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carolinehayter

Opinion | Will Trump's Presidency Ever End? - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-election-supreme-court.html

opinion trump presidency politics us crisis election supreme court

shared by carolinehayter on 25 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • That was when Trump supporters descended on a polling location in Fairfax, Va., and sought to disrupt early voting there by forming a line that voters had to circumvent and chanting, “Four more years!”This was no rogue group. This was no random occurrence. This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.
  • Republicans are planning to have tens of thousands of volunteers fan out to voting places in key states, ostensibly to guard against fraud but effectively to create a climate of menace.
    • carolinehayter
      carolinehayter on 25 Sep 20
       
      Isn't voter intimidation illegal?
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      yes, but this is an interesting work around...
  • bragged to Sean Hannity about all the “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.”
  • ...45 more annotations...
  • Color me alarmist, but that sounds like an invitation to do more than just watch. Trump put an exclamation point on it by exhorting those supporters to vote twice, once by mail and once in person, which is of course blatantly against the law.
  • On Wednesday Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost to Joe Biden. Shockingly but then not really, he wouldn’t. He prattled anew about mail-in ballots and voter fraud and, perhaps alluding to all of the election-related lawsuits that his minions have filed, said: “There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”
    • carolinehayter
      carolinehayter on 25 Sep 20
       
      Absolutely terrifying-- insinuating that there would not be a peaceful transfer of power for the first time in this country's history...
  • “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      This lack of social awareness from a president seems unfathomable.
  • “I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      pointent and true. America is in great danger
  • And the day after Ginsburg died, I felt a shudder just as deep.
  • This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.
  • “I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”
  • Is a fair fight still imaginable in America? Do rules and standards of decency still apply? For a metastasizing segment of the population, no.
  • Right on cue, we commenced a fight over Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat that could become a protracted death match, with Mitch McConnell’s haste and unabashed hypocrisy
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      HYPOCRISY!!!!!!!! I feel nothing but seething anger for Mitch Mcconnell
  • On Wednesday Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost to Joe Biden. Shockingly but then not really, he wouldn’t
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      A peaceful transfer of power is a pillar of our democracy. The thought that it could be forever undone by a spray tanned reality star is harrowing.
  • “There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”
  • We’re in terrible danger. Make no mistake.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      Ain't that the truth
  • Trump, who rode those trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground.
  • The week since Ginsburg’s death has been the proof of that. Many of us dared to dream that a small but crucial clutch of Republican senators, putting patriotism above party,
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      I truly commend the senators who have respected the laws they put in place for Justice Scalia four years ago.
  • Hah. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, broke with McConnell, and in Collins’s case, there were re-election considerations and hedged wording. All the others fell into line.
  • Most politicians — and maybe most Americans — now look across the political divide and see a band of crooks who will pick your pocket if you’re meek and dumb enough not to pick theirs first.
  • “If the situation were reversed, the Dems would be doing the same thing.”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      maybe... but I have more optimism for the moral compasses of the Dems than I do for the GOP
  • Ugliness begets ugliness until — what? The whole thing collapses of its own ugly weight?
  • The world’s richest and most powerful country has been brought pitifully and agonizingly low. On Tuesday we passed the mark of 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, cementing our status as the global leader, by far, on that front. How’s that for exceptionalism?
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      Perfectly encapsulates the American dilema right now.
  • What’s the far side of a meltdown? America the puddle? While we await the answer, we get a nasty showdown over that third Trump justice. Trump will nominate someone likely to horrify Democrats and start another culture war: anything to distract voters from his damnable failure to address the pandemic.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      So so so so so so true
  • University of California-Irvine School of Law, with the headline: “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      Me too...
  • you can be re-elected at the cost that American democracy will be permanently disfigured — and in the future America will be a failed republic — I don’t think either would have taken the deal.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      Retweet!
  • “I don’t think the survival of the republic particularly means anything to Donald Trump.”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      Couldn't have said it better
  • “Tribal,” “identity politics,” “fake news” and “hoax” are now mainstays of our vocabulary, indicative of a world where facts and truth are suddenly relative.
  • “The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery,”
  • But what if there’s bottom but no bounce? I wonder. And shudder.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      This article has left me speechless and truly given me pause. 10/10 would recommend.
  • This country, already uncivil, is on the precipice of being ungovernable, because its institutions are being so profoundly degraded, because its partisanship is so all-consuming, and because Trump, who rode those trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground. The Republican Party won’t apply the brakes.
  • At some point, someone had to be honorable and say, “Enough.”Hah. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, broke with McConnell, and in Collins’s case, there were re-election considerations and hedged wording. All the others fell into line.
  • So the lesson for Democrats should be to take all they can when they can? That’s what some prominent Democrats now propose: As soon as their party is in charge, add enough seats to the Supreme Court to give Democrats the greater imprint on it. Make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states, so that Democrats have much better odds of controlling the Senate. Do away with the filibuster entirely. That could be just the start of the list
  • And who the hell are we anymore? The world’s richest and most powerful country has been brought pitifully and agonizingly low. On Tuesday we passed the mark of 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, cementing our status as the global leader, by far, on that front. How’s that for exceptionalism?
  • he might contest the election in a manner that keeps him in power regardless of what Americans really want.
  • The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery,
  • this election might well degenerate into violence, as Democratic poll watchers clash with Republican poll watchers, and into chaos, as accusations of foul play delay the certification of state vote counts
  • headline: “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.”
  • “The republic is in greater self-generated danger than at any time since the 1870s,” Richard Primus, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, told me, saying that Trump values nothing more than his own power and will do anything that he can get away with
  • “If you had told Barack Obama or George W. Bush that you can be re-elected at the cost that American democracy will be permanently disfigured — and in the future America will be a failed republic — I don’t think either would have taken the deal.” But Trump? “I don’t think the survival of the republic particularly means anything to Donald Trump.
  • What gave Primus that idea? Was it when federal officers used tear gas on protesters to clear a path for a presidential photo op? Was it when Trump floated the idea of postponing the election, just one of his many efforts to undermine Americans’ confidence in their own system of government?
  • Or was it when he had his name lit up in fireworks above the White House as the climax of his party’s convention? Was it on Monday, when his attorney general, Bill Barr, threatened to withhold federal funds from cities that the president considers “anarchist”? That gem fit snugly with Trump’s talk of blue America as a blight on red America, his claim that the pandemic would be peachy if he could just lop off that rotten fruit.
  • The deadly confrontations recently in Kenosha, Wis., and Portland, Ore., following months of mass protests against racial injustice, speak to how profoundly estranged from their government a significant percentage of Americans feel.
  • Litigation to determine the next president winds up with the Supreme Court, where three Trump-appointed justices are part of a majority decision in his favor. It’s possible.
  • Rush Limbaugh — you know, the statesman whom Trump honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this year — has urged McConnell not even to bother with a confirmation hearing for the nominee in the Judiciary Committee and to go straight to a floor vote. Due diligence and vetting are so 2018
  • You know who has most noticeably and commendably tried to turn down the temperature? Biden. That’s of course its own political calculation, but it’s consistent with his comportment during his entire presidential campaign, one that has steered clear of extremism, exalted comity and recognized that a country can’t wash itself clean with more muck.
  • He’s our best bid for salvation, which goes something like this: An indisputable majority of Americans recognize our peril and give him a margin of victory large enough that Trump’s challenge of it is too ludicrous for even many of his Republican enablers to justify. Biden takes office, correctly understanding that his mandate isn’t to punish Republicans. It’s to give America its dignity back.
  • Maybe we need to hit rock bottom before we bounce back up.But what if there’s bottom but no bounce? I wonder. And shudder.
  • “I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”
carolinehayter

