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Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Sean Parnell wrote a fiction thriller in 2018 that coincidentally included scenes where women were violently abused, strangled, pinned down, and called “whore”—all things his estranged wife said she endured at the hands of Parnell in sworn testimony earlier this week in a custody hearing regarding their three children.

Parnell has the blessing of Donald Trump in his campaign for the Keystone State Senate seat left open by the retirement of GOP Sen. Pat Toomey. But Parnell’s candidacy has been rocked in recent months as his personal history of alleged abuse comes into clearer focus. His estranged wife testified that Parnell also slapped one of their children so hard it left welts on the child’s skin.

Details of Parnell’s book, Man of War, are just one more piece of the puzzle. And given the testimony of his estranged wife, the book seems far more biographical than fictional. According to Politico, Parnell, who is an Army combat vet, “portrays multiple scenes of men assaulting women in the 2018 novel, the first of four in a fiction series.”

The abusive behavior in the book includes scenes of women being hit, pulled by their hair, and dragged across the floor. Some male characters also relish the pain they are inflicting on their female victims. Politico writes of one scene:

“Nate grabbed a handful of Meg’s hair and roughly forced her head around,” Parnell wrote of a female CIA agent being beaten by a rogue military official who “savored the grimace of pain that flitted across her face and the fear that sparked in her eyes.”

“When she tried to jerk free, he struck a blade against her cheek and smiled at the involuntary flinch caused by the cold steel touching warm flesh,” the book says.

The CIA agent was eventually strangled, zip-tied, and punched. She was also dismissed by Parnell as someone her male counterparts objectified and “just wanted to fuck.”

Parnell included another graphic scene in which crying children witness their mother being gang raped by three men, one of them with a “toothy grin spread across his face.”

Parnell’s real-life estranged wife provided tearful testimony Monday in which she described being strangled, choked, verbally assaulted, and even forced out of the car by Parnell and left on the side of the road.

“He tried to choke me out on a couch and I literally had to bite him,” she said in one instance. “He was strangling me.”

She also described the whole family—including their children—being “petrified” of Parnell and “walking on eggshells” whenever he was in the home.

Male candidates with allegedly abusive histories is becoming the norm for the GOP, not the exception, heading into the midterms next year.

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Pennsylvania is pursuing legal action over the proposed reopening of the closed Moshannon Valley Correctional Center as a private Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility. The group said that under state law, commissioners are supposed to publish agendas in advance of their meetings. But that didn’t happen for the meeting where they voted in favor of the immigration contracts.

The organization is now suing on behalf of two Clearfield County residents and the advocacy group Juntos. “In our democratic form of government, the public has a right to know what elected officials are doing,” ACLU of Pennsylvania executive director Reggie Shuford said. “The county commissioners are required by law to inform the public of their business, and they failed to do so in this instance.”

“The contract with the private prison company, GEO Group, is one of two contracts approved by the commissioners to repurpose the facility for immigration detention,” the ACLU of Pennsylvania said. That was approved this past fall, after the Bureau of Prisons declined to renew Moshannon Valley’s contract earlier this year. The second agreement was with ICE.

But the civil rights organization said that commissioners “did not publicly post an agenda in advance” of the Sept. 28 meeting where the contracts were approved, “as required by the state Sunshine Act. They only provided public notice that a meeting would be held, without offering specifics of the commissioners’ agenda.” This means that local residents and advocates who may be opposed to ICE’s cruelty had no chance to offer public comment—and there’s quite a lot to say when it comes to both GEO Group and ICE.

“As a local resident, I expect the county commissioners to comply with the law. That’s a reasonable request,” said Tim Smith. He’s one of two residents represented by the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “The Sunshine Act requires the county to inform the public of its business so that people can comment in an open and public meeting. The county commissioners took a great deal of input from GEO and ICE but almost none from the public. None of these details were known or seen by the public before they decided. We now know that this is a very bad deal for the people. An open meeting will allow us to point this out.”

Looking at the commissioners’ actions since, it seems like they know they effed up. ACLU of Pennsylvania immigrants’ rights attorney Vanessa Stine and Juntos executive director Erika Guadalupe Núñez said in a blog post that since filing the legal action late last month, “the county commissioners announced a special meeting to accept public comment. We hope that the county hears people’s concerns and halts further action on the contracts.” 

