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by digby

TRUMP: "Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president."

(Article 2 does not in fact empower the president to do whatever they want.) pic.twitter.com/qIFP1AbHw6— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2019

He said that to a bunch of cheering teenagers wearing MAGA hats.

President Donald Trump was candid about the unlimited power he believes he has during a speech at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit on Tuesday.

After reasserting that investigations into Russia’s election meddling found “no collusion,” Trump claimed, “Then I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.”

“But, I don’t even talk about that,” he added, “because they did a report and there was no obstruction.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller, who led the nearly two-year long probe into Russian interference efforts, did not in fact absolve Trump of claims of “collusion,” as the term has no solid legal definition. Instead, Mueller sought to determine whether there had been criminal coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. In the end, the special counsel did not have sufficient evidence to prove such coordination occurred, but laid out the numerous ties between the two sides, as well as at least 10 instances of possible obstruction by Trump.

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Trump has repeatedly downplayed Mueller’s findings, contained in his 400-plus page report made public in April, suggesting the report both exonerates him and is part of a partisan smear campaign.

Trump frequently references Article II of the Constitution, but his comments on Tuesday were some of his boldest yet.

Aaron Rupar
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Trump’s blatant lies about tariffs get a big round of applause from his Turning Point USA audience

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Aaron Rupar
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@atrupar
TRUMP: “Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

(Article 2 does not in fact empower the president to do whatever they want.)

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In recent months, the president has ramped up his rhetoric on the topic, signaling both his misunderstanding of the executive powers outlined in the Constitution as well as his intent to abuse them. Tuesday’s remarks were just the latest example.

Last month, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, the president defended his right to fire Robert Mueller if he wanted to. “Article II allows me to do whatever I want,” he explained. “Article II would have allowed me to fire him.”

Just two weeks ago, when speaking to reporters, Trump reiterated that there was “no obstruction,” insisting falsely that an investigation cannot be obstructed if it turns out there was “no crime” committed.

“Also, take a look at one other thing,” he said. “It’s a thing called Article II. Nobody ever mentions Article II. It gives me all of these rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before. We don’t even talk about Article II.”

Article II has not changed while Trump has been president. The suggestion that it gives him new “rights” that are different from the constraints placed on past presidents has no merit. But it does appear to be an indication that he intends to exercise more power than past presidents, perhaps undeterred by the other two branches that might try to check and balance that power.

All things considered, Article II is not very substantial. The first section merely outlines how the president is elected and compensated. The second section enumerates some of the president’s basic powers, such as serving as Commander in Chief, granting reprieves and pardons, making treaties, appointing ambassadors and judges, and filling vacancies when Congress is in recess. Section 3 adds that the president will provide to Congress the State of the Union, that they can convene the House and Senate “on extraordinary Occasions,” and that he shall execute the laws and commission officers.

The last section briefly adds that the president can be impeached.

That’s it. There’s not much there, certainly nothing that substantiates firing people or obstructing justice as he claims, let alone allowing Trump to do whatever he wants.

The rest of Trump’s speech Tuesday was chock full of extremism. He reiterated his attacks on several congresswomen of color and lied about voter fraud to claim that the elections in California and other states were “rigged” thanks to undocumented immigrants.

The president also threatened to act against Democrats because they somehow haven’t treated Republicans “fairly,” and enjoyed a laugh when someone suggested he’d be “President for life!”

“That’s what they’re afraid of, you know,” he said.

I think most people assume he’s just trolling. But honestly, he’s so dumb I think he actually believes Article II gives him dictatorial powers. So who knows?

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The second coming of Jim Crow
by Tom Sullivan

“The essence of the Confederate worldview,” Doug Muder wrote in 2014, “is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.” So it was in the pre-Civil War United States. So it is today. The political parties devoted to safeguarding that established social order have changed over time. The Confederate worldview has not.

Defeated on the battlefield, men of the South set about undoing their loss. They morphed the Civil War into The Lost Cause. Reconstruction they morphed into Jim Crow. Through stubbornness and “terrorist insurgency,” the planter aristocrats that lost the war succeeded in winning the peace and rewriting history. The “three constitutional amendments that supposedly had codified the U.S.A’s victory over the C.S.A.– the 13th, 14th, and 15th — had been effectively nullified in every Confederate state,” Muder wrote. “Except for Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, [blacks] vanished like the Lost Tribes of Israel. They wouldn’t re-enter history until the 1950s, when for some reason they still weren’t free.”

Nancy LeTourneau pulled together several more recent threads at Washington Monthly that leave the impression history being made today at least rhymes with that Confederate past. If the 1960s represented a second Reconstruction, legislative terrorism being wrought now by a rump Confederate faction against American minorities represents a renewed insurgency against rights they’ve won at the ballot box and in the courts since then.

In “The American Right Gets Tired of Democracy,” Josh Marshall examines how in the face of a demographic trajectory unfavorable to upholding the white political and cultural dominance God intended, the right concluded “the culture war and the related battle for an ethno-nationalist identity are simply too important, immediate and dire to have any time to worry about things like the rule of law or even democracy.”

Conservative faux-patriots are systematically laboring to ensure their incipient plurality status will not mean they must share power with neighbors not of their tribe. “Republicans in red and battleground states have spent the last six years winding back the clock to the good old days when voting was a (white) privilege, not a right,” Bob Moser writes at The American Prospect in a near-exhaustive accounting of post-Shelby election-rigging. He begins, naturally, in North Carolina.

A series of field hearings across the country sponsored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi would examine voting discrimination since Shelby. The hearings hope to document the persistence in 2018 of election practices outlawed in 1968 and loosed again with the Supreme Court overturning the “preclearance” provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote in her dissent that past “attempts to cope with this vile infection resembled battling the Hydra. Wherever one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place.” She predicted “second-generation barriers” would arise to replace the old Jim Crow system. And so they have:

She proved to be prophetic. The field hearings, which concluded in Birmingham in late May, provided ample evidence of the Hydra-headed nature of the new voter suppression—and how Republicans in Southern and battleground states have been learning from each other since the monster law set the tone for the post-Shelby era. “Notes are compared,” Tomas Lopez, head of the civil rights group Democracy North Carolina, said in Halifax. “You see something in one place, it gets used in another.”

The recent battle cry for “uniformity,” for instance, hadn’t originated with North Carolina lawmakers; it was the brainchild of Ohio Republicans. And that, in turn, means that the 900,000 voters in Ohio’s largest county, Cuyahoga, have just one polling place till Election Day—making Cleveland a supersized version of Halifax County. At the hearing there, longtime county board of elections member Inajo Chappell projected photos of the predictably long lines that ensued. She couldn’t tell the subcommittee how many voters in her majority-black county had simply given up and gone home. “There is no way to estimate the number. But I can say that uniform rules have continued to be implemented in a manner that limits voter access,” she testified. The Republicans’ justifications for the changes did not pass muster, she said. “The constant clamoring about rampant voter fraud is discouraging voter participation, and my experience over the years permits me to say that persistent claims about voter fraud are wholly without merit.”

Ohio Republicans also popularized voter purges, with former Secretary of State Jon Husted (who’s now lieutenant governor) showing other states how to perfect the art of tweezing minority voters from the rolls. As Tom Roberts of the Ohio NAACP testified, Husted used a provision in the 2002 Help America Vote Act—Congress’s timid response to the Florida debacle in 2000, which “we all thought was a helpful law,” said Roberts—to start removing voters from the rolls if they’d sat out two straight elections. The Supreme Court upheld the practice, which stripped 270,000 voters from the rolls in Ohio in 2018. There’s ample evidence that the practice disproportionately affects poor people and voters of color, who tend to move more and miss the notices that come in the mail from the state, directing them to update their information to remain active voters. “The decision allows states to treat the fundamental right to vote as a use-it-or-lose-it right,” Roberts said.

Repressive practices that pop up in one state replicate themselves in others where Republicans control legislatures. Diabolical in their “sheer inventiveness,” the measures end up in litigation that drags out for years.

“We will support democracy in Venezuela, in Russia, in China, everyplace but here,” said Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio. “Every time we change the rules, which we do in every single election, we make it more difficult for people to vote. If you’re confused about what time of the day you can vote, it is suppressing your vote.”

North Carolinians have voted since 2012 in state and congressional districts declared unconstitutional. Still, the costly court battles to enforce those rulings continues, sewing “nothing but chaos and confusion” among voters. But Republicans are well funded. They’re fighting a war of attrition. If they retain control of North Carolina’s legislature after 2020, they’ll gerrymander, suppress, and go to court again for another ten-year cycle. Voting rights advocates have overcome the obstacles through aggressive organizing, but they shouldn’t have to.

LeTourneau adds that conservatives in America as well as in Europe are poised to replace democracy with authoritarianism:

This willingness to eschew democracy in favor of authoritarianism was forecast by Zachary Roth before Trump’s election. He noted that, recognizing that they were about to become a permanent minority, Republicans decided that “being outnumbered doesn’t have to mean losing.” The strategies employed to undermine democracy included voter suppression, gerrymandering, fighting for the involvement of dark money in politics, judicial engagement, and something called pre-emption, by which red states overruled laws passed by more progressive local communities.

Frustrating in the debate over impeaching Donald Trump is Democrats’ insistence on procedure and rule-following in the face of an administration openly rejecting liberal democracy. Pundits peddling both-siderism may argue that were the demographic shoe on the other foot, Democrats would do the same. Adam Serwer argues the opposite case:

Black Americans did not abandon liberal democracy because of slavery, Jim Crow, and the systematic destruction of whatever wealth they managed to accumulate; instead they took up arms in two world wars to defend it. Japanese Americans did not reject liberal democracy because of internment or the racist humiliation of Asian exclusion; they risked life and limb to preserve it. Latinos did not abandon liberal democracy because of “Operation Wetback,” or Proposition 187, or because of a man who won a presidential election on the strength of his hostility toward Latino immigrants. Gay, lesbian, and trans Americans did not abandon liberal democracy over decades of discrimination and abandonment in the face of an epidemic. This is, in part, because doing so would be tantamount to giving the state permission to destroy them, a thought so foreign to these defenders of the supposedly endangered religious right that the possibility has not even occurred to them. But it is also because of a peculiar irony of American history: The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises, and no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted.

Bishop William Barber II, a leader of the renewed Poor People’s Campaign, argues what we are experiencing in America today are the birth pangs of a Third Reconstruction. Meeting it head on is a second Jim Crow thinly disguised as “election integrity” or “uniformity” or state-sponsored terrorizing of Latinos and blacks. It is a cat-and-mouse game played by flag-waving legislators, their hands over their hearts and humming Lee Greenwood, as they ensure no matter how much the white majority shrinks, the established order — their Confederate order — retains power, democratically or not.

A mile wide and an inch deep — again
by Tom Sullivan

Platte River in central Nebraska. Panorama photo by Jetuusp via Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0.

People’s devotion to American institutions, the very idea of the United States of America, is not as rooted as they believe. Like teenage boys in a high school locker room boasting about sexual romps, those who talk about it the most sometimes do it the least. Boasts about love of country can be like that. Hugging flags by someone who invites foreign interference in American elections is like that.

Patriotism is a secular religion. For all their hands-over-hearts public piety, I have long written many of our conservative countrymen’s faith in their country is a mile wide and an inch deep. But like believers’ faith in Jesus, we can, as 2nd Amendment devotees do, be selective about what parts of the Constitution we believe sacrosanct and which we treat more as suggestions when pressed.

The Week’s Damion Linker examines the religious right’s shift away from considering themselves in the 1980s and 90s a moral majority — allied with social conservatives — to seeing themselves as an embattled minority making a last stand arrayed against “the tyrant state.”

The presidency of George W. Bush with his “faith-based initiatives” cooled their fervor temporarily. But with Sen. John McCain’s loss to Barack Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney’s in 2012, plus the declaration of same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, they flocked to Donald Trump for protection.

“It would be a purely transactional relationship, like the one a businessman struggling with neighborhood crime might enter into with a local mob boss,” Linker writes. If democracy is not giving them the America they demand, social conservatives (a faction, anyway) are prepared to discard it to preserve political control by the religious right:

Maybe its problem isn’t that it’s too weak but that it’s accepted the legitimacy of liberal rules that place it at a competitive disadvantage in its battles with the left. Instead, social conservatives need to fight harder and even be willing to fight dirty, seeking to win at any cost, just as their secular liberal enemies do.

Or so they believe. Certainly, for some time social conservatives have considered themselves the only Real Americans™. All others are pretenders and illegitimate. For decades now, conservatives have trafficked in rumors of rampant voter fraud perpetrated by (non-white) liberal foes, undetected, yet present behind any election loss by champions of the right. To fight these implacable, invisible foes, American true believers needed tougher measures. They would, like Sohrab Ahmari, op-ed editor of the New York Post, question “the legitimacy of a system designed to keep liberals in charge,” Linker argues.

When social conservatives thought they were the moral majority, it made sense for them to dream of exercising real political power. When they recognized that they were a minority, it made sense for them to resign themselves to adopting a defensive posture and preparing to live out their days in a country as dissenters from the reigning liberal consensus.

What makes no sense is for social conservatives to think they can be both weak and strong at the same time — a minority that wields the power of a majority.

Unless, of course, social conservatives no longer care about democracy.

Linker’s column focuses on Ahmari’s minority views among social conservatives. But the view that any president not carrying the Republican brand is illegitimate is long-established. As is superficial piety from people publicly supporting spreading the blessings of democracy to the world while privately undermining democracy here.

NC Policy Watch comments on how the Hofeller documents demonstrate Republican operatives at the highest levels have worked throughout this decade to rig the electoral system in their favor, and now by adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Gerrymandering, Rob Schofield writes, is “much too polite a word to describe what the Trump administration and its Republican Party allies are trying to do to our democracy.” Common Cause of North Carolina director Bob Phillips describes the Hofeller papers as “smoking gun” that reveals the Trump administration plans to rig the census … so Republicans might rig redistricting … so they might rig elections permanently in their favor. And whether or not a majority of voters support them and their policies. GOP vote suppression measures are the chocolate sauce on their dessert.

Speaking to the Hofeller affair’s meaning for the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the census matter, Adam Serwer comments on Justice Scalia’s view that the Voting Rights Act constitutes a black “racial entitlement.” Serwer writes:

Since the rise of Trump, the American right has been offered a stark choice between the democratic ideals it has long claimed to believe in, and the sectarian ethno-nationalism of the president, which privileges white identity and right-wing Christianity over all. Scalia didn’t quite have it right: The fundamental question for American democracy since the founding has indeed been whether it is a “racial entitlement,” but only because of those who have tried for centuries to ensure that white people alone are entitled to it.

A mile wide and an inch deep. The Trump GOP has already abandoned “the pretense of liberal democracy,” Serwer concludes, in favor of securing “white political hegemony over a changing electorate.”

In January 2018, David Frum warned:

Maybe you do not much care about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

Frum was late to his own former party.

Now comes a time of testing.

He knows he’s calling for the death penalty

by digby

If he didn’t know before, he knew after the reporter asked him this question. And he didn’t miss a beat:

REPORTER: Sir, the constitution says treason is punishable by death. You've accused your adversaries of treason. Who specifically are you accusing of treason?

