Category: Government

Government is not the enemy.

Democrats: what exactly are you angry about?

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 11, 2025

Trump at Commanders game where he is booed

People are angry because 8 Democratic Senators voted with Republicans to pass a continuing resolution and re-open the government. The measure now goes to the House where, if Johnson remembers where he left the key to open the doors, it’s likely to pass.

Democrats are furious with the Democrats who joined with the Republicans. Oh, not the Republicans for not negotiating with us. Not with Johnson for keeping the House shut down.

No, all the anger is directed at Senate Democrats, because they did not keep up the fight.

I can understand. I was pretty disappointed myself. I really wanted to see us push back on the harm Trump has been doing to the country; to show he’s not the boss of all of us. And I wanted us to help the millions of people who are about to lose their no longer affordable healthcare.

We ended up shutting the government down for 40 days and seemingly have nothing to show for it. Wow, Senate Democrats…you suck.

Except there’s a part of me that knows we had only two choices at this point: We could continue the government shut down until Trump gets his way, and the Senate Republicans kill the filibuster; or we could vote for the CR, without the healthcare subsidies. There are no other options.

We knew these were the only options when Schumer made his offer of a deal last week: that Democrats would drop all other demands in exchange for getting the healthcare subsidies. This was a good deal for Republicans. After all, a whole lot of Republican voters are now facing higher insurance costs, and the subsidies have overwhelming support with both Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans could also claim that they got Democrats to drop all other demands and re-opened the government.

But they didn’t take the deal. They not only didn’t take the deal, their faux outrage and instant rejection told us there was no deal Democrats could offer that Republicans would take. They wanted complete capitulation and they were willing to keep the government shut down as long as it took to get the Democrats to give up. To them, the greater harm was bipartisanship.

People keep talking about how Congressional Democrats don’t seem to understand how things have changed with Trump, and they have to change what they do to fight him. But we, on the outside of Congress looking in, also need to understand that things have changed. There’s a new math in play.

You have, on one side of an equation, us. On the other side, you have a group of people who only care about one thing: holding power. They don’t care about anything else.

They don’t care that we can’t afford healthcare. They don’t care if hungry people get fed. They don’t care if planes fly on time. They certainly don’t care that the federal government continues to function.

Once upon a time, they may have cared about these things, or a minimum, cared about the optics of voters not getting fed, not having healthcare, being able to safely travel, and have a functioning government. But people voted for Trump and he promised none of this, and this sent a message to today’s Republicans: the only thing that matters is holding power and the way to hold power is by pleasing Trump, and the best way to please Trump is hurting Democrats.

How to hurt Democrats? Well, basically, you hurt the people of this country: the more vulnerable the people, the better.

Nothing else matters.

So, wise and wonderful pundits who have been nammering for two days about the awful Democratic senators, how exactly do you negotiate successfully with a people who see no harm coming from doing nothing? No, let me rephrase the question: How exactly can you fight people like this without also harming the people of this country?

When you have a President and party in control that don’t give a damn about anything else but themselves, everything that we thought we knew about responsible governance goes out the door.

House Democrats can easily fight Republicans just by not voting for anything the Republicans want to pass, because we can be fairly confident that whatever they want won’t be any good. House Democrats can always dance on the side of angels.

Senate Democrats, though, are hindered by this thing called a filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate. It’s an outdated, outmoded idea that invariably harms the Democrats, and frankly, the people of this country, more than it constrains the Republicans. We should have dumped it when we had a chance, but didn’t.

But, we still have the filibuster. And because we do, Senate Democrats have basically two choices from now on: either a small subset throws themselves on the sword and votes to continue funding the government and keeping it functioning; or they all go for broke—do nothing for potentially several months, until Trump bullies Senate Republicans into dropping the filibuster to end the shutdown.