U.S. To Proceed With Executions Through Transition In Break With Precedent : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...sition-in-break-with-precedent

politics us trump biden death penalty Policy gop

shared by carolinehayter on 24 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department is proceeding with plans for more federal executions in the closing days of President Trump's administration
  • Attorney General William Barr announced the moves, connected with what he called "staggeringly brutal murders," in a statement late Friday.
  • If the Justice Department plan moves forward, 13 people will have faced death by lethal injection during the Trump administration. Legal experts who follow capital punishment said that would be the most since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served 12 years in office before his death in 1945.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center said the Trump Justice Department had behaved in ways that are "historically anomalous."
  • "In a normal presidency that followed the traditional norms of civility, you wouldn't see executions during a transition period," Dunham said. "The outgoing administration would defer to the incoming administration in matters like this."
  • Their legal teams say Bourgeois and Johnson suffer from intellectual disabilities and that Higgs didn't pull the trigger to kill the women. Instead, the man who admitted firing the weapon was tried separately and was sentenced to life in prison.
  • "The federal government has already presided over the executions of eight people so far this year," said Hannah Riley, a spokeswoman at the Southern Center for Human Rights. "The death penalty is always unconscionable, but it is especially egregious to carry out executions as hundreds of people are dying of COVID-19 in this country every day."
  • Dunham said the unusual moves by the Justice Department also extended to an announcement about a decision to seek capital punishment against a defendant who has not yet gone to trial.
  • The Biden transition team didn't comment directly on the Justice Department plan. But during the campaign, candidate Biden pledged to eliminate the death penalty, citing 160 people who were sentenced to capital punishment and were later exonerated.
  • Biden said he wanted to work with Congress to pass a law to eliminate federal capital punishment and "incentivize" states to follow that example.
  • Lawyers who follow federal capital punishment trends said they hoped that Biden, who supported expanding the death penalty 30 years ago, only to reverse course, had learned from hard experience that informal moratoriums don't solve the problem.
chrispink7

Trump's Response to Protests Draws Bipartisan Rebuke in Congress - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gress-protesters-tear-gas.html

shared by chrispink7 on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — Democratic leaders in Congress and a pair of Republicans on Tuesday condemned President Trump for his response to protests around the country and in the capital, the day after peaceful demonstrators were gassed in front of the White House so he could pose for a photograph with a Bible.The rare bipartisan rebukes reflected a broad sense of alarm at the president’s behavior as protests of police violence and racial discrimination reach a boiling point throughout the country. They followed a remarkable spectacle that unfolded Monday evening, when the police fired flash-bang explosions and tear gas and used officers on horseback to drive away peaceful protesters as Mr. Trump appeared in the Rose Garden and threatened to send the United States military into states where governors could not bring protests under control.He then left the White House and, with Attorney General William P. Barr and other aides, crossed a park that had been cleared of demonstrators to have his picture taken holding the Bible outside a historic church that had been vandalized in the unrest.“After the president’s reality show ended last night, while the nation nervously watched the chaos that engulfs us, President Trump probably laid in bed pleased with himself for descending another rung on the dictatorial ladder,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning. “He probably wore out his remote control watching the clips of General Barr’s victory over the unarmed in the battle of Lafayette Square.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyHe added: “It’s all so sad, so pathetic, so weak.”On the other side of the Capitol, wielding her own Bible and quoting from the Book of Ecclesiastes, Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged the president to focus on “a time to heal,” adding that the aggressive scene that played out in Washington on Monday had “no place” in the nation’s capital.
Javier E

The System Failed the Test - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...611911

system failure trump crisis institutions corruption

shared by Javier E on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • Trump has done things that no previous American president would ever have dared, that no previous president sank low enough even to imagine. Sometimes he was stopped, more often not. But whether stopped or not in any particular case, he has never ceased pressing ahead to do even worse the next time
  • Trump is a swindler, but the Trumpocalypse of 2020 represents something a lot bigger and a lot worse than a swindle. In the fall of 2019, a nonpartisan research organization studied the distinctive attitudes of Republicans who watched Fox News as their primary source of information. Among that group, 55 percent said there was virtually nothing President Trump could do that would change their minds about supporting him.
  • Fox News and the Facebook feed have become for many Americans friends more intimate and trusted than family or neighbors. The validation of their prejudices by television and Facebook is a validation of themselves.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • And so, for the sake of flag and faith, millions of decent conservative Americans countenanced scandals, wrongs, disloyalty, and crime.
  • The Trump years demonstrated the very great extent to which presidential cooperation with the law is voluntary, especially if he retains a loyal attorney general, and a sufficient blocking vote in Congress.
  • It’s illegal for federal employees to overspend on travel to benefit themselves or their colleagues. In 2012, a senior executive at the General Services Administration was sentenced to three months in prison, three months under house arrest, and three years’ parole for taking personal side jaunts and overspending on lavish retreats for his staff.
  • Yet when Vice President Pence visited Ireland in 2019, he wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by staying not in Dublin, the site of his meetings, but at Trump’s golf course 180 miles away, on the opposite coast of the island.
  • It is illegal for government employees to use their positions to engage in certain political activities. They are especially forbidden to engage directly in election campaigns while on the government payroll
  • Trump disregarded the recommendation. Conway mocked the finding to reporters. As one journalist read the recommendation to her, she replied: “Blah, blah, blah. If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work. Let me know when the jail sentence starts.”
  • In other democracies, the equivalents of the AAG for the criminal division are career civil servants
  • in those other countries, the brute political pressure that Trump applied via Attorney General William Barr on the Department of Justice is much less likely to have an effect.
  • At one point in 2019, Trump simultaneously refused all cooperation with 20 distinct congressional investigations—testing whether there was much Congress could do about it. There proved to be surprisingly little. Congress’s contempt powers lag far behind those of courts
  • Even outright lying to Congress can prove exceptionally difficult to punish. “Almost no one is prosecuted for lying to Congress,”
  • “In fact, only six people have been convicted of perjury or related charges in relation to Congress in the last sixty years.”
  • Some wonder: Why doesn’t Congress act? But there is no “Congress.” There are only the two parties in Congress. The members of the two parties cannot even agree on methods of evidence or standards of behavior.
  • Republican Representative Ted Yoho from Florida spoke for troublingly many members of his caucus when he said of a fellow member of Congress that he “works for the president; he answers to the president.”
  • Congress as an institution cannot function on this kind of partisan mentality. There can be no meaningful oversight of the executive branch if the only standards are “Yay, team!” and “Boo, team!
  • The system that protects all of us has failed because the protectors of that system have failed to protect it for us.
  • Democracy does not fly on autopilot. If the people responsible for the institutions of democracy will not do the job, the job will not be done. While the job goes undone, the United States and the world careen toward conflict and crisis.
Javier E

