I suppose there are some people who'd argue that it's impolite to directly call out my fellow members of Congress when they do awful things. I've seen emails dancing around the obvious, trying to gloss over the appalling behavior of some House Republicans.
This isn't one of those emails. Because I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors by pretending the collapse of basic decency is normal.
There's something very wrong with too many Republicans serving Congress today, and the only responsible thing to do is to face it head-on.
But first, the obvious conclusion: we need to ensure that Republicans don't take back Congress. Your grassroots support is how we do that.
In just the last few weeks:
Paul Gosar of Arizona tweeted out an animated scene where someone literally kills our colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Literally. She dies in the animation. After the House censured Gosar for the video, he retweeted it.
Are there any other workplaces in America where you can openly fantasize (twice) about murdering a coworker?
Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has paid more than $50,000 in fines for refusing to wear a mask in Congress during a pandemic. That's how much she hates science.
Florida's Matt Gaetz went on Steve Bannon's War Room so the two of them could discuss "raising an army of patriots," with 4,000 "shock troops" to purge the government when Trump wins in 2024.
He can't wait to deploy "shock troops" against Americans. This is a sitting member of the Congress of the United States.
We've also recently learned that, in the days leading up to January 6, several of our newer members, including Colorado's Lauren Boebert and North Carolina's Madison Cawthorn, gave guidance and direct support to the extremists who planned that day's riot.
Sitting members of Congress helped insurrectionists plan an attack on our nation's Capitol.
Congressional Republicans cannot be allowed to take back control of the House in 2022. Donate today.
Even writing this email feels ridiculous. Congressional Republicans have become so used to running on spite and ignorance that they've completely forgotten the basics of living in a functioning society.
Enough. More than enough. This is what we have to look forward to if Republicans take back Congress. And this is why we can't let them.
Donate today. We must hold our progressive majority in 2022.
Jim
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This email was sent by Jim McGovern |
03 December 21
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The US must end all support for the Saudi war effort in Yemen. It is fueling the largest humanitarian crisis in the world
For more than six years, Saudi-led military intervention into Yemen’s civil war on behalf of Yemen’s exiled government against Yemeni rebels has been a key driver of the largest humanitarian disaster in the world. “The country’s economy has reached new depths of collapse, and a third wave of the pandemic is threatening to crash the country’s already fragile healthcare system,” United Nations humanitarian relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said in September, with millions “a step away from starvation”.
Under first the Obama and then the Trump administration, the United States was Saudi Arabia’s partner in this horrific war. In 2019, Congress made history by passing its first War Powers Resolution through both chambers of Congress, pressing Donald Trump to end this support. It marked the first time that Congress invoked the War Powers Resolution of 1973 to direct the president to withdraw troops from an undeclared war.
We were proud to lead this effort. The passage of that resolution has implications far beyond Yemen and opened a much broader and extremely important debate about how and when the United States uses our military to wage war, and the sole constitutional authority of Congress to authorize that use.
We welcomed the Biden administration’s announcement earlier this year that it would end support for “offensive” military operations led by Saudi Arabia in Yemen and name a special envoy to help bring this conflict to an end. But the crisis has only continued. American defense contractors continue to service Saudi planes that are waging this war and the United States just announced new arms sales to the Saudis. We are aware that ending US military support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal assault will not alone end the multi-sided conflict in Yemen. The Houthis are launching bloody attacks on the central Yemeni city of Marib and launching cross-border attacks on Saudi territory. Violence has also erupted between rival factions in the south of Yemen. A UN expert panel found that all parties to the conflict may have committed war crimes.
The US may not be able to stop all the violence it helped create, but it can stop enabling Saudi warplanes to bomb Yemeni civilians. Doing so will save lives – not only the Yemenis spared in Saudi bombing runs, but also by utilizing its leverage to pressure Saudi Arabia to lift the blockade on Yemen, which continues to block fuel and other essential imports into the country, pushing millions of Yemenis toward the brink of starvation. Lifting the blockade must happen immediately and be delinked from final peace negotiation talks.
We have proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to finally end all US support for the Saudi war effort. The House already passed this amendment for the third consecutive year. Given that this amendment simply codifies a prohibition on providing support for the Saudi war that already passed both houses of Congress in 2019 – legislation supported at the time by multiple officials now in the Biden-Harris administration – it is long overdue for this provision to be included in the final defense policy bill that is sent to the president’s desk.
