Tuesday, November 19, 2024

ANS -- TRUMP TAKES FLAMETHROWER TO CONSTITUTION.

This is the heading of a Facebook post by Rebecca Solnit.  
--Kim


MILITARY, CONSTITUTION, HEALTH, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT, BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP UNDER ATTACK. TRUMP TAKES FLAMETHROWER TO CONSTITUTION. But you won't see those headlines much. You'll see too many bland little pieces about how they plan to do those things, not much about how they violate the law and the harm that will proceed from them if realized. It's as if they described the planes headed for the World Trade Center on 9/11 as "well educated foreigners informally decide to detour route of airlines."
Much of the media is more or less erasing Biden, which it's been doing for four years (so that a whole lot of people didn't know what the administration did domestically and saw almost no footage of Biden, except for The Debate), and letting Trump fill up their field of attention, while also normalizing a lot of outrages and intentions to violate the law by the incoming administration and the MAGA-aligned state governments. In a way it feels like they're installing the new regime two months early. And caving to it before it has any power.
Meanwhile, here's the NYT headline on a flagrant breach of freedom of religion: "Texas Education Board to Vote on Bible-Infused Lessons in Public Schools" and only several paragraphs down notes "the proposed curriculum has ignited an uproar, with parents and teachers — including some Christian Texans — expressing worry that the lessons blur the line between instruction and evangelizing, and present scripture and tenets of the Christian faith as factual truths to young children."
And here's a NYT editorial normalizing a totally unqualified guy covered in white nationalist tattoos: "Pete Hegseth, like many of President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet picks so far, may seem unworthy of the role he has been tapped to fill. But the instinct to choose someone like him is not.... Mr. Hegseth, despite his heavy baggage, represents something that needs to be acknowledged: the deep bipartisan dissatisfaction with a military leadership that has presided over 20 years of failed wars and incalculable costs to America's veterans and their families." Ma'am do we know who started those wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Do you? I do.
She goes on "If Mr. Trump could find a nominee for secretary of defense who holds similar views, but without his obvious shortcomings, his choice would be justified. Mr. Hegseth has become an influential adopter of the isolationist views..." So the NYT is on the isolationist bandwagon. The author clearly thinks the US should abandon Ukraine, although she justifies isolationism by pointing to war's toll on American soldiers and no American soldiers are in combat in Ukraine. And does this isolationism she praises in the sex crimes nominee really mean the guy just wants to be nice to Putin, as do Trump and Musk?
I have the impression the NYT will accommodate almost anything, and normalize almost anything. Friends, today's lesson: hang onto your vocabulary. Don't accommodate the outrages.
Here's another NYT headline: "Trump says he'll use the military to help fulfill his immigration plans. Here's what that could look like." It would look like violating the law. It would look like using the US military against civilians inside the country. It would look like a massive break with long-established precedent. Here's the NYT on a vast network of concentration camps Stephen Miller proposed: "The Trump team believes that such camps could enable the government to accelerate deportations of undocumented people who fight their expulsion from the country. The idea is that more people would voluntarily accept removal instead of pursuing a long-shot effort to remain in the country if they had to stay locked up in the interim." So much for rights. The word "illegal" is only used to describe immigrants, not illicit attacks on them.
Meanwhile independent voices stand up for stuff too much of the media daren't:
Laurence Tribe πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ ⚖️
@tribelaw
No president has used his Art. II power to force Congress to recess for the purpose of circumventing the Senate's obligation to provide "advice and consent" regarding presidential nominations. Doing so would violate the Constitution's basic structure of checks and balances.
Barry R McCaffrey [former general]
@mccaffreyr3
If Trump fires the JCS Chairman Gen Brown and then conducts a purge of the senior officers of the Armed Forces it will an utter disaster for US national security. The Service Chiefs are not political by law. They have no operational command authority.
Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski
·
8h
At 4:03 AM Trump posts that he is prepared to use the military to round up migrants in a mass deportation effort after Mike Johnson, Tony Gonzales & other Republicans spent the weekend saying this was not the case.
Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
·
Nov 17
Schiff on Trump calling him "enemy within" & threatening to use military against him: "Would he go to the length with the military [of asking] them to fulfill an unconstitutional order? I would hope the military has more independence than that ... I'm not going to be intimidated"
Bobby Kogan‬ ‪@bbkogan.bsky.social‬
·
4h
Republicans are looking at cutting Medicaid and nutrition assistance as a way to partially offset the cost of tax cuts that disproportionately help the rich.
I posted some more stuff I think constitutes useful information from reliable sources in the comments.
All reactions:
2.4KCarol Cook and 2.4K others


