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Greg Walden recently was riding comfortably in his Subaru Outback, the cruise control guiding his car, when a big black bird a crow, he suspects swooped down in front of him. The car braked on its own, the Oregon congressman recalled. Of course, my wife woke up. Startled in the passenger seat beside him, she asked if he was tired. She didnt believe him when he said no.

To Walden, though, the minor incident illustrated a point. Compared to his old Dodge van, it reacted before I reacted, he told Recode in an interview. Braking assistance is hardly some new, gasp-inducing feature in sport-utility vehicles, but Walden said it helped crystallize for him how more-advanced technology fully self-driving cars might someday prevent more harrowing traffic incidents.

Fast forward to Tuesday, as a committee in the U.S. House under Waldens watch debated a total of 14 bills that Republican lawmakers believe might someday clear the roads for more driverless vehicles. Lawmakers like Walden believe their early efforts are a boon for safety, not to mention U.S. business. We lose 30,000 to 40,000 people a year in highway fatalities, he explained, adding: What can we do to set standards that will make sure that innovation is taking place in the United States?

Chief among Republicans offerings is a bill that would permit the likes of Google and Uber to test their self-driving cars around the country, scrapping a current system in which states from New York to California have pitched varying, if conflicting, rules on how and where autonomous vehicles can operate. The idea is sure to satisfy the tech and auto industries, which have lobbied extensively in Washington, D.C., to push the policy boundaries for self-driving cars.

Some lawmakers, however, sounded an early note of caution Tuesday that Congress itself might be at risk of speeding. We need to figure out a responsible way to keep innovation moving forward, while ensuring safety at every stage, said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill.

For the moment, at least, theres no single, overarching, autonomous-vehicle-specific law on the federal governments books nothing that says where companies can test their tech and what sort of safety standards might apply in vehicles that someday might not even have steering wheels.

Before President Barack Obama departed office, his administration worked with tech and car companies on a set of voluntary safety standards for driverless cars. But much remains unresolved, and in a rare break from the norm on Capitol Hill, theres bipartisan interest in working through the issues: Senate Democrats and Republicans recently signaled they also planned to start debating self-driving car rules in the coming months.

One concern for Republicans: Lacking federal standards, 22 states have imposed some sort of regulations, according to a tally by the National Conference of State Legislatures, often in an attempt to address safety concerns with a technology they believe is in its infancy.

To Walden and his GOP colleagues, the flurry of state-level activity marks a break with a longstanding division of labor, one that sees the federal government determining national safety and driver standards while leaving only the logistics, like approving licenses, to the locals.

From the front bumper to the back bumper whether its a pickup truck or a car or a van how the vehicle works and is designed should be the province of the federal government as has been the case for more than 50 years, said Rep. Bob Latta, who convened the Tuesday hearing.

Preempting the states would be a boon for tech giants like Google and Uber and automakers including Ford and Volvo; one of their lobbying groups, the Self Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, offered lawmakers its stamp of approval during testimony on Tuesday.

One of its aides, David Strickland, the former director of the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration, said 50 states ultimately adopting 50 different safety standards for self-driving cars would amount to a disaster.

But some in Congress seemed reticent to strip states self-driving car laws from the books. Schakowsky, for one, said Stricklands former agency, NHTSA, needed to adopt a federal standard for autonomous vehicles before Congress could replace existing state safety regulations. Trouble is, that agency still has no full-time director under President Donald Trump a fact that rankled one of Schakowskys colleagues, New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone.

We should not be moving bills out of the committee until we hear from the administration, said Pallone, the committees chief Democrat.

Another Republican proposal would allow the government to designate as many as 100,000 self-driving cars to be exempt from existing federal motor safety rules, even though those guidelines which govern everything from steering wheels to airbags were written many years before that technology existed. A third would set up a federal board to study the cyber security of autonomous vehicles.

And still a fourth proposal would allow the manufacturers of those vehicles to share data, including information about crashes, with the U.S. government in a way that appears to make it impossible for reporters and watchdogs to obtain that data through record requests. There, the aim is to protect carmakers confidential information about their technology. To consumer watchdogs, however, it may ultimately serve to undermine the publics trust in a technology still coming to market.

