News from the South - Alabama News Feed

U.S. House GOP punts vote on Trump-backed budget for now amid battle over spending cuts

Published

2 months ago

April 9, 2025

alabamareflector.com – Jennifer Shutt – 2025-04-09 19:39:00

by Jennifer Shutt, Alabama Reflector
April 9, 2025

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson postponed a vote on the budget resolution that was supposed to take place Wednesday, as he tried to get the support of far-right members of the party who object because it won’t go far enough to achieve their goals of slashing government spending.

Johnson, R-La., said he hoped the House would be able to vote on the tax and spending blueprint Thursday, before leaving town for a two-week recess, though he didn’t rule out setting up a conference process with the Senate, or changing the budget resolution and sending it back across the Capitol.

“We are working through some good ideas and solutions to get everybody there,” Johnson said. “It may not happen tonight, but probably by tomorrow morning.”

Johnson’s comments came after he huddled behind closed doors for about an hour with more than a dozen far-right House Republicans who believe the budget resolution doesn’t require the Senate to cut enough spending.

“We want everybody to have a high degree of comfort about what is happening here,” Johnson said. “And we have a small subset of members who weren’t totally satisfied with the product as it stands. So we’re going to talk about maybe going to conference with the Senate, or adding an amendment. But we’re going to make that decision. We are going to continue to move forward. This is all positive.”

The House and Senate are far from agreement on how much to reduce federal spending later this year when they write the reconciliation bill.

The House instructions call on numerous committees to cut spending by at least $1.5 trillion, with more than half of that deficit savings coming from the committee that oversees Medicaid. Those instructions would likely lead to hundreds of billions in federal funding being pulled from the program, though Republicans insisted during floor debate they were only looking to address waste, fraud and abuse.

The Senate has given itself a floor of $4 billion in spending cuts, which could lead to substantial deficit increases. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released analysis last week, showing the reconciliation package could bolster deficits by up to $5.8 trillion during the next decade.

Trump lobbying, last-minute drama

House debate, which took place before the vote was delayed, followed days of lobbying by House GOP leaders and President Donald Trump, who urged holdouts to adopt the budget resolution during a campaign fundraising dinner Tuesday evening.

“I think we are there,” Trump said. “But just in case there are a couple of Republicans out there, you just got to get there, close your eyes and get there. It’s a phenomenal bill. Stop grandstanding, just stop grandstanding.”

That didn’t sway everyone, however, leading Speaker Johnson to pull about a dozen of the far-right members off the floor Wednesday evening just as the House was supposed to move on to the budget vote.

The rest of the chamber’s lawmakers waited on the floor for more than an hour as the group huddled nearby.

Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett and Texas Rep. Chip Roy were among the members to get summoned off the floor by Johnson.

Scalise pleads to ‘get America back on track’

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., called on Republicans to adopt the budget resolution earlier in the day during floor debate, saying it “just opens the door to” using the complex budget reconciliation process to enact their agenda.

“The process where 11 of our committees here in the House will go to work to start making improvements in so many areas to get America back on track,” Scalise said. “And ultimately, that’s why we all come here. We come here to solve big problems. We deal with small issues too. But every now and then — and it’s not often — you deal with a big issue that can actually improve the lives of families all across this country.”

Budget Committee ranking member Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., said members of his party wouldn’t allow the parts of the 2017 tax law that benefit the middle class to expire at the end of the year, rejecting claims from GOP lawmakers.

“If you’re a middle-class American, if you are in the 99%, you will not see your taxes go up next year,” Boyle said. “There is no question about that. What is at issue is the tax cuts for multimillionaires, billionaires and big corporations.”

Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Lloyd Smucker said he couldn’t vote to approve the budget resolution since the Senate’s instructions for spending cuts were “not acceptable.”

“To me, it’s important we have the guardrails in the initial resolution,” Smucker said, before encouraging House leaders to amend the budget resolution to increase the amount of spending cuts the Senate must implement.

“I can’t vote on this bill as it is, but there’s a path forward here and that is very, very important,” Smucker said.

Roy of Texas also spoke out against the budget resolution, saying the Senate’s instructions didn’t go far enough to reduce deficits.

“The Senate sent over a joke. And we’re going to capitulate to the Senate, knowing full well that the Senate instructions carry the day,” Roy said. “And we’re going to be sitting there in a reconciliation debate, where we’re going to end up on the short end of the stick. But worse, the American people are going to end up on the short end of the stick because it absolutely increases deficits. No one can deny it.”

Roy added that members of Congress should “pass a math test” because the numbers in the budget resolution didn’t add up.

Lengthy struggle

Republican leaders have struggled for months to get the vast majority of their members on board with the outline.

Even if the House finally approves the resolution, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., have months of work ahead of them as committees begin writing and debating their sections of the reconciliation package.

The budget resolution tasks 11 House committees and 10 Senate panels with meeting vague budget targets. Committees either have a minimum amount of spending to cut or a maximum amount of deficits they can create.

The House and Senate are relatively aligned on some of those targets, though they are far apart on spending cuts and potentially tax policy.

