Tag Archives: GOP

national news

Trump politicizes suffering of fed employees

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What in the name of human decency — which he doesn’t possess — is Donald J. Trump trying to assert with this latest idiotic declaration?

He said this week that “most federal employees are Democrats” and said they are those who are most concerned about the partial shutdown of the federal government. They have been furloughed, not getting paid, which I guess in Trump’s mind means that congressional Democrats are more liable to support those workers because of their party affiliation. Is that what he means?

The president’s idiocy prompts a couple of questions.

What difference does it make which party they identify with? Why does it matter whether they’re mostly Democrat, mostly Republican, mostly socialist, communist or Whig?

Is the president trying, therefore, to lay all the blame on Democrats as a way to deflect the criticism that is coming directly at him and those in his political party?

Let’s recall briefly an element that preceded this shutdown.

Senators voted 100 to zero to approve a spending bill that did not contain money for The Wall. They sent the bill to the House of Representatives, where House leaders agreed in principle to send the measure to the president’s desk. Then the president got a snootful from right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh and right-wing gadfly Ann Coulter. Then Trump changed his mind and told GOP lawmakers that he wouldn’t sign the bill after all.

Now this goofball is fabricating some phony scenario that suggests that “most federal employees are Democrats.”

I have to ask: To what end does he intend to take this ridiculous assertion?

national news

Democrats plan to provide Trump with an immediate test

Suppose this government shutdown lasts until the new Congress takes office in early January. Republicans will maintain control of the Senate, but Democrats take over in the House of Representatives.

The new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is going to do the following: She is going to urge the House to approve a budget deal that doesn’t pay for The Wall that Donald Trump wants to erect along our southern border. The House will send it to the Senate. She will dare the GOP Senate majority to kill the bill the House will enact.

If the Senate discovers its spine, it well could send the bill to the president’s desk for his signature. Or, it might approve a different bill and the legislation could be hammered out in a conference to reconcile the differences.

Either way, Donald Trump is going to face a serious challenge when January rolls around. It’s only a few days away, folks.

Pelosi is no one’s fool. She is fully capable of engineering this House deal, of getting Democrats to hold the line and shoving this government shutdown issue squarely onto the GOP’s lap.

As the saying goes: Elections have consequences.

Put another way: Karma’s a bitch, man.

national news

What ‘policy change’ could Trump enact? Let me think

A fellow I do not know, but someone who reads this blog, has posed an interesting question that I have chosen to answer with a blog post.

He asks: (High Plains Blogger), other than stepping down, what policy could Trump enact to change your mind about him?

Fair question, right? You bet it is. It deserves an answer. So, here goes.

The president can surrender his effort to build The Wall. He can stop insisting that Mexico pay for it. He surely must know he cannot order another sovereign government to do his bidding. He should recognize that The Wall won’t solve anything. He should simply ask Congress to spend more money to enhance existing methods to curb illegal immigration.

Trump can stop demonizing refugees, implying that those seeking asylum comprise gang members, terrorists and assorted felons intent on murder, rape, human trafficking, drug dealing . . . you name it.

The president can acknowledge publicly that Russia is our No. 1 geopolitical adversary and that Russian operatives sought to influence the 2016 presidential election. Along those lines, he can demand the immediate extradition to the United States of the dozen or so Russians indicted for criminal activity related to that effort.

Trump can apologize for demonizing his foes. He can atone for the hideous insults he has hurled at the media, at members of his own Republican Party. One place to start would be to publicly apologize to the family of the late Sen. John McCain, the Republican who stood at the gates of hell while he was imprisoned during the Vietnam War. Trump’s statement that McCain was a “hero only because he was captured” was hideous in the extreme.

Donald Trump can learn to act like the president of the United States of America. He can behave with decorum and dignity. He can stop his ceaseless Twitter tirades. He can learn how to treat Cabinet officials with respect, and stop informing them of their departure through those petulant tweets.

