Tag: Trump wants to be a dictator

Trump takes immediate step to try to curb new inspector general’s autonomy, as battle over stimulus oversight begins

Washington Post logoIn signing statement, he signals he could restrict new watchdog’s independence

Immediately after signing the historic $2 trillion coronavirus aid package, President Trump sought to curb oversight provisions in the bill by asserting presidential authority over a new inspector general’s office.

The move could presage a major battle between the White House and Capitol Hill as the Trump administration moves to implement the new law.

In a White House signing statement released Friday evening, Trump questioned the constitutionality of the law’s requirement that a new Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery notify Congress immediately if the administration “unreasonably” withholds information requested by investigators. Continue reading.

Rep. Phillips Responds to President Trump’s Rejection of Oversight Language in Stimulus

Phillips helped secure key legislation that mandates a Congressional Oversight Commission for a $500 billion fund

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Just hours after signing a historic $2.2 trillion stimulus package, President Trump announced that he would attempt to reject certain elements the bill, including provisions introduced by Rep. Dean Phillips (MN-03) mandating oversight over the spending, including a five-person Congressional Oversight Commission for the $500 billion Treasury Department fund.

“This is the most significant distribution of taxpayer money in human history. Everybody in this country, Republicans, Democrats, and independents agree – we want to see our tax dollars used effectively, efficiently and with accountability and oversight,” Phillips said during an interview with Alex Witt on MSNBC.

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Click here to watch the full interview. Continue reading “Rep. Phillips Responds to President Trump’s Rejection of Oversight Language in Stimulus”

The McGahn ruling could shred Congress’s ability to oversee the executive branch

Washington Post logoTHE U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled last week that it could not order former White House counsel Donald McGahn to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, though the committee issued a subpoena that Mr. McGahn flouted, on President Trump’s orders. If allowed to stand, the ruling would shred Congress’s ability to oversee the executive branch.

Courts have previously brokered informal compromises between Congress and the president on congressional subpoenas, avoiding definitive rulings that would settle the extent of lawmakers’ power to demand documents and testimony. Many judges still wish to avoid formal involvement. The D.C. Circuit’s two-judge majority warned that if courts refereed subpoena disputes between the executive branch and Congress, they would preclude the dealmaking and “flexible settlements” that typically resolve such problems.

But the era of give-and-take has ended. One party in the equation definitively broke faith: President Trump is now refusing to engage in any negotiations with Congress on providing information or witnesses. By refusing to act, courts are not preserving balance; they are ratifying its destruction, because the balance rested in large measure on the possibility that Congress could resort to the courts. “What would disrupt the present balance of power is not a holding that such lawsuits are permissible but the decision that they are not,” Judge Judith W. Rogers wrote in a dissent. “The judiciary can upset that careful equilibrium when it dismisses a suit that it ought to decide.” Continue reading.

Democracy is in decline around the world — and Trump is part of the problem

Washington Post logoFor the 14th year in a row, a major annual report on the health of global democracy warned of its decline. In its survey evaluating 195 countries and 15 territories, Freedom House, a nongovernmental, nonpartisan advocacy organization established in 1941, found that political freedoms and civil liberties across the world are backsliding more often than they are improving.

“Democracy and pluralism are under assault,” read the opening sentence of its report, written by Sarah Repucci. “Dictators are toiling to stamp out the last vestiges of domestic dissent and spread their harmful influence to new corners of the world.”

The usual suspects remain among the worst offenders. Freedom House decried China for its “totalitarian offensive” in Xinjiang and other campaigns of repression, and it warned of Beijing’s “relentless campaign to replace existing international norms with its own authoritarian vision.” It pointed to Russia’s “stage-managed elections” in 2019, in which the genuine opposition was largely shut out. Iran’s leadership, even as it sowed “discord” in neighboring countries, deployed security forces that used live ammunition to crush demonstrations last fall, killing hundreds of people.

How Trump purged non-loyalists from federal government institutions and reshaped them in his own crude image

AlterNet logoPresident Ronald Reagan’s influence on the U.S. conservative movement greatly decreased in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president and ushered in a different type of right-wing politics that owed a lot to Patrick Buchanan and combined social conservatism with an emphasis on protectionism, isolationism and hyper-nationalism. The Atlantic’s George Packer, three years into Trump’s presidency, examines the ways in which Trump has reshaped the federal government and the White House — and not for the better.

