The Democrats under the lead of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are complaining that the Republicans have no alternative plan to replace Obamacare. Nancy Pelosi is telegraphing the same thing and Barack Obama is headed to the Hill on Wednesday in an attempt to work his side of the aisle in Congress to save his signature law.
CNN
In part from CNN: Democrats are pointing to two new provisions added in the rules package that they say are designed to help the GOP effort to repeal Obamacare.
One change would allow exceptions to the rule instituted by House Republicans in their recent budget plan that limits votes on any legislation that increases the federal deficit by $5 billion over a specific period. Republicans typically require any proposal that adds to the deficit has to be fully offset with cuts to other programs.“This rule is a set-up to overturn the Affordable Care Act,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi maintained on Tuesday.Democrats also say that another change dealing with committee oversight could open up federal entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security to potential funding cuts. The new GOP rule directs certain committees to draft recommendations for shifting these programs from the mandatory side of the federal ledger to the discretionary side. While Democrats admit this is “inside baseball” they say that if it’s implemented it could mean Congress would decide funding details for all of these programs as annual spending bills, potentially removing the automatic funding stream they now receive.The Republicans have worked for several years on alternate solutions and kept them under wraps until a new Congress was seated. It must be known that no user of Obamacare will be left without coverage one the law is repealed as an item on the table is to give Obamacare subscribers several months and perhaps up to a year to go back into the private market for coverage with the use of subsidies and or block grants issues to the states.
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Sen. Mike Enzi (R., Wyo.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, introduced a budget resolution on Tuesday that would repeal the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.
The resolution utilizes the reconciliation process to repeal elements of the health care law, since Republicans do not have a 60-seat majority that would allow them to overcome a Democratic filibuster. Reconciliation could be used to repeal parts of Obamacare with only 51 votes, similar to how Democrats used the reconciliation process to amend tax and spending provisions contained in Obamacare in 2010.
Republicans can use reconciliation to “fast-track” repeal and send legislation to President-elect Donald Trump’s desk as soon as possible. More here.
*** There are two other items regarding Obamacare that remain in question and will require diligence by conservatives.
They include: The lawsuit against Obama, Burwell and Treasury for funding subsidies and insurance provider bailouts from Treasury without the advise and consent of Congress. The other item is the severability clause, which stated if one part of the law goes away in any form, the law in full collapses.
Speaker Ryan put out this statement today:
WASHINGTON—Today, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) released the following statement after the Obamacare repeal resolution was introduced in the Senate:
“This is the first step toward relief for Americans struggling under Obamacare. This resolution sets the stage for repeal followed by a stable transition to a better health care system. Our goal is to ensure that patients will be in control of their health care and have greater access to quality, affordable coverage. Today we begin to deliver on our promise to the American people.”
- Repeal Is Relief
- Obamacare Has Failed the American People
- How Obamacare Is Getting Worse
- The Tools It Takes to Repeal Obamacare
- A Stable Transition to a Better Health Care System
Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion
Netanyahu will not Attend Paris Peace Summit
Did any of those votes at the UN for the recent resolution endorsed by John Kerry, Samantha Power and the Obama White House remember this?
Now would be a good time to refer to an earlier post on this site:
The documents reveal an extensive relationship between the Soviet Union and the nascent Palestinian nationalist movement that began in the late 1960s. At the time, the Soviets established a covert channel with Yasser Arafat’s terror-inclined guerilla group, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or PLO. Abbas held an integral role in these backdoor communications, functioning as liaison. Accordingly, the PLO closely collaborated with the KGB, receiving Soviet arms to launch asymmetrical warfare against the State of Israel. More from DailyWire.
January 15, there is a Peace Summit in Paris, Prime Minister Netanyahu will not attend. Below could be the reason for that decision.
TEL AVIV, January 2. /TASS/. A meeting of Palestine’s major forces Fatah and Hamas alongside representatives of other factions seeking to restore unity among the Palestinians will be held in Moscow on January 15, Wasel Abu Yousef, a PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) Executive Committee member, said cited by Israel’s The Jerusalem Post daily on Monday.
“The Russians will host a meeting of Fatah, Hamas and other Palestinian officials in Moscow in the middle of January to discuss reconciliation,” Yousef said.
The PLO official added that the talks in Russia would be held simultaneously with an international peace conference in Paris scheduled for the same day, January 15.
“The Palestinian leadership wants to demonstrate that it is working on both the peace process through the Paris conference and reconciliation by way of the Moscow meeting,” he said.
On June 3, 2016 Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, the special presidential envoy for the Middle East and Africa, at the first international conference on the Israeli-Palestine settlement in Paris called “the split among Palestinians” as “another negative factor hampering the peace progress.”
“This issue should be resolved as the priority task so that the Palestinians present a single and united delegation at the talks on the final status,” Bogdanov said at the time.
