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Eddie Lucio Jr. is a unique kind of Democrat in the Texas Senate, a devout Catholic from the states border lands who openly admits that his faith guides his decisions as a lawmaker. Over the years, that has meant Lucio's been quick to help his colleagues across the aisle champion policies his party generally eschews like supporing greater abortion restrictions for abused or neglected teenage girls, school vouchers or a gay-marriage ban.

So it was little surprise when Lucio came out as the only Democrat in the Texas Senate to support the other partys red-meat social conservative item for the session Senate Bill 6, a measure that would, in many cases, ban transgender people from using public restrooms that match their gender identity. This week, Lucio explained the decision by doubling down on his faith-driven approach to policymaking, telling a Rio Grande Valley NBC station, I dont believe in separation of church and state.

But is that really the reason Lucio voted to advance SB6? The issue got a little more clouded last month when the Quorum Report (a sometimes wonky, deeply-reported newsletter on Texas politics) discovered that the bills author had quietly slipped a $5 million rider into the senates spending plan to help fund a pet project in Lucios district, a historic adobe mansion and birding center in McAllen. And all in a tight budget year where lawmakers are having to cut elsewhere.

Lucio told the Valley TV station this week that the project's convenient boost in funding had nothing to do with his vote on the anti-trans bill. Everything that I do, I look at it as an act of faith, a moral obligation that I have for all people.

Lucio kept pressing the doctor, Colt Keo-Meier, on how a trans persons presence in a public restroom might violate someones privacy. Keo-Meier responded with a question: How does my existence violate your privacy?

So Lucio followed up by asking Keo-Meier if he believes in god. When the doctor answered yes, this was Lucios response: Do you also believe in altering his creation? When Keo-Meier brought up the discrimination trans people face every day, Lucio was dismissive, offended even. I am against segregation, OK? I lived through the civil rights era, which you did not. This is no where close to that.

Naturally, Lucio ended the exchange on a pious note: I embrace all human beings. Thank you very much.

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Border Democrat Says I Don't Believe In Separation of Church and State - San Antonio Current

LIVE OAK Two of the Suwannee Democrats reporters were honored among CNHIs best Monday.

Mike Jones was named CNHIs 2016 Sports Writer of the Year for Division III while Thomas Lynn was the companys 2016 Reporter of the Year for Division III. CNHI is the parent company of the Suwannee Democrat.

Jones, who came to the Democrat in January 2016, was honored for an entry that included features on former Suwannee High star Jimmie Taylor IIIs success at Rider University as well as SHS golfer Matthew Hilliard overcoming spina bifida. Game coverage was also part of Jones work that impressed the judges, including a Suwannee High football win last fall and Lafayette Highs baseball state championship last spring.

Mike regularly hits it out of the park on features, Democrat editor Jamie Wachter said. His story on Taylors rise from Jenkins Park to Division I basketball was especially a great read.

Mike has made quite an impact on our sports coverage in Suwannee, Hamilton and Lafayette counties.

Lynn also made an impression in a short time, joining the Democrat last April. Among Lynns winning works were a story on a local resident gaining her U.S. citizenship, East Coast residents finding shelter locally from Hurricane Matthew, a feature on Sam Jones sunflower fields in Hamilton and Suwannee counties and a look at domestic violence in Suwannee County.

Weve been blessed to have a talented, versatile journalist like Tom, Wachter said. He has a passion for journalism and is equally adept at covering hard news as well as writing touching features.

Publisher Myra Regan added about the two award winners: Were well aware of the talented, hard-working journalists Mike and Tom are, and its good to see them receive that recognition from others too.

CNHI, a private company based in Montgomery, Alabama, is one of the leading publishers of local news and information in the United States. Founded in 1997, its newspapers, Web sites and specialty publications serve more than 100 communities in 23 states throughout the United States.

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CNHI honors Democrat's Jones, Lynn - Suwannee Democrat

When President Trump is paying attention, he thinkswe're all Keynesians now.

"We're also going to prime the pump," he recentlytold the New York Times's Robert Draper, by which hemeans that the government is going to "spend money to make a lot more money in the future." That, he explained, is what will get the economy "going, and going big league, and having the jobs coming in and the taxes that will be cut very substantially and the regulations that'll be going."

Now, it's hard to say what exactly Trump has in mindhere, as it's not clear he himself does. What he seems to be saying, though, is that the government needs to spend more for the economy to grow more, which, given what we know about the kinds of things he supports, would probably mean investing a lot more in defense and infrastructure.But at the same time, he couldn't take too much out of everything else, because the whole idea is that the government would be spending more in total. Not that he seems to understand this, as we'll get to in a minute, whenhis budget would cut enough old spending to balance out all the new spending he's proposing.

