Guns, Money, and Healthcare
I spent a lot of Wednesday and Thursday ducking in and out of C-SPAN, checking in on the #NoBillNoBreak sit-in and watching as much as I could until it was time to get back to work.
I was watching Wednesday night when they voted on whether to bring the House back into session at 2:30 a.m. to vote on a bill that would give $1.1 billion to combat the Zika virus. The Zika bill passed, but President Obama is reportedly planning to veto the bill should it pass the Senate:
House passes $1.1B Zika bill over Democratic opposition
The White House Thursday promised that President Barack Obama would veto the long-delayed response of the Republican-controlled Congress to the president’s request for fighting the Zika virus, saying it provided too little money and contained too many partisan provisions.
The $1.1 billion measure had already appeared sure to die in the Senate next at the hands of filibustering Democrats backing Obama’s $1.9 billion request and opposing spending cuts that House Republicans added to the measure.
I wasn’t watching earlier that night when the House was brought back into session to vote on whether to override a veto President Obama had placed on a resolution that the House had passed to block a rule that the Department of Labor had created that would require financial advisors to hold themselves to a fiduciary standard.
Wow. That’s confusing.
The point is that a lot of us just saw John Oliver discuss the difference between financial advisors and fiduciaries (fiduciaries are required to act in their clients’ best interests, financial advisors can promote investments or financial products that will make them money even if those aren’t the best choices for their clients), and now we know that part of our government is attempting to hold financial advisors to a fiduciary standard and another part is attempting to prevent that from happening.
As with nearly all aspects of our government, it’s not as simple as it seems; #NoFlyNoBuy means connecting gun purchases to our deeply flawed No-Fly List (although many people have suggested that this is a strategy deliberately chosen to reform both gun purchases and the No-Fly List), the bill funding efforts to combat Zika also restricts funding to Planned Parenthood, and even the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule includes exemptions for advisors who might still have conflicts of interest.
But it’s telling that the big discussions in the House of Representatives on Wednesday involved guns, money, and healthcare—maybe the three biggest issues we’ve got going, right now.
(Also: yeah, I’m spending a lot of today reading up on Brexit news and speculation. So we can discuss that in the comments too, if you want.)
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