Sure, a resignation would be my preferred solution to ending the Trump Era in modern presidential politics. Donald Trump need not exercise that option as the only way out. A close second-best option would be to see him denied the GOP nomination in 2020; absent that, for him to be defeated in the 2020 general election.

However, having laid out these notions, I do not expect the president to change his mind, enact any new executive policies that would make me or other critics better of him.

Therefore, the criticism from this forum will continue.

national news

Donald Trump: classic RINO

I know a lot of Republicans. They are friends of mine. By that I mean they’re actual friends, people with whom I’ve shared many ups and downs, highs and lows.

I haven’t yet had the nerve to ask any of them in person a question that has been bugging me ever since Donald Trump rode down the escalator in the summer of 2015 to run for president of the United States — as a Republican.

Why do they continue to support a guy who is a classic Republican In Name Only? Trump is the living embodiment of the term RINO.

He had no serious ties to the Republican Party before he declared his presidential candidacy. Those who fancy themselves as pure-bred Republicans, descendants of the Party of Lincoln, surely were aghast when he launched his campaign by invoking xenophobic rhetoric against Muslims and Latino immigrants.

Trump’s international trade policy is about as anti-Republican as any I can think of. He is a protectionist in the mold of labor-union bosses who tilt heavily toward the Democratic Party. Most GOP politicians I’ve encountered favor free trade, detest tariffs and do whatever they can avoid international trade wars; they damn sure avoid those wars when it involves our allies and strong trading partners.

Republicans used to detest federal budget deficits, let alone deficits that spiral out of control. That’s what the current GOP president is delivering with his tax cuts coupled with spending increases.

GOP politicians used to stand foursquare behind our intelligence community and law enforcement officials. Not this POTUS. He undermines and undercuts the CIA, the DNI and other spooks who say in unison that Russia interfered with our 2016 election. He blasts the FBI and the Justice Department, two agencies that usually are the darlings of GOP officials.

Donald Trump alienates our allies. He eschews virtually every normal diplomatic channel to communicate with them. Republicans normally would chafe against all of that, too.

But they don’t. They let Trump trample all over them.

Too few of them call out the president for what he is: a RINO. Yet they blast others of their own party to have the stones to criticize the president for being unfaithful to the political banner under which Donald Trump was elected as president.

Weird.

national news

Government shutdown: it’s on Trump

Here is where we stand with this partial shutdown of the federal government.

Donald Trump and some right wingers in Congress want to erect a wall along our southern border. The rest of Congress won’t give them the money to build that wall, which Trump pledged would be paid by Mexico.

The government has shuttered some agencies. All’s quiet in many federal agencies, along with Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, Democrats and some reasonable Republicans are blaming Trump for this monumental government cluster-flip.

But as Politico reports, Trump is OK with that.

I want to stipulate something that I believe is the reason behind this shutdown: It’s all about whether to build the wall; it has nothing to do with the overall scheme of “border security.”

Democrats want to secure the border as much as those rigid Republicans. They just don’t to erect a wall. They keep saying they support border security in the form of implementing and augmenting existing technology. Thus, they are willing to appropriate a sum of money that pays for those techniques.

That’s not good enough to suit Trump, members of that far right coalition called the Freedom Caucus and a handful of Fox News commentators and right-wing radio talkers. Indeed, it was the radio blowhards who got to Trump and persuaded him to renege on the pledge he made to Senate Republicans to sign the bill they approved.

That, my friends, is the sign of a mealy-mouthed weak leader. Yet the president pretends to be a strongman when in reality he is a tool, a puppet being manipulated by the right-wing element of his political base.

This shutdown might last a while. Or, it might end if senators and House members can come up with a compromise that everyone — including Donald Trump — can endorse.

This is an unacceptable state of play in Washington, D.C.

Donald Trump pledged to take control of government, to “drain the swamp,” to “unite” a nation torn by political division, to make the “best deals ever seen.” He is an abject failure.

He told congressional leaders in the Oval Office he would be proud to take ownership of a government shutdown. He’s got one now. Trump seems proud, all right. He also is acting like an ignoramus.