Butthis is getting a little ahead of ourselves. As is the case whenever Trump talks about policy, the relevant questions are whether he actually means it, and whether Republicans in Congress would go along if he did.

Let's take those in reverse order. Members of Congress are the only ones who can follow through on Trump's kind-of, sort-of promise to "spend more money to make a lot more money," but that might be too hypocritical even for them. Now, on the one hand, Republicans havealways had a double standard when it comes to the deficit. They treat itlike an existential threat to the republic when they don't control the White House, but an afterthought when they do especially if it's the result of one of their big, beautiful tax cuts. Indeed, even Rep. Mark Meadows (N.C.), the leader of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, has said that, as a "fiscal conservative," he'd be okay with tax cuts that aren't "fully offset" by spending cuts or other revenue increases. Never mind that those words don't mean what he thinks they mean. The point is that the GOP won't have any problem with half of Trump's deficit-increasing agenda.

But, on the other hand, so many Republicans have convinced themselves that the road to hell is paved with too much spending that they wouldn't green-light any more of it even if Ronald Reagan's ghost came back to tell them to build that border wall. It's not just that the Grover Norquist wing of the party wants to shrink the government below bathtub size. It's that their activists have tried to come up with some story they can tell themselves about what went wrong during the George W. Bush years that doesn't involve the words "Iraq" or "Wall Street," and spending is the one they've settled on. Back then, Republicans in Congress rubber-stamped Bush's unfunded expansion of the welfare state (Medicare Part D) and the security state (the Department of Homeland Security). It was this betrayal of principles, they believe, that made Bush so unpopular, and it's something that at least the most ideological of them don't want to repeat. That's why the House Freedom Caucus prevented House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) from passing any of what they deemed insufficiently austere budgets last year, and why they would like to see further cuts than the ones Trump has proposed, particularly to entitlements.

And that brings us to what has been the defining feature of the Trump presidency. For all his populist talk, Trump doesn't know, care, or follow policy well enough to make any of it actually happen. He might say that he supports Keynesian stimulus, but his budget wouldn't increase spending, and, in fact, would impose deeply unrealistic cuts to everything but the Defense Department.He might say that he wants "insurance for everybody," but his health-care plan would have taken it away from 24 million people, including a lot of the older and poorer folks who propelled him to the presidency. And he might say that he'll rip up our trade agreements and replace them with great, great deals, but he has just made minor tweaksto them instead.

So although it may not be hard to imagine Trump getting into the budgetary equivalent of trench warfare with House Republicans, that would depend on him first realizing that his own plan doesn't increase spending, then insisting that his new one actually do so, and finallyfollowing through with a more detailed legislative strategy than just sending a few mean tweets to try to get Congress to pass it. In other words, an alternative fact. In the real world we live in, Trump just doesn't seem to have the intellectual stamina to do anything other than send 140-character book reports on whatever cable news show he's watching.

Trump isn't really a Keynesian. He just plays one on TV.

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Trump is talking like a big-spending Democrat - Washington Post

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Posted: Apr 03, 2017 12:11 AM

If youre stressed out about this whole Russian nonsense, relax Donald Trump didn't do anything wrong, and he's not going be impeached, arrested, or ritually disemboweled. When the truth comes out and it explodes in the Democrats soft, girlish hands, well all be laughing and toasting their humiliation with Stoli shots.

How do I know this with utter certainty? Because it's all so glaringly obvious, and its the only scenario that fits the facts. As Hugh Hewitt says, this scandal has three silos. The first silo is the question of whether the Russians somehow hacked our election. The second silo is whether any Trump people colluded with the Russians. The third silo, the one patriots care most about since its the one that isnt a ridiculous fantasy, is whether anyone in Obama's administration used our intelligence apparatus to spy on his and Hillarys political opponents. The answers are No, No, and Yes. The end results are going to be a stronger Trump, weaker Democrats, and various Obama minions exploring new career opportunities in the exciting fields of license plate-making, large-to-small rock transformation, and artisanal pruno distilling.

Russians didnt hack the election. Liberals use the word hacked because they can claim they only mean influenced while implying to stupid people inclined to believe their conspiracy theories that the Russians broke into computers and changed votes from Hillary to Donald. Of course, they forgot to also change the Senate votes to the Dems, but whatev.

Even James Comey agrees that never happened, so now the Democrats are claiming that Russian social media bots used fake news to trick the previously Hillary-inclined electorate into voting against her. Basically, theyre saying Hillarys supporters were easily duped idiots. Now, dummies have always been a key Democrat demographic. She clearly has a unique appeal to the stupid, the gullible, and the readily confused, making the voters she was counting on especially vulnerable to those cunning Russian clickbaiters operating from secret Macedonian villages.