Opinion | An American Disaster Foretold - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...donald-trump-europe-china.html

europe foreign policy US international relations trump election

shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • “It’s lonely being a European today,” Delattre mused. Russia is hostile. China is hostile. Emerging powers view the postwar multilateral organizations which Europe prizes as relics of a world made by and for Western powers — and want to change them. As for the United States, it’s absent.
  • Increasingly, Europeans speak of the need for “containment” of the United States if Trump is re-elected, the term coined by the U.S. diplomat George Kennan to define America’s Cold War policy toward the Communist Soviet Union. That would be a shocking development, except that nothing is shocking any longer.
  • Not after Trump set the scene for a demolition of American democracy by saying on the convention’s opening day that “the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • I asked Ornstein, not prone to histrionics, how real the threat to American democracy is, at 67 days from the election. “If we are not at Defcon 1, we are pretty close,” he said, referring to the label used by the United States armed forces for the highest level of threat.
  • Europeans know how this goes. Viktor Orban, the rightist Hungarian prime minister, has established a template for the authoritarian system Trump would pursue if re-elected: neutralize an independent judiciary, demonize immigrants, claim the “people’s will” overrides constitutional checks and balances, curtail a free media, exalt a mythologized national heroism, and ultimately, like Orban or Vladimir Putin or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, secure a form of autocratic rule that retains a veneer of democracy while skewing the contest sufficiently to ensure it can yield only one result.
  • Officials close to Biden are looking at several ominous scenarios: Trump claiming victory before the votes in battleground states are fully counted — a count that could take many days or even weeks given the likely number of absentee ballots
  • Trump, supported by Barr, who has claimed that foreign governments have produced counterfeit mail ballots, refusing to concede and challenging the validity of the mail-in voting tally
  • some attempt by Trump to use the armed forces to help him win
  • Trump contesting the outcome in one or more states, so that neither Biden nor Trump has the needed 270 electoral votes and the election is determined by Republican-majority delegations with one vote per state.
  • any of this could happen — and Europe will want to “contain” that America.
anonymous

Swine flu vaccine: Like coronavirus, the government sought 'warp speed' inoculation - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...vaccine-swine-flu-coronavirus

history US trump

shared by anonymous on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • The federal government has launched “Operation Warp Speed” to deliver a covid-19 vaccine by January, months ahead of standard vaccine timelines.The last time the government tried that, it was a total fiasco.
  • Gerald Ford was president. It was 1976.
  • Ford raced to come up with a response, consulting with Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, the scientists behind the polio vaccine, and in late March he announced an audacious plan for the federal government to produce the vaccine and organize its distribution.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “They were well aware of the ravages of the 1918 flu, and this virus appeared to be closely related,”
  • Every American, Ford said, would be vaccinated.The government had never attempted such an endeavor — both in its breadth and speed.Almost immediately, there was chaos.
  • One manufacturer produced 2 million doses with the wrong strain. As tests progressed, more scientific problems emerged — even as there were few, if any, signs that a pandemic was materializing. In June, tests showed the vaccine was not effective in children, prompting a public squabble between Salk and Sabin over who should be vaccinated.
  • And then more problems emerged. There were reports of sporadic deaths possibly connected to the vaccine. Cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome also emerged, and are still cited today by the anti-vaccine movement. Panic emerged, with dozens of states pausing vaccinations.
  • By December, following 94 reports of paralysis, the entire program was shut down.
  • Almost immediately, in grand Washington fashion, fingers were pointed. Scientists and government officials turned on each other, with allegations that Ford acted recklessly for political gain without knowing for sure whether a pandemic would emerge — an impossible predictive game, his defenders argued.The recriminations were fueled by the fact that the swine flu pandemic hadn’t materialized.
  • The program “appears clearly to have been based on concern for the public good,” Skidmore wrote, “not to achieve political advantage.”
delgadool

The extremists taking part in riots across the US: What we do and don't know - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by delgadool on 01 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • the state is looking at data from arrests and human intelligence that points to some outside influence seeking to capitalize on the situation and create unrest.
  • Trump and Barr have focused on Antifa, the FBI and other agencies are tracking groups from both the extremist right and left involved in the riots and attacks on police.
  • Those domestic extremist groups include anarchists, anti-government groups often associated with far-right extremists and white supremacy causes, and far-left extremists who identify with anti-fascist ideology.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Trump has also blamed Democratic officials in Minnesota and other states where violence has occurred. "Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors. These people are ANARCHISTS. Call in our National Guard NOW," Trump tweeted Sunday.
  • Minnesota officials said this weekend white supremacists and others were mixing in with legitimate protestors. Authorities there are looking at connections between those arrested and white supremacist organizers who have posted online about coming to Minnesota. Officials have also tracked messages about seeking to loot and whether there was a connection to organized crime.
  • Walz also said the state was looking at who was behind a "very sophisticated" denial of service attack on all state computers that was executed on Saturday. "That's not somebody sitting in their basement, that's pretty sophisticated," he said.
katherineharron

