The Next Step

On the road to one-man rule. Well, one man and a host of incompetent "advisors". Who needs Congress anyway?

Donald Trump is threatening to use a never-before-employed power of his office to adjourn both chambers of Congress so he can make “recess appointments” to fill vacant positions within his administration he says Senate Democrats are keeping empty amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr Trump opened his daily virus press conference on Wednesday by griping about Senate Democrats blocking tens of his nominees, alleging many otherwise would be working on virus-related efforts. He offered few specifics, however, on how the federal virus response might be different if a substantial amount of those individuals had been approved by the upper chamber.

Article II, Section 3, Clause 3 of the US constitution gives a president the power to adjourn both chambers if they cannot agree on an adjourn date. No chief executive, however, has ever used it.

Call it a trial balloon. He wants to see how bad the blowback is going to be -- or what Sean Hannity says.

And I can't quite shake the feeling that he is running scared about November -- there's something of panic in this latest threat.

Via Joe.My.God.

He Said It Again

I have two possibilities for the origins of statements like this:

“When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total … and the governors know that,” said Trump. “The authority of the president of the United States is total.”

He probably thinks that's the case -- he's cited Article II of the Constitution, saying it says he can do whatever he wants. (Anyone who's read it knows it says just the opposite.) And Moscow Mitch's Senate has rubber-stamped that idea.

I really can't decide whether he's setting us up for the idea of Trump as President for Life -- which assumes he's much more of a strategic thinker than we have any evidence for -- or whether he's living in a fantasy world built around his own megalomania.

Hmm.

I'll take "megalomania" for four hundred, Alex.

Today's Must-Read: Another Brick in the Wall

And here we have another instance of the Trump regime trying (and probably succeeding) in stonewalling Congress:

Greg Sargent does an excellent job of laying out the DNI whistleblower story. It's confusing and the media generally isn't making it less so. (They seem to be being led in various directions by Intelligence sources who may or may not have their own agenda.)

This story is about to get a whole lot more media scrutiny, because it involves secretive back-channel maneuvering, a possible threat to national security and potential lawbreaking at the highest levels of the Trump administration, possibly at the direction of President Trump himself — all with a whole lot of cloak-and-dagger intrigue thrown in.

And now the mystery of Rep. Adam Schiff and the whistleblower has taken an ominous new turn, one that should only underscore concerns that serious — and dangerous — lawbreaking might be unfolding.

At the very least, we’re seeing yet another serious erosion in checks on this administration’s norm-shredding — and, as I hope to explain, there are big and important principles at stake here.

The latest development: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has informed Schiff, the California Democrat and chairman of the Intelligence Committee, that he will not forward a whistleblower’s complaint to the committee, as required by law.

Yet the legal rationale for refusing to do this appears specious — and raises further questions as to why this is happening at all.

Sargent makes the point that the acting Director of National Intelligence hasn't got a legal leg to stand on in this -- the statute that deals with whistleblowers in the executive is very clear and unambiguous, and he simply hasn't got the legal authority to do what he's doing.

Digby finishes with this caveat:

I should add that anyone who thinks that an administration that is willing to defy the congress this way will adhere to the rules and norms governing out elections are fooling themselves. We saw how far they were willing to go in 2000 and did nothing about it. We saw what they did in 2016 and we're wanking on the kitchen table every day. So I'm afraid we can't act surprised if they simply steal it openly in 2020 and then stand there and say "what are you going to do about it?" They have every reason to believe we will do nothing.

That's if we have an election at all.

Todfay's Must-Read: The Enemy Within

This post from Tom Sullivan summarizes a lot of what I've been thinking about the GOP's disdain for American democracy, with specific examples. Starting off with an OpEd by Joe Scarborough:

Since 2017, Republicans have put party ahead of country to protect a "buffoon," Scarborough scolds. Gary Trudeau more graphically suggests a spineless GOP is well on its way towards putting its collective head where the sun never shines.

