Crooked Media - What A Day: Smirnov on the rocks

- Meghan McCain going scorched-earth on fellow Arizona Republican Kari Lake

After the GOP-controlled House rejected the Senate’s bipartisan border security and foreign aid bill, they’re now faced with the horrifying prospect of having to Do Something. 
 

• Will they, though? Probably not. According to a report in Axios, House GOP lawmakers are privately expecting to shut the government down rather than, you know, do anything. The government will begin a partial shutdown unless a budget or stopgap spending measure is passed by March 1. Are we seriously doing this again? This puts Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in much the same place where former Speaker Kevin McCarthy found himself months ago. McCarthy had to work with Democrats on a stopgap spending bill in order to avert a shutdown, which ultimately led to his ouster. There have been rumblings that Johnson is headed for the same fate for months now, and Republicans, unsurprisingly, have no backup plan if they head down that road and have to pursue a third speaker’s vote in two years. 
   

• So what are House Republicans doing in the meantime? Pursuing a sham impeachment probe of President Joe Biden, of course. Nevermind the fact that their “star witness” Alexander Smirnov was charged earlier this month with lying to the FBI about the case. Nope! No matter! Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan was asked about the indictment of the GOP’s key attestant and had this inspiring reply: “Well, I mean, it is what it is.” Incredible. 
   

• Smirnov accused Biden and his son Hunter of each taking a $5 million bribe in foreign deals when the elder Biden was Vice President, and his allegations alone have propped up this whole House Judiciary charade. President Biden’s younger brother James testified before the Judiciary and Oversight Committees on Wednesday in a closed-door deposition, where he asserted that his brother had no role in any of his business dealings.

Republicans are looking to take back the Senate this November, and the policies they’re waiting to enact should they return to power are as horrifying as you would imagine. 
 

• Aides and allies of disgraced former president Donald Trump have been champing at the bit to push through unimaginably cruel immigration policies after he tanked the bipartisan proposal to address the mounting crisis at the border. Should Trump win the big prize in November, he and Congressional Republicans may try some of the policies that they wanted but failed to pull off in his first term, like detaining migrants on military bases and flying them out of the country on Pentagon aircrafts. A former senior administration official told the Washington Post that during his presidency Trump was “obsessed with having the military involved” in border security, but the Pentagon rebuffed him. Now, Trump has pledged that as president he would immediately launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” using an Eisenhower-era program known as—I cannot believe this was the actual name and I’m sorry you have to read it—“Operation Wetback” as a model for his program. Of course, he made similar promises in 2016. 
   

• Americans across the political spectrum are unhappy with the government’s handling of border security. This puts the heat on President Biden, who is reportedly considering executive action that could completely remake the asylum system as we know it. The White House action under consideration would have a similar trigger to the one in the failed bipartisan border security package: If more border crossings exceed an average of 5,000 per day in a given week, or there are more than 8,500 on a given day, the government would automatically shut down the border. This measure would be similar to one pursued by Trump in 2018, which was blocked by federal courts and which Democrats rightly condemned at the time. 
   

The American Civil Liberties Union, which helped argue against that 2018 Trump effort, promised to challenge the policy again should Biden pursue it. ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said, “Hopefully, the Biden administration is not considering recycling this patently unlawful and unworkable policy.”

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The corpse of a man found riddled with bullets and run over by a vehicle in Spain last week was identified as Maksim Kuzminov, a former Russian military pilot who defected from the army in August. A very public threat to his life was made on Russian state television last year.

After the Alabama Supreme Court decided that frozen embryos should have the rights of full personhood, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System announced that it was pausing IVF treatments on Wednesday, as the ruling effectively criminalizes IVF. 

An Israeli airstrike hit a residential building in Syria’s capital of Damascus on Wednesday, killing two people, according to Syrian state media and an unnamed security source. 

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) has left the Congressional Progressive Caucus over his staunch support of Israel, calling opposition to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza among his CPC colleagues “fringe.”

A group of Virginia labor unions said on Tuesday they oppose the proposal to move the Washington Capitals and Washington Wizards from D.C. to Alexandria, VA, because they said the plan lacks necessary labor protections for the workers who would build the stadiums. 

The Teamsters, one of the largest unions in the United States, sent the RNC $45,000, the maximum political donation their PAC is allowed, and just $30,000 to the DNC after disgraced former president Donald Trump met with the union’s leadership. Seems like they don’t remember that Trump staffed his entire Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board with union-busting right-to-work creeps!

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The United Auto Workers pledged $40 million in the next two years to support non-union autoworkers and battery workers across the country as they fight to organize, particularly in the South. 

The Biden administration began forgiving $1.2 billion in student loans on Wednesday under its new repayment plan. 

Amy Brown, the wife of a Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada, opened up about her abortion at age 24 in a televised interview to bring awareness to the issue. In the interview, Sam Brown embraced the Nevada state law allowing abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy.