We are now in the eighth week of the 119th Congress, which has distinguished itself with incredibly low productivity and low effort. So far, we have brought up just a bunch of moldy old leftovers from the last Congress. We have been averaging roughly about two votes a day since the Congress was sworn in on January 3. Despite the fact that we have a government shutdown looming in about 2 weeks, on March 14, the Speaker is much more focused on other things than trying to again avoid a catastrophe like that. It appears that this week we actually are going to take up the budget reconciliation bill that again has been worked out down at the Mar-a- Lago hotel over the last 2 months or so, where a conga line of billionaires have been observed walking through, meeting with leadership of the Republican Conference, laying out their priorities, not the American people's priorities, in terms of what they want to see in that reconciliation bill. This week, we are going to take up, apparently, according to the Speaker's Office, an actual vote on that. Why is that being given priority over a government shutdown? The real reason that is being given priority is that the tax cuts that were passed in 2017, particularly on personal rates, are going to be expiring in 2025. For the people who benefited the most, the top 1 percent of this country in terms of their economic position, for them, that is their number one priority.…
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