Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat · January 13

January 12, 2025 (Sunday)

Almost ten weeks after the 2024 election, North Carolina remains in turmoil from it. Voters in the state elected Donald Trump to the presidency, but they elected Democrat Josh Stein for governor and current Democratic representative Jeff Jackson as attorney general, and they broke the Republicans’ legislative supermajority that permitted them to pass laws over the veto of the current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. They also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the state supreme court.

Republicans refuse to accept the voters’ choice.

In the last days of their supermajority, under the guise of relieving the western part of the state still reeling from the effects of late September’s Hurricane Helene, Republican legislators stripped power from Stein and Jackson. They passed a law, SB 382, to take authority over public safety and the public utilities away from the governor and prohibited the attorney general from taking any position that the legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans, does not support.

The law also radically changes the way the state conducts elections, giving a newly elected Republican state auditor power over the state’s election board and shortening the amount of time available for the counting of votes and for voters to fix issues on flagged ballots.

Outgoing governor Cooper vetoed the bill when it came to his desk, calling it a “sham” and “playing politics,” but the legislature repassed it over his veto. Now he and incoming governor Stein are suing over the law, saying it violates the separation of powers written into North Carolina’s constitution.

There is an important backstory to this power grab. North Carolina is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. In 2010, Republican operatives nationwide launched what they called Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take control of state legislatures across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census.

It worked. In North Carolina, Republicans took control of the legislature for the first time in more than 100 years. They promptly redrew the map of North Carolina’s districts so that the state’s congressional delegation went from a split of 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans in 2010 to a 9–4 split in favor of Republicans in 2012 despite the fact that Democrats won over 80,000 more votes than their Republican opponents. By 2015 that split had increased to 10–3.

The same change showed in the state legislature. North Carolina’s House of Representatives has 120 seats; its Senate has 50 seats. In 2008, Democrats won the House with 55.14% of the vote to the Republicans’ 43.95%. And yet in 2012, with the new maps in place, Republicans won 77 seats to the Democrats’ 43. The North Carolina Senate saw a similar shift. In 2008, Democrats won 51.5% of the vote to the Republicans’ 47.4%, but in 2012, Republicans held 33 seats to the Democrats’ 17.

When they held majorities in both chambers, Democrats passed laws that made it easier to vote, and voter turnout had been increasing with more Black voters than white voters turning out in 2008 and 2012. But in 2012, Republicans used their new power to pass a sweeping new law that made it harder to vote.

When courts found those maps unconstitutional because of racial bias, the state legislature wrote a different map divided, members said, not according to race but according to political partisanship, despite the overlap between the two.

“I’m making clear that our intent is to use the political data we have to our partisan advantage,” said state representative David Lewis, who chaired the redistricting committee. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage of 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Lewis declared: “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

That map, too, skewed representation. Although Democrats won a majority of votes for both the state House and the state Senate in 2018, Republicans held 66 out of 120 seats in the House and 29 of 50 seats in the Senate. Although they had lost the majority of the popular vote, Republican leaders claimed “a clear mandate” to advance their policies.

The fight over those maps went all the way to the Supreme Court, which said in Rucho v. Common Cause that the federal courts could not address partisan gerrymandering. Plaintiffs then sued under the state constitution, and in late 2019 a state appeals court agreed that the maps violated the constitution’s guarantee of free elections. A majority on the state supreme court agreed.

The court drew a new map that resulted in an even split again in the congressional delegation in 2022 (North Carolina picked up an additional representative after the 2020 census). But Republicans in that election won two seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court. In late spring 2022 the new right-wing majority said the state courts had no role in policing gerrymandering. The state legislature drew a new congressional map that snapped back to the old Republican advantage: in 2024, North Carolina sent to Congress 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats.

But they also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the North Carolina Supreme Court, by 734 votes. Her challenger, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has refused to concede, even after the two recounts he requested confirmed her win. He is now focusing on getting election officials to throw out the ballots of 60,000 voters, retroactively changing who can vote in North Carolina.

There has been a fight over whether the case should be heard in federal or state court; Griffin wants it in front of the state supreme court, which has a 5–2 majority of Republicans. Last Tuesday the state supreme court temporarily blocked the state elections board from certifying Riggs’s win while it hears arguments in the case.

As Will Doran of WRAL News explains, Republicans currently have a court majority, but three of the seats currently held by Republicans are on the ballot in 2028. Taking a seat away from Riggs would ensure Democrats could not flip the court, leaving a Republican majority in place for redistricting after the 2030 census.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gives North Carolina an “F” for its maps. In states that are severely gerrymandered for the Republicans, politicians worry not about attracting general election voters, but rather about avoiding primaries from their right, pushing the state party to extremes. In December, Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Washington Post noted that Republican leaders in such states are eager to push right-wing policies, with lawmakers in Oklahoma pushing further restrictions on abortion and requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, and those in Arkansas calling for making “vaccine harm” a crime, while Texas is considering a slew of antimigrant laws.

This rightward lurch in Republican-dominated states has national repercussions, as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in December sued New York doctor Margaret Daly Carpenter for violating Texas law by mailing abortion pills into the state. Law professor Mary Ziegler explains that if the case goes forward, Texas will likely win in its own state courts. Ultimately, the question will almost certainly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.

The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful, and today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system. But the political machinations that supported their efforts came from the work of New York politician Martin van Buren, whose time in the White House from 1837 to 1841 ultimately had less effect on the country’s politics than his time as a political leader in New York.

In the early 1800s, van Buren recognized that creating a closed system in the state of New York would preserve the power of his own political machine and that from there he could command the heavy weight of New York’s 36 electoral votes—the next closest state, Pennsylvania, had 28, after which electoral vote counts fell rapidly—to swing national politics in the direction he wanted. Van Buren’s focus was less on reinforcing enslavement for racial dominance—although he came from a family that enslaved its Black neighbors—but on money and power.

Van Buren set up a political machine known as the Albany Regency, building his power by taking over all the state offices and judgeships and by insisting on party unity. He opposed federal funding of internal improvements in the state, recognizing that such improvements would disrupt the existing power structure by opening up new avenues for wealth. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1820, he used his machine to elect Andrew Jackson to the White House on a platform promising “reform” of the federal government calling for economic development, a government the Democrats claimed had fallen into the hands of the elite. Once in power, Jackson used the federal government to benefit the enslavers who dominated the southern states.

That focus on preserving power in the states to keep political and economic power in the hands of a minority is a key element of our current moment. After the 1950s, as federal courts upheld the power of the federal government to regulate business and promote infrastructure projects that took open bids for contracts, they threatened to disrupt the economic power of traditional leaders. While state power reinforces social dominance as a few white men make laws for the majority of women and racial, gender, and religious minorities, it also concentrates economic power in the states, which in turn affects the nation.

When a Republican in charge of state redistricting constructs a map based on his idea that “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” and when a Republican candidate calls for throwing out the votes of 60,000 voters to declare victory in an election he lost, they have abandoned the principles of democracy in favor of a one-party state that will operate in their favor alone.

brianlux · January 13

mickeyrat said:

January 12, 2025 (Sunday)

Almost ten weeks after the 2024 election, North Carolina remains in turmoil from it. Voters in the state elected Donald Trump to the presidency, but they elected Democrat Josh Stein for governor and current Democratic representative Jeff Jackson as attorney general, and they broke the Republicans’ legislative supermajority that permitted them to pass laws over the veto of the current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. They also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the state supreme court.

Republicans refuse to accept the voters’ choice.

In the last days of their supermajority, under the guise of relieving the western part of the state still reeling from the effects of late September’s Hurricane Helene, Republican legislators stripped power from Stein and Jackson. They passed a law, SB 382, to take authority over public safety and the public utilities away from the governor and prohibited the attorney general from taking any position that the legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans, does not support.

The law also radically changes the way the state conducts elections, giving a newly elected Republican state auditor power over the state’s election board and shortening the amount of time available for the counting of votes and for voters to fix issues on flagged ballots.

Outgoing governor Cooper vetoed the bill when it came to his desk, calling it a “sham” and “playing politics,” but the legislature repassed it over his veto. Now he and incoming governor Stein are suing over the law, saying it violates the separation of powers written into North Carolina’s constitution.

There is an important backstory to this power grab. North Carolina is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. In 2010, Republican operatives nationwide launched what they called Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take control of state legislatures across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census.

It worked. In North Carolina, Republicans took control of the legislature for the first time in more than 100 years. They promptly redrew the map of North Carolina’s districts so that the state’s congressional delegation went from a split of 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans in 2010 to a 9–4 split in favor of Republicans in 2012 despite the fact that Democrats won over 80,000 more votes than their Republican opponents. By 2015 that split had increased to 10–3.

The same change showed in the state legislature. North Carolina’s House of Representatives has 120 seats; its Senate has 50 seats. In 2008, Democrats won the House with 55.14% of the vote to the Republicans’ 43.95%. And yet in 2012, with the new maps in place, Republicans won 77 seats to the Democrats’ 43. The North Carolina Senate saw a similar shift. In 2008, Democrats won 51.5% of the vote to the Republicans’ 47.4%, but in 2012, Republicans held 33 seats to the Democrats’ 17.

When they held majorities in both chambers, Democrats passed laws that made it easier to vote, and voter turnout had been increasing with more Black voters than white voters turning out in 2008 and 2012. But in 2012, Republicans used their new power to pass a sweeping new law that made it harder to vote.

When courts found those maps unconstitutional because of racial bias, the state legislature wrote a different map divided, members said, not according to race but according to political partisanship, despite the overlap between the two.

“I’m making clear that our intent is to use the political data we have to our partisan advantage,” said state representative David Lewis, who chaired the redistricting committee. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage of 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Lewis declared: “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

That map, too, skewed representation. Although Democrats won a majority of votes for both the state House and the state Senate in 2018, Republicans held 66 out of 120 seats in the House and 29 of 50 seats in the Senate. Although they had lost the majority of the popular vote, Republican leaders claimed “a clear mandate” to advance their policies.

The fight over those maps went all the way to the Supreme Court, which said in Rucho v. Common Cause that the federal courts could not address partisan gerrymandering. Plaintiffs then sued under the state constitution, and in late 2019 a state appeals court agreed that the maps violated the constitution’s guarantee of free elections. A majority on the state supreme court agreed.

The court drew a new map that resulted in an even split again in the congressional delegation in 2022 (North Carolina picked up an additional representative after the 2020 census). But Republicans in that election won two seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court. In late spring 2022 the new right-wing majority said the state courts had no role in policing gerrymandering. The state legislature drew a new congressional map that snapped back to the old Republican advantage: in 2024, North Carolina sent to Congress 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats.

But they also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the North Carolina Supreme Court, by 734 votes. Her challenger, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has refused to concede, even after the two recounts he requested confirmed her win. He is now focusing on getting election officials to throw out the ballots of 60,000 voters, retroactively changing who can vote in North Carolina.

There has been a fight over whether the case should be heard in federal or state court; Griffin wants it in front of the state supreme court, which has a 5–2 majority of Republicans. Last Tuesday the state supreme court temporarily blocked the state elections board from certifying Riggs’s win while it hears arguments in the case.

As Will Doran of WRAL News explains, Republicans currently have a court majority, but three of the seats currently held by Republicans are on the ballot in 2028. Taking a seat away from Riggs would ensure Democrats could not flip the court, leaving a Republican majority in place for redistricting after the 2030 census.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gives North Carolina an “F” for its maps. In states that are severely gerrymandered for the Republicans, politicians worry not about attracting general election voters, but rather about avoiding primaries from their right, pushing the state party to extremes. In December, Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Washington Post noted that Republican leaders in such states are eager to push right-wing policies, with lawmakers in Oklahoma pushing further restrictions on abortion and requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, and those in Arkansas calling for making “vaccine harm” a crime, while Texas is considering a slew of antimigrant laws.

This rightward lurch in Republican-dominated states has national repercussions, as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in December sued New York doctor Margaret Daly Carpenter for violating Texas law by mailing abortion pills into the state. Law professor Mary Ziegler explains that if the case goes forward, Texas will likely win in its own state courts. Ultimately, the question will almost certainly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.

The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful, and today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system. But the political machinations that supported their efforts came from the work of New York politician Martin van Buren, whose time in the White House from 1837 to 1841 ultimately had less effect on the country’s politics than his time as a political leader in New York.

