Scott Boehmer

Tag: Donald Trump

  • Profiles in Courage

    Sometimes it takes a crisis to reveal one’s true character. This is especially true of people who occupy positions of leadership, both in the private and public sectors. Are they courageous, or are they cowards? Worse yet, are they complicit in doing grave harm?

    …

    But today I’d like to honor unsung heroes whose courage in the face of the Trump-Musk takeover of America deserves our profound thanks. They are public servants who have chosen to fight rather than submit to Trump’s treachery, contesting his blatantly illegal attempts to fire them.

    Robert Reich

    Profiles in Courage (Robert Reich)

  • Egg Prices!

    Well, after farmers wrote that letter, the White House and FTC started making noise about antitrust action. They said egg companies, we heard you’ve been price gouging. You’re just overcharging and you’re using bird flu as an excuse. We see you. The fact that you can play with prices like that tells us that there’s not enough competition happening in the egg market.

    …

    And that’s all the federal government had to do. FTC didn’t have to do anything beyond that, because just threatening antitrust action is often enough to get companies to back off.

    Sarah Taber

    Egg prices! Bird flu! Price gouging! What’s going on? (Farm to Taber)

  • The End of Law?

    As Trump’s marauding continues, America’s last defense is the federal courts. But the big story here (which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts.

    On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

    This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power “legitimately,” not the president.

    Robert Reich

    The end of law? (Robert Reich)

  • The Constitution Should Be a Red Line

    In fact, this herky-jerky structure of checks and balances, vetoes, two houses, jurisdiction left to the states, the war powers divided between the president and the congress. This unwieldy structure is the whole idea. No one has or should ever have all the power. So the concern I’m raising today isn’t some academic exercise or manifestation of political jealousy, or abstract institutional loyalty. It’s the guts of the system designed to protect us from the inevitable, and I mean inevitable, abuse or an authoritarian state.

    Senator Angus S. King, Jr.

    Now is the time to establish a redline — the Constitution itself (Senator Angus S. King, Jr.)

  • Pardoning 1500 Insurrectionists Is An Insult To America

    It was, without hyperbole, an insurrection against this country. An attempted coup, a bona fide attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. And it was the most violent attack on the Capitol since 1814. And yet, now re-elected President Trump has made a mockery of the attack on our country and our democracy by pardoning 1500 traitors involved and commuting the sentence of 14 others, including violent felons who attacked law enforcement officers on their way to invading the Capitol. President Trump is not a member of a party of law and order.

    Devin Stone, LegalEagle

    Pardoning 1500 Insurrectionists Is An Insult To America (LegalEagle)

  • A Radical Test of the Presidency’s Power

    Much about the initial memo from Matthew Vaeth, the acting director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which has since been rescinded, was unclear — including the scope or duration of the “temporary” pause on “all federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities.” Most importantly, the memo identified no source of constitutional or legislative authority for the president to pause any, let alone all, domestic grant programs.

    But it is animated, at least implicitly, by a striking claim: Not only can the president freeze all funding amid a review, but he must also then be permitted to permanently eliminate items from appropriations statutes at a whim. It’s a move that threatens not only a radical curtailment of Congress’ authority but imperils the separation of American civil society from the partisan tides of the White House.

    And it goes far beyond what previous presidents have done during contentious displays of executive authority.

    Aziz Huq

    All Presidents Test the Limits of Their Authority. Trump Is Doing Something Far More Radical. (Politico)

  • Have Mercy

    Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. Good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen.

    Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde

    I didn’t think it was a good service.

    President Donald Trump

    Trump demands apology after bishop asked him to ‘have mercy’ on LGBTQ+ people and migrants (PBS)

  • Meta’s Policy Changes Pave the Way for Mass Deportations

    Multiple speech and content moderation experts 404 Media spoke to drew some parallels between these recent changes and when Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar in 2017, in which Facebook was used to spread anti-Rohingya hate and the country’s military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture, and rape against the Muslim minority population. Although there are some key differences, Meta’s changes in the U.S. will also likely lead to the spread of more hate speech across Meta’s sites, with the real world consequences that can bring.

    Joseph Cox

    Meta Is Laying the Narrative Groundwork for Trump’s Mass Deportations (404 Media)

  • Emulating Trump’s Lack of Decency

    Even the way people on Wall Street talk and interact is changing. Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.

