15-year-old’s commentary on GOP trans attack. Columnist on Trump’s verdict: He’s a loser.

A 15-year-old, Ms. Hanson, visited a political club & unleashed on the anti-trans GOP with some inconvenient truths. Bloomberg columnist slammed Trump as a loser & castigated his political sycophants.

15-year-old opens the eyes of many

15-year-old’s commentary on GOP trans attack.

The President of the Humble Area Democrats, John Cotter, asked me to visit with them to broadcast their main program. They invited Dr. Nancy Beck Young to discuss the similarity of the Jan 6 and occurrences in 1940 Germany. Nancy Beck Young, the Chair of the Department of History and Associate Director of the UH Center for Public History was selected as a political expert featured in several episodes of Rachel Maddow’s new podcast, “Ultra.”

After the professor spoke, John said he received an email from a young student who wanted to speak to the group. 15-year-old Ms. Hanson walked to the front of the room and spoke about her trans friends and the pain and suffering the Republican Party policies are causing them.

What made me happy about this speech was the age of Ms. Hanson. She chose to engage at an early age, and she knows her subject. My only question to her was, ‘How can we clone her?’ If we can, there is still hope for our Democracy. It is her generation that will be making the decision. And knowing that our GenZs are coming of age and taking no prisoners is refreshing.

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Bloomberg Columnist on Trump’s verdict: He’s a loser.

Bloomberg’s opinion columnist Tim O’Brien did not mince his words. He pointed out that Donald Trump is a loser. He said that now that a jury of his peers has looked at the allegations and ruled against him, it makes his machinations moot.

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Debt Ceiling Hostage Taking must stop.

Josh Bivens and Samantha Sanders of the Economic Policy Institute laid out why the Biden Administration must not succumb to the Republican hostage-taking to raise the debt ceiling.

Recent reports indicate that the debt limit “X-date” could come as early as June 1. On this X-date, the U.S. Treasury will no longer have enough cash in its accounts at the Federal Reserve to meet all the legal spending obligations legislated by Congress. These obligations include paying holders of U.S. Treasury debt, Social Security checks, and reimbursements to doctors treating patients covered by Medicare and Medicaid. The normal way of dealing with such a cash shortfall—selling new debt issues and depositing the proceeds into the Treasury’s account—is exactly what the debt limit will make impossible on that date.

If the X-date comes and nothing is done except the federal government fails to fulfill its spending obligations, economic calamity will ensue: People who depend on programs like Social Security and food stamps will suffer, and the spillover effects on the larger economy would certainly cause a recession—and a truly horrible one if the stalemate lasted for any significant amount of time.

And how do they suggest we deal with the irresponsible intransigence?

Some defenders of the debt limit claim that it is good because it forces Congress to “reflect” on the nation’s fiscal trajectory. Former Trump administration budget director Mick Mulvaney made this claim about how the debt limit should be treated: “…the debt ceiling is really that buzzer that goes off when your battery is busted in your smoke alarm. It always goes off at an inconvenient time, it is always a pain to change it, but you always do it.”

This analogy is predictably terrible as a description of the real world. A faulty battery in a smoke detector can’t burn your house down. The debt limit could. But if Mulvaney really thinks that’s how the debt limit should operate, then a deal could be constructed consistent with this interpretation: each debt limit breach should lead to an entire day of legislative debate in Congress over the nation’s fiscal trajectory. And that’s it.

If the Speaker doesn’t agree to that deal, then the administration should use the range of accounting and legal workarounds available to them to keep the debt limit from binding. These are all suboptimal relative to debt ceiling abolition in the short run, but in the long run they will end up implicitly codified (unless the Supreme Court wants to take responsibility for forcing an unnecessary economic crisis) and will take the prospect of a debt limit crisis off the table of future presidents and Congresses. This would be a huge gift to the future.

Will Biden remain bold? We will know in two weeks.

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