While Núñez and others spoke out against the contracts at that meeting on Wednesday, Juntos tweeted that commissioners voted “unanimously to reaffirm agreements with ICE & Geo Group”:

“Your livelihoods should not depend on the imprisonment of others,” she continued. “This community deserves better; your elected leaders should be working on an actual solution to bring economic growth that will bring long-term jobs to the area.” The fact is this site’s possible reopening as a for-profit immigration prison shouldn’t be happening at all, under the president’s campaign pledge making “clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.”

“President Biden has the authority to cancel the ICE contract with GEO Group in Clearfield County. He should do just that,” Stine and Núñez continued in their post. They said that at nearly 1,900 beds, it could become the largest immigration detention site in the Northeast. Mr. President, shut it down.

“What’s more, Clearfield County commissioners and all public officials across Pennsylvania would do well to remember their obligation to open government and to their constituents’ voices, opinions, and concerns,” they continued. “In this age of frayed democracy, such democratic principles have never been more important.”

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On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Smartmatic, a voting technology company, has followed in the footsteps of Dominion Voting Systems and filed a lawsuit against One America News (OAN). The details of the lawsuit have not yet been posted to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s docket, but they contain allegations of libel and slander.

In February, Smartmatic sued “Fox News, its parent Fox Corp (FOXA.O) and several Fox hosts in a New York state court, alleging they falsely accused the company of helping rig the U.S. presidential election in favor of Democrat Joe Biden,” according to Reuters. That defamation lawsuit, like Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit, is looking for billions in recompense. Smartmatic has also, like Dominion Voting Systems, sued Trump attorneys, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani.

How much the Florida-based Smartmatic will be looking for in damages from the San Diego-based OAN is not precisely known. However, since the allegations are almost identical to the ones being made by Dominion in its case against the right-wing propaganda machine, that number is believed to be in the billions. That’s billions with a “B.” If OAN’s case rests on the “experts” they pranced in front of their cameras to make false election fraud claims, they might be in big trouble. (Fingers crossed!)

Giuliani and Powell have also been sued by Dominion, specifically in regards to their baseless claims that Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer was some kind of mastermind in flipping tens if not hundreds of thousands (and maybe millions) of votes from Donald Trump to Joseph Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Coomer’s defamation lawsuit against two of the worst lawyers in America makes a clear case for just how spurious that dynamic duo’s claims of election fraud really are. So far, Giuliani and Powell have been unable to lawyer themselves out of a paper bag, let alone get the case dismissed.

The only bad news in this report is that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has not been sued by Smartmatic. He is facing the same defamation lawsuit from Dominion that Giuliani and Powell are involved in.

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As progressives process a number of disappointing losses from the Nov. 2 election results, it’s important we don’t glaze over a concerning ruling that came from a federal judge in Texas on Sunday. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor—the guy who Trump once praised at length for striking down the Affordable Care Act and who overturned protections for trans patients in health care settings—ruled that for-profit businesses do not have to abide by LGBTQ+ discrimination claims if it clashes with their religious beliefs, as reported by the Dallas Morning News. This ruling is in opposition to a ruling from the Supreme Court that protected people based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

O’Connor’s ruling also permits certain other religious groups, like churches and nonprofits associated with a religion, to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. How so? By refusing to hire them because of their identities, and by allowing them to be fired once employed because of their identities. 

O’Connor, nominated to the bench by George W. Bush back in 2007, issued this opinion in response to gray areas in the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v Clayton County, Ga., the historic 2020 case that finally granted Title VII protections for LGBTQ+ people. O’Connor’s opinion suggests that Christian-run health care businesses can, in fact, use freedom of religion and the First Amendment to protect themselves from anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination claims. In his 70-page ruling, he applied this same logic to the aforementioned nonprofits and church organizations.

As some background, Stephen Hotze—infamous as an anti-LGBTQ activist and long-standing conservative—brought the case involving his Christian management firm, Briadwood Management Inc., in which he sued the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) for its enforcement of Bostock. Hotze does not permit his firm to “hire or employ individuals who are known to engage in sexually immoral behavior or gender non-conforming conduct of any sort, including homosexuality, cross-dressing, and transgenderism,” according to his lawsuit. Hotze argued this violates the firm’s “deeply held religious beliefs.” Hotze’s church, the Bear Creek Bible Church, was also named as a plaintiff in the suit.

