Trump Versus Canada

Donald Trump wants to annex Canada and Greenland. To accomplish that goal without an invasion he is using tariffs. Trump doesn’t want to use the military to obtain his objectives. Vladimir Putin’s effort to annex Ukraine using his military is a message that Trump should not use military force to reach his objectives.

Mr. Trump followed through on a threat at midnight Wednesday to slap 25-per-cent tariffs on aluminum and steel from all countries including Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Australia and Europe. The 27-nation European block joined Canada with retaliatory tariffs of US$28-billion on American goods.

“These tariffs are completely unjustified, unfair and unreasonable,” Canada Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc told a news conference on Wednesday, warning U.S. protectionist measures will hurt American and Canadian consumers.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the tariffs put in place Wednesday will stay in effect until there is a strong U.S. aluminum and steel industry. That is not a likely scenario.

Ontario premier Mr. Ford on Monday announced a 25-per-cent surcharge on electricity exports to three U.S. states, but suspended it Tuesday after a call with the Commerce Secretary. The Premier said Mr. Lutnick “extended an olive branch” to start a conversation about the future of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly said she’ll once again told Mr. Rubio that Canadians are fed up with Mr. Trump’s call for the annexation of Canada. “Everything that has to do with the 51st state rhetoric is unacceptable,” she said.

The President also defended his whipsaw approach to tariffs, after weeks of threats followed by retreats – and then new rounds of levies.

“It’s called flexibility,” he said. “It’s not called inconsistency.”

Will the American congress assert itself? The authoritarian has control for now.

Aesop fable Live

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is an Aesop fable about a shepherd boy who tricks villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his sheep. But there was no wolf. The story teaches that people who lie will not be believed, even when they are telling the truth.

President Donald Trump has threatened new tariffs on Canadian lumber and dairy products, potentially as soon as Friday, just one day after providing Canada a one-month reprieve from 25% tariffs. The tariff on dairy products and lumber Trump threatens is 250%.

Is Trump serious or is it just noise?

Trump’s repeated threats of tariffs applied to Mexico and Canada are getting tiresome because he seems to change his mind daily.

Canada, Mexico, and other countries will soon tire of his threats.

Because of his power as president of the United States we all need to be concerned.

A new report from ABC News concludes that many Americans who voted for Donald Trump do not necessarily support most of his policies. The study, which analyzed 300 poll questions from publicly available surveys conducted since Trump took office on Jan. 20, reveals that while voters largely support his immigration policies, they disapprove of several other aspects of his agenda.

Trump Dares the Courts to Stop Him

New York Times Editorial Board

Feb. 13, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET

The U.S. Constitution established three branches of government, designed to balance power — and serve as checks on one another. That constitutional order suddenly appears more vulnerable than it has in generations. President Trump is trying to expand his authority beyond the bounds of the law while reducing the ability of the other branches to check his excesses. It’s worth remembering why undoing this system of governance would be so dangerous to American democracy and why it’s vital that Congress, the courts and the public resist such an outcome.

Among legal scholars, the term “constitutional crisis” usually refers to a conflict among the branches of government that cannot be resolved through the rules set out in the Constitution and the system of checks and balances at its heart.

Say, a president who openly disregards the 22nd Amendment’s two-term limit and asserts a right to remain in office indefinitely.

But there’s no need to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, in February 2025, only weeks into President Trump’s second term, he and his top associates are stress-testing the Constitution, and the nation, to a degree not seen since the Civil War.

A partial list would include flouting the express requirements of multiple federal laws, as though Congress were an advisory board and not a coequal branch of government. It would include feeding entire agencies into the “wood chipper” (their words), an intentionally gory metaphor for the firing of thousands of civil servants without the legally mandated congressional approval. It would include giving an unelected “special government employee” access to the private financial information of millions of Americans, in violation of the law. And it would include issuing an executive order that purports to erase one of the foundational provisions of the Constitution on Mr. Trump’s say-so.

There is also reason to fear that powers that solely rest with the president, and therefore don’t raise direct constitutional concerns, are being abused in ways that weaken the constitutional order. His mass pardon of Jan. 6 rioters, for instance, is technically legal, but it both celebrates and gives license to anyone who wishes to engage in violence to keep Mr. Trump in power.