In the early 1800s, van Buren recognized that creating a closed system in the state of New York would preserve the power of his own political machine and that from there he could command the heavy weight of New York’s 36 electoral votes—the next closest state, Pennsylvania, had 28, after which electoral vote counts fell rapidly—to swing national politics in the direction he wanted. Van Buren’s focus was less on reinforcing enslavement for racial dominance—although he came from a family that enslaved its Black neighbors—but on money and power.

Van Buren set up a political machine known as the Albany Regency, building his power by taking over all the state offices and judgeships and by insisting on party unity. He opposed federal funding of internal improvements in the state, recognizing that such improvements would disrupt the existing power structure by opening up new avenues for wealth. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1820, he used his machine to elect Andrew Jackson to the White House on a platform promising “reform” of the federal government calling for economic development, a government the Democrats claimed had fallen into the hands of the elite. Once in power, Jackson used the federal government to benefit the enslavers who dominated the southern states.

That focus on preserving power in the states to keep political and economic power in the hands of a minority is a key element of our current moment. After the 1950s, as federal courts upheld the power of the federal government to regulate business and promote infrastructure projects that took open bids for contracts, they threatened to disrupt the economic power of traditional leaders. While state power reinforces social dominance as a few white men make laws for the majority of women and racial, gender, and religious minorities, it also concentrates economic power in the states, which in turn affects the nation.

When a Republican in charge of state redistricting constructs a map based on his idea that “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” and when a Republican candidate calls for throwing out the votes of 60,000 voters to declare victory in an election he lost, they have abandoned the principles of democracy in favor of a one-party state that will operate in their favor alone.

"n the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country."

MAGAs are just itching to start a civil war. Lovely...

josevolution · January 13

brianlux said:

mickeyrat said:

January 12, 2025 (Sunday)

Almost ten weeks after the 2024 election, North Carolina remains in turmoil from it. Voters in the state elected Donald Trump to the presidency, but they elected Democrat Josh Stein for governor and current Democratic representative Jeff Jackson as attorney general, and they broke the Republicans’ legislative supermajority that permitted them to pass laws over the veto of the current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. They also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the state supreme court.

Republicans refuse to accept the voters’ choice.

In the last days of their supermajority, under the guise of relieving the western part of the state still reeling from the effects of late September’s Hurricane Helene, Republican legislators stripped power from Stein and Jackson. They passed a law, SB 382, to take authority over public safety and the public utilities away from the governor and prohibited the attorney general from taking any position that the legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans, does not support.

The law also radically changes the way the state conducts elections, giving a newly elected Republican state auditor power over the state’s election board and shortening the amount of time available for the counting of votes and for voters to fix issues on flagged ballots.

Outgoing governor Cooper vetoed the bill when it came to his desk, calling it a “sham” and “playing politics,” but the legislature repassed it over his veto. Now he and incoming governor Stein are suing over the law, saying it violates the separation of powers written into North Carolina’s constitution.

There is an important backstory to this power grab. North Carolina is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. In 2010, Republican operatives nationwide launched what they called Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take control of state legislatures across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census.

It worked. In North Carolina, Republicans took control of the legislature for the first time in more than 100 years. They promptly redrew the map of North Carolina’s districts so that the state’s congressional delegation went from a split of 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans in 2010 to a 9–4 split in favor of Republicans in 2012 despite the fact that Democrats won over 80,000 more votes than their Republican opponents. By 2015 that split had increased to 10–3.

The same change showed in the state legislature. North Carolina’s House of Representatives has 120 seats; its Senate has 50 seats. In 2008, Democrats won the House with 55.14% of the vote to the Republicans’ 43.95%. And yet in 2012, with the new maps in place, Republicans won 77 seats to the Democrats’ 43. The North Carolina Senate saw a similar shift. In 2008, Democrats won 51.5% of the vote to the Republicans’ 47.4%, but in 2012, Republicans held 33 seats to the Democrats’ 17.

When they held majorities in both chambers, Democrats passed laws that made it easier to vote, and voter turnout had been increasing with more Black voters than white voters turning out in 2008 and 2012. But in 2012, Republicans used their new power to pass a sweeping new law that made it harder to vote.

When courts found those maps unconstitutional because of racial bias, the state legislature wrote a different map divided, members said, not according to race but according to political partisanship, despite the overlap between the two.

“I’m making clear that our intent is to use the political data we have to our partisan advantage,” said state representative David Lewis, who chaired the redistricting committee. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage of 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Lewis declared: “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

That map, too, skewed representation. Although Democrats won a majority of votes for both the state House and the state Senate in 2018, Republicans held 66 out of 120 seats in the House and 29 of 50 seats in the Senate. Although they had lost the majority of the popular vote, Republican leaders claimed “a clear mandate” to advance their policies.

The fight over those maps went all the way to the Supreme Court, which said in Rucho v. Common Cause that the federal courts could not address partisan gerrymandering. Plaintiffs then sued under the state constitution, and in late 2019 a state appeals court agreed that the maps violated the constitution’s guarantee of free elections. A majority on the state supreme court agreed.

The court drew a new map that resulted in an even split again in the congressional delegation in 2022 (North Carolina picked up an additional representative after the 2020 census). But Republicans in that election won two seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court. In late spring 2022 the new right-wing majority said the state courts had no role in policing gerrymandering. The state legislature drew a new congressional map that snapped back to the old Republican advantage: in 2024, North Carolina sent to Congress 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats.

But they also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the North Carolina Supreme Court, by 734 votes. Her challenger, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has refused to concede, even after the two recounts he requested confirmed her win. He is now focusing on getting election officials to throw out the ballots of 60,000 voters, retroactively changing who can vote in North Carolina.

There has been a fight over whether the case should be heard in federal or state court; Griffin wants it in front of the state supreme court, which has a 5–2 majority of Republicans. Last Tuesday the state supreme court temporarily blocked the state elections board from certifying Riggs’s win while it hears arguments in the case.

As Will Doran of WRAL News explains, Republicans currently have a court majority, but three of the seats currently held by Republicans are on the ballot in 2028. Taking a seat away from Riggs would ensure Democrats could not flip the court, leaving a Republican majority in place for redistricting after the 2030 census.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gives North Carolina an “F” for its maps. In states that are severely gerrymandered for the Republicans, politicians worry not about attracting general election voters, but rather about avoiding primaries from their right, pushing the state party to extremes. In December, Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Washington Post noted that Republican leaders in such states are eager to push right-wing policies, with lawmakers in Oklahoma pushing further restrictions on abortion and requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, and those in Arkansas calling for making “vaccine harm” a crime, while Texas is considering a slew of antimigrant laws.

This rightward lurch in Republican-dominated states has national repercussions, as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in December sued New York doctor Margaret Daly Carpenter for violating Texas law by mailing abortion pills into the state. Law professor Mary Ziegler explains that if the case goes forward, Texas will likely win in its own state courts. Ultimately, the question will almost certainly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.

The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful, and today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system. But the political machinations that supported their efforts came from the work of New York politician Martin van Buren, whose time in the White House from 1837 to 1841 ultimately had less effect on the country’s politics than his time as a political leader in New York.

In the early 1800s, van Buren recognized that creating a closed system in the state of New York would preserve the power of his own political machine and that from there he could command the heavy weight of New York’s 36 electoral votes—the next closest state, Pennsylvania, had 28, after which electoral vote counts fell rapidly—to swing national politics in the direction he wanted. Van Buren’s focus was less on reinforcing enslavement for racial dominance—although he came from a family that enslaved its Black neighbors—but on money and power.

Van Buren set up a political machine known as the Albany Regency, building his power by taking over all the state offices and judgeships and by insisting on party unity. He opposed federal funding of internal improvements in the state, recognizing that such improvements would disrupt the existing power structure by opening up new avenues for wealth. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1820, he used his machine to elect Andrew Jackson to the White House on a platform promising “reform” of the federal government calling for economic development, a government the Democrats claimed had fallen into the hands of the elite. Once in power, Jackson used the federal government to benefit the enslavers who dominated the southern states.

That focus on preserving power in the states to keep political and economic power in the hands of a minority is a key element of our current moment. After the 1950s, as federal courts upheld the power of the federal government to regulate business and promote infrastructure projects that took open bids for contracts, they threatened to disrupt the economic power of traditional leaders. While state power reinforces social dominance as a few white men make laws for the majority of women and racial, gender, and religious minorities, it also concentrates economic power in the states, which in turn affects the nation.

When a Republican in charge of state redistricting constructs a map based on his idea that “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” and when a Republican candidate calls for throwing out the votes of 60,000 voters to declare victory in an election he lost, they have abandoned the principles of democracy in favor of a one-party state that will operate in their favor alone.

"n the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country."

MAGAs are just itching to start a civil war. Lovely...

They can’t win fair elections they have to resort to manipulation of the maps it’s disgusting they are a bunch of cheaters and have been for decades if not centuries!

mickeyrat · January 14

January 13, 2025 (Monday)

The incoming Trump administration is working to put its agenda into place.

Although experts on the National Security Council usually carry over from one administration to the next, Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller of the Associated Press today reported that incoming officials for the Trump administration are interviewing career senior officials on the National Security Council about their political contributions, how they voted in 2024, and whether they are loyal to Trump. Most of them are on loan from the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency and, understanding that they are about to be fired, have packed up their desks to head back to their home agencies.

The National Security Council is the main forum for the president to hash out decisions in national security and foreign policy, and the people on it are picked for their expertise. But Trump’s expected pick to become his national security advisor—his primary advisor on all national security issues—Representative Mike Waltz (R-FL) told right-wing Breitbart News that he wants to staff the NSC with people who are “100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”

Ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA) warned that the loyalty purge “threatens our national security and our ability to respond quickly and effectively to the ongoing and very real global threats in a dangerous world.”

But during Trump’s first term, it was Alexander Vindman, who was detailed to the NSC, and his twin Eugene Vindman, who was serving the NSC as an ethics lawyer, who reported concerns about Trump’s July 2019 call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to their superiors. This launched the investigation that became Trump’s first impeachment, and Trump appears anxious to make sure future NSC members will be fiercely loyal to him.

With extraordinarily slim majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans are talking about pushing through their entire agenda through Congress as a single bill in the process known as budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliation, which deals with matters related to spending, revenue, and the debt limit, is one of the few things that cannot be filibustered, meaning that Republicans could get a reconciliation bill through the Senate with just 50 votes. If they can hold their conference together, they could get the package through despite Democratic opposition.

House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican leaders have said that the House intends to pass a reconciliation bill that covers border security, defense spending, the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, spending cuts to social welfare programs, energy deregulation, and an increase in the national debt limit.

But Li Zhou of Vox points out that it’s not quite as simple as it sounds to get everything at once, because budget reconciliation measures are not supposed to include anything that doesn’t relate to the budget, and the Senate parliamentarian will advise stripping those things out. In addition, the budget cuts Republicans are circulating include cuts to popular programs like Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (more commonly known as Obamacare), the Inflation Reduction Act’s investment in combating climate change, and the supplemental nutrition programs formerly known as food stamps.

Still, a lot can be done under budget reconciliation. Democrats under Biden passed the 2021 American Rescue Plan and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act under reconciliation, and Republicans under Trump passed the 2017 Trump tax cuts the same way.

A wrinkle in those plans is the Republicans’ hope to raise the national debt limit. As soon as they take control of Congress and the White House, Republicans will have to deal immediately with the treasury running up against the debt limit, a holdover from World War I that sets a limit on how much the country can borrow. Although he has complained bitterly about spending under Biden, Trump has demanded that Congress either raise or abandon the debt ceiling because the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tax cuts he wants to extend will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years, and cost estimates for his deportation plans range from $88 billion to $315 billion a year.

Republicans are backing away from adding a debt increase to the budget reconciliation package out of concern that members of the far-right Freedom Caucus will kill the entire bill if they do. Those members want no part of raising the national debt and have demanded $2 trillion in budget cuts before they will consider it. Tonight, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told Jordain Carney of Politico that Senate Republicans expect the debt limit to be stripped out of the budget reconciliation measure.

So Republicans are currently exploring the idea of leveraging aid to California for the deadly fires in order to get Democrats to sign on to raising the debt ceiling. Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Trump met with a group of influential House Republicans over dinner Sunday night at Mar-a-Lago to discuss tying aid for the wildfires to raising the debt ceiling. Today, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) confirmed to reporter Hill that this plan is under discussion.

