Latest news with #JohnMcCain
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
‘Vote-a-rama' drama as these 5 in GOP threaten McCain-like ‘thumbs-down' moment on Trump's ‘Big Beautiful' bill
The beginning of the Senate's marathon 'vote-a-rama' session is underway as the upper chamber debates final passage of the so-called 'one big, beautiful bill' addressing several of Donald Trump's legislative priorities. It was still unclear by Monday morning whether the vote would pass. Republicans have only 53 seats in the Senate, which is not enough to overcome a filibuster by the Democrats. As a result, they plan to use a process called budget reconciliation. This would allow them to pass the legislation with a simple 51-vote majority as long as the bill relates to the federal budget. Vice President JD Vance can cast a tie-breaking vote. A massive piece of legislation increasingly representing the norm on Capitol Hill, the 'big, beautiful bill' is more than a simple budgetary package. It includes an extension of the 2017 Republican tax cuts, a costly proposition, as well as a surge in funding for Trump's mass deportation efforts. The legislation would fund the hiring of nearly 20,000 new immigration agents, including 10,000 new ICE personnel alone. Republicans found funding for those measures through cuts to Medicaid and food stamps (SNAP). The imposition of work requirements in the bill is estimated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to result in millions losing Medicaid coverage over the next decade if passed, and changes to the legislation in the Senate would also effectively end the expansion of Medicaid in states that chose to do so after passage of the Affordable Care Act — resulting in millions more losing coverage. Democrats are hoping to pick up four Republican defections in an effort to defeat the bill. The 'vote-a-rama' process allows for both parties to introduce amendments to the legislation, and it's possible that the bill could change significantly before the final vote — which was set for late in the afternoon. And the continued debate over the budget reconciliation package — officially the 'One Big, Beautiful Bill Act' — leaves open a very real possibility for one or more Republican senators to have their own 'John McCain moment' later in the day. In 2017, the late Sen. John McCain, who at the time had an aggressive form of brain cancer, ping-ponged back and forth between Democrats and Republicans as both competed for his vote before he famously went to the Senate well and delivered his literal thumbs down to kill Trump and conggressional Republicans' attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. His deciding vote shocked members of both parties, and firmly ended any political momentum for ACA repeal efforts through the rest of Trump's first term — a fact Trump never forgave of the late McCain. Even with twin majorities in Congress once again, Republicans have not yet floated a similar plan for ACA repeal. As of Monday morning, meanwhile, two Republican senators looked to be hard "no" votes: Sens. Rand Paul and Thom Tillis. Paul, the Senate's leading libertarian, is demanding steeper spending cuts in the budget package, while Tillis opposes the extent of cuts to Medicaid, including the rollback of the program's expansion. Tillis's home state of North Carolina began the expansion of Medicaid coverage in the state under the ACA's provisions in late 2023. President Trump threatened Tillis plitically over the announcement that he would oppose the legislation in a Truth Social post. The senior North Carolina Republican then announced that he would not seek re-election next year. Tillis, in turn, fired back in a tweet urging Trump not to endorse Mark Robinson, the state's scandal-plagued former lieutenant governor, for his seat upon his retirement. Robinson, Tillis said, would lose his election by 20 points. Three other Republicans are thought to be on the fence. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are both publicly critical of calls for cuts to Medicaid; neither have announced how they will vote on final passage. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is the last outlier, having expressed his own reservations about insufficient deficit reduction efforts though he seemed to get on the same page with GOP leadership Sunday evening. With Vance set to break a tie, Collins and Murkowski are the likeliest candidates to block the bill — though they'd have to vote as a bloc to do so. To be successful, their votes would also require Paul and Tillis to remain in opposition, though Tillis at least seems immovable. If Monday's vote succeeds, Republicans will still have to put the legislation through the House of Representatives one final time for passage. Several members of the lower chamber, where Republicans hold an equally thin majority, have already expressed reservations about changes made to the legislation in the Senate. The scope of the legislation and disagreements within the disparate factions of the House Republican caucus have already caused their share of drama in the weeks and months leading up to Monday's vote-a-rama in the Senate. The House narrowly passed the legislation after arguments between Speaker Mike Johnson and members of his caucus over raising the cap on deductions for state and local taxes (SALT), as well as the bill's Medicaid provisions. A major rift also erupted between the president and Elon Musk, formerly one of his chief advisers, over projections that the bill would add nearly $4trn to the national debt over a decade. Musk, who spun out publicly and made accusations about Trump's involvement with the sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein before deleting them, criticized the legislation again on Saturday as voting neared. 'The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!' he wrote. 'Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.'