Any one of these acts sets off major alarms. Taken as a whole, they are a frontal assault on the laws and norms that underpin American government — by the very people who are meant to execute the law.

So are we in a constitutional crisis yet?

The most useful way to answer that question is to focus less on discrete events and more on the process, in which one branch pushes the limits of its authority and then the others push back. When those in power understand that their first obligation is to the Constitution and the American people, this process can be normal, even healthy.

When they don’t — well, that’s what we are watching play out.

Voters gave Mr. Trump a Republican-controlled Congress, and those lawmakers are within their right to try to pass the president’s agenda through the legislative process. That doesn’t relieve either chamber of its constitutional responsibility to the American people to serve as a check on the power of the president.

With virtually no exception, Republican leaders in Congress have made clear through their inaction that as long as they and Mr. Trump hold power — until January 2027, at least — they will stay out of his way. One reason, however, that Mr. Trump is using executive orders so often is that many of his plans would find resistance from Congress because of the Republicans’ slim majorities and the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold.

While it may seem that the Republican leaders in Congress are free to abdicate their power to the president if they choose, that is not the case. As the sole branch granted lawmaking authority, they can repeal a law only by passing another one — not by failing to complain when a president chooses not to follow the ones he doesn’t like. That ensures that every law passed has the support of a majority of members elected to represent this diverse, divided country.

The United States Agency for International Development, for example, is funded through the congressional appropriations process. Would the current Congress vote to cut that funding? Perhaps. But at the very least, the House speaker and Senate majority leader should be putting the question up for a vote.

And Congress plays another important role: When the president or his administration is believed to have broken the law, it’s up to Congress to investigate and, when appropriate, use its censure powers. There is no sign that lawmakers plan to hold Mr. Trump accountable in this manner.

The willingness of Republican congressional leadership to watch passively as its own rights and responsibilities as a coequal branch of government are undermined leaves only one other branch actively checking the excesses of this overreaching presidency: the federal courts, where nearly all intragovernmental disputes eventually wind up.

The courts exist to define the bounds of the Constitution and the laws and to tell the other branches when they have strayed past those bounds. They also tend to slow everything down — frustrating, perhaps, for those who are impatient to wield their power or who wish to see justice done quickly — but that deliberation is essential to the rule of law and due process. So far, the federal courts have done their job, blocking several of Mr. Trump’s more brazenly illegal moves, including his executive order ending the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. He has already refused to comply at least once: A Rhode Island judge ruled on Monday that the president has defied a federal court order to release billions of dollars in federal grants. This is a dangerous trial balloon that Mr. Trump is daring someone to pop.

It’s fine for presidents to disagree, even strongly, with court rulings. That’s part of America’s evolving constitutional conversation, and it can lead to important changes. But the way to handle such disagreements is through the appeals process or passing legislation or even an amendment. “That’s how the rule of law works,” one federal judge said last week in blocking Mr. Trump’s birthright citizenship order.

In short, change needs to happen through the established channels of litigation in, and obedience to, the courts. Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized this last December, when he warned of the dangers of disobeying court rulings. “Every administration suffers defeats in the court system,” he wrote, but until recently people didn’t dare ignore decisions they didn’t like. Now we live with “the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings.”

He did not name Mr. Trump, but it was clear whom he was talking about. Of course, Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues made their jobs harder with their 2024 decision in Trump v. United States, which granted astonishingly broad presidential immunity — a decision that emboldened Mr. Trump and his allies to see how far he can expand his powers without resistance.

Some may argue that defying a lower court order is not as serious as defying a final ruling of the Supreme Court. The complication is that the judiciary depends on the executive branch to enforce its orders. When the executive branch is the defendant, as it is in these cases, and refuses to follow a court order, who can compel it to do so? This is the predicament Mr. Trump and his allies have put the nation in.

However it may play out, the refusal to obey a Supreme Court ruling — from which there is no appeal — would be the moment that America’s constitutional order completely fails. That is a clear red line separating countries that operate under the rule of law from those that do not. If he crosses it, Mr. Trump will have created the precise scenario the nation’s founders fought a war and established an entirely new government to avoid. And if that happens, no part of society can remain silent.