TRUMP: A number of people. If you look at Comey, McCabe, if you look at Strzok, his lover Lisa Page… 😳 pic.twitter.com/6louyWsqaa— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 23, 2019

No president before him would have even thrown that word around about former FBI officials. Obviously, even if they did commit a crime, they’d have to have been working on behalf of Al Qaeda (and because there has been no formal declaration of war, even that wouldn’t apply) for it to be treason. But Trump is saying that anyone who investigated him attempted “a coup” which in Trump’s America would be treason.

That’s certainly how kings and dictators see such things which is what Trump thinks he is:

President Donald Trump on Sunday night retweeted conservative religious leader Jerry Falwell Jr., who said the president should have two years added to his first term “as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup,” referencing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s lengthy investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

While the move would be an unconstitutional power grab, Falwell referred to the extension of the president’s term as a form of “reparations,” a troublesome nod to current ongoing discussions within the Democratic Party about whether the U.S. government should pay reparations to the descendants of formerly enslaved people.

Trump then went on a tweet storm of his own, arguing that “they have stolen two years of my (our) Presidency.” In a follow up tweet, the president added, “The Witch Hunt is over but we will never forget.”

This is not the first time Trump has referenced extending his presidential term, leaving some concerned that he would not voluntarily give up the White House if he lost the 2020 election.

Since 2016, Trump has repeatedly claimed that the election was rigged against him, and that there was widespread voter fraud.

Trump joked last month about extending his presidency, after he received an award at an event for the Wounded Warrior Project. The event was held the same day Mueller’s report was released to the public.

“Well, this is really beautiful,” Trump said. “This will find a permanent place, at least for six years, in the Oval Office. Is that okay?”

He continued: “I was going to joke, General, and say at least for 10 or 14 years, but we would cause bedlam if I said that, so we’ll say six.”

The president made similar comments last year in a speech to Republican donors at Mar-A-Lago, where he praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for consolidating his power and doing away with term limits.

“He’s now president for life. President for life. And he’s great,” Trump said. “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot someday.”

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she didn’t trust Trump to respect the results of the upcoming election if he lost, unless a Democratic candidate won by an overwhelming majority. Pelosi argued, for this reason, the party should embrace centrist politics going into 2020, as some Democrats are leaning further left.

But Pelosi isn’t the only one who has expressed this concern.

Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer of 10 years, told the House oversight committee earlier this year that he worries “there will never be a peaceful transition of power” if Trump loses in 2020.

Just last week he said this:

Trump jokes about serving as many as 5 terms as president.

"And maybe if we really like it a lot and if things keep going like they are going we will do what we have to do, and a three [terms] and a four, and a five." pic.twitter.com/NeektAccaR— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 20, 2019

American presidents don’t “joke” about that sort of thing over and over and over again.

Trump repeats things for a reason… so it sounds normal after a while.

Democrats are still going to be bickering over whether initiating impeachment proceedings is or is not ‘divisive’ while Trump is staging show trials and public executions of FBI officials and his re-election opponent. https://t.co/U8MsTjcML1— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) May 24, 2019

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Trump is certainly making a power grab. But he’s not the one driving the train

by digby

Jonathan Bernstein has some of the same concerns I’ve been articulating for a while about Trump’s power grab. The difference is that while I’m sure that Trump wants more power, I don’t think he’s driving this train. It’s being driven by the “Unitary Executive” Republicans who see their chance to test out the theory with a friendly judiciary, cowed GOP congress and a president who’s willing to push the envelope because he doesn’t understand or care about the possible fall-out. IN any case, it’s pretty clear to me that there’s more going on here than Trump’s ego:

If President Donald Trump thinks he’s been totally exonerated, as he says, why is he stonewalling Congress? Why wouldn’t he want special counsel Robert Mueller to testify about a report that supposedly clears him? Why not encourage all the witnesses Mueller’s team spoke with to come forward? Why is he attempting to block 20 separate investigations, if he’s done nothing wrong?

Those are the very sensible questions the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has been asking. One possible answer is that Trump is trying to hide information from Congress because it would only confirm the parts of Mueller’s report that weren’t exonerating at all. Although the probe didn’t establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian agents, it did find a whole lot of dubious choices and a whole lot of obstruction of justice. It would make sense if the president didn’t want further details of that misconduct made public.

What worries me is that there’s another possible answer, and it’s a lot worse.

What if Trump is stonewalling Congress because the lesson he took from the Mueller report is that his behavior was perfectly okay? That is, what if Trump isn’t pretending that he didn’t do the misdeeds detailed in the report? What if instead he thinks that Attorney General William Barr, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans are now willing to go along with a theory of presidential power so expansive and unrestricted that even John Yoo and other advocates of executive authority are alarmed?

Unfortunately, that theory fits with Rudy Giuliani’s perfectly open plan to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. It also fits with a series of tweets and statements and actions by the president that appear to be a continuation of a cover-up. Perhaps Sargent is right: Trump knows how bad the underlying facts of the Mueller investigation are, and simply doesn’t want them scrutinized. Or perhaps it’s something worse. I don’t know.

But the biggest questions are the same either way: Are Republican members of Congress really going to endorse the idea that presidential campaigns can urge foreign governments to interfere in U.S. elections? And do they really think that the president should use the full weight of the criminal justice system to protect himself and go after his political opponents? If so, are they so certain they’ll never be among those opponents?