It is essential we pass this amendment to restore US credibility as an arbiter of peace in Yemen. But that alone is not enough. The US must support an international observer mission alongside the Saudi-Yemeni border and spearhead generous development efforts to rebuild Yemen. This aid should be focused on bolstering localized humanitarian and development initiatives like Yemen’s Social Fund for Development. We also must dramatically increase our diplomatic engagement to press Saudi Arabia, the Riyadh-based Republic of Yemen government, and the Houthis to accept the UN’s roadmap as the basis for a compromise that ends foreign military intervention and allow Yemenis to come to an agreement. The war has gone on too long, and it’s time we begin to take bold steps on the path to peace.
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PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
30 October 21
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Yarmuth insisted that his reasons for retiring are “ninety-five-per-cent” personal. “I just wanted more control over my time,” he told me. He also contended that the Democrats have “at least a fifty-fifty chance” of holding the House in next year’s midterm elections. His district, which encompasses Louisville, is Kentucky’s only remaining Democratic stronghold in Congress, and will likely be safe. But Yarmuth, a thoughtful former newspaper editor, couldn’t conceal his profound fears about the changes that he has witnessed in both parties during his eight terms in Congress—and for the future of American democracy. “Omigod, yes,” he said, when asked if he was worried. He recounted how, in 2019, he’d warned local Rotary Club members that, if they didn’t think American democracy was in great jeopardy, they weren’t paying attention. Since then, he told me, “it’s only gotten worse.”
Once Donald Trump was defeated, in 2020, Yarmuth acknowledged, he, like many Democrats, felt a false sense of relief: “We all felt, ‘Whew, we can relax.’ ” He said, “People may still think that elsewhere in the country, but in Congress no one thinks that now. Yet,” he added, “we’re all just sitting here waiting for Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin to save democracy. But they won’t bend on the filibuster.”
With future Democratic control of the Senate and White House also very much in question, Yarmuth expressed frustration with President Biden. “I do fault him,” he said, looking pained. “I think he’s been too slow.” If Biden doesn’t speak out against the Senate filibuster rule soon, in order to save the John Lewis voting-reform act, Yarmuth told me, then “all opportunity to save democracy may be lost. I think he needs to think very hard about his place in history at this point.” (Shortly after we spoke, Biden did, in fact, signal his support for changing or eliminating the filibuster, albeit cryptically.)
Surprisingly, perhaps, Yarmuth didn’t blame Trump entirely for the crisis in Congress. “Trump didn’t cause it. It’s the one thing I won’t blame him for,” he said. As Yarmuth sees it, Congress was taken over by media-obsessed performance artists, who would rather attract attention than govern, starting with the rise of the Tea Party, in 2010. Conservatives who entered Congress that year—many of whom now identify with the Freedom Caucus—had no chance of enacting any legislation that President Barack Obama would sign, so, Yarmuth said, “all they wanted to do was blow things up.”
Yarmuth lamented the changes on Capitol Hill since his arrival, in 2007. “It was different when I got here,” he said. “There were Republicans who were really thoughtful and wanted to do things. The Republicans were engaged in discussions,” he said. Now, however, “you have a Republican Party that has no interest in governing.” Starting in 2010, he added, the G.O.P.’s far-right minority ritually began to oppose anything Democrats supported, including commonsense public policies, such as insuring clean water and clean air. They adamantly opposed Obama’s health-care plan, calling for it to be repealed and replaced—but never actually offering any viable alternative. “All these guys would do was throw red meat to their base and donors,” Yarmuth said. “It was all just symbolic.”
The growing need to please big campaign donors, Yarmuth pointed out, has played a huge part in democracy’s breakdown. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, in 2010, which struck down most restrictions on campaign spending, enormously increased candidates’ reliance on rich and often politically extreme outside groups and contributors. “If you represent a congressional district in rural Kentucky, and you need to raise a couple million dollars, you can’t do it in that district, so what are you going to do? You have to call national donors and groups. And they want ‘reliable’ voters. People who will vote with the Party.” What they don’t want are officeholders who might cross party lines to act independently. “The political world’s gotten so tribal,” Yarmuth said. “They will vote for you no matter what you do so long as you have their team’s jersey on.”