Either choice has consequences. Funding the government means people will lose healthcare. But not funding the government until the Republicans decide to blow up the filibuster means people still don’t have affordable healthcare, but we also have a badly broken government from being nonfunctioning for so long, and a severely harmed vulnerable population. And Senate Republicans can finally do the things they’ve wanted to do but couldn’t because of the filibuster:

Make it difficult to vote
Make life hell for the trans community
Kill or maim the Affordable Care Act
Starve SNAP, and diminish Medicaid even more
Attack vaccines, prohibit abortions nationally, and kill birth control
Cut taxes even more for the wealthy
Destroy most government functionality, particularly the components that regulate commerce and industries
Undermine academic freedom
Expand the military and federal police organizations
Push up the age in which a person can access Social Security and Medicare

Well, the list goes on. All you have to do is listen to the Trump administration folks and Congressional Republicans on Sunday talk shows to see the world they want to create. Or re-read the Project 2025 manifesto.

I used to think that Republicans had enough survival instincts to know that doing all of this will ultimately result in them losing power, but…people voted for Trump a second time. We no longer live in a rational universe.

As much as I think the filibuster harms Democratic goals, thank goodness we have it now.

Once the Republicans turned down the Schumer proposal, we knew there was nothing we could offer that the Republicans wanted. Their entire purpose now is to please Trump, because they see this as the way of holding onto power. And Trump has no problems inflicting maximum harm on the country to get his way, and his way is total domination of Democrats and complete subjugation of the country.

Other than being annoyed because nasty journalists keep asking him questions about it, Trump could care less that the country is shut down. It doesn’t stop him from building monuments to himself. It doesn’t stop his migrant pogrom. It certainly doesn’t stop him funding what he wants to fund, regardless of what Congress does.

It might be satisfying to keep the government shut down because it gives us the illusion we hold Congressional power, but we really don’t. Not unless we’re willing to sacrifice people who need food, who need to be paid, who are under threat of losing cars and homes, because of the shutdown.

The power we do have is our resistance, but never to the point of harming people who don’t deserve to be harmed. But, we can resist much in Congress without harming folks, and we should. We can resist much in the streets, and we will. We can resist when we vote, and we must.

Most importantly, we can remember exactly who it is we are resisting, and never let the pundits tell us otherwise.

When voters see their healthcare double at the end of the year, it won’t be because of a choice eight Democrats made, but because this is the choice 52 Republicans made. When people get their SNAP benefits, federal workers get their jobs back and get paid, and the country is functioning again, it won’t be because 52 Republicans voted, but because eight Democrats did.

Government Health Insurance Healthcare

Dear Buddy Carter: Health Care Premium subsidies help people

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date October 5, 2025

NAIC letter header

Buddy Carter, why do you persist in sending lies in your Congressional newsletter? Isn’t the purpose of these newsletters to inform rather than misinform?

Your recent newsletter takes aim at Democrats during the shutdown. You claim that Democrats are keeping the government shutdown in order to provide subsidies for healthcare for undocumented migrants.

You wrote:

Democrats, including Schumer and Jon Ossoff, have now voted for the fourth time to shut down the government, demanding $1.5 trillion in new partisan spending, including nearly $200 billion in taxpayer-funded health care for illegal immigrants.

That partisan spending you’re talking about, is subsidies necessary to keep Affordable Care Act insurance policies affordable for primarily middle class US Citizens and lawfully present migrants. These subsidies were passed into law during the COVID epidemic but now they’re terminating at the end of 2025. This will drive up the cost of health insurance policies for US citizens and lawfully present migrants by an average of 114%. That’s well over double, which most US Citizens and lawfully present migrants can’t afford.

I keep repeating US citizens and lawfully present migrants, because the Affordable Care Act provides health insurance for US Citizens and lawfully present immigrants, only, as this fact check carefully notes.

Now, there is a law, called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTLA), signed into law by Ronald Reagan decades ago that does allocate a small amount of Medicaid funds to reimburse hospitals for treating anyone and everyone in an emergency life-saving scenario regardless of the person’s status. So, if an undocumented migrant shows up at the hospital with his hand cut off because he’s operating machinery no US citizen wants to operate, the ER has to save his life.

Now, I realize that you may prefer that this person die. I hope, though, as a country we’ve not fallen so far as to wish death on people in this country solely because of the promise of an American dream.