Indeed, Republicans have been in the media suggesting that disaster aid to Democratic states should be tied to their adopting Republican policies. The Los Angeles fires have now claimed at least 24 lives. More than 15,000 firefighters are working to extinguish the wildfires, which have been driven by Santa Ana winds of up to 98 miles (158 km) an hour over ground scorched by high temperatures and low rainfall since last May, conditions caused by climate change.

On the Fox News Channel today, Representative Zach Nunn (R-IA) said: "We will certainly help those thousands of homes and families who have been devastated, but we also expect you to change bad behavior. We should look at the same for these blue states who have run away with a broken tax policy.... Those governors need to change their tune now.” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) blamed Democrats for the fires and said of federal disaster relief: “I certainly wouldn't vote for anything unless we see a dramatic change in how they're gonna be handling these things in the future.”

Aside from the morality of demanding concessions for disaster aid after President Joe Biden responded with full and unconditional support for regions hit by Hurricane Helene (although Tennessee governor Bill Lee is still lying that Biden delayed aid to his state, when in fact he delayed in asking for it, as required by law), there is a financial problem with this argument. As economist Paul Krugman noted today in his Krugman Wonks Out, California “is literally subsidizing the rest of the United States, red states in particular, through the federal budget.”

In 2022, the most recent year for which information is available, California paid $83 billion more to the federal government than it got back. Washington state also subsidized the rest of the country, as did most of the Northeast. That money flowed to Republican-dominated states, which contributed far less to the federal government than they received in return.

Krugman noted that “if West Virginia were a country, it would in effect be receiving foreign aid equal to more than 20 percent of its G[ross] D[omestic] P[roduct].” Krugman refers to the federal government as “an insurance company with an army,” and he notes that there is “nothing either the city or the state could have done to prevent” the wildfires. “If the United States of America doesn’t take care of its own citizens, wherever they live and whatever their politics, we should drop “United” from our name,” he writes. “As it happens, however, California—a major driver of U.S. prosperity and power—definitely has earned the right to receive help during a crisis.”

Today, Biden announced student loan forgiveness for another 150,000 borrowers, bringing the total number of people relieved of student debt to more than 5 million borrowers, who have received $183.6 billion in relief. This has been achieved through making sure existing debt relief programs were followed, as they had not been in the past.

Establishment Republicans continue to fight MAGA Republicans, and MAGA fights among itself: former Trump ally Steve Bannon yesterday called Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk “truly evil” and vowed to “take this guy down.” But even as their enablers in the legacy media are normalizing Republican behavior, a reality-based media is stepping up to counter the disinformation.

Aside from the many independent outlets that have held MAGA Republicans to account, MSNBC today announced that progressive journalist Rachel Maddow will return to hosting a nightly one-hour show for the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.

And today journalist Jennifer Rubin joined her colleagues who have abandoned the Washington Post as it swung toward Trump. She resigned from the Washington Post with the announcement that she and former White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen have started a new media outlet called The Contrarian. Joining them is a gold-star list of journalists and commentators who have stood against the rise of Trump and the MAGA Republicans, many of whom have left publications as those outlets moved rightward.

“Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission—defending, protecting and advancing democracy,” Rubin wrote in her resignation announcement. In contrast, the new publication “will be a central hub for unvarnished, unbowed, and uncompromising reported opinion and analysis that exists in opposition to the authoritarian threat.”

“The urgency of the task before us cannot be overstated,” The Contrarian’s mission statement read. “We have already entered the era of oligarchy—rule by a narrow clique of powerful men (almost exclusively men). We have little doubt that billionaires will dominate the Trump regime, shape policy, engage in massive self-dealing, and seek to quash dissent and competition in government and the private sector. As believers in free markets subject to reasonable regulation and economic opportunity for all, we recognize this is a threat not only to our democracy but to our dynamic, vibrant economy that remains the envy of the world.”

In what appears to be a rebuke to media outlets that are cozying up to Trump, The Contrarian’s credo is “Not Owned by Anybody.”

mickeyrat · January 15

January 14, 2025 (Tuesday)

Shortly after midnight last night, the Justice Department released special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on former president Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The 137-page report concludes that “substantial evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump…engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power.”

The report explains the case Smith and his team compiled against Trump. It outlines the ways in which evidence proved Trump broke laws, and it lays out the federal interests served by prosecuting Trump. It explains how the team investigated Trump, interviewing more than 250 people and obtaining the testimony of more than 55 witnesses before a grand jury, and how Justice Department policy governed that investigation. It also explains how Trump’s litigation and the U.S. Supreme Court’s surprising determination that Trump enjoyed immunity from prosecution for breaking laws as part of his official duties dramatically slowed the prosecution.

There is little in the part of the report covering Trump’s behavior that was not already public information. The report explains how Trump lied that he won the 2020 presidential election and continued to lie even when his own appointees and employees told him he had lost. It lays out how he pressured state officials to throw out votes for his opponent, then-president-elect Joe Biden, and how he and his cronies recruited false electors in key states Trump lost to create slates of false electoral votes.

It explains how Trump tried to force Justice Department officials to support his lie and to trick states into rescinding their electoral votes for Biden and how, finally, he pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to either throw out votes for Biden or send state counts back to the states. When Pence refused, correctly asserting that he had no such power, Trump urged his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol. He refused to call them off for hours.

Smith explained that the Justice Department concluded that Trump was guilty on four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States by trying “to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest”; obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct by creating false evidence; and conspiracy against rights by trying to take away people’s right to vote for president.

The report explains why the Justice Department did not bring charges against Trump for insurrection, noting that such cases are rare and definitions of “insurrection” are unclear, raising concerns that such a charge would endanger the larger case.

The report explained that prosecuting Trump served important national interests. The government has an interest in the integrity of the country’s process for “collecting, counting, and certifying presidential elections.” It cares about “a peaceful and orderly transition of presidential power.” It cares that “every citizen’s vote is counted” and about “protecting public officials and government workers from violence.” Finally, it cares about “the fair and even-handed enforcement of the law.”

While the report contained little new information, what jumped out from its stark recitation of the events of late 2020 and early 2021 was the power of Trump’s lies. There was no evidence that he won the 2020 election; to the contrary, all evidence showed he lost it. Even he didn’t appear to believe he had won. And yet, by the sheer power of repeating the lie that he had won and getting his cronies to repeat it, along with embellishments that were also lies—about suitcases of ballots, and thumb drives, and voting machines, and so on—he induced his followers to try to overthrow a free and fair election and install him in the presidency.

He continued this disinformation after he left office, and then engaged in lawfare, with both him and friendly witnesses slowing down his cases by challenging subpoenas until there were no more avenues to challenge them. And then the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in.

The report calls out the extraordinary July 2024 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. United States declaring that presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts. “Before this case,” the report reads, “no court had ever found that Presidents are immune from criminal responsibility for their official acts, and no text in the Constitution explicitly confers such criminal immunity on the President.” It continued: “[N]o President whose conduct was investigated (other than Mr. Trump) ever claimed absolute criminal immunity for all official acts.”

The report quoted the dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, noting that the decision of the Republican-appointed justices “effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding.”

That observation hits hard today, as January 14 is officially Ratification Day, the anniversary of the day in 1784 when members of the Confederation Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War and formally recognized the independence of the United States from Great Britain. The colonists had thrown off monarchy and determined to have a government of laws, not of men.

But Trump threw off that bedrock principle with a lie. His success recalls how Confederates who lost the Civil War resurrected their cause by claiming that the lenience of General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States toward officers and soldiers who surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April 1865 showed not the mercy of a victor but rather an understanding that the Confederates’ defense of human slavery was superior to the ideas of those trying to preserve the United States as a land based in the idea that all men were created equal.

When no punishment was forthcoming for those who had tried to destroy the United States, that story of Appomattox became the myth of the Lost Cause, defending the racial hierarchies of the Old South and attacking the federal government that tried to make opportunity and equal rights available for everyone. In response to federal protection of Black rights after 1948, when President Harry Truman desegregated the U.S. military, Confederate symbols and Confederate ideology began their return to the front of American culture, where they fed the reactionary right. The myth of the Lost Cause and Trump’s lie came together in the rioters who carried the Confederate battle flag when they breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, is adamant about restoring the names of Confederate generals to U.S. military installations. His confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee began today.

The defense secretary oversees about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions, as well as a budget of more than $800 billion. Hegseth has none of the usual qualifications of defense secretaries. As Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare pointed out today, he has “never held a policy role…never run anything larger than a company of 200 soldiers…never been elected to anything.”

Hegseth suggested his lack of qualifications was a strength, saying in his opening statement that while “[i]t is true that I don’t have a similar biography to Defense Secretaries of the last 30 years…as President Trump…told me, we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’...and where has it gotten us? He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm.”

The “dust on his boots” claim was designed to make Hegseth’s authenticity outweigh his lack of credentials, but former Marine pilot Amy McGrath pointed out that Trump’s defense secretary James Mattis and Biden’s defense secretary Lloyd Austin, both of whom reached the top ranks of the military, each came from the infantry.

Hegseth has settled an accusation of sexual assault, appears to have a history of alcohol abuse, and has been accused of financial mismanagement at two small veterans’ nonprofits. But he appears to embody the sort of strongman ethos Trump craves. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”

When Hegseth was in the Army National Guard, a fellow service member who was the unit’s security guard and on an anti-terrorism team flagged Hegseth to their unit’s leadership because one of his tattoos is used by white supremacists. Extremist tattoos are prohibited by army regulations. Hegseth lobbied Trump to intervene in the cases of service members accused of war crimes, and he cheered on Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. Hegseth has said women do not belong in combat and has been vocal about his opposition to the equity and inclusion measures in the military that he calls “woke.”

Wittes noted after today’s hearing that “[t]he words ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ barely came up. The words ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’ made only marginally more conspicuous an appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as Europe even existed. By contrast, the words ‘lethality,’ ‘woke,’ and ‘DEI’ came up repeatedly. The nominee sparred with members of the committee over the difference between ‘equality’ and ‘equity.’”

Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) spoke today in favor of Hegseth, and Republicans initially uncomfortable with the nominee appear to be coming around to supporting him. But Hegseth refused to meet with Democrats on the committee, and they made it clear that they will not make the vote easy for Republicans.

The top Democrat on the committee, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) said he did not believe Hegseth was qualified for the position. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) exposed his lack of knowledge about U.S. allies and bluntly told him he was unqualified, later telling MSNBC that Hegseth will be an easy target for adversaries with blackmail material.

Hegseth told the armed services committee that all the negative information about him was part of a “smear campaign,” at the same time that he refused to say he would refuse to shoot peaceful protesters in the legs or refuse an unconstitutional order.

After the release of Jack Smith’s report, Trump posted on his social media channel that regardless of what he had done to the country, voters had exonerated him: “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” he wrote. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”

It's as if the Confederates’ descendants have captured the government of the United States.

mickeyrat · January 16

January 15, 2025 (Wednesday)

It is somehow fitting that President Joe Biden’s farewell address to the nation, scheduled for 8:00 Eastern time tonight, was overshadowed today by the dramatic announcement that after months of negotiation backed by the United States and facilitated by Egyptian and Qatari mediators, negotiators from Israel and Hamas have agreed to a ceasefire and to exchange Israeli hostages taken on October 7, 2023, for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

From when he broke his foot playing with his dog shortly after he was elected in 2020 and opted to forgo time-consuming physical therapy to address the stiffness in his gait in order to focus on his work, to the day of his January 2021 inauguration when he went straight to the office, through his decision to negotiate the historic 2024 Ankara prisoner exchange involving 26 prisoners and at least five nations at the expense of his reelection campaign, to today’s focus on the long-awaited ceasefire rather than his final speech, Biden has approached the office of the presidency as an opportunity to work for the goals he thinks advance the interests of the United States of America and its people.

This afternoon, Biden appeared, flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “Good afternoon,” he said to the press. “And it’s a very good afternoon, because at long last I can announce a ceasefire and a hostage deal has been reached between Israel and Hamas. [After] more than 15 months of conflict that began with [Hamas’s] brutal massacre of October the seventh, more than 15 months of terror for the hostages, their families, the Israeli people, more than fifteen months of suffering by the innocent people in Gaza, fighting in Gaza will stop and soon the hostages will return home to their families.”

