Why it matters: The job and funding cuts are now hitting GOP lawmakers’ districts and states. There’s also a larger conflict brewing over whether the administration can simply bypass Congress on these decisions.
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I’d Like to see Congress doing something. Trump is in the process of making Congress irrelevant, which you would think was something they cared about. To paraphrase Jean Anouilh’s play Becket, if they let him get away with this power grab, in the future he can take them one by one and break them across his knee. The thing to do, if they wish to retain any power is to act together and say “no” to him, as they did when he asked them to adjourn and let him make all his cabinet appointments as recess appointments. They weren’t willing to cave so easily there. They ought to show more backbone here. Musk can’t primary ALL of them.
Bullshit (at Congress, not CalMeacham). At the very f…ing least, Congress can subpoena Musk to answer questions about what he is doing, hold him in criminal contempt if he refuses to show up and (theoretically) have him arrested for such. At the very least.
I wanted to flag this. Purely ceremonial actions actually DO give you some power: if you publicly refuse to comply, that is a big deal. They’d find someone else to swear him in, or skip the ceremony, so it would have little immediate practical effect, but rhetorically it’s a big deal, and gives courage to others.
Courage, which you’ll note, is notably lacking at present.
On the other hand, merely going along makes a different powerful statement, “This Is Fine.” Which is a lie, and (in my opinion anyway) makes anyone performing their purely ceremonial roles complicit.
Unfortunately, one of the effects it would have among some 75 million Trump voters would be to stain the Supreme Court as anti-Trump before he had even done anything. Now, instead, the Supremes can rule on his individual actions in their traditional legitimate role without any obvious appearance of bias – and, in fact, from a position of being fairly obviously right-wing biased but still intent on upholding the law.
Whether they will actually do this is entirely another question. I’m not hopeful. But what’s required of them at this point could not be simpler – do nothing and let lower court rulings stand.
(I wish I could pull in a big six-figure salary for which doing nothing would be praised as my crowning achievement. Supreme Court justice: nice job if you can get it!)
Yeah. Whatever else happens the economy is going to turn really bad quite soon, you simply can’t do the sort of things they are doing and have anything else happen.
“Hakeem Jeffreys and Dem leadership’s picking out inflation for messaging is safe in its way, but it is similar to complaining about the litter after a tornado hits your town.”
That’s something I pointed out back when the P2025 stuff was first being discussed. Fed jobs won’t make you rich, but they generally pay a decent wage. Intentionally getting rid of hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs, while simultaneously creating more competition for the lesser-paying jobs, is going to have a huge effect on the economy. Assume an average wage of $50k, that’s potentially $10 billion in consumer spending that will disappear overnight, and take years to rebound, if it ever does.
Every business that sells to those people will see a decrease in their revenue, and that’s going to affect even more workers. Every business that downsizes a few employees because business is lagging just makes the problem worse.
I just checked my 401K and it’s not plummeting yet. In 2007 I could see what was coming. I wanted to convert my investments to cash with the intention of re-investing back into the stocks, but I didn’t know how. Had I been able to do that, I would have doubled (at least) my investment. I need to contact John Hancock to see how I can do that if and when the market starts to crash.
DOW is down almost 1.5% today. Of course, it’s been down most mornings and mostly recovered each day, but it hasn’t been down over 600 points in a day like right now.
I wonder if it is all the US war machine companies that are currently dropping causing this?
My union sent me a link to this tracker of the pending federal lawsuits aginst Trump. Whoo doggy, there’s a bunch of them! Trying to keep up on them would be a full time job.
I guess taking action which will predictably necessitate defending against a whole bunch of lawsuits is “efficient”?