Well, I was exploring the shocking real reason CHiPS went off the air, which was going to stun me, when I saw a story on OMGLinks that Hillary Clinton had an alien baby. Why, then I knew I had to vote for Donald Trump because I hate aliens. We got to build us a wall around space and make them Space Mexicans pay for it!

I was using my portable computer machine to internet, and I was about to have my jaw dropped by what Joyce Dewitt of Threes Company looks like today, when I saw the link to proof that Hillary and Bill Clinton are gun-grabbing devil worshipers. So I had to vote for Trump, because I cling to my guns and my religion and my other guns.

Their alternate version of You Stole My Morons! is that the release of the damning facts contained in John Podesta and Felonia von Pantsuits emails made people think she was terrible. People thought that because those emails showed, beyond any doubt, that she is terrible, and that her Democrat Party is less a political organization than a disorganized crime ring. Remember that when the media gets angry about the emails, the reason is that you got accurate information about the medias partisan pals that the media wanted hidden from you. Democracy dies in darkness all right; the media is trying to strangle it in an unlit alley.

The Trump campaign never colluded with the Russians. This is true even though the definition of colluding has been expanded to include pretty much any interaction with anyone or anything Russian. If they found out Reince Preibus had an old DVD of Rush Hour, Adam Schiff would be in front of a mic with CNN cutting in live. The whole stupid collusion thing has become a weird, Beautiful Mind-esque conspiracy theory with scores of Trumpaphobic loonies out there sharing their bizarre spider webs of intrigue via Twitter memes. Does Gorky Park have a grassy knoll?

Regardless, its safe to say that there was absolutely no collusion of any kind between Team Trump and anyone Russian. None. How do I know this to a near certainty? Because we haven't seen anybody leak any evidence of any in the six-plus months that they've been pushing this nonsense.

Nothing.

Butbutbut Ivan Ivanoskys airplane was in Utah once and Utah has the Great Salt Lake and Trump put salt on his taco and ALL THE PIECES FIT!

Nothing.

You think the geniuses leading our intelligence community not the brave and dedicated folks in the trenches but the clowns and political suck-ups lording over them could have or would have kept real collusion secret? Do you think if Trump was cavorting with the former commies we wouldnt have heard about it from the NYT, the WaPo and the rest of the Democrat steno pool about a week before November 8th?

Get. Real.

And that brings us to the third silo, because the Democrat heads of our intelligence community desperately wanted to leak anything that might remotely embarrass Trump. In fact, my money has always been on the person who leaked the classified Flynn info being a name well all recognize, a suspicion Foxs Adam Housleys reporting backs up. Hell yes, Donald Trump was "wiretapped. So were you, by the way. And me. From open source information shared by defectors the intelligence community was too incompetent to keep from defecting, we know that every single electronic communication we send is collected in the NSA mainframes. Every single one. And the NSA has algorithms they can use to search it. You dont go plant a bug in Trump Tower. You wiretap the opposition partys nominee for president by running a search through the communications that the government incidentally collected. And if you find something juicy, then you call up your buddy at the Post and hand it over.

If. Does anyone here think for a millisecond that the Obama-appointed leadership in the intelligence community, whose loyalty is to their own political class and not to the country, would hesitate for a microsecond before leaking something they thought would hurt Trump? We know they wouldnt hesitate because they didn't hesitate they feloniously released a classified transcript involving Mike Flynn just to shaft him and the Administration. Flynn did not do anything illegal in that illegally released transcript; he misled the Veep about the topics he (legally and properly) discussed, and for that he got canned. So why is his lawyer demanding immunity? Because his lawyer isnt a drooling moron working rear-ender soft tissue cases out of a van down by the river; no quarter-competent lawyer is going to let his client walk into a Democrat witch hunt without either ironclad immunity or the words I take the Fifth on his lips you know, just like all of Hillarys people did.

The only crime we know about for sure the only one is that some senior member of Obamas intelligence community committed a felony by leaking classified information regarding Mike Flynn's intercepted communications. That's it. And thats why the Democrats would rather talk about anything else. Understand that everything the Democrats say is a lie. Every single word, plus the punctuation. Theyre dumb, but they're not so stupid as not to realize that this Putin nonsense, manufactured as a pathetic excuse for their utter humiliation in November, is falling apart. With the help of their media minions, they hope if they keep shouting Look, Russians! well grow so bored well just tune out. Its their only hope for keeping Obamas buddies off the chopping block. They all thought Hillary was going to win and that there would be no accountability, so they were safe using the government systems they had been entrusted to manage to spy on their incoming bosss political opponents. Oops.