Packer explains that when Trump was sworn into office in January 2017, many people in Washington, D.C. believed that he would be “outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited.” But it didn’t work out that way; instead, Trump refashioned government institutions in his own crude image, from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to the State Department.

“The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions,” Packer recalls. “They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it didn’t really matter as long as ‘the adults’ were there to wait out the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk. After three years, the adults have all left the room.” Continue reading.

Trump is pushing a dangerous, false spin on coronavirus — and the media is helping him spread it

Washington Post logoAmong the many outlandish statements President Trump has made since taking office, one in particular stands out for me.

Speaking in Kansas City, Mo., in the summer of 2018, he urged the attendees of the VFW annual convention to ignore the journalism of the mainstream media.

“Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” he said. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

In other words, if you didn’t hear from me or my minions, it isn’t true. Continue reading.

Behind Trump’s Latest Threat To Press Freedom

Wednesday was an ominous day for freedom of the press in this country, and I want to tell you why.

You may have heard or seen that President Trump filed a libel suit against the New York Times. Perhaps you weren’t surprised: the president is known to frequently disparage the Times even as he reads it obsessively. Borrowing a page from what I’ve referred to before as a Mount Rushmore of totalitarians, Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin and Mao, Trump loves to call the press the “enemy of the people.”

But Wednesday’s suit is an important step beyond bluster to try to silence the press using the legal system — and just days after the president announced that he considers himself the country’s “chief law enforcement officer.” Continue reading.

Trump is trying to bring ‘thousands’ of federal adjudicators under his control — and hurling the US ‘further toward an authoritarian future’: attorney

AlterNet logoMuch has been written about President Donald Trump’s impact on the United States’ federal government — not only the U.S. Supreme Court, but also, the lower federal courts. Trump’s influence at the federal level, however, goes beyond the courts and the judicial branch of the federal government. And journalist/attorney Peter M. Shane, in an article for The Atlantic, warns that Trump is also trying to bring federal administrative adjudicators under his control within the government’s executive branch.

Shane opens his article by explaining who administrative adjudicators are and what they do.

“Throughout the federal government are thousands of officials who do not direct courtrooms, but who are, in a sense, judges,” Shane notes. “They are federal employees who preside over trial-like disputes, hear evidence and testimony, and make decisions that can deeply shape people’s lives, such as the granting of asylum and veterans benefits. These executive branch employees are administrative adjudicators.” Continue reading.

Trump’s India visit opens with more symbolism than substance as he celebrates ties with a fellow nationalist

Washington Post logoNEW DELHI — President Trump began a whirlwind visit to the world’s largest democracy Monday by praising what he called India’s unity and tolerance, but offering no public critique of recent actions by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that have been widely condemned as discriminatory.

Amid pageantry and crowds that were enormous but apparently shy of the president’s predictions, Trump and Modi celebrated their warm personal bond and shared nationalist political philosophy while talking up economic and military cooperation that is a bulwark to China. Trump said a long-promised trade deal with India is in sight, but he gave no date for its completion.

“India is a country that proudly embraces freedom, liberty, individual rights, the rule of law and the dignity of every human being,” Trump said. “Your nation has always been admired around the Earth as the place where millions upon millions of Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and Jains, Buddhists, Christians and Jews worship side by side in harmony; where you speak more than 100 languages and come from more than two dozen states, yet you have always stood strong as one great Indian nation. Your unity is an inspiration to the world.” Continue reading.

Trump makes veiled threat toward Schiff over classified briefing on Russian 2020 election interference

Washington Post logoPresident Trump on Sunday made a veiled threat toward House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff, claiming without evidence that the California Democrat had leaked information from a classified briefing in which a senior U.S. intelligence official told lawmakers that Russia wants to see Trump reelected.

“Somebody please tell incompetent (thanks for my high poll numbers) & corrupt politician Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff to stop leaking Classified information or, even worse, made up information, to the Fake News Media,” Trump tweeted. “Someday he will be caught, & that will be a very unpleasant experience!”

Trump’s tweet comes more than a week after the intelligence official, Shelby Pierson, told members of Schiff’s committee during a bipartisan briefing that Russia has “developed a preference” for Trump and views his administration as more favorable to its interests, according to people who were briefed on the comments and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.