Fw: November 18, 2024

Hi Group  -- Here's one from Heather Cox Richardson.  A good summary of what's going on.  
--Kim

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>
To: "kimc0240@yahoo.com" <kimc0240@yahoo.com>
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2024 at 09:50:32 PM PST
Subject: November 18, 2024

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more

On Friday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo locked in a $6.6 billion deal with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for it to invest $65 billion in three state-of-the-art fabrication plants in Arizona. This will bring thousands of jobs to the state. The money comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, about which Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan on October 25: "That CHIPS deal is so bad." House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he would work to repeal the law, although he backed off that statement when Republicans noted the jobs the law has brought to their states. 

Also on Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule that would have made 4 million workers eligible for overtime pay. The rule raised the salary level below which an employer has to pay overtime from $35,568 to $43,888 this year and up to $58,656 in 2025. The decision by Texas judge Sean D. Jordan kills the measure nationally.

On Sunday, speaking from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, President Joe Biden said that it would not be possible to reverse America's "clean energy revolution," which has now provided jobs across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states. Biden noted that the U.S. would spend $11 billion on financing international responses to climate change in 2024, an increase of six times from when he began his term. 

But President-elect Trump has called climate change a hoax and has vowed to claw back money from the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated to mitigate it, and to turn the U.S. back to fossil fuels. What Trump will have a harder time disrupting, according to NicolΓ‘s Rivero of the Washington Post, is the new efficiency standards the Biden administration put in place for appliances. He can, though, refuse to advance those standards.

Meanwhile Trump and his team are announcing a complete reworking of the American government. They claim a mandate, although as final vote tallies are coming in, it turns out that Trump did not win 50% of the vote, and CNN statistician Harry Enten notes that his margin comes in at 44th out of the 51 elections that have been held since 1824. He also had very short coattails—four Democrats won in states Trump carried—and the Republicans have the smallest House majority since there have been 50 states, despite the help their numbers have had from the extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina. 

More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.

Although Trump ran on lowering the cost of consumer goods, Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have vowed to slash the U.S. government, apparently taking their cue from Argentina's self-described anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei, who was the first foreign leader to visit Trump after the election. Milei's "shock therapy" to his country threw the nation into a deep recession, just as Musk says his plans will create "hardship" for Americans before enabling the country to rebuild with security. 

Ramaswamy today posted on social media, "A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids." He has suggested that cuts are easier than people think. The Washington Post's Philip Bump noted that on a podcast in September, Ramaswamy said as an example: "If your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you're out. If it ends in an even number, you're in. There's a 50 percent cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security number starts in an even number, you're in, and if it starts with an odd number, you're out. Boom. That's a 75 percent reduction done."

But, as Bump notes, this reveals Ramaswamy's lack of understanding of how the government actually works. Social Security numbers aren't random; the first digit refers to where the number was obtained. So this seemingly random system would target certain areas of the country. 

Today, both Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein, and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post and Robert Tait of The Guardian reported that Trump's economic advisors are talking with Republicans in Congress about cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly known as food stamps, and other welfare programs, in order to cover the enormous costs of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Medicaid is the nation's health insurance for low-income Americans and long-term care. It covers more than 90 million Americans, one in five of us. Rural populations, which tend to vote Republican, use supplemental nutrition programs more than urban dwellers do. 

The Washington Post reporters note that Republicans deny that they are trying to reduce benefits for the poor. They are, they say, trying to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending. "We know there's tremendous waste," said House Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX). "What we don't seem to have in the hour of action, like when we have the trifecta and unified Republican leadership, is the political courage to do it for the love of country. [Trump] does."

Those cuts will likely not sit well with the Republicans whose constituents think Trump promised there would be no cuts to the programs on which they depend.

Trump's planned nominations of unqualified extremists have also run into trouble. Senate Republicans are so far refusing to abandon their constitutional powers in order to act as a rubber stamp to enable Trump's worst instincts. Former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a Trump bomb thrower, was unqualified to be the nation's attorney general in any case, but as more information comes out about his alleged participation in drug fueled orgies, including the news that a woman allegedly told the House Ethics Committee that she saw him engage in sex with a minor, those problems have gotten worse. 