Yes, they are going to endorse it because they know that the Democrats will self-police and if they don’t the Republicans will fall on them like a pack of starving hyenas without a care in the world for their own hypocrisy. They are shameless which is the true power they have discovered.

If the Democrats don’t use all of their institutional power to stop this, Trump will welcome more foreign involvement and will likely also back vote rigging on some pretext of “voter fraud” as they did in Georgia in 2018. The executive branch has tremendous power and the states in the hands of Republicans will get the same signal.

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Yes, he really is dangerous

by digby

The Washington Post rounds up the latest on Trump’s authoritarian tendencies:

President Trump often demands legally dubious solutions to complex problems. When he’s denied, he blames others — including his own staff. That’s really the nub of why he’s pushing out Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

Well at least he’s not an icky Democrat. That’s the main thing. Sure he’s a viciously racist demagogue and instinctive fascist, but no need to worry until he actually gets people killed. (Oh wait …. And wait.)

The 30-minute sit-down in the White House residence at 5 p.m. on Sunday wasn’t like the end of an episode of “The Apprentice.” It wasn’t televised in prime time, for one, and he didn’t dramatically say “You’re fired” at the end.

But it had the same effect. Just like the partial government shutdown he forced earlier this year in a futile effort to get money for a wall, Trump telegraphed to his base that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to secure the southern border and conveyed that he intends to make this issue a centerpiece of his reelection campaign.

“Two senior administration officials said that Nielsen had no intention of quitting when she went to the meeting Sunday with the president and that she was forced to step down,” Nick Miroff, Josh Dawsey, Seung Min Kim and Maria Sacchetti report. “Trump told aides last fall that he wanted to fire Nielsen … She appeared to regain her footing after U.S. Border Patrol agents used tear gas to repel a large crowd attempting to break through a border fence — the kind of ‘tough’ action Trump said he wanted …

The president grew frustrated with Nielsen again early this year as the number of migrants rose and as she raised legal concerns about some of Trump’s more severe impulses, particularly when his demands clashed with U.S. immigration laws and federal court orders.”

This is a central theme in all the news accounts of why Trump turned on her.

“The president called Ms. Nielsen at home early in the mornings to demand that she take action to stop migrants from entering the country, including doing things that were clearly illegal, such as blocking all migrants from seeking asylum,” the New York Times reports. “She repeatedly noted the limitations imposed on her department by federal laws, court settlements and international obligations. Those responses only infuriated Mr. Trump further.”

It’s part of a pattern. Trump has repeatedly shown disdain for the rule of law. The president declared a national emergency on Feb. 15 so he could divert money from the military to build his wall, even though his own lawyers at the White House and Justice Department advised him against doing so.

Trump alone cannot fix it, but he’s still learning the limits of the presidency and the added constraints that come with divided government.

The law needs to change to accomplish most of what Trump wants at the southern border, and this is very unlikely to happen now that Democrats control the House. The president ran promising that he alone can fix it, and he appears to still be learning that this is not how republican government works.

Nielsen “believed the situation was becoming untenable” because Trump was “becoming increasingly unhinged about the border crisis and making unreasonable and even impossible requests,” a senior administration official told CNN.

The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board describes her termination as “a ritual sacrifice”: “Ms. Nielsen wasn’t responsible for the surge of Central American migrants arriving at the border to claim political asylum, but Donald Trump and Democrats in Congress both needed a fall guy.”

Trump prefers to surround himself with yes men.

This is a major reason that the administration has experienced historically high turnover.

“Nielsen’s ouster fits with a pattern of Trump forcing out officials who have pushed back against his more radical instincts or been unable to carry them out, or who have earned his ire for being unwilling to match his defiance for governing practice and convention,” CNN’s Stephen Collinson notes. “They include former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, ex-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and former chief of staff John Kelly.”

Nielsen waits for Trump to disembark from Air Force One on Friday in California so he can visit the border. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

The proliferation of “acting” secretaries continues.

Trump announced that Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, will take over as acting DHS secretary. Normally, the deputy secretary would take over on an acting basis, but the president hasn’t nominated a No. 2 – despite all his talk of there being a national emergency. Nielsen tweeted that she’ll stay on through Wednesday — the day after tomorrow — “to assist with an orderly transition.”

This means that there will be interim leaders, who have not been confirmed by the Senate for the jobs they hold, atop the departments of Defense, Interior and Homeland Security. There is also not a permanent director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Mick Mulvaney remains the acting White House chief of staff.

Trump has said that he prefers it this way, and he’s “in no hurry” to name permanent replacements who can hold the jobs indefinitely. He wants his people at places like the Pentagon to feel like they’re on a tight leash. It means they’re constantly trying to curry favor.

[…]
It’s not clear that someone who will be “tough” enough for Trump can get confirmed to lead ICE or DHS.

Trump said Friday that he wants someone “tougher” to lead ICE after he unceremoniously dumped Ron Vitiello, a 30-year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol, just weeks before he was poised to win confirmation. No one from the White House bothered to tell Vitiello he was being dumped. He found out the nomination had been formally rescinded in the press. His staff initially thought it was a clerical error. The challenge is finding someone who will be as “tough” as Trump wants without turning off moderate Senate Republicans.

Former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli is under consideration to replace Nielsen and has been at the White House recently, according to my colleagues on the White House beat. But he could run into trouble over his efforts to block Trump from winning the Republican nomination in 2016.

