Does that mean we can blame third party voters for being naive without being shouted down for once? (I don’t think such shouting happens here, but in other spaces)
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I mean, I get that’s what they meant, I just bristle at the concept of “you know this festival you’ve been celebrating for 2000 years and that you have always called by this name? Yeah, we do that, too now and your name for it is exclusively ours now”.
What do you want to blame them for?
In this context, I don’t see a reason to blame them. They voted for someone other than Tromp; that helped to prevent him from winning 50% of the vote, i.e., a genuine mandate.
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Americans are good at that sort of appropriation, see football, thanksgiving, and so on…
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I want to blame them for not having voted for a candidate that had a chance. I know that this only applies to those in swing states, but I wouldn’t be surprised if once all numbers are known, it would have made a difference. I’m just sick of “protest voters”, tbh
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One could almost be forgiven for thinking such people were short-sighted and selfish to such a degree that they are more trouble than they were ever worth because their cause is nothing but a sandbag.
I suspect politicians adjust according to logic like that.
Seems counterproductive?
IDK. I try to show patience… but avoidance is what I can accomplish more easily.
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November 19, 2024 (Tuesday)
For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.
A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.
They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.
And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Abraham Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.
On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began. While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution’s protection of property—including their enslaved Black neighbors—Lincoln dated the nation from the Declaration of Independence.
The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed to be “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”
He noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”
“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and to vow that “these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
[Image of President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, center-left, with his head tilted downward. Work is in the U.S. public domain, obtained here from Wikimedia Commons.]
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November 20, 2024 (Wednesday)
Remember how American voters so hated Project 2025, the playbook for a second Trump term written by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing institutions, that Trump said he had nothing to do with it, and then one of its key architects, Russell Vought, told undercover filmmakers that Trump was only running away from the project as political cover?
It appears Vought was right and the story that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 was, indeed, just political cover. Ed O’Keefe and Major Garrett of CBS News reported today that two sources close to the Trump transition team have told them that they expect Trump to name Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Vought wrote the section of Project 2025 that covers the presidency, calling for “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and identifying the OMB as the means of enforcing the president’s agenda. Vought was Trump’s OMB director during the end of his first term and tried to remove the civil service protections that have been in place since 1883 to protect federal workers from being fired for political reasons. That plan, known as Schedule F, would have affected about 88% of the federal workforce.
One of the first things Biden did when he took office was to rescind Trump’s executive order making that shift.
Like that earlier attempt, Project 2025 leans heavily on the idea that “personnel is policy,” and that idea illuminates the choices the Trump team is making. Trump has refused to sign the official documents required by the 2022 Presidential Transition Act. Those documents mandate ethics commitments and require the incoming president to disclose private donations. They also limit those donations. Without the paperwork, Trump appointees cannot start the process of getting security clearances through the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the team says it is planning to do its own vetting of its candidates instead.
Claiming they have a mandate, Trump’s people have said they are launching “a hostile takeover” of the American government “on behalf of the American people.” But as voting numbers continue to come in, Trump’s majority has fallen below 50% of voters, meaning that more voters chose someone else than chose Trump on November 5. These results are far from being in “mandate” territory.
The U.S. Constitution charges Congress with writing the laws under which the American people live, and the president with taking “care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Since 1933, Congress has created an extensive system of agencies that regulate business and provide a basic social safety net. Congress will say, for example, that the U.S. needs an agency to protect the environment (like the Environmental Protection Agency, established under Republican president Richard M. Nixon), appropriate money for it, oversee its leadership, and then trust those leaders to hire the personnel necessary to carry out its mission.
Regulations and social welfare programs and the agencies that provide them are broadly popular—think how hard it has been for members to get rid of Social Security, for example—so Congress trims at the edges rather than abolishing them. As the U.S. budget has grown, they often bear the brunt of accusations that the government spends too much, although what has really caused the budget to operate deeply in the red is the tax cuts for the wealthy put into place by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Right-wing leaders who want to continue cutting regulations and taxes are newly empowered by Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, and they are turning to a quirk of the government to enable them to work around Congress.
Since the first administration of President George Washington, agencies created by Congress have lived in the Executive Branch. If, as Vought and others argue, the president is the absolute authority in that branch, Trump can do whatever he wants with those agencies and the civil servants—the bureaucrats—who run them.