O’Connor also ruled that employers can mandate that workers use the bathroom that correlates with their sex assigned at birth, not their gender identity, which is obviously transphobic and potentially dangerous for trans workers. He also ruled that employers can set dress codes. Over the summer, my colleague Joan McCarter described O’Connor as a “whack job,” and that assessment still rings quite true today. If anything, given the potential harm caused, it’s generous. 

If you’re wondering how O’Connor thinks one should decide if a business qualifies for a religious exemption, he sets the bar pretty low. What is it? Just if their religious belief appears to be an “honest conviction.”

Thankfully, O’Connor’s ruling is unlikely to go without appeals. It would first go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and potentially could go to the Supreme Court, but it’s up in the air on whether the justices would agree to take the case or not. As we’ve covered here at Daily Kos, the court has heard some cases involving LGBTQ+ discrimination and businesses, and that’s (unfortunately) gone in both directions. But there’s no guarantee they would make a bid on this one. 

Gregory Nevins, who serves as senior counsel for LGBTQ+ advocacy group Lambda Legal, told Reuters he “firmly” believes the decision is “so bad and contains so many errors” that the Fifth Circuit will reverse at least part of it. But Nevins stressed that exactly what they will reverse, and what will happen after, is unknown at this point.

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Nothing paints a more stark picture of our nation’s dysfunctional health care system than the stories of everyday Americans and the bills they receive following medical treatment.

In a recent case in Atlanta, Georgia, a woman named Taylor Davis went to her local ER for a head injury only to wait several hours to be seen by a doctor. She finally threw in the towel and left, but that didn’t stop Emory Decatur Hospital from sending her a bill for $700 anyway. 

“I sat there for seven hours. There’s no way I should be sitting in an emergency room … for seven hours,” Davis told FOX-5 Atlanta. 

“I didn’t get my vitals taken, nobody called my name. I wasn’t seen at all,” Davis says.

Convinced the hospital made a mistake, Davis reached out. She was told emergency room visits charge a facility fee or ER room visit fee. “You get charged before you are seen. Not for being seen,” read an email sent to Davis from an Emory Healthcare patient financial services employee. 

“I’m very reluctant to go to the hospital now. That’s kind of like the last resort now. Seeing that they’re able to bill you for random things, it doesn’t make me want to go. So that’s not good,” Davis said.

Emory Healthcare sent a response to FOX-5:

“Emory Healthcare takes all patient concerns seriously and appreciates this has been brought to our attention. Our teams are currently looking into this matter and will follow up directly with the individual.”

While Emory is “looking into” the matter, another American, Kristen R. Moore, tweeted about her experience of having a miscarriage and then having to pay over $1,000 out of pocket. 

Moore’s Twitter thread finds one commenter tweeting that she paid nearly $14,000 for her miscarriage. Follow the thread below: 

The examples of these two women don’t even account for the 30 million Americans who don’t have health insurance or are underinsured. 

“Tens of thousands of Americans will die this year for lack of health coverage and the U.S. ranks last out of 16 industrialized countries for deaths that could be prevented with proper medical care,” according to Public Citizen. 

“Medical bills contribute to more than 60 percent of all bankruptcies. Three-fourths of those bankrupt had health insurance at the time they got sick. While the Affordable Care Act reduced the accumulation of medical debt, it has not ended medical bankruptcy.”

Despite a worldwide pandemic and the death of nearly 750,000 people due to COVID-19 in the U.S. alone, the level of health and wellness in this nation has not changed. It’s as sick as it ever was, and the only answer is a single-payer system. 

“Switching to a single-payer system could save nearly $600 billion per year by slashing overhead and negotiating lower drug costs. Savings are enough to cover everyone and eliminate cost-sharing in health care,” a report from Public Citizen reads. 

The battle for a bill that would equally cover all Americans with health insurance is ongoing. The Medicare for All Act would expand and improve coverage; eliminate out-of-pocket costs; add dental, vision, and reproductive care; and add long-term support for elderly and disabled people. 

In March, Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingle introduced the legislation. 

“There is a solution to this health crisis — a popular one that guarantees health care to every person as a human right and finally puts people over profits and care over corporations. That solution is Medicare for All — everyone in, nobody out,” Jayapal wrote. 