“The elements of this deal were what I laid out in detail this past May,” Biden said. That plan “was embraced by countries around the world and endorsed overwhelmingly by the U.N. Security Council.” It has three phases.

Phase one is a six-week ceasefire in which Israeli forces will withdraw from all the populated areas of Gaza and Palestinians can return to their homes. Hamas will release the women, elderly, wounded, and American hostages it holds. Humanitarian assistance will surge into Gaza.

“During the next six weeks,” Biden said, “Israel will negotiate the necessary arrangements to get to phase two, which is a permanent end of the war.” The ceasefire will continue throughout the negotiations, even if they take longer than six weeks. Once phase two begins, the remaining living hostages will come home and all remaining Israeli forces will be withdrawn from Gaza.

In phase three the final remains of hostages who have been killed will be returned to their families, and a major reconstruction plan for Gaza will begin.

Biden noted that he has worked in foreign policy for decades and that “[t]his is one of the toughest negotiations I’ve ever experienced.”

Tonight, Biden began his farewell address by reiterating that negotiators had reached a ceasefire deal. Although incoming president Trump has already tried to take credit for the deal, Biden said: “This plan was developed and negotiated by my team. And it will be largely implemented by the incoming administration. That’s why I told my team to keep the incoming administration fully informed. Because that’s how it should be. Working together as Americans.”

Biden then turned to his farewell message to the nation. He began by reflecting on the need to protect our institutions against the abuse of power. “Our system of separation of powers, checks and balances…may not be perfect,” he said, “but it’s maintained our democracy for nearly 250 years, longer than any other nation in history that’s ever tried such a bold experiment.”

“In the past four years, our democracy has held strong,” he said, “And every day, I’ve kept my commitment to be president for all Americans through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history.” He praised Vice President Kamala Harris as his partner, calling it the honor of his life to see Americans working together to come through a once-in-a-century pandemic, “standing up for our rights and our freedoms instead of losing their jobs to an economic crisis,” with “millions of entrepreneurs and companies creating new businesses and industries, hiring American workers, using American products.”

“Together,” Biden said, “we’ve launched a new era of American possibilities, one of the greatest modernizations of infrastructure in our entire history, from new roads, bridges, clean water, affordable high-speed Internet for every American.” We brought back semiconductor manufacturing to the United States, “creating thousands of jobs.” We have given “Medicare the power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for millions of seniors” protected children and families “by passing the most significant gun safety law in 30 years and bringing violent crime to a 50-year low,” and met “our sacred obligation to over one million veterans so far who were exposed to toxic materials and to their families, providing medical care and education benefits.”

“We’ve created nearly 17 million new jobs—more than any other single administration in a single term. More people have healthcare than ever before. And overseas, we’ve strengthened NATO. Ukraine is still free. And we’ve pulled ahead of our competition with China…. I’m so proud of how much we’ve accomplished together for the American people. And I wish the incoming administration success. Because I want America to succeed.”

Then Biden issued a warning that will stand alongside other prescient warnings outgoing presidents have delivered, like President George Washington famously warning about the dangers of foreign entanglements, and President Dwight Eisenhower warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”

Biden warned the country of “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.” There are dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked, he said. “Today an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

Biden pointed out that a century ago the American people stood up to the robber barons and made them “play by the rules everybody else had to…. And it helped put us on a path to building the largest middle class in the world [and] the most prosperous century any nation in the world has ever seen.”

He and his administration worked to accomplish this plan for the last four years, he said, with legislation aimed at both “protecting the environment and growing the economy,” but “powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis, to serve their own interests for power and profit.” He warned about “the concentration of technology, power, and wealth.”

While President Eisenhower warned of the rise of the military-industrial complex and “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,” Biden said that six decades later he is “equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation,” he said, “enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling [or] disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit…. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.”

Going forward, Biden said, “it’s going to be up to the president…, the Congress, the courts, the free press, and the American people to confront these powerful forces.” He called for reforming the tax code to make billionaires pay their fair share, and for getting rid of the flood of dark money in politics.

He called for ethics rules and an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices, and for banning members of Congress from trading stock. He also called for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that no president is immune from crimes they commit in office. “The president’s power is not unlimited,” he said. “It’s not absolute.”

The concentration of wealth and power threatens democracy, Biden warned, by eroding “the sense of unity and common purpose,” noting that when people feel they don’t have a fair shot at success, staying engaged in the process becomes “exhausting and even disillusioning.” It is essential to democracy for people to feel like they can go as far as their hard work and talent can take them.

Biden noted the “short distance between peril and possibility” but promised that “what I believe is the America of our dreams is always closer than we think. It’s up to us to make our dreams come true.”

After thanking members of his administration, public servants and first responders across the country and around the world, U.S. service members and their families, Vice President Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and their family, Biden offered his “eternal thanks to you, the American people.”

“After 50 years of public service,” he said, “I give you my word: I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands. A nation where the strengths of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure.

“Now it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame. May you keep the faith.

"I love America.

“You love it too.

“God bless you all.”

mickeyrat · January 17

January 16, 2025 (Thursday)

In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was "the single most important economic issue of the day." But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

mickeyrat · January 18

January 17, 2025 (Friday)

As President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris prepare to leave office at noon on Monday and President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance prepare to be sworn in, on the one hand last-minute orders are being made and goodbyes are being said, while on the other, the incoming administration is setting expectations.

On Thursday, Biden issued an executive order to strengthen the cyber defenses of the United States after hackers from China, Russia, and other countries have broken into federal agencies. The executive order requires software manufacturers like Microsoft to prove that their products meet security requirements before the federal government will buy them.

Today, Biden issued a statement declaring his belief that the Equal Rights Amendment guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex is the law of the land. Congress passed the amendment in 1972 and sent it off to the states for ratification, imposing on that ratification a seven-year deadline. Thirty states ratified the ERA within the next year, but a fierce opposition campaign led by right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly eroded support among Republicans, and although Congress extended the deadline by three years, only 35 states had signed on by 1977. And, confusing matters, legislatures in five states—Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee—voted to take back their earlier ratification.

In 2017, Nevada became the first state to ratify the ERA since 1977. Then Illinois stepped up, and finally, in 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, putting it over the required three quarters of states needed for the amendment to become part of the Constitution. But the radical right worried that women’s legal equality to men would protect abortion rights and that, as Catholic bishops of the United States wrote to senators, it would prohibit “discrimination based on ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ and other categories.” Opponents have challenged the amendment’s ratification over both the original deadline and whether the states’ rescinding of previous ratifications has merit.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) agrees that the amendment would help to protect abortion rights and has spearheaded efforts to get Biden to direct the national archivist, Colleen Shogan, to certify and publish the ERA, pointing out that the American Bar Association agrees that it has been ratified. But the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel says it considers the ERA expired unratified in 1982, and Shogan says she will defer to the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel.

The executive branch doesn’t have a role in the ratification of constitutional amendments, and Biden’s announcement did not direct the archivist to certify the amendment. But a president’s public disagreement with the Office of Legal Counsel will add weight to the argument that the amendment has been ratified.

“We, as a nation, must affirm and protect women’s full equality once and for all,” Biden said.

Biden also set out to right the wrong embedded in the 1986 Anti–Drug Abuse Act. That law imposed a mandatory minimum of five years in federal prison without the possibility of parole for possession of five grams of crack cocaine, which urban Black Americans favored, while the same penalty applied to 500 grams of powdered cocaine, the form of the drug favored by white Americans. That disparity has been a symbol of racial injustice in the federal justice system, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission called for its reform in April of 1995. Today, Biden shortened the sentences of 2,490 nonviolent drug offenders convicted of crimes related to crack cocaine.

Biden and administration officials have been saying goodbye to their teams. On Thursday, Biden bid farewell to U.S. service members, thanking them for “your service to our nation and for allowing me to bear witness to your courage, your commitment, your character.” He asked them to “remember your oath” and to protect “American values: [o]ur commitment to honor, to integrity, to unity, to protecting…and defending not a person or a party or a place, but an idea…that we’re all created equal.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland also bid his team farewell yesterday, thanking them for their work confronting fentanyl dealers who threaten our communities, disrupting threats from both foreign and domestic terrorists and from authoritarian leaders that threaten the country’s security, protecting economic competition and prosecuting fraud and corruption, and defending civil rights. “You have worked to pursue justice—not politics,” he said. “That is the truth, and nothing can change it.”

Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken thanked those in the State Department for building partnerships and strengthening alliances, “rallying the world in common cause.” “We come from different places, different experiences, different motivations and backgrounds,” he said, “But I think what brings all of us together in this place, in this time, is that unique feeling that you get going to work every single day with the Stars and Stripes behind your back,” “working every day to make things just a little bit better, a little bit more peaceful, a little bit more full of hope, of opportunity.”

Blinken told members of the department, “the custodians of the power and the promise of American diplomacy,” that he would always be their champion, but that he was returning “to the highest calling in a democracy, that of being a private citizen.”

As Biden administration officials leave, the incoming Trump administration is vowing to unleash “shock and awe” in the first days of Trump’s presidency as the new president issues what Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) called a “blizzard of executive orders” to reshape the country according to his policies. In The Bulwark today, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Mark Hertling, former Commanding General of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army, explained that the concept of shock and awe calls for gaining an advantage over an enemy with overwhelming firepower followed by brilliant execution. The plan anticipates paralyzing the enemy with “such overwhelming force that resistance is futile.”

For his part, Hertling seems unimpressed, noting that “[i]f your plan calls for your side being all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect in execution, and immune to surprise—when you’re working with human beings and you presume your enemy is stupid, weak, and all but inanimate—the plan probably isn’t worth all that much.”

Aaron Zitner and Xavier Martinez of the Wall Street Journal reported today on a new Wall Street Journal poll revealing that American voters want what they call “MAGA lite, rather than extra-strength MAGA.” More than 60% oppose Trump’s plan to replace nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists. More than 60% also oppose Trump’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education. Almost 75% of voters oppose his plans for sweeping deportation raids, wanting only those with criminal records to be removed from the country. More than two thirds oppose calls to take control of Greenland, and only 46% approve of his choices for cabinet positions.

But the Republican-dominated Senate seems poised to approve Trump’s picks for cabinet secretaries and other appointees that require Senate confirmation. As they have been appearing before the committees responsible for vetting those candidates before they go on to the vote of the full Senate, key appointees have been demonstrating that their primary qualification is their loyalty to Trump.

Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth revealed that he knows close to nothing about the actual requirements for the job but declined to say he would refuse an unconstitutional order. Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, said she would “study” the Fourteenth Amendment after being asked about the birthright citizenship embedded in it, and she refused to say that Biden won the 2020 election.

In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has apparently caved to Trump’s demand that he remove Representative Mike Turner (R-OH) from the chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, an action that will remove him from the committee altogether because of term limits for those committee members who are not the chair. Turner was well respected in that post by members of both parties, but was a staunch defender of Ukraine who last April had warned that it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”

Alice Miranda Ollstein, Caitlin Oprysko, and Irie Sentner of Politico reported yesterday that experts expect Trump and his allied political action committees to pull in as much as $250 million for Trump’s inauguration. But much of the cost of the inauguration is actually covered by taxpayer dollars, they report, and while laws require the inaugural committee to disclose its donors, there is no requirement to say where the money goes. Trump’s Inaugural Committee fundraiser told the reporters that any money not spent on the inauguration will likely go toward Trump’s presidential library.

The weather forecast for Washington, D.C., for Monday’s inauguration predicts a high in the low 20s (approximately –5° Celsius), and late this afternoon, Trump announced on his social media company that he was moving the inauguration inside to the Capitol Rotunda because of the cold. This leaves workers less than 72 hours to change the plan for an outdoor inauguration they had begun preparing for on September 18.

Members of Congress have been distributing tickets to their constituents, but because of the change, the Joint Inaugural Committee of Congress has told the public that the “vast majority of ticketed guests will not be able to attend the ceremonies in person.” The House sergeant at arms suggested to members of Congress that they should tell their constituents that their tickets should now be considered “commemorative.”

mickeyrat · January 19

January 18, 2025 (Saturday)

Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July when it asked eight large companies to turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices. The FTC focused on the middlemen hired by retailers. Those middlemen use algorithms to tweak and target prices to different markets.

