Sunday School 11/21/21

For this week's Sunday School, we'll start with Dana Bash and her State of the Union chat with Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH), and then check in with Margaret Brennan for her conversations with Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Ted Cruz (R-Cancun) on Face the Nation.

Sununu agrees that "everyone likes" the kind of things that are in the Build Back Better bill (BBB) passed by the House - clean energy, climate incentives, universal pre-K, and so on. That's good, but the "immense amount of money" is an issue. He thinks 

fiscal responsibility has left the window out of Washington, DC, and I think that's a frustration for all Americans. 

Inflation "is the worst tax you can put on low- and middle-income families, he added; the answer is finding the middle - and that takes more than cutting the size of the spending.

You do it by looking at what happens at a local level. How do you make sure these programs can get implemented? Remember, the Senate supports a policy. They support funding. And then they go on to the next thing. It's governors and the citizens in local communities that have to implement these programs and that feel the real cost of them. 

He also mentioned, without any detail and without follow up from Bash, that in February, the feds are putting in regulations that will bring "further barriers to getting a CDL license, just getting someone a trucking license." According to the NYS DMV website, the new federal "barriers" include ensuring that new drivers are, you know, trained to be drivers. Oh, the horror.

Sununu turned down a Senate run, saying "as a governor, you can actually play defense and protect the interests of your citizens" from what happens in Washington. And that includes his belief that "politics in its entirety on both sides of the aisle in Washington is screwed up. I mean, it really is," mostly due to them focusing on the wrong priorities.

I agree with a lot of what he said about Washington; how about you?

For her part, Sen. Gillibrand said Sen. Joe Manchin "has come a long way" on paid family leave, and he's "come forward with a lot of really smart questions" in the past few weeks. They both want it to be "an earned benefit" and she's "optimistic" they can come up with something that's bipartisan. The problem is, other Rs who are interested in paid leave aren't interested in what Manchin's looking for. 

Specifically on Manchin's desire to strengthen the "social safety net," Gillibrand says that's what paid family leave will do. 

We know if it's parental leave, parents, mothers are 40% more likely to get back to work if they have paid leave, which goes to Sen. Manchin's concerned that he wants to strengthen our social safety nets. He wants to strengthen Social Security. That's what paid leave does. It gets people back to work. 

They talked about the increase in the SALT deduction cap, which the House bumped up from $10K to $80K, which she hopes will make it through the Senate. Brennan failed to ask Gillibrand what she was doing back home to get NY to reduce taxes, instead of putting this massive benefit to the wealthy in the BBB. While she says the increase will help the middle class, it would give about 40% of the overall benefit to folks making between $366K and $866K, according to the Tax Policy Center. 

Gillibrand also said she thinks Dems are getting the message out now that voters should stick with them in the midterms. And, they'll be doing that even more once the darn thing is signed, when they'll be in their districts talking about how the bill helps families and how that helps the economy.

Brennan wondered if Senator Cruz he agreed with fellow potential 2024 candidates Nikki Haley and Tom Cotton that we should fully boycott the Beijing Olympics. He thinks the Olympics should have been moved to another location, but not with a full boycott.

You know, Jimmy Carter tried that in the 1970s. All it did was punish a generation of athletes. We've got young men and young women, Americans, who spent their whole lives practicing for this moment. I don't want to punish those young athletes.

He agrees with the administration (without agreeing with Brennan that he agrees), on a "so-called diplomatic boycott," in which we "try to minimize the attention" by not sending any high-ranking government officials. But wait - there's more.

Number one, that we actually show the courage the Women's Tennis Association is showing to call out the murder, the genocide, the torture, the lies, the complicity in COVID-19 of the Chinese communist government to speak the truth. And then number two, I really hope our young men and women, that they go over there and kick their commie asses. We need to win in the Olympics.

He'd also like to see corporations "show a tiny bit of courage" and not do any Olympic-related advertising; he thinks that would make sense.

And finally, is Cruz running for president? He said he has "no idea what's going to happen in 2024" and that the Former Guy has a decision to make - is he running, or is he not. Aside from that, 

I can tell you that- that when I ran in 2016, we came incredibly close. I came in second. There's a long history of runner-ups becoming the next nominee, and it was the most fun I've ever had in my life. But there's a lot of time between now and 2024.

See you around campus.