“A system that prioritizes profits over patients and ties coverage to employment was no match for a global pandemic and will never meet the needs of our people,” Dingell wrote. 

“In the wealthiest nation on earth, patients should not be launching GoFundMe pages to afford lifesaving health care for themselves or their loved ones. Medicare For All will build an inclusive health care system that won’t just open the door to care for millions of our neighbors but do it more efficiently and effectively than the one we have today. Now is not the time to shy away from these generational fights, it is the time for action.”

The Medicare for All Act of 2021 is also endorsed by 300 local, state, and national organizations that represent nurses, doctors, business owners, unions, and racial justice organizations. This includes Physicians for a National Health Program, Public Citizen, National Nurses United, Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, Social Security Works, Labor Campaign for Single Payer, SEIU, and hundreds more, yet the legislation and the health of Americans languish. 

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We’ve known for some time now that the “official” attempt by Donald Trump’s inner circle to find a strategy for nullifying a United States presidential election was deadly serious, was plotted for many weeks, and featured some of the top Republican criminals in the country. Rudy Giuliani gave up stovepiping false claims against Joe Biden’s family invented by corrupt European oligarchs for this one. Bernard Kerik took time off from whatever the hell he’s been doing, since he got out of prison, to join up. Steve Bannon was spurred into action even though it’d take time away from his day job of bilking Trump’s base with fake border wall schemes. Anyone who was anyone in the GOP crime family was working all the knobs.

Mar-a-Lago’s resident golf cheat is now claiming that those team attempts to nullify Trump’s removal from office were a matter of “executive privilege,” private deliberations, and advice given to him as the nation’s pretzeldent. These claims didn’t fly from Day One and are no closer to becoming airborne today. There is no “executive privilege” recognized for ex-presidents, as he is no longer in government. “Executive privilege” specifically cannot be used to cover up crimes, and what the House Select Committee is currently investigating is the crime of obstructing a U.S. election through violent and nonviolent means.

It also won’t count as “executive privilege” when it wasn’t being done as part of your “executive” duties to begin with. The Washington Post has a new piece targeting that point, noting that Giuliani and Kerik’s attempts to dodge House demands for information on the plot suffer from a rather glaring weak point: It was the Donald Trump campaign that footed the bill for the team’s posh Washington hotel “command center” and other expenses.

The attempt to nullify a U.S. election was being paid for by Trump’s campaign, not by Trump’s administration. Giuliani and the others involved can pound sand on any thought of invoking an “executive” defense for Team Sedition.

The details laid out in the Post are gorier, of course, with the team racking up huge bills while Trump threatened to stiff them (as usual), Fox News shouting-head Jeanine Pirro personally intervening with Trump and team to convince them to reimburse Giuliani and Kerik (did you remember that Pirro’s husband is another cog in the Republican crime machine, one who would get a last-day Trump pardon for felony tax evasion?), and the Trump campaign eventually paying out “more than $225,000” for steep hotel bills and travel expenses.

Everyone involved is an absolutely terrible person, either a felon or within hand-shaking distance of felonies, and it was all the sort of incompetent mess that Trump’s bottom-feeders specialized in. The point, though, is that the team’s attempts to nullify the election by inventing a new vice presidential power to simply declare that the election didn’t count was decided to be an offshoot expense of the Donald Trump presidential campaign.

And that means there is no “executive” to invoke for an executive privilege claim. Team Sedition was acting on behalf of Trump’s political campaign, not his administration.

In practice, not a lot of this matters. Trump’s executive privilege claims were nonsensical from the start; the only real test is whether the team’s absolute contempt for U.S. laws and the investigative powers of Congress will result in consequences. The new rule of Republicanism is that legality or illegality doesn’t matter, because even international extortion or assembling a violent mob are allowed so long as you have sufficient allies in government to ensure no investigation takes place.

If Congress wants to get to the bottom of just how the violent mob that Trump’s team assembled on January 6 intersected with the rest of the Trump White House and campaign’s efforts to intimidate Mike Pence and Congress into nullifying the presidential election’s results, it’s going to have to start throwing people in jail—and soon. Come next November, there’s a very good chance enough pro-sedition Republicans will be elected to Congress to shut down the investigation and bar even the Justice Department from probing the day’s events further.

Come next November, there could very well be a Republican majority in place that would order the minting of new coins commemorating the seditionists as new American heroes. The clock is ticking here.