Regardless of the moral ambiguity of letting people die in the street, what the Democrats are pushing for has nothing to do with the EMTLA and everything to do with helping middle class folk, like your voters, afford the premiums for healthcare.

Of course, you think of me as a screaming radical leftist and therefore beneath your interest, even though you are my elected representative, which means you’re supposed to represent people like me. Still, because of your partisan approach to leading, you may discount what I say. Well, that’s fine. So let’s look to someone else who you might find worth your time.

Let’s look to the insurance commissioner for the state of Georgia, who has joined with other insurance commissioner of every single state, in sending to Congress several letters, including the latest, pleading with Congressional members like yourself, to please continue the ACA subsidies.

For more than a year, NAIC has voiced its strong support for continuation of the enhanced premium tax credits for Marketplace coverage. The enhanced credits expire at the end of this year, but health insurance premiums for 2026 must be finalized much sooner. Health insurers have already filed their initial rates for 2026, and state regulators are poised to give them final approval in the coming weeks. We must complete this action soon in order to make plans available for the annual Open Enrollment Period that begins on November 1. Without an extension of the enhanced credits in September, insurers and marketplaces will begin to notify over 20 million consumers in all 50 states of major premium increases in
a matter of weeks.

Contrary to what Speaker of the House Johnson implies by continuing to cancel House sessions, there is an urgency to renew these subscriptions now, before it’s too late. As North Dakota’s—note, North Dakota…not a screaming leftist liberal state—insurance commissioner notes:

Democratic lawmakers say extending enhanced premium tax credits is urgent, with open enrollment weeks away. Republican lawmakers say there’s time to negotiate over a policy later, since the subsidies expire in December.

Who’s right?

“The window is rapidly closing,” says Jon Godfread, North Dakota’s insurance commissioner. He says the enhanced subsidies need to be extended before open enrollment starts Nov. 1. “Let’s do this now.”

If lawmakers miss that deadline, he says, “it’s going to be really, really challenging to go back [to consumers] and say, ‘OK, now we fixed it, please come back and shop at this market that you were priced out of.’ I just don’t believe consumers are going to do that.”

Again, this is about renewing the healthcare subsidies that impact on the people you represent: voters in the state of Georgia. It is not, as you stated in your newsletter, about healthcare for undocumented immigrants. This is a lie, and you know this is a lie. It’s not as egregious as the lie Ryan Zinke told, with his claim that Democrats are somehow trying to kill the $50 billion dollar rural healthcare fund recently passed, but it’s still a lie.

And the sad thing for you is, if you don’t do something now, if Johnson doesn’t stop shutting down the House and actually work with the Democrats, people will know November 1 that you all lied.

Tags Buddy Carter

Government

The best outcome for this shutdown tug of war: the end of the filibuster

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date October 4, 2025

Tug of War

Have you ever played tug of war? If so, you recognize what’s happening in Congress right now. Republicans pulling, Democrats pulling, and here we are: stuck in the middle, again.

Shutdowns for the government are never a good thing. Our country should have eliminated the possibility a long time ago. However, this particular shutdown is far worse than any others primarily because of how Trump has weaponized the shutdown. If he and his administration aren’t violating the Hatch Act on a daily basis, Trump and his Project 2025 minion, Vought, are using the shutdown as an excuse to decimate even more of the government.

We would think that Congressional members would be busily negotiating an end to the shutdown, but Speaker of the House Mike Johnson won’t even convene the House for other business, much less working to resolve the shutdown. To me, this proves that Republicans are less interested in getting the government up and running, and more interested in pandering to our newest SCOTUS-appointed King, Trump.

Which leads me to what I think is the best possible outcome for this shutdown and that’s for Thune to finally blow up the filibuster and allow a party-line vote on resuming operations.

It would be nice to get healthcare for the citizens of this country, but Republicans have shown that little things like feeding the hungry and caring for the sick are not as important as building a ballroom for the President and striking a new coin in his image.

From both Johnson and Thune we’ve seen nothing but disinterest on ending the shutdown. However, at some point, critical functionality like paying for all those $50,000 bonuses for new ICE goons will shake them out of their Fox-headlight dazed stare and require them to actually Do Something.