The initial findings of the FTC using data from six of the eight companies show that those prices are not static. Middlemen can target prices to individuals using their location, browsing patterns, shopping history, and even the way they move a mouse over a webpage. They can also use that information to show higher-priced products first in web searches. The FTC found that the intermediaries—the middlemen—worked with at least 250 retailers.

“Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person's location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage,” said FTC chair Lina Khan. “The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service.”

The FTC has asked for public comment on consumers’ experience with surveillance pricing.

FTC commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson, whom Trump has tapped to chair the commission in his incoming administration, dissented from the report.

Matt Stoller of the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, which is working “to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power,” wrote that “[t]he antitrust enforcers (Lina Khan et al) went full Tony Montana on big business this week before Trump people took over.”

Stoller made a list. The FTC sued John Deere “for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment,” released a report showing that pharmacy benefit managers had “inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion,” “sued corporate landlord Greystar, which owns 800,000 apartments, for misleading renters on junk fees,” and “forced health care private equity powerhouse Welsh Carson to stop monopolization of the anesthesia market.”

It sued Pepsi for conspiring to give Walmart exclusive discounts that made prices higher at smaller stores, “[l]eft a roadmap for parties who are worried about consolidation in AI by big tech by revealing a host of interlinked relationships among Google, Amazon and Microsoft and Anthropic and OpenAI,” said gig workers can’t be sued for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and forced game developer Cognosphere to pay a $20 million fine for marketing loot boxes to teens under 16 that hid the real costs and misled the teens.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “sued Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by misleading consumers over savings accounts,” Stoller continued. It “forced Cash App purveyor Block…to give $120 million in refunds for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers,” “sued Experian for refusing to give consumers a way to correct errors in credit reports,” ordered Equifax to pay $15 million to a victims’ fund for “failing to properly investigate errors on credit reports,” and ordered “Honda Finance to pay $12.8 million for reporting inaccurate information that smeared the credit reports of Honda and Acura drivers.”

The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice sued “seven giant corporate landlords for rent-fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage,” Stoller went on. It “sued $600 billion private equity titan KKR for systemically misleading the government on more than a dozen acquisitions.”

“Honorary mention goes to [Secretary Pete Buttigieg] at the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and fining Frontier for ‘chronically delayed flights,’” Stoller concluded. He added more results to the list in his newsletter BIG.

Meanwhile, last night, while the leaders in the cryptocurrency industry were at a ball in honor of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency. By morning he appeared to have made more than $25 billion, at least on paper. According to Eric Lipton at the New York Times, “ethics experts assailed [the business] as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.”

Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told Lipton: “It is literally cashing in on the presidency—creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office. It is beyond unprecedented.” Cryptocurrency leaders worried that just as their industry seems on the verge of becoming mainstream, Trump’s obvious cashing-in would hurt its reputation. Venture capitalist Nick Tomaino posted: “Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it.”

Yesterday the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, asked X, the social media company owned by Trump-adjacent billionaire Elon Musk, to hand over internal documents about the company’s algorithms that give far-right posts and politicians more visibility than other political groups. The European Union has been investigating X since December 2023 out of concerns about how it deals with the spread of disinformation and illegal content. The European Union’s Digital Services Act regulates online platforms to prevent illegal and harmful activities, as well as the spread of disinformation.

Today in Washington, D.C., the National Mall was filled with thousands of people voicing their opposition to President-elect Trump and his policies. Online speculation has been rampant that Trump moved his inauguration indoors to avoid visual comparisons between today’s protesters and inaugural attendees. Brutally cold weather also descended on President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, but a sea of attendees nonetheless filled the National Mall.

Trump has always understood the importance of visuals and has worked hard to project an image of an invincible leader. Moving the inauguration indoors takes away that image, though, and people who have spent thousands of dollars to travel to the capital to see his inauguration are now unhappy to discover they will be limited to watching his motorcade drive by them. On social media, one user posted: “MAGA doesn’t realize the symbolism of [Trump] moving the inauguration inside: The billionaires, millionaires and oligarchs will be at his side, while his loyal followers are left outside in the cold. Welcome to the next 4+ years.”

Trump is not as good at governing as he is at performance: his approach to crises is to blame Democrats for them. But he is about to take office with majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, putting responsibility for governance firmly into his hands.

Right off the bat, he has at least two major problems at hand.

Last night, Commissioner Tyler Harper of the Georgia Department of Agriculture suspended all “poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales” until further notice after officials found Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or bird flu, in a commercial flock. As birds die from the disease or are culled to prevent its spread, the cost of eggs is rising—just as Trump, who vowed to reduce grocery prices, takes office.

There have been 67 confirmed cases of the bird flu in the U.S. among humans who have caught the disease from birds. Most cases in humans are mild, but public health officials are watching the virus with concern because bird flu variants are unpredictable. On Friday, outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra announced $590 million in funding to Moderna to help speed up production of a vaccine that covers the bird flu. Juliana Kim of NPR explained that this funding comes on top of $176 million that Health and Human Services awarded to Moderna last July.

The second major problem is financial. On Friday, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen wrote to congressional leaders to warn them that the Treasury would hit the debt ceiling on January 21 and be forced to begin using extraordinary measures in order to pay outstanding obligations and prevent defaulting on the national debt. Those measures mean the Treasury will stop paying into certain federal retirement accounts as required by law, expecting to make up that difference later.

Yellen reminded congressional leaders: “The debt limit does not authorize new spending, but it creates a risk that the federal government might not be able to finance its existing legal obligations that Congresses and Presidents of both parties have made in the past.” She added, “I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”

Both the avian flu and the limits of the debt ceiling must be managed, and managed quickly, and solutions will require expertise and political skill.

Rather than offering their solutions to these problems, the Trump team leaked that it intended to begin mass deportations on Tuesday morning in Chicago, choosing that city because it has large numbers of immigrants and because Trump’s people have been fighting with Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat. Michelle Hackman, Joe Barrett, and Paul Kiernan of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, reported that Trump’s people had prepared to amplify their efforts with the help of right-wing media.

But once the news leaked of the plan and undermined the “shock and awe” the administration wanted, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said the team was reconsidering it.

mickeyrat · January 19

So we're doing this tonight. The administrators will stream it here on my Facebook page as well as on their site, but Katie says you should sign up at this link because they're going to have state-specific action parties after we're done.

https://secure.everyaction.com/s6QgxkaLIkO5mV_NmNIVRQ2?utm_campaign=Event-Build&utm_source=partner&utm_medium=social&utm_content=HCR&region=National&oa_audience&oa_medium=social&oa_source=partner&oa_content=HCR&oa_campaigntype=Event-Build&fbclid=IwY2xjawH6R7dleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHfQCYCtm_oTGegjgSpETQADHuQggpH0WjdSFg41yw3hopdQLwTe54eTCyQ_aem_y4UaKKwswZyc2hM1IU5W6w

mickeyrat · January 20

January 19, 2025 (Sunday)

You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter…because I've been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2025.

brianlux · January 20

mickeyrat said:

January 19, 2025 (Sunday)

You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter…because I've been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2025.

Beautiful! One of her best ever!

mickeyrat · January 21

January 20, 2025 (Monday)

The tone for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States at noon today was set on Friday, when Trump, who once trashed cryptocurrency as “based on thin air,” launched his own cryptocurrency. By Sunday morning it had made more than $50 billion on paper. Felix Salmon of Axios reported that “a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon—now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.”

As Salmon noted, “The emoluments clause of the Constitution,” which prohibits any person holding a government office from accepting any gift or title from a foreign leader or government, “written in 1787, hardly envisaged a world where a president could conjure billions of dollars of wealth out of nowhere just by endorsing a meme.” Salmon also pointed out that there is no way to track the purchases of this coin, meaning it will be a way for those who want something from Trump to transfer money directly to him.

Former Trump official Anthony Scaramucci posted that “anyone in the world can essentially deposit money” into the bank account of the president of the United States.

On Sunday, Trump’s wife Melania launched her own coin. It took the wind out of the sales of Trump’s coin, although both coins have disclaimers saying that the coins are “an expression of support for and engagement with the values embodied by” the Trumps, and are not intended to be “an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.” Her cryptocurrency was worth more than $5 billion within two hours.

CNN noted that the release of the meme coin had raised “serious ethics concerns,” but those who participate in the industry were less gentle. One wrote: “Trump’s sh*tcoin release has caused possibly the greatest overnight loss of credibility in presidential history. He made $60B. Great for Trump family, terrible for this country and hopes we had for the Trump presidency.”

Walter Schaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics under Trump in his first administration, who left after criticizing Trump’s unwillingness to divest himself of his businesses, wrote to CNN: “America voted for corruption, and that’s what Trump is delivering…. Trump’s corruption and naked profiteering is so open, extreme and pervasive this time around that to comment on any one aspect of it would be to lose the forest for the trees. The very idea of government ethics is now a smoldering crater.”

At a rally Sunday night at the Capital One Arena in Washington, Trump highlighted the performance side of his public persona. He teased the next day’s events and let his audience in on a secret that echoed the “neokayfabe” of professional wrestling by leaving people wondering if it was true or a lie. After praising Elon Musk, he told the crowd “He was very effective. He knows those computers better than anybody. Those vote counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide. So it was pretty good…. Thank you to Elon.”

This morning, hours before he left office, President Joe Biden pardoned several of the targets of MAGA Republicans, including "General Mark A. Milley, Anthony S. Fauci, the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee.” Biden clarified that the pardons “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.” He noted, “Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.”

But, he said, "These are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong—and in fact have done the right thing—and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances." He later pardoned his siblings and their spouses to protect them from persecution by the incoming president.

Before he left office, Biden posted on social media: Scripture says: “I have been young and now I’m old yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken.” After all these years serving you, the American people, I have not seen the righteous forsaken. I love you all. May you keep the faith. And may God bless you all.”

This morning, members of the far-right paramilitary organization the Proud Boys marched through the capital carrying a banner that read “Congratulations President Trump” and chanting: “Whose streets? Our streets!”

Two days ago, Trump moved his inauguration into the Capitol Rotunda, where his supporters had rioted on January 6, 2021, because of cold temperatures expected in Washington, D.C. Even with his supporters excluded, the space was cramped, but prime spots went to billionaires: Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook, Google chief Sundar Pichai, TikTok chief executive officer Shou Zi Chew, and Tesla and SpaceX chief executive owner Elon Musk, who appeared to be stoned.

Right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who launched the Fox News Channel in 1996, was there, as were popular podcaster Joe Rogan and founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk.

Although foreign leaders are not normally invited to presidential inaugurations, far-right foreign leaders President Javier Milei of Argentina and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni were there, along with a close ally of Chinese president Xi Jinping.

The streets were largely empty as Trump traveled to the U.S. Capitol. Supporters watched from Capital One Arena as Trump took the oath of office, apparently forgetting to put his hand on the Bibles his wife held. After Vice President–elect J.D. Vance had taken the oath of office, sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had sworn in Trump, the new president delivered his inaugural address.

While inaugural addresses are traditionally an attempt to put the harsh rhetoric of campaigns behind and to emphasize national unity, Trump’s inaugural address rehashed the themes of his campaign rallies. Speaking in the low monotone he uses when he reads from a teleprompter, he delivered an address that repeated the lies on which he built his 2024 presidential campaign.

He said that the Justice Department has been “weaponized,” that Biden’s administration “cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad,” that the U.S. has provided “sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals,” that the government has “treated so badly” the storm victims in North Carolina,” and so on.

Fact-checkers at The Guardian noted the speech was full of “false and misleading claims.”

Trump went on to promise a series of executive orders to address the crises he claimed during his campaign. He would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” he said, and “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” (Border crossings are lower now than they were at the end of Trump’s last term.) He promised to tell his cabinet members to bring down inflation (it peaked in 2022 and is now close to the Fed’s target of 2%), bring back manufacturing (the Biden administration brought more than 700,000 new manufacturing jobs to the U.S.), end investments in green energy (which has attracted significant private investment, especially in Republican-dominated states), and make foreign countries fund the U.S. government through tariffs (which are, in fact, paid by American consumers).

He also vowed to take the Panama Canal back from Panama, prompting Panama’s president José Raúl Mulino to “fully reject the statements made by” Trump, and Panamanian protesters to burn the American flag.