Long story short, the foot-dragging by the Biden Justice Department and by the House itself is getting more dangerous by the day. There is yet no serious belief among the insurrection’s orchestrators that Congress will pursue them if they simply refuse to testify, and—still—there are zero plausible claims that any of Trump’s pro-nullification plotters have protection against congressional demands. Dust off the powers of inherent contempt and send the Sergeant-at-Arms off with enough pairs of handcuffs to do the job. The nation can’t claim to have laws if the nation’s elites never find the stomach to enforce them.

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Senate Republicans spit on the memory of civil rights hero John Lewis Wednesday afternoon when all but one of them blocked the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act from proceeding to the floor for debate, 50-49. Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican willing to join Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer changed his vote to “nay” so that he can bring the bill back to the floor at some point.

Republicans didn’t even filibuster it as none of them bothered to spend any time talking on the floor about it. They just gave the finger to democracy, as everyone—including Sen. Joe Manchin, who keeps insisting that Republicans will work with him—knew they would.

The bill would have restored the federal government’s ability to prohibit and prevent voting discrimination, which was lost when the Supreme Court gutted much of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 2013 with the Shelby County v. Holder decision, then finished the job this year in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. In Shelby, the Supreme Court struck down the requirement in the VRA that states and local jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting had to have any change to voting or elections law preapproved by the Justice Department.

The Court declared that the formula used by the Justice Department to determine which jurisdictions were covered in this “preclearance” system was unconstitutional. A wave of new voter suppression laws flowed from Republican states in response. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would overcome that Supreme Court ruling by imposing a national preclearance system in which any state with 15 voting right violations on record within the past 25 years, or states that had 10 violations if “at least one of which was committed by the State itself” would be covered.

Any local government that had three violations in that time period would also be covered. All 50 states, regardless of their history or lack thereof of racist voting laws, would have to submit to a degree of preclearance for laws that reduce “the proportion of the jurisdiction’s voting-age population” belonging to particular racial or language minority group by 3% percent or more; redistricting laws in areas with significant minority population growth; certain voter ID laws; and closing or reducing the hours of polling places.

The bill would also have restored and strengthened protections abolished by the court in Brnovich, allowing courts to block voting laws on their discriminatory effect rather than intent, a harder threshold to prove. The court made proving discrimination much harder for plaintiffs, and gave lawmakers and election officials enacting discriminatory rules expansive leeway in the supposed interest of combating voting fraud—even in the total absence of evidence of such fraud. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would prohibit courts from considering factors like whether a particular voting restriction “has a long pedigree or was in widespread use at some earlier date,” or whether the law is defended as an effort to fight “fraud.”

Once again, Republicans were able to stop the Senate from even debating the bill without lifting so much as their pinkies. Neither Manchin nor Sen. Kyrsten Sinema did a thing to question that. Worse, they spent part of the vote cozying up to Mitch McConnell.

This, Democrats say, is the end of their efforts to get Republicans to do the right thing on voting rights. “This is our fourth, and I think final, attempt to find partners across the aisle who will defend the right of every American to vote,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, told reporters. “We’ve given it every possible effort over now five months, four different strategies. It’s not going to happen, so we’re going to have to do it with 50 members. And we’re going to have to sit down and decide how we’re going to do it.”

That means ending the filibuster, which Manchin and Sinema are continuing to refuse to do. “We’ve got Lisa Murkowski, we just need nine more,” Manchin said, sounding like either the world’s stupidest or most duplicitous man. “We need other people to be talking to each other and find a pathway forward. It can’t just be one or two people talking to both sides.”

No wonder McConnell is so cozy with him.

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Virginia GOP Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin cracked the code. The consensus of multiple election analysis pieces is that Youngkin entertained the fringe views of Trump voters just enough while also managing to stay palatable to more mainstream voters in the suburbs. He did this in large part by barring Trump from the Commonwealth and assiduously avoiding most overt connections between himself and the wildly unpopular two-time popular vote loser.

Now, the thinking goes, all Republicans have to do next year is recreate Youngkin’s playbook.

In fact, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy—among the GOP’s biggest Trump bootlickers—was crowing Wednesday morning about House Republicans potentially netting more seats next year than they did in 2010 when they lost 63 seats in a red wave.

