Tag: Trump weakening American democracy

Republicans Warn Against Trump’s Creation Of ‘Personal Militia’

President Donald Trump gave Democrats yet another reason to oppose his reelection when he bragged about using federal law enforcement officers against George Floyd protesters in Portland, Oregon and threatened to do the same thing in Chicago and other major cities with Democratic mayors. But some Republicans have been speaking out as well, and liberal Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent discusses their objections in his column this week.

“Under fire for dispatching federal law enforcement into cities in defiance of local leaders, in part to create TV imagery that sends an authoritarian thrill up President Trump’s leg, top officials are offering several new defenses,” Sargent writes. “All are profoundly weak, which is why senior members of previous Republican administrations are now condemning what’s happening.”

One of those Republicans is Michael Chertoff, who served as secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush. Chertoff, Sargent notes, has described Trump’s use of DHS officers as “very problematic” and “very unsettling.” Continue reading.

How Trump’s Use of Federal Forces in Cities Differs From Past Presidents

New York Times logoLegal scholars fear the president is trying to take on a job that the Constitution did not give the federal government.

Federal forces went into Los Angeles to control the Rodney King riots. They entered Washington, Chicago and Baltimore in the days after the killing of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. They went into Detroit during a race riot in 1943, and then again in 1967. They were in Little Rock, Ark., during school integration. For the Pullman Strike of 1894 in Chicago, and across numerous cities during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, they were there, too.

So in some ways, the scenes of officers clad in riot gear this week in Portland, Ore., have a long American lineage in federal responses to domestic unrest. But there is something different in this moment, too, in President Trump’s repeated vows to send forces to other American cities for reasons that slip between protecting specific federal properties, restoring general order and combating violent crime.

“The idea of bringing in troops or law enforcement in its many forms to quell civilian protest is as American as apple pie — it is foundational to this nation,” said Heather Ann Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan. But then the president began talking about crime in Chicago, and naming cities where protests this summer haven’t turned violent. Continue reading.

Legal experts slam Trump’s ‘blatantly unconstitutional’ attempt to corrupt the census

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a memorandum declaring undocumented immigrants are not to be counted when the number of U.S. Representatives for each state is allotted. That process, called “apportionment,” occurs every ten years after the official national census is conducted.

The U.S. Constitution mandates the census, which is being conducted this year, count “the whole number of persons in each state.” It makes no distinction as to their citizenship status.

What Trump is doing is claiming he has the authority to bypass the Constitution and declare undocumented immigrants are not “persons,” and therefore, literally, do not count. Continue reading.

The dubious deployment of armed enforcers within the U.S. is central to Trump’s politics

Washington Post logoThere are constant protests in New York City.

Meaning daily. It’s a city of millions, including a large number of activists and activist organizations. There are labor protests, antiwar protests, protests focused on foreign policy, protests aimed at arcane legal changes, demonstrations about housing laws, demonstrations leveraging whatever happens to be in the news. At times those protests are massive, a coalescing of activism around a common theme, as they were following the death of George Floyd earlier this year after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. But even when the protests don’t involve tens of thousands of people, they exist as an undercurrent.

For several days, the protests in May and June over Floyd’s death spiraled into something else. As happened in other places in the same period, groups of looters and vandals used the protests as a jumping-off point for theft and property damage. That quickly faded. When the protests shifted to focus attention on tributes to leaders of the former Confederacy and those who had participated in the slave trade, New York — not exactly a hotbed of Confederate nostalgia — was not an epicenter. City leaders did agree to remove a statue of Theodore Roosevelt from outside a museum, but that was more because of the presentation of the statue itself than anger at Roosevelt specifically. Continue reading.

Trump seizes on Bush-era torture memo author’s call for extralegal executive authority: ‘Intellectual bankruptcy’

AlterNet logoProgressives are raising alarm after news Sunday that President Donald Trump is reportedly looking to move forward with a series of extralegal maneuvers to further his agenda by bypassing Congress with use of a legal argument from John Yoo, the lawyer notorious for- helping craft the justification of torture in the George W. Bush administration.

“The fun part is that Yoo frames this as ‘making it easy for presidents to break the law,’” tweeted journalist David Dayen “and Trump jumps on it and says ‘yes let’s do that.’”