With a declaration about the Pennsylvania shooting that bloodied his ear, Trump declared that he believes he is on a divine mission. “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

After his inaugural address, former president Biden and former first lady Dr. Jill Biden left, and Trump delivered a much more animated speech to prominent supporters in which CNN’s Daniel Dale said he returned to his “lie-a-minute style.” He rehashed the events of January 6, 2021, and claimed that then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi is “guilty as hell…that’s a criminal offense.”

But the bigger story came in the afternoon, when Trump held a rally at the Capitol One Arena in place of the traditional presidential parade. Supporters there had watched the inauguration on a jumbotron screen, booing Biden and jumping to their feet to cheer at Trump’s declaration that he had been saved by God. In the afternoon, Elon Musk spoke to the crowd, throwing two salutes that right-wing extremists, including neo-Nazis, interpreted as Nazi salutes.

Trump and his family arrived after 5:00 for the inaugural parade. The new president spoke again in rally mode after six, and then staged a demonstration that he was changing the country by holding a public signing of executive orders. Those appeared to be designed, as he promised, to retaliate against those he feels have wronged him. Among other executive orders, he withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, drawing approving roars from the crowd.

As Jonathan Swan of the New York Times noted, “Signing executive orders and pardons are two of the parts of the job that Trump loves most. They are unilateral, instantaneous displays of power and authority.” After signing a few executive orders for the crowd, Trump threw the signing sharpies into the crowd, and then he and his family left abruptly.

Back at the White House, retaliation continued. Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of the January 6 rioters who had been convicted of crimes related to the attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election, including Enrico Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys who was serving 22 years for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.

His pardon also included Daniel Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to tasing Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, who suffered cardiac arrest and a traumatic brain injury. “Omg I did so much f---ing s--- r[ight] n[ow] and got away,” he texted to his gang. “Tazzed the f--- out of the blue[.]”

Trump signed an executive order that withdraws the U.S. from the World Health Organization, another that tries to establish that there are only two sexes in the United States, and yet another that seeks to end the birthright citizenship established by the Fourteenth Amendment. He signed one intending to strip the security clearances from 51 people whom he accuses of election interference related to Hunter Biden’s laptop, and has ordered that an undisclosed list of Trump appointees immediately be granted the highest levels of security clearance without undergoing background checks. He also signed one ordering officials “to deliver emergency price relief.”

Behind the scenes today, officials in the Trump administration fired the acting head of the U.S. immigration court system as well as other leaders of that system, and cancelled the CBP One app, an online lottery system through which asylum seekers could schedule appointments with border agents, leaving asylum seekers who had scheduled appointments three weeks ago stranded. Trump officials have also taken down a government website that helped women find health care and understand their rights. They have also removed the official portrait of former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley from the hallway with the portraits of all the former chairs…now all minus one.

But for all their claims to be hitting the ground running, lawyers noted that some of the executive orders were poorly crafted to accomplish what they claimed—an observer called one “bizarre legal fanfic not really intended for judicial interpretation”—and lawsuits challenging them are already being filed. Others are purely performative, like ordering officials to lower prices.

Further, CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand reported that almost an hour after Trump became president, “current and former Pentagon officials say they don’t know who is currently in charge of the Defense Department,” a key position to maintain U.S. security against adversaries who might take advantage of transition moments to push against American defenses.

Bertrand reported that the Trump transition team had trouble finding someone to serve as acting secretary until the Senate confirms a replacement for Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Trump’s nominee, former Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth has had trouble getting the votes he needs, although tonight the Senate Armed Services Committee approved him by a straight party line vote.

Bertrand notes that two senior department officials declined to take on the position. The Trump administration swore in Robert Salesses, deputy director of the branch of the Pentagon that focuses on human resources, facilities, and resource management—who has already been confirmed by the Senate in that position—as acting Defense Secretary.

Beginning tomorrow, the Republicans will have to deal with the fact that the Treasury will hit the debt ceiling and will have to use extraordinary measures to pay the obligations of the United States government.

mickeyrat · January 22

January 21, 2025 (Tuesday)

“I JUST GOT THE NEWS FROM MY LAWYER… I GOT A PARDON BABY! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!” Jacob Chansley, dubbed the QAnon shaman as a reflection of his horned-animal headdress and body paint at the January 6, 2021, riot inside the U.S. Capitol, posted on X shortly after President Donald Trump commuted the sentences of or pardoned all those convicted of crimes related to the events of that day.

“NOW I AM GONNA BY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!” he continued. “J6ers are getting released & JUSTICE HAS COME… EVERYTHING done in the dark WILL come to light!”

A Scripps News/Ipsos poll conducted in late November, after Trump had won the 2024 presidential election, found that only 30% of Americans supported pardoning the January 6th protesters. In early January, many Republican lawmakers suggested they would not support pardons for those who committed violence against police officers, and on January 12, 2025, then vice president–elect J.D. Vance told Fox News Sunday that “if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

This puts Republican leaders, who claim to defend law and order, on the back foot. When CNN’s chief congressional correspondent, Manu Raju, asked Republican senators what they thought of the blanket pardons, even MAGA senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said it was unacceptable to pardon people who assaulted police officers but claimed he “didn’t see it,” although the footage of the violence is widely available. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME) both criticized the pardons.

Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) tried to blame Trump’s pardons on former president Joe Biden, saying he had opened the door to broad pardons, although Biden preemptively pardoned people who had not been convicted of crimes but were in Trump’s crosshairs: people like former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, whom Trump appointed but later accused of “treason” for being unwilling to execute an illegal order. In one of his first moves as president yesterday, Trump had the official portrait of Milley removed from the hall in the Pentagon where portraits of all previous chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are displayed—all, now, except Milley.

The D.C. Police Union expressed its “dismay over the recent pardons,” reiterating its stance that “anyone who assaults a law enforcement officer should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, without exception.”

Trump’s blanket pardons signal to his MAGA base that the judicial system that tried to hold him—and them—accountable is corrupt and that he will protect those who fight for him in the streets. But those pardons do not appear to have popular support.

At the same time, Trump is demonstrating that he intends to create a country dominated by the right-wing, white men who supported him. It is not clear that that intent is any more popular than his pardons for the January 6 rioters.

In that Scripps poll, only 23% of Americans supported restricting women from military combat. But today, Trump fired the first uniformed woman to lead a branch of the armed forces, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan. A senior official for the newly-staffed Department of Homeland Security said she was fired for an “excessive” focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.

Demonstrating his determination to advance a particular kind of Americanism, Trump announced he would rename the Gulf of Mexico, calling it the Gulf of America, and that he would change the name of Denali in Alaska, the tallest peak in North America, back to the name it held between 1917 and 2015: Mt. McKinley, in honor of the nation’s twenty-fifth president, who was famous primarily because he was assassinated in 1901.

Trump has made McKinley a touchstone of his second administration, saying yesterday that he would “restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs. President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”

Senator Murkowski strongly objected to the change. “Our nation’s tallest mountain, which has been called Denali for thousands of years, must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial,” she said.

But it is in his executive order concerning birthright citizenship that Trump most clearly demonstrated his determination for white men to dominate the United States, and for Trump to dominate those men. In an executive order issued last night titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” Trump sought to overturn the U.S. Constitution and its consistent interpretation. He wants the power to decide who can be considered a citizen, and he apparently wants to force the U.S. Supreme Court to give him that power.

In 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, as southern states were passing laws that relegated Black Americans to subservience, Americans added the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to enable the federal government to override those discriminatory state laws. The Fourteenth Amendment provided that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” and then it charged the federal government with guaranteeing that no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The Fourteenth Amendment made it clear that being born in the United States made someone a United States citizen.

That clarity meant that the Supreme Court reinforced the amendment’s intent, even in the late nineteenth century during a period of anti-immigrant sentiment that was most virulent against the Chinese who made their way to American shores.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting the immigration of workers from China. Thirteen years later, in 1895, Wong Kim Ark, an American-born child of Chinese immigrants, was denied reentry to the U.S. after a visit to China. He sued, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship, and he won. In the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the Supreme Court determined that the children of immigrants to the U.S.—no matter how unpopular immigration was at the time—were U.S. citizens, entitled to all the rights and immunities of citizenship, and that no act of Congress could overrule a constitutional amendment.

Trump would like the Supreme Court to award him the power to override the Constitution that a previous Supreme Court denied to Congress, but his attempt to overturn our foundational law has already launched lawsuits. Twenty-two Democratic-led states have sued the Trump administration for violating the U.S. Constitution. Washington, D.C., and San Francisco—fittingly, the city where Wong Kim Ark was born—have joined the lawsuits. So have the American Civil Liberties Union and an expectant mother.

Trump’s administration is facing lawsuits not only on his attacks on birthright citizenship, but also on the executive order that would enable Trump to fire nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with loyalists. And, within minutes of Trump taking office, at least three lawsuits were filed in Washington, D.C., against the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk—Vivek Ramaswamy has been pushed out—charging that it was breaking transparency laws.

The new administration has other problems as well. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, Trump’s first day on the job was “a dangerous display of rapid mental decline.” Bunch recorded Trump’s slurred speech, rambling, and nonsensical off-the-cuff speeches and said that his “biggest takeaway from a day that some have anticipated and many have dreaded for the last four years is seeing how rapidly the oldest new president in America is declining right in front of us.”

Even before he took office, Trump began to walk back his campaign promises—on lowering food prices, for example—and the administration is continuing to move the goalposts now that he’s in office. Last night the Senate confirmed former senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) 99–0 for secretary of state. Today, when CBS asked Rubio about Trump’s repeated promise to end the war in Ukraine on Day 1, Rubio said that what Trump really meant was that the war in Ukraine needs to come to an end.

But Trump is not helping those trying to defend his presidency. Tonight he pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who founded and from January 2011 to October 2013 ran an online criminal marketplace called Silk Road, where more than $200 million in illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services, such as computer hacking, were bought and sold with cryptocurrency. Most of the sales were of drugs, with the Silk Road home page listing nearly 13,000 options, including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD. The wares were linked to at least six deaths from overdose around the world. In May 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison and was ordered to forfeit more than $180 million.

In May 2024, during his presidential campaign, Trump promised to pardon Ulbricht in order to court the votes of libertarians, who support drug legalization on the grounds that people should be able to make their own choices. They saw Ulbricht’s sentence as government overreach.

Tonight, Trump posted that he had pardoned Ulbricht (although Trump spelled his name wrong), saying: “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”

mickeyrat · January 23

January 22, 2025 (Wednesday)

Marc Caputo of Axios reported today that Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of all the January 6 rioters convicted of crimes for that day’s events, including those who attack police officers, was a spur of the moment decision by Trump apparently designed to get the issue behind him quickly. “Trump just said: ‘F*ck it: Release ‘em all,’” an advisor recalled.

Rather than putting the issue behind him, Trump’s new administration is already mired in controversy over it. NBC News profiled the men who threw Nazi salutes, posted that they intended to start a civil war, vowed “there will be blood,” and called for the lynching of Democratic lawmakers. These men, who attacked police with bear spray, flag poles, and a metal whip and choked officers with their bare hands, are now back on the streets.

That means they are also headed home to their communities. Jackson Reffitt, who reported his father Guy’s participation in the January 6 riot and was a key witness against him, told reporters he fears for his life now that his father is free. Jackson recorded his father’s threat against talking to the authorities. “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor,” his father said, “and traitors get shot.” “I’m honestly flabbergasted that we've gotten to this point," Jackson told CNN. “I’m terrified. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

The country’s largest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, has spoken out against the pardons, as has the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote: “Law and order? Back the blue? What happened to that [Republican Party]?” “What happened [on January 6, 2021] is a stain on Mr. Trump’s legacy,” it wrote. “By setting free the cop beaters, the President adds another.”

Mark Jacob of Stop the Presses commented: “Republicans—the Jailbreak Party.”

One of the pardoned individuals is already back in prison on a gun charge, illustrating, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance said, why Trump should have evaluated “prior criminal history, behavior in prison, [and] risk of dangerousness to the community following release. Now,” she said, “we all pay the price for him using the pardon power as a political reward.” On social media, Heather Thomas wrote: “So when all was said and done, the only country that opened [its] prisons and sent crazy murderous criminals to prey upon innocent American citizens, was us.”

MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin reported that Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, who was convicted of sedition and sentenced to 18 years in prison, met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill this afternoon.

