Rudy Giuliani is one step closer to paying the piper after a federal judge tossed his bankruptcy case on Friday.
The move should make it easier for Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss to collect on their $148 million defamation judgment against him.
Continue reading “GA Election Workers Take Aim At Rudy Giuliani After His Bankruptcy Case Dismissed”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
If elected to serve a second term, Donald Trump says he supports a plan that would give him the authority to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with members of his political party loyal to him. Under this plan, if he eventually deemed those new employees disloyal, he claims he could fire them too.
The United States has tried such a plan before.
As we write in our book “How Government Built America,” newly elected President Andrew Jackson, after he took office in 1828, fired about half the country’s civil servants and replaced them with loyal members of his political party.
The result was not only an utterly incompetent administration, but widespread corruption.
Jackson’s actions that rewarded political loyalists and punished enemies were a dramatic departure from what the founders had envisioned by establishing an independent civil service whose members were literally pledged to uphold the country’s laws.
In passage of its very first law, on June 1, 1789, Congress required newly appointed federal officials to take the oath of office to uphold the laws of the country and faithfully carry out their duties.
Congress also passed conflict-of-interest legislation at that time to prevent employees from making decisions based on personal financial considerations.
While oaths may have less significance today, they were regarded as significant personal commitments in the 18th and 19th centuries. The U.S. Constitution, for example, contains an oath of office for the president, and it specifies that members of Congress and other federal officials “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this Constitution.”
When President George Washington — and the next five U.S. presidents — hired a new employee, reputations mattered. Each of the presidents looked at how an appointee’s neighbors regarded him and whether he had been elected to local office, an indication that the man — and they were all men — was competent and an honest employee.
That’s not what Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, and his system aimed to do; he wanted loyalists in government jobs.
While the first presidents were concerned with the competence and honesty of civil service employees, Jackson quickly set aside those concerns.
Instead of hiring those who wanted to work for the public interest and the good of the nation, Jackson employed members of his political party who pledged to march in lockstep with him and his policies. This became known as the “spoils system.”
Like Trump, Jackson also had a version of the “deep state” that he opposed. He claimed that the appointment process was aristocratic and blocked the appointment of the ordinary people he represented. He also insisted that experience and competence were unnecessary.
Jackson was quite wrong about some of his political appointments.
One of his worst was Samuel Swartwout, a longtime Army friend and political sycophant. Jackson named him to two consecutive terms as collector of customs at New York, where he served from 1829 through 1837.
Considered a plum assignment, the job at the time was the highest paid in federal government and involved collecting taxes and fees on imported goods that arrived in the nation’s busiest port.
But a congressional investigation showed that Swartwout had stolen a little more than US$1.2 million during his tenure, or about $40 million in today’s dollars.
Swartwout had fled to London, but he returned to the U.S. after he was assured that he would not face criminal charges.
Jackson also learned that his power to influence federal agencies with high-level appointments was limited. Such was the case with the U.S. Postal Service.
As a slaveholder, Jackson was disturbed by the mailing of antislavery flyers in 1835 by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Fearing the flyers would lead to a Black insurrection, Jackson instructed his postmaster general, Amos Kendall, an enslaver himself, to fix their problem by limiting the mailings and asking Congress to prohibit the U.S. Postal Service from mailing all abolitionist material.
Congress refused, citing freedom of speech and expansion of presidential authority as the main reasons.
Long after Jackson had left the White House, Congress, between 1864 and 1883, debated making “merit” a key condition of hiring new employees, but nothing happened until after a disgruntled office seeker assassinated President Chester Garfield.
Congress then passed the Pendleton Act in 1883, which established the merit appointment system still used today. It also put a virtual end to a system that allowed whichever party that won the White House to reward its supporters with tens of thousands of jobs.
Currently, most of the nearly 3 million federal employees are appointed using merit-based hiring that relies on competitive exams. They cannot be fired except for a limited set of reasons, such as poor performance or misconduct.
But the law exempts about 4,000 federal employees whose appointment requires the Senate’s advice and consent and who have been determined by the president to hold a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character.”
The idea is to give a new president the capacity to influence his policymaking by hiring top-level federal officials.
The plan that Trump supported would extend the president’s authority under the previous exemption to hire and fire tens of thousands of civil servants without regard to merit.
In short, he intends to reestablish the spoils system.
This is no idle threat.
Near the end of his administration, then-President Trump signed an executive order establishing a new job classification within the government’s career civil service called Schedule F for “employees in confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating positions.”
