Jake Johnson, Senior Editor and Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan:
If you, like me, get Medicare and Social Security, get ready to have both attacked by the Congressional Republicans.
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) was applauded after being nominated for speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Credit: Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty
The newly elected Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has previously proposed trillions of dollars in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and suggested that slashing the programs should be the top priority of Congress.
During his tenure as chair of the Republican Study Committee (RSC) between 2019 and 2021, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) helped craft budget resolutions that called for roughly $2 trillion in Medicare cuts, $3 trillion in Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts, and $750 billion in Social Security Cuts, noted Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress.
Alex Lawson, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Social Security Works, said in a Wednesday statement following the speakership vote that the budget proposals released by the Johnson-led RSC also endorsed raising the Social Security retirement age, lowering annual cost-of-living benefit increases, and advancing privatization efforts.
Jennifer Bendery, Senior Politics Reporter - HuffPost
Stephan:
This is now the second person in line for the Presidency should something happen to Biden and the most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives. Mike Johnson is a racist bigot and christofascist, and makes no bones about it. In my lifetime, and probably yours, no person like this has ever been leader of the House.
“We have been working in ministry side by side and together for our whole marriage,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) says of his wife, with whom he co-hosts a podcast about political and social issues from a conservative Christian perspective. Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty
The wife of newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) runs a counseling business that advocates the belief that homosexuality is comparable to bestiality and incest, according to its operating documents.
Johnson and his wife, Kelly, have long intertwined their political and business lives: They became a known entity in the late 1990s when they went on national television as the face of Louisiana’s new marriage covenant law, which makes it harder to get a divorce. Today, they co-host a podcast, “Truth Be Told,” where they talk about political and social issues from a conservative Christian perspective. Their podcast is up to 69 episodes.
“We have been working in ministry side by side and together for our whole marriage,” Johnson said last year when he and his wife launched their podcast, […]
He dresses well, speaks in a polite tone while smiling. I suspect that is one of the reasons the Republicans chose him. He doesn’t look or sound like Jim Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, or the other MAGAt nutcases. And yet the new Republican speaker is as much a fanatical christofascist as any of them, maybe even more so. There is only one way to resolve this. Those of us who care about democracy and wellbeing must vote entirely Democratic. Yes, yes, I know the Democrats are not perfect and have all kinds of issues. But as a party, they support democracy and sponsor legislation that fosters wellbeing. It’s your choice.
The new MAGAt Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson Credit: NBC
Newly sworn-in Speaker Mike Johnson‘s record is being rapidly unearthed and critics are expressing anger and outrage that House Republicans have elevated what some are calling a far-right Christian nationalist to become the third most-powerful elected official in the country.
“While preaching a sermon in 2016,” MeidasTouch Network reports Thursday, “Johnson blamed mass shootings on the teaching of evolution.”
During his sermon at the Christian Center in Shreveport, Louisiana, Johnson said: “Some of you were around in the late 60s, you remember that what that was about? The counterculture revolution, Woodstock, and drugs and peace and free love and all that, but,” he claimed, it was “more about the undermining of the foundations of religion and morality.”
“Because if you remember in the late 60s we invented things like no-fault divorce laws. We invented the sexual revolution. We invented radical feminism. We invented legalized abortion in 1973, where the state government sanctioned the killing of the unborn,” he said.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Amid a prolonged search for a new House speaker that paralyzed the House of Representatives for three weeks while two U.S. allies are engaged in wars, Americans’ approval of Congress’ job performance fell from 17% to 13%. This is the lowest approval rating of Congress since October and November 2017, when it was also 13%, and is just four percentage points above the all-time low from November 2013.
Gallup has measured Americans’ opinions of the job Congress is doing since 1974, including monthly updates since 2001. Congress’ approval rating has mostly been in the teens and 20s since 2010. It has averaged 30% historically.
The U.S. House of Representatives ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Oct. 3 after eight Republican members led a revolt against him. The action came in response to McCarthy negotiating a bipartisan bill to fund the government through mid-November to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the 2023 fiscal year. The eight members objected to McCarthy relying on Democratic votes for passage of the spending bill, […]
Jessica Corbett, Senior Editor and Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan:
Clarence Thomas’ corruption just goes on and on. How you can be an unethical grifter and a Supreme Court Associate Justice I do not know. But you obviously can. Have you noticed like me that no one in the top political ranks is ever held responsible for anything. Trump all the people who served him, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, we have been doing their two-step criminal tango for two years now, and nobody has gone to jail. No wonder the approval ratings of Congress and the Court are barely into double digits.
Criminal grifter MAGAt and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Credit: Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post / Getty
The U.S. Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday released a report detailing how embattled Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas may have had a substantial amount of a loan for a luxury RV forgiven by a wealthy friend—which one watchdog called “a serious ethics issue.”
The panel’s probe was sparked by New York Timesreporting from August about Anthony Welters loaning Thomas money to buy a used Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon, or “the Rolls-Royce of motor coaches,” which cost $267,230 in 1999. Welters told the newspaper that “the loan was satisfied” and provided a photograph of the title with his signature and a handwritten “lien release” date of November 22, 2008.
The Senate memorandum states that “while additional documents pertaining to the loan agreement may exist, documents reviewed by Democratic staff suggest that Justice Thomas did not repay a significant portion of the loan principal. In fact, none of the documents reviewed by […]