“Russia fully supports efforts on soonest restoration of inter-Palestinian unity on the basis of PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) and Arab Peace Initiative, holds dialogue with representatives of the whole range of Palestinian forces, first of all Fatah and Hamas, in the interests of achieving appropriate agreements. We hope that such approach is shared by other members of the international community,” the diplomat concluded.
In May 2011, a first meeting behind closed doors took place at a health resort near Moscow in an attempt to reconcile major Palestinian groups, including Fatah and Hamas. High-ranking officials of key Palestinian movements arrived in Russia after Fatah and Hamas had sealed a deal in Cairo to form a Palestinian government of “professionals.”
A split between Palestine’s two major forces, Fatah and Hamas, occurred after the parliamentary elections in Palestine in 2006 when Hamas won. In June 2007, its militants seized power in Gaza Strip. Since then, Palestine has been divided into two parts: Fatah controls West Bank and Hamas controls the Gaza Strip.
FBI: 7,700 Terrorist Encounters in USA in 2015
In a wide-ranging request for documents and analysis, President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team asked the Department of Homeland Security last month to assess all assets available for border wall and barrier construction.
Reuters: The team also asked about the department’s capacity for expanding immigrant detention and about an aerial surveillance program that was scaled back by the Obama administration but remains popular with immigration hardliners. And it asked whether federal workers have altered biographic information kept by the department about immigrants out of concern for their civil liberties.
The requests were made in a Dec. 5 meeting between Trump’s transition team and Department of Homeland Security officials, according to an internal agency memo reviewed by Reuters. The document offers a glimpse into the president-elect’s strategy for securing the U.S. borders and reversing polices
The requests were made in a Dec. 5 meeting between Trump’s transition team and Department of Homeland Security officials, according to an internal agency memo reviewed by Reuters. The document offers a glimpse into the president-elect’s strategy for securing the U.S. borders and reversing polices
The requests were made in a Dec. 5 meeting between Trump’s transition team and Department of Homeland Security officials, according to an internal agency memo reviewed by Reuters. The document offers a glimpse into the president-elect’s strategy for securing the U.S. borders and reversing policesput in place by the Obama administration.
Trump’s transition team did not comment in response to Reuters inquiries. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment.
In response to the transition team request, U.S. Customs and Border Protection staffers identified more than 400 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, and about the same distance along the U.S.-Canada border, where new fencing could be erected, according to a document seen by Reuters.
Reuters could not determine whether the Trump team is considering a northern border barrier. During the campaign, Trump pledged to build a wall and expand fencing on parts of the U.S.-Mexico border but said he sees no need to build a wall on the border with Canada.
One program the transition team asked about, according to the email summary, was Operation Phalanx, an aerial surveillance program that authorizes 1,200 Army National Guard airmen to monitor the southern border for drug trafficking and illegal migration. Much more here from Reuters.
For perspective:
FBI: 7,700 Terrorist Encounters in USA Last Year
The jihad is crossing the southern border: a majority of encounters in Arizona were with Islamist groups.
From 9/2016: Breitbart news has received a collection of leaked documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that show a massive number of terrorist encounters, especially in border states. The documents are not classified, though they are marked sensitive. 7,712 terrorist encounters occurred from July 20, 2015 and the same date a year later — last year, in short.
Some of the documents pertain to the entire U.S., while others focus specifically on the state of Arizona. The states with the highest encounters are all border states. Texas, California, and Arizona–all states with a shared border with Mexico–rank high in encounters…. Most significantly, the map shows that many of the encounters occurred near the border outside of ports-of-entry, indicating that persons were attempting to sneak into the U.S.
Page Six shows a pie chart indicating that the majority of encounters in Arizona were with Islamic known or suspected terrorists, both Sunni and Shi’a.
That last is surprising, as one would expect drug cartels to make up the majority of such encounters. The leak comes at a time when the FBI’s crime reporting shows an increase in violent crime across the country.
The Shiite terrorist organization Hezbollah has developed connections with the Latin American drug cartels because of its prominent role in heroin. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) controls the opium trade from the poppy fields in Afghanistan to the Levant, and they provide a great deal of opium to Hezbollah. Hezbollah has a refining capacity in Lebanon that allows them to provide a substantial part of the world’s heroin. They trade heroin to the Latin American drug cartels for other illegal money-making opportunities, forged documents, and access to the Americas. Hezbollah’s operations produce between ten and twenty million dollars in revenue for its American operations, which are based out of a large Lebanese immigrant community in what is called the “Tri-border region,” an area between Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina.
In addition to its money-making ventures, Hezbollah provides the cartels with military training. As one of the world’s foremost guerrilla organizations, Hezbollah finds that its military trainers are sought after commodities. They are able to parley those connections in order to perform operations in Mexico. Their ability to infiltrate the United States, in order to conduct terrorist violence in service to Iran, is highlighted by these leaked FBI documents.