For the past two days, the new Trump administration has been demonstrating that it is far easier to break things than it is to build them.

In his determination to get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures, Trump has shut down all federal government DEI offices and has put all federal employees working in such programs on leave, telling agencies to plan for layoffs. He reached back to the American past to root out all possible traces of DEI, calling it “illegal discrimination in the federal government.” Trump revoked a series of executive orders from various presidents designed to address inequities among American populations.

Dramatically, he reached all the way back to Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in September 1965 to stop discriminatory practices in hiring in the federal government and in the businesses of those who were awarded federal contracts. Johnson put forward Executive Order 11246 shortly after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to protect minority voting and a year after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, both designed to level the playing field in the United States between white Americans, Black Americans and Americans of color.

In an even more dramatic reworking of American history, though, the Trump administration has frozen all civil rights cases currently being handled by the Department of Justice and has ordered Trump’s new supervisor of the civil rights division, Kathleen Wolfe, to make sure that none of the civil rights attorneys file any new complaints or other legal documents.

Congress created the Department of Justice in 1870…to prosecute civil rights cases.

Today, Erica L. Green reported for the New York Times that Trump’s team has threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they refuse to turn in colleagues who “defy orders to purge diversity, equity and inclusion efforts from their agencies.” Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill commented: “Can’t wait until these guys have to define in court a ‘DEI hire’ and ‘DEI employees.’”

Trump’s team has told the staff at Department of Health and Human Services—including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—to stop issuing health advisories, scientific reports, and updates to their websites and social media posts. Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, and Rachel Roubein of the Washington Post report that the CDC was expected this week to publish reports on the avian influenza virus, which has shut down Georgia’s poultry industry.

Trump has also set out to make his mark on the Department of Homeland Security. Trump yesterday removed the U.S. Coast Guard commandant, Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, and ordered the Coast Guard to surge cutters, aircrafts, boats and personnel to waters around Florida and borders with Mexico and to “the maritime border around Alaska, Hawai’i, the U.S. territories of Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands,” to stop migrants. The service is already covering these areas as well as it can: last August, the vice commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Kevin Lunday, told the Brookings Institution that the service was short of personnel and ships.

As Josh Funk reported in the Associated Press, Trump also fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), responsible for keeping the nation’s transportation systems safe. He also fired all the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, mandated by Congress after the 1988 bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to review safety in airports and airlines.

Hannah Rabinowitz, Evan Perez, and Kara Scannell of CNN reported that Trump has pushed aside senior Department of Justice lawyers in the national security division, prosecutors who work on international affairs, and lawyers in the criminal division, all divisions that were involved in the prosecutions involving Trump.

Trump has also suspended all funding disbursements for projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, laws that invested billions of dollars in construction of clean energy manufacturing and the repair of roads, bridges, ports, and so on, primarily in Republican-dominated states.

Breaking things is easy, but it is harder to build them.

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly teased the idea that he had a secret plan to end Russia’s war against Ukraine in a day. This morning, in a social media post, he revealed it. He warned Russian president Vladimir Putin that he would “put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”

In fact, President Barack Obama and then–secretary of state John Kerry hit Russia with sanctions after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine, and under President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the U.S. and its allies have maintained biting sanctions against Russia. At the same time, Russia’s trade with the U.S. has fallen to lows that echo those of the period immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union.

“Making a ridiculous post about tariffs on Truth Social was his secret plan to end the war in 24 hours?” wrote editor Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews. “What a ridiculous clown show. Idiocracy.”

Yesterday, Trump held an event with chief executive officer Sam Altman of OpenAI, chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison of Oracle, and chief executive officer Masayoshi Son of SoftBank to roll out a $500 billion investment in artificial intelligence, although Ja’han Jones of MSNBC explained that it’s not clear how much of that investment was already in place. In any case, Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk promptly threw water on the announcement, posting on X, “They don’t actually have the money.” He added “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”

Musk has his own plan for developing AI tools and is in a legal battle with OpenAI. Altman retorted: “this is great for the country. i realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role i hope you’ll mostly put [America] first.” As Jones noted, the fight took the shine off Trump’s big announcement.

As for turning his orders into reality, Trump has turned that responsibility over to others.

Mark Berman and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post noted today that Trump’s executive orders covered a wide range of topics and then simply told the incoming attorney general to handle them. A key theme of Trump’s campaign was his accusations that Biden was using the Justice Department against Trump and his loyalists; Berman and Roebuck point out that Trump “appears to want the Justice Department to act as both investigator and enforcer of his personal and policy wishes.”

This morning, Meryl Kornfield and Patrick Svitek of the Washington Post, with the help of researcher Alec Dent, reported on Trump’s first meeting with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD). Trump frequently repeated, “promises made, promises kept,” but offered no guidance for how he foresees getting his agenda through Congress, where the Republicans have tiny margins. Both Johnson and Thune pointed out that it will be difficult to get majorities behind some of his plans.

According to Kornfield and Svitek, Trump stressed “that he doesn’t care how his agenda becomes law, just that it must.”

mickeyrat · January 24

January 23, 2025 (Thursday)

Last night, in an interview with host Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel, President Donald Trump tried to explain away his blanket pardons for the January 6 rioters, calling the instances of violence against police officers “very minor incidents.”

In fact, as Brett Samuels of The Hill reported, about 600 of the rioters were accused of assaulting, resisting, or impeding police officers, and ten were convicted of sedition.

Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News explained that rioters wounded more than 140 officers with “firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive ‘Trump’ billboard, ‘Trump’ flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device.”

Three federal judges have weighed in on the pardons after Trump’s appointees in the Department of Justice ordered them to dismiss pending cases against current January 6 defendants, an order that, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo noted, “flies in the face of decades of DOJ independence.”

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly summed up the judges’ outrage when she wrote: “Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021. What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens. Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.”

The leaders of two key paramilitary gangs who participated in the January 6 violence, Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, are not helping Trump to put the pardons behind him. Now out of prison rather than serving his 22-year sentence, Tarrio called in to conspiracy-theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars within hours of his release to claim that he still commands the gang and that he plans retribution for those who put him behind bars. Tess Owen of WIRED reported that the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which monitors online activity, saw a surge among Proud Boys’ channels after the pardons, as members discussed ways to advance Trump’s agenda.

Rhodes, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison, also wants revenge. On Wednesday, he was at the U.S. Capitol, where Michael Kunzelman and Lisa Mascaro of the Associated Press reported he met with at least one lawmaker and chatted with others.

Politico’s Charlie Mahtesian reported tonight that those January 6 rioters Trump pardoned are already talking about running for office. Mahtesian notes that in primaries where candidates need to prove they are truly MAGA, those who served time in prison for Trump will have sterling credentials.

Kunzelman and Mascaro also noted that, in an apparent attempt to divert attention from the pardons back to Trump’s contention that the bipartisan January 6 committee had been biased against him, on the same day that Rhodes was at the Capitol, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) revived a special committee to retrace the steps of the House committee that investigated the riot.

But that didn’t go terribly well, as Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post today reported an exclusive story revealing that last June an aide to Johnson advised the committee not to subpoena White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson out of concern that if it did, the sexually explicit texts Republican lawmakers had sent her might come to light. According to Alemany, “multiple colleagues had raised concerns with the speaker’s office about the potential for public disclosure of ‘sexual texts from members who were trying to engage in sexual favors’ with Hutchinson.” Instead, the committee accused former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) of talking to Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s lawyer present. Cheney called the report “defamatory” and a “malicious and cowardly assault on the truth.”

Apparently undaunted, Trump today issued pardons for nearly two dozen antiabortion activists convicted of violating the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, which the civil rights division of the Department of Justice explains “prohibits threats of force, obstruction and property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care services.” Trump, who is due to speak tomorrow by video with the annual antiabortion March for Life, said it was a “great honor” to pardon the protesters.

Still, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico reported that one antiabortion activist, who wanted to remain anonymous because she fears retaliation from the administration, wondered why Trump hadn’t pardoned the antiabortion activists on Monday, as he did the January 6 rioters. “These pardons are fully in line with Trump’s agenda to oppose the weaponization of the government,” she told Ollstein. “So why he couldn’t have pardoned them along with the 1,500 on Day 1 is beyond me.”

It seems that for Trump and his extremist supporters, the federal government—which reflects the will of the majority—has been “weaponized” against a political minority that seeks to control the country.

To gain that control, Trump has assured his followers that the country is literally under attack and that the United States, which has the strongest military and the strongest economy in the world, is losing. On Monday, Trump—who persuaded congressional Republicans to kill a strong bipartisan measure to tighten the border and fund immigration courts so asylum-seekers could have quick hearings—declared that a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States, although border crossings are lower now than they were at the end of his first administration. The order asked the heads of the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security to consider whether it was necessary to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy the military to suppress domestic insurrection.

Yesterday, acting secretary of defense Robert Salesses told reporters that the Department of Defense has ordered 1,500 active-duty military personnel along with air support and intelligence assets to the southern border of the United States, joining 2,500 active-duty military personnel already there, and that the military will provide flights for deportations led by the Department of Homeland Security. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Trump is directing “the Department of Defense to make homeland security a core mission of the agency.”

Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart of Reuters report that there have been informal discussions in the department about sending as many as 10,000 troops to the border, a discussion that raises the question of whether Mexico would feel obliged to respond in kind. And, according to Meg Kelly, Alex Horton, and Missy Ryan of the Washington Post, the Trump administration is trying to get rid of an office in the Pentagon that works to protect civilians in battlefield operations. The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence is housed within the Department of the Army and works to help the military limit unintended civilian deaths.

And yet the idea of using a strong military to defend America apparently does not extend to its leadership. Tara Copp of the Associated Press reported that Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth, who has a history of financial mismanagement, alcohol abuse, and allegations of sexual assault, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he paid a woman $50,000 as part of a confidentiality agreement to maintain her silence after she accused him of sexual assault.

Today, both Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) said they could not support Hegseth’s nomination. They were the only two Republicans who refused to vote in favor of his nomination advancing to the full Senate today.

But they are not the only ones standing against Trump’s attempt to overturn traditional American values.

Today, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour issued a temporary restraining order to block Trump’s executive order that sought to end the birthright citizenship established in 1868 by the Fourteenth Amendment. Twenty-two states and two cities, as well as other parties, have sued over the executive order. Coughenour was responding to a suit brought by Arizona, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington.

Coughenour, who was appointed to the bench by Republican president Ronald Reagan in 1981, told Trump’s Department of Justice attorneys, “I have been on the bench for over four decades. I can't remember another case where the question presented is as clear as it is here. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order." When the lawyers told him they maintained the order was constitutional, Coughenour was aghast. "I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar can state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It boggles my mind. Where were the lawyers when this decision was being made?"

Coughenour blocked the order until February 6, when he will hold a hearing to consider a preliminary injunction.

And after Trump announced he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), billionaire former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg yesterday announced that his philanthropic foundation will cover the financial contribution the U.S. will not. According to Zack Budryk of The Hill, it will also provide the agreement’s reporting requirements for emissions associated with climate change.

“[P]hilanthropy’s role in driving local, state, and private sector action is more crucial than ever—and we’re committed to leading the way,” Bloomberg said.

Finally, tonight, firefighters have begun to control the fires in Southern California. As of this evening, the Hughes fire is 36% contained, the Laguna fire is no longer expanding, the Palisades fire is 75% contained, and the Eaton fire is 95% contained. New fires have broken out, but rain is forecast for the weekend.

mickeyrat · January 25

January 24, 2025 (Friday)

“NUTS!”

That was the official answer Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe delivered to the four German soldiers sent on December 22, 1944, to urge him to surrender the town of Bastogne in the Belgian Ardennes.

In June 1944, on D-Day, the Allies had begun an invasion of northern Europe, and Allied soldiers had advanced against the German troops more quickly than anticipated. By December the Allied troops were stretched out along a 600-mile (1,000 km) front and were tired. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff decided to hold the most fatigued troops in the easily defended Ardennes region over the Christmas to let them rest. To reinforce them, they sent inexperienced troops. The Allies anticipated little trouble.

So they were surprised on December 16, 1944, when the Germans launched more than 400,000 personnel, more than 1,400 tanks and armored vehicles, 2,600 pieces of artillery, and more than 1,000 combat aircraft directly at a 75-mile (120 km) stretch of the front in the Ardennes in an offensive designed to punch through the Allied lines.