They may realize that causing millions of taxpayer health insurance premiums to double in price could actually impact on their elections next year. It may actually also dawn on them that all the government cuts Trump is gleefully making are harming people that vote for them. And they may decide to toss Democrats a bone, and Democrats, knowing the hurts caused by the shutdown, may grab the bone. But I hope they don’t.

The best of all outcomes from this shutdown is to force Thune to blow away the 60-vote threshold to advance legislation.

While this seems like a win for Republicans, why do I consider this a win for Democrats? After all, this removes the last bit of power Democrats have in Congress.

The 60-vote threshold requires that at least eight Democrats cross over to help Republicans pass legislation. The Republicans then can claim at some future time—when their bad legislation hits Americans—that the bills passed with ‘bipartisan’ support. And the media will find someway, somehow, to twist the pretzel that now passes for ‘journalism’ and decide not only are Democrats partially to blame, they’re solely to blame.

After all: how many times have we read in the past that this or that is really the fault of Democrats, no matter who instigates the action and no matter how little Democrats have a say? Even now, when Democrats don’t control any part of the government, the White House and Congressional Republicans are saying the fault lies solely with the Democrats.

If the filibuster is gone, everything from this point on is solely and wholly owned by Republicans. And while there might be some positive legislation passed under complete Republican constrol, with this President and this Congress a lot of ugly will pass through the hallowed (or is that hollowed?) Congressional halls.

For once, Democrats won’t be around to clean up the mess Republicans make, and maybe this time, voters will actually wake up long enough to see it.

Best of all, we would no longer have to depend on Chuck “Everything’s fine” Schumer to eliminate the filibuster when the Democrats do finally get the Senate. And we’ll need to destroy the filibuster at that point if we have any hope of repairing even half the damage Trump, SCOTUS, and Congressional Republicans have done and will continue to do to this country in the next few years.

Sometimes the only way to ‘win’ at tug of war, is to just let go of the rope and let your opponent fall on their asses.

cover image, courtesy of Wannapik Studio

Tags Filibuster, shutdown

Government

Georgians: About that email you received from Social Security…

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date July 5, 2025

Screenshot of Social Security's email

I’m retired, and as such, an important segment of my income comes from Social Security. If you’re a retired US citizen, chances are Social Security is important to you, too.

As a Social Security recipient, I occasionally get emails from the Social Security Administration (SSA) with important information, such as a new benefit letter is available for the coming year, or Social Security tax documents are ready.

I was surprised to receive an email from the Social Security Administration a couple of days ago with the following bold headline

Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors

Evidently, Trump’s administration had decided the best way to obscure the fact that tens of millions of people, including many seniors, are going to lose both healthcare and food assistance is to focus on one component of the bill they claim will be a savior for seniors.

I can assure you, my fellow Georgians: it’s not.

What was included in that monster bill just passed was a provision to provide an additional $6000.00 tax deduction to seniors that will apply only in the years 2025-2028.

Currently, we don’t pay taxes on Social Security if our incomes fall below $25,000 for an individual and $32,000 for a couple. Roughly 50 percent of Social Security recipients have income less than these upper limits and don’t pay income tax. In fact, many people don’t even have to file with the IRS annually because their income is too low.

Taxation on Social Security is relatively new (passed in legislation in 1984) and came about as a way to bolster dwindling Social Security and Medical trust funds. All of the money that comes from taxing Social Security income goes directly to these trust funds.

By increasing the standard deduction for seniors, Congressional Republicans have provided some additional income for middle and higher-income Social Security recipients, and will increase the numbers that don’t have to pay taxes. However, the amount seniors receive is relatively negligible.

According to the Tax Foundation, if all taxes for Social Security were eliminated, those in the 60-80% income percentiles would receive an additional 0.9 percent in income. With the increased deduction, these folks will receive an additional 0.3 percent. The White House touts number of people who won’t have to pay any income tax, but most of these folks have to pay very little anyway. As the Tax Foundation notes:

Overall, the increased senior deduction with the phaseout would deliver a larger tax cut to lower-middle- and middle-income taxpayers compared to exempting all Social Security benefits from income taxation and would not weaken the trust funds as much. But given the temporary nature of the policy, it would increase the deficit-impact of the reconciliation bills without boosting long-run economic growth.

