"A deal only offering a commitment to hold a vote gives away everything for nothing. When the only deal on the table is a shit sandwich, the correct response is to get up from the table and walk away. Smearing some mayonnaise on that shit sandwich isn’t going to make it more palatable."
"While the measure provides more funding for Indigenous health services, it does nothing to extend the premium tax credits for insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act healthcare marketplace. Without those credits, millions will lose their healthcare insurance and millions more will face skyrocketing premiums."
"Republicans did not extend the premium tax credits in their July budget reconciliation bill, although they did extend tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations."
"I’s hard to overstate just how devastating the coming ACA premium hike is going to be. Some 20 million Americans are going to see their insurance rates go up by hundreds of dollars. Some will wind up owing more than double what they currently pay."
"Virtually no one wants this. Three-quarters of Americans want Congress to extend the ACA credits. And not that it should matter, but most Americans who rely on the ACA for healthcare live in states that went for Trump in 2024."
"Senate Republicans will line up like penguins and vote down the subsidies in December, and the House won’t even bother to hold a vote. By that time millions will have received notices of what their new health insurance bills will be. They will be very, very unhappy consumers of what Republicans are selling to them."
"These health care subsidies, folks, if they expire, I'm telling you, people are going to die. They're going to die. You know, how can they afford this? They're going to give up their health care. They can't. They can't. They're going to be bankrupt."
"I fear a few people are going to literally die. And this is before Medicaid gets cut with these billionaire tax, you know, these great tax cuts for the billionaires. They'll help the money trickle down. Nothing gets trickled down ever. It all stays at the top always."
"The health insurance crisis is happening right now, as Americans open letters from their insurers and discover that they are facing huge increases — more than 100 percent on average, much more in many cases — in the cost of coverage beginning in just a few weeks."
"Republicans were in an advantageous position, since they sincerely don’t care how much people suffer. They want those ACA subsidies to disappear, just as they wanted millions of people to lose their SNAP benefits."
"Don’t forget that their 'Big Beautiful Bill' already cut SNAP by $186 billion, and many in the GOP spent the last few weeks sneering that food stamp beneficiaries are a bunch of lazy moochers ('Stop smoking crack,' one congressman tweeted)."
You can either stuff the pockets of the already filthy rich with more dollars or you can see that people are fed and have healthcare coverage.
"Health insurance subsidies, upon which tens of millions rely, are at extreme risk. Medicaid and Medicare are scheduled for cuts and it is logical to wonder whether Social Securjty is next.
All of this is done to pay for tax cuts for his wealthy cronies. But it is more than that: the cruelty is the point."
"The eight Neville Chamberlains who foolishly convinced themselves that caving for a vote (with a 60-vote margin, no less) with a reversal of reductions in force (RIFs), backpay (which the regime was legally obligated to do anyway), and a package of three appropriations bills (with no guarantee Donald Trump won’t pull a rescission)" (continued in /14)
"betrayed the thousands of government workers who have held out, the SNAP beneficiaries who have faced starvation, and the millions of Democrats who supported this fight. They have blurred the lines on the single best issue they have—healthcare—allowing a handful of Republicans to vote with them in December, knowing it will not reach 60 votes or pass the House."
"Senate Democrats surrendered when they had maximum leverage and were winning the fight. This surrender came weeks after the largest protest in American history, and days after the best election night in a decade or more. The public opinion polling showed Democrats were winning the fight, and the party’s own approval ratings were rising in response to them keeping up the fight."
"Several of the Democrats who voted to open the government have been on a media tour. They held a press conference on Sunday night and then made the rounds on cable trying to sell the deal.
Stop.
They are doing a terrible job. Trying to sell this as some sort of win is embarrassing."
"Yesterday, as I spoke to activists and organizers – all of whom understood that Democrats were trying to feed 42 million people and pay federal workers – I heard a common refrain: betrayal.
We were all in on the strategy, however painful it was. And the strategy was working. We were winning the messaging wars, public opinion – and even elections."