Sunni extremists are infiltrating the United States with the help of alien smugglers in South America and are crossing U.S. borders with ease, according to a U.S. South Command intelligence report. The Command’s J-2 intelligence directorate reported recently in internal channels that “special interest aliens” are working with a known alien smuggling network in Latin America to reach the United States…. Army Col. Lisa A. Garcia, a Southcom spokeswoman, did not address the intelligence report directly but said Sunni terrorist infiltration is a security concern.
“Networks that specialize in smuggling individuals from regions of terrorist concern, mainly from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, the Middle East, and East Africa, are indeed a concern for Southcom and other interagency security partners who support our country’s national security,” Garcia told theWashington Free Beacon…. “In 2015, we saw a total of 331,000 migrants enter the southwestern border between the U.S. and Mexico, of that we estimate more than 30,000 of those were from countries of terrorist concern,” she said….
[T]he Southcom intelligence report revealed that the threat of Islamist terror infiltration is no longer theoretical. “This makes the case for Trump’s wall,” said one American security official of the Southcom report. “These guys are doing whatever they want to get in the country.”
Here at CounterJihad, we reported on Southern Command’s commander, Admiral Kurt Tidd, and his testimony before Congress on the threat. Tidd reported that a number of terrorists were transiting the region who had gone to Syria and fought for the Islamic State (ISIS) and other radical groups. Their ability to return to Latin America was smooth, given that they actually had legal travel documents.
Whether they can then pass into the United States is an open question. The leaked FBI documents only talk about actual law enforcement encounters with people on terrorist lists. How many are infiltrating without encountering law enforcement?
DHS Officials Took Bribes, and Billions $ Left the U.S. for Mexico
Valerie Jarrett during a recent interview said that the Obama administration was scandal free.
Okay, stop laughing, hold on…there are countless scandals and this whole administration is delusional. There are two items below is a huge sidebar scandal when it comes to DHS and illegals. Breathe deeply….you can do it and read on.
Report: Homeland Security Officials Took Millions in Bribes to ‘Look the Other Way’ on Drug Cartels
TownHall: A stunning case of corruption inside the Department of Homeland Security was overshadowed by headlines about Russia and Israel this past week. Yet, federal employees accepting millions of dollars in bribes to avoid doing their job, is certainly worth a look.
Hundreds of DHS employees have “looked the other way” as drugs crossed the border because cartels have made them offers they can’t refuse. Other employees have sold green cards and other documents illegally. More from The New York Times:
It was not an isolated case. A review by The New York Times of thousands of court records and internal agency documents showed that over the last 10 years almost 200 employees and contract workers of the Department of Homeland Security have taken nearly $15 million in bribes while being paid to protect the nation’s borders and enforce immigration laws.
No wonder our immigration system is so broken.
In order to address the internal issues, the department has hired more investigators, offered ethics training and is administering polygraph tests to new applicants, The Times reports.
The Times report does not include the gifts, trips or money that DHS employees have stolen, the editors note.
Once the inside corruption is taken care of, Donald Trump’s administration can get to work on building a wall along the southern border, install better aerial surveillance and send more agents down there to be on the patrol.
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Wait, wait, wait….there are more implications. Every action has a reaction:
Reuters: Remittances to Mexico posted their biggest jump in over ten years in November in a possible reaction to the U.S. election victory of Donald Trump, who threatened to block the transfers and eroded confidence in the peso currency during the campaign.
Mexicans abroad sent home nearly $2.4 billion in transfers in November, 24.7 percent higher than a year earlier, marking their fastest pace of expansion since March 2006, according to Mexican central bank data on Monday.
President-elect Trump ran a campaign steeped in anti-Mexican rhetoric and threatened to halt transfers from Mexican nationals unless Mexico agreed to pay for the massive wall he has vowed to build on the U.S. southern border to keep out illegal immigrants.
Trump’s surprise Nov. 8 election triumph also sent the Mexican currency to record lows in a sell-off fueled by his threats to scrap a trade deal between Mexico and the United States, and to levy punitive tariffs on Mexican-made goods.
Goldman Sachs economist Alberto Ramos said in a client note the weak peso fanned the remittance surge, noting workers could be “strategically front-loading” transfers to avoid potential taxes or restrictions from the incoming U.S. administration.
The value of the remittances considerably exceeds that of Mexico’s oil exports, Ramos noted.
The payments from Mexicans living in the United States are a key source of income for many families in Mexico, where around half the population lives in poverty.
Bank BBVA Bancomer has forecast that those Mexicans will have sent a record $27 billion in remittances into Mexico in 2016, an increase of more than $2 billion over 2015.
Mexico’s central bank governor Agustin Carstens said last month that a rise in remittances was due to a weak exchange rate, more U.S. jobs and fears over Trump’s policies.