One name getting a lot of attention is Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state who lost the governor’s race in November. He’s a hard-liner who co-chaired Trump’s ill-fated commission to explore voter fraud. For several reasons, a Kobach nomination would put a bunch of Republican senators in a tough spot. The likeliest role for him would be a post that doesn’t require Senate approval.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry is seen inside the White House as the most confirmable of the names being floated, per Bob Costa.

Conservative provocateur Ann Coulter, who has publicly soured on Trump over his failure to deliver the wall, celebrated Nielsen’s departure but worriedon Twitter that her replacement won’t be any better.

Stephen Miller listens as President Trump meets with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the Oval Office on Dec. 11. That was the meeting at which Trump said he would take responsibility for shutting down the government. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Stephen Miller is ascendant.

The White House policy adviser has recently gotten more control over this issue internally. Trump said in a recent Oval Office meeting that Miller is now in charge of all immigration initiatives. He’s encouraged Trump’s nativist tendencies and criticized both Vitiello and Nielsen to the president.

“Miller has pushed for someone to take over the ICE role who would be more receptive to his policy ideas,” per Nick, Seung Min and Josh. “He also is ‘particularly adept,’ one administration official said, at placing blame on others in the White House when ideas he promotes do not work. ‘Ron Vitiello has spent as much time defending our nation’s borders as Stephen Miller has been alive,’ one official said of Miller, who is 33. One senior official said: ‘This is part of an increasingly desperate effort by Stephen to throw people under the bus when the policies he has advocated are not effective. Once it becomes clear that Stephen’s policies aren’t working, he tells the president, “They’re not the right people.”’”

“Miller has also recently been telephoning mid-level officials at several federal departments and agencies to angrily demand that they do more to stem the flow of immigrants into the country,” Politico reports. “The officials at the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State, who each handle different parts of the immigration process, were initially surprised that a high-ranking White House official like Miller would call them directly, rather than contact their bosses. ‘It’s intimidation,’ one of the people who was briefed on the calls [said]. ‘Anytime you get a call like this from the White House it’s intimidation … Under normal circumstances, if you were a deputy in one of these agencies, it would be very unusual.’”

The story quotes “a person close to Nielsen” saying: “They failed with the courts and with Congress and now they’re eating their own.”

Nielsen’s departure is also a win for John Bolton, who has consolidated power since John Kelly left as chief of staff.

The national security adviser has repeatedly told the president that Nielsen isn’t the right fit for her job, a senior administration official told The Post.

Nielsen, 46, was Kelly’s chief of staff when he was the secretary of homeland security and replaced him when he became White House chief of staff. With her protector gone, and her enemies in such close proximity to the president, Nielsen struggled to survive.

Feel safer? Everything this fine?

When you’re president, you can’t do anything
by Tom Sullivan

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” Donald Trump said on tape, infamously, before winding up in the White House. He meant sexual assault. But assaulting a democratic republic?

No one has explained to the sitting president he is no longer the celebrity CEO of a small, family business where family members and sycophants follow his orders and cater to his whims without question. There are rules here. There are checks. (Sort of.) There are balances. (Sort of.)

Which is why a man accustomed to ignoring rules and getting his way unchallenged is losing in federal court. A lot. The Trump administration has lost in federal courts at least 63 times in two years, reports the Washington Post. Judges have repeatedly upbraided his administration for “failing to follow the most basic rules of governance.”

The Post explains:

Two-thirds of the cases accuse the Trump administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a nearly 73-year-old law that forms the primary bulwark against arbitrary rule. The normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent, according to analysts and studies. But as of mid-January, a database maintained by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law shows Trump’s win rate at about 6 percent.

The loss-rate is virtually unprecedented. “It’s not just that they’re losing. But they’re being so nuts about it,” said Seth Jaffe, a Boston-based environmental lawyer who represents corporations in deregulatory cases, adding that Trump’s losses have “set regulatory reform back for a period of time.”

Trump blames “Obama judges,” naturally, not his administration’s failure to do basic due diligence. In case after case, judges are united in finding the administration’s efforts at implementing Trump’s will ham-fisted and lacking legal justification:

Four judges, for instance, have rejected the decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has protected from deportation nearly 700,000 people brought to the United States as children. All four judges said essentially the same thing: that the government’s stated reason for ending DACA — that it was unlawful — was “virtually unexplained,” as U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, an appointee of President George W. Bush in Washington, said in an April opinion. A second explanation — that DACA creates a “litigation risk” — was derided by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in California as mere “spin.”

Three judges have invalidated the attempt to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census, the latest being U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco on March 6. All rejected as unbelievable Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s explanation that the move was intended to improve enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

On voting rights in particular, an observation by Aaron Blake about Trump’s approach reflects a kind of Republican politics that predates Trump’s arrival:

Trump is by all accounts an impatient man who doesn’t have much regard for the “obstacles” that stand in his way. We’ve seen repeatedly how that’s meant hasty and sometimes aborted solo policy decisions, such as the complete withdrawal from Syria. Administration officials struggling to implement his often-unwieldy ideas may find it hard to justify them or to reason that even if they’re ultimately struck down in court, Trump will have gotten the coverage he wants.

