Donald Trump has been publicly insistent for months about his supposed position on the social safety net programs Medicare and Social Security: he will not cut a dollar from their budgets.
Continue reading “Another House Republican Is Being Loud And Clear About Plans To Slash Medicare”It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year: Golden Dukes 2024
It is that time again.
As the year draws to a close, TPM takes a moment to reflect on those in political life who most excelled in behaving poorly, grifting boldly, and pushing the frontiers of misconduct out past where we previously understood them to be. For more than a decade, con-artistry and shameless, bizarre behavior have continued to move into the mainstream, and so we acknowledge those who are doing the most to advance the cause by awarding them the Golden Duke. The prize is named for the infamously corrupt member of Congress Randy Duke Cunningham, an early TPM fascination.
While once a questionable honor, receiving a Golden Duke now marks a political figure as a true thought-leader — and, apparently, a great candidate for a pardon and/or a Cabinet position, depending on the details.
This year we have six categories, some old, some new.
• Best Scandal – General Interest
• Best Scandal – Sex & Generalized Carnality
• Best Scandal – Local Venue
• Meritorious Achievement in the Crazy
• “I’m Going To Trump’s Cabinet And I’m Bringing …”
• Best Scandal — World-Wide Wingnutery
To make this work, we need your nominations. Fill out the form here to submit a political figure for TPM’s highest honor.
Waiting for Trump: Norms, Trash Talk and the Cold Hand of ‘Militant P#$%ydom’
As the clock winds down on the Biden presidency, Democrats and the Democrat-adjacent are hashing out, often awkwardly and painedly, what stance to take toward the second Trump presidency. I’ve already discussed this issue in the piece I wrote back on November 14th: “The Most Pernicious Anticipatory Obedience Hides in Plain Sight.” As I wrote in that post, there’s a species of Democrat who imagines there’s “some power or badassery or even a species of courage in” declaring constantly that Trump is all-powerful and everyone is powerless before him. Today this is playing out over Trump’s threat to jail the members of the Jan. 6th committee after pardoning the insurrectionists themselves.
For myself, I’m with former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, whose response to Trump was “bring it on.” This isn’t just about the personal and aesthetic importance of standing or going down fighting rather than cowering. (And yes, obviously it means much less coming from me than Kinzinger.) There’s also the deeper issue I discussed in that November post, which is how much fuel anyone should give Trump, how large a penumbra of fear and shock we should allow Trump to cast with boasts he probably lacks the courage to make good on and would probably struggle to make good on if he were up to trying. This isn’t the same as ignoring these crazed and degenerate threats. And it doesn’t mean these threats couldn’t come to pass. Managing that balance is at the heart of this period we are living through.
Continue reading “Waiting for Trump: Norms, Trash Talk and the Cold Hand of ‘Militant P#$%ydom’”Incoming President Threatens Prison For Jan. 6 Committee Members
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Don’t Blink
While Donald Trump’s vow to jail members of the Congress who investigated his efforts to subvert the 2020 election has been repeated ad nauseam, it remains an unprecedented and extraordinary threat to the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the Constitution.
In his first sit-down interview since the election, President-elect Trump reiterated on Meet the Press his desire for the Jan. 6 committee members to be jailed. In an awkwardly worded exchange, Trump said he wouldn’t order his Justice Department to pursue the Jan. 6 committee members but that he expected his new appointees there to do it on their own. So much for coded speech.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee, issued a withering statement in response to Trump’s interview. “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting – a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee – and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct,” Cheney said.
Trump Jan. 6 Pardons Could Come As Soon As Day 1
Trump’s latest promise to pardon Jan. 6 rioters was laden with misinformation, mistruths, and misdirection – but he appears likely to follow through with a blanket pardon as soon as he takes office next month.
The Last Remaining Recourse Against Trump?
