Jamaal Bowman: Why Are We Negotiating With Economic Terrorists (Republicans)?

Jamaal Bowman is not impressed.

On Thursday, as Republicans continued their stall on allowing the government to increase the debt ceiling, the New York representative reiterated his urges to President Biden not to negotiate with “the economic terrorists here that are the Republican Party.”

“I’m very frustrated. I called on the president to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment and mint a coin, and do not negotiate with hostage-takers,” Bowman said to CNN’s Manu Raju. “I mean, we don’t negotiate with terrorists globally, why are we gonna negotiate with the economic terrorists here that are the Republican Party?”

Since then, the White House and Republicans have reportedly closed in on a deal that involves a two-year debt limit hike in exchange for maintaining the defense budget but cutting other spending, like $10 billion in IRS funding.

To Bowman’s point, Matt Gaetz outright admitted that the debt limit talks have just been about holding the government “hostage” (as if it was not already abundantly clear by Republicans’ actions). And while Republicans may not win every single one of the cuts they wanted—like instating work requirements on Medicaid and food stamps and repealing green energy programs—the cut in IRS funding is still worrisome. The additional funding Biden allocated to the agency has already led to massively faster support call times for Americans, and a cut of that size is expected to greatly limit the agency’s ability to audit wealthy tax cheats.

Most important is that none of these cuts had to happen, had the White House and Democrats put forth a stronger front earlier or even taken care of the debt ceiling before the new Congress was seated in January. Of course, it is Republicans’ fault for only now deciding to play hardball on doing something they happily did three times under twice-impeached, criminally indicted, and liable-for-sexual-abuse former President Donald Trump. But Democrats know this is how the Republicans behave. And as Bowman said, it didn’t have to be this way.

The Indiana doctor who made headlines last year for performing an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim has been punished for telling reporters about it.

Caitlin Bernard carried out the procedure in June, less than a week after Roe v. Wade was overturned. The 10-year-old had traveled to Indiana from neighboring Ohio, where a trigger law banned abortion after six weeks (the trigger law has since been temporarily blocked while it is challenged in court). Bernard told the story to the Indianapolis Star.

And Indiana’s Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita has waged a campaign against Bernard ever since. He first accused her of making the story up, but when that claim was debunked, he accused her of failing to report the case to authorities—she had already reported it—and of violating privacy laws by revealing too much information about the patient.

The state medical licensing board ruled late Thursday that Bernard had violated ethical standards and privacy laws, even though her employer, Indiana University Health, had determined she was not at fault. The board decided to fine Bernard $3,000 but allowed her to continue practicing medicine, in part because she is one of the only ob-gyns in Indiana who accepts Medicaid.

“I think that it’s incredibly important for people to understand the real-world impacts of the laws of this country, about abortion or otherwise,” Bernard said during the 14-hour hearing. “I think it’s important for people to know what patients will have to go through because of legislation that is being passed.”

Rokita’s team argued that Bernard was acting on a political agenda, and she faced pointed questions throughout the hearing to try to determine a political motivation. At one point, she was asked if she had a tattoo of a coat hanger that said, “Trust women.” Her lawyers objected to the question as being irrelevant.

The 10-year-old’s story was one of the first about the effects of abortion bans to come out after Roe was rolled back. While abortion rights advocates had pushed it as proof of how important abortion access is, Republicans have remained firm in opposing the procedure. Some even doubled down and argued that it wouldn’t have been so bad to force that child to carry the pregnancy to term. In April, Ohio Republicans held hearings for several anti-abortion bills. When asked about the 10-year-old, anti-abortion activist Laura Strietmann said, “While a pregnancy might have been difficult on a 10-year-old body, a woman’s body is designed to carry life.” (A 10-year-old is a child, not a woman.)

The Indiana board has 90 days to finalize its decision, after which Bernard has a month to file an appeal. The licensing board’s seven members are appointed by the governor, and two of the current members reportedly donated a total of $25,000 to Rokita’s campaigns.

Just a day after Elon Musk and David Sacks hosted Ron DeSantis on Twitter for an exclusive and disastrous presidential announcement, the Florida governor signed a bill shielding Musk’s SpaceX from liability if workers are killed after his rockets blow up (something that Musk is apparently very adept at making happen, from Tesla cars to rocketships, to presidential campaigns).

The Spaceflight Entity Liability Bill expands legal immunities that will shield private space companies, like Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, from legal responsibility when workers suffer injuries or even die. At its core, the bill broadens when these companies are exempted “from liability for injury to or death of a crew resulting from spaceflight activities.”

And Musk made sure his presence was known throughout the process of the bill. While the bill was advancing through both the state House and Senate, a SpaceX lobbyist, Jeffrey Sharkey, appeared at practically every single committee meeting related to it—lobbying members on at least five separate occasions, in five different state House committees. Other lobbyists from Boeing, Space Florida, and Florida Rising also made their presence known—but not to the extent SpaceX did.

While tycoons imagine a future of taxiing their fellow fat cats to space on a whim, these billionaire-plaything rockets keep exploding. The urge to make a business out of something that is not safe—nor, well, needed at the moment since we can’t even take care of the planet we’re on—helps explain the genesis of the bill. An analysis by the Florida state Senate admits it all quite plainly: “This bill has the potential to limit the cost of litigation to businesses engaging in spaceflight activities.”

The bill mandates “crew” and participants alike fill out a waiver that grants legal immunities to space companies in cases of injury or death.

