< infrastructure|145||They were against it until they were for it.>
Days after last fall’s election, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell had Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg as a guest. The conversation was about Joe Biden’s and the Democrats’ Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which provided $1.2 trillion in grants for some 72,000 projects 
encompassing roadway, ports and waterways, bridges, rail, broadband access, clean water and electric grid renewal. Buttigieg said that one of his rules of political mathematics of working in concert with governors and mayors on such projects is that…
“If two willing parties share credit for something like this, each party walks away with two-thirds of the credit.”
Wry, but fitting. Buttigieg continued…
“I try not to be cynical about this, but again and again we’ve seen, often it’s been Republican members of the House, telling their constituents ‘I delivered this project'”
O’Donnell had started out as a Senate aide and Senate committee director, so he knows how it works:
“I know when you pass one of these bills the transportation secretary gets calls, gets letters from members of Congress saying can you please make sure this project in my district, in my town, gets funded? Have you been getting those calls as secretary from Republicans who voted against it?”
”All the time” Buttigieg answered.
The two commiserated that because infrastructure projects take years, the projects made possible by Biden would happen throughout the Trump years “creating jobs and improving lives… And you know Donald Trump is going to take credit for that.”
stop the steal
We kept that exchange between Buttigieg and O’Donnell waiting for this moment, because, sure enough, articles have been reporting, “Signs bearing President Trump’s name have gone up at major construction projects financed by the 2021 law”. The New York Times cites a sign by a bridge being built in Connecticut that reads, “PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP REBUILDING AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE”. Trump signs have been appearing at several major infrastructure projects funded by Biden’s bill in Seattle, Boston, and Philadelphia; at another bridge in Maryland; at an Amtrak tunnel replacement project between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The signs acknowledge (in a smaller font) that the projects are “funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act” but there’s no mention of Biden. Nor do they say “The Donald J. Trump Administration” to acknowledge that it is the people across the government who are overseeing the projects to the extent that they are overseen at all once the grant money is disbursed. Just Donald, taking all the credit. No surprise there.
hypocrites all
Trump traded on his building credentials in his campaign for the presidency in 2016 promising an infrastructure program to rival Roosevelt’s New Deal, but nothing came of it. Several stabs at launching “Infrastructure Week” fizzled and gave rise to a standing joke.
So he railed against Biden’s bill, calling it “a loser for the U.S.A.”. “Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill is a disgrace,” he said in August 2021 before a Senate vote on the bill. He warned that Republican lawmakers who voted for it could be thrown out of office by angry primary voters. After it passed Congress, he referred to it as a “terrible Democrat Socialist Infrastructure Plan.”
Probably seething over Biden’s success at pulling off the massive bill, on his first day back in office Trump signed an executive order pausing disbursements for what Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy described as Biden’s “radical social and environmental agenda”. But a day later they backtracked and now Duffy is touting rail improvements funded by the Biden legislation as Trump’s effort to “Make Travel Great Again.” Imagine , though, the disruption – work sites slowed to a halt, costly heavy equipment stranded, workers idled, their income frozen – that so precipitous an action, thoughtless as to consequences, would have caused.
Mr. Trump is not the only Republican claiming credit. Representative Nancy Mace, running for governor in her state, South Carolina, had voted “no” and called the bill a “socialist wish list”, but does not object to the millions of dollars at work in the Charleston area.“What do you want me to do, turn my back on the Lowcountry when we get funding for public transit?” She even said she “helped secure the largest infrastructure grant in state history, in South Carolina history.”
Virginia Representative Rob Wittman called Biden’s bill the “Green New Deal in disguise” but later praised the $70 million expansion of the Port of Virginia in Norfolk. “While Congressman Wittman voted against the infrastructure bill, he’s ecstatic that the Port of Virginia received the funding that he worked so hard over the years to secure,” his spokesperson told ABC News.
“And so it goes” was Kurt Vonnegut’s resignation to human failings.