Opinion: What Biden gets about being president -- and Trump doesn't - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

biden

shared by katherineharron on 04 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • It was especially refreshing to see President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris use their CNN interview with Jake Tapper on Thursday to make clear that leading America is, first and always, a complex effort requiring the cooperation and good will of millions.
  • the Biden-Harris conversation made clear why voters kicked Trump out of the White House.
  • Trump spouted falsehoods and tried to advance his own interests by demanding that somebody -- courts, state legislatures, maybe even Santa Claus -- somehow reverse the outcome of the election he lost last month.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Biden and Harris, by contrast, talked about the national interest and urged the public to support their plans for the future.
  • Biden said he will issue a mandate for all Americans to wear masks for a little more than 3 months -- long enough to help halt and reverse the surging infection numbers. "Just 100 days to mask, not forever," he told Tapper. "100 days. And I think we'll see a significant reduction."
  • That nuanced call to arms is a 180-degree reversal from Trump's steadfast refusal to order the use of masks and his plea to the public back in October
  • We've had a year of divisive bombast and boasting with Trump claiming the virus would vanish; that he accepted no responsibility for the failed national response; and finally threw up his hands at the over 276,000 deaths from the virus, saying "it is what it is."
  • Biden estimated that "we can safely open those elementary schools" -- but at an estimated price tag of $100 billion, which he called on Congress to supply.
  • "I alone can fix it." Biden and Harris, by contrast, are consistently talking about sharing responsibility with other actors -- Congress, Republicans, governors, and allied nations overseas.
  • "Our Justice Department is going to operate independently," Biden said. "I'm not gonna be telling them to prosecute A, B or C." Another sharp contrast with Trump, who fired his first attorney general and routinely urged his second to go after Trump's political opponents.
  • Even the relationship between Biden and Harris appears to be based on conversation and consensus rather than firm hierarchy, despite the fact that the two exchanged tough words on the campaign trail during the Democratic primaries
  • Harris pointed to a recent Zoom meeting at which the incoming administration brought together labor leaders and corporate CEOs. "There's a consensus on what needs to be done" to get Americans back to work, she said.
  • n this case, voters chose to replace the singular, disruptive ego-driven approach of Trump with an administration that understands that the most potent power of an American president is his ability to convene, coax and cajole our vast nation into moving forward together.
  • "You're not gonna see me making policy by tweets," Biden told Tapper.
rerobinson03

Georgia Republicans Seek Cover From Trump's Fury Over Loss - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...epublicans-election-trump.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The lawmakers will not fulfill Mr. Trump’s ultimate wish, expressed in a tweet earlier this week: that enough proof of fraud will be uncovered for him to prevail. But Georgia, perhaps more than any other state in the nation, continues to be haunted by a sort of zombie campaign to produce a Trump victory, one month after Election Day.
  • The effort, which also encompasses numerous lawsuits and an influential far-right disinformation campaign, will not change the election result, barring some Hail Mary upending of a race that has already been certified. But it may have other powerful consequences for the political future of Georgia — and by extension, the nation, given Georgia’s unquestionable new status as a battleground state.
  • On Wednesday, a group of 19 prominent Georgia Republicans — among them former Gov. Nathan Deal and two former U.S. senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson — issued an open letter warning that the focus on fraud allegations could “detract” from the runoffs, which will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Their concerns came to life Wednesday afternoon at a park in the upscale Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, where hundreds of Trump supporters gathered, waving American flags and Trump flags, to cheer two lawyers who have challenged the Georgia election results in federal court, Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood.
  • But in other ways, the momentum seemed to turn against Mr. Trump this week. On Tuesday, a top state election official, Gabriel Sterling, laced into the president, pleading with him to scale back the conspiratorial rhetoric that Mr. Sterling said was inspiring people to make violent threats against election workers.
  • Noting that the U.S. attorney general, William P. Barr, had just said that the Justice Department found no widespread fraud in the national race, Mr. Raffensperger said, “Our investigators have seen no widespread fraud either.”
  • The president may spout conspiracy theories and acrimony — he has publicly attacked Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp for not acceding to his wishes — but he is also the most popular figure in the Republican Party. Nationally, Mr. Trump’s sustained assault on voting integrity, while false, has persuaded many Republicans that there was something crooked about the election. And no one is sure whether, or for how long, he will continue to command the fealty of his party.
  • But the fact remains that Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp have refused to give Mr. Trump what he wants most: an opening that would allow the results to be overturned (Mr. Kemp has not only certified the state’s 16 electors; he has also refused to call a special session of the legislature, which people like Mr. Wood have demanded, and where the election results could ostensibly be overturned).
  • Aside from trying to assuage Mr. Trump, Republicans in Georgia also appear to be laying the groundwork for new limits on voting, and particularly on absentee voting. Mr. Trump has baselessly claimed that there was something fraudulent about the signature-matching system election officials used to verify the identities of absentee voters.
  • This week, Nse Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project, said that Mr. Raffensperger was “resorting to desperate attempts to smear law-abiding organizations and scare eligible Georgians from registering to vote in critical upcoming elections.” Mr. Raffensperger’s office said on Wednesday that Ms. Ufot’s group had sent an absentee ballot registration form to his dead son.
  • “I would be highly surprised and very disappointed,” Mr. Chambliss, the former senator, said in an interview, “if Donald Trump came to Georgia this weekend and had any comments that weren’t positive about any Republican politician.”
kaylynfreeman

A Full Guide to the Kamala Harris vs Mike Pence Debate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-harris-mike-pence-debate.html

trump politics us

shared by kaylynfreeman on 07 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris will begin at 9 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday and run for 90 minutes without commercial interruptions. This will be their only debate.
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 07 Oct 20
       