But the truth of it is the GOP has simply made a foreign adversary an ally in its own attacks on democracy. The headlines may hail from Washington, D.C., but the fighting is out in the provinces. The Post's Editorial Board rolls out the map to highlight the battle in North Carolina "where African Americans’ voting rights have been under siege."

Sullivan focuses mostly on attempts at voter suppression in North Carolina, but it's something you're going to find to one degree or another in any state government dominated by Republicans.

And now they've got a federal government that will back them -- as soon as they finish packing the courts.

You're probably getting sick of reading my comments about how "conservatives" and their constituent elements -- evangelical "Christians," Wall Street oligarchs, neo-Nazis, etc. -- don't like the American system. Well, it's true.

Today's Must-Read: The Road to Dictatorship, Part 455

That's approximately the number of days Trump's been squatting in the White House. Two posts from Hullabaloo on how the Trump regime's pernicious influence is bringing us more and more into line with such sterling examples of democracy as Turkey, the Philippines, and Venezuela. First, from Tom Sullivan, on a speech by French President Emanuel Macron:

Macron warns of “national selfishness and negativity” and a “fascination with the illiberal” spreading across Europe in the emergence of far-right movements and parties:

But his words also apply more broadly to the surge of illiberalism in Turkey, Egypt, Russia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, the Philippines and Venezuela, among other places, where leaders have actively snuffed out civil society, suborned or faked elections, asphyxiated free expression, ignored rule of law, and repressed basic human rights. Leaders in such countries learn from one another as they refine methods to crush democracy, by banning or restricting nongovernmental organizations, creating laws to single out independent voices as “foreign agents,” imposing censorship on the news and social media, and, most tried and true, jailing those who dissent. They also echo one another’s claims that their imposed order offers a viable alternative to democracy, which can be so unpredictable and messy.

And authoritarianism becomes much easier to implement when a sizable portion of those institutions that are supposed to provide the "check and balance" are on board with Our Leader's agenda:

As if to drive home the Post's point about jailing dissenters (if indeed the editorial is not in reaction to this news), eleven Republicans sent a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Jeff Sessions urging him to prosecute an enemies list of Trump foes. The list includes former FBI Director James Comey, former Secretray of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former Acting Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe, FBI Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Counsel Lisa Page.

Digby expands on this in another post. Her summation:

We are going to depend upon Jeff Session and Donald Trump to be the calm leaders who would never consider such actions. Indeed, assuming that we don't find ourselves in a major crisis I'd guess that Sessions and most other officials would oppose this.

It's good that there's no chance of a crisis, amirite? Everything's perfectly normal and in control thank goodness.

I'd surmise that Trump and/or Sessions put them up to it, but then, they don't have to, do they?

Because Diplomacy's for Sissies

Well, he did it:

The United States and European allies launched airstrikes on Friday night against Syrian research, storage and military targets as President Trump sought to punish President Bashar al-Assad for a suspected chemical attack near Damascus last weekend that killed more than 40 people.

Britain and France joined the United States in the strikes in a coordinated operation that was intended to show Western resolve in the face of what the leaders of the three nations called persistent violations of international law. Mr. Trump characterized it as the beginning of a sustained effort to force Mr. Assad to stop using banned weapons, but only ordered a limited, one-night operation that hit three targets.

These "limited operations" have a way of morphing into full-scale war.

I suppose this was inevitable, considering that neither Trump nor his National Security Advisor, John Bolton, believe in diplomacy, both being bullies. Of course, we lost the chance for a diplomatic solution a while ago -- not that it's entirely our fault: Assad's a real piece of work, and with Russia and Iran behind him, the stage is set for a real mess. And a condemnation in the UN has about as much force as -- well, come up with your own example of completely ineffectual.

As far as I'm concerned, the question of whether Putin has any control over Trump is open -- and I think that's a real issue here -- but then, Trump is enough of a wild card that "control" becomes meaningless.

We'll see if this remains "limited":

Today's Must-Read: Book Burning in the Digital Age

David Mixner has a sobering post at Towleroad this morning, on the "house cleaning" of government computers:

Recently over dinner with some friends, I brought up ‘Trump’s Book Burners’.

A friend responded that he hadn’t seen any evidence of book burning taking place in a systematic way by the Trump administration.

If you are looking for a 1930s Nazi type of public book burning, he is right. However, in today’s world, book burning doesn’t happen by pulling literature out of libraries and setting it afire.

Today, book burning is carried out by simply hitting the delete button.

Over the last year, the Trump administration has destroyed decades of research and data by hitting the delete button in almost every department and agency in the federal government. This administration is eliminating entire groups of people from past and future research as if they no longer exist.

He goes on to detail some of the research and other information that has vanished from government websites -- at least, the things we know about, like not allowing the use of the term "climate change".

As I noted, it's sobering, and I'll be it's just the tip of the iceberg.

But when you elect an Il Duce wannabe to the White House, this is what you get.

It' Not Really Baby Steps Any More

Our rush to dictatorship. (You can call it "totalitarian," "authoritarian," or whatever. It's dictatorship.)

To start, from the No. 1 source for "fake news," Sarah Huckabee Sanders:

NBC's Kristen Welker was asking Sanders some pretty reasonable questions about why Rob Porter was allowed to have access to classified documents when he did not have the clearance to do so. As the questioning became more pointed, Huckabee Sanders got more defensive.

Finally, she let fly. “I think we’re doing and taking every step we can to protect classified information,” Sanders snarled. “I mean, frankly, if you guys have such concern with classified information, there’s plenty of it that’s leaked out of the Hill, that’s leaked out of other communities, well beyond the White House walls. If you guys have real concerns about leaking out classified information, look around this room. You guys are the ones that publish classified information and put national security at risk,” Sanders said, taking aim at every reporter in the room.

Dictators don't like an independent press.

Digby goes into this issue more thoroughly in an earlier post:

I don't think E.J. Dionne is a hysteric, do you? And yet he seem concerned. Very concerned:

The autocratic leader lies and then falsely charges his opponents with lying. He politicizes institutions that are supposed to be free of politics by falsely accusing his foes of politicizing them. He victimizes others by falsely claiming they are victimizing him.

The autocrat also counts on spineless politicians to cave in to his demands. And as they destroy governmental institutions at his bidding, they insist they are defending them.

In fact, dictators don't like independent anything, especially anything that restricts their power. (This one is a must-read, for sure.)

Next, an almost offhand remark from Digby:

Tuesday's televised annual Global Threat Hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee seemed like a rare and special event. What used to be considered routine and ordinary in American political life -- open hearings with government officials testifying about the issues of the day -- felt like an exciting look into the secret workings of the Star Chamber. Considering that we are in the midst of one of the most significant presidential scandals in American history, concerning possible conspiracy with a foreign power and an active coverup, it's extremely odd that we have so little public congressional testimony about any of it. That's not the way our system is supposed to work.

Dictators like to do things behind closed doors.

Digby brings up another telling point later in the post:

But that wasn't the most dramatic moment. That came when Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., asked a simple question that sent shockwaves through the hearing room. He asked the assembled intelligence leaders if the president had ever urged them to address the threat of further Russian interference.

He has not. When pressed, Rogers said, “I can’t say I’ve been specifically directed to blunt or actually stop" future Russian attacks. Pompeo tried to defend Trump, but the best he could come up with was to say the CIA takes “all kinds of steps to disrupt what the Russians are trying to do.” Wray said he had not been specifically tasked to combat Russian interference by the president. Coats said the same. When asked if the president has ordered an inter-agency strategy, he replied, "We essentially are relying on the investigations that are underway."

Dictators like to control things. Everything. Especially examination of those things that brought them to power.