And thus began the Battle of the Bulge.

This German counteroffensive moved forward fast, creating the bulge that gave the battle its name. But the German advance hit bottlenecks at Bastogne and other places, while isolated soldiers defended important crossroads and burned gasoline stocks to keep them out of German tanks. On December 22, 1944, as Allied troops were reeling, German soldiers brought to McAuliffe a demand that he surrender Bastogne.

“The fortune of war is changing,” their missive read. “This time the U.S.A. forces in and near Bastogne have been encircled by strong German armored units…. There is only one possibility to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation: that is the honorable surrender of the encircled town…. If this proposal should be rejected one German Artillery Corps and six heavy A. A. Battalions are ready to annihilate the U.S.A. troops in and near Bastogne.”

It was that request that prompted McAuliffe’s “NUTS!” Members of his staff were more colorful when they had to explain to their German counterparts what McAuliffe’s slang meant. “Tell them to take a flying sh*t,” one said. Another explained: “You can go to hell.”

By the time of this exchange, British forces had already swung around to stop the Germans, Eisenhower had rushed reinforcements to the region, and the Allies were counterattacking. On December 26, General George S. Patton’s Third Army relieved Bastogne. The Allied counter offensive forced back the bulge the Germans had pushed into the Allied lines. By January 25, 1945, the Allies had restored the front to where it had been before the attack and the battle was over.

The Battle of the Bulge was the deadliest battle for U.S. forces in World War II. More than 700,000 soldiers fought for the Allies during the 41-day battle. The U.S. alone suffered some 75,000 casualties that took the lives of 19,000 men. The Germans lost 80,000 to 100,000 soldiers, too many for them ever to recover.

The Allied soldiers fighting in that bitter cold winter were fighting against fascism, a system of government that rejected the equality that defined democracy, instead maintaining that some men were better than others. German fascists under leader Adolf Hitler had taken that ideology to its logical end, insisting that an elite few must lead, taking a nation forward by directing the actions of the rest. They organized the people as if they were at war, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together to consolidate their power. Logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, fascists demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate, dividing their population so they could control it.

In contrast to that system was democracy, based on the idea that all people should be treated equally before the law and should have a say in their government. That philosophy maintained that the government should work for ordinary people, rather than an elite few. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt inspired the American people to defend their democracy—however imperfectly they had constructed it in the years before the war—and when World War II was over, Americans and their allies tried to create a world that would forever secure democracy over fascism.

The 47 allied nations who had joined together to fight fascism came together in 1945, along with other nations, to create the United Nations to enable countries to solve their differences without war. In 1949 the United States, along with Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the U.K., created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a peacetime military alliance to stand firm against aggression, deterring it by declaring that an attack on one would be considered an attack on all.

At home, the government invested in ordinary Americans. In 1944, Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, more commonly known as the G.I. Bill, to fund higher education for some 7.8 million former military personnel. The law added to the American workforce some 450,000 engineers, 180,000 medical professionals, 360,000 teachers, 150,000 scientists, 243,000 accountants, 107,000 lawyers, and 36,000 clergymen.

In 1946 the Communicable Disease Center opened its doors as part of an initiative to stop the spread of malaria across the American South. Three years later, it had accomplished that goal and turned to others, combatting rabies and polio and, by 1960, influenza and tuberculosis, as well as smallpox, measles, and rubella. In the 1970s it was renamed the Center for Disease Control and took on the dangers of smoking and lead poisoning, and in the 1980s it became the Centers for Disease Control and took on AIDS and Lyme disease. In 1992, Congress added the words “and Prevention” to the organization’s title to show its inclusion of chronic diseases, workplace hazards, and so on.

Congress invested in the nation’s infrastructure with projects like the Interstate Highway System, funded by the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, which fueled the economy not just by providing jobs and tying together the states, but also by creating a market for new cars and for motels, diners, and gas stations along the new roads.

Americans also worked to put the racial segregation that had inspired Hitler behind them, using the federal government to level the playing field between white Americans, Black Americans, and people of color. As Chris Geidner wrote yesterday in Law Dork, that impulse had gained traction in 1941, when labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph told President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Black Americans weren’t being hired at the factories working in defense industries. He urged Roosevelt to issue an executive order requiring that factories that received federal contracts must hire Black workers.

As Geidner recounts, a week later, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, saying it was “the policy of the United States “to encourage full participation in the national defense program by all citizens of the United States, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin, in the firm belief that the democratic way of life within the Nation can be defended successfully only with the help and support of all groups within its borders.“

After the war, President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, and as Black and Brown Americans claimed their right to be treated equally, Congress expanded recognition of those rights with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Shortly after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, translating FDR’s 1941 measure into the needs of the peacetime country. “It is the policy of the Government of the United States to provide equal opportunity in Federal employment for all qualified persons, to prohibit discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin, and to promote the full realization of equal employment opportunity through a positive, continuing program in each executive department and agency.”

This democratic government was popular, but as the memory of the dangers of fascism faded, opponents began to insist that such a government was leading the United States to communism. Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, along with the deregulation of business and cuts to the social safety net, began to concentrate wealth at the top of society. As wealth moved upward, lawmakers chipped away at the postwar government that defended democracy.

And now, since the inauguration of President Donald Trump on Monday, the dismantling of that system is happening all at once.

The Guardian reported today that incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered a halt to almost all foreign aid, with the exception of military assistance to Israel and Egypt. The Guardian notes that this order is likely unlawful, since Congress sets the budget and in 1974 declared it illegal for the president to impound funds. Still, a source foresaw the end of the global influence the U.S. has had since World War II, telling The Guardian: “Freezing these international investments will lead our international partners to seek other funding partners—likely US competitors and adversaries—to fill this hole and displace the United States’ influence the longer this unlawful impoundment continues.”

As Peter Baker of the New York Times notes, new president Donald Trump is trying to break NATO by demanding that members increase military spending to 5% of their nations' economies, although the U.S. currently spends about 3% of its GDP on defense. If we were to meet that requirement, Baker points out, the U.S. would have to increase its defense budget by $567 billion a year. Isabel van Brugen of Newsweek reports that an Italian news agency says that Trump intends to pull about 20,000 U.S. troops from Europe and wants Europe to pay to maintain the rest.

Trump has undertaken to dismantle the postwar democratic government at home, too. He has stopped the funding for repairing roads, bridges, airports, and ports that passed Congress in a bipartisan vote in 2022, as well as taken away funding for new solar manufacturing plants and other new systems to address climate change.

He has frozen all travel and communications at the Department of Health and Human Services, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” one researcher told Dan Diamond, Lena H. Sun, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Mark Johnson of the Washington Post. “This is like a meteor just crashed into all of our cancer centers and research areas.”

And, of course, Trump has declared a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. In his revoking of LBJ’s Executive Order 11246, itself based on FDR’s Executive Order 8802, he explicitly rejected the principles for which the Americans fought in World War II.

January 25, 2025, marks eighty years since the end of the Battle of the Bulge.

The Germans never did take Bastogne.

battle1 · January 25

You’re damn right they didn’t.

Who is the “one researcher”?

mickeyrat · January 25

what?

mickeyrat · January 26

Type your commentJanuary 25, 2025 (Saturday)

We have all earned a break for this week, but as some of you have heard me say, I write these letters with an eye to what a graduate student will need to know in 150 years. Two things from last night belong in the record of this time, not least because they illustrate President Donald Trump’s deliberate demonstration of dominance over Republican lawmakers.

Last night the Senate confirmed former Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth as the defense secretary of the United States of America. As Tom Bowman of NPR notes, since Congress created the position in 1947, in the wake of World War II, every person who has held it has come from a senior position in elected office, industry, or the military. Hegseth has been accused of financial mismanagement at the small nonprofits he directed, has demonstrated alcohol abuse, and paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement. He has experience primarily on the Fox News Channel, where his attacks on “woke” caught Trump’s eye.

The secretary of defense oversees an organization of almost 3 million people and a budget of more than $800 billion, as well as advising the president and working with both allies and rivals around the globe to prevent war. It should go without saying that a candidate like Hegseth could never have been nominated, let alone confirmed, under any other president. But Republicans caved, even on this most vital position for the American people's safety.

The chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-MS), tried to spin Hegseth’s lack of relevant experience as a plus: “We must not underestimate the importance of having a top-shelf communicator as secretary of defense. Other than the president, no official plays a larger role in telling the men and women in uniform, the Congress and the public about the threats we face and the need for a peace-through-strength defense policy.”

Vice President J.D. Vance had to break a 50–50 tie to confirm Hegseth, as Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky joined all the Democrats and Independents in voting no. Hegseth was sworn in early this morning.

That timing mattered. As MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted, as soon as Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), whose “yes” was secured only through an intense pressure campaign, had voted in favor, President Trump informed at least 15 independent inspectors general of U.S. government departments that they were fired, including, as David Nakamura, Lisa Rein, and Matt Viser of the Washington Post noted, those from “the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration.” Most were Trump’s own appointees from his first term, put in when he purged the inspectors general more gradually after his first impeachment.

Project 2025 called for the removal of the inspectors general. Just a week ago Ernst and her fellow Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley co-founded a bipartisan caucus—the Inspector General Caucus—to support those inspectors general. Grassley told Politico in November that he intends to defend the inspectors general.

Congress passed a law in 1978 to create inspectors general in 12 government departments. According to Jen Kirby, who explained inspectors general for Vox in 2020, a movement to combat waste in government had been building for a while, and the fraud and misuse of offices in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon made it clear that such protections were necessary. Essentially, inspectors general are watchdogs, keeping Congress informed of what’s going on within departments.

Kirby notes that when he took office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan promptly fired all the inspectors general, claiming he wanted to appoint his own people. Congress members of both parties pushed back, and Reagan rehired at least five of those he had fired. George H.W. Bush also tried to fire the inspectors general but backed down when Congress backed up their protests that they must be independent.

In 2008, Congress expanded the law by creating the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. By 2010 that council covered 68 offices.

During his first term, in the wake of his first impeachment, Trump fired at least five inspectors general he considered disloyal to him, and in 2022, Congress amended the law to require any president who sought to get rid of an inspector general to “communicate in writing the reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress, not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer.” Congress called the law the “Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022.”

The chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, Hannibal “Mike” Ware, responded immediately to the information that Trump wanted to fire inspectors general. Ware recommended that Director of Presidential Personnel Sergio Gor, who had sent the email firing the inspectors general, “reach out to White House Counsel to discuss your intended course of action. At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss” the inspectors general, because of the requirements of the 2022 law.

This evening, Nakamura, Rein, and Viser reported in the Washington Post that Democrats are outraged at the illegal firings and even some Republicans are expressing concern and have asked the White House for an explanation. For his part, Trump said, incorrectly, that firing inspectors general is “a very standard thing to do.” Several of the inspectors general Trump tried to fire are standing firm on the illegality of the order and plan to show up to work on Monday.

The framers of the Constitution designed impeachment to enable Congress to remove a chief executive who deliberately breaks the law, believing that the determination of senators to hold onto their own power would keep them from allowing a president to seize more than the Constitution had assigned him.

In Federalist No. 69, Alexander Hamilton tried to reassure those nervous about the centralization of power in the new Constitution that no man could ever become a dictator because unlike a king, “The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.”

But the framers did not anticipate the rise of political parties. Partisanship would push politicians to put party over country and eventually would induce even senators to bow to a rogue president. MAGA Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming told the Fox News Channel today that he is unconcerned about Trump's breaking the law written just two years ago. “Well, sometimes inspector generals don't do the job that they are supposed to do. Some of them deserve to be fired, and the president is gonna make wise decisions on those.”

There is one more story you’ll be hearing more about from me going forward, but it is important enough to call out tonight because it indicates an important shift in American politics. In an Associated Press/NORC poll released yesterday, only 12% of those polled thought the president relying on billionaires for policy advice is a good thing. Even among Republicans, only 20% think it’s a good thing.

Since the very earliest days of the United States, class was a central lens through which Americans interpreted politics. And yet, in the 1960s, politicians began to focus on race and gender, and we talked very little about class. Now, with Trump embracing the world’s richest man, who invested more than $250 million in his election, and with Trump making it clear through the arrangement of the seating at his inauguration that he is elevating the interests of billionaires to the top of his agenda, class appears to be back on the table.

Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

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