      Hopefully, they are more civilized than the first presidential debate.
  • Mr. Pence is also likely to be pressed to defend Mr. Trump’s actions since his illness was diagnosed — leaving the hospital against the counsel of many medical professionals, minimizing the threat of the virus and dramatically removing his mask when he returned to the White House. The president has offered himself as evidence that Covid-19 can be beaten; does Mr. Pence agree with that?
  • But that basic rule of thumb got a little more tricky for Ms. Harris. With Mr. Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis and him just being back at the White House after three nights in a hospital, harsh attacks against an ailing president might be politically unwise. The Biden campaign pulled down its negative advertising attacking Mr. Trump as soon as he disclosed his diagnosis. Joseph R. Biden Jr. has stepped carefully in talking about the president.
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  • Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has established her credentials as a tough interrogator with her questioning of officials like William P. Barr, the attorney general. She knows how to make a case. But can she attack Mr. Trump’s handling of the virus — which has come to define his presidency — without veering toward an overly personal attack on a president battling a potentially lethal disease?
  • Mrs. Clinton, the only woman to serve as a major-party presidential nominee, warned Ms. Harris, in so many words, about the corrosive role that sexism will play onstage.
  • “You should also be prepared for the slights, the efforts to diminish you, you personally, you as a woman, who is about to be our next vice president,” Mrs. Clinton said on her podcast. “So I do think there will be a lot of maneuvering on the other side to try to put you in a box.”
  • Ms. Harris is not just a woman but also the first woman of color on a major-party ticket.
  • Don’t look too angry’ line,” Ms. Lawless said. “These are cliché. But they’re cliché because they’re true.”
  • “She symbolizes everything that ‘Make America Great Again’ wants to push back on by virtue of being a Black woman,” Ms. Lawless said.
  • (Step 1); moved quickly to talk about the aspirations of a Trump presidency (Step 2); and swung into an attack on the Democrats (Step 3).
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 07 Oct 20
       
      This was clearly effective
  • because so many vice presidents, and vice-presidential candidates, eventually run for president.
Javier E

Trump's Captain Queeg Crackup - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/trumps-captain-queeg-crackup

trump 25th amendment deranged crisis 2020

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The situation in Washington grows dire. For Trump’s most recent ravings make Queeg look like a model of sanity and restraint.
  • He attacked his own cabinet members for not prosecuting or persecuting his political adversaries. Attorney General William Barr, Trump proclaimed, will go down in history as “a very, sad, sad situation” if he did not indict Joe Biden and Barack Obama:
  • Of Kamala Harris, Trump said, “she’s a communist,” calling her “this monster that was on stage with Mike Pence.” He claimed that Biden “wouldn’t be president for two months” because “he’s not mentally capable.”
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  • He retweeted tweets asserting that Nancy Pelosi might be planning “a coup” against him. He asserted that law enforcement was “watching” Nevada’s governor for potential voter fraud.
  • After the FBI thwarted a kidnap attempt by right-wing militia against Michigan Gretchen Whitmer, he labeled her “the lockup queen”—a reference to her life-saving public-safety directives to stave off the pandemic. He complained that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had not yet released Hillary Clinton’s emails, exhuming his demented obsession from 2016.
  • All this in but a few hours.
  • Obviously, Trump has long since has become an unacceptable danger to the country he is sworn to protect—not only to our spirit, but to our safety, security, and the conduct of our democracy
  • Until now, only in feverish political potboilers do lunatic presidents propose to jail the opposing candidate. No man this unmoored should be permitted to hold—and abuse—such power.
  • What might that be? One cannot help but remember that John F. Kennedy’s coolheaded judgment during the Cuban missile crisis helped save the Western hemisphere from a nuclear catastrophe. One simply cannot know, and America should not risk, what Trump may do when his psychic thermometer passes the boiling point.
  • For his own sake, and that of others, a president possessed of minimal self-awareness and empathy would refrain from debating in person—or demanding the presence of others.
  • Not Trump. “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young,” announced our ill-conditioned, 74-year-old president
  • That this man has already threatened the peaceful transition of power—and clearly means it—is reason enough to remove him from office.
  • So is the worry that Trump will abuse our military power—potentially provoking an incendiary geopolitical crisis—in a reckless attempt to reverse his failing electoral fortunes. This need not involve that terrifying conceit of apocalyptic political fiction: the unhinged president reaching for the nuclear button. But whatever dangers Trump may pose, one cannot dismiss the deranged verbiage he used yesterday with Rush Limbaugh to threaten Iran
  • The language itself shows a president who has exceeded his limited capacities for self-control, rhetorical and behavioral. “If you fuck around with us,” he informed the Iranians, “if you do something bad to us, we’re gonna do things to you that have never been done before.”
  • But he does, and so we watch the spectacle of his unraveling
  • He has a pre-existing condition which made him a danger to our country since his first day in office: an ineradicable personality disorder which fatally compromises the ability to perceive anything outside his own stunted inner landscape. The only reality he has grasped, in his frighteningly feral way, is that Joe Biden is going to beat him—and it is making him more dangerous than ever.
Javier E

Opinion | Rod Rosenstein Was Just Doing His Job - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...enstein-family-separation.html

conformity trump politics us government

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Rosenstein’s complicity in this machine was ugly, but it was by no means unique. Top officials at the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services all played a role. They were all sowing chaos, inflicting cruelty and causing unfathomable trauma at the behest of a small, vicious cadre up top
  • his argument was this: The jail time for these misdemeanors was usually a matter of days. So why were these parents not being reunited with their children afterward? “What became clear,” he told me, “is that they never had any intention of reuniting them until the parent gave up and was deported, if ever.”
  • The federal judge in San Diego agreed, saying the government’s behavior “shocks the conscience,” that the separation policy violated due process and that all separated families had to be reunited within 30 days.
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  • what galls Gelernt now, after seeing the Times report about the inspector general’s investigation, is that his suspicions were right all along: Separating families was the objective of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, not a byproduct. The children were the targets of the policy, not collateral damage. “We need to take away children,” Sessions reportedly told the local U.S. attorneys.
  • When the number of immigrants surged at the border in 2014, President Barack Obama responded by building more detention facilities and holding families indefinitely — though still together — and faced a legal backlash.
  • But Trump’s policy was something altogether different. It was child abuse, plain and simple. “That’s why it’s so chilling,” Gelernt told me. “D.O.J. officials apparently declined to exempt even cases with a baby.
  • note what Rosenstein did not deny: That he refused his U.S. attorneys permission to automatically exempt undocumented immigrants with young children from prosecution.
  • what we have lately learned about Rosenstein is that he is a very canny political operator. He has a gift for threading needles that even a tailor would envy.
  • While serving in the Trump Justice Department, for instance, he wrote a memo recommending the removal of James Comey as the head of the F.B.I., and he later defended his boss, William Barr, after he misled the public about the results of the Mueller investigation
  • But he also had the presence of mind to appoint Robert S. Mueller in the first place — and, though he has denied it, to question Trump’s own presence of mind. (It has been reported that he suggested secretly recording Trump’s ravings in order to expose him as unfit to lead.)
  • when it was Rosenstein’s turn, he did nothing to stop government-orchestrated cruelty. Instead, he simply did his job.
rerobinson03