"The whole hard reality is We have a crazy fascist party and we have a status quo party. And unfortunately, both of them are funded by way too many of the same people in APAC and AI and crypto and pharma and big tech and the real estate lobby. And we need that something else."
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In news from the quivering bowels of Vichy America, a major liberal law firm has agreed to work for fascists and stop hiring so many women, brown people, or members of the LGBTQ community to placate an aggrieved, would-be dictator and keep raking in those sweet government contracts:
Trump-Targeted Law Firm Caves, Vows $40M in Legal Support to Right-Wing Causes
"resident Donald Trump withdrew an executive order targeting a major Democratic-leaning law firm after the firm agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services in support of his administration’s far right initiatives.
“This is unbelievably shameful from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP,” Molly Coleman, executive director at People’s Parity Project, said on LinkedIn. “I’m embarrassed to have any association with this firm that failed to find the courage the moment requires.”
Recently, the White House has escalated attacks on law firms whose attorneys have been involved in legal efforts opposing Trump. Just last week, Trump signed an executive order attempting to revoke security clearances from Paul, Weiss attorneys, restrict the firm’s access to federal buildings, and terminate any of its government contracts. The order reportedly prompted at least one client to sever ties with the firm.
However, following a meeting between Trump and Brad Karp, the chair of Paul, Weiss, the administration abruptly rescinded the order. “We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration,” Karp said in a statement."
So, let's make sure we all understand what's going on here. Trump is brazenly and almost certainly illegally, shaking down a powerful law firm that has literally worked on cases opposing him in the past, and is known from their commitment to diverse hiring practices, and instead of fighting back, or even just taking the loss of government money on the chin, they've decided to check notes concede that a former partner who worked on cases against Trump was engaged in "wrongdoing," work pro-bono for the fascist regime, and capitulate to the fascist "war on DEI" - an idea whose ever-expanding meaning appears to be "restore mandated white supremacy in America."
Are you kidding me? Does the larger liberal establishment in the United States have anything resembling a spine to share between them? More importantly, if Americans trapped inside the increasingly ominous, fascist nightmare that is Trump 2.0 can't count on a high profile law firm in the business of protecting civil rights and taking on the government, to even stand up for the firm's own rights, how can they have faith that anyone in position to defend their rights in a legal capacity, is going to step up to the plate for them? The answer of course, is that they can't.
Folks, you'll get no argument from me if you say that the greater evil in this story is a fascist president who would be king, using the authority of his office to gain revenge on law firms that helped charge him for real crimes, he absolutely committed. As the extorted settlement proves, this too is part of Trump's plot to take complete control of America as a dictator. This isn't legal, and as a federal judge's restraining order in a similar case involving the Trump-targeted firm Perkins Coie demonstrations, complete surrender was not the only option Paul Weiss and its chair Brad Karp had here. By that same measure you can't win if you don't fight, and when losing means capitulating to fascism, a law firm full of civil rights lawyers has a goddamn responsibility to resist.
“It is a sad day for the legal industry. Paul, Weiss, didn’t just bend a knee, it set a new standard for shameful capitulation. This is a stain on the firm, every one of its partners, and the entire legal profession,” Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, said on Bluesky."
Folks, I've been talking about and writing about the rise of fascism for over a decade now. And I'm not bragging, because I wish I had been wrong about the signs I was reading around me, but I have largely been right when I insisted we were all heading for a moment like this. Furthermore, I have repeatedly warned that a liberal establishment (no, not you; your leaders, your media, your "liberal" capitalist employers) which would always have the option of simply collaborating with the fascist order, wasn't going to save us from fascist predation. There is no cavalry; the opposition party, the courts, and the lawyers aren't going to stop this. At the rate things are going, I have no idea how long I'll still be able to tell you that we are the cavalry, and the only way this nightmare ends is if we use our bodies en masse to shut down the fascist order and the profits that motivate the guys paying for all this; but it's the truth. If you can do it to Tesla, you can do it to any of them.