Im not opposed to these vehicles, Im not opposed to testing, but we need somebody to look at this material other than NHTSA and the auto companies, said Alan Morrison, a leading faculty member at The George Washington University Law School, during the hearing Tuesday.

Other terrain remains uncharted territory for the committee. By design, its a different portion of Congress that deals with heavy trucking a major area of disruption in the realm of self-driving cars, and one that could leave many drivers out of work if companies like Uber succeed.

Nor has the committee tackled broader issues, like privacy, that affect the industry, despite the clamor from consumer protection advocates that cars, like smartphones, have become warehouses of knowledge about their owners.

And Walden said its too soon for Congress to wade into philosophical questions about the complex decision-making algorithms powering the forthcoming fleet of self-driving vehicles in the first place questions like, does a self-driving Google Prius or Uber ride kill its owner in order to spare more lives?

I think Congress will have a role in that. I think were a ways away from that ... When you get to the point when you have no steering wheel, I think a lot of those discussions will be had, Walden said.

Youre going to lose some people because of what autonomous vehicles do, he continued. But if you can cut that loss to a 10th or a half or name the number [from what it is now], it has to improve overall, and I think thats what we have to keep our focus on whats the overall good here?

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Republicans want to open US roads for companies testing self-driving cars - Recode

Threading the needle of getting defense hawks, fiscal conservatives and those steering tax reform within his own party has been a difficult task, but House Speaker Paul Ryan has reminded House GOP members that this year's budget is critical for getting top priorities like tax reform through both chambers.

It's unlikely any Democrats will back the fiscal blueprint, so Republican leaders are locking down support from the various factions of their conference. They plan to hold up the proposal as evidence they are following through on the promise of GOP control of the White House and the Capitol intent on reshaping the federal government.

The fiscal blueprint is expected to propose more than $1.1 trillion for the next fiscal year and would provide more money for the military and domestic spending than President Donald Trump requested in his budget, which he sent to the Hill in May, according to several congressional aides familiar with the proposal.

Republicans reached an agreement on the discretionary funding levels for the Pentagon and domestic agencies, and the last sticking point Republican leaders had to overcome was over how much deficit-reduction should be taken out of mandatory programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

The budget plan would provide $621.5 billion in base defense spending, as well as $75 billion in war funding, known as Overseas Contingency Operations, sources told CNN. That's $28.5 billion more than the President requested $18.5 in the base budget and $10 billion extra in war dollars.

The House budget blueprint would set domestic discretionary spending at $511 billion, an increase compared to the Trump administration's $462 billion budget request, which proposed deep cuts to agencies like the State Department and EPA.

When President Barack Obama was in the White House, final spending deals in recent years included equal increases for defense and domestic spending, but Republicans are trying to move away from that construct now that they control the legislative and executive branches.

While the budget agreement will likely will have enough votes to get those spending bills through the House, Senate Democrats are likely to filibuster them, making a final deal uncertain ahead of a September deadline to keep the government from shutting down.

This emerging budget deal lays out the GOP wish list, but an agreement that funds federal agencies will be tougher to hammer out. Republicans have had to rely on Democrats to pass those in recent years, so they may need to give in on the split between defense and other domestic programs.

Another problem the House faces with the emerging budget agreement is that the defense funding violates spending caps established by the 2011 Budget Control Act. The defense cap for 2018 is $549 billion, and if the cap is not changed, the Pentagon would be subject to across-the-board cuts known as sequestration.

Republican defense hawks want to repeal the budget caps for defense, as Trump has requested, but Democrats won't go along unless the cap is also removed for domestic spending.

For defense hawks, the $621.5 billion topline for defense is a compromise, as House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry and Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain have been pressing for at least $640 billion for the military.

The difficulties in creating a budget deal in the House have also made for a topsy-turvy process crafting individual authorization and appropriation bills. Both Thornberry and Rep. Kay Granger, the chairwoman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, were preparing their defense bills at different levels Thornberry's at $37 billion more than the Trump request and Granger's at the same level as Trump's.

But with a budget deal near, the House's defense authorization and appropriations bills were finalized at the same level as the emerging budget agreement.

Thornberry told reporters last week that he was willing to come down from $640 billion, but he would need assurances there would be future growth for military spending in future years.