Despicable.

International news, national news, political news

GOP losing patience, finally, with POTUS?

The beginning of the end of the Trump presidency came and went a long time ago. I have never wavered from my oft-stated convictions that (a) Trump will not finish out his term, and (b), the end will be triggered by a presidential meltdown that forces the Vichy Republicans in Washington to mount an insurrection — if only to save their own asses, not the country. This week was a big step toward that endgame, and surely one of the most remarkable weeks in American history.

So writes Frank Rich, a writer for New York Magazine and a former columnist for the New York Times.

Those “Vichy Republicans,” and they include Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and lame-duck House Speaker Paul Ryan, took a shiv in the back from Donald J. Trump.

They thought they had a deal to keep the government running. The Senate voted unanimously to send a spending bill to the House — but with no money to build that damn wall along our southern border.

The House got its hands on it. Right wing radio talkers got the ear of the president and told him he was betraying that shrinking base of his base by not demanding money for the wall. Trump called Ryan to the White House and told he had changed his mind, that he wouldn’t sign the bill.

The government has been shut down. Yes, it’s a partial shutdown. However, it still affects hundreds of thousands of federal employees . . . at Christmas!

Is this the moment that the GOP finally — finally! — will stand up to this goofball president?

Meanwhile, the president’s chaos pattern escalated with the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis, who quit over severe disagreements about the way the president develops policy statements. By that I refer to the Twitter torrents that announce policies such as, oh, the withdrawal of about 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria. There was no consultation with allies, with the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the DNI. Trump did it all by himself.

That did it for Mattis. He has quit and will walk away with his reputation intact.

Meanwhile, the federal government will stagger along. The president will continue to operate in a chaotic atmosphere.

How much longer will Trump’s supposed GOP allies tolerate it?

I will leave you with this from Rich’s commentary: The Mattis resignation is huge. It’s not that he was the last “adult in the room” but that as a retired military man and a secretary of Defense with access to both foreign intelligence and the inner workings of the White House, he knows treason when he sees it.

Wow!

International news, military news

Danger still lurks in Syria, Mr. POTUS

Donald Trump, the self-described “stable genius,” has given us yet another demonstration of why he is so damn dangerous as commander in chief of history’s greatest military machine.

With all the combat-experienced officers surrounding him, he either (a) ignored their advice or (b) never consulted with them prior to announcing a decision to pull all 2,000 or so troops out of Syria.

Trump declared that the Islamic State in Syria “has been defeated.” Really? Has it? Do we believe this president’s simple declaration? Do we take anything he says about such matters as a statement of irrefutable fact? I certainly do not!

The Pentagon got a major surprise Wednesday when the president tweeted a decision to pull the troops out. So did the State Department. Same with the CIA and the director of national intelligence.

No one saw it coming, according to reports.

One theory being kicked around is that Turkey’s president talked the president into pulling out of Syria. What do you suppose might have prompted that request? It might be that the Turks wanted our forces out of the way so they can deal more aggressively with Kurdish forces along the Turkey-Syria border; the Turks, you see, hate the Kurds and want to eliminate the threat posed by the Kurds — who have been fighting against the Syrian government — to the Turkish government.

Let’s not forget another party that is happy with this decision: That would be Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Enough said about that one, yes?

To be clear, Trump acted within his presidential authority. He is the commander in chief. He possesses broad executive authority to do what he did.

It’s the so-called “wisdom” of the decision that has riled so many observers in Congress, most notably many of the president’s supposed “allies” within the Republican caucus in both congressional chambers. Congressional Democrats, of course, are shaking their heads in astonishment.

They, too, were surprised. The president didn’t consult with them, either.

Many of the president’s more ardent critics point out another curious dichotomy. It is that a New York attorney general has ordered the shuttering of the Trump Foundation because of what is alleged to be misuse of charitable donations, but still . . . the creator of that foundation maintains control of the nation’s nuclear launch codes.

Is this how you make America great again?