This is precisely how “voter fraud” found a national audience on the right. Allegation after allegation of widespread fraud proved exaggerated if not imaginary, but only after blaring headlines reinforced in the public’s mind that where there are smoke bombs there must be fire. The result is dozens of voter suppression measures passed across the country, litigated, and often struck down. No matter. Republicans will will have gotten the coverage they want. Democracy is undermined. Because the only good democracy (they cannot control) is a dead one.

That form of “untruthful hyperbole” was a feature of Republicans astroturfing a market for imaginary problems before Trump. On Wednesday, David Corn responded in a tweet thread to an attempt by George W. Bush administration flack Ari Fleischer to rewrite the history of WMD hysteria and the Iraq invasion — another manufactured crisis that resulted in the worst American foreign policy blunder in memory.

Truth was a casualty in America before Trump, but it took a malignant narcissist from a minor crime family to turn an entire administration into one.

The one saving grace (so far) of this fiasco of a presidency is its failures at governing should put to rest any notion that electing a rich CEO as president is the way to get things done in Washington. It won’t. Howard Schultz proves that.

A different kind of vote suppression

by digby

Ballot referendums in California are almost unintelligible these days due to the fact that big money groups step in to oppose legitimate populist initiatives with propagandistic mumbo-jumbo and TV ads that distort the process. It’s a problem. What is meant to be direct democracy has turned into a mind game.

For years Republicans, allied with big money, have benefitted from this system. But now that Democrats are having some success in getting past their propaganda, they want to shut it down:

In November, 64 percent of Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing former felons to regain their right to vote. Three weeks later, a Republican state representative introduced legislation that would require constitutional amendments to earn 67 percent of the vote to pass.

In Missouri, voters passed measures to raise the minimum wage, legalize medical marijuana and take legislative redistricting out of the hands of legislators. A month later, state House Republicans introduced a bill to nearly double the number of signatures needed to qualify an initiative for the ballot.

In Idaho, 60 percent of voters approved an initiative to expand Medicaid to cover low-income residents. Last week, a Republican state senator introduced legislation to increase both the number and geographic spread of signatures required to qualify an initiative.

Republican legislators in states across the country have introduced dozens of bills that would make significant changes to the initiative and referendum process, tightening rules and raising requirements after their voters approved progressive proposals that legislators opposed or refused to take up.

Critics of the proposals say they are a Republican end run around the direct democracy process, meant to stifle popular progressive policies before they get to the ballot.

“This is, combined with what we saw after the success of many of these ballot initiatives in 2018, state legislatures undermining the will of the people,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, who runs the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. “Rather than listen to the will of the people, elected officials are undermining the will of the people.”

Conservative groups such as the Republican State Leadership Committee and the American Legislative Exchange Council have advocated for tightening ballot rules.

And some Democrats have supported similar measures in states such as Oregon and Washington, where low signature requirements have led to crowded ballots.

Fields said her group was watching about 90 bills around the country that would tighten ballot access.

The nonpartisan political website Ballotpedia is tracking about 140 pieces of legislation introduced in 31 states related to ballot measures, though some of those bills would loosen requirements.

Some of the Republicans behind this year’s bills say they are necessary to curb the influence of big-money groups that increasingly fund some of the most expensive ballot measure campaigns across the country.

In Arizona, voters rejected an initiative that would have required the state to generate 50 percent of its energy from renewable sources, which made the ballot with the help of millions of dollars from California billionaire Tom Steyer.

After that measure, state Sen. Vince Leach (R) introduced a bill regulating who could collect signatures for a ballot initiative and giving counties more time to inspect signatures once they have been turned in.

“It’s pretty clear to see that over the last six years, we’ve had any number of initiatives that have started from outside of the state of Arizona,” Leach said in an interview. “We need to protect one of the most precious things we have, and that’s the ability to go to the ballot and vote.”

These people are terrified of democracy and for good reason. They’ve made themselves so hateful that it’s getting harder and harder to form a majority even on issues much less on candidates. So rather than living with the rules as they are written they are changing them, once again, to advantage themselves at the expense of the majority.

They will continue, of course, to project this manipulation of the system on to the other side with their bogus cries of “voter fraud” and “rigging the election.” That’s the new normal.

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What is this vote fraud you speak of?

by digby

Republican politicians across the country have for years railed against the threat of voter fraud. Some have made unproven claims about how rampant it has become in order to pass voter ID laws and open sweeping investigations. The sanctity of the vote, they have said, must be protected at all costs.

But when a hard-fought congressional election in North Carolina — in which a Republican candidate appeared to narrowly beat his Democratic opponent — was overturned this week because of election fraud by a Republican political operative, the party was measured, and largely muted, in its response.

Well … not exactly

This CNN chyron completely misses the point. Trump dismissed North Carolina election fraud, he didn't really "condemn" it. pic.twitter.com/vdQVAj6apg— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 22, 2019

Ain’t he sweet?

For the record, there was no voter fraud in California or anywhere else — other than North Carolina.

Something else to keep you up at night

by digby

I don’t know if Trump would go this far, but it is worth thinking about. I do know for sure that he will contest the results if he doesn’t win and that his rabid followers will have a full blown hissy fit. They’re already talking about civil war…

President Donald Trump’s critics are increasingly focused on the question of which Democrat will challenge him for the presidency in 2020. It’s an important question, but another one might be even more important: Regardless of who runs in 2020, if Trump loses, will he leave the Oval Office peacefully?

