Set aside pee jokes for a few minutes and call your senators about Ben Carson, Trump’s terrible pick for Housing and Urban Development.
If you’ve been calling about Trump’s other picks, you know the drill.
Get phone numbers and other contact info for your senators here.
Carson is testifying before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; check here to see if either of your senators is on the committee.
Tell the staffer who takes your call who you are, and note that you are one of the senator’s constituents — i.e., someone who will actually be voting for or against them in future elections.
Raise your concerns about Carson.
Like, say, the fact that he has absolutely no expertise on housing issues and no experience in government at all; he’s a retired neurosurgeon. Not only that, but when the possibility of a cabinet position for him was first raised he said that he felt unqualified to run a federal agency.
Carson is also a raging homophobe with regressive views on women’s issues. And he holds a number of odd beliefs that raise questions about his judgement, to put it mildly. In the brief video below, he explains a few of his, er, positions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH6uD0vjGw8
The video below has nothing to do with Ben Carson, but, I dunno, it’s pretty great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLKk7kaNb0A
Back to your call about Carson.
Ask if the senator plans to vote against Carson, or if they have spoken out against him; offer support if they say yes, tell them that you are disappointed if they say no.
If they are on the Banking Committee, encourage them to give Carson the “extreme vetting” he deserves, or something along these lines.
If you can’t call, writing a personalized email is also effective. See my posts here and here for more advice on how to call/write your reps.
And here’s some advice on calling politicians if you have social anxiety.
See my post here for a schedule of all the cabinet confirmation hearings this week.
Margot: What they passed was a resolution to direct the ACA to be dismantled through the budget process, which will prevent a filibuster.
Mitch McConnell and Trump’s stated plan is to repeal the ACA then come up with an alternative “eventually”. There are still a few within the Republican party who think this is a terrible idea, and want an alternative to replace the ACA immediately, since tearing up the ACA and claiming some nebulous solution will come “soon” results in a lot of uncertainty for insurance companies.
Unless the Republican Senators hold firm on that, this means with simple majority votes in the future, there will soon be laws eliminating subsidies and the medicaid expansion, insurance companies will once again be allowed to discriminate against pre-existing conditions, and create plans which cover virtually nothing to keep the premium costs down.
@Margot, it’s a procedural thing. If the Rs just introduce a bill to repeal the ACA in the Senate using the normal procedures, then the Ds can filibuster it and prevent it from ever passing, the same way the Rs were obstructionist for the last 8 years. (A filibuster is a tactic to take up all the debate time and prevent a vote.) What they’ve passed allows them to repeal the ACA using budget reconciliation, which does not allow a filibuster because the Democrats killed the filibuster back in 2013 because the Republicans were being so obstructionist.
They don’t have a replacement. They’ve had many years to come up with a replacement, and they haven’t. They just want to repeal it so that they can give tax cuts to lots of people and increase taxes on the poorest.
They can’t even agree on when to replace it. Trump just promised that it’d be replaced right away, but some Senators want to vote now and delay the effects until after the midterms.
It’s a clusterfuck and there’s a real chance that insurance companies are going to remove themselves from the exchanges in the meantime, which would be a disaster.
EDIT: Ninjas!!
yes, if GOP is smart (and they are, in a crafty way) they will repeal ACA now but that law won’t come into effect until 2019 or whenever – essentially they time limit it. This gives them the opportunity to say “in the mean time we’ll come up with something great” and then they won’t come up with anything great – or they won’t come up with anything at all.
And in the meantime, the insurance companies weasel out of the exchanges, the exchanges collapse, and the ACA and thousands of people die.
EDIT: Got through to Lamar Alexander’s local office and asked encouraged him not to confirm Puzder, the Labor secretary pick.
The calls are working! 🙂
Time to turn up the heat—Senate staffers are complaining about the avalanche of angry calls
@ leftwingfox and Falconer:
Thank you for your explanation! I’m scared for American people now… Republicans care so much about ”life” that they’re doing extremely irresponsible stuff like this. Terrible.
Yeah, Republicans and their deep concern about life…
I need a better fluttershy-rolling-her-eyes gif. I really do.
All they care about is making everyone else shut up and disappear. Everything else is just convenient excuses.
@Margot, and it’s gone on forever.
That’s Geo. H. W. Bush there.
Political cartoons from 30 years ago ought to be completely opaque.
There are any number of parliamentary tricks that can be used by Congresscritters to avoid taking responsibility for votes. One of the most venerable is to vote for a bill, and then vote against providing the funds to carry it out.
In the Senate, bills are passed by a simple majority, but it takes 60 votes to end debate and proceed to voting on the bill. This is the filibuster. A “reconciliation bill” cannot be filibustered but can only deal with money; thus it can be used to strip funding but not repeal Obamacare. The Republicans are currently trying out the idea of threatening to disapprove the continuation of CHIP — the children’s health insurance plan, which must be reauthorized this year; the Democrats don’t have enough votes to continue it, but the “optics” of killing health insurance for kids is pretty terrible.
The Republican problem is that 75% of USians don’t want Obamacare repealed unless there is an adequate replacement. They could do it in a sneaky manner by ending the unpopular individual mandate, which might get 8 Democratic votes and would send the insurance companies scurrying away — they aren’t going to let you wait until you get sick to buy a policy and still agree to cover pre-existing conditions. But there is a substantial part of the Republican base that wants Obamacare killed instantly by being bashed over the head with a blunt instrument with plenty of resulting gore, and then the Republicans would have to own the resulting chaos.