Washington Post
6 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
I'm Muslim. Zohran Mamdani's victory is a Barack Obama moment.
Zaid Jilani is a journalist and author of 'The American Saga' newsletter. When I found out about New York Democratic Assembly member Zohran Mamdani's upset victory in New York City's mayoral Democratic primary, an old memory popped into my head. It was the day after Barack Obama trounced John McCain in 2008's presidential election. A friend of mine who was running his student chapter for the state of Georgia greeted me at the student center of the University of Georgia, where we both went to school.
The Guardian
24-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Republican Lisa Murkowski on Trump's America and the ‘intensity on the security of our democracy'
Late one night about six months into Donald Trump's first term, John McCain stepped onto the Senate floor and with a dramatic thumbs-down gesture dealt the president his first major legislative setback by defeating an attempt by his fellow Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It was the last major political effort of the Arizona senator, who would die the following year from brain cancer, but his no vote would not have been effective had he had not been joined by fellow Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – who gives that incident, and many other brushes with Trump, a prominent place in Far from Home, the memoir she released on Tuesday. 'Susan and I did smile wryly about the laurels he received for that one vote – which came only after the two of us had already taken the heat for many days for standing up against the party on our own,' Murkowski writes. About halfway through her fourth full term representing the largest state in the union, Murkowski has chosen this moment to release a memoir documenting her years as a politically moderate politician who repeatedly stood up to the president that transformed modern rightwing politics in the United States. There's a good case to be made that Murkowski, and Alaskans at large, have a unique perspective when it comes to the political changes he has wrought. Alaska is the state that elected as governor Sarah Palin, whose chant of 'drill, baby, drill' has essentially become US government policy under the second Trump administration. It was a hotbed of the Tea Party movement, whose candidate Joe Miller managed to defeat Murkowski in the 2010 Republican Senate primary only for her to win the general election through a historic write-in campaign. Its voters backed Trump three times straight, but Murkowski refrained – in her memoir, she reveals that in 2016, she wrote in Ohio's Republican governor John Kasich, a fellow moderate. Later, she would be one of seven Republican senators to vote for Trump's conviction after the January 6 insurrection. Murkowski is no Democrat – despite helping to keep the Affordable Care Act on the books, she did not vote for it in the first place nor much else of what Barack Obama and fellow Democrat Joe Biden proposed during their terms. She acknowledges the peril of the climate crisis, but has supported opening the Arctic national wildlife refuge to drilling, as well as the Willow oil project. But much of Murkowski's focus in Far from Home is on navigating the crises the country faced during the Trump era, such as his two impeachments, the Covid-19 pandemic and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election – which often put her against him, to the extent that he backed an unsuccessful challenger in 2022. 'It's not like I highlighted things that were going on in the Trump administration or that directly tied to Trump, so much as they're events in recent political memory that were very significant issues. And what I'm trying to share is my thought process and how I approached some really hard things,' the senator told the Guardian by phone from her Washington DC residence as she took a break from making rhubarb crisp. Yet she acknowledges that Trump's dominance of rightwing politics – it's now been 10 years since he began his political career by riding down a golden escalator in his New York tower to make a speech calling Mexicans rapists – has left a mark on the world's oldest democracy. 'I've been in the Senate now for 22 years, and I have never been either asked so many questions about, you know, do you feel like our democracy is secure? Do you feel that these are threats to democracy? Never, never, have I felt this, this intensity on the security of our democracy. So I do think that we are in a different place,' she said. All signs point to more difficult choices ahead for the senator, who was appointed in 2002, with much controversy, by her father, governor Frank Murkowski, to a Senate seat he had recently vacated. Though she is a member of the 53-strong Senate Republican Conference, in April, she publicly acknowledged that 'we are all afraid,' and 'retaliation is real' – comments that have been interpreted by many as a sign that the senator now personally fears the consequences of crossing Trump. She downplayed that conclusion to the Guardian, saying that she was rather trying to empathize with a room of non-profit employees in Anchorage who had seen their organizations' funding slashed haphazardly by the new administration. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion Murkowski, however, believes that there can be only so much fear and uncertainty that the public can handle, pointing to the recent No Kings protests: 'There's a difference between asserting as much power as you are authorized, and then … kind of pushing the envelope and seeing if there's even more, if you can go even beyond that. And is the court going to check me? Is the legislative branch going to check me? And your question is, how much will the public tolerate? And I think we're starting to see that.' Her solution? 'This is where I think we in Congress need to make sure that not only are we keeping the executive in check, but that we are doing our job. We're doing what the constitution requires of us.' Murkowski pointed to two opportunities for that oversight: a vote that could happen this week on a war powers resolution to restrict Trump's ability to further bomb Iran, and, separately, on a White House proposal to slash $9.4bn in funds appropriated for foreign aid programs and public broadcasters. After Trump ordered air strikes against Tehran's nuclear program over the weekend, Murkowski wrote: 'We must remember that Congress alone holds the constitutional power to authorize war.' Much of the Senate's focus right now is being taken up by negotiations over the One Big Beautiful Bill act, Trump and the Republicans' marquee legislation that would extend tax cuts, create new ones and fund ramped up immigration enforcement, while slashing the social safety net and sunsetting clean energy tax credits created under Biden. The latter was intended to address the climate crisis, which Murkowski views as a threat to her state – she even begins her book with a visit to Newtok, an Alaskan village being swallowed by climate crisis-driven erosion. In April, she was one of four Republican senators to sign a letter opposing the 'full-scale repeal' of the tax credits. (She declined to say how she would vote on the bill.) Trump is pushing for it to reach his desk by 4 July Independence Day holiday, but Murkowski described that demand as unrealistic. The peril, she said, is passing an imperfect bill that sets the public against the GOP – and leads to them losing their congressional majorities in next year's midterm elections. 'It's all about making sure that we've got the best policy, not for Republicans, not for Democrats, but the best policy for the people in this country,' Murkowski said. 'And if we take the time to do that and deliver that, not necessarily tie ourselves to an arbitrary date to just get there as quickly as we can, but so that we can actually deliver good policy, I think then that's rewarded by the voters when they feel that you did the work of the people.'
Los Angeles Times
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Letters to the Editor: This reader felt the call to speak out against the ‘Big Beautiful Bill'
To the editor: When I retired from my teaching career, I decided that I was going to get more actively involved in trying to make a difference through communication in written form. I had already educated students in history for 16 years and now I wanted to reach a bigger audience. Although writing was rewarding, I felt that I still needed to continue to communicate verbally to try to make a difference. To that effect, I have, on three occasions, made calls to lawmakers to express my opinion about legislation. I called countless federal legislators during President Trump's first term to try to keep the Affordable Care Act from being repealed. I still remember my joy in watching Sen. John McCain cast the deciding vote. Twice now in the last two months, I have called every senator over two bills, the first being the SAVE Act. Yesterday, I completed 100 calls to try to convince the senators that parts of the 'Big Beautiful Bill' are devastating ('Senate Republicans seek tougher Medicaid cuts and lower SALT deduction in Trump's big bill,' June 17). The huge cuts to social programs like Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act are overwhelming and the amounts seem to change daily. My biggest fear is the provision on Page 562 that few know about and mention (including your article). Although the details are confusing, the effects are clear: The power of the courts, which so far have been the people's only recourse, will essentially be weakened and the results could lead to full dictatorship. Lynn Lorenz, Newport Beach .. To the editor: The simple answer to avoiding the cruel and unnecessary cuts to programs and services funded by the federal government is to let the Trump tax cuts expire ('Republican fractures multiply over Trump's megabill,' June 19). Our priorities should be the poor, those in danger of losing healthcare, school lunch programs, national parks and climate change, not continuing tax breaks for the wealthy. Patricia Koch, Long Beach
CNN
15-06-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Why McCain and Obama are causing marital tension
(LifeWire) -- Pamela Rainey Lawler and Denis Lawler of Philadelphia have handled the travails of being married 38 years without seeing eye to eye on a lot of things. The upcoming presidential election is no different. Pamela, a 58-year-old self-described "left-left" Democrat, will be voting for Barack Obama. Denis, a 60-year-old longtime Republican, plans to vote for John McCain. Although they joke about their situation, Pamela says it's hard to keep her sense of humor when the stakes are so high. Good thing they love each other. "It gets hard when things are getting down and dirty and there is a lot on the line," Pamela, the director of outreach and development at an educational company, says of her husband, a lawyer. But she adds, "The foundation of [our] relationship is so much bigger than politics, and tends to trump politics." Especially in an election season where emotions are running high, couples who don't agree on politics can keep the peace by being open and honest with one another. "Where couples get in trouble is not so much having a different opinion; it's how they communicate it," says Grecia Matthews, a couples therapist and social worker in New York City. Couples need to be honest about their arguing styles and tolerance for criticism, she adds. State your opinion Good communication skills are important, it's true, but as Lorraine Duval knows, it also helps to be married to a good-natured spouse. Duval, a 33-year-old music teacher and McCain disciple from Glens Falls, New York, admits that in the heat of the moment she has called her pro-Obama husband, Chris, by other, less loving names. "Sometimes you have to state your opinion," she says, though she emphasizes that Chris' easygoing nature diffuses the tension. She returns the favor at social gatherings where Republicans far outnumber Democrats. She'll "go off the deep end" in his defense if she feels McCain voters are ganging up on him, says Chris, a 34-year-old mortician. "We really didn't discuss our views until later on in the relationship," Lorraine explains. "It wouldn't have been an issue for me anyway." Besides, points out Andre Anthony Moore, the founder of Marriage and Couples Counseling in New York City, if spouses agreed on everything, "life would be dull." "But in the process of drinking in the other's opinion," he says, "you might get to be a bigger person." Embrace the difference Opinions always got a good airing in the Lawlers' home when she was growing up, says their daughter, Kristin, 37. "At our dinner table, if you couldn't be persuasive, you were toast," says Kristin, an assistant professor of sociology at the College of Mount St. Vincent in Riverdale, New York. But such debate wasn't divisive, it was healthy, she says. Even today, when the family gathers, they debate politics. "I do think that my parents would make a good model for others who vote differently and who are able to see their differences in a positive light," says Kristin. "Difference is a vital principle -- it keeps you on your toes. Having a good opponent makes you a better debater. And if you want your side to win, you have to know how to make a strong political argument." For the record, though, Pamela Lawler says the couple's three children tend to side with her. Agree to disagree "Elizabeth Leslie, 37, a Democrat from Sacramento, California, works hard to maintain the political peace with husband Troy Gassaway, 35, a Republican." "It's exceptionally challenging," she says. "We agree to disagree." Leslie confesses she can't help but try to sway her husband's allegiance -- as communications manager for the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of California, political persuasion is part of her job. Leslie, who was not speaking on behalf of the League, says she has persuaded her husband to vote her way on several proposals in the past two elections. She praised him for listening to her when he's on the fence about any legislation. But come November, he's sticking with McCain. "My advice is for couples to hear the other out," she says. "The passion that made up their mind -- at least consider it." And even if the debate gets ugly, consider the fringe benefits. All that emotion can stimulate friendlier activity, therapist Grecia Matthews points out: "There can be makeup sex." Keeping the peace Live in a house divided? Here are some tips for keeping the peace when you and your partner split the ticket: • If disagreements get too personal, consider keeping sensitive subjects like politics off-limits. • If you need to vent an unpopular opinion, talk with a friend who holds similar values. • Agree on a "safe word" signifying that a tense conversation needs to end, out of respect for one another. • After tensions peak, do an activity you both enjoy -- take a walk or go to the movies -- and remember why you love each other. • Establish firm guidelines on when and where it's OK to bring up the campaign -- if at all. E-mail to a friend LifeWire provides original and syndicated lifestyle content to Web publishers. Ron Dicker, a Brooklyn-based journalist, frequently writes about relationship topics. He previously covered sports for the New York Times. All About U.S. Politics • John McCain • Barack Obama
