Rescissions bill passes
Just after midnight, the House of Representatives approved a $9 billion rescissions package by a 216-213 vote. The bill now heads to President Donald Trump’s desk for his signature which is expected on Friday.
Two Republicans, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio, voted against the measure. Fitzpatrick, you may recall, also voted against passage of Trump’s big, beautiful bill earlier this month. He is a moderate from a swing district in the state that Democrats are hoping to flip in next year’s midterms. …
This legislation will block $8 billion in funding to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and $1 billion to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the remainder of the fiscal year.
NPR has long outlived its usefulness, except to the left. And the left isn’t happy. If so, I would suggest they donate money to keep NPR going.
Yes. Those who think Planned Parenthood and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are worthy organizations should begin supporting them with donations to replace the lost federal funding.
Glad for the passage. However, why do the Democrats have such discipline where no one, and I mean no one, ever breaks rank on votes? Well, maybe Fetterman, but he got in trouble quickly. Meanwhile. the GOP has to heard cats to get anything passed. The Stupid Party.
We only watch British murder mysteries. I’d be happy to just buy them on a DVD.
physicsguy:
I don’t see it as stupid. They let only a couple of people in swing districts vote against it, in order to preserve those people’s chances for re-election in 2026 and to perhaps be able to preserve the GOP majority in the House. But the GOP still had enough votes to pass it. That seems rather smart to me.
I used to support the local public radio station — even worked as a part-time announcer for the classical side of the house. Just last year we donated my daughter’s Montero SUV to the station.so they could sell at auction to benefit the station. It was the most painless way to dispose of a car which was becoming increasingly expensive to maintain, and at least I got a credit for my income tax return. But holy jeeze, the begging messages, the hair-on-fire panic in them that I have been getting for the last week or so …
Sorry – public radio and TV – you all ought to stand on your own two feet, economically. You do not get to suck down government funds, and then turn around and be one-sidedly partisan – even f**king insulting – to better than half the American audience.
Doesn’t work that way.
If PBS and NPR had been even-handed, non-partisan, I don’t think many Americans would have minded at all. But to be so nakedly, insultingly progressive in sympathies for decades … well, that’s the bed they made. Hope they are comfortable in it.
$9 billion cut is a start, and it’s cut from the right people. We just need about 200 times that much cut–per year–to restore fiscal sanity.
0.005 of a loaf is better than none, of course.
Neo,
Your take is ok, and probably right…I hope. It just seems to me the GOP is always scrambling to bring the votes. Never see that happen with the Ds…always in lockstep.
Physicsguy is right. Dems march and vote in lockstep, like little Soviets. It ain’t about NPR but about their entire behavior, legislatively.
It takes a lot of years of hard focused effort to make yourself un-listenable, but NPR did it. Top O’ the World, Ma ! I used to really like NPR and its creative output, but not for the past 15 years or so. They would get a 3-figure check from me, every year – for the news, the entertainment, the music.
I think they’ll get their funding back eventually, but hopefully they will have learned that ‘Public’ means everybody, not just the 3% of the population they absolutely adore so much, they can think of nothing else.
I think they’ll get their funding back eventually, but hopefully they will have learned that ‘Public’ means everybody, not just the 3% of the population they absolutely adore so much, they can think of nothing else.
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For that to happen, you’d have to replace every employee responsible in some way for editorial matter. And you’re never going to find a bloc of leftoid employees who do not fancy the place belongs to them by right and the non-leftists are to be tolerated until we get rid of them.
It’s so simple, don’t know why they are whining. Just start accepting advertising like everyone else does (it should be embarrassing to them that they need government funding, has a bit of the totalitarian feel to it). They probably have some left over sense of superiority about being answerable to advertisers, and actually appealing to the masses to draw enough listeners to generate some income. Should be fun watching them flounder.
— physicsguy
It was not always thus. Once upon a time, the Democrats were riven by a whole bunch of internal regional and ideological divisions, and the GOP, believe it or not, was more or less unified.
From the time of FDR all the way up until the late 1970s, the Democratic Party was absolutely dominant politically. They controlled the House of Representatives with only brief freak interruptions for more than half a century. When the GOP captured the House of Representatives in 1994, it came as a shock because the Dems had controlled it for over 40 years at that point.
But back in those days, Party leaders had to balance off Southern ‘blue dog’ Democrats against patrician northeastern Dems, western Dems vs. Atlantic coast Dems, union labor vs. farm interests, black vs. white, it was an intricate dance. Many components of the Roosevelt coalition absolutely, genuinely despised each other, but were held together by certain common interests.
The GOP, back then, was a permanent minority and basically the ‘party of business’. It was internationalist and anti-union and socially liberal, and it was fairly unified. It had a few odd exceptions, but that was all.
Back in those days, the Dems had members like ‘Scoop’ Jackson, RFK Sr. (who was ideologically very different from Jackson), they had Clark Clifford and Harry Truman and Robert Byrd. The sheer size of the coalition masked deep divisions.
