Reddit Politics Summary Monday Dec 18th 17

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This is a digest of the top posts on reddit/r/politics over the last 24 hours.
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Donald Trump to drop climate change from list of national security threats

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“There will be a [Senate] vote” to reinstate net neutrality, Schumer says

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• The Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal its own net neutrality rules last week, and the repeal will take effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register. But Congress can overturn agency actions by invoking the Congressional Review Act , as it did earlier this year in order to eliminate consumer broadband privacy protections.
• A CRA vote lets Congress "undo regulations with a simple majority," without the possibility of a filibuster, as a Washington Post story said in February.
• While a few Republicans in the House of Representatives either opposed or expressed skepticism about the net neutrality repeal, Republicans have a 239-193 majority in the House.

Warren and Sanders pen NY Times op-ed: 'Who Is Congress Really Serving?'

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• Warren and Sanders urge their fellow lawmakers to use this week’s funding bill to fund social programs that support low- and middle-income people and working parents.
• "The task in front of Congress over the coming week boils down to a basic question: Does Washington work for all of us or just for those at the top?" they ask. "Congress has a chance, right now, to take steps that will make life a bit better for millions of working people immediately and in the years to come.

Scarborough: The GOP tax plan 'steals' $1.5 trillion from millennials

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FBI warned Trump in 2016 Russians would try to infiltrate his campaign

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• They said the briefings, which are commonly provided to presidential nominees, were designed to educate the candidates and their top aides about potential threats from foreign spies.
• They were timed to occur around the period when the candidates began receiving classified intelligence, the officials said, which put them at greater risk for being targeted by foreign spies.
• As a former senator and secretary of state, Clinton would have been familiar with counterintelligence briefings, having already held a top-level security clearance.

If Bias of FBI Agents Is Issue for GOP, Let's Talk About the NYC Field Office

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• The idea is to discredit Mueller, even though he fired Strzok in July as soon as he found out about the texts, and prematurely smear the investigation's results as a partisan snipe hunt.
• But if Republicans want to go down this road of revealing text messages to probe bias against a politician, by all means let's grab the text messages of every agent who was working in the bureau's New York City field office in 2016.
• Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani spent much of the summer and fall of 2016 bragging that people he knew in the office, with which he had extensive dealings from his days as both U.S. Attorney for Southern New York and NYC's mayor, were constantly leaking anti-Clinton dirt to him.

Internal FCC Report Shows Republican Net Neutrality Narrative Is False

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• A core Republican talking point during the net neutrality battle was that, in 2015, President Obama led a government takeover of the internet, and Obama illegally bullied the independent Federal Communications Commission into adopting the rules.
• But internal FCC documents obtained by Motherboard using a Freedom of Information Act request show that the independent, nonpartisan FCC Office of Inspector General—acting on orders from Congressional Republicans—investigated the claim that Obama interfered with the FCC’s net neutrality process and found it was nonsense.
• First, some background: The FCC is an independent regulatory agency that is supposed to remain "free from undue influence" by the executive branch—it is not beholden to the White House, only the laws that Congress makes and tells it to regulate.

Donald Trump 'Would Probably Be a Dictator by Now' in Almost Any Other Country, Expert Says

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• Robert Reich, who served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, has openly called the president "an authoritarian." Terence Szuplat, a foreign policy speechwriter for former President Barack Obama, said in November Trump has "sought to emulate" authoritarians, demagogues and dictators in his responses to terror attacks.
• Meanwhile Trump has praised some of the most authoritarian leaders in the world, from Russia's Vladimir Putin to China's Xi Jinping to Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Rodrigo Duterte, the leader of the Philippines.
• The president's bellicose rhetoric toward Kim's regime has received widespread criticism, as many experts say it exacerbates the tensions with the rogue state and increases the likelihood it will be provoked into an act of war.

Trump privately calling Rosenstein a threat to his presidency: report

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The "What happened in your state last week?" Megathread, Week 51

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• Our AG, Josh Shapiro, will be taking legal actions against FCC decision to rule back Net Neutrality laws, there's no more details on it yet but he was one of the AG who sent a letter calling on the FCC to delay the vote and to allow the investigation of the fake comments to continue.
• I'm hoping that my vote there will make a difference in turning it blue- and on that topic as well- one of PA state senator, Daylin Leach , is running in the 2018 primaries for congress, for District 7. On that topic, I'll be relocating from District-15 to District-7 this month, PA District 7 is one the of the most gerrymandered districts in the nation, I attached an image of it if you're curious.
• There has been a rumor for a while that the Governor will announce a "higher education executive," a high paid muckymuck who will try to put more state control on state college budgets.