US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3696

On April 28 2016 11:14 Sermokala wrote:
Well if Europe doesn't care about Russia much I guess we don't have to worry about them either.

The day after Donald Trump leapfrogged toward the GOP nomination, this was how top House Republicans spent their Wednesday: Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy hosted a technology summit where he touted the passage of the first email privacy bill since “Top Gun” hit theaters in 1986, and Indiana Rep. Susan Brooks boasted of teaching her Hill colleagues how to use Snapchat.

Paul Ryan, meanwhile, headed to Georgetown to try and persuade graduating seniors that they should make the GOP – the one on the verge of making Trump its nominee – their party. The speaker also huddled with rank-and-file Republicans in the Capitol basement to talk up his legislative agenda.

“Take advantage of the work we’re doing this week,” Ryan told them. “If we don’t tell this story, no one will."

House leaders are effectively trying to create an alternate political universe in which Trump is relegated to an afterthought. Forget about delegate counts or a possible floor fight in Cleveland. The focus on Capitol Hill is on crafting an agenda — one that, to be sure, won’t become law — to try and project a competing, more substantive face of the Republican party.
A face, in other words, that looks nothing like Trump's.

Most House Republicans will concede in a private moment that the presidential election is all but lost for them. The prevailing expectation is that their party will lose the White House and the Senate, and probably and see their House majority trimmed by 10 to 15 seats.

That's why they overwhelmingly welcome Ryan’s efforts to talk about something besides the brawl between Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), even if lawmakers snicker about Ryan’s repetitive tone and glossy videos. Even McCarthy, Ryan’s No. 2, joked earlier this week that talking about his “innovation initiative” was making journalists’ eyes glaze over.

“It’s hard for us to get attention when we’re competing with Donald Trump,” said Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Charlie Dent. “What Ryan and McCarthy are trying to do is establish an agenda for the House, and I think that is important given the challenge we’re facing in the presidential election, which sucks up all the oxygen,”

Trump’s Hill supporters say GOP leaders are wasting their time. If Ryan is trying to change the subject from Trump, it’s a lost cause.

The US Senate talks a good game about sending humans to Mars. The group holds itself up as the protector of NASA and a champion for the space organization's grand exploration aims. For example, as part of this spring's appropriations process, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee with oversight of NASA's budget chided Charlie Bolden, the space agency's administrator, when his budget request didn't amply fund exploration.

"Mr. Administrator, you have traveled around the country in recent months touting NASA’s strong support for the SLS and Orion missions, when in reality this budget will effectively delay any advancement in a NASA-led human mission to Mars, or anywhere at all," Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican senator from Alabama, told Bolden during a hearing in March.

Shelby was upset with Bolden because the president's budget request did not seek a stratospheric level of funding for the Space Launch System rocket, which is being designed at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. And if there were any doubt about his parochial intent, consider Shelby's own position statement on NASA: "The ability of NASA to achieve our goals for further space exploration has always been and always will be through Marshall Space Flight Center."

In his efforts to rectify the budget, Shelby therefore increased the funding for NASA's heavy lift rocket by $840 million, a 60 percent bump. To help pay for this, his committee cut the space agency's technology budget request from $826.7 million to $686.5 million. Additionally, the committee specified that $130 million of the space technology budget should be spent on the RESTORE-L initiative to refuel the aging Landsat 7 satellite.

This week we learned one of the consequences of those cuts. According to a report in Space News, James Reuter, NASA deputy associate administrator for space technology, said Tuesday the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator project would get only a small fraction of its originally planned budget of $20 million for 2016. The cut exemplifies the political hamstringing of NASA's exploration efforts.

On April 28 2016 22:01 Barrin wrote:

What are you referring to?