Hunter Biden Discloses He Is Focus of Federal Tax Inquiry - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-biden-tax-investigation.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The investigation is being led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware. It was opened in late 2018 and has included inquiries into potential criminal violations of tax and money laundering laws, according to people familiar with the inquiry.
  • The inquiry was focused on Hunter Biden and some of his associates, not the president-elect or other family members, two people familiar with it said.
  • The timing means it is possible that one of the last decisions of the Trump Justice Department could be about a potential case against the son of the incoming president, if investigators uncover enough evidence to go forward.
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  • Mr. Biden has long been an intense target of Mr. Trump and his allies over the range of business ventures he pursued around the world during his father’s time as vice president and beyond
  • The investigation could also complicate Mr. Biden’s efforts to instill public confidence that the department can operate independent of the personal interests of the president after it became deeply politicized under President Trump. L
  • “It’s not my Justice Department. It’s the people’s Justice Department.”
  • t also means that Mr. Biden will most likely come into office as the Justice Department is actively investigating his son, a case his political opponents are certain to seize on to try to damage the early days of his presidency.
  • Mr. Biden and a group of partners — including his uncle James Biden, the president-elect’s brother — were also involved in negotiations about a joint venture with a Chinese energy and finance company called CEFC China Energy in 2017, documents provided by a jilted former business partner show.
  • The Republican report, which was released weeks before Election Day in an apparent effort to damage the Biden campaign, found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice president.
  • Efforts by Mr. Trump and his supporters to damage Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign took on new urgency in October after The New York Post published reports based on files from a laptop that appeared to have belonged to Hunter Biden. The Post, which obtained materials from Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, reported that the laptop had been seized by the F.B.I.
  • The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the files upon which they were based.
  • Mr. Trump and his allies openly pressed the Justice Department to disclose negative information about Mr. Biden ahead of the election, but investigators did not make overt moves that would have exposed the investigation before the ballots were cast.
tsainten

Opinion | What Really Saved the Republic From Trump? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-constitution-norms.html

Trump politics 2021 Presidency

shared by tsainten on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • an informal and unofficial set of institutional norms upheld by federal prosecutors, military officers and state elections officials. You might call these values our “unwritten constitution.”
  • anti-Muslim travel ban, the courts have been too unwilling to look beyond form to ferret out unconstitutional motive.
  • More generally, Mr. Trump has tended to move fast, while the courts are slow, and to operate by threat, which the courts cannot adjudicate.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Madison intended Congress to be the primary check on the president. Unfortunately, that design has a key flaw (as Madison himself realized). The flaw is vulnerability to party politics. It turns out that if a majority of members of at least one body of Congress exhibits a higher loyalty to its party than to Congress, Congress will not function as a reliable check on a president of that same party. This was what happened with Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate.
  • Instead, the president’s worst impulses were neutralized by three pillars of the unwritten constitution. The first is the customary separation between the president and federal criminal prosecution
  • That is why, throughout this fall, even as Mr. Trump urged his appointees in the Justice Department to openly announce a criminal investigation into the Biden family, they did not comply. None of Mr. Trump’s appointees was willing to openly investigate Joe Biden or his family members, let alone issue an indictment or civil complaint.
  • Imagine if in response to the provocations of Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, a U.S. attorney had charged Mr. Biden with criminal fraud. Even if Mr. Biden ultimately prevailed in court, publicly fighting such charges during an election would be a political and logistical nightmare. The unwritten constitution blocked this line of attack on the electoral process.
  • Over the past four years, six of Mr. Trump’s close associates have been convicted and seven were indicted, including his adviser Stephen Bannon, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his lawyer Michael Cohen. Such prosecutions would be unimaginable in a dictatorship.
  • Mr. Trump’s plan had the written law on its side. Neither the Constitution nor any congressional statute would have prevented the president from directly ordering active duty military to suppress the protests. The Constitution makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces and the Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the president to use the military or National Guard to suppress civil disorder, providing a broad exception to the general rule barring domestic use of the military.
anonymous

Brandon Bernard executed after Supreme Court denies request for a delay - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by anonymous on 11 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Bernard was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m. He was the youngest person in the United States to receive a death sentence in nearly 70 years for a crime committed when he was an adolescent.
  • "I'm sorry ... I wish I could take it all back, but I can't," Bernard said to the family of the Bagleys during his three-minute last words. "That's the only words that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day."
  • Bernard's execution was scheduled this fall by the government. It was the ninth execution since Attorney General William Barr announced restarting federal executions after a 17-year hiatus -- a decision that has been fraught with controversy, especially during the global pandemic, and could be halted under President-elect Joe Biden's administration.
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  • the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson called on the President to commute the sentences of and pardon all the inmates scheduled for execution; and 23 elected and former prosecutors filed an amicus brief on Wednesday in support of Bernard's appeal due to allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
  • Attorneys Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr joined Bernard's legal team late on Thursday and had filed a petition with the Supreme Court requesting to delay the execution for two weeks so they could get up to speed on Bernard's case.
  • "Brandon's execution is a stain on America's criminal justice system. But I pray that even in his death, Brandon will advance his commitment to helping others by moving us closer to a time when this country does not pointlessly and maliciously kill young Black men who pose no threat to anyone," Bernard's attorney Robert Owens said in a statement.
  • The court's decision left Trump as Bernard's last hope. The President did not act.Trump was made aware of the case -- and of the calls by celebrities and activists to commute Bernard's sentence -- over the past several days
  • "the jury heard ample evidence indicating that Bernard did not have a leadership role in the gang -- and was not even a full-fledged member."
  • Five of the sentencing jurors came forward saying that if they had been aware of the undisclosed information, they would not have agreed to sentence Bernard to death, Owens said.
  • "The decision to move forward with all these super spreader events in the midst of a pandemic that has already killed a quarter of a million Americans is historically unprecedented," Dunham said.
  • According to Chief Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson's order denying the preliminary injunction, up to 125 people enter the facility for an execution, including nearly 40 out-of-state Bureau of Prisons employees who are part of the execution team.
  • Interactions between the execution team and Federal Correctional Center Terre Haute staffers are "extremely limited, and members of the execution team generally do not even enter the FCI or interact with inmates there. Plaintiffs do not interact with inmates on death row or with anyone in the execution facility,"
Javier E