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out their plans for cutting the U.S. government. Neither of them has ever held elected office, but they see that as an advantage, not a downside: “We are entrepreneurs, not politicians,” they write. “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees.” Trump has named them to the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE. Despite the “department” name, DOGE is not an official government agency—which would require ethics disclosures—but rather an advisory panel.
Their op-ed begins by redefining congressional authority to create agencies to suggest that agencies are illegitimate. “Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees,” they write, “but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.” This, they say, “imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers.”
“Thankfully,” they continue, “we have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On Nov. 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it.”
While “politicians” have “abetted” an “entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy,” they write, they will work with the OMB to identify regulations that, they claim, Trump can issue an executive order to stop enforcing. “This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy,” they write. Should Trump want to cut things that Congress wants to fund, they claim that Trump will simply refuse to spend those appropriations, challenging the 1974 Impoundment Control Act that declared such withholding illegal.
Musk and Ramaswamy reiterated their support for cutting programs that are not currently authorized, although budget experts note that such a lapse is a tool to permit adjustments to programs Congress has, in fact, authorized and have also pointed out that one of the top items on that list is health care for veterans. Cuts to all these programs will naturally mean extensive cuts to the federal workforce.
“With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6–3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court,” they write, “DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government. We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action.”
They conclude by asserting that “[t]here is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud,” which is one heck of a conclusion to a blueprint for taking the power of American lawmaking from the Congress, where the Framers put it, and delivering it into the hands of an extraordinarily powerful president acting on the advice of two unelected billionaires, one of whom wasn’t born in the United States.
In the vein of getting rid of regulations, today the chief executive of Delta Air Lines said he expected the Trump administration would be a “breath of fresh air” after the Biden administration’s consumer-protection laws that he called government “overreach.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, the Senate has been confirming President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, with the absence of Republican senators making the confirmations easier.
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This country is going to be a dumpster fire for the next 4 years.
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What’s one step beyond a dumpster fire?
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Failed state.
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Tire fire?
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My hope is that he spends so much time getting in his own way, with these policies that are so incredibly disliked by pretty much everyone, that he isn’t able to do much.
I know that, unlike his first term, he’s both got nothing to lose AND people who are far smarter than him actually putting his hands on the wheel, so some of these terrible things will happen. If you remember though, for all the pain we went through his first time, he got little done…but it did set him up for his biggest potential thanks to his SCOTUS change. That ruling has to be one of the worst the SC ever made.
Assuming we survive this, which despite all my pessimism I think will happen, Trump’s going to be the scapegoat for all the horrible stuff his puppeteers inflict because he’s cheering it on. I sincerely believe that history will look back on him with the same disgust most do of other aspects of our dark past.
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My fervent hope is that in the end the right-wing asshats, who will absolutely still be around, will expend as much energy trying to eliminate the study of this coming shitshow as they have trying to suppress things like the 1619 project or the Japanese internment camps. But so many people will be hurt…
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I will do all I can to prevent harm to anyone I can. If others do the same, that’s about all we can do. Democracy gives and takes, and this is a take cycle.
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Same. It seems so little, but what can be done will be done.
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Cross post:
Hi All, I’m not going to be sending a lot of these out, unless one of you says you’d like it, but these are things we can do right now to at least hobble some of the Trump admin’s intents:
Call your senators - urge them to press the Biden administration to fill the empty judicial slots. There are at least 29 unfilled lifetime appointments to judgeships.
Call your house rep - vote NO on HB 9495. Here’s why, from Indivisible:
In case you missed our email last week, here’s the short version: H.R. 9495 would allow Trump’s Treasury Department to label any nonprofit (including human rights groups, civil liberties orgs, universities, student groups, even Indivisible Civics) a “terrorist supporting organization” and strip it of its tax-exempt status.
This bill requires no oversight. No due process. No justification. In Trump’s hands, it would be a weapon of mass destruction against dissent.
Is my call really needed (part 1)?
Last week, Republicans tried to rush through this legislation by voting under a “suspension of the rules.” That meant the bill needed a 2/3 majority to pass**.**
This week, they’re doing it the standard way, meaning it’ll only need a simple majority to go through. So although we defeated the bill 256-145 the first time around, this time 256 votes will be more than enough to pass it. We cannot assume that everyone who voted “no” last time will stand strong again, and we need to peel away some of those yes votes. So it’s vital we keep up the pressure.
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More specifically:
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