There is disagreement among even legal scholars about whether the country is all the way to a constitutional crisis yet. Regardless, the statements from the White House and the unwillingness of Republican leaders in Congress to even consider acting as a check should be taken as a flashing warning sign. If we have learned anything from the past decade of living with Donald Trump, it’s that when he tells you about what he will do with power, believe him.

Trump’s push to make Canada the 51st state could backfire on Republicans

Story by Ali Velshi of MSNBC. A 4 min read

Since entering office, President Donald Trump has been ambitious about territorial expansion. Sounding more like Donald the Conqueror, he’s insisted the United States take ownership of the Gaza Strip and the Panama Canal, he’s proposed buying Greenland from Denmark and he’s pitched Canada on joining our union as the 51st state. At his inauguration, Trump took America’s original expansionist slogan and blasted it skyward, “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”

American history has seen the country grow in size and Betsy Ross’ flag grow in stars but Trump’s ideas ebb between delusions of grandeur and old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy.

There was Trump’s announcement that the United States would “own” Gaza, sending Palestinians to neighboring countries and establishing a “Middle East riviera.” With literally zero specifics laid out by the White House as to how exactly this would happen, this idea has received bipartisan and international condemnation as logistically impossible.

Trump has also set his sights on “seizing back” the Panama Canal, which was signed over to Panama by the late President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Trump has erroneously claimed that China is running the canal, which is actually operated by an independent authority in Panama. A subsidiary of a Hong Kong company runs two of the canal’s ports but doesn’t control access to the canal.

Trump has also floated the idea of purchasing Greenland from Denmark, a concept that, while not new in the grand scheme of American history, stands firmly against the interests of the people of Greenland, whose prime minister has said bluntly, “We want to be Greenlanders.”

Then there’s Canada, the second-largest country by land mass on the planet. It’s also my home country. While I can’t speak for Panamanians or Greenlanders, I do have a suggestion for my fellow Canucks on this:

Trump has offered Canada the chance to become the 51st state, but I say, why stop there? Canada has 41 million people, spread throughout 10 provinces and three territories. So, if Canada were to become part of America, some changes would be in order.

First of all, Congress would have to grow. That would mean Canada, as part of the new America, would net at least 54 seats in the House. For context, the 20 states with the smallest populations have just 46 House seats among them all.

But here’s problem No. 1: This little thing called the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. That act mandates that the House is no bigger than 435 members. So, if you did the math, combining Canada’s population with America’s and dividing it by 435, Canada would net 47 seats. Those seats would be taken away from states all over the country. Who’s going to tell voters that Trump gave their congressional representation to a guy in Saskatchewan?

That’s just the House of Representatives. What about the Senate? Trump is only offering for Canada to become one state with two senators. But Canadian provinces, like American states, compete with one another. They aren’t going to be interested in all snuggling up into one state.

Each province would have to be its own U.S. state. So Canada wouldn’t be the 51st state; it would be states 51 through 60, at the very least, meaning Canada would have 20 senators. It would be the largest reorientation of political power in America since women were given the right to vote in 1920.

Trump is specifically asking Canada to join as just one state for that reason. Statehood for Canada would likely swing power away from Republicans. That’s one of the reasons most Republicans have long opposed statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. They assume both would become Democratic strongholds, increasing the Democrats’ control in Congress.

If the thought of a couple of senators from Puerto Rico representing people who are already American citizens scares Republicans, I wonder how 20 from the land of maple syrup, Mounties and “Anne of Green Gables” would go over?

While it’s difficult to compare American and Canadian politics directly, we have some sense of how Canadians, or what might come to be known as “Camericans,” might vote:

Canada has a multiparty parliamentary system but in 2003, the conservative parties united under one banner. Since then, the conservatives have received, on average, about 35% of the popular vote in each election. On average, the left-of-conservative parties have received a combined 63% of the popular vote.

Expansion from Canada to the Gulf of America might be a fun idea for Trump … until our nice neighbors up north kick his party oot of office and install a liberal supermajority. And we haven’t even talked about what this would do to the Supreme Court.

