Losing My Perspicacity February 26, 2025

The case for revoking unanimous consent; The entire House GOP -1 votes to gut Medicaid to fund tax cuts to the rich; Twenty DOGE staffers resign in protest; Another study concludes that gender equity in sports isn’t as simple as TERFs make it; Farewell to the Queen, Diana Taurasi

Author

Julie DiCaro
February 26, 2025

Good morning and happy Wednesday! Thanks for being here this morning.

Tonight is one of those nausea-inducing days in the news where it’s hard to figure out where to start. The last thing I want to do is bum you out first thing in the morning, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Democrats in Congress are not going to save us.

I had to call Dick Durbin’s office (again) today to ask why he’s voted to confirm Dan Driscoll as Secretary of the Army, especially after Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth just canned the Joint Chiefs’ only Black and female members. It’s not that I have anything against Driscoll, I don’t know the guy from Adam, although his friendship and history with JD Vance is enough for me to hazard a guess as to what I’d think of him as a person. But why are the Democrats voting for anything congressional Republicans are doing right now? Elon Musk is single-handedly dismantling our federal government, Trump is out there alienating our allies on the world stage, and the entire administration refers to anyone who is not a cishet white man as a “DEI” hire. Why in God’s name would you cooperate with the GOP on anything?

Here’s Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) yelling yesterday that the Dems aren’t going to vote for the GOP’s budget resolution (more on that in a second).

"This is not a budget resolution. This is a blueprint for suffering!" Democrats vow not to cast a single vote in support of the Republican plan to gut Medicaid. 🚨 The House plans to vote on their budget TODAY. This is a 5-alarm fire. Please call your Representative!

— Bren (@kindofnerdy.bsky.social)2025-02-25T19:33:36.661Z

Okay. AND? I can tell you, without even looking at it, that you shouldn’t vote for anything involving the budget submitted by Republicans. That’s not a bold stance. What else are you going to do?

Here’s an idea: How about bringing the Senate to a standstill by revoking unanimous consent? If you don’t know what unanimous consent is (I didn’t until the first Trump administration), there’s a good explainer here. Basically, unanimous consent means that the Senate Democrats would not agree to allow the Senate Republicans to bring anything to the floor without a vote to adopt a motion to proceed. Unanimous consent is a procedural move used to make everyone’s life easier by expediting legislation, especially bills that are almost certain to pass.

Here’s how it works: A member of one party takes the floor to ask unanimous consent — meaning the agreement of all 100 senators — to immediately take up and pass this bill or that measure without debate, often since something has occurred to give it urgency.

Believe it or not, much of the Senate’s business is conducted this way, which allows Senators to avoid sitting around all day having to debate and vote on lots of little bills. Unanimous consent is generally used for things like mundane housekeeping matters, inserting items into the Congressional Record, etc.

If you’ve heard about unanimous consent before now, it was probably when Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) objected to unanimous consent more than 270 times, holding up hundreds of military promotions during the Biden administration. He did this for years and the Dems weren’t able to fill any of those military roles. It was only when the GOP started pressuring Tuberville in 2023 that he backed down.

As the Republicans now have control of the Senate and are using it to do things like …. oh, I dunno… confirm the worst and most damaging cabinet in US History, why are Dems still agreeing to unanimous consent? Shut the Senate down. They should have done this the day Trump’s administration took office. Make them sit in the Senate Chamber all day. Fight them on everything, no matter how small. Make every little bit of Senate business as painful as possible. Treat them the way they treat all of us “DEI hires.”

Here’s what the fantastic Hayes Brown wrote over at MSNBC last week:

Tactically speaking, there would be a clear benefit in Schumer pulling every lever possible to make the process of legislating more difficult for his counterpart, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota. Forcing votes on even the little things and requiring Republicans to stay on the Senate floor to keep processes moving would at least be something in the face of Trump’s threatened usurpation of congressional powers. It would also require some sacrifice from his members, who have gotten used to heading home on Thursday afternoons, and some of whom still hope to maintain a measure of comity with their GOP colleagues.

I understand the idea that a party has to stand for something and not just be the party of obstruction. After all, that’s what the GOP has been since Barack Obama’s first term in office. But when the thing you are seeking to obstruct is harm to America’s most vulnerable people, I’m great with being the party of obstruction until the mid-terms roll around. Or longer. Hopefully, Dems can take back both houses and end this absolute madness. As of right now, we’ve got Americans being dragged out of public forums by the 2025 Gestapo, and meanwhile, the Dems are still playing nice with the Republican Senate. There is dignity in stopping bad actors from doing harm.

Call your Senators and demand that they withhold unanimous consent from any Senate proceedings until such time as (choose your own adventure) a) Elon Musk and DOGE are out of federal agencies; b) Trump is impeached; c) the mid-term elections; d) Trump and Musk are thrown in jail. Whatever you decide works best for you. But this can’t go on.

Today: The entire House GOP -1 votes to gut Medicaid to fund tax cuts to the rich; Twenty DOGE staffers resign in protest; Another study concludes that gender equity in sports isn’t as simple as TERFs make it; Farewell to the Queen, Diana Taurasi

Here we go.

Who cares about the poor and elderly?

If you’re wondering why I started off today ranting about a mundane procedural tool in the Senate, this is why: Last night, every Republican member of the House, save Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), voted to advance Trump’s budget, which seeks to gut Medicaid to fund tax cuts for the rich. The final vote tally was 217-215.

It came after a head-spinning hour in which Republican leaders tried to put down a revolt among conservatives who wanted deeper spending cuts, failed to do so, canceled the budget vote and then reversed course minutes later and summoned lawmakers to call the roll.

***

The plan instructs the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid and Medicare, to come up with at least $880 billion in cuts. While some Republicans denied that they would slash programs for the poor, the amount of revenue they are calling to raise would all but certainly necessitate some cuts to at least one of those programs.

***

Democrats see the Medicaid cuts that are likely to be included in whatever legislation House Republicans put together as a salient line of political attack, akin to their efforts to campaign in 2018 on the G.O.P. efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“It has to come from Medicaid, it has to come from the A.C.A. premiums,” said Representative Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the Budget Committee, “because that’s the only place you can find $880 billion.”

(emphasis added)

Why is Medicaid important? Well, it pays for approximately half of all births, for starters. It’s also our nation’s largest insurance program, and covers more than 65% of all nursing home bills. And, given that Medicaid and Medicare both fall under the umbrella of Energy and Commerce, nothing prevents the GOP from making cuts to Medicare, too.

Meanwhile, Trump is seeking to extend nearly $4 trillion in tax cuts, with the wealthy seeing the biggest of the cuts, proportionally.

Here’s a gift link if you want to see everything in the bill. It’s long past time to get to work on the mid-terms.

In good news…

It turns out that some of those 19-year-olds working for Elon Musk actually have a moral compass. More than 20 staffers resigned from DOGE today rather than “dismantle critical public services.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them

(Gasps, clutches pearls) Do you mean to tell me that Big Balls and the guy who wants to “normalize Indian hate” are not qualified to determine what is necessary to run the federal government? I will not stand for this Big Balls slander! In all seriousness, kudos to those who peaced out of there.

(By the way, am I the only one who missed this story about Big Balls being the grandson of an executed KGB officer?)

Yet another study finds that gender equity in sports is more complex than TERFs think

A study on the advantages women with “high T” allegedly have in sports concludes that there is no evidence that women who are 46 XY DSD (Disorders of Sex Development) — like Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba, and Margaret Wambui — have any innate physical advantage over XX women when it comes to sports.

Here’s the set of women the study analyzed:

The issue involves a small group of women that World Athletics claims have an unfair performance advantage over other women, due to their unique biology. These women are referred to variously as intersex athletes, athletes with Differences in Sexual Development (DSDs), or athletes with natural variations in their biological development (natural variations).

All of these women were registered female at birth, maintained that identity into adulthood, and then throughout their athletic careers. This issue is not about transgender athletes who have at some point in their lives legally changed their gender. That too is an important issue, but very different from the one I am discussing today.

The study is quite involved and has a lot of dense statistics, but here’s what it breaks down to: The researchers took the competition times of nine women who fall under the DSD guidelines (and who are currently banned from competition unless they undergo “medical intervention”) and compared them to “hundreds of other women who competed in the 2024 Paris Olympics.” Here’s what they found:

1. The career best times of the four women who are currently banned from competition (unless they undergo medical interventions) are consistent with performances of other women at Paris 2024.

2. None of these women has approached the women’s world record.

3. None of these women perform anywhere close to men.

The takeaway is that while it may sound like “women who have a higher testosterone level than ‘normal’ have an advantage in sports!” is logical, you can’t fake the science. If women in the DSD set did have an innate advantage over XX women, comparing the times to XX women should bear that out. It didn’t.

Farewell to the Queen

We all knew this day was coming, but it doesn’t make it suck any less.

Diana Taurasi, First of Her Name, Holder of three NCAA championships, Thrice Ruler of the WNBA Finals, Fracturer of Doors, Queen of the First Women and six Olympic gold medals, has decided to retire. Long may she reign.

Here are some words from yours truly on why Diana Taurasi kept going for as long as she did and the magical night when reached 10,000 career points. @thenext.bsky.social

— Jesse Morrison (@morrscode.bsky.social)2025-02-26T03:53:43.278Z

There’s no doubt that Taurasi is leaving women’s hoops in a much different place than she found it, and that she was instrumental in getting the WNBA to where it is today. But I also am a bit sad that she didn’t get to enjoy the packed arenas and crowds going nuts for the women’s game for a few more years. She will be sorely missed.

The High Note

Each day, I endeavor to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

I’m sure you’ve heard this one by now, but I’ve been singing it all day, so you get to hear it again.

Survive and advance today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down. We’re all in this together.

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