Moreover, the bill expands the definition of “spaceflight entity” to include any entity authorized to conduct spaceflight activities, beyond ones solely associated with the United States Federal Aviation Administration, opening up which entities in the broader industry will qualify for the expanded immunity. The bill also cuts out language ascribing liability to spaceflight entities for damage caused from “inherent risks” of spaceflight activity; instead, the bill broadens the scope of liability immunity to include all spaceflight activities.

Finally, the bill also amends language that orders entities to be liable for injury if they had actual knowledge, or reasonably should have known, of risks. The new language only orders legal liability for “actual knowledge” of risks, meaning there is no longer any expectation for companies to be responsible for damages from risks they “reasonably should have known” about.

The bill comes after both DeSantis’s annoucement—where hand-picked guests spent more time hailing Musk like God than asking DeSantis questions—and DeSantis’s own campaign released a bizarre post-launch video that showcases Musk as much as (if not more than) DeSantis.

On its way to DeSantis’s desk, buttressed by the heavy lobbyist presence, the bill passed the state Senate 39–0 and state House 107–5. The wildly bipartisan effort to give special legal immunities to the richest people in the world’s pet projects is in part a result of how much money these companies have flooded into both parties.

Musk’s SpaceX has spent some $8 million in lobbying efforts since 2020 and donated another $1 million to members of both parties during the 2022 election cycle alone. Bezos’s Blue Origin has spent some $6.3 million in lobbying efforts since 2020, while sending just over half a million dollars to members of both parties during 2022.

This post has been updated.

On Thursday, Wisconsin Republican Representative Glenn Grothman used his time on the floor of America’s Capitol to complain that President Joe Biden has not nominated enough straight “white guys” as judges.

“Apparently in his first two years, President Biden had appointed 97 federal judges. Of the 97 federal judges, I was expecting maybe 25 or 30 were white guys, because I know President Biden wasn’t heavy on appointing more white guys,” Grothman started. “Five of the 97 judges were white guys,” he continued with a tinge of disgust. “Of those, two were gay. So, almost impossible for a white guy who’s not gay apparently to get appointed here.”

According to the American Constitution Society, over 68 percent of federal judges are white.

Still, it seems to Grothman that you can either be a straight white guy, or you’re everything else. And, well, he doesn’t seem to be a big fan of “everything else.”

In 2015, Grothman was one of 37 co-sponsors of a House resolution that defined marriage as “consisting only of the union of a man and woman.” The resolution prohibited either the Constitution or even states to be required to recognize marriages of “any other union.”

In 2012, Grothman said Kwanzaa is a fake holiday made up by a college professor and the libs. “Irresponsible public school districts such as Green Bay and Madison … try to tell a new generation that Blacks have a separate holiday than Christians.”

Grothman also has a tenuous relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, arguing that public employees should be forced to work on the holiday. In 2018, at an event on the holiday itself, when asked about some of then-President Trump’s controversial comments—like ones about immigrants from African countries—Grothman offered a puzzling retort. “The past president brought Al Sharpton into the White House something like 80 times,” he told the college crowd. “That was kind of stunning to me, but nobody ever made a big ruckus out of it.”

The derangement goes beyond people’s social lives, into their economic ones.

In 2014, Grothman, then a state Senator, expressed disdain for a Wisconsin law that mandated businesses provide workers with “at least one period consisting of 24 consecutive hours of rest in each calendar week.”

“Right now in Wisconsin, you’re not supposed to work seven days in a row, which is a little ridiculous because all sorts of people want to work seven days a week,” he told HuffPost.

After he voted to repeal Wisconsin’s equal-pay protection law, Grothman said the wage gap wasn’t about workplace discrimination. “You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious,” he told The Daily Beast.

Calling for restrictions on food stamps (sound familiar?), Grothman has also encouraged citizens to spy on food stamp recipients’ shopping carts, lest any person be lying about their need for help to buy groceries. He has previously written that some recipients do not look “genuinely poor” enough to be obtaining such benefits.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Thursday for his role in inciting the violent attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Rhodes and four other members of the far-right paramilitary group were found guilty in November of various crimes relating to the January 6 insurrection. This is one of the first sentences to be handed down for seditious conspiracy in the attack, and the longest of any January 6 defendant to date.

“These defendants were prepared to fight. Not for their country, but against it,” assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nestler wrote in sentencing memos for the prosecution. “In their own words, they were ‘willing to die’ in a ‘guerrilla war’ to achieve their goal of halting the transfer of power after the 2020 Presidential Election.”

The Oath Keepers were part of the mob that swept into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, trying to stop the certification of 2020 presidential election results. Prosecutors had argued Rhodes was a key figure in spreading falsehoods that the election had been rigged for Joe Biden, and they asked he be sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Rhodes and Oath Keepers member Kelly Meggs were both found guilty of seditious conspiracy in November. Three other members—Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Karrelson, and Thomas Caldwell—were found guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding and aiding and abetting for their actions on January 6. Meggs and Watkins were also found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct.

Rhodes’s conviction and sentencing is one of the most significant yet to come out of the investigation into the January 6 riot, marking a major win for the Justice Department. Another came in early May when Proud Boys chairman Henry Tarrio was also convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Tarrio and three other members of the far-right, neofascist group were found guilty of seditious conspiracy, as well as conspiracy to obstruct Congress and obstruction of Congress. A fifth group member was also found guilty of obstruction of Congress but not the other charges. There have now been a total of 14 convictions of seditious conspiracy over the January 6 insurrection.

This post has been updated.