Of course, in typical Canadian politeness, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there’s “not a snowball’s chance in hell” that Canada joins America. But, Canada, if I were you, maybe the chance to take over your noisy neighbor from the inside isn’t the worst idea in the world.

America has Surrendered to a Madman

This column and introductory commentary was forwarded to me. Mike Greenberg of Texas wrote the opening comments. This is exhausting.

I don’t think any US journalist has written as tough (and spot-on) a portrayal of the threat facing us as this Canadian, Andrew Coyne of the Toronto Globe and Mail. If you read to the end, you will be rewarded with the most flattering photograph yet of the convicted-felon-in-chief:

“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.

The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.

There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.

The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.

At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.

At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.

The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.

Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fueled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.

Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.

We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”

Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.

All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.

All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.”

The only thing standing between democracy and dictatorship in America

Opinion by Thom Hartmann on Alternet https://www.alternet.org/

Trump wants FBI agents who investigated his coup attempt, his facilitating espionage, or his other financial and criminal activities fired.

Let’s be very clear: this is how dictatorships start.

A guy who wants to be a dictator always begins by changing how the government works. Even though the majority of the nation had agreed previously that the government should do certain things in certain ways, he reassures everybody he’s got a better way and it’ll all work out.

In the process, he breaks a bunch of laws, but people mostly shrug because they don’t directly affect them. Pastor Niemöller wrote about this in 1930s Germany; to paraphrase: First they came for the government workers…

Then people start resisting, which is when he begins to use the police power of the state. The people who show up in the streets, the people who speak out in the media, the people who try to fight him in the legislatures and the courts: he figures out ways to get them fired, harassed, and ultimately imprisoned.

When she was being confirmed, Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to say that she would not executed an illegal order on Donald Trump’s behalf. Like if he directed her to investigate somebody who irritated him. Or prosecute somebody who had investigated him. Or imprison — perhaps only temporarily, at first — somebody who has spoken out against him.

We’re there now. Bondi just announced that the political prosecutions are about to begin. At first they will be going after the police agencies themselves, as a way of bringing them to heel: Terrify the terrifiers.

Next will be the Press. First they will use financial terror to force compliance; we’re already seeing that with Trump’s lawsuits against all three major networks and multiple newspapers. That will expand. Eventually it will turn into shutdowns and arrests.

He will remake our schools so they become indoctrination factories for his white, male supremacist worldview and the new authoritarianism.

He will realign our democratic country away from democratic allies and toward countries run by dictators like he aspires to become.

He will purge the military of leadership that might resist him and of troops who might refuse his orders.

He will remake our criminal justice system so it becomes more violent and brutal, opening prisons for “the worst of the worst“ in places beyond the reach of law, like Auschwitz in Poland or Guantánamo in Cuba.

He will remake our media so it becomes a Greek chorus, singing his praises and carrying his every word.

By proclaiming, as every dictator does, that divine providence and the blessings of God put him where he is, he will bring the country‘s largest religious institutions to heel.

He will proclaim grand plans and spectacular efforts, like the Autobahn or remaking Gaza, Greenland, and Panama. They will distract the public from the relentless, grinding destruction of the guardrails of government itself.

He and his allies will empower civilian militias who will then become his terror shock troops against the people who oppose him. Hitler had his Brownshirts; Republicans in Nassau County are right now trying to field America’s first armed private militia.

He will remake commerce and business, so the most successful companies are those that throw money and resources at him. Fritz Tyson wrote a book about this, about his shame at facilitating it, titled I Paid Hitler. Someday, perhaps, Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook will write a similar book.

America today is early in this process, although it doesn’t typically take very long. It took Hitler 53 days. It took Putin about a year. It took Victor Orban about two years. It took Pinochet less than a week, although he had the help of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Trump and his project 2025 friends, however, have been preparing for this for four years: They hit the ground running.

This moment proves that the preservation of democracy requires constant attention and a collective commitment to uphold the integrity of its institutions.

Right now, though, the only thing standing between democracy and dictatorship in America are public opinion, the media, and the Democratic Party; Republicans have completely caved and the courts move too slowly to stop him.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump seem to think they can pull this off in a matter of weeks, and so far — because of the cowardice of Republican legislators and the disorganization and lack of leadership among Democrats — they may be right.

Unless we all stand up and speak out now.