Opinion | What Really Saved the Republic From Trump? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-constitution-norms.html

trust virtue civic virtue Trump crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • our system of checks and balances, in which the three branches of government are empowered to control or influence the actions of the others, played a disappointingly small role in stopping Mr. Trump from assuming the unlimited powers he seemed to want.
  • What really saved the Republic from Mr. Trump was a different set of limits on the executive: an informal and unofficial set of institutional norms upheld by federal prosecutors, military officers and state elections officials.
  • You might call these values our “unwritten constitution.” Whatever you call them, they were the decisive factor.
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  • in other cases, such as his anti-Muslim travel ban, the courts have been too unwilling to look beyond form to ferret out unconstitutional motive. More generally, Mr. Trump has tended to move fast, while the courts are slow, and to operate by threat, which the courts cannot adjudicate.
  • The bigger and more important failure was Congress. Madison intended Congress to be the primary check on the president. Unfortunately, that design has a key flaw (as Madison himself realized). The flaw is vulnerability to party politics.
  • It turns out that if a majority of members of at least one body of Congress exhibits a higher loyalty to its party than to Congress, Congress will not function as a reliable check on a president of that same party. This was what happened with Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate.
  • The problem is chronic, but over the last four years it became virulent. Confronted with a president who was heedless of rules, Senate Republicans, in ways large and small, let him do what he wanted.
  • They allowed acting appointees to run the federal government. They allowed him to claim a right to attack Iran without congressional approval. The impeachment process was reduced to nothing but a party-line vote. The Senate became a rubber stamp for executive overreach.
  • Instead, the president’s worst impulses were neutralized by three pillars of the unwritten constitution
  • The first is the customary separation between the president and federal criminal prosecution (even though the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch).
  • The second is the traditional political neutrality of the military (even though the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces).
  • The third is the personal integrity of state elections officials.
  • The Constitution makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces and the Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the president to use the military or National Guard to suppress civil disorder, providing a broad exception to the general rule barring domestic use of the military.
  • That is why, throughout this fall, even as Mr. Trump urged his appointees in the Justice Department to openly announce a criminal investigation into the Biden family, they did not comply. None of Mr. Trump’s appointees was willing to openly investigate Joe Biden or his family members, let alone issue an indictment or civil complaint.
  • Prosecutorial independence was not limited to refusing to indict Mr. Trump’s political adversaries; it also extended to indicting his allies. Over the past four years, six of Mr. Trump’s close associates have been convicted and seven were indicted, including his adviser Stephen Bannon, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his lawyer Michael Cohen. Such prosecutions would be unimaginable in a dictatorship.
  • On June 1, as protests and counterprotests occasioned by the killing of George Floyd became violent and destructive, Mr. Trump appeared in the Rose Garden of the White House and denounced what he called “acts of domestic terror.” He said he would “deploy the United States military” if necessary to “defend the life and property” of U.S. citizens.
  • an unwritten norm has long held that the president should not dictate law enforcement decisions in general, and criminal prosecutions in particular.
  • Mr. Trump’s plans ran afoul not of the law, but of an unwritten rule. In a few days, the active duty troops gathered around Washington were sent home. Though briefly tested, the norm had held.
  • Despite the pressure, Mr. Raffensperger and the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, held steady, along with an overwhelming majority of state elections officials around the country. They have refused to “discover” voting fraud without good evidence of it. Party loyalty — at this point — seems not to have fatally corrupted the vote-counting process.
  • Might this welcome result be credited to constitutional design? Not really. The states are an important part of the constitutional design, and the document does give them a central role to play in federal elections. But what seems to have mattered most, in terms of ensuring the integrity of the voting process, was less the constitutional structure and more the personal integrity of the state elections officials. Their professional commitment to a fair vote may have spared the Republic an existential crisis.
  • Madison famously wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Cynical minds have read this line to mean that we should never trust people and should rely only on structural controls on government power.
  • The last four years suggest something different: Structural checks can be overrated. The survival of our Republic depends as much, if not more, on the virtue of those in government, particularly the upholding of norms by civil servants, prosecutors and military officials.
  • as every major moral tradition teaches, no external constraint can fully substitute for the personal compulsion to do what is right.
  • Madison, too, saw the need for this trust. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he wrote, but also “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” A working republican government, he argued, “presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
  • It is called civic virtue, and at the end of the day, there is no real alternative.
lucieperloff

Australia's (Brief) Idea to Ease Supply Chains: Juvenile Forklift Drivers - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...juvenile-forklift-drivers.html

pandemic supply international politics

shared by lucieperloff on 20 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The Australian government has been trying all kinds of things to address a pandemic labor shortage: Letting international students work more hours. Reimbursing visa costs to lure backpackers. Easing isolation requirements for essential workers.
  • Mr. Morrison had planned, according to media reports, to present the notion to state and territory leaders as part of a suite of proposals to reduce regulatory requirements for crucial segments of the work force, as soaring coronavirus case counts keep many off the job.
  • The chief minister of the Australian Capital Territory, Andrew Barr, said in an apparent dig at the prime minister that while the assembled leaders had supported “sensible and safe” measures to alleviate workplace shortages, “allowing 16-year-olds to drive a forklift was unanimously rejected by all states and territories.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • As in many places around the world, supply chains in Australia have been snarled as the Omicron variant has swamped a country that had largely contained the coronavirus for almost two years.
  • To ease the shortages, the Australian government announced last week that transport, freight and logistics workers would no longer have to isolate for seven days if they were identified as a close contact of someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. Instead, they can go back to work as soon as they test negative on a rapid antigen test.
Javier E

Book Review: 'The Divider' Is a Sober Look at the Trump White House - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...peter-baker-susan-glasser.html