Mexico’s government said in November that it is ready to lobby the U.S. Congress and use all legal means possible to stop Trump blocking remittances.
He Was Deported 19 Times, Raped her on a Bus
Seems we may have a district attorney or two that need to be sued, disbarred and jailed as accomplices. In fact this could have been done under edict by the White House and the Department of Justice.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP)— A Mexican man accused of raping a 13-year-old girl on a Greyhound bus that traveled through Kansas had been deported 10 times and voluntarily removed from the U.S. another nine times since 2003, records obtained by The Associated Press show.
Three U.S. Republican senators — including Kansas’ Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts — demanded this month that the Department of Homeland Security provide immigration records for 38-year-old Tomas Martinez-Maldonado, who is charged with a felony in the alleged Sept. 27 attack aboard a bus in Geary County. He is being held in the Geary County jail in Junction City, which is about 120 miles west of Kansas City.
U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, from Iowa and chairman of the judiciary committee, co-signed a Dec. 9 letter with Moran and Roberts to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, calling it “an extremely disturbing case” and questioning how Martinez-Maldonado was able to re-enter and remain in the country.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has placed a detainer — a request to turn Martinez-Maldonado over to ICE custody before he is released — with Geary County. ICE declined to discuss his specific case beyond its October statement regarding the 10 deportations.
Court filings show Martinez-Maldonado has two misdemeanor convictions for entering without legal permission in cases prosecuted in 2013 and 2015 in U.S. District Court of Arizona, where he was sentenced to serve 60 days and 165 days respectively.
A status hearing in the rape case is scheduled for Jan. 10. Defense attorney Lisa Hamer declined to comment on the charge, but said, “criminal law and immigration definitely intersect and nowadays it should be the responsibility of every criminal defense attorney to know the possible ramifications in the immigration courts.”
Nationwide, 52 percent of all federal prosecutions in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 were for entry or re-entry without legal permission and similar immigration violations, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
It’s not unusual to see immigrants with multiple entries without legal permission, said David Trevino, a Topeka immigration attorney also representing Martinez-Maldonado. Most of Martinez-Maldonado’s family lives in Mexico, but he also has family in the United States, and the family is “devastated,” Trevino said.
“(President-elect Donald Trump) can build a wall 100 feet high and 50 feet deep, but it is not going to keep family members separated. So if someone is deported and they have family members here … they will find a way back — whether it is through the air, under a wall, through the coast of the United States,” Trevino said.
He declined to comment on his client’s criminal history and pending charge.
Records obtained by AP show Martinez-Maldonado had eight voluntary removals before his first deportation in 2010, which was followed by another voluntary removal that same year. He was deported five more times between 2011 and 2013.
In 2013, Martinez-Maldonado was charged with entering without legal permission, a misdemeanor, and subsequently deported in early 2014 after serving his sentence. He was deported again a few months later, as well as twice in 2015 — including the last one in October 2015 after he had served his second sentence, the records show.
ICE said in an emailed statement when it encounters a person who’s been deported multiple times or has a significant criminal history and was removed, it routinely presents those cases to the U.S. attorney’s office for possible criminal charges.
Cosme Lopez, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Arizona, declined comment on why prosecutors twice dismissed felony re-entry after deportation charges against Martinez-Maldonado in 2013 and 2015 in exchange for guilty pleas on misdemeanor entry charges.
Arizona ranks third in the nation — behind only the Southern District of Texas and the Western District of Texas — for the number of immigration prosecutions among the nation’s 94 federal judicial districts for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, TRAC records show.
Moran told the AP in an emailed statement that the immigration system is “broken.”
“There must be serious legislative efforts to address U.S. immigration policy, and we must have the ability to identify, prosecute and deport illegal aliens who display violent tendencies before they have an opportunity to perpetrate these crimes in the United States,” he said.
**** And the FBI is putting out a warning: Hear the FBI podcast here.
Mollie Halpern: During this busy holiday travel season and beyond, the FBI is asking those who cross our nation’s borders, use airports, and other ports of entry to keep an eye out for border corruption.
Teresa Tampubolon: You just have to keep your eyes open and be situationally aware. And if you see a screener doing something they shouldn’t be, you see an official taking money—if you see something that’s suspicious, then you have to report it.
Halpern: That was Supervisory Special Agent Teresa Tampubolon, who says not only does border corruption lead to drug, weapon, and sex trafficking, it can jeopardize our country’s national security.
Tampubolon: National security is border security, it really is. To protect our nation, we’ve got to protect our borders, everything. National security is border security, and the threat is real.
Halpern: Don’t turn a blind eye. Report border corruption to the FBI at tips.fbi.gov. Support the effort on social media using #ReportBorderCorruption. With FBI, This Week, I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau.