Tag: capitol

“Just over a week ago, soon-to-be-Vice President JD Vance opined that nonviolent trespassers prosecuted for entering the Capitol on January 6, 2021, should be pardoned — but that day’s violent rioters “obviously” should not be.
Trump had other ideas when he issued his sweeping clemency for those he called the “J6 hostages.” He did separate out 14 members of two far-right groups, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy, commuting their sentences instead of giving full pardons. But “all other individuals convicted” of offenses related to the Capitol chaos that day received full unconditional pardons — including those who assaulted police officers, and including the Proud Boys’ leader, Enrique Tarrio.

Trump, it has always been clear, was “delighted” by the storming of the Capitol on January 6; he doesn’t care that his supporters assaulted police, terrorized members of Congress, and threatened to hang his own vice president. What mattered to him was that they were his supporters. So he handed them a get-out-of-jail-free card, even to those who violently tried to overthrow democracy.”

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Trump’s Day 1 executive orders were most numerous and detailed on the topic of immigration. The president revived previous hard-line administration policies, such as a refugee admissions freeze, deportation orders, and border wall construction. He also rolled back some Biden policies intended to let more migrants come in legally if they followed an orderly process, ending Biden’s “parole” program and shutting down an app created for migrants to schedule appointments to make asylum requests.

But on some fronts, Trump’s orders already went much further than he did in his first term and showed a newly emboldened willingness to defy legal caution. For instance:

He ordered that the US military would now be responsible for the “mission” of closing the border.
He used a public health emergency rationale to shut down the asylum system even though there’s no public health crisis at the moment.
He ordered that federal prosecutors recommend the death penalty for any unauthorized immigrant convicted of a capital crime.
He fired several top officials in the US immigration court system, including the system’s acting head.
And he declared that despite what the Constitution says, birthright citizenship would no longer apply to children born in the US to unauthorized immigrants or visa-holders (unless one parent was a US citizen or lawful permanent resident).”
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“Though Trump fired some federal employees Monday, the first day did not seem to bring a mass firing of federal bureaucrats, but the groundwork was laid for something like that to happen in the future.

First off, Trump restored what was previously known as his “Schedule F” executive order, issued in late 2020 shortly before he left office (it was never really implemented and Biden soon revoked it). The idea behind Schedule F — now rebranded as “Schedule Policy/Career” — is to reclassify various important civil servant jobs as exempt from civil service hiring rules and protections, making it easier for those workers to be fired.

Secondly, Trump took aim at part of the federal workforce known as the Senior Executive Service (SES). These are, basically, the top jobs at agencies in the civil service, which liaise with the political appointees to run things. Trump’s order demanded plans from his agencies for making SES more “accountable” (easier to fire). His order also said hiring for SES jobs would now be done by panels composed mostly of political appointees, rather than civil servants as is currently the case.

Third, the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo letting agencies hire unlimited “Schedule C” appointees — another class of political appointees that don’t go through the civil service hiring process. And fourth, another order instructed Trump appointees to come up with plans for reforming the civil service hiring process itself.

Altogether, this shows an intense focus from Trump’s people on wresting agency authority away from civil servants and toward greater numbers of political appointees — and though mass firings haven’t happened yet, it may be only a matter of time.”

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“A Trump order Monday made the unexpected announcement that, in fact, an existing part of the executive branch — the US Digital Service, set up during the Obama administration to modernize government IT — would become the US DOGE Service.
Now, this executive order laid out a surprisingly limited mission of “modernizing federal technology and software,” rather than DOGE’s previously announced remit of overhauling government spending, regulations, and personnel. Liberals on social media crowed at this apparent demotion for Musk.

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Reports on Musk’s planning, and public statements from people in contact with his team, suggest they are planning to go very big indeed, in ways that haven’t yet been revealed. With a new report that Musk is likely to get a West Wing office, it’s hard to believe he’s scaled back his grand ambitions.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/395882/trump-day-one-agenda-executive-orders-takeaways