Month: January 2025

Biden Warns Americans Not to Forget, Ignore or Rewrite Jan. 6, 2021

Buck Banks

“To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand. This is not what happened.”

— President Biden, writing in the Washington Post, warned Americans not to forget the violent attack that took place at the Capitol four years ago, and he accused President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters of trying “to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day.”

Just Another Day for the Chaos Monkeys in Washington

Buck Banks


Playbook: “The simplest and most important reason for the country’s expected return to a peaceful transfer of presidential power is that Trump actually won this presidential election, unlike the last one. As a result, he and his Republican allies have not mounted a public campaign of lies in an effort to mislead his supporters into thinking that he won, and they haven’t lobbied Republican elected officials to try to get them to throw the election to him anyway, as they did after the 2020 election. (Oh, there will also be much more security tomorrow, too.)”

“But even if tomorrow’s congressional certification goes off without a hitch, there is no question that the events on Jan. 6 four years ago — and the legal system’s response to them — will continue to loom large in American history and politics, and that they will continue to shape our perception and understanding of some major political figures.”

Donald Trump and the Grift that Keeps on Giving

Buck Banks

$200 million

“Since his victory in November, President-elect Donald Trump’s allies have raised well over $200 million for a constellation of groups that will fund his inauguration, his political operation and eventually his presidential library,“ the New York Times reports. “It is a staggering sum that underscores efforts by donors and corporate interests to curry favor with Mr. Trump ahead of a second presidential term after a number of business leaders denounced him following the violence by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

‘Performative’ 118th Congress Passed Fewest Laws in Decades

Buck Banks

>150

The 118th Congress passed just under 150 bills over the last two years, according to the Quorum data provided to Axios. That’s down from more than 350 passed in the previous Congress — in which Democrats held control of both chambers and the White House. The 17 congresses since the start of George H.W. Bush’s presidency in 1989 have passed an average of more than 380 laws.

Immigration Courts Backlog Could Sow Trump’s Mass Deportations

Buck Banks

36 million

Time: “Currently there are 3.6 million cases pending before immigration judges, the largest number of pending cases in the history of the American immigration system. That is a 44% increase from the 2.5 million cases pending the year before. And the problem is only getting bigger, as more people continue to be put into deportation proceedings.”