    “I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘r****d’ and ‘p***y’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

    Some Wall Streeters also feel able to embrace making money openly, without nodding to any broader social goals. “Most of us don’t have to kiss ass because, like Trump, we love America and capitalism,” one said.

    FT Reporters

    Is corporate America going Maga? (Financial Times)

  • By “Personal Responsibility” We Meant “Impunity”

    Decades ago, people in Trump’s orbit, such as Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, taught him that rules are malleable, that winning is all that matters. Democrats, however, are by and large a party of rule followers. Despite being forced out of the race by his own party, President Joe Biden is still an institutionalist. There he was, smiling next to Trump, the man whom he had characterized as an “existential threat.” Biden’s courtesies, his adherence to norms, extend all the way down. Susie Wiles, Trump’s former co–campaign manager, said that Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, has been “very helpful” to her, and that he has gone so far as to host a dinner for her and others at his home.

    Opposition party this is not. The Democrats are playing one game, and Trump is playing another. Trump is winning.

    John Hendrickson

    Trump’s Rule-Breaking Keeps Working (The Atlantic)

    As Republicans whitewashed January 6 and the legal system failed to hold Trump to account, the importance of Trump’s attack on our democracy seemed to fade. Even the Trump v. U.S. Supreme Court decision, which undermined the key principle that all Americans are equal before the law by declaring Trump above it, got less attention than its astonishingly revolutionary position warranted, coming as it did just four days after President Joe Biden looked and sounded old in a televised presidential debate.

    Heather Cox Richardson

    January 6, 2025 (Letters from an American)

    A federal judge dismissed the Jan. 6 election interference case against Donald Trump hours after federal prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss both that case and the Mar-a-Lago documents cases against Trump.

    Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the case without prejudice.

    The move was widely expected. Just a day after the election, special counsel Jack Smith, who headed the investigations, began to unwind the federal cases against Trump: the first for clinging to power in 2020, events that resulted in the storming of the U.S. Capitol; the second for hoarding classified documents and obstructing FBI efforts to retrieve them.

    NPR Washington Desk

    Judge grants dismissal of Jan. 6 case against Trump (NPR)

    There is little in the part of the report covering Trump’s behavior that was not already public information. The report explains how Trump lied that he won the 2020 presidential election and continued to lie even when his own appointees and employees told him he had lost. It lays out how he pressured state officials to throw out votes for his opponent, then-president-elect Joe Biden, and how he and his cronies recruited false electors in key states Trump lost to create slates of false electoral votes.

    It explains how Trump tried to force Justice Department officials to support his lie and to trick states into rescinding their electoral votes for Biden and how, finally, he pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to either throw out votes for Biden or send state counts back to the states. When Pence refused, correctly asserting that he had no such power, Trump urged his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol. He refused to call them off for hours.

    Smith explained that the Justice Department concluded that Trump was guilty on four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States by trying “to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest”; obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct by creating false evidence; and conspiracy against rights by trying to take away people’s right to vote for president.

    Heather Cox Richardson

    January 14, 2025 (Letters from an American)

    Appearing in court virtually from his Mar-a-Lago home Friday [10 January 2025], President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced for his crimes in the New York “hush money” case and released with no restrictions.

    Justice Juan Merchan followed through on a promise made one week ago to give Trump a sentence of unconditional discharge, which includes neither jail time nor any other restriction that might impede Trump after his inauguration on Jan. 20.

    Graham Kates, Kathryn Watson, Katrina Kaufman, Shawna Mizelle, Nathalie Nieves

    Far from expressing any kind of remorse for his criminal conduct, the defendant has purposefully bred disdain for our judicial institutions and the rule of law, and he’s done this to serve his own ends, and to encourage others to reject the jury verdict that he finds so distasteful.

    Joshua Steinglass, Prosecutor

    Trump sentenced in felony “hush money” case, released with no restrictions (CBS News)

    In a historic decision, a divided Supreme Court on Monday [1 July 2024] ruled that former presidents can never be prosecuted for actions relating to the core powers of their office, and that there is at least a presumption that they have immunity for their official acts more broadly.

    Amy Howe

    Justices rule Trump has some immunity from prosecution (SCOTUSblog)