#reconciliation

Jim Saksa at Democracy Docket:

House Republicans are once again attempting to enact a version of President Donald Trump’s long-sought SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter suppression measure that the Senate has repeatedly refused to pass. This time, the GOP leadership is trying to get the anti-voting provisions through the Senate via the budget reconciliation process, which allows the chamber to bypass the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold and pass legislation with a simple majority.   Republicans included $10 billion worth of election-related grants over a 10-year period in the $95 billion legislative framework for funding the Iran war and bailing out farmers hit by Trump’s tariffs. Those grants would be used to coax states into adopting anti-voting measures like those in the SAVE America Act.  The House Budget Committee voted 20-14 Thursday to adopt the reconciliation resolution. Ahead of the vote, some Republicans threatened to vote against the plan, and its passage on the House floor is far from guaranteed. 

It’s unclear what elements of the SAVE America Act the House will ultimately try to pass. The procedural outline merely authorizes the House Administration Committee to draft legislation with a $10 billion budget.  The version Trump has pushed most forcefully for would require voters to show documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) when registering and ID when casting their ballots. It would also ban no-excuse mail voting, gender affirming care for minors, and transgender athletes in women’s sports.

[...] Legislation passed through reconciliation must be budgetary in nature. The Senate Parliamentarian, the chamber’s procedural umpire, ruled last month that the SAVE American provisions did not fit the bill, leading Trump to call for her ouster.  By turning the SAVE America Act’s dictates into conditions on federal grants, supporters hope it will survive a Senate “Byrd bath,” the procedure — named after former West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd — for stripping non-budgetary measures out of reconciliation bills. But budget experts have said that’s unlikely to work.  “Finding a workaround to tie it to budgetary-related matters would be unlikely to pass muster,” Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told Democracy Docket in March.

And even if the Senate did pass a $10 billion grant program conditioned on states implementing their own versions of the SAVE America Act, there would be no impact on the upcoming midterm elections. 

Such a scheme would take effect in Fiscal Year 2027, which begins October 1, 2026, but it would take the federal government some time to stand up a new funding program, begin accepting and assessing applications, and then award grants. And besides the 14 states that already have SAVE America Act-like laws on their books, other state legislatures would need to first enact new laws to qualify. 

With or without the voting restrictions, Republicans’ third reconciliation package this Congress might fail. The House budgetary plan did not include spending offsets to cover its costs, something the incoming Senate Budget chairman, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), says he will insist on adding.  And time to pass the spending measure ahead of the midterms is rapidly running out. Between the August recess and October campaign season, Congress will only be in session for a few more weeks before November. 

The weak House bill shows the party can’t agree on an agenda. Source link

excerpt:

The Passing of the Notebook: Evolutionary Curiosity and the Eternal Chain of Inquiry

With shifting the focus away from having answers to participating in the process of inquiry the evolutionary story becomes almost poetic. Life learns because learning increases the probability of persistence which is life. Every organism is, in a sense, an experiment conducted against entropy. Those experiments that learn well continue. Those that do not disappear.

Humans inherited an extraordinary version of this capacity. We do not merely learn where food is or how to avoid predators. We ask why stars exist, what consciousness is, and whether the universe has a beginning. Evolution gave us a brain whose curiosity extends far beyond the problems it evolved to solve. That creates a paradox. The very faculty that helped our ancestors survive also reveals questions that no individual can hope to answer. Instead of seeing this as a tragedy, see it as participation what will change your emotional attitude towards uncertainty. Not that I must know but I belong to a process that is looking for answers. You are a process that knows. That is a profound shift. You are no longer the final knower. You are one finite link in a chain of knowing that began long before you and may continue long after humanity itself.

In that light, asking questions becomes less like demanding an answer from the universe and more like contributing one sentence to a conversation carried by life itself across evolutionary time. You will die, our race will die but another species will be born and laugh in a million years at ours struggle. But notice that without your dance on the tightrope of uncertainty, I won't be a laughing representative of a new race in a million years. It has humility, pride and joy at the same time.

Perhaps I will never know. But the process of life, of which I am only one brief expression, will continue asking better questions long after I am gone. That thought does something interesting to the fear of death. Death no longer appears as the failure of knowledge. It becomes the passing of one investigator's notebook to another. The investigation continues even though the investigator does not. We do not need every answer. I need the courage to live without most of them. It doesn't diminish science. It acknowledges the condition of being finite.

Evolution gave us curiosity not so that each individual could understand the universe, but so that life itself could gradually understand more of the universe through countless generations. If that is true, then each of us is both a beneficiary and a contributor. We inherit questions from those who came before us, we add a few insights of our own, and we pass the unfinished work onward. No individual completes the project, yet the project itself continues.

omg interesting question.. firstly, i hope the rpf ecosystem in the wingman-verse is thriving.

i've probably mentioned this before (or at least thought about it before lmao) but boone and his general friendliness/touchiness has been responsible for launching so many ships. there are kimmyboone stans and boonecallum stans and probably archieboone stans as well. i imagine they're all at each other's throats, and of course boonecallum stans are veryyy smug about the sheer amount of content they get. boonecallum is easily the most popular though.