Clearing up a few more things about Biden’s cancer diagnosis; plus Scott Adams

The New Neo Posted on by

A sad note: Scott Adams says he has terminal prostate cancer. Adams is only 67 and a big voice on the right, and I’m certainly sorry to hear it.

He says he has “the same cancer” as Biden, and although that’s certainly true in the basic sense, it’s impossible to know exactly what similarities they share because we don’t know too much about when Adams was diagnosed or how (except he says it wasn’t recent), what his Gleason score and metastatic status were at the time of diagnosis, and what treatments he’s undergone in the past. At this point, however, he seems to have run out of effective treatments and is in serious pain. He says he’s probably going “to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.” The article goes on to say he’s indicating it might be an assisted suicide.

Now, back to Joe Biden.

I wrote a lengthy post yesterday on that topic, and there was plenty of discussion in the comments. Some of it indicated to me that some of what I was saying may have been misunderstood. So I’m going to clarify here.

In yesterday’s post I was not saying that for sure the announcement about Biden’s diagnosis, and especially its recent timeline, was the truth. I said this:

Of course, there’s zero reason to trust anything that is said about his health, due to past experience with coverups of Biden’s state. But what we’re reading about his prostate cancer diagnosis could certainly be true …

I wrote that because a great many people, some of them doctors on cable news shows, are saying for various reasons that Biden had to have gotten the diagnosis much earlier. I very much disagree with that and I continue to say it’s possible that Biden’s diagnosis was in fact very recent. What are the odds? I’d need more information, such as whether he was being given regular PSA tests, and that information hasn’t been released yet.

I began yesterday’s post by saying I’m not a doctor. One of the commenters in the thread wondered why I was criticizing the opinion of one of the doctors who spoke about Biden’s diagnosis. I criticize doctors at times because I find flaws in what they’re saying (or what they’re reported to be saying; the two are not always the same).

For example, there’s this observation:

A handful of medical experts were quick to question how the former president could be diagnosed at such a late stage — especially given that prostate cancer can be detected early with routine bloodwork, which is recommended for men over the age of 50.

“It is inconceivable that this was not being followed before he left the Presidency,” Dr. Howard Formman said in a post on X.

Not in the least inconceivable. In fact, the PSA test (the screening blood test) is not routinely recommended for someone of Biden’s age. I wrote an entire post about that back in 2011 and linked to it yesterday; I’ll link to it again here. The directive about that is still in place; see this for more details, as well as this from ye olde CDC. From the latter site:

Men who are 70 and older should not be screened for prostate cancer routinely.

Of course, many men do continue to be screened by having the PSA test after 70. Unless Biden had some extra reason to be screened – such as, for example, a family history – his doctors may just have been following these recommendations and not screening him that way. Have you noticed there’s not been any mention of his PSA level (at least, I haven’t located anything that mentions it)? We merely read that his diagnosis began with a palpable nodule. He was probably being screened that way for something like prostate enlargement, very common in elderly men, and that precipitated the rest of the testing and the discovery of the cancer.

I’m not a doctor, but I know these things because I follow them and have followed them for years. And I know them also from the personal experience of people I know who have had prostate cancer diagnoses at advanced ages. The person I know who had a diagnosis of aggressive prostate cancer at a similar age as Biden was told by his urologist that he shouldn’t pay any attention to a slightly elevated PSA and shouldn’t have any testing, although his internist had already ordered it and recommended a special MRI. The MRI showed a very high likelihood of cancer and his biopsy showed it was very aggressive. When the biopsy results came back, the doctor who did it told him that it was a very good thing that his alert internist had done the testing because it may have been caught before it metastacized, which it almost certainly would have in fairly short order and that it might even be metasticized now on the cellular level. The point of that story is that his urologist would have missed it, and he probably would have been in Biden’s shoes if the urologist had been in charge. Plus, the urologist would just have been following the guidelines.

My guess is that Biden’s doctors followed the guidelines and he wasn’t having PSA testing.

More from Dr. Foreman on Biden:

“Gleason grade 9 would have had an elevated PSA level for some time before this diagnosis. And he must have had a PSA test numerous times before. This is odd,” he added. “I wish him well and hope he has an opportunity for maximizing his quality of life.”