Both the additional amount seniors will receive and the temporary nature of the deduction combine to negate any lasting positive impact of the new deduction. However, there is a lasting negative impact on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.

According to a report in Fox Business:

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) estimated that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s tax policy changes would result in those depletion dates moving up from early 2033 to late 2032 for Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund and from late 2033 to mid-2032 for Medicare’s Hospital Insurance trust fund.

The deduction for seniors is nothing but smoke and mirrors, but it’s smoke and mirrors that actually increases the vulnerability of seniors in the long run.

Tax Foundation: How Would the Proposed Additional Senior Deduction Compare to No Tax on Social Security?

Fox Business: Experts warn Senate tax bill accelerates Medicare and Social Security insolvency dates

Government Political

Dear Buddy – No Kings edition

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date June 14, 2025

No Kings

Dear Buddy,

Long time, no see. Since I last touched base with you, democracy was kidnapped off the street, put in handcuffs, and hauled off by both National Guard and Marines. Lawyers are frantically working to ensure it doesn’t get shipped off to El Salvador, or some place with an active volcano.

The people rose up across the country and all 50 states—yes, even the Republican ones—in protest at democracy’s treatment. Why people even showed up in your district, which is kind of ironic, considering you never do.

Why all of the protests?

You see, we’re used to the National Guard showing up when our homes flood or get burned down to the ground, and we’re vulnerable and scared, and they look like saviors sent from on high to help us try to return to normalcy. They find us in the debris and they rescue us from rivers and bring us food and water and comfort.

We’re not used to seeing National Guard surround a bevy of masked government agents in street clothes, themselves surrounding a single frightened man, or young child screaming in terror.

Of course, the National Guard troops aren’t used to it, either. They’re used to being welcomed with open arms—and pizza—not cold stares and terrified tears. I have a suspicion they don’t like it and may rethink their membership in the Guard because of it.

As for the Marines, well…the photo of a US citizen being detained by Marines looks familiar. Didn’t I see the same thing in photos in Pravda? I’m sure it must have been some Russian newspaper or another, because I know I’ve certainly never seen anything like that here, in the United States.

Active duty soldiers being turned loose on the people in this country. The idea is so outlandish, I’m sure it will become the plot of some book or movie. Probably one that doesn’t have a happy ending.

Before I continue with improbable movie plots, I did hear you’re running to be Senator of our state. I find this a little odd, though. I mean, if you find it so hard to meet with people in your smaller Congressional district, how are you going to meet with the people of the entire state? And I don’t think showing up at luncheons for Republican women really counts, do you?

But I digress…this isn’t about your political chances, or thoughts of hell freezing over. This is about democracy. The small ‘d’ kind. The kind that once upon a time, it seemed both parties supported. Oh, the parties had differences of opinions on exactly what the support entailed, but I’m pretty sure that activating 4000 National Guard and 700 Marines because of a couple of hundred protestors was not on anyone’s Bingo card.

What happened to you, Buddy, so that you’d turn a blind eye to all of this? Are you so lost in reaching for political power that you forgot that with great power comes great responsibility?

Oh darn, now I know that last line was from some book or movie, but I don’t care, because it’s true: power must be tempered by responsibility.

The power of a leader is not in how much money they get, or how many tanks they can roll down the street; it’s not measured in numbers of federal employees fired, or scared hardworking immigrants sent to torture chamber in another country; it’s certainly not measured in how many American people can be cowered or suppressed. The power of a leader is how much of a force for good they are for the people as a whole. Not just some people, not just rich people, not just people of one race and religion, and not just people who belong to a certain party.

To all of us.

Buddy, I want you to listen carefully to what I say, because it’s more important than introducing bills to create a committee of 13 people whose sole purpose is to investigate the mental health of a man who is no longer President.

The true power of a leader is directly proportional to the people’s own power over that leader. A truly great leader is a servant, not a king.

Tags Buddy Carter