidacy for the governor’s race as a Democrat – consider her a shoo-in for her party’s nod next year.
Abrams narrowly lost the 2018 race against Kemp – he’s the incumbent, remember – and went on to lead the runoff campaigns of Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who won in January to give the party its veep-tie-breaker-thin majority over the GOP in the Senate. Ossoff, in fact, beat David Perdue in part because Trump, defeated two months earlier in his re-election bid, told his MAGA followers not to bother with a “fixed” runoff anyway.
Last February David Perdue filed papers to run against Sen. Warnock in 2022, as his seat filled in the final two years of Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson’s term. Isakson stepped down due to health issues. Gov. Kemp appointed Kelly Loeffler, former owner of the Atlanta Dream, of the Women’s National Basketball Association, as Isakson’s replacement. Loeffler claimed a “100%” pro-Trump voting record for the year she served as Georgia’s junior senator.
Anyway, after filing paperwork to challenge Warnock, the first Black U.S. senator from Georgia, he decided not to run for the seat. Trump’s man for that midterm primary is 1982 Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker. Still with us?
Challenging All the Best People: What seems like a golden opportunity for Abrams and the Democratic Party also is yet the latest, probably biggest, test of Trump v. what remains of the traditional wing of the GOP. It’s also a test of strict new state voters’ laws implemented by the state’s legislatures over trumped-up allegations of “voter irregularities” after the ex-president’s loss of Georgia’s Electoral College votes to Joe Biden.
Could come down to 11,780 votes, again.
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Rising Inflation Fears Push Fed Policy – Federal Reserve officials are making plans to accelerate the wind-down of its bond-buying stimulus program to begin raising interest rates by next spring, The Wall Street Journal reports. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell had previously indicated bond-buying would end next June, but the supply v. demand balance clearly isn’t balancing out as delta and omicron variants of the coronavirus rage on.
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Predictable Outcome – Counties in the U.S. in which a majority voted for Donald J. Trump for president last November are nearly three-times as likely to die from COVID-19 than counties that voted for Joe Biden, NPR reports in an investigation based on election data. The bigger the margin for ex-president Trump, the higher the death rate, according to NPR’s Morning Edition.
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Former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole Has Died – Former Sen. Bob Dole, Republican from Kansas who became the only candidate to lose campaigns for both president, in 1996, and vice president, in 1976, has died, age 98. Dole served as both majority leader, and minority leader of the Senate for 11 years combined, until his retirement in 1996 following his loss to Bill Clinton.
Dole was the last presidential candidate who was a World War II veteran. He was “left for dead” on a WWII battlefield, and lost the use of his right arm as an Army soldier, according to The New York Times’ obituary.
President Biden, whose senate career overlapped Dole’s over 23 years, called him “An American statesman like few in our history. A war hero and among the greatest of the Greatest Generation.”
Known for bi-partisan comity, though with a fierce and sometimes cutting sense of humor, Dole served in the House from 1961 to 1969, and the Senate from 1969 to 1996. He became a Capitol Hill lobbyist following his Senate retirement.
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Gary S. Vasilash