In the House, the Agriculture Committee needs to slice at least $230 billion; Education and Workforce must reduce spending by a minimum of $330 billion; Energy and Commerce needs to cut no less than $880 billion; Financial Services must find at least $1 billion in savings; Natural Resources has a minimum of $1 billion; Oversight and Government Reform has a floor of $50 billion; and the Transportation Committee needs to reduce deficits by $10 billion or more.

The Energy and Commerce Committee’s instructions have been a central issue for Democrats, and many centrist Republicans, who are concerned that Medicaid, the state-federal health program for lower-income people, will be a target for hundreds of billions in cuts.

Four Senate committees — Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry; Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; Energy and Natural Resources; and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP — must each find at least $1 billion in spending cuts over the 10-year budget window.

House committees that can increase the federal deficit include the Armed Services Committee with a cap of $100 billion in new spending, Homeland Security with a $90 billion ceiling for new funding for programs it oversees, Judiciary with a maximum of $110 billion and Ways and Means, which can increase deficits up to $4.5 trillion for tax cuts.

Senate committees also got instructions for increasing the deficit, which will allow them to spend up to the dollar amount outlined in the budget resolution. Those committees include Armed Services at $150 billion; Commerce, Science and Transportation with $20 billion; Environment and Public Works at $1 billion; Finance with $1.5 trillion in new deficits, likely for tax cuts; Homeland Security at $175 billion and Judiciary with $175 billion.

House instructions call for the reconciliation package to raise the debt limit by $4 trillion while the Senate’s plans say lawmakers can raise it by up to $5 trillion.

Slim majority

Assuming the House adopts the budget resolution, GOP leaders will need to keep nearly all of their members supportive during the next couple months as those numbers turn into tangible policy proposals.

House Republican leaders can only lose three members on party-line votes, given their paper-thin 220-lawmaker majority.

The same number of GOP senators can vote against the final reconciliation package as long as Vice President J.D. Vance casts the tie-breaking vote.

Any more Republicans opposing the package would prevent it from becoming law.

Last updated 7:37 p.m., Apr. 9, 2025

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

The post U.S. House GOP punts vote on Trump-backed budget for now amid battle over spending cuts appeared first on alabamareflector.com

Up Next

Wednesday Night Weather – 4/9/25

Don't Miss

Wendy Bailey to appear in court on charges related to her son's death

News from the South - Alabama News Feed

In polluted Birmingham community, Trump terminates funding for air monitoring

Published

1 day ago

June 15, 2025

Staff Editor

alabamareflector.com – Lee Hedgepeth, Inside Climate News – 2025-06-15 07:01:00

by Lee Hedgepeth, Inside Climate News, Alabama Reflector
June 15, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

BIRMINGHAM — When Jilisa Milton received the grant termination letter, she wasn’t surprised. She suspected this day would come.

The language the Greater Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution (GASP) had used in its application to the Environmental Protection Agency had been clear. “We’re talking about helping a community,” Milton, GASP’s executive director, said last week, “where Black people have been disproportionately impacted.”

Black residents had breathed heavily polluted air from a nearby coke plant for decades, and their neighborhoods had been declared a federal hazardous waste Superfund site after it was determined that waste soil laced with arsenic, lead and benzo(a)pyrene, a human carcinogen, from several nearby coke plants had been spread around their homes as yard fill.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

In light of this history and continued industrial pollution, GASP had obtained a $75,000 air monitoring grant from the Biden EPA in 2023.

Milton received the letter earlier this month from officials in President Donald Trump’s EPA terminating the grant because it no longer aligned with the agency’s priorities.

“I knew at some point they would notice the language of our grant,” Milton said, in that it made reference to services intended to help Black people.

Still, she said she doesn’t regret the way GASP characterized the situation on the ground in north Birmingham—that the need for air monitoring stemmed from the city’s history of corporate exploitation of majority-Black workers and residents.

Growing up in Birmingham, Milton said her grandparents often discussed the legacy of workers in the Magic City—so-nicknamed because of the seemingly supernatural economic boom spurred by steel production following the end of the Civil War.

“The majority of these workers were Black, and we can see the disparate impact that still has today,” Milton said. “And it’s really important for Birmingham to talk about our legacy and our history.”

Sanitizing that history, then, to comply with the Trump administration’s stated opposition to all things DEI and environmental justice—as if they were the same thing, just because they both often involve Black people—doesn’t sit well with her.

“I think the narrative work is gone then,” Milton said. “And we have to think about history so we don’t live it again.”

The grant, awarded through EPA’s small grants program, was set to fund GASP’s efforts to train residents in using air monitoring equipment to help establish a community air monitoring program, allowing those in north Birmingham access to critical information about the pollutants filling their lungs every day.

In addition to what is now the 35th Avenue Superfund site, encompassing the neighborhoods of Collegeville, Harriman Park and Fairmont, north Birmingham remains home to several polluters, leaving its residents in the 90th percentile for particulate matter, according to EJ Screen, a government tool also recently shuttered by the Trump administration.