Legal analyst Marcy Wheeler notes that the lawyers representing the witnesses for the committee are pushing for the release of the ethics committee's report at least in part out of concern that if he becomes attorney general, Gaetz will retaliate against them. 

According to Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman, fear of the MAGA Republican colleagues who are already trying to bully them into becoming Trump loyalists is infecting congress members, too. When asked if Gaetz was qualified for the attorney general post, Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID) answered: "Are you sh*tting me, that you just asked that question? No. But hell, you'll print that and now I'm going to be investigated."

The many fringe medical ideas of Trump's pick for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earned him the right-wing New York Post editorial board's denigration as "nuts on a lot of fronts." The board called his views "a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines." Kennedy is a well-known opponent of vaccines—he called Covid-19 vaccines a "crime against humanity"—and has called for the National Institutes of Health to "take a break" of about eight years from studying infectious diseases, insisting that they should focus on chronic diseases instead.

Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Peter Baker noted that Trump "has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation's capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it." Mischievous glee is one way to put it; another is that he is trying to destroy the foundations of the American government.

Baker notes that none of Trump's selections would have been anything but laughable in the pre-Trump era when, for example, Democratic cabinet nominations were sunk for a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny, or for a donor-provided car. Nor would a president-elect in the past have presumed to tap three of his own defense lawyers for top positions in the Department of Justice, effectively guaranteeing that he will be protected from scrutiny. 

A former deputy White House press secretary during Trump's first term, Sarah Matthews, said Trump is "drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote."

Today Trump confirmed that he intends to bypass normal legal constraints on his actions by declaring a national emergency on his first day in office in order to launch his mass deportation of undocumented migrants. While the Congressional Budget Office estimates this mass deportation will cost at least $88 billion a year, another cost that is rarely mentioned is that according to Bloomberg, undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Losing that income, too, will likely have to be made up with cuts from elsewhere. 

Finally, today, CNBC's economic analyst Carl Quintanilla noted today that average gasoline prices are expected to fall below $3.00 a gallon before the Thanksgiving holiday. 

Notes:

https://azmirror.com/briefs/biden-locks-in-6-6b-for-huge-tsmc-chip-factories-in-arizona-ensuring-trump-cant-rescind-chips-act-deal/

https://apnews.com/article/biden-amazon-peru-g20-3cc827382d1e3c32865a14616ddfe467

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/11/18/appliance-efficiency-standards-biden-trump/

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/overtime-expansion-for-4-million-workers-tossed-by-texas-judge

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/15/trump-elon-musk-javier-milei-government-cuts.html

https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/10-things-to-know-about-medicaid/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/18/trump-medicaid-food-stamps-welfare

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/18/trumps-2024-mandate-isnt-robust-bidens-was-2020/

https://lexfridman.com/vivek-ramaswamy-transcript/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/18/dream-gutting-government-offered-with-technocratic-veneer/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/18/gop-targets-medicaid-food-stamps/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/woman-told-house-ethics-committee-saw-gaetz-sex-minor-lawyer-says-rcna180435

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/11/15/congress/robert-f-kennedy-jr-new-york-post-00189800

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/rfk-jr-comes-home-anti-vaccine-group-commits-break-us-infectious-disea-rcna123551

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rfk-jr-vaccine-access-hhs/

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-confirms-plan-declare-national-emergency-military-mass/story?id=115963448

https://protectdemocracy.org/work/presidential-emergency-powers-explained/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-30/undocumented-immigrants-in-us-paid-nearly-100-billion-in-taxes

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/matt-gaetz-attorney-general-republicans-shocked_n_67351edce4b0958bad3e0cb5

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/us/politics/trump-signals-a-seismic-shift-shocking-the-washington-establishment.html

X:

ForecasterEnten/status/1858527168608829707

VivekGRamaswamy/status/1858559544202502250

gabrielsherman/status/1858150639513002043

Bluesky:

kevinmkruse.bsky.social/post/3lazmbaly4k2d

emptywheel.bsky.social/post/3lbavtjxuzk2y

carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3lba2dqbgfk2e

grantstern.bsky.social/post/3lba2dxjyrs22

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