Look, I have friends who think differently, and Ive carefully considered their views because some are serious people. They really believe that there is something out there. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it was Russian-inspired clickbait stories on Facebook that magically converted hundreds of thousands of dedicated Im with her Hillary fans in the Rust Belt into #MAGA hat-wearing Trumpmaniacs. Maybe liberal Washington D.C. establishment types had the honor and patriotism required to keep a juicy tidbit like Trump playing footsie with the Russians under wraps for better than half a year. And maybe Lena Dunham will get put on the cover of the next Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.

Yeah, no. I'm not wrong. This is all going to blow up in the Democrats faces, and when it does I'm going to laugh and raise my vodka glass in a joyous toast to their latest and greatest failure. ?? ????????!

Nuke 'Em: On Judicial Nominations, GOP Must Punish Democrats for Decades of Unprecedented Escalation

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The Russiagate Scam Will Blow Up In The Democrats' Smug Faces - Townhall

House Democrats are taking a two-pronged approach for leverage in a divided but still Republican-led Congress: Let the majority duke it out among themselves, and wait and see whether tooffer votes when there is not enough GOP support to advance key legislation.

The fissures in the GOP were on full display in late March when Speaker Paul D. Ryan pulled a bill that aimed to repeal and replace parts of the 2010 health care law because it failed to get support from the conservative and moderate wings of the party.

That opens Republican leadership up to the possibility of needing Democratic votes in the future, though some GOP caucus members demurred when asked about the notion.

As Ryan announced that he was yanking the health care bill from the House floor on March 24, Democrats chanted, Vote! Vote! Vote! in the chamber, encouraging Republicans to take the vote. That would have forced members of the GOP who campaigned on repealing the health care law to vote no publicly, potentially leaving them vulnerable in 2018.

The minority party has since exercised some restraint at times in criticizing their counterparts.

The best way to describe it was not exuberance in terms of our expression, it was an expression of relief that damage was not done, New York Rep.Joseph Crowley, the House Democratic Caucus chairman,told Roll Call about the bills failure. Part of what our strategy is going to be is to point out where we think the administration will move next to undermine the law.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosilast week panned Ryan for his disastrous performance during the health care episode.

The next congressional showdown is set for the last week in April, when lawmakers have to pass a spending package to keep the federal government in business.

When asked if Democrats would offer votes on a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown, Pelosi said, Well see.

While assertingthat bipartisan appropriators could negotiate an agreement among themselves, the California Democrat said her party colleagues would have to see what it is before pledging support.

There are areas, however, where Democrats wont budge,Pelosi said. A spending bill that includes funding for a wall on the southern border or funding cuts to agencies such as the National Institutes of Health is unlikely to garner support from virtually any of the 193 members of the minority party in the House.

House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer said Democrats could also take a back seat and let the majority fight publicly among themselves as a means of finding leverage.

We dont let them duke it out. They just duke it out, the Maryland Democrat said last week. They dont need our help, apparently, to do that.

President Donald Trump has on several occasions said he intends to work with Democrats to pass bills if factions of House Republicans refuse to come on board.

The failure of the health care bill was largely attributed to members of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of hard-line conservative Republicans, and members of the moderate Tuesday Group.

While Republicans have now vowed to revisit the effort after thefailure, they pledged to move on to an overhaul of the tax code they may need Democratic support if divisions within the GOP cannot bebridged.

Crowley didnt have a positive assessment of that.

The New York Democrat said the White House was speaking out of both sides of itsmouth by blaming Democrats for failing legislation, but then offering to reach out.

Crowley, Hoyer and a spokesman for Pelosi all said their offices had not been contacted by the White House.

You really cant have it both ways, Crowley said. There is so much distrust right now with this administration and the Democratic caucus, universally speaking that a path forward is not clear to us in terms of cooperation.

While Democrats insist there are areas of compromise, the details of such deals are scant. The chancesof working in a bipartisan way largely dependson the Republicans, Crowley said.

The leverage happens when theyre dysfunctional; they cant work amongst themselves, hesaid.

Crowley said that while Democrats dont support a government shutdown, they would not be held hostage by a spending package that includes money for the border wall, bars federal money from Planned Parenthood, or makes cuts to a host of other programs and agencies as Trumps first budget proposed.

We will not be held hostage, Crowley said of Republicans. If they do want to work in a bipartisan way, thats up to them.

Contact Rahman atremarahman@cqrollcall.comor follow her on Twitter at@remawriter

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House Democrats Take Wait-and-See Approach - Roll Call