The final sticking point to getting House Republicans on the same page was negotiating how much money the plan would cut from the mandatory side of the ledger. Programs like Social Security and Medicare that are funded through mandatory spending account for about two-thirds of the total budget, but they are difficult to reduce because any change requires Congress to pass a new law.

With divided government in recent years, Republicans in Congress have been unable to make a dent in this area. But House GOP members are looking to get some significant savings from changes to some programs that fall under the Agriculture Department, like food stamps, or other welfare programs.

The House GOP budget is expected to direct several committees to come up with roughly $200 billion in deficit savings. Some in the House Freedom Caucus were hoping they could get a significantly higher number, and House Budget Chair Diane Black also appealed to top GOP leaders to make those savings a major component of the final deal, according to several House Republican sources.

Rep. Mark Meadows, the leader of the Freedom Caucus, said there was not a budget deal he could agree to yet.

Meadows said he wasn't concerned with the numbers in the agreement, but rather the details when it came to how the deficit reduction was achieved.

The budget proposal does not provide details on how each committee could achieve these savings targets, but including the provision in the budget resolution gives Republicans in Congress the ability to say they are following through on their pledge to reduce the size of the federal government.

Ryan, a former budget chair, has been sympathetic to those pressing for major deficit reduction, but he is also balancing the challenge of shepherding a major overhaul of the tax code through the House. Leaders wanted to reach agreement on a savings number they felt was manageable for the House Ways and Means Committee to meet as it evaluates what various changes to the tax rates and exemptions will mean for the overall budget.

Republicans don't need to pass a budget the various spending bills that detail how much each agency will get for federal programs are the measures that keep the government operating. But as they did with health care, GOP leaders are using this vehicle so they can use a tool known as "budget reconciliation" to pass a tax reform package through the Senate with a simple majority, avoiding a Democratic filibuster.

Democrats are expected to be united against the package.

Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth, the top Democrat on the Budget Committee, hasn't seen the details, but is already arguing that it's the same as the Trump administration's version sent to the Hill in May.

"The reports on the Republican budget proposal indicate that they are embracing much of the Trump budget," Yarmuth said in a written statement to CNN. "Instead of investing in American families and the future of our nation, it appears they are prepared to undermine our country's economic progress, health security, and safety just so they can give massive tax breaks for millionaires and corporations. We will fight this irresponsible proposal every step of the way."

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House Republicans put final touches on budget deal - CNN International

Miami Herald

Man accused of threatening lawmaker on Facebook says he was 'fed up' with Republicans Miami Herald Two weeks after a U.S. congressman and four others were shot during a baseball practice in a Washington suburb by a man with a history of lashing out at Republicans, a Florida lawmaker decided he wasn't taking any chances. So Sunday, after someone ... Florida man arrested for threatening to kill Republican state representativeHot Air all 13 news articles »

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Man accused of threatening lawmaker on Facebook says he was 'fed up' with Republicans - Miami Herald

Mark Levin's new book, "Rediscovering Americanism," an assault on the media and progressives and a call for Americans to take back their country, debuts today at No. 1 on Amazon.

Showing the draw of the New York Times bestselling author and top syndicated radio host, his book is already on the way to becoming another big seller.

"My new book covers a lot of territory philosophy, history, economics, law, culture, etc. And I look deeply into what is meant by Americanism, republicanism, individualism, capitalism. What do we mean by natural law, unalienable rights, liberty, and property rights? From where do these principles come? Why are they important?" he told Secrets.

It follows in the path of his other books and the nation: Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto; Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America; The Liberty Amendments; and Plunder and Deceit.

Secrets reviewed "Rediscovering Americanism" last week and wrote:

In the book, Levin attacks the embrace by the media, politicians and academia of progressive promises of a "utopia" defined by the end of personal freedom and individuality.

He has a grim name for it: "The Final Outcome." Levin wrote, "They reject history's lessons and instead are absorbed with their own conceit and aggrandizement in the relentless pursuit of a diabolical project, the final outcome of which is an oppression of mind and soul."

Levin added, "the equality they envision but dare not honestly proclaim, is life on the hamster wheel, where one individual is indistinguishable from the next."

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com

Continued here:
Mark Levin book condemning media, progressives, debuts No. 1 on ... - Washington Examiner

Supporters of Planned Parenthood hold a rally as they protest the Senate Republicans healthcare bill outside the US Capitol on Tuesday. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Progressive activists hailed a huge victory and a giant step toward single-payer healthcare on Tuesday, after Senate Republicans were forced to postpone a vote on their proposed healthcare bill.