Let’s start with why we need to ask this question: Trump is increasingly proving himself to be a President eager to overstep his authority. Just last week, Trump displayed his willingness to invoke unprecedented presidential power to declare a national emergency utterly without justification. This week has brought a startling report from the New York Times that, for the past two years, Trump has tried to undermine the investigations by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and other parts of the Justice Department in order to, in the words of the Times, “make the president’s many legal problems go away.” In light of these overreaching assertions of his own authority, it’s at least plausible that Trump might attempt to cling to power in ways previously unimaginable by an American president.
Thankfully, there are four steps that key actors across the American system of governance can take to get ahead of this possibility.

Remember, when Trump was merely a private citizen running for President in 2016, he became the first presidential candidate in recent memory to refuse to commit that he’d honor the results of the election if he lost. Now, he occupies the Oval Office. He’s the commander in chief of the most powerful military on Earth. If he even hints at contesting the election result in 2020, as he suggested he might in 2016, he’d be doing so not as an outsider but as a leader with the vast resources of the US government potentially at his disposal. 

Trump’s unrelenting assaults on the media and intelligence community, augmented by his baseless insistence on widespread voter fraud, have laid the groundwork for him to contest the election results in worrisome ways by undermining two institutions Americans would count on to validate those results.

Defeating Amy Klobuchar could give progressive Democrats a chance for real change
As the 2018 midterms approached, Trump appeared to preview exactly such behavior. He tweeted that he was “very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election” and “pushing very hard for the Democrats.” Without pointing to even a shred of analysis from the intelligence community, media reports or any other sources, Trump seemed to dangle the notion that, if the elections went too badly for the Republicans, he might allege foreign interference with the vote tally to cast doubt on the validity of the results.

In 2020, with his reelection on the line, the stakes for Trump himself are, of course, wildly bigger. 

All told, there’s real reason to worry here. So, what can be done now to avoid a potential constitutional crisis and ensure that the 2020 election results — whatever they might be — are respected and that any transfer of power occurs peacefully?

While many of us worry that President Trump has fallen woefully short in addressing foreign election interference through social media that can change American voters’ minds, there’s nonetheless an obvious imperative to respect the actual vote tally unless the intelligence community indicates that malicious actors have directly altered it (which would be unprecedented). Thankfully, there are four key sets of governmental actors across the United States that can commit now to certain steps that would help to isolate President Trump should he refuse to hand over power peacefully.

First is the justifiably much-maligned Electoral College. As we were reminded in 2016, elections are not determined by popular vote but by the votes of each state’s and the District of Columbia’s electors, who are generally chosen by the political parties at state conventions or through a vote of the party’s central committee. For the sake of the rule of law and peaceful transfer of power, both parties should require anyone seeking to be one of the college’s electors to pledge that they will not withhold, delay or alter their vote based on the claims or protestations of any candidate, including President Trump. 

Second is Congress. It’s the outgoing Congress that, in January 2021, will meet in joint session to receive the Electoral College’s handiwork and count the electoral votes. Thereafter, the President of the Senate will formally announce the election’s result. Unlike the electors, who haven’t been selected as of this writing, we already know who will be serving in Congress that day (with the exception of any resignations, deaths or other unusual occurrences). These senators and representatives should make a joint pledge not to delay or alter counting of the votes based on any candidate’s objections. Moreover, they should pledge to hold public hearings with intelligence community leaders should those officials or any candidate suggest that vote counts were influenced by foreign election interference or for any other reason. That unvarnished testimony by intelligence professionals could debunk any claims by Trump (or any other candidate) that the final vote count shouldn’t be honored.

Third, 39 of America’s 50 state governors will not be up for reelection in 2020. They represent continuity in critical positions of leadership, and some command respect across party lines. Those 39 should band together now to make clear that they will serve, at least informally, as bastions of our democracy should a peaceful transfer of power look threatened by any candidate’s response to the election. Especially because most, if not all, are sure to support one candidate or the other, they hold great power to urge respect for the election’s results, regardless of who wins. Think here of the example set by former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas after the December 2017 special election for a Senate seat in Alabama. When Republican candidate Roy Moore initially appeared intent on baselessly contesting the election results, Huckabee, a Republican stalwart, issued a sharply worded rebuke to Moore. Moore soon acknowledged defeat.

Fourth, our civilian and uniformed Defense Department leaders have a role to play. The health of our democracy rests, in part, on not involving the military in transfers of power. And that should continue. But imagine the most extreme scenario, with Congress certifying Trump’s defeat but Trump refusing to leave office. In those circumstances, the military would no longer owe its loyalty to Donald Trump as of noon on January 20, 2021. And it’s worth asking the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as they testify before Congress in coming months, to affirm that they understand that and would act consistently with it.

These are dire thoughts. But we live in uncertain and worrying times. Perhaps, in 2016, Donald Trump never really intended to contest a loss at the ballot box. Still, having seen him in action as President, it’s surely best, as we hurtle toward 2020, to be prepared in case President Trump makes good on his threats from 2016 — now with far more power at his disposal.

This is extreme. But it says something that people are actually thinking about this. It’s isn’t really that farfetched.

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