According to Axios, which broke the news of the new White House strategy Sunday evening, the president is relying on a legal argument in an article Yoo wrote in June for the National Review after the Supreme Court’s Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California ruling. Continue reading.

A Navy vet asked federal officers in Portland to remember their oaths. Then they broke his hand.

Washington Post logoPORTLAND, Ore. — He came to the protest with a question. He left with two broken bones in a confrontation with federal officers that went viral.

Christopher David had watched in horror as videos surfaced of federal officers in camouflage throwing protesters into unmarked vans in Portland. The 53-year-old Portland resident had heard the stories: protesters injured, gassed, sprayed with chemicals that tugged at their nostrils and burned their eyes.

David, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and former member of the Navy’s Civil Engineer Corps, said he wanted to know what the officers involved thought of the oath they had sworn to protect and defend the Constitution. Continue reading.

Trump law enforcement officials brush off pleas to butt out of Portland

The president praised the DHS officers whose aggressive treatment of protesters has drawn widespread scrutiny.

President Donald Trump’s top law enforcement officials on Monday defended the descent of militarized government forces upon Portland, Ore., rejecting pleas from local and state leaders to pull back the fusion of federal officers.

In an interview on CNN, acting deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli claimed the department deployed federal law enforcement personnel to Portland over the July 4 weekend after having received “locally generated” intelligence regarding “planned attacks” on federal facilities.

Cuccinelli said the federal agents have “been there ever since” on a mission to protect those U.S. government buildings, wearing the “very same uniforms” throughout their time in Portland. Continue reading.

Think you’ve heard the Cuccinelli name before?  You have: https://americasvoice.org/blog/ken-cuccinelli/
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/01/811023475/judge-says-ken-cuccinelli-was-appointed-unlawfully-to-top-immigration-post
https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/blog/top-five-things-you-need-know-about-ken-cuccinelli

Trump to send federal forces to more ‘Democrat’ cities

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Monday said he would send law enforcement to more U.S. cities, as a federal crackdown on anti-racism protests in Oregon with unmarked cars and unidentified forces angered people across the country.

Trump, a Republican, cited New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland, California, as places to send federal agents, noting the cities’ mayors were “liberal Democrats.” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot frequently blasts Trump on Twitter.

“We’re sending law enforcement,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can’t let this happen to the cities.”

In Portland, federal agents are reportedly tossing protesters in unmarked vans

For the past several days, unidentified, ambiguously accountable, and largely anonymous federal agents have been terrorizing the activist community in Portland, Oregon, snatching protesters off the streets and throwing them into unmarked civilian vans as the social justice movement launched in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer continues to embroil the city.

“I see guys in camo,” protester Conner O’Shea told Oregon Public Broadcasting, describing the scene as his friend Mark Pettibone was detained by the assortment of federal officers. “Four or five of them pop out, open the door, and it was just like, ‘Oh shit. I don’t know who you are or what you want with us.'”

“I am basically tossed into the van,” Pettibone added. “And I had my beanie pulled over my face so I couldn’t see and they held my hands over my head.” Continue reading.

Here’s why the White House is sending stormtroopers into Portland

AlterNet logoIn one of the most alarming developments of Trump’s presidency, dozens of federal agents in full camouflage seized protesters and threw them into unmarked cars, taking them to locations unknown without specifying a reason for arrest. It appears that at least some of the agents involved belonged to the US Customs and Border Protection (colloquially known as Border Patrol), an organization that obviously has no business whatsoever conducted counterinsurgency tactics against peaceful American protesters in Portland, Oregon. Neither the mayor of Portland nor the governor of Oregon wanted them there; in fact, they specifically requested that they leave. And now a U.S. Attorney for the State of Oregon is calling for an investigation into the arrests, even as the Acting head of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, is vowing to ramp up these actions both in Portland and reportedly elsewhere.

Needless to say, this is a chilling step toward police state authoritarian rule in the United States, one that was presaged by Attorney General Barr’s approval of an pre-curfew assault on protesters instigated in Lafayette Square to clear the way for a presidential campaign photo op. Few took it seriously when leftist organizers were warning that the border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were being culturally and structurally converted into stormtroopers for the Trump regime, equally ready to be deployed against politically inconvenient American citizens as against undocumented immigrants seeking a better life. Those warnings should be heeded now. Continue reading.