Performative partisanship now afflicts some Democrats, too, Yarmuth admitted. He is frustrated with House members who, in the midst of the negotiations over the Democrats’ most ambitious domestic program in years, “have drawn red lines and said, ‘I won’t vote for it if it doesn’t have this.’ ” Yarmuth is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but he says the only thing he’s been advocating for is to get all the various Democratic factions to unite and compromise. The holdouts, he suggested, “are all members who have not served in a governing majority—they’ve all come here since 2010.” Although they may have served elsewhere, he said, Congress is different: “You have people from all over the country with very different perspectives and priorities.” One lesson that newcomers haven’t learned, he said, is that it’s better to negotiate behind closed doors rather than on cable television. “We played it quiet,” he said, of how he reached deals in the past. In contrast, he said, “this is their first time when they actually have the opportunity to pass something, and they all think, Oh, gosh, this is our big shot, so I want to be a player!” Perhaps it’s Trump’s influence, but “they all need the attention.”
For someone like Yarmuth, who passionately believes that government can do good, the perilous state of American democracy is stunning. “I’d like to think that January 6th was an aberration,” he said, “but I know that it wasn’t.” What bewilders him, though, is what is driving this transformation. “The amount of anger that is in the country right now surprises me,” he said, “because it doesn’t seem to be based on anything real.”
In fact, he feels that government can not only work—it can make an enormous difference, as seen in congressional legislation targeting the COVID-19 pandemic. On the night, this past March, that Congress passed the American Rescue Plan, which has Yarmuth’s name on it, he stayed behind in his congressional office until well past 2 A.M. As he drove home, he told me, the awe-inspiring impact of the $1.9-trillion economic package to boost vaccine distribution, stave off economic hardship, open schools, and get people back to work “hit me all at once. Millions of lives would be changed because of it. I just totally lost it.” Soon after, when he was back in Kentucky, he said, “my phone rang”—it was an unfamiliar, “weird number with a whole lot of zeros. I thought, That’s interesting, so I took the call.”
A voice said, “The President would like to speak to you.” Biden and Yarmuth talked about the bill and a bit about Kentucky’s senior senator, Mitch McConnell, with whom Yarmuth has sparred for decades. “I held it together” during the call, he said. “But, as soon as I hung up, I totally lost it again. Who’d have thought we could pass something like this?” As Yarmuth described one of the greatest moments of his legislative career, at one of the worst moments in American politics, he dabbed his eyes, which had filled with tears.
Yarmuth said he remains optimistic that Democrats can reach an agreement and pass another breathtakingly ambitious package of domestic programs. “I think we’re going to get something done. It will be big. So all this stuff about not being able to govern will go away,” he predicted. He also took solace in his doubts that Trump—whom he calls “a sick person”—will run for President again. Yarmuth thinks that Trump will be too beset by legal problems, and too afraid of losing. “And,” he suggested, somewhat mischievously, if Trump runs again, “my guess is that Melania’s gone from his life.”
As for himself, he said that he is looking forward to spending more time with his two-year-old grandson and to teaching, and that he will stay in the public arena one way or another. He said he would miss his friends in Congress, and likely be “miserable” his first day out of office. Maybe that’s what was getting to him. But it was hard not to suspect that he was weeping out of concern for what may come next in this country.
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Today, 10 years ago, President Obama relegated “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to the dustbin of history. For seventeen years, the official military policy against LGBTQ+ service members was outright discrimination. It prevented thousands of brave Americans from serving in the armed forces, and its message of intolerance echoed throughout our society. The end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a victory for equality, justice, and our national security. But the fight against homophobic and transphobic discrimination continues today. Trans people in the U.S. still experience disproportionate rates of discrimination, violence and poverty. Many lack health care coverage, or have difficulty finding gender-affirming care. To make matters worse, Republican state legislatures across the country have passed or proposed a flood of bills targeting trans Americans, and federal law still doesn’t offer explicit civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ Americans. As a proud cosponsor of the Equality Act, Veronica is leading the fight to change that. If you can, please consider chipping in to support Veronica’s work for LGBTQ+ civil rights. Thank you, ANTONIO. — Team Veronica
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We're happy to share this exciting news with you today:
The House of Representatives approved more than $5.4 million for the ten Community Project Funding requests that Jamaal submitted for New York's 16th District, getting our district one step closer to receiving much-needed support to vitalize our communities.