Under that designation, employees would lose virtually all of their civil service protections and could be fired without cause. It’s unclear how much effect Trump’s order had on the federal government because it was enacted two weeks before the 2020 election and was in effect for only a few months.
Shortly after taking office, President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s order.
In our view, if political loyalty replaces merit as the basis of key federal appointments, Americans can expect government to be less competent — as Andrew Jackson learned during his administration.
While this might not matter to those who regard government as unimportant to the country — or worse, the enemy of the country — our book “How Government Built America” tells a much different story about the thousands of federal employees who provide everything from health services to protection from natural disasters.
Not every civil servant is a great employee, nor is every employee of private industry.
But there is ample proof that government works because of the many people behind the scenes in Washington and across the country who serve the American people — and uphold their oaths of office.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
In a new filing Thursday, former President Donald Trump launched a wholesale attack not just on his conviction in the New York hush money case but on the underlying indictment, too – relying heavily on the Supreme Court’s unprecedented ruling in his favor on presidential immunity.
You knew this was coming, but there was a jolt in reading the particulars of the motion. Perhaps it was the effect of seeing anew that the Supreme Court gifted Trump so many angles of attack by issuing such a broad, vague ruling and tacking on to it a newly invented evidentiary rule that benefits Trump and future lawless presidents in myriad ways.
It was the high court’s new evidentiary rule that evidence of official acts can’t be used in a criminal proceeding against the former president – ostensibly because it would deprive him of the benefits of the immunity protection the court bestowed on him – that opened the door for Trump now to challenge the underlying indictment.
“Because of the implications for the institution of the Presidency, the use of official-acts evidence was a structural error under the federal Constitution that tainted DANY’s grand jury proceedings as well as the trial,” Trump argued in the new filing.
Trump is asking the trial judge to dismiss the indictment and vacate the conviction. Most legal observers think the conviction will likely survive review in New York state, but the scope of the Supreme Court ruling on immunity means the high court will almost certainly get a chance to weigh in and is likely to take that chance. That was not the case, or at least was much more of a stretch, before the immunity ruling, when there were few if any real constitutional issues in the New York case that would have been a basis for Supreme Court intervention.
To reiterate, close observers recognized right off the bat that the immunity ruling posed a threat not just to the Jan. 6 case in DC and the RICO case in Georgia but also to the hush money conviction and the Mar-a-Lago case. Yesterday’s filing was evidence of those chickens coming home to roost.
As I suggested in yesterday’s Morning Memo, Joe Biden’s press conference to wrap up the NATO summit was a trap more than a potential escape route for the embattled president.
Despite a strong showing that effectively muted concerns that Biden had suffered a sudden and irreversible cognitive decline in recent months, the news coverage universally took on the bitter flavor of “he did fine but it won’t matter” – a hall of mirrors of political analysis that seems destined to be the surreal place American politics is going to spend the next few days, weeks, and maybe even months.
The one bit of good news yesterday for Biden was that a meeting of Democratic senators with Biden’s campaign triumvirate was not followed by a series of Senate defections. That number still stands at one.
The Biden campaign sent a memo to campaign staffers yesterday that amounted to a concession that the Electoral College map for the president has shrunk to the “blue wall” of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, the Associated Press reports:
The fresh emphasis on the “blue wall” states by the campaign, which has heavily invested in other battlegrounds such as Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia, acknowledges that the path to defeating Donald Trump in November is narrowing, even as the team insists the Sun Belt states are “not out of reach.”
Democratic political strategist Doug Sosnik cites the campaign memo as he reassess the current political map in a NYT op-ed out today. Sosnik paints a grim picture for Biden:
Unless the basic contours of the race change and some of the Sun Belt battleground states become more competitive (which is unlikely), Mr. Biden’s only viable path for winning is to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Each of the three states poses particular challenges for Mr. Biden. Current polling shows him trailing Mr. Trump by as many as five points in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and more narrowly in Michigan.
I should add one note for the discerning reader: The Sosnik op-ed, while sound, also reads like part of the internal party drumbeat for Biden to exit the race. That’s not to denigrate the analysis just to heighten your awareness.
Brian Beutler has a insightful callback to the desperate measure GOP nominee John McCain reached for in 2008 to try to change the trajectory of his losing campaign: Sarah Palin.
It’s fucking awesome.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), on seeing congressional Democrats swarmed by reporters this week and having to face uncomfortable questions about President Biden
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: What Viktor Orbán brought to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago last night.