Say Goodbye to the American Democracy

On July 19,2024 Donald Trump told a gathering of Christian conservatives: “I love you. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

His interviewer on the following Monday, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, noted that Democrats have highlighted that quote as evidence that Mr. Trump would end elections, and urged Mr. Trump to rebut what she called a “ridiculous” criticism.

But Mr. Trump declined to do so, repeating a pattern he frequently employs in which he makes a provocative statement that can be interpreted in varying ways, and makes no attempt to quiet the uproar. This comment was especially striking, given his attempts to overturn the 2020 electionand his shattering of other democratic norms.

Today Donald Trump has been in office just over 2 weeks and has given a non-elected, non-authorized by congress, Elon Musk, to discharge federal government employees en masse. This includes all employees in USAID, the FBI, and other agencies. Musk now has access to all Treasury files including the IRS, Social Security and all medical agencies (Medicare etc.).

Republicans have largely cheered on the moves — though there are a few exceptions. Some senators have said they want more information about Musk’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, which prompted the resignation of a longtime civil servant who refused to turn over the system last week.

Trump has stated that the United States will take control of Gaza not for months but years.

The idea of a 100-day action plan, the milestone set by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he took office in the midst of the nation’s worst depression, now seems almost quaint, like snail mail. Helped by a compliant Congress, Trump 2.0 is moving at fiber-optic speed, with more discipline and bigger ambitions than during his first term.

The press has mostly been silent as the owners of most media stop broadcasting and printing news that reports anything that puts Trump in a negative light.

Say hello to King Donald Trump!

545 vs. 300,000,000 People

Charlie Reese (January 29, 1937 – May 21, 2013) was a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper. This is his final column.

545 vs. 300,000,000 People

-By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The President does.

You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don’t write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don’t control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.. ( The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.)

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House?( John Boehner. He is the leader of the majority party. He and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. ) If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to. [The House has passed a budget but the Senate has not approved a budget in over three years. The President’s proposed budgets have gotten almost unanimous rejections in the Senate in that time. ]

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts — of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red.

If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan it’s because they want them in Iraq and Afghanistan ..

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it’s because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.

Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like “the economy,” “inflation,” or “politics” that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses. Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees… We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

A show-stopping takedown of Donald Trump

BREAKING: Democratic star Congressman Jamie Raskin delivers a show-stopping takedown of Donald Trump’s lawless mass pardon of violent January 6th insurrectionists.

This is exactly what all of us are thinking right now…

“The chairman began by saying that the point here is to restore the rule of law… restore the rule of law… Can you even pretend to do that if you stand by and support Donald Trump who on day one — as the chairman of the committee just said — day one of his presidency, pardoned fifteen hundred insurrectionists including hundreds of people who violently assaulted and attacked American police officers?” said Raskin during a hearing of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement.

“Let’s just take one person who is free today, Julian Khater, who had been convicted after having every due process protection, the right to counsel, the right to cross-examine witnesses, the right to introduce evidence, but they had him completely,” said Raskin.

“They knew exactly what happened. Most of this was videotaped so the whole world could see it,” he continued. “Well, Julian Khater repeatedly violently assaulted our officer protecting us in Congress, Officer Brian Sicknick, who then proceeded to have several strokes and died on January the 7th, 2021, the next day.”

“The family of Officer Sicknick is absolutely devastated and demolished by what’s just happened,” Raskin went on. “I invite any of my colleagues, including the members new to this committee who maybe weren’t here on January 6th and didn’t experience the trauma of that violent insurrection when we saw a mob marauding through here yelling ‘Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!’ and looking to assassinate Nancy Pelosi.”

“And now you have the temerity to come forward and say this is about public safety? How much safer are we now with these fifteen hundred criminals at large in Washington D.C. and going out into the country?” asked Raskin.

“Are you vouching that these people are not going to be attacking any other police officers?” he added. “Are you vouching that they’re no longer a threat to public safety? What an outrage! What a scandal!”

The truth is that there is no defending Trump’s pardons on anything other than purely partisan grounds. He released these criminals because they support him. He doesn’t care that they attacked police officers. He doesn’t care that they might do it again. All that matters is that they’re in his MAGA cult.