But replicating Youngkin’s playbook requires three fundamental elements to remain constant in 2022, which will be a nearly impossible task for congressional Republicans in the House and particularly the Senate.

The first requirement is the notion that none of the politics will change between now and next year. It’s a ridiculous proposition. If the only factor that matters in a midterm is which party controls the White House—then yeah, that’s not changing.

But other factors surely will have changed by next year. One very clear shift is the fact that Democrats will have likely passed two very important, even historic, bills by next November. So instead of heading into an election weighed down by the baggage of months of inaction in Washington accompanied by a gusher of negative political coverage, Democratic candidates will have something to run on. That will play a critical role in turning out the base and will also probably boost Biden’s approvals to some extent.  

Second, a Supreme Court with a distinctly fringe lean will have heard and ruled on a Mississippi abortion ban that could upend abortion rights across the country. It’s a visceral issue and a potentially historic setback that could very well ignite a cross-section of liberals and feminists nationwide.

Outside of a change in political environment is the fact that congressional Republicans have spinelessly and repeatedly bowed to Trump, even after voters booted him from office. That causes two fundamental problems for them. First, they will never have the strength to entirely keep Trump under wraps nationally the way Youngkin did locally in Virginia. Trump will be campaigning and holding rallies, and everything that so many voters hate about him will be on full display.

Second, Trump is currently in the process of handpicking a GOP field made in his likeness that has zero chance of projecting the mostly bland, unassuming, fleece- and khaki-wearing persona that Youngkin did.      

Just imagine former football star and Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who owes his entire candidacy to Trump, keeping Trump at arm’s length. Or how about Trump’s pick for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat, Sean Parnell, pulling off Youngkin’s mostly anodyne business persona as he faces the threat of losing custody of his three children amid a bitter divorce and abuse allegations?

Democrats are undoubtedly facing the headwinds of history next year based on the mere fact that Joe Biden is sitting in the Oval Office.

But the notion that Republicans will be able replicate the campaign Youngkin ran, even as Trump radicalizes the GOP congressional field, is laughable.

No one can say exactly what the pivotal issues will be by November 2022, but one thing is certain: Next year’s midterms will be a different election altogether.

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On Tuesday, House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney subpoenaed six fossil fuel entities in hopes of continuing the committee’s investigation into whether these organizations hid the dangers of climate change and their role in the climate crisis through disinformation campaigns. The American Petroleum Institute, BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have until Nov. 16 to produce documents related to climate change.

Rep. Maloney noted that the information the six groups have so far provided was inadequate at best, and only included readily available public documents like press releases and regulatory filings. The committee has been waiting since Sept. 16 for more information and originally set a deadline of Sept. 30. Additional letters were sent Oct. 21 to the six entities, urging them to hand over documents.

Days later, the House Oversight Committee interviewed executives from many of these companies for the first time ever. Hoping for any semblance of honesty and transparency, committee members were consistently met with what one lawmaker described as “weasel words.”

“Is anyone prepared to make a statement saying we are going to take accountability on something important and stop funding groups that are actively engaged in any form of climate disinformation? Is there any form of commitment in any way? Even with a bunch of weasel words would be great,” Rep. Ro Khanna said during the hearing last Thursday.

Khanna wasn’t the only lawmaker exasperated by the likes of executives from Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, BP America, and Chevron. Maloney called out the companies for failing to provide information requested by the committee in her closing statement. “The oil companies employed the same tactics they used for decades on climate policy—delay and obstruction,” Maloney said.

She followed up those remarks in a press release on Tuesday: “We are at ‘code red’ for climate, and I am committed to doing everything I can to help rescue this planet for our children. We need to get to the bottom of the oil industry’s disinformation campaign.  And with these subpoenas, we will.”

The subpoenas will move forward, albeit without the support of one ranking member of the committee—Rep. James Comer, who released a press release on Monday calling for Democrats to “cease political theatrics” when it comes to holding fossil fuel groups accountable. The Republican serves a coal-rich section of Kentucky but has been somewhat honest about the sector’s decline. He hasn’t, however, owned up to the fact that his campaign received thousands of dollars from the likes of ExxonMobil, Valero Energy, and Marathon Petroleum.

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is moving full steam ahead on getting the budget reconciliation bill that comprises President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan to the floor, despite the demands from Sen. Joe Manchin to delay, delay, delay. What’s more, the House will include a provision that Manchin opposes: four weeks of paid family leave.

