Republicans trying to fulfill election promises of 2022
2023.01.13 11:02
Republicans trying to fulfill election promises of 2022
By Tiffany Smith
Budrigannews.com – This week, Republicans who hold control of the U.S. House of Representatives quickly used their new majority to pass political messaging bills that targeted conservative voters with hot-button issues but frequently included more exaggeration than substance.
House Republicans used their first legislative week to pass bills on taxes, abortion, and energy security that have little to no chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate or being signed into law by Democratic President Joe Biden after a historic struggle to elect Kevin McCarthy as their speaker.
The bills are intended to benefit politics because Republicans want to keep their campaign promises for 2022 and plan to win the Senate and White House in 2024.
McCarthy stated to reporters, “The American public made a decision, where they fired the Democrats and they put us in charge.”
He stated, “We continue to keep that commitment.” You’ll watch it each and every week.
Republicans also set up committees to look into competition between the United States and China and Biden’s Justice Department.
Republicans and Democrats alike have long embraced the strategy of messaging bills. In the lead-up to the midterm elections in November, House Democrats approved legislation pertaining to election reform and abortion rights despite the fact that they were aware that the bills would never be approved by the Senate, which was only slightly divided.
Democrats said that the bill was meant to protect the wealthy, stop federal investigations into Republican former President Donald Trump, and make it harder to get an abortion.
“That’s this week in extreme MAGA-Republican land,” Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the House Democrats, stated.
As the Republican Party prepares for political battles over spending and the debt ceiling, messaging bills may play a crucial role.
According to Republican strategist Charles Black, “the real purpose for the House Republican conference is to hold down spending and try to limit the debt.” All of that will require negotiations with the White House and the Senate.”
He went on to say, “However, I suspect that they feel the best way to negotiate is to take a hard-line position and pass it through the House before you go negotiate.”
Republicans attacked Democratic funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which is intended to assist in reclaiming an estimated $500 billion in annual unclaimed taxes, at the beginning of the week.
Last year, a bill to cancel $72 billion in new IRS funding was passed by the House on a party-line vote. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise stated that Biden’s promise not to raise taxes on those with incomes below $400,000 would be broken.
Republicans made the claim a lot, and it was based on a report from the Congressional Budget Office that said audit rates for taxpayers with incomes less than $400,000 would actually stay close to their current levels.
A separate CBO report that stated their bill would increase the federal deficit by more than $114 billion was also absent from Republican rhetoric.
Even though experts in the oil industry predicted that it would have little effect, 113 Democrats and Republicans voted on a bill on Thursday that, according to its sponsors, would prohibit oil sales from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Beijing.
The bill is part of a larger strategy by Republicans to say that Democratic “green” energy policies are to blame for higher gasoline prices in the United States. They also want to say that Biden is trying to make up for it by taking some of the country’s emergency oil reserve and selling it to China.
Biden announced a record-setting 180 million barrel sale from the reserve in March.
Some of the SPR oil was purchased by Chinese buyers directly, and more made its way to China via the global market.
Experts in the field stated that it was unlikely that the restrictions would prevent oil from reaching China on the global market.
“They are able to identify the designated buyers. “But they can’t follow where the barrels go after that,” said Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners LLC, a nonpartisan research organization based in Washington.
Additionally, the issue of U.S. oil industry exports to China, which dwarf SPR volumes as a result of Republican-backed reforms in 2015, is not addressed in the legislation.
Another Republican messaging bill sought to safeguard the well-being of babies born during abortions, a rare occurrence that, according to experts, legislators have long used to emphasize their opposition to.
There are no reliable statistics on so-called “born-alive” abortions, according to experts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data suggest that less than one percent of abortions in 2020 will take place after a woman has reached 20 weeks of pregnancy.
The abortion birth legislation was criticized within the party after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn national abortion rights turned female voters against Republicans in November.
Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who opposed the bill but nevertheless voted for it, stated, “We’re only playing lip service to the pro-life movement.” On the other hand, she was in favor of expanding access to birth control.
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