I have no idea why this doctor says that, but it’s not “odd” for an 82 year old man not to be tested.

Let me repeat that the person I know with Gleason 9, who is about Biden’s age, had a PSA of only a tiny bit over 4 when diagnosed. He was having his PSA tested every year, and a year before his PSA was 2.3. As I already indicated, his urologist didn’t even think he should be tested but his internist was doing it anyway, and the internist decide this jump in a year needed further investigation. The urologist disagreed and recommended ignoring it, but the MRI and then biopsy was done and the surgeon who did the biopsy praised the internist’s decision because of the very aggressive nature of the cancer.

In addition – and any doctor should be aware of this – there’s a group of men who have prostate cancer and whose PSAs are not elevated:

A false-negative result means that the test shows that the PSA level is normal even though prostate cancer is present. Not all prostate cancers cause a high PSA level. PSA testing misses about 15% of prostate cancers.

Lastly, I know some men who were very conscientious about getting PSA testing and yet who had sudden elevations and were already metastatic at diagnosis. I’m not saying this is common, but it’s possible.

This article mentions:

“Prostate cancer can develop between screening tests,” Morgans said. “It doesn’t necessarily grow super slowly. It can develop between screenings, and it can be aggressive when it does develop; that doesn’t mean it’s not treatable.”

That is what I already knew, and it could apply to Biden if he has in fact been getting regular PSA testing.

And there’s also this:

However, in hormone-resistant aggressive subtypes, PSA may be at a low level in the initial stages. …

There’s no single timeline, but aggressive prostate cancer progresses in the body rapidly. This tendency is in stark contrast to traditional adenocarcinomas of the prostate gland, which tend to progress very slowly for years. …

Aggressive prostate cancer tends to present with metastasis in the bones and lymph nodes in the pelvic region despite a low PSA level.

The announcement of Biden’s diagnosis, however, said that his cancer is not hormone resistant, which would give him a somewhat better prognosis.

Yesterday, commenter “Alan” wrote:

I was listening to Dr. David Samadi – a fairly famous urologist – on Megyn Kelly this evening and he made an interesting point: The only way to determine whether prostate cancer is hormone sensitive is to administer hormone blockers and watch whether the PSA decreases over time. No way they could have gone from nodule discovery to this point in a few weeks or months.

I responded that what that doctor said isn’t strictly true. It may be the only certain way to tell if a cancer is hormone-sensitive, but there are other ways to see if it’s most likely hormone-sensitive and therefore whether hormone blockers are a good idea. Here’s a description of one such test.

Put all of that together and I think it’s very possible the story being put out about Biden is the truth, although an incomplete one. I’d like a more specific timeline as well as information on whether or not he had regular PSA tests, and if not why not, and if so what his figures were over time.

And of course it’s also possible they’re lying; wouldn’t be the first time. But at the moment I see no reason to assume it.

SCOTUS acts to end block on Trump’s policy reversing Biden-era exception

The New Neo Posted on by

SCOTUS has ruled in support of a Trump policy this time – for the moment:

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to lift a lower court injunction that blocked President Donald Trump’s decision to terminate the protected legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants living in the U.S., in a win for the administration as it looks to deliver on its hard-line immigration enforcement policies.

The decision clears the way for the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to terminate Biden-era Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protections for roughly 300,000 Venezuelan migrants living in the U.S. and allows the administration to move forward with plans to immediately remove these migrants, which lawyers for the administration argued they should be able to do.

This is one of those many cases in which a lower court had issued a nationwide injunction. However, SCOTUS hasn’t yet ruled on the general and very important question of whether lower courts can issue nationwide injunctions.

In this case:

At issue was the TPS program, which allows people from certain countries to live and work in the U.S. legally if they cannot work safely in their home country due to a disaster, armed conflict or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.” …

The protections were extended during the end of the Biden administration, shortly before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in February abruptly terminated the program for a specific group of Venezuelan nationals, arguing they were not in the national interest.

In March, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California agreed to keep the protections in place, siding with plaintiffs from the National TPS Alliance in ruling that the termination of the TPS program, which is extended in 18-month increments, is “unprecedented” and suggested that the abrupt termination may have been “predicated on negative stereotypes” about Venezuelan migrants.

