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james lankford
Big Oil Doesn't Just Want to Get Rich Wrecking the Climate—They Want Lower Taxes Too
"If this polluter handout is snuck into the GOP tax bill, then cuts to Medicaid and food stamps could well pay for another giveaway to Big Oil," said the co-author of a new report. "That's obscene."
Mar 24, 2025
Having helped install the most fossil fuel-friendly administration of the climate awareness era, Big Oil and their Republican boosters in Congress are now setting their sights on undermining a tax enacted by during the tenure of former President Joe Biden as part of the landmark Inflation Reduction Act.
Alan Zibel, research director at the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen, and Lukas Shankar-Ross, deputy director of Friends of the Earth's Climate and Energy Justice Program, noted in a report published Monday that Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who chairs the Senate Ethics Committee, earlier this year introduced industry-backed legislation, the Promoting Domestic Energy Production Act, for possible inclusion in Republicans' proposed $4.5 trillion tax giveaway to corporations and the ultrawealthy.
As Common Dreamsreported in January, the fossil fuel industry spent an estimated $445 million during the 2024 election cycle to elect President Donald Trump and other GOP candidates who serve their climate-wrecking interests, and it expects much in return.
"Domestic oil and gas companies, including from Lankford's home state of Oklahoma, have warned their investors about the corporate alternative minimum tax," Zibel and Shankar-Ross wrote. "The industry could soon be rewarded with specially tailored tax relief courtesy of their Republican political allies."
As the report explains:
Here's how the tax scheme works: In August 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic climate investments. To help pay for new spending, the bill included a set of corporate tax increases, the largest of which was the $222 billion corporate alternative minimum tax. This tax is meant to prevent corporations that deliver massive profits to investors from paying nothing or nearly nothing in taxes because of corporate-friendly tax loopholes. Under the corporate minimum tax, if a company reports an average of at least $1 billion in annual income over three years, then it must pay 15% of that reported income in taxes, minus certain deductions.
The report highlights Republican efforts to eliminate the minimum tax, including via legislation introduced by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and endorsed by the American Petroleum Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, National Mining Association, Western Energy Alliance, and industry lobbyists.
The bill introduced by Lankford would enable fossil fuel companies to skirt the minimum tax by allowing them to deduct "intangible" drilling costs, a tactic used as an effective subsidy for more than 120 years. Zibel and Shankar-Ross described the tax dodge as "the oldest and the largest fossil fuel subsidy on the books," and one which "allows all of the costs for drilling an oil or gas well to be deducted immediately in the year they are incurred."
"If individual taxpayers understood the magnitude of the extreme subsidies for Big Oil, they would be shocked."
"It is simply outrageous that the GOP is using its trifecta to create yet another fossil fuel subsidy," Shankar-Ross said in a statement, referring to Republicans' control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. "If this polluter handout is snuck into the GOP tax bill, then cuts to Medicaid and food stamps could well pay for another giveaway to Big Oil. That's obscene."
Zibel asserted that "oil and gas companies are using the political influence they purchased to dodge paying even a minimal part of their fair share."
"If individual taxpayers understood the magnitude of the extreme subsidies for Big Oil, they would be shocked," he added. "The newest effort to bypass even the most modest of tax bills by the industry is shocking, but sadly not surprising."
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Senate Dems Block 'Deliberately Misleading' GOP Bill Attacking Reproductive Care
"This bill is the very definition of pernicious: It attacks women's healthcare using false narratives and outright fearmongering," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Jan 22, 2025
U.S. Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked from a final vote a Republican bill that, according to Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, made clear that under newly sworn-in President Donald Trump, "it will be a golden age, but for the extreme, anti-choice movement."
"This bill is the very definition of pernicious: It attacks women's healthcare using false narratives and outright fearmongering, and adds more legal risk for doctors on something that is already illegal," Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the chamber's floor before senators voted 52-47 along party lines, short of the 60 votes needed to advance the so-called Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (S. 6) to a final vote.
Introduced by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), S. 6 would "prohibit a healthcare practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion," under the threat of fines and up to five years in prison. Healthcare professionals and rights advocates have condemned the legislation as deeply misleading.
"So much of the hard-right's anti-choice agenda is pushed, frankly, by people who have little to no understanding of what women go through when they are pregnant," said Schumer. "The scenario targeted by this bill is one of the most heartbreaking moments that a woman could ever encounter, the agonizing choice of having to end care when serious and rare complications arise in pregnancy. And at that moment of agony, this bill cruelly substitutes the judgment of qualified medical professionals, and the wishes of millions of families, and allows ultraright ideology to dictate what they do."
After honoring Cecile Richards, a longtime Planned Parenthood leader who died earlier this week, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Wednesday that "of all the bills that we could be voting on—lowering the cost of healthcare, expanding childcare, helping our families—it's an absolute disgrace that Republicans are spending their first week in power attacking women, criminalizing doctors, and lying about abortion."
"This isn't how abortion works; Republicans know it," stressed Murray, a senior member and former chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. "All babies are already protected under the law, regardless of the circumstance of their birth. Doctors already have a legal obligation to provide appropriate medical care. And we already know this sham bill from Republicans is not going anywhere."
"Last time we voted down this bill, I actually spoke about something Republicans refuse to acknowledge in this debate: the struggles, the struggles of a pregnant woman, who has received tragic news that her baby had a fatal medical condition and would not be able to survive, and who were able to make the choice that was right for their family," she noted. "But now, here we are, already hearing stories of women who were denied that choice by extreme Republican abortion bans."
Wednesday's vote fell on the 52nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that affirmed abortion rights nationwide—until it was reversed by right-wing justices in 2022, with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organizationdecision, which provoked a fresh wave of state-level restrictions on reproductive freedom.
