“The nation’s top public health agency was left reeling Thursday as the White House worked to expel the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director and replace her with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ‘s current deputy.
The turmoil triggered rare bipartisan alarm as Kennedy tries to advance anti-vaccine policies that are contradicted by decades of scientific research.
Two administration officials said Jim O’Neill, the second-in-command at the Department of Health and Human Services, would supplant Susan Monarez, a longtime government scientist. O’Neill, a former investment executive who also served at the federal health department under President George W. Bush, does not have a medical background.”
Trump ran on mass deportation. Mass deportation inherently requires removing a lot of hard working good people against their will because they crossed a geographic line they weren’t supposed to. If you voted for him thinking he would only remove criminals, then you didn’t pay enough objective attention.
But, Trump is doing more than that. He is violating due process–a basic right to all people. He is forcing a mass of people into detention centers where it is difficult for their family and lawyers to reach them, and where conditions are sometimes abysmal. Trump is using troops and law enforcement to do demonstrations to strike fear.
The militarization of criminal justice can lead to the end of democracy and basic rights.
The administration is actively making it more difficult for those accused of immigration violations to get a lawyer. They are sending police to lawyers’ houses apparently to intimidate them. They are making student loan repayment more difficult for lawyers who defend immigrants.
Masked men who don’t identify themselves and force you into custody is not how democracies do law enforcement.
Trump has purged parts of the military and replaced them with unqualified sycophants. Instead of lawyers telling Trump that what he wants to do is illegal so he can’t do it, this term he has people finding excuses for him to do undemocratic things.
“Trump may have been “unfit for our nation’s highest office,” Vance wrote in his first column in April 2016, but at least he was willing to say what other Republicans were not: “That the war was a terrible mistake imposed on the country by an incompetent president.””
“The second Trump administration has been consumed by two central themes. The first theme is the unprecedented pace at which this administration has attacked the rule of law and the constitutional system on which it is built. The second theme is the unprecedented weakness of the response from major institutions to the Trump administration’s actions. Wall Street’s passivity amid Trump’s unprecedented attack on the Fed is only the latest example.”
“due to structural changes in our politics, which are largely due to a realignment in our politics based on education levels, even if the Democrats were to have a really great election cycle in the midterms, there’s going to be a limit to how many seats they can win back due to these structural changes.
If you look at Trump’s job approval on issues, he’s underwater on everything, particularly way, way lower now on the economic ratings, on inflation, and even immigration now is underwater. So you would think that his total job approval, currently around 44 percent, would be lower.
The bottom line is based on historical standards, Trump and the Republicans should be headed to a really bad midterm election. But because of these changes in our politics, due to realignment based on education, they’ll be more insulated than they would have been in the past from a tsunami-type of midterm.”
Trump has used the pardon power to unjustly save his political allies. The founders said the control on the pardon power was impeachment, but that clearly isn’t going to happen.
“They were the 187th and 188th executive orders of Trump’s second term, on just its 203rd day.
That’s more executive orders than predecessor Joe Biden issued in his entire presidency, 162. It’s also more than George H.W. Bush (166), Gerald Ford (169), and 24 of the first 25 presidents. (Ulysses S. Grant, with his 217 over eight years, will likely be eclipsed by Trump’s 2025 totals this fall.) Neither the famously power-expanding George W. Bush, nor Barack Obama of the notorious “pen and phone,” signed as many as 188 executive orders in any of their combined four terms.
…
The move toward federal government by presidential fiat comes as a transformation not just of Republican orthodoxy, but of Trump’s own prior statements and actions.
At a campaign event in February 2016, the GOP front-runner complained that “the country wasn’t based on executive orders….Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.” The next month, he vowed: “I want to not use too many executive orders, folks. Executive orders sort of came about more recently. Nobody ever heard of an executive order. Then all of a sudden Obama, because he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him, he starts signing them like they’re butter. So I want to do away with executive orders for the most part.”
The 2016 Republican Party Platform decried executive-branch overreach, starting a multiparagraph section on the subject with the declaration that “Our Constitution is in crisis.””
“Advocacy groups say more than 100 cruise ship crew members have been deported in recent months, and they’re not being shown the evidence against them or given any due process.”