WaPo: “U.S. intelligence officials warned the German authorities earlier this year that Russia was plotting to assassinate the head of Europe’s biggest weapons producer, according to two Western officials, amid an escalating sabotage campaign by Moscow to raise the cost of Western support for Ukraine.”
Via NBC News’ Frank Thorpe V:
Outside Sen Brown’s office this morning, his GOP opponent, Bernie Moreno, gaggles with reporters, saying, “I can tell you this, if I’m here, I will talk to you at any point in time, even take tough questions. Sherrod Brown won’t do that.”
He then immediately got a Q from @AndrewDesiderio about if his stance on abortion conflicts with the party platform.
Moreno: “We’re not here to talk about abortion.”
Outside Sen Brown’s office this morning, his GOP opponent, Bernie Moreno, gaggles with reporters, saying, “I can tell you this, if I'm here, I will talk to you at any point in time, even take tough questions. Sherrod Brown won't do that.”
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) July 11, 2024
He then immediately got a Q from… pic.twitter.com/FLp1epSvYf
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Republican lawmakers and right wing media are spreading misinformation about two new election laws that will regulate recounts and audits in Michigan, falsely claiming that the newly signed legislation deliberately makes it more difficult to investigate fraud.
Continue reading “GOPers Spin Up Fresh Conspiracy Theories About New Law To Block Baseless Election Challenges”Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán is set to meet with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday evening, sidestepping the White House after a week of travel to Ukraine, Russia, China, and Azerbaijan.
Continue reading “What Viktor Orbán Brought To Mar-A-Lago On Thursday”Democratic members of Congress took some steps this week to take as-yet-untried stabs at Supreme Court accountability after this month’s striking immunity ruling, which gave former President Trump, and all future presidents, sweeping criminal immunity.
Continue reading “Legislative Branch Takes Some Stabs At Doing Something, Anything About The Unchecked Judiciary”Just in the last hour or two there was a rush of new articles which report that top people in the Biden campaign either think Biden won’t be able to hold on or that he has no path to victory, etc. In a way, these are all versions of the same thing, or one inevitably relies on the other. I think the real issue is that a presidential candidate simply can’t lose the confidence of his or her congressional party. Why that happens or whether it’s fair doesn’t really matter after a certain point. Or rather it doesn’t matter in an operative way. And it does appear we are either at that point or near to it.
There are two additional points I want to note. They may seem contradictory and they are at least in tension. But I think they’re both true.
Continue reading “Gut Checks and Decisions”A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the standoff over President Joe Biden’s candidacy.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
As I explain below, today is shaping up to be another long day for President Biden and the White House as they attempt to ride out the chorus of calls from within his own party for him to end his re-election bid. We may have a better read by this evening on whether the dynamics of the past two weeks have substantively changed.
In the meantime, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have mostly taken a half-step back and out of the glare of the spotlight to allow the Biden turmoil to bubble and stew. No reason to interrupt the dynamic that is throttling your opponent’s campaign. But the entire far-right apparatus is continuing to position itself for what looks like an increasingly likely win in the fall, and maybe a big one.
The momentum that the far-right forces would have coming off a landslide win that would give them the White House, Senate, and House would be staggering. I’m not predicting outcomes here. But the wolves are circling closer, and the present picture of our politics is sobering.
A few examples from this week that you might have missed:
I’m snarking a bit with that subhed, but the day ahead is a looking like a rough one for Biden, with the bulk of the news coverage built around two key events, neither of which seems likely even in the best-case scenario to be able to rescue him but both of which could further doom him.
Going into the day with these set-piece events is the kind of thing White Houses often engineer for their own advantage. But today feels more like a made-for-TV set-up forced on the Biden White House amid all the demands for Biden to come out swinging, look capable, and overcome the doubts about his vigor and resilience by demonstrating a lot of vigor and resilience.
Tim Alberta embedded himself with the Trump campaign brain trust and has a close look at their strategy, reaction to the Biden debate meltdown, and the electoral map.
Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby on the flawed coverage of the new Republican Party platform.
We’re still picking through the debris of the just-finished term, and mapping the way ahead to some future high court reforms:
A ruling is expected Friday that would dismiss Rudy Giuliani’s Chapter 11 filing and strip him of the bankruptcy protections that have kept Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss (and other creditors) from collecting on the debts he owes them.
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Ever since the 2022 midterm elections did not go as well as expected for Republicans, the party has been trying to pull a fast one on its voting base and convince them that the thing they just demonized — mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes — are actually a good thing; a thing that, specifically, Republican voters should take advantage of.
Continue reading “Someone Forgot To Give Hannity The Memo?”