Sep 27 2025 | Posted in
Politics |
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< media|147||>
Many voices across America during the past week insisted on the safeguarding of unabridged free speech after the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show and after no less than the attorney general, Pam Bondi, 
declaring that the Justice Department will “will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech”. That’s the very speech the amendment protects. “Pam Bondi Needs a Free Speech Tutorial” was the title of a Wall Street Journal editorial.
But there is the looming question of where we will be able to hear free speech other than populous ideology and propaganda as ever more media outlets are scooped up by rightwing owners.
ABC, Now TikTok
On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order that, still subject to China’s Xi Jinping’s final approval, would move content control of TikTok away from China and into the United States. A group led by Oracle Corporation of Austin, Texas, would own 45%, leaving the rest still in the hands of TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance and its investors, but Vice President JD Vance says, “What this deal ensures is that the American entity and American investors will actually control the algorithm” that decides what to serve up in an unending stream to the viewer.
Several Trump-aligned billionaires led by Oracle founder Larry Ellison have previously been spoken of as in on the deal, but Trump didn’t mention them Thursday. He had assured us on Fox News…
“You know, they’re very well-known people, and Larry Ellison is one of them. He’s involved. He’s a great guy.”
If you are unfamiliar with Ellison, a sudden spurt in Oracle’s
stock price made him the world’s richest person recently, edging out Elon Musk for an eye blink, until the share price fell back at day’s end. Ellison is worth more than Bank of America, says
Business Insider, after doubling his wealth this year to nearly $400 billion.
To make this happen, Trump has three times broken a law passed by Congress the day before the president took office — four if the deal doesn’t go through by December 16. The law required that TikTok be sold to American interests within 90 days else be shut down out of worry that the powerful social media phenomenon is a conduit for Chinese propaganda and for gathering data about American viewers. The deal would deliver the same potential of the social media giant into the hands of a clutch of rightwing oligarchs.
Skydance
Ellison’s son David is CEO of Skydance Media, which just took over Paramount Global, a merger that puts the younger Ellison in charge of Paramount Pictures — and CBS.
Paramount board chair Shari Redstone needed FCC approval for the deal to go forward. But there was Trump’s lawsuit against CBS’s “60 Minutes”. It charged that editing of an interview with Kamala Harris before last fall’s election — no different than editing practiced over the program’s 50-year history — was somehow damaging. CBS could easily have won, but Redstone had the broadcast network pay Trump $16 million to resolve the dispute, a payment widely viewed as a “bribe”. Trump’s FCC approved the deal.
The approval also followed Redstone’s cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”, a comedian who, along with Jimmy Kimmell, made Trump the object of jokes nightly. Redstone says that Colbert’s cancellation was not to please Trump. Rather, it was because Colbert’s show is a money loser, except, oddly, no salvage attempt was made to trim the show’s 200-person staff.
The upshot: CBS now has solid Republican ownership. David Ellison acceded to the FCC requirement that there be a “bias ombudsman” to oversee programming, which would include not just keeping “60 Minutes” in line but CBS News overall.
That’s already in effect. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem complained that “Face the Nation” had “shamefully edited [her] interview to whitewash the truth”. Missing were her unproven accusations about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran migrant deported in error and without due process by the administration. Instead of defending editorial policy, CBS capitulated to the Trump government without any evident resistance, agreeing henceforward to air interviews in full.
an Ellison empire
Hardly catching his breath after putting together a company valued at $28 billion, the young Ellison is now working up a bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for cash, and that would bring HBO and Trump-reviled CNN under his control. CNN’s conversion to yet another right-slanted channel would add to an already formidable list: Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Epoch Times, NewsNation.
On the left, cable offers only MSNBC, now being renamed MSNOW because it is being severed from NBC as parent company Comcast spins off most cable assets into a new company called Versant. Liberal MSNBC is vital for airing news that the rightwing channels don’t cover for their being contrary to their political viewpoint. No telling for now whether MSNOW has the financial wherewithal needed to endure.
reversing congress
Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress scrubbed funding of NPR (National Public Radio) and PBS (Public Broadcast System) in their so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and Trump even went to the extent of rescinding funding Congress had already approved. The two networks, established by Congress in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and operating for the 58 years since, believe themselves to be unbiased, but if so or not, they do provide news that the rightwing cable channels simply suppress.
broadcast giants
ABC’s cancellation of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” made us aware of how immediately willing two major television corporations are to cancel free speech in fealty to or fear of Donald Trump. Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media Group together own 66 ABC local television stations (“affiliates”) but are much larger than that — the two largest TV station operators in the United States having bought up hundreds of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates in the past 25 years.
Millions still get their news by tuning into broadcast TV every evening. Sinclair tilts its news well to the right and gained some notoriety a few years back when sports site Deadspin.com discovered that Sinclair management required newscasters on every one of its stations to read on air the same political message sent by headquarters. Deadspin stitched them together in a composite of all reciting the same script simultaneously. At once hilarious and depressing. You can watch here..
Nexstar wants to buy Tegna Inc., which has 64 broadcast outlets, in a $6.2 billion deal. The combined companies would have a total 265 stations reaching 80% of the U.S. This extreme concentration is double the FCC rule that caps ownership at a reach of 39%. It would also violate the agency’s “top four” rule that says a company can’t own more than one of the top four stations in a given market; a federal appeals court has struck that down. No problem. Chairman Brendan Carr, who triggered the Kimmel imbroglio, looks sure to accommodate. He’s indicated he plans to repeal nearly a hundred broadcast rules.
Disney, about to anger customers by raising prices, thought it prudent to reinstate Kimmel, who was back on the air Tuesday.
“I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back”, tweeted Trump. After insults and accusing him of being an “arm of the DNC” (Democratic National Committee), Trump continued…
I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers. Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his in his bad Ratings.”
Kimmel’s return proved limited. Nexstar decided to not offend Trump is more important than free speech and is keeping him off the air.
President Trump repeatedly threatens revoking the licenses of broadcasters that permit negative coverage of him. To a gaggle of reporters aboard Air Force One on the return flight from the United Kingdom he complained:
“They’re 97% against ‒ they give me only bad publicity or press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It will be up to Brendan Carr.”
About Kimmel, Carr made the implicit threat that media corporations need to “find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Trump agrees:
I’m a very strong person for free speech. At the same time when you have networks that, where I won an election, like in counties, I guess it’s two-thousand-six-hundred to five-hundred-and-twenty-five .That’s called landslide, a landslide times two. But ninety-seven, ninety-four, ninety-five, ninety-six percent… of the newscasts are against me…They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal, personally.”
press suppression
Trump aims to silence the press. He sued The Wall Street Journal for a ludicrous $10 billion for describing a page in Jeffery Epstein’s 50th birthday book as being a forgery, a claim undermined when the page was reprinted visually far and wide. And he then sued The New York Times and a few of its journalists for a still more ridiculous $15 billion for articles and a book published near the 2024 election that defamed him, he says, by diminishing his reputation as a successful businessman.
Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post to protect a national institution, or so it seemed, but has since deferential to Donald Trump out of fear for Amazon, decreeing that the opinion writers be subject to certain of his precepts.
When Patrick Soon-Shiong, a doctor, professor, and billionaire creator of healthcare companies bought The Los Angeles Times, it seemed the paper would retain its liberal voice, but he required the editorial staff to veer to the center and initiated a “bias meter” to watch over content.
A federal judge in Tampa threw out the Times suit this week, calling it too long at 85 pages and giving Trump’s lawyers four weeks to come back with a revised complaint not to exceed 40 pages.
No matter the outcome of such suits, their real and peripherally intended effect is to intimidate – to cause journalists and the their publishers to hold back stories that might unleash costly-to-defend lawsuits from a Trump who has used the presidency to make billions of dollars and will be happy to bankrupt critical media.
Trump might want to team up with “great guy” Ellison, who believes that a China-style surveillance society governed by all-seeing artificial intelligence holds great promise for humanity. In a Q and A session with Oracle investors he said:
“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on. It’s unimpeachable.”
< autocracy|147||>
The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel in an outright suppression of free speech culminated a week of Republicans campaigning to vilify anyone they could find who had made light of Kirk’s assassination.
Senator Marsha 
Jimmy Kimmel.
Blackburn, who is running to be Tennessee’s governor, found deans and professors at three small universities who she said must be fired. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that the pilots grounded by American Airlines for “celebrating” Kirk’s death should be dismissed. South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace, also after a 
Charlie Kirk.
governorship, insisted in a letter to the Education Department that it deny federal funding from any school that did not “take immediate administrative action” against employees who voiced such views. On his X account Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin began doxxing private citizens who had been critical of Kirk or welcomed his removal. Texas Governor Greg Abbott posted on X that more than 100 teachers in his state are facing investigation and the possible loss of their certification to teach.
The Washington Post came up with more than 30 employers that have sanctioned or fired employees as varied as the Secret Service, Office Depot, Nasdaq, Clemson University, MSNBC, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Carolina Panthers.
Vice President JD Vance took over Kirk’s daily podcast to suggest…
“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer.”
“So many people have been fired. I’m so proud of you guys,” the online activist Laura Loomer posted on X.
“They’re going after companies, educators, news outlets, political rivals and others they judge as promoting hate speech”, wrote the Associated Press. The searchers found firefighters, grade-school teachers, small-town journalists, a veterinarian at an Oklahoma animal hospital, even “nurses, psychologists, social workers”, said right-wing activist Chris Rufo on X.
It is remarkable how quickly those on the right adopted the very cancel culture they so reviled when practiced by those on the left. There can be no official count, but it is believed that thousands have lost their jobs, many over innocuous comments such as Kimmel’s.
respectful left
They went looking far afield because, significantly, they could not find malicious comments among any in the Democratic leadership. Democrats in the House and Senate, Democratic governors and mayors, Democratic university presidents had universally expressed only anguish and sorrow over the horrific murder of the 31-year-old Kirk, who leaves behind a wife and two children.
Jonathan Haidt at The Atlantic made this observation:
“And so, in the absence of evidence of any serious strain of liberal support for the Charlie Kirk murder, some influential voices on the right willed one into existence. They hunted the internet for expressions of support for Kirk’s murder, or even insufficient remorse, a search that yielded almost exclusively random private citizens.”
In a country of 330 plus million, one can of course find people who have said or done exactly what is sought. Having found such a random collection has the right wing saying this proves all Democrats are what Trump says they are. In a telephone interview, the President said,
“I’d like to see it [the nation] heal, but we’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics, and they don’t play fair and they never did.”
His idea of healing.
never waste a serious crisis
This is the right wing’s chance to calcify the nation’s polarization by casting all on the left as…well, let Missouri Representative Bob Onder say it:
“Some on the American left are undoubtedly well-meaning people. But their ideology is pure evil. They hate the good, the truth, and the beautiful, and embrace the evil, the false and the ugly.”
What could not be clearer is that Republicans are using the assassination to maximum advantage to accuse Democrats of inciting the killing even though the murderer has so far shown no history of political involvement and had only recently “started to lean more to the left”, investigators were told by his mother. This is an unusual story in which the accused, Tyler Robinson, reportedly had begun a romantic relationship with his male roommate who is transgendering to female, and Robinson had expressed anger at Kirk, who has often made negative comments about LGBTQs and trans rights. He said to his father that Kirk “spreads too much hate” and “I had enough of his hatred.”
the movement
No matter his motive, he is but one person. Karl Rove, deputy chief of staff in George W. Bush’s presidency, now a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, writes,
“‘They’ Didn’t Kill Charlie Kirk. It insults his memory to blame political opponents for one man’s heinous act. Despite this earnest plea, there has been a disturbing and growing undercurrent in our national conversation and on the internet, a pronounced emphasis on “they” and “them.” Charlie would be alive but for “them.” “They” killed him. “They” are responsible for his death. “They” must be made to pay.”
But, seeing an opportunity to paint as the enemy every fellow American who does not align with their leader, the right wing wants to make the case that Kirk’s murder is part of a vast, sinister left-wing movement that must be destroyed. If there is such a movement, Democrats, their party and organization in total disarray, would like to know of it.
Anonymous insiders tell The New York Times that cabinet secretaries and federal department heads have been assigned to ferret out left-wing organizations that fund or otherwise promote violence against those on the right. Trump tells us:
”We have some pretty radical groups and they got away with murder, some of the people that you’ve been reading about that have been putting up millions and millions of dollars for agitation.”
He didn’t name the groups, if there are any that actually fund “agitation”, and substitution of that word means Trump intends to go after protests. He wants to know who was behind the burning of Teslas, assuming only a conspiracy explains it. He says he will consider having the IRS revoke the tax exempt status of what groups he dislikes, which federal law prohibits the president and vice president doing.
Trump of course has George Soros in mind, the bugbear that the right wing perennially calls out for backing progressive causes. The president accuses his Open Society Foundation of funding violence, for which there is no evidence and which the organization calls “outrageous”. Trump said he is working with Attorney General Pam Bondi: “We’re going to look into Soros” for possible violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law. To NBC News the president said Soros, a perpetual irritant for Trump, “should be put in jail”.
In a tweet, Mr. Trump “informed our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZXATION”, except it isn’t an organization, more an ideology, and federal law only allows the terrorist designation for foreign groups. How he would go against antifa is a puzzle, for it has no leader and takes the form of random groupings of individuals who coalesce to challenge some action and then dissolve. The word antifa comes from the German word “antifaschistisch”, a reference to a German anti-fascist group from the 1930s. That makes it clear why Trump has a problem with it.
trump’s heydrich
Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and a principal adviser, is persuaded there is a movement:
”There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. This ideology has one unifying thread, the insatiable thirst for destruction. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence. The fate of millions depends on the defeat of this wicked ideology.”
As guest, with Vance sitting at Kirk’s desk as host of his podcast, Miller assured us:
“We are going to 
Stephen Miller.
channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks…We’re going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Miller made a promise:
“The power of law enforcement, under President Trump’s leadership, will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”
Before the Kimmel cancellation, it was already evident that the Trump administration was using the Kirk assassination as justification for snuffing free speech. Miller’s wife Katie
Pam Bondi.
asked Pam Bondi,
“Do you see more law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people so we show them that some action is better than no action?”
Bondi answered:
”We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
That the attorney general of the United States does not know that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment is revealing, but equally important in her anger is the hint that it is not just hate speech she is after, but dissent in general. She is using Kirk’s killing to advocate the obverse of what Kirk believed. Asked by a woman in the audience for one of his talks, “Where you draw the line with free speech, hate speech, and slander”, Kirk responded:
”My position is that even hate speech should be completely and totally allowed in our country. The most disgusting speech should absolutely be protected.”
In a video posted by his organization Turning Point USA, he said:
”As soon as you use the word ‘hate,’ that is a very subjective term. Then all of a sudden it is in the eyes, or it is in the implementation, of whomever has the power.”
the corporate cowards
Just hours after FCC (Federal Communications Commission) Chairman Brendan Carr slammed Jimmy Kimmel, saying that his regulatory agency might take action, the mighty Walt Disney Company, through its ABC broadcast subsidiary, caved in fear and suspended Kimmel and his late-night show “indefinitely”. Nexstar, a company that owns and operates ABC affiliate stations, had already surrendered. Wouldn’t you know, it has a pending $6.2 billion deal to buy a competitor, and may need FCC approval. Sinclair, which owns 30 ABC affiliates, pulled Kimmel next. Trump must be gleeful, seeing how easy it is to topple big corporations like a row of dominoes.
What was it Kimmel said?
”We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”
This was for Carr “the sickest conduct possible” despite it not being about Kirk, rather, a criticism of MAGA for rushing to prove the killer a leftist. But for saying this, Carr erupted on Benny Johnson’s show,
”We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
That’s an arch suggestion that ABC, CBS, and NBC could be taken off the air, their broadcast licenses revoked, a move that Trump has threatened repeatedly.
Aligned with Miller and Bondi in silencing dissident speech, Carr has made a complete turnabout in the service of Trump. In 2019 he posted “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not.” In 2022, “Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of speech…It challenges those in power…That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship”. In 2023 he tweeted, “Free speech is the counterweight – it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream”. It is troubling to see our officials throwing away their principles so readily lest they offend Caesar.
Trump called Kimmel’s suspension “Great News for America” in a Truth Social tweet which continued…
”Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT”
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote on social media,
”Pay attention. Something dark might be coming. The murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence. Instead, Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent.”
Sep 19 2025 | Posted in
Takeover |
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< the founding|116||>
Those who think the Constitution is the bedrock of our democracy were aghast when this week 
the Supreme Court decided there is nothing wrong with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents practicing racial profiling, seizing anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job, and detaining them for deportation.
It is yet another instance of either government or the Court chipping away at the grand old document, so we thought to take a look at some of the other provisions that have been ignored or transgressed, beginning with this week’s:
Racial profiling has been the practice from the beginning of Stephen Miller’s demand that ICE round up 3,000 people a day in a campaign that discards any claim that the Trump administration is only going after “the worst of the worst”. The agency has shown profiling in Los Angeles by targeting businesses where Latins find jobs — hair salons, lawn care, car washes; at Home Depot parking lots where they gather mornings to find day labor jobs; and most cynically snatching at courthouses people who had come to fulfill their legal obligation to attend immigration proceedings. The Supreme Court seems not to have made the connection with the Fourth Amendment.
One could call this clause the most thoroughly overridden of them all, for resulting in more guns than people in the United States. Any tie-in with a militia being a requirement for arms possession was tossed aside long, long ago, with not even military continuous-fire AR-15 assault rifles, designed to kill as many of an enemy as possible, banned from even the mentally troubled buying.
In the U.S., the AR-15s must be semi-automatic, requiring a trigger pull for each shot, but the size of the magazines that carry as many as 30 bullets is unrestricted. Last year, the Supreme Court overturned a ban on “bump stocks” that effectively convert the rifles into the military’s rapid-fire weapons. The device was used in the 2017 deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, when a 64-year-old from a 32nd floor window of a luxury suite fired more than 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes into a crowd of concert-goers, killing 60 people and wounding at least 413 others.
The Court reversed a ban on bump stocks ordered by the Trump in his first administration in reaction to the Las Vegas killings. Written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the majority opinion said that bump stocks did not transform semi-automatic rifles into illegal machine guns because each trigger it pulled in rapid succession still only releases one shot. Five others at the conservative side of the bench, perhaps fearful of all the gun fanatics out there, agreed, making it a 6-to-3 decision.
Heads of state and foreign government emissaries are wont to come bearing gifts when meeting with U.S. presidents and dignitaries, and that prompted this clause as a safeguard against buying favor. But the gifts typically are not worth much more than a few hundred dollars. That was topped by many million percent when Trump accepted a 13-year old customized Boeing 747-8 airliner from the Qatari former prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim, worth an estimated $400 million. To work around the gift issue, it is the Defense Department that officially has accepted the plane. The aircraft is undergoing refurbishment that could cost as much as $1 billion estimates Forbes — at taxpayer expense, of course. It is to be turned over to Trump’s presidential library when and if he leaves office, and he will be free to use it for personal travel. So much for the emoluments clause.
President Trump was impeached twice: first for abuse of power by withholding congressionally appropriated funds for Ukraine to extract from President Zelenskyy the “favor” of investigating rival Joe Biden in advance of a coming election, and second for attempting to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021, in our history’s most blazon act of treason.
In neither case was he convicted by the Senate, demonstrating that, because a political party won’t vote to remove its own — every Republican except Mitt Romney voted for acquittal — a two-third vote has become impossible. So impeachment and conviction is a nullity.
The Colorado Supreme Court affirmed rulings by the state’s lower courts that for having inciting an insurrection, Donald Trump could not be on the ballot in Colorado. Section 3 reads as self-executing — engage in insurrection or rebellion and you cannot be president, and that’s that — just as the due process section of this same amendment has always been treated as self-executing.
And yet, the Court ruled that Congress must decide whether there has been an insurrection and whether the amendment should prevail. That, of course, did not happen nor would it happen. Section 3 is effectively voided; nothing stops an insurrectionist from running for high office after all. This is the Supreme Court practicing lawfare.
