Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Trump is throwing the baby out with the Bathwater

 What I mean by the title is that in order to try to reign in spending of the U.S. government he is willing to destroy many of the lives of the American people. Students with no student loans or grants, Elders with no Medicaid or Medicare, you can add to the list from here. This is NOT what people voted for at all. Anyone I have talked to that actually voted for Trump said they wanted him to reduce food prices more than anything else. Since he is not doing that they feel betrayed by Trump so far because many of these people are elderly and need things like Medicare and Medicaid in order to stay alive. So, he has betrayed the survival of the base of those who elected him in the first place. There will be hell to pay for Trump for this I presently believe. Consequences for his actions may finally destroy him this year.

Trump is presently assassinating directly and indirectly the base of those who voted for him the most.

Begin quote from: 

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/29/politics/donald-trump-funding-freeze-analysis/index.html

Trump seems to subvert the constitutional role of Congress

But the deepest questions raised by the now partially stayed funding freeze arise from Trump’s latest attempt to wield unrestrained authority in a new presidency already characterized by dubious power grabs.

In seeking to freeze loans and grants and align them with his priorities laid out in a blizzard of executive actions, Trump was seeking to redirect or halt funding already appropriated by Congress.

“It is a direct challenge against Congress and its ability to be able to approve and authorize its expenditure of money,” Kettl said.

Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the freeze was needed because bureaucrats were pushing out funds for “wicked and pernicious” policies.

And Leavitt insisted that Trump was within his rights to analyze federal spending because it was “exactly what the American people elected President Trump to do.”

One interpretation of Trump’s victory last year is that a plurality of Americans had lost confidence in the government and were angry at the volume and content of the Biden administration’s spending.

But winning an election doesn’t give a president a right to simply ignore the law – indeed Trump swore an oath to uphold it just nine days ago. And the government spending in question was contained in laws passed by Congress – which, under the Constitution, controls the power of the purse. Trump has the chance to write and propose new laws but can’t simply ignore those on the books.

A similar disregard for the law was evident in the president’s summary dismissal of prosecutors who investigated him under former special counsel Jack Smith. The career prosecutors are not political appointees and therefore enjoy civil service protections that govern the terms of their employment. Trump and his allies have long argued that large corps of liberal bureaucrats frustrate the goals of Republican presidents. And the dozen or so officials thrown out of the DOJ were told that they could not be trusted to carry out Trump’s agenda – even though prosecutors are meant to follow the law not political agendas.

The White House insists that the president’s Article Two constitutional powers mean he’s within his right to fire anyone. This is an argument headed for the courts too.

Trump’s effort to repeal birth right citizenship as part of his immigration crackdown also appears to fly in the face of the Constitution – which the president lacks the powers to amend.

Trump’s firing of more than a dozen watchdog officials from inside government agencies late last week seems to follow a similar principle – that a law on the books doesn’t apply to him. The statute requires Trump to give 30 days’ notice to Congress of such terminations, which he declined to do. But Miller told Tapper that the law that has been on the books for generations is unconstitutional. “Absolutely it is. I don’t even think so. I know it is,” he said.

But presidents and their advisers are not kings and don’t get to decide what is constitutional. If they did, the system of US democratic governance would collapse.

“What democracy requires isn’t that as soon as the president comes into power, they could wipe away everything that came before,” said Corey Brettschneider, author of “The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens who Fought to Defend it.”

“The idea of a democracy is that when laws are passed, take the 1964 Civil Rights Act or environmental protection, that those laws bind not just citizens, but bind even the president,” said Brettschneider, a constitutional law and politics professor at Brown University.

President Donald Trump returns to the White House Monday night.

Trump is only just beginning his constitutional pressure

Tuesday further clarified that Trump intends to push presidential power to the limit. And there are growing suspicions that the administration is initiating political battles and legal fights specifically to get the conservative Supreme Court to further expand the scope of the presidency.

The confluence of a president who believes in his own unrestrained power and the recent weakening of restraints on the executive suggest he may get a long way toward his goal.

After all, the principal checks on presidential dominance – Congress and the courts – have actively bolstered it.

Republican support for Trump on Capitol Hill – underscored by lawmakers refusing to convict him – proved in the first Trump term that impeachment is an ineffective tool for holding Oval Office occupants to account. And the US Supreme Court majority that Trump built paved the way last year for more power grabs by the 47th president by granting him substantial immunity for official acts in office.

“The presidency is supposed to be limited by the law and by the Constitution,” Brettschneider said. “And Trump sees it quite differently – that he is empowered to do whatever he wants. And that really is a vision of authoritarian control.”

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