So it was another instance of a lower court saying Biden could do something on an issue and saying that Trump couldn’t undo it. SCOTUS today ruled that Trump can undo it, at least in this instance. And one very interesting aspect of this decision is that it was 8-1, which surprises me. Justice Jackson was the holdout. However, today’s decision is only temporary and the ruling is very terse as well, with the following being the heart of it:

The March 31, 2025 order entered by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, case No. 3:25-cv-1766, is stayed pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought. Should certiorari be denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. In the event certiorari is granted, the stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of this Court.

My interpretation of that is that the case may end up going back to SCOTUS for a more definitive hearing on the merits.

My 2-cents on Biden’s prostate cancer

The New Neo Posted on by

No, I’m not a doctor, much less an oncologist. But I happen to have a more-than-average amount of information about prostate cancer, due to the fact that I know – and am even close to – quite a few men with it. And by “close to” I mean that I even know many details about their diagnoses and subsequent medical treatment. Much of this information is also very current, one person having been diagnosed extremely recently and in Biden’s age category.

I used to think that prostate cancer in the elderly was almost never aggressive, and that if left untreated almost all those men will die of something else. However, as you can see from this article, aggressive prostate cancer is far from rare in elderly men, although their prognosis without treatment is less clear as to the time frame:

Brassell and colleagues reported on the clinicopathologic features and the survival outcomes in 12,081 men diagnosed with prostate cancer between 1989 and 2009, from the Prostate Disease Research database. …

Men aged 70 years (n = 3350, 30.2%), had a significantly higher clinical stage and biopsy Gleason grade. Older men also had higher prediagnosis PSAV (P <.0001), which has previously been shown to be a marker for more aggressive prostate cancer. Among patients aged 70 years, 49.4% had external beam radiation therapy (EBRT), 24.6% had RP, 18.7% received primary hormonal therapy, 6% had brachytherapy, and 1.2% had cryotherapy. Among patients who underwent RP, pathologic stage, upgrading, and positive surgical margin rates were all significantly higher in older men.

That’s an article from 2013, and I’m sure there are plenty of others but I’m not about to spend hours and hours on this at the moment. I will add that the person I know who is about Biden’s age and who was recently diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer (Gleason 9, the same score as Biden) but without metastases, was told that without treatment the cancer would probably kill him before anything else just going by his type of cancer versus his average life expectancy at that age. Other doctors may have advised him differently, of course, but the one who did his biopsy was a very well-known and highly-respected prostate cancer expert who wasn’t gung-ho for treatment of the elderly with prostate cancer in general.

The men I know who have prostate cancer, including the one with the very recent diagnosis, all had had regular prostate screenings and yet several had small bone metastases when diagnosed, and their PSAs had only recently elevated. So I don’t have a problem with the idea that Biden was only diagnosed recently. It’s even possible that he had stopped having PSA screenings because of his advanced age; a lot of doctors no longer do them routinely in men of his age. I have read that Biden was diagnosed because of a physical exam in which a nodule was felt, and I don’t find that so strange. I’ve read that his metastases are treatable as well, and that was true for the several men I know who had small bone metastases at diagnosis.

I’ll add that the elderly person I know who was recently diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer and is being treated had only had a very small PSA elevation and no nodules present that could be felt, and yet had fairly extensive although localized aggressive prostate cancer. The lack of metastasis was determined by PET scan, although it could not be ruled out at the cellular level. It was recommended that he take androgen-blocking injections and have localized radiation therapy.

Prostate cancer, even with bone metastases, is usually very treatable. From what I’ve read it’s likely Biden will have androgen-blocking drugs, plus possibly radiation. As I said, the person I know with a disease profile something like Biden’s is getting those treatments, although he was first diagnosed through a slightly elevated PSA rather than nodules that could be felt. These decisions are not cut-and-dried, and not all doctors would make the same recommendations.

The usual pathway to diagnosis goes like this: suspicion raised by elevated PSA or felt nodules, special MRI to determine the likelihood of cancer and if the likelihood is in the much higher range it is followed by a biopsy. The biopsy gives the diagnosis and the Gleason score, which helps determine a treatment plan. The MRI is a more recent development (a doctor told me that it became widely available for this purpose in 2017) that greatly facilitates the decision about whether or not to have a biopsy, particularly in elderly men. Therefore it prevents unnecessary biopsies compared to in the past, and makes it more likely that biopsies are only done in men who have a good chance of needing treatment. After the positive biopsy and Gleason score, there’s usually a PET-scan to determine if metastases are present.

So I have much less difficulty than most people in assuming that Biden really has been diagnosed only quite recently. Of course, there’s zero reason to trust anything that is said about his health, due to past experience with coverups of Biden’s state. But what we’re reading about his prostate cancer diagnosis could certainly be true; prostate cancer is an odd beast for many reasons.

NOTE: Here’s one of several posts I’ve previously written on prostate cancer.

Elusive muse: Suzanne Farrell

The New Neo Posted on by

All dancers are unique. But some are more unique than others.

Suzanne Farrell may have been the most unique of all – that is, I’ve never seen another dancer who reminds me of her in the least. The closest would be Galina Ulanova, who shares the interior-ality (is that a word?) of Farell’s presentation as a dancer; that is, the sense that she is lost in her own world and not performing or posing. I’ve seen interviews where Farrell has been asked whether, when she was growing up, she wanted to be a ballerina, and she has answered that she only wanted to dance. She is a highly unusual person.

There is a documentary about Farrell made in 1996, about seven years after she retired from her performing career, a career that began when she was a teenager and the New York City Ballet was under Balanchine’s direction. He was about forty years older than she was and became enthralled with her, not just as a dancer but in the romantic sense. They had a complex relationship that was never sexually consummated and which Farrell discusses in the documentary. I think that even in the film’s first few minutes you can see why she enchanted Balanchine so.

Unfortunately it’s not possible to embed the video, but you can watch it here. You don’t have to see the whole thing to get the flavor, although I certainly watched it in its entirety. Watch as much as you like.

Farrell also has said that you reveal your personality when you dance. That is very very true. It’s revealed in a million ways both subtle and unsubtle. The audience may not be able to describe or list them, but the audience perceives them. A dancer is relaxed or tense, self-centered or not, risk-taker or cautious – but it’s all there for the world to see. Farrell herself always seemed relaxed, in her own dreamworld but it was not at all about her, and a physical risk-taker. Although she was never flashy or show-offy, she nevertheless knocked people’s socks off.

Another thing Farrell said in another interview was that a dancer must fascinate the audience even before the dancer starts to dance. Just standing still onstage, he or she must fascinate. The strange and uncanny thing is that Farrell did exactly that, although I don’t know how she did it. Even when she was dancing as part of a group, which she didn’t usually do, one could always spot her not just through her looks or body proportions but through her unique and riveting – that is, fascinating – quality of movement.

SCOTUS rules against Alien Enemies deportations

The New Neo Posted on by

SCOTUS ruled yesterday:

Trump tried to address the problem as to a particularly vicious gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA), by invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), which allows summary removal. That effort has been stymied by multiple courts, incuding the Supreme Court, ruling that persons subject to removal under the AEA are entitled to due process before removal. Depending what the due process looks like may render deportation efforts futile – you can’t have millions of trials, even if they are truncated proceedings.

Is the Constitution a suicide pact? We’re in the process of finding out.

The Supreme Court ruled [Friday] that the hold it previously put on efforts to remove TdA via the AEA will stay in place. A lot of the Per Curiam Opinon related to jurisdiction, including the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, to decide these matters.

The bottom line is the Supreme Court put everything on hold, and told the 5th Circuit to figure out what type of due process the TdA members should get. Removal of TdA members through other statutory authority, other than AEA, could continue …

It’s a bit complicated and I think, from what I’ve read online, there’s a fair amount of confusion about what it means. That’s in part because it’s still undetermined what the “due process” would consist of; SCOTUS has for the moment left that question to the lower court. This only applies to the Tren de Aragua members deported under the Alien Enemies Act.

It might be a good idea if Congress were to act on this question to create some expedited process. Then again, SCOTUS might rule it unconstitutional if it lacks what SCOTUS considers due process.

The big issue is that Biden was allowed to open the borders, and the millions who came in that way should be just as easy to deport. Illegal entry shouldn’t be a one-way street.

The release of the audio of Hur’s interrogation of Joe Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that the audio of the Hur interviews with Biden has been released, there’s a lot of talk about what it reveals. (see this, for example). Nothing on the recording should surprise anyone on the right. Biden’s state of mind is not the real scandal; the real scandal is the failure of the previous administration to release the audio, the smear campaign previously mounted by the left against Hur, and the extent and duration of the coverup of Biden’s cognitive failures in general and not just his failures with Hur.

Here’s the full audio; it’s long:

Here’s a short excerpt:

His condition is painful, although he’s clearly not totally out of it.

One of the many things I’ve thought about as a result Biden’s cognitive problems during his entire presidency, and especially the latter half of it, is that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is useless without an honest group of people to activate it. We didn’t have that in the Biden administration, to say the least. We had conspiracy and collusion to keep his deficits from the American people, and we had a press that was an active part of it.

It’s a reminder that no laws, no Constitution, can protect a country if its rulers and its press don’t have integrity.

Joe Biden: what were they thinking?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “TommyJay” asks:

What were the Dem leadership and their minions thinking when they engaged in this massive coverup of Sloe Joe’s feebleness and disfunction?

Good question. along with the related one of “why did they think they could get away with it?” Short version of the answer: they thought it was their only option.

If we go back in time to the 2020 campaign, it was obvious that a second Donald Trump term would be a truly nightmare scenario for the Democrats. They felt they absolutely had to win. The only thing they lacked was a healthy, vigorous candidate who could do it. Bernie Sanders become – to their horror – the frontrunner but he was too old, too obviously leftist, too ethnically Jewish. He simply wouldn’t do because they felt he would lose the election. Kamala Harris was great on paper in terms of identity politics but seemed to have zero electoral appeal even to Democrats, much less Republicans and/or Independents. The others in the running were hardly doing much better.

The Democrats’ only hope became Joe Biden, whom they knew they could label a moderate compared to Sanders. Whatever cognitive problems he had – and he clearly had them even in 2020, although not as severe as they later became – the Democrats wagered they could cover up and/or minimize them in the highly unusual COVID campaign season. The others were pressured to drop out, Biden became the nominee, and then there was a full court press to rig the election through the cooperation of the MSM and the intelligence community, which (among other things) managed to suppress and discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story when it surfaced near the election. Biden’s cognitive problems offered an opportunity for control by others who were to the left of Biden himself, which they considered a feature rather than a bug.

Remember after the election, how the right was betting that Biden wouldn’t last? That he’d retire by June, a lot of people said, and would be replaced. I didn’t think so, for one simple reason: Kamala Harris was not ready for prime time, and as a black woman she could not be bypassed for a substitute. I believe that Biden’s handlers were surprised at how incompetent she seemed, much more than they were surprised at any of Biden’s deficits. So they were stuck with him, and stuck with her, and they never really figured a way out of that dilemma for the entire four years of the Biden administration.

As far as the 2024 campaign went, my guess is that they didn’t really try to talk Biden out of running at first, even though his cognitive issues had increased, because they still didn’t have a winning replacement. They hoped to take Trump out by lawfare anyway, and that would solve the problem. They tried to do that; oh how they tried! But the lawfare didn’t work and the Biden/Trump debate loomed. Did Biden do worse in that debate than they expected, or exactly as bad as they expected? I don’t know, but that’s the point at which they suddenly were forced to acknowledge – because it simply could not be denied any longer – that Biden couldn’t run for president in 2024 and had to be replaced.

Things were in a state of flux for a little while, and it was during that time that Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt. What didn’t kill him made him stronger as a candidate. About a week later Biden withdrew from the race, and Harris became his nearly immediate replacement. The Democrats didn’t see any other way to deal with the mess, and they still had to pretend that Biden had dropped out for other reasons because to admit he was too cognitively challenged would be to admit that they’d covered it up for a long time. Therefore the message the campaign put out was that Biden was stepping aside to make room for youth. And Harris was also left with few options but to go around pretending Biden was cognitively intact, as well, because as his VP she had to have known and been part of any coverup.

From start to finish the entire thing was determined by the fact that Democrats had no good candidates to run as alternatives. They hoped that the MSM’s cooperation would help their sleight of hand fool the public one more time and Harris would become president. Fortunately, it didn’t work.

Now they have some ‘splaining to do, and the agreed-on narrative du jour is that they – the press and the Democrats, that is – were fooled by a bunch of canny political aides to Biden. And additionally, that Biden was too selfish and foolhardy to drop out in a timely fashion and give Kamala a chance to blossom and shine – although anyone who actually watched Harris in interviews would have been aware that time was not her friend. The tack they’re taking is ludicrous, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a better one. The truth makes them look like knaves and fools; the lie makes them look like knaves and fools. So knaves and fools it is.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Here we go; lots of news:

(1) Ex-hostage Edan Alexander says that the terrorists treated him better after Trump’s election:

Alexander’s aunt, Sharon Senyor, told the Ynet news site on Wednesday that “he said that since Trump took power his conditions improved. From the moment they started to talk about him, they gave him more food so that he would gain weight.”

Ynet also reported, citing conversations Alexander had with others since his release on Monday, that following Trump’s inauguration, the freed hostage was moved to a “VIP tunnel” with senior Hamas officials in order to both serve as a human shield and provide him with further protection due to his American citizenship.

2025. (Office of the Special Envoy to the Middle East/X)
Freed hostage Edan Alexander’s conditions in captivity improved following the inauguration of US President Donald Trump in January, according to a family member.

Alexander’s aunt, Sharon Senyor, told the Ynet news site on Wednesday that “he said that since Trump took power his conditions improved. From the moment they started to talk about him, they gave him more food so that he would gain weight.”

Ynet also reported, citing conversations Alexander had with others since his release on Monday, that following Trump’s inauguration, the freed hostage was moved to a “VIP tunnel” with senior Hamas officials in order to both serve as a human shield and provide him with further protection due to his American citizenship.

This echoes comments Alexander reportedly made during his phone conversation with Trump on Tuesday.

Fearing Trump’s anger and perhaps retaliation, they didn’t want him to look like a concentration camp inmate. So they fattened him up a tiny bit.

(2) Kash Patel says the FBI will be moving from the Hoover Building. Not just the building, but DC itself:

“Look, the FBI is 38,000 when we’re fully manned, which we’re not. In the national capital region, in the 50-mile radius around Washington, D.C., there were 11,000 FBI employees,” Patel said. “That’s like a third of the workforce. A third of the crime doesn’t happen here, so we’re taking 1,500 of those folks and moving them out.”

“Every state’s getting a plus-up, and I think when we do things like that, we inspire folks in America to become intel analysts and agents and say, ‘we want to go work at the FBI because we want to go fight violent crime, and we want to get sent out into the country to do it,'” he added. “That’s what we’re doing in the next three, six, nine months we’re going to do that hard.”

(3) You know that Qatar airplane the left has made such a hue and cry about, as though it’s a gift for Trump? Well, now we learn the following from an interview with Senator Markwayne Mullin:

“What the media isn’t telling you and what no one’s talking to you about is this same 747 has been in negotiations for a year,” Mullin revealed. “The Biden administration is the one that started these conversations.”

“It didn’t start in the Trump administration. Why? Because we need a backup for Air Force One. Because right now, the President of the United States is flying around on a 40-year-old plane and there is no backup for it.”

Mullin reiterated his initial point.

“No one is discussing that part. They’re discussing that the deal ended with President Trump,” the senator continued. “Maybe the media doesn’t know.”

Yeah, maybe. Nor do they care to find out.

(4) Speaking of “not knowing,” that’s Comey’s claim about a tweet of his highlighting what appears to be a call to assassinate Trump:

Comey claims to have had no idea what the numbers meant. Why put it up, then? And if he’s really that ignorant – which I very much doubt – has he never heard of finding out?

More here on the subject.

(5) Trump’s budget bill fails to come to a vote in the House. The Budget Committee didn’t approve:

The committee vote failed with just 16 lawmakers in favor, and 21 voting against.

Several hard-liners signaled that they would derail the tax and budget measure over concerns that it adds to a bloated national debt. The holdouts — which include Republican Reps. Ralph Norman, Chip Roy and Andrew Clyde — threatened to prevent the package from advancing out of the House Budget Committee, which convened Friday morning.

And that’s what happened. I assume there will be more negotiating on this.