On today’s BradCast: Republican insistence on skyrocketing health care costs for tens of millions of Americans as of January 1 continues to keep much of the federal government closed for a second day. But it hasn’t prevented Trump’s ICE thugs from dragging American citizens, including women and children, out of their beds and into the streets naked in the middle of the night. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
It’s Day 2 of the federal government shutdown, as Democrats vow to go the mat to prevent an explosion of health care costs for tens of millions of Americans beginning on the first day of the new year. The cost of monthly premiums for nearly 25 million Americans who purchase access to coverage via the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) exchanges is set to more than double, thanks to Donald Trump and Republicans cutting federal subsidies.
At the same time, Trump is vowing to exact maximum pain on his political foes by using cover of the shutdown for mass firings of federal workers and axing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of government services at what he describes as “Democrat agencies.”
We’re joined today by BOBBY KOGAN, formerly senior adviser in the Biden-Harris White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and, prior to that, chief analyst for the U.S. Senate Budget Committee under Senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT). He is now Senior Director of Federal Budget Policy at American Progress. Suffice to say, Kogan knows a lot about what happens during shutdowns, what goes on behind the scenes in these standoffs, how they (usually) work, and why they matter.
He’s also very funny and good spirited, which is really appreciated on a day like today. So, mostly, I’m gonna recommend you tune in. You’ll get a lot from our wide-ranging conversation on all of this, as I did.
But, there are two specific points that he made that I want to highlight here for the moment. In regard to Trump and his OMB Director, Russ Vought (architect of the hard-right Project 2025 manifesto that Trump pretended to know nothing about during the campaign), are promising “mass layoffs” of government workers during the shutdown. If they do so, Kogan tells me, it would be, “extremely illegal”. As he details, a shutdown does not give the White House some sort of special shutdown powers to carry out mass Reductions in Force (RIFs) of federal workers.
“It’s actually the opposite. You are allowed, within reason, to RIF people when the government is open. Doing it when the government is closed is actually extremely illegal. It’s an Antideficiency Act violation,” he explains. “They’re doing it because they want to do it. There is no special power to do this. It’s illegal to do it during a shutdown, because the work necessary to make it happen is not work that is allowed to happen under a shutdown. They’re just doing it anyway.”
“It’s a criminal act that carries a jail term. But, of course, the Trump Administration won’t prosecute itself, so it will be yet another lawless budget act that the White House does.”
Kogan’s other point that I want to underscore here is his response when I asked if this is the right fight — to prevent health care costs from spiking for millions of Americans beginning on the first of the year, with $350 billion in Trump/Republican cuts next year alone, along with a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid and another half-trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare over the next ten years — for Democrats to plant their flag on.
His response is passionate in explaining why he believes that, yes, this is exactly the right fight for them to stand on…
There are lots of things in life that are unfair. You don’t get to pick if you’re born healthy. You don’t get to pick if you’re born to supportive parents. You don’t get to pick if you’re born rich or poor. You don’t get to pick whether you’re even born smart. You can work on your brain, but the natural abilities of your brain, you don’t get to pick that. You don’t get to pick if you’re going to be born super-duper athletic. You can work towards it, but if you’re want to be the best in the world, you need a lot of luck involved in that, as well. You don’t get to pick any of those things.
There’s lots and lots that’s unfair about life. But the point of government is to help ameliorate some of that unfairness. It’s to help people.
What we secure in a government funding bill is nutrition for the poor. It’s housing for the poor. It’s education. It’s cancer research. It’s grants to make sure that our water is literally potable and safe. It’s all sorts of things that we all rely on to make the world a little less bad. So, absolutely, making sure that people can afford their health care is a really legitimate thing to care about.
It’s a policy fight. Government funding fights are about policy. It’s about deciding how we are going to distribute our resources. That’s a natural thing to fight about in a government fight.
Tune in for much more.
THEN… Last month, in a decision on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket allowing previously unconstitutional “roving” ICE raids to continue in Los Angeles, based on nothing more than criteria such as race, skin color, how one is dressed, where they work or hang out, Justice Brett Kavanaugh dismissed concerns about U.S. citizens and others with the legal right to be in the country who might get swept up in these raids.
“As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country,” Kavanaugh wrote in his much-derided concurrence, “the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.”
I wonder if Kavanaugh is standing by that what happened in Chicago this week, in an apartment building in the middle of the night, where federal agents busted down doors on every floor of a five-story building, dragged residents out of beds — including men, women, children and U.S. Citizens — without warrants, zip-tied them, brought them out into the streets, some of them naked, where they were left without explanation or attorneys until 3am, as part of Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz”.
It was not the only such brutal, middle-of-the-night operation. Another was carried out in the Chicago suburbs this week, also ensnaring U.S. citizens. The masked, jack-booted thugs aren’t “coming”. They are here and coming to your town soon enough. Someone alert Justice Kavanaugh.
FINALLY… Desi Doyen helps us close things out this week with our latest Green News Report, in what, ironically, may include some of the brightest news we are able to offer you today…
Trump wants Doge 2.0.
In republican government now, everything is legal as long as you don’t get caught (When Accountability Is A Plague, Follow The Immunity – 11).
I’m late to comment, but I was wondering why the children were naked? The weather that night should have been cool, so I just don’t see why they would be sleeping naked? Could they have been stripped on purpose by ICE as a tactic to prevent witnesses from filming? (from streaming or sharing the video publicly) No one is really talking about this part. Sometimes dirty cops play copyrighted music when they are being filmed, and I was wondering if ICE is doing something similar.