By in the late 60s and the 70s, the liberals began to take over. Or the Progressives, as they prefer to be called. The hippies. The Woke. The McGovernites. Call ’em whatever you want. All the way back in the 1940s, FDR knew that the policies and ideas of Wallace would split the Democrats, so he forced Wallace out.
In the 1970s, Wallace’s spiritual heirs returned and began to take over the Party…and they split the Democrats, just as FDR predicted. As the Progressive elite Left became ever more dominant in the Democratic Party, they started driving out other viewpoints and attitudes and types. That left the Dems ideologically united but shrunken, no longer the automatic dominant force.
The conflicting elements came over to the GOP, transformed it into a potential majority party…and brought with them the conflicts of interest and ideological splits that had formerly tormented the Dems. The more former Dems come over (and the majority of the GOP coalition now are former Dems), the more conflicts.
It was not always thus. Once upon a time, the Democrats were riven by a whole bunch of internal regional and ideological divisions, and the GOP, believe it or not, was more or less unified.
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Disagree. The period of formal Democratic dominance at the federal level lasted from 1932 to 1968. It has been a see saw since then, with Republicans competing better in executive contests from 1968 to 1994 and better in legislative contests thereafter. The problem for the Republicans since 1994 is that they’ve never had a sufficient majority in both chambers conjoined to the Presidency, so their capacity the liquidate agencies has been truncated. Disasters like the Department of Housing and Urban Development live on and on. One notable success was dismantling Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Office of Economic Opportunity’, which was the agency administering a scrum of misbegotten Great Society programs.
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Please note, people like Paul Krugman fancy the federal government is the Democratic Party’s property, so the improved competitive position of the GOP after 1968 is an act of theft which can only be explained by malicious marketing. See the idiot ‘Southern Strategy’ discourse. Rick Pearlstein’s Nixonland is the sophisticate’s version of this sort of agitprop.
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The Republican Party during those years was not unified at all and did not, in federal politics, have a vigorous and consistent response to the Democrats various innovations in policy (some of them defensible, some of them a train-wreck, some of them nefarious). The internal fissures were manifest in the persons of Barry Goldwater and William Scranton. During the period running from about 1962 to about 1988, developed a consistent response (as well as having for a brief run of years an advantage in campaign techniques and organization). It hasn’t proved to be implementalbe except in spot controversies. There’s usually a critical mass of careerists among Republican legislators who sabotage everything of value. The Senate Republican caucus always seems to be dominated by the Fredocon Donorist wing of the Republican Party. The fellow who posts here under the handle ‘Former Legislator” has given us a precis of how shambolic are the operations of Republican caucuses in state legislators as he’s known them.
Patrick – about those ads… If you really think about it all those fundraising breaks are ads since they interrupt the flow of the program and your time enjoying it.
And once you contribute, you never get off the list. I gave a few times a long time ago and still get the occasional catalog from the station. And with political contributions, I think I finally stopped all the crap from winred. It took a lot of unsubscribing and blocking the emails.
In the 80s my leftist friends and I complained that Republicans in Congress were more disciplined than Democrats, at least on the issues we cared about.
Those were the Reagan years. We were probably right.
except they didn’t get the House till the 90s, the Senate was perhaps a different bag, as they got it through 86, even those things that were deemed reasonable like the 86 tax bill, had a lot of poisoned pills that helped do in the S&L’s for instance
the Dems had a murderers row of Special Prosecutors, two against Meese, as Mark Levin, will tell you from his experience as chief of staff, that addlepated time server, Lawrence Walsh, who criminalized foreign policy, as Pat Fitzgerald would do a generation later,
in retrospect, the hubub over Oliver North, rather unorthodox strategy, seems over the top, did trading some hostages for some old tow missiles seem illconsidered well maybe, but look at what transpired later,
the occasion for the late Bill Moyer panjandrums and the Christic institutes insanity, also John Kerry’s next big fraud circus, the first was the Winter Soldier
investigation,
this was the era where horse whispers like Jane Mayer got his start, before she went after Clarence Thomas and took up defending Al Queda terrorists at Gitmo,
this was also when they started pretending about deficits, see David Stockman’s cri de coer, if that hasn’t proven an utter bipartisan fraud, there is a bridge i’d like to sell you,
except they didn’t get the House till the 90s,
The issue on the table is party discipline, not dominance.
neo on July 18, 2025 at 6:07 pm said:
Yes. Strategy and sausage making. A simple way for a voter to inform him or herself is to look at a candidate’s voting record. But the method is corrupted by the fact that the only thing that matters is if the bill passes or fails. Who votes for or against, is often just politic’ing.
I do suspect that GOP members get bought or extorted to some limited extent. Or that a couple or few are DIRC’s. Dems In Republican Clothing. I think McCain was a bit like that. His billionairess wife called his shots on occasion IMO.
The problem with advertising is that you have to deliver the requisite ears.
Again with the pan flutes!