DL Open Thread: Thursday, November 14, 2024

Meet Suck-Up #1:  While other Rethug senators’ heads exploded at the idea of having to vote to confirm Matt Gaetz to be AG, one senator said the following:

“He’s smart — clever guy,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said of Mr. Gaetz, adding: “I usually support presidential picks to be in their cabinet. I’ve done that for both sides. That’s my disposition.”

The disposition of a lap-dog.

Others were not nearly so enthusiastic:

“He’s got his work really cut out for him,” Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, said, chuckling as she spoke.

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, raised his eyebrows when reporters informed him of Mr. Trump’s choice.

“I’m still trying to absorb all this,” he said. Mr. Cornyn later told reporters: “I don’t really know him, other than his public persona.”

“I was shocked by the announcement — that shows why the advice and consent process is so important,” said Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, who has sometimes clashed with Mr. Trump. “I’m sure that there will be a lot of questions raised at his hearing.”

“I don’t think he’s a serious candidate,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican who also has broken with Mr. Trump frequently, said of Mr. Gaetz.

Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, refused to speak specifically about Mr. Gaetz’s candidacy, repeating that he was looking forward to all of Mr. Trump’s nominees receiving confirmation hearings and getting the president-elect’s cabinet in place.

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa and a former chair of the Judiciary Committee, stood expressionless as reporters asked him if he had any concerns about Gaetz, refusing to answer.

BTW, Gaetz resigned from the House yesterday, just days before…

…the House Ethics Committee was set to vote this week on releasing a report about Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), who resigned from Congress on Wednesday after being picked as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The Ethics Committee is still expected to meet and could release the report as soon as Friday, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations.

Gaetz has been under investigation by House Ethics, a bipartisan committee made up of an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, for allegations that he may have engaged in sexual misconduct and illegal drug use and accepted improper gifts. If a lawmaker is under investigation by the committee and resigns, is expelled or leaves Congress, the Ethics Committee immediately ceases any ongoing investigation.

Maybe Trump will get the Rethugs to support his recess appointment scheme:

A recess appointment, however, allow presidents to install their nominee to the position while the Senate is in recess, without a confirmation hearing or vote, according to the Recess Appointments Clause in the U.S. Constitution. It says: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”

So this means if a president manages to make a recess appointment, that individual’s term would only last for about two years. At that point, the person could be appointed again through the same recess appointment or through the regular Senate confirmation process.

TPM reviewed Hegseth’s youthful writings, including one year of columns for the Tory. They represent some of his earliest forays into political commentary, as Hegseth highlighted aspects of campus life that evidently turned him into a conservative firebrand. In pieces for the Tory, Hegseth and the team he oversaw railed against efforts to promote diversity on campus and what they described as the immoral “homosexual lifestyle.” Hegseth also cheered the Iraq War, wondered whether Princeton was too laudatory of Martin Luther King Jr., and advocated for children receiving “strong discipline” from their parents “in the form of spankings, moving next to soap-in-the-mouth.”

The company, the largest distributor of home oxygen equipment in the United States, admitted billing Medicare for ventilators it knew customers weren’t using (2024) and overcharging Medicare and thousands of elderly patients (2023). It settled allegations of violating a law against kickbacks (2018) and charging Medicare for patients who had died (2017). The company resolved lawsuits alleging a “nationwide scheme to pay physicians kickbacks to refer their patients to Lincare” (2006) and that it falsified claims that its customers needed oxygen (2001). (Lincare admitted wrongdoing in only the two most recent settlements.)

Such a litany of Medicare-related misconduct might be expected to provoke drastic action from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the federal health insurance program that covers 1 in 6 Americans. Given that most of Lincare’s estimated $2.4 billion in annual revenues are paid by Medicare, HHS wields tremendous power over the company.

Sure enough, as part of the 2023 settlement, HHS placed Lincare on the agency’s equivalent of probation, a so-called corporate integrity agreement.

That sounds dire. Except that before that corporate integrity agreement was signed in 2023, Lincare was under the same form of probation, with the same death penalty provision, from 2018 to 2023, and violated its terms. From 2006 to 2011, Lincare was similarly on probation and also violated the terms, according to the government. And before that — well, you get the picture. Lincare has been on probation four times since 2001. And despite a pattern not only of fraud, but of breaking its probation agreements, Lincare has never been required to do more than pay settlements that amount to pennies relative to its profits.

This is not an aberration. While HHS routinely imposes the death penalty on small operations, it has never barred a national Medicare supplier like Lincare from continuing to do business with the government. Some companies, it seems, are too big to ban.