"It's no accident that congressional Republicans used the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a watershed case for liberty, equality, and bodily autonomy, to vote on a bill that perpetuates myths about abortion care, shames the people who seek that care, and vilifies those who provide it," said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, in a statement.
"A majority of the electorate continues to support abortion rights and access," she noted. "Americans have seen the results of the Supreme Court's unjust and callous decision to overturn Roe v. Wade—from abortion bans forcing people to travel across state lines to access the care they need to pregnant people being denied care and even dying to an exodus of doctors that is exacerbating the existing maternal health crisis we face—and they reject restrictive abortion policies. That's why anti-abortion advocates must rely on disinformation like this bill to further their extreme agenda."
Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, also highlighted the country's sweeping healthcare crisis in her Wednesday statement about Republicans' failed bill.
"This bill is deliberately misleading and offensive to pregnant people, and the doctors and nurses who provide their care," she said. "At a time when we are facing a national abortion access crisis, lawmakers should be focused on how to bring more care to the communities they serve, not spending their time spreading misinformation, criminalizing doctors, and inserting themselves further into medical decisions made by healthcare professionals."
"This bill is not based in any reality of how medical care works," she added, "and it's wrong, irresponsible, and dangerous to suggest otherwise."
As the GOP works to restrict reproductive rights, advocacy groups are determined to fight back. All* Above All marked the Roe anniversary by releasing an Abortion Justice Playbook that the organization's president, Nourbese Flint, said "is our blueprint for a future where abortion access is equitable, universal, and free from discrimination."
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2 Baptist Pastors and US Senators Vote for More Killing of Palestinians in Gaza
The vote showed the hypocrisy of the two senators who are pastors of the Christian denomination.
Feb 20, 2024
The February 12, 2024 U.S. Senate vote on $14 billion to Israel shows the depravity of most of the members of the legislative body.
In particular it showed the hypocrisy of the two senators who are pastors of a Christian denominations as well as the shallowness of the few senators who called for a cease-fire and then voted for money to kill more Palestinians. Only three Senators who caucus with the Democrats voted against the funding—Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.)
Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) voted for $14 billion for Israel. He is a Baptist preacher from Georgia. For 19 years Warnock was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr.’s former congregation. He is the fifth and youngest person to serve as Ebenezer’s senior pastor since its founding, and he has continued with the position while serving in the Senate.
Would Martin Luther King, Jr. be proud of Ebenezer Church Senior Pastor Warnock? I think not!
Warnock was elected with the help of volunteers who came to Georgia from all over the country… and by funds from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that wanted desperately for the Democrats to be in charge of the Senate so that Israel super-supporter Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) would become the Senate majority leader. Schumer ties President Joe Biden as the strongest supporter for the state of Israel in the U.S. government. They both have protected the criminal actions of the state of Israel for decades, throughout Biden’s 36 years in the Senate, eight years as vice president, and now three years as president and Schumer’s 25 years in the Senate.
A small group of us caught Senator Warnock outside the door of the private entrance to his office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on February 12, less than 15 hours before the early morning vote on $14 billion to Israel to continue the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
In our appeal to his Christian values, we pleaded with him as a pastor, the only pastor in the Senate, to not vote for money for Israel to continue the killing in Gaza. He shook the hands of each in our group, our red-stained hands from our daily protests, symbolizing the blood on the hands of those protecting Israeli crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Warnock thanked us for our comments but would not say he would call for a cease-fire, and he didn’t say he was voting for the money to Israel and why.
But, as an aside, Warnock mentioned that he was not the only pastor in the Senate. We asked who the other one was?
Warnock replied, “James Lankford,” to which our group gave a collective groan. Lankford is from Oklahoma and is known as an ultra-conservative and is a strong supporter of Israel. He said that Israel is fighting “morally” while Hamas is not. Lankford was for 15 years the director of student ministry for the Baptist Convention of Oklahoma.
During the 2022 Georgia run-off election, Warnock’s 2018 sermon in which he condemned Israel for directing fire at unarmed Palestinian protesters near Israel’s separation fence with the occupied Gaza Strip was dug up by opponent former Sen. Kelly Loeffler.
As an African-American church leader, Warnock certainly knew of Israeli apartheid actions in Gaza and the West Bank. In 2019, he signed a statement published on the website of the National Council of Churches which compared Israeli control of the West Bank to “previous oppressive regimes” such as “apartheid South Africa” and said that the “ever-present physical walls that wall in Palestinians” are “reminiscent of the Berlin Wall.”
The statement was signed by several Christian faith leaders who traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories in late February and early March of 2019 as part of a joint delegation including representatives of “historic Black denominations of the National Council of Churches” as well as “heads of South African church denominations of the South African Council of Churches.”
Despite his comments that challenged the Israeli apartheid treatment of Palestinians and Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza, Warnock interestingly received campaign donations from the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) and began parroting its agenda, which includes supporting unconditional aid for Israel; condemning the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement; and strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship. All of this to get another Democratic Senator so that Chuck Schumer would become the Senate majority leader.
15 hours after our conversation with Pastor Warnock, at 5:00 am in the morning of February 13, the two Christian pastors in the U.S. Senate voted for $14 billion for Israel to continue the killing of massive numbers of Palestinians.
Would Martin Luther King, Jr. be proud of Ebenezer Church Senior Pastor Warnock? I think not!
As Warnock is a pastor in the footsteps and in the church of Martin Luther King Jr., one is quite sure that MLK in heaven is not pleased with Pastor Warnock’s vote for more military funding for Israel and for Ukraine.
One hopes that MLK comes to Warnock in his dreams to give him counsel for any future votes, votes that one would hope would reflect an abhorrence to genocide instead of bowing to Israeli political pressure.
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