trump presidency book review politics history

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • Comprehensively researched and briskly told, “The Divider” is a story of disasters averted as well as disasters realized.
  • It’s all here: the culture wars and the corruption, the demagogy and the autocrat-love, the palace intrigue and the public tweets, the pandemic and the impeachments (plural).
  • those with strong stomachs will find a lot they didn’t know, and a lot more that they once learned but maybe, amid the daily barrage of breaking-news banner headlines, managed to forget.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • they draw on an impressively broad array of materials: hundreds of original interviews, reams of contemporary daily journalism, and an already-fat library of memoirs and journalistic accounts of the Trump years,
  • the authors are persuasive in arguing that in this White House, “impulse and instinct ruled.” Given the sheer number of crises and conflicts that erupted on Trump’s watch, herding them all into a narrative isn’t easy.
  • the authors center each chapter on its own topic or story line — Trump’s rocky relationship with foreign allies, for example, or the 2018 budget battle over the Mexico wall. Other chapters focus on key supporting players, who are rendered with deft portraits, such as Jared Kushner, Trump’s widely reviled but fireproof son-in-law, or the president’s antagonist-turned-sycophant, Senator Lindsey Graham
  • Some of the weightiest chapters take up Trump’s relationship with Russia.
  • Yet Baker and Glasser seem to endorse the view of the Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who, during the first impeachment, warned Republicans, “You will not change him, you cannot constrain him.”
  • The chapters on the 2019 Ukraine scandal, when Trump linked aid to its government to delivery of dirt on Joe Biden, re-establish the gravity of the first impeachment
  • If “The Divider” has a dominant theme, it may be the struggle within the “almost cartoonishly chaotic White House” by people more reasonable and ethical than Trump to rein in his most dangerous instincts
  • Time and again, staffers debate whether to stay put in hopes of mitigating Trump’s basest impulses or to run screaming from the room. Even more stunning is the number of onetime loyalists who, after their tours of duty, emerged as among the president’s most strident critics.
  • Many Trump aides — even some, like National Security Adviser John Bolton or Attorney General William P. Barr, who might deserve harsh criticism on other grounds — did intervene valiantly at times to keep Trump in check. Without their small acts of resistance, things could have gone even worse
  • “The Divider” soberly and carefully reconstructs events to reveal anew Trump’s shocking deference to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin — notably at the 2018 Helsinki summit, where, the authors pointedly write, “Trump acknowledged that he would accept the word of Putin over that of his own intelligence agencies.”
  • They write: “So many had told themselves that they could manage the unmanageable president, that they could keep him from going too far, that they could steer him in the direction of responsible governance. … They had justified their service to him or their alliances with him or their deference to him on the grounds that they could ultimately control him. And what Schiff was saying is that three years had shown that was not possible.”
Javier E

Why Trump's Drastic Plan to Slash the Government Could Succeed - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ernment-could-succeed-6828ccbe

trump government plan

shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • In campaign speeches and statements, the former president has promised to eliminate the independence of key federal agencies, reduce protections for civil servants, deny citizenship to tens of thousands of people born in the U.S. and wrest control of some authority over spending from Congress. If implemented, those measures and others Trump has proposed would amount to the most sweeping overhaul of the government in modern times, legal scholars said.
  • Trump’s agenda mirrors the longstanding priorities of prominent conservative groups, which have been working behind the scenes to revamp every corner of the government, agency by agency. The goal, conservative leaders said, isn’t only to shrink the size of the government, but also to snuff out perceived opposition to the president’s agenda within the bureaucratic ranks.
  • “I would hope this is a seminal moment to crush the deep state and the administrative state that has operated with its own set of agendas for a long time,”
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • In practical terms, that means weakening measures first put in place in the 19th century that turned federal employment from a partisan spoils system into a professional workforce, and setting aside federal laws intended to insulate some areas of policy-making and enforcement from political interference.
  • Underpinning the effort is what is called the unitary executive principle, which draws from a constitutional clause that vests “the executive power” in the president. Conservative leaders argue that the clause gives the president virtually unchecked authority over the executive branch.
  • Conservative justices have signaled support for the unitary executive principle and repeatedly espoused skepticism of federal agencies, signaling they could have sympathy for Trump’s contention that the federal bureaucracy must be reined in. 
  • f he wins in 2024, Trump would find a friendlier court than the one that sometimes frustrated him. Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s third pick for the high court, was seated just months before Trump left office, expanding its conservative majority and reducing the sway of Chief Justice John Roberts, who had joined the then four-member liberal bloc in finding Trump officials cut legal corners in trying to alter the census and cancel the DACA program.
  • Still, hurdles remain. There were occasions when each of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees joined with liberals or Roberts against conservative objectives.
  • Lawmakers of both parties, protective of their own power, would likely object to efforts by Trump to reassert what is known as the impoundment authority and allow a president to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. And former Trump administration officials say his focus can drift from one
  • some people who know him expressed concern that an emboldened Trump could push the limits of the law far beyond what he did in his first term, and would surround himself with advisers who are unwilling to resist his impulses. 
  • “I’m sympathetic to some of the initiatives that are being considered,” said Barr, who has been critical of the former president. “My concern generally is that the president is very imprudent and very excessive in anything he does, and therefore will end up doing things that end up actually curtailing executive power, rather than expanding it.”
  • the Supreme Court could be more open to the president taking more control over independent agencies and limiting protections for civil servants. 
  • “It’s hard to predict how far [the Supreme Court] would go. But I think there’s less judicial restraint and there’s more willingness to allow what were once seen as extreme or fringe constitutional arguments on the right to be entertained,” said Shalev Roisman, a University of Arizona law professor.
  • Trump advisers would seek greater power to hire and fire career federal employees so they can select who carries out presidential policies throughout the government. In 2020, Trump issued an executive order that could have stripped thousands of federal employees of civil service protections and removed competitive exams as a hiring criterion. President Biden rescinded that order, but Trump advisers are planning to resurrect it. 
  • Although the Supreme Court’s conservative majority holds a robust view of the unitary executive theory, it is unlikely there are sufficient votes to fully scrap the merit-based employment that has been part of the federal firmament for 140 years. But the president does have authority to manage the civil service system, and Trump could find a court open to expanding the class of employees that can be hired and fired at the White House’s discretion.
  • Trump advisers also are considering a broader challenge to Supreme Court precedent, hoping to win new authority to replace members of independent commissions at will—a step some justices have signaled they might consider. 
  • Conservative officials involved in the discussions reject the notion that Trump is trying to hoard unchecked authority, arguing that they want to revert to a vision of the presidency outlined in the Constitution. In their view, agencies essentially are extensions of the president and their employees serve at his pleasure. In a second Trump term, Vought said, “the bureaucracy would care more about what the president thinks and what his agenda is.”
  • Biden has ramped up his criticism of Trump, homing in on the former president’s efforts to expand his power. “This MAGA threat is the threat to the brick and mortar of our democratic institutions,”
  • The origins of conservatives’ efforts date back to 1982, when then-President Ronald Reagan established a commission to improve government efficiency, assembling more than 100 private-sector figures with the mandate to “drain the swamp” in Washington. The group, known as the Grace Commission, released a 47-volume report with more than 2,400 recommendations, including proposals to rethink protections for government workers.
  • Many of the recommendations were never implemented.
  • “It’s been hard to make progress on this front,” said ​​Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “At its core, the incentives within government are for more spending, more growth, more intervention.”
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