“Castrate, kill, remove voting rights,” the soon-to-be Georgia sheriff's deputy wrote in a text found by the FBI. “The only problem is you can’t expect to get them all that way.”
"I’m going to charge them with whatever felonies I can to take away their ability to vote," read one text. One text described beating up a Black person as "stress relief." (!)
The deputy and ex-Marine was found with an arsenal of weapons, pled guilty to a weapons charge and will be sentenced in August, AJC reports.
You'd have to be deaf not to have known Democrats were going to seek a reconciliation package too.
I've been speaking to Republican and Democratic senators on this very point. Rs oppose the reconciliation package, but they weren't pretending it doesn't exist. It was part of the deal from the first Biden-Capito & Co meeting that Ds/Biden would pursue a follow-on package.
Central tension here is Rs want to kill and/or shrink the reconciliation package, & Ds/WH have been trying to make it essential. The new part was Biden explicitly saying no signing this package w/o reconciliation too. But a little redundant after Pelosi said she'd hold the bill.
Kyrsten Sinema’s op-ed seems to forget that Medicare, Medicaid and other spending programs can be completely eliminated with 50+VP via budget reconciliation washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Republicans tried to turn the ACA Medicaid expansion into a kind of block grant in 2017 via reconciliation. You can defund Planned Parenthood programs in reconciliation. You can set the Medicare age to 100. You can nix food stamps etc.
The ACA itself had a massive reconciliation sidecar that included a massive federal takeover of student loans and a new long-term care program.
One big question is sort of chicken, meet egg: How does Schumer get liberals to back a GOP-friendly bill while their priorities are on hold? There's a potential solution for Dems...
AOC has pointed out House can simply hold up the Senate's GOP-friendly infrastructure bill until the much broader Democratic package is ready and vote on both near simultaneously.
(This is similar to how the ACA ended up passing in 2010.)