This is a major step in Jamaal's mission to bring home the extensive resources of the federal government to uplift New York's 16th and doing so successfully; all ten projects that were submitted were approved. It's the perfect example of what it means to bring solutions that truly meet the scale and scope of our problems.
Items that were in Jamaal's Community Project Funding requests include:
The best part? These priorities were decided by the residents of New York's 16th; Jamaal took the time to listen to constituents and worked to ensure that federal funding reflects the voices and priorities of New York's 16th at every step.
The funding requests now await approval in the Senate, and then will go to President Biden's desk for his signature. You can count on Jamaal to continue pushing for these funding requests to be approved, and to continue to fight for our communities and the progressive movement in Congress.
While Jamaal is in Congress fighting for us, we need to fight to keep our grassroots movement strong. Please chip in $10 or anything you are able to ensure our momentum continues to grow, and to keep Jamaal legislating.
Thank you for your support,
Bowman For Congress
Friend: Meet the F-35 Lightning II: our newest, trillion-dollar-price-tag, fighter jet that STILL can't fly in combat.
After 20 years and BILLIONS of dollars it still has NINE deficiencies so serious they could "cause death, severe injury, or severe occupational illness" to the pilots flying them.
Even the military doesn’t want them: the Navy cut its order, the Marine Corps is expected to as well, and it's being reported the Air Force might follow suit — and yet every year, taxpayers are stuck with gobsmacking billion-dollar-bills. Why? Because Congress continues to lob more and more money at defense contractors by buying F-35s the military hasn't even asked for.
ENOUGH. From Los Angeles, CA, to Burlington, VT, too many of us are struggling to recover and rebuild from the worst of the pandemic. Classrooms have no heat or AC, families go hungry to pay for prescription medicines, and a massive climate crisis is coming straight for all of us because lawmakers say the solutions are too expensive. But one solution that can save us BILLIONS is obvious:
Add your name: Tell Congress to cancel the F-35 Failed Fighter Jet
Who wants these ridiculous failed fighter jets? Defense mega-contractors who spend tens of millions of dollars lobbying Congress every year and who tailor-made the F-35 for maximum political impact by claiming they were spreading production across 46 states.
Here's the backstory: In 2001 when the contract to build this so-called futuristic fighter jet was awarded, the U.S. public was promised a fleet of cutting edge fighter jets for a total cost, from development to production, of $200 billion.
Cut to today, when all the operating costs for the planned fleet are calculated across the program's expected 50-year lifetime, we're on the hook for an estimated $1.727 TRILLION!
At the end of the Trump administration, the Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller called the F-35 a "piece of s**t." The Air Force chief admitted the F-35 would never be able to live up to its original purpose. And Adam Smith, the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said we should stop throwing money down the F-35 "rathole."
WE AGREE, and since Congress controls the purse strings, we've got to let them know:
Congress: Cancel the F-35 Failed Fighter Jet!
Thank you for working for peace,
Stephen and the Win Without War team
Last cycle, Alexandria faced 13 challengers who were vying for her seat in the primary. In the coming cycle, we could be facing the same crowded field.
We can expect that there will be another well-funded GOP challenger in this next race. Last year, her GOP opponent in the general election raised $425,000 in just 10 weeks after announcing his run on Fox & Friends. By the end of the race, he’d raised $10 million to unseat her.
The truth is, we don’t know what the GOP will throw at us this time. Which is why we must be prepared and hit every monthly goal to ensure we can execute our full plan to fight back against disinformation, continue organizing in our communities, and keep AOC in Congress.
That's why we're really counting on you, if you're able to pitch in today. We’re 7,922 contributions behind where we need to be in order to be on track to hit our fundraising goals this month.
If you're able, please make a donation of $15 or anything you can today. We're counting on your support to power our campaign and keep Alexandria in Congress.
We couldn't do this without you.
Thank you,
Team AOC
Small donors like you keep us going. To contribute via check, please address to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress, PO Box 680080, Corona, NY 11368.
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Help Lucas Kunce defeat Josh Hawley in November: https://LucasKunce.com/chip-in/ Josh Hawley has been a proud leader in the fight to ...