“It had been my intention throughout this process to put on the House Floor and pass a bill that would pass the Senate in the same form,”  Pelosi informed her colleagues in a letter Wednesday morning. She announced that the text of the legislation would go to the Rules committee Wednesday. “Because I have been informed by a Senator of opposition to a few of the priorities contained in our bill and because we must have legislation agreed to by the House and the Senate in the final version of the Build Back Better Act that we will send to the President’s desk, we must strive to find common ground in the legislation.”

That said, the opposition of one Senator isn’t stopping the House. “As we are reviewing priorities and at the urging of many Members of the Caucus, I have asked the Ways and Means Committee for its legislation for Paid Family and Medical Leave to be included in this morning’s hearing,” she said. “Chairman Richie Neal and the Committee staff have worked on this priority for a long time and were ready.”

The provision for leave would “cover all workers wishing to take paid time off to deal with the birth of a newborn, care for a family member, or deal with an illness or injury, among other things, beginning in 2024,” a source told Politico.

Predictably, that one senator is balking. Manchin says he had “no idea” the provision was still alive and—here’s the big joke—he’s been talking to Republicans who want to do it in a bipartisan way. Right. Like that old Republican idea from Sen. Marco Rubio to steal from Social Security to “pay” workers for leave. No word on whether Manchin still thinks you can slap work requirements on people taking leave from . . . work.

Senate Democrats are working to isolate Manchin on this one. Sen. Patty Murray—who has been incensed at Manchin for blocking this—immediately responded to the news that Pelosi is including paid leave, saying, “I am incredibly relieved to see Speaker Pelosi include paid leave in the House Build Back Better Act. This is a key step forward—but we are not done fighting to get this across the finish line.” Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden backed her up, saying he would “pull out all the stops for paid family leave.”

Before celebrating too much on this one, note this from Rep. Richie Neal: “The Ways and Means Committee crafted a policy that will finally give workers and their families the peace of mind of knowing that when disaster strikes, they can rely on paid leave to avoid total crisis. We do this responsibly, fully paying for the means-tested program. [emphasis added]” So actually not “all workers” after all. Maybe they’ll get Manchin. He loves him some means-testing. Still, four weeks of leave for lower-income people isn’t 12 weeks for literally everyone, but it’s also better than a bucket of warm spit.

There’s also a small—but at the same time huge—win in the prescription drug price reform agreement the House finally settled on with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. It will cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month, for insured people, anyway. That’s for everyone with insurance, both Medicare and private insurance. It would take effect immediately.

In addition to that, it includes a cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for Medicare enrollees at $2,000/year, with a smoothing proposal that will allow seniors to pay a monthly installment to cover those costs, rather than each time they fill their prescriptions. As for drug price negotiation for Medicare, it’s not what Biden proposed or what the majority of people and Democrats in Congress wanted, but it’s what the saboteurs would agree to: Medicare being able to negotiate drugs in Part B (drugs administered by providers, like in hospital or outpatient settings) and in Part D (drugs purchased directly by consumers), but only for drugs that are outside the “exclusivity” period—the time in which the Food and Drug Administration allows them a monopoly on the drug. That means some of the most expensive drugs can’t be negotiated. So-called “orphan drugs,” those generally very expensive drugs used to treat rare illnesses are also exempted from negotiations, as are drugs from “small biotech” firms, though their exemption expires in 2028.

It’s a start on drug price negotiating, a foot in the door. It’s enough to bring advocates along. “This means so much for people,” Anne Shoup, a senior adviser with Protect Our Care, told Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman at the Washington Post. “It’s a kitchen table issue. It affects their health and well-being—their ability to live their lives.”

AARP added a strong endorsement. “AARP applauds the leaders in Congress who have fought so hard for so long to get to this point,” CEO Jo Ann Jenkins said. “Now it is time for Congress to deliver for their constituents by passing a Build Back Better Act that will truly lower their prescription drug prices and improve the lives of millions of older Americans. We will not stop until the President signs legislation that lowers drug prices.”

There seems to be an agreed-upon strategy now for dealing with Manchin. Sinema was brought along through both prescription drug and tax provisions where she got a lot of say, so now Manchin stands alone. It looks like Democrats are ready to just, en masse, call his bluff and force him to be all by his lonesome, tanking his president’s agenda.