WTF Just Happened Today

Thursday, June 24, 2021

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1/ Biden agreed to a bipartisan infrastructure deal after meeting with a group of senators at the White House. “We have a deal,” Biden said, endorsing the roughly $1 trillion infrastructure plan by a group of 10 senators. Under the framework, the bipartisan package would include about $579 billion in new spending to overhaul the nation’s transportation, electric utilities, water, and broadband infrastructure. The Senate, meanwhile, has started to work on a budget resolution that would allow Democrats to pass a second, much larger package of spending and tax increases unilaterally. Chuck Schumer said the Senate will simultaneously move forward with both the bipartisan agreement and the reconciliation bill. Nancy Pelosi told House Democratic leaders that the House won’t take up the bipartisan agreement until the Senate approves a package through reconciliation. (Bloomberg / Washington Post / Wall Street Journal / New York Times / Politico / CNN / NBC News / CNBC)

2/ The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pushed back against suggestions from a Republican congressman that the military was becoming too “woke” for teaching critical race theory at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Gen. Mark Milley called the accusations from Rep. Michael Waltz “offensive,” saying that studying institutional racism could be useful in understanding what “caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America” during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Milley added that military university graduates should be “open-minded and be widely read,” adding: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding — having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?” The exchange came at a House Armed Services Committee hearing to discuss the 2022 Defense Department budget. (New York Times / Reuters / NPR)

3/ Rudy Giuliani was temporarily barred from practicing law in New York and faces disbarment for making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while helping Trump challenge to the 2020 election results. The New York State appellate court temporarily suspended Giuliani’s law license, saying Giuliani represented an “immediate threat” to the public and had “directly inflamed” the tensions that led to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. “The seriousness of respondent’s uncontroverted misconduct cannot be overstated,” th...

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