- “Though the criminal cases against him are all but dead, Trump is likely to be fighting eight civil lawsuits — from members of Congress and injured police officers — deep into his second term. They may be the last form of legal redress Trump faces for his role in spurring the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.”–Politico
- “The cases are not criminal, but if they end up at trial, they could result not only in financial damages imposed on Mr. Trump, but also in the public airing of evidence about Jan. 6 that has not taken place — and may never — in the context of his dismissed or delayed criminal trials.”–NYT
Bracing For Trump II
- WaPo: Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge
- AP: Military leaders are rattled by a list of ‘woke’ officers that a group urges Hegseth to fire
Hegseth Held On Through The Weekend
I didn’t think Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense would survive through the end of last week. It not only made it through Friday but survived the weekend, too. It’s worth noting that no GOP senators has gone so far as to openly oppose Hegseth. So, while GOP senators have told reporters the votes aren’t there, Hegseth’s demise is not a done deal … yet.
At the same time, some GOP members of Congress are rallying to defend Hegseth against allegations of sexual assault and excessive drinking on the job – in the most shameless ways.
Exhibit A:
Chip Roy dismisses the Pete Hegseth rape allegation: "We've all had some indiscretions in our past and things like that."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) December 6, 2024 at 12:46 PM
[image or embed]
Exhibit B:
Tapper: When you're talking about drinking at ten in the morning, that's a drinking problem.
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 8, 2024
Mullin: Well, then there's a lot of politicians that have a drinking problem… and there's probably a lot of media that has a drinking problem too. pic.twitter.com/1Sk9qv1TA4
Meanwhile, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation and incubator of Project 2025, is pledging to spend $1 million to pressure reluctant GOP senators to support the Hegseth nomination. (That’s not really much money, to be honest.)
More On Hegseth …
- Politico: Pete Hegseth’s Crusade to Turn the Military into a Christian Weapon
- CNN: Hegseth’s name has been submitted for FBI background check, weeks after he became presumptive nominee
- Hegseth is threatening a “civil extortion claim” against his sexual assault accuser if he is not confirmed as defense secretary:
Pete Hegseth's lawyer on CNN threatens Pete Hegseth's sexual assault accuser with a defamation lawsuit if he's not confirmed as secretary of defense
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) December 5, 2024 at 9:43 PM
[image or embed]
IMPORTANT
Beyond Pete Hegseth’s abject unsuitability for the job of defense secretary, there’s a whole nother issue that deserves close scrutiny: His support for limiting VA health care for veterans and for “privatizing” the VA system:
Hegseth, now Trump’s nominee to serve as secretary of defense, had been a vocal and persistent advocate for veterans having unfettered access to private health care, rather than having to go through the VA to keep their benefits. He’s also lobbied for policies that would restrict VA care and believes veterans should ask for fewer government benefits.
Trump II Clown Show
- Trump has named his criminal defense attorney Alina Habba as a White House counselor to the president
- Fracking CEO Chris Wright, Trump’s pick for energy secretary, preaches the benefits of climate change
- Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, is on the Hill this week meeting with senators.
Grifters Gonna Grift
The WSJ introduces us to the Trump presumptive nominees personally hawking supplements:
- Kash Patel for FBI director;
- Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for surgeon general;
- Dr. Mehmet Oz for administrator of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not included on the list, even though he’s expected to champion supplements, because he’s not selling them personally.
Trump Picks ‘America First’ Trio For Top Roles At State
- Former ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau: deputy secretary of state
- Former Trump White House official Michael Anton: director of policy planning
- Michael Needham, counselor of the State Department
Birthright Citizenship Alert
Despite all the talk of birthright citizenship over the weekend, including Trump’s posturing that he might just try to usurp the 14th Amendment via executive action, reporting from the WSJ suggests the transition team is working on a more modest executive order:
Weeks before he takes office, Trump’s transition team is now considering how far to push the scope of such an order, knowing it would almost immediately be challenged in court, according to a transition official and others familiar with the matter. The eventual order is expected to focus on changing the requirements for documents issued by federal agencies that verify citizenship, such as a passport.
Still potentially damaging and all but certain to be challenged in court, but perhaps less than a full-blown attempt to pretend the 14th Amendment doesn’t exist.
Ya Don’t Say?
As Donald Trump gathered his supporters, family and friends at Mar-a-Lago on US election day last month to wait for the results to trickle in, a small group of far-right Germans went largely unnoticed.
Among them was the purported semi-professional, one-time porn actor, self-confessed former cocaine user, convicted thief and hard-right candidate for the German parliament Phillipp-Anders Rau. Together with a compact delegation of young political activists and influencers, Rau posed for the cameras with the American president-elect at his invitation, chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” in English and German.
A Brutal Denouement For Biden
- WSJ: Biden Is Ceding Presidential Influence to Trump, and Some Democrats Are Furious
- Politico: Biden shrinks from view ahead of Trump’s return to Washington
GOOD READ
The NYT’s Adam Liptak with a good primer on a how a 1925 law conveyed to the Supreme Court much of its current power and indluence.
Quote Of The Day
“Our involvement over there had a cost. The cost was Syria.”–Anton Mardasov, a Moscow-based analyst referring to Russia’s war in Ukraine
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
An Observation
When I look at the video of Trump, Macron and Zelensky today I see something I hadn’t expected — not just in this quick footage but more generally. (Google it.) The first thing is that Trump looks like the least comfortable guy there. But there’s something more general that I have seen globally, in both senses of the word. Round one, no one knew how to deal with Trump. He always had the element of surprise, just by being the freak that he is. Round two, I get the sense that everyone knows exactly how to deal with him. I think he feels that intuitively, and doesn’t necessarily like it.
I’m not saying this is necessarily “good” or bad for Trump. You could see it as the opposite: everyone now accepts that this is how things work and they’re ready to work with him on that basis. But I don’t think it’s totally that either. It’s a pattern or dimension of this story that I’m going to be thinking more about.
With Major Trans Rights And Abortion Decisions On The Horizon, The Culture War Commences
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear a major abortion case Tuesday, the next chapter in a case that the Supreme Court punted last term.
Continue reading “With Major Trans Rights And Abortion Decisions On The Horizon, The Culture War Commences”Use Hegseth as Fly Paper, Say Trumpers
Very interesting update from MAGA-whisperer Marc Caputo at The Bulwark. Following on Trump’s tweet of support, the idea is that Pete Hegseth has bought himself at least time to continue his nomination fight because Trump likes his fight. But the operative theory is twofold, that even though Hegseth doesn’t currently have 50 votes that they can break the GOP senators’ … well, let’s call it their moonwalk confirmation strategy (I’ll explain that later) and that Hegseth is good to have as a punching bag because maybe that will help RFK Jr. and Kash Patel move through more easily. Caputo quotes a Trumper: “Hegseth is a heatshield. Pete can take the heat, and that’s better for everyone else.”
Continue reading “Use Hegseth as Fly Paper, Say Trumpers”Let’s Call It: Trump 2.0 Is Lining Up for Massive Social Security Cuts
One of the central features of Trumpism is that Trump never wants to deal in pain. Not for people who might vote for him. Or at least, no pain to anyone who might vote for him … that they would blame on him. That’s why, at least in concept, he’s always said he’d never support cuts to Social Security or Medicare. That’s in concept of course. What happens down in the fine print of administrative decisions or omnibus tax bills is another matter. But the position in concept is still important and fairly consistent. But over the last couple weeks things have gone sideways in a pretty big way. And key players in his administration-in-the-making are now proposing massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Continue reading “Let’s Call It: Trump 2.0 Is Lining Up for Massive Social Security Cuts”Listen To This: Beg Your Pardon
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the Hunter pardon, Pete Hegseth and his mom and the ascendancy of some star House Democrats.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Trump Allies’ Idea Of Citizenship Would Take US Back To The Nineteenth Century
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
As President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to implement sweeping policy changes affecting American immigration and immigrants, one of the issues under scrutiny by his allies appears to be birthright citizenship — the declaration in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that anyone born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen, regardless of their parents’ nationalities or immigration status.
Some prospective members of Trump’s team, including anti-immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Thomas Homan, have said they intend to stop issuing federal identification documents such as Social Security cards and passports to infants born in the U.S. to undocumented migrant parents, according to The New York Times.
This first step down a path to deny citizenship to some individuals born in the United States reflects a conflict that’s been going on for nearly 200 years: who gets to be an American citizen.
Debates in American history over who gets citizenship and what kind of citizenship they get have always involved questions of race and ethnicity, as we have learned through our individual research on the historical status of Native Americans and African Americans and joint research on restricting Chinese immigration.
Nonetheless, even in the highly racialized political environment of the late 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed an expansive view of birthright citizenship. In an 1898 ruling, the court decreed that the U.S.-born children of immigrants were citizens, regardless of their parents’ ancestry.