That context of present and past pollution was what made securing funds for air monitoring so important, Milton said, giving residents an opportunity to learn more about the continued impact of industry on their health.

“For decades, residents of North Birmingham and other historically marginalized communities have been forced to live in the shadow of toxic industries with little support or transparency,” Milton wrote in a statement after receiving the termination letter. “The grant made it possible for us to monitor and document the pollution people live with everyday. Revoking this support sends a message that the health of Black, Brown, and low-income communities in Alabama is disposable.”

In its letter, EPA officials said the agency no longer supported the grant’s objectives.

“The purpose of this communication is to notify you that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hereby terminating Assistance Agreement No. EQ-02D22522 awarded to GASP,” the letter said. “This EPA Assistance Agreement is terminated in its entirety effective immediately on the grounds that the award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities. The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.”

Piles of coal and coke waste remain on the ground at the Bluestone Coke in Birmingham nearly three years after the plant closed. (Lee Hedgepeth/Inside Climate News)

GASP’s isn’t the only environmental justice effort in Alabama nixed by federal officials. In April, Trump announced the termination of what the administration termed an “illegal DEI” settlement aimed at addressing sewage issues in the state’s black belt that have left its majority-Black residents sometimes unable to flush their own toilets.

The agreement, reached under the Biden Administration, required the state’s Department of Public Health to improve sanitation efforts in the region. It’s still unclear what that termination will ultimately mean on the ground.

In the end, Milton said the impact of the administration’s decision to terminate the north Birmingham air monitoring grant is racist.

“Look at the way they talk about environmental justice,” she said of administration officials. “They say it’s illegal to address these issues. So you hear the things they say, and it’s reasonable to discern from that that the impact is racist, and that what they’re doing is intentional.”

People of all races are forced to face the consequences of polluted air and water, Milton emphasized, but ignoring the reality that people of color have borne and continue to bear the brunt of industrial exploitation isn’t helpful. In fact, she explained, doing so could undermine the relationship organizations like hers have built with residents of color living through the impacts of pollution every single day.

“I don’t want to sacrifice the trust we have in communities that want to be heard because they notice that we start to change the way we talk about these issues,” she said. “Because they are the most important stakeholders. They’re who we’re here to serve.”

Moving forward, GASP plans to appeal the termination with EPA officials, Milton said, though she suspects the agency is unlikely to change its mind. If that’s the case, the nonprofit will do what they’ve always done—look to individual donors to fill in the gaps. It’s work that can’t be abandoned, Milton said. Not if she can help it.

Independent Journalism for All

As a nonprofit newsroom, our articles are free for everyone to access. Readers like you make that possible. Can you help sustain our watchdog reporting today?

SUPPORT

The post In polluted Birmingham community, Trump terminates funding for air monitoring appeared first on alabamareflector.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning

This article exhibits a Left-Leaning political bias through its framing, language, and emphasis on environmental justice, racial disparities, and criticism of the Trump administration’s policy decisions. While it is presented under the banner of a nonprofit, non-partisan outlet, the narrative foregrounds the disproportionate impact on Black communities and casts recent Republican-led actions—particularly the termination of air monitoring and civil rights-related initiatives—in a negative light. It frames these decisions as racially motivated and harmful, aligning with progressive values on environmental equity and systemic injustice, without offering counterarguments or perspectives from the opposing side.

News from the South - Alabama News Feed

Faith Time: Challenges to faith Part I

Published

1 day ago

June 15, 2025

Staff Editor

www.youtube.com – WKRG – 2025-06-15 06:40:01

SUMMARY: Rabbi Steven Silberman of Congregation Ahavas Chesed discussed challenges to faith on Faith Time, emphasizing how global instability prompts deep spiritual questioning, such as “Where is God?” He highlighted the importance of community in Judaism, tracing its roots from Abraham to modern Jewish identity as an extended family. In today’s mobile society, he stressed the need for individuals to find belonging in local Jewish communities. Healthy questioning includes seeking purpose, understanding suffering, and connecting with God. Silberman encouraged engagement through prayer, charitable acts, activism, study, Hebrew language, and ties to Israel as essential ways to navigate and strengthen faith.

We talk about facing challenges to fundamental beliefs.

Source

News from the South - Alabama News Feed

Scattered summer storms in Alabama for Father's Day.

Published

1 day ago

June 15, 2025

Staff Editor

www.youtube.com – WVTM 13 News – 2025-06-15 06:35:38

SUMMARY: Alabama will experience scattered heavy storms on Father’s Day afternoon, following a cloudy and foggy morning with improving visibility. There’s no severe weather threat, but storms may bring frequent lightning, heavy downpours, and localized flooding, especially in areas like Walker and Winston counties affected by previous heavy rain. Temperatures will be in the mid to upper 80s with hot, steamy conditions. Storm coverage is expected to be more widely scattered than yesterday, but outdoor plans should account for possible rain. Summer storms will continue throughout the week, with decreasing storm activity later, leading to higher heat indices and approaching triple-digit feels-like temperatures by week’s end.