Many warned, however, that the battle was not over, promising continued attempts to pressure Republican senators over the Fourth of July recess and beyond.

Thousands of activists from groups including Our Revolution, Indivisible and Planned Parenthood had spent the past week mounting frantic efforts to derail the legislation, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said would leave 22 million more people without health coverage over the next 10 years.

On Tuesday, after a number of GOP senators said they would not vote for the bill, the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, told his caucus he would delay the vote on legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) until after the coming recess.

Its beyond a victory, said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, which encouraged members to pressure Republican senators to vote against the bill. What people are saying is, We want a society, we dont want a market to protect our health.

The bill would have been a victory for insurance companies, DeMoro said, and senators apparent distaste for the legislation was a blow for both those companies and Republicans.

I think this is a giant step toward single-payer healthcare the fact that they defeated the Republicans because ultimately, embedded in that is a defeat for free-market fundamentalism.

What people are saying is, We want a society, we dont want a market to protect our health'

Indivisible, a progressive organization established after the 2016 election to oppose Donald Trump and Republican policies, mobilized activists from more than 3,000 chapters across the country to protest the bill.

It is a huge, huge victory, said Ezra Levin, Indivisibles executive director. But its not a final victory.

Levin said Indivisibles ultimate goal was to defeat the bill outright, but the short-term plan had been to delay a vote until after the Senate recess.

House Republicans who voted for the first and second iterations of their own healthcare bill, which passed in May, faced angry receptions at town hall events during the April and May recesses.

McConnell was trying to rush it through this week because he knew Fourth of July recess was coming up, Levin said. He knew senators would be heading back to their states and hearing from their constituents, so he knew it was going to get harder if the vote was delayed.

It was not a foregone conclusion that the bill would be defeated, Levin said. The challenge now is going to keep the pressure up. We cannot forget what happened on the House side. This is a huge blow against Trumpcare but in order to actually defeat this, pressure will have to continue.

An unprecedented resistance has knocked Trumpcare off course. But we will not stop organizing, protesting, speaking out

Winnie Wong, co-founder of People for Bernie, an independent activist group with more than a million supporters, echoed Levins concern but praised collaboration between dozens of leftwing groups in the weeks leading up to the delay of the bill.

Its an effort that is being held up by almost all progressive groups, she said, whether they have anything to do with the Democratic party or not, I think there is a unification between all progressives right now around making sure Trumpcare does not go through the Senate.

All these Republican lawmakers are really feeling the heat from their constituents. They are not stupid. And in some states you see them doing the right thing.

Our Revolution, a progressive organization founded in the wake of Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, said supporters had made almost 8,000 calls to the Senate to oppose the bill.

Todays delay is a victory for the 22 million people who are at risk of losing coverage, said Shannon Jackson, Our Revolutions executive director. As senators head back home for the Fourth of July holiday we will continue to demand they vote no on this immoral and disastrous bill.

The Working Families Party (WFP), meanwhile, organized weekly protests outside the offices of Nevada senator Dean Heller and a sit-in in the office of Susan Collins of Maine over the past few weeks. It also held a demonstration at Reagan national airport in nearby Arlington, Virginia, on Friday which targeted senators flying home for the weekend.

An unprecedented resistance movement has knocked Trumpcare off course, said WFP national director Dan Cantor. But we will not stop organizing, protesting or speaking out until this immoral proposal is crushed, discarded and buried.

Cantor predicted that Republicans attempts to repeal the ACA will only serve to strengthen the resolve of millions of Americans to fight for the guarantee of healthcare for all.

In a statement, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards called the Republican plan the worst bill for womens health in a generation that would devastate millions of people.

With the threat of a vote after recess week, however, Richards warned that it was now more important than ever for people to make their voices heard.

Republican leadership needs to hear over and over that the people of America will not stand to see healthcare stripped from millions, and they will not stand to see Planned Parenthoods patients lose their access to healthcare, she said.

Now, as senators go home for recess next week, its time to send the message that we need to stop this harmful bill once and for all.

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'Huge victory': progressives vow to keep fighting GOP health bill after vote delay - The Guardian