That decision set the terms for the current controversy, as various Republican leaders, U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, as well as Vice President-elect JD Vance, have claimed that they will possess the power to overturn more than a century of federal constitutional law and policy and deny birthright citizenship.
Citizenship by birth
.jpg){kind=link}
Most citizens of the U.S. are born, not made. Before the Civil War, the U.S. had generally followed the English practice of granting citizenship to children born in the country.
In 1857, though, the Supreme Court had decided the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, with Chief Justice Roger Taney declaring that people of African descent living in the U.S. – whether free or enslaved, and regardless of where they were born – were not actually U.S. citizens.
After the Civil War, Congress explicitly rejected the Dred Scott decision, first by passing legislation reversing the ruling and then by writing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which specified that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
This broad language intentionally included more than just the people who had been freed from slavery at the end of the Civil War: During legislative debate, members of Congress decided that the amendment should cover the children of other nonwhite groups, such as Chinese immigrants and those identified at the time as “Gypsies.”
Still barring some people from citizenship
This inclusive view of citizenship, however, still had an area judges hadn’t made clear yet – the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” In 1884, the Supreme Court had to interpret those words when deciding the case of a Native American who wanted to be a citizen, had renounced his tribal membership and attempted to register to vote.
The justices ruled that even though John Elk had been born in the U.S., he was born on a reservation as a member of a Native American tribe and was therefore subject to the tribe’s jurisdiction at his birth – not that of the United States. He was, they ruled, not a citizen.
In 1887, Congress did pass a law creating a path to citizenship for at least some Native Americans; it took until 1924 for all Native Americans born on U.S. soil to be recognized as citizens.
The text of the 14th Amendment also became an issue in the late 19th century, when Congress and the Supreme Court were deciding how to handle immigrants from China. An 1882 law had barred Chinese immigrants living in the U.S. from becoming naturalized citizens. A California circuit court, however, ruled in 1884 that those immigrants’ U.S.-born children were citizens.
In 1898, the Supreme Court took up the question in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, ultimately ruling that children born in the U.S. were, in the 14th Amendment’s terms, “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, so long as their parents were not serving in some official capacity as representatives of a foreign government and not part of an invading army. Those children were U.S. citizens at birth.
This ruling occurred near the peak of anti-Chinese sentiment that had led Congress to endorse the idea that immigration itself could be illegal. In earlier rulings, the court had affirmed broad powers for Congress to manage immigration and control immigrants.
Yet in the Wong Kim Ark ruling, the court did not mention any distinction between the children of legal immigrants and residents and the children of people who were in the United States without appropriate documentation. All people born in the United States were automatically simply citizens.
The long reach of Wong Kim Ark
Since the Wong Kim Ark ruling, birthright citizenship rules haven’t changed much – but they have remained no less contentious. In 1900 and 1904, leaders of several Pacific islands that make up what is now American Samoa signed treaties granting the U.S. full powers and authority to govern them. These agreements, however, did not grant American Samoans citizenship.
A 1952 federal law and State Department policy designates them as “non-citizen nationals,” which means they can freely live and work in the U.S. but cannot vote in state and federal elections.
In 2018, several plaintiffs from American Samoa sued to be recognized as U.S. citizens, covered by the 14th Amendment’s provision that they were born “within” the U.S. and therefore citizens. The district court found for the plaintiffs, but the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, ruling that Congress would have to act to extend citizenship to territorial residents.
A new debate has ignited over whether Congress has the power to alter birthright citizenship, and even over whether the president, either through an executive order or through directing the State Department not to recognize some individuals as citizens, can change the boundaries around who gets to be a citizen. Efforts to alter birthright citizenship are sure to provoke legal challenges.
Trump is just the latest in a long line of politicians who have objected to the fact that Latin American immigrants who come to the U.S. without legal permission can have babies who are U.S. citizens. Most legal scholars, even those who are quite conservative, see little merit in claims that the established rules can be altered.
At least until now, the courts have continued to uphold the centuries-long history of birthright citizenship, dating back to before the Constitution itself and early American court rulings. But if the Trump administration pursues the policies that key figures have discussed, the question seems likely to reach the Supreme Court again, with the fundamental principle hanging in the balance.
This article includes material previously published on Jan. 15, 2020. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