I think not.

national news

Senate GOP should rethink resistance to Mueller protection

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has stated he has faith that Donald Trump won’t fire special counsel Robert Mueller.

I do believe McConnell has more faith in the president acting rationally than many of his fellow Americans possess.

Which brings me to the Senate’s latest refusal to enact legislation would protect Mueller from a foolish presidential act.

Mueller is closing in on the end of his lengthy investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian operatives who interfered in our election. He’s also closing in on Trump and his closest aides and associates.

Is there any way to guarantee that the president won’t do something profoundly foolhardy by, say, firing Mueller? Of course not! It’s because Trump cannot be pigeonholed, he can’t be measured by any of the standard methods.

That ought to give Senate Republicans reason enough to enact this legislation that would prevent Trump from doing something stupid. Think of it: If the president does deliver an act of profound stupidity by firing Mueller, he delivers to Congress a tailor-made case for obstruction of justice that, I do believe, is an impeachable offense.

Is the Senate majority leader really ready for that event? He cannot predict it won’t happen without some legislative protection for Robert Mueller.

political news

Elections always have consequences

I have long understood and appreciated the consequences that elections bring to those in public service.

It’s an accepted part of the electoral process. If the individual you want doesn’t get elected to any office, you then must face the prospect of the other individual doing something with which you likely will disagree.

It happened certainly in 2016 with the election as president of Donald J. Trump. He won the Electoral College as prescribed by the Constitution, but more of us cast ballots for his major foe than for the winner. Still, we are paying the consequences of the previous presidential election.

Well, here we are. Two years later and the president finds himself facing his own consequential electoral result in the wake of the congressional midterm election. The House of Representatives, half of the legislative branch of government, is about to flip from Republican to Democratic control; the gavel-passing occurs on Jan. 3 when Nancy Pelosi ascends to the speakership. Committee chairs will get their respective gavels, too.

Get ready, therefore, for hearings. Get ready for lots of questions that House Republicans so far have been  unwilling to ask of the president of their own political party.

The president appears to be in trouble. His GOP “allies,” and I use that term guardedly, have been reticent in seeking the truth behind the many questions that swirl around the president. They aren’t “friends” with Trump as much as they are frightened by him. He has bullied them into remaining silent.

The president won’t be able to play that hand with Democrats who are in charge of the lower chamber of Congress. Thus, it remains increasingly problematic for the president to do something foolhardy, such as fire the special counsel who is examining those questions concerning the alleged “collusion” between the president’s campaign and Russian government agents who interfered in our electoral process.

Yes, indeed. Elections have serious consequences. We are likely to witness them play out in real time . . . very soon.

legal news

GOP facing a familiar set of impeachable standards

If it comes down to an impeachment of Donald J. Trump, many of the congressional Republicans who are defending him now will have to face down their former selves.

One of them is U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who in 1998 led the House impeachment team that brought charges against President Bill Clinton.

It was a time when then-Rep. Graham said that the House didn’t need to have a high crime and misdemeanor to determine whether a president had debased his high office. He made the case that President Clinton had debased and disgraced the office through his affair with a young White House intern.

It turned out that the GOP found a crime on which to impeach the president: perjury. Clinton spoke falsely to a grand jury about that relationship. House GOP members said that you just can’t allow a president to break the law.

If we now fast-forward to the present day we have another president who might have broken the law. He might have authorized illegal payments to two women to keep them quiet about sexual encounters he had with them.

Graham and other Republicans have reset the bar. It’s much higher now than it was when they had a Democratic president in their crosshairs.

However, even the president’s own lawyer — Rudolph Giuliani — says that Trump likely broke the law with the payments. Is that an impeachable offense? Will Republicans who once impeached a Democratic president for arguably an equal crime be able to do the same with a president from their own political party?

This is where we might be able to see what wires certain members of the House of Representatives.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to see the final report from special counsel Robert Mueller. Trump keeps insisting that Mueller doesn’t have anything. We’ll just have to see about that.