Part of President Trump’s desire to purge the United States of brown-skinned people is to deny citizenship to those born here if parents are undocumented and of a certain hue. When a case reached the Supreme Court that challenged a nationwide injunction of a lower court against the Trump administration going forward with its intent, the high court instead used the case to do away with lesser courts declaring nationwide injunctions. It extraordinarily did not deal at all, then and there, with the irrefutable language of the amendment conferring birthright citizenship, leaving it for consideration at some later date as if there is something to consider. In the meantime, Trump is free to proceed.
So the cross-out above may be removed on some future date if the Supreme Court still honors its mandate to enforce the Constitution, but the six conservatives seem to want to ruminate on the question as if the Constitution is just a set of suggestions.
Immigration law holds that persons who are apprehended having just crossed borders are not entitled to any process and can be deported on the spot. But the Trump administration has from the outset of its purge made that the practice for immigrants deep in country and who have lived here for years, raised families, worked and paid taxes, sweeping them into detention without any due process. The Supreme Court ruled that there must be a process where detainees have the opportunity to be heard, to state their case, possibly to prove that they are U.S. citizens. At the rate ICE is collaring people, there is no agency to monitor what is happening to people by the thousands, nowhere near the number of deportation judges to assure that Fifth Amendment due process is occurring.
Only five major military conflicts have garnered congressional Declarations of War: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. The Korean and Vietnam Wars occurred without formal congressional declaration. (President Truman initially called Korea a “police action”). In 1973 Congress passed the War Powers Act, which required campaigns lasting more than 60 days (90 if an extension is granted) to be authorized to use military force.
Just a week after 9/11, Congress pass the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that granted the president the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who “harbored such organizations or persons”.
The authorization was aimed specifically at al Qaeda but has been twisted around ever since to to justify other military actions. Business Insider tallied use of the AUMF to justify military deployment in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, and Somalia. To this can since be added the B2 bombings of Iran and now the killing at sea of unproven drug smugglers from Venezuela.
Between 2018 and 2020 alone, U.S. forces initiated what they labeled “counter-terror” activities in 85 countries. The 2001 AUMF has been used to launch classified military campaigns in at least 22 of those countries.
There has been no congressional oversight for decades.
The Trump administration shipped over 250 alleged members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador to be imprisoned for life, with no due process to determine whether individuals were actual gang members or had committed crimes. Some released said they had been tortured. Trump has said he approves of torture.
The Supreme Court gave the go ahead to the Trump administration to deport people to countries of which they are not citizens, the particular case being eight alleged gang members who were to be deported to South Sudan, a region shredded by war and suffering acute starvation. This court’s rightist majority seems in its lost morality to think cruel and unusual is fitting for some.
doubly wrong
It is troubling that it is so many of the vital rights and principles of the Constitution that have been badly ignored or compromised while nothing has been done in the way of amendments since 1992 to fix what ill fits the country a quarter millennium after the Constitution’s adoption, and that, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, dealt only with Congress members’ paychecks.
Sep 13 2025 | Posted in
Law |
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< the presidency|152||>
President Trump has gone rogue, defying GOP orthodoxy, leaving conservatives wondering what they have wrought. Where is this coming from?
taking a cut
You didn’t get to build in New York City or New Jersey without dealing with the Mafia back in the years when Donald Trump started out by rehabbing the Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central and going on to build gambling casinos in Atlantic City. The amounts of money he is forcibly extracting from law firms, higher education, and now corporations, says that he learned a lot in those days.
The difference between then and now is scale. In his second term, Trump realized straightaway that, as capo dei capi sitting at the pinnacle of power in the White House, the numbers could be huge — far beyond what he saw change hands in the real estate world of decades ago.
As soon as he decided to run for the presidency ten years ago, the media was savvy enough to see Trump as transactional. You do something for me, I’ll do something for you (maybe). You do something against me, I’ll do something to you (for certain).
He first went after law firms whose attorneys had been involved in investigating him or had represented clients in lawsuits against him. “Those law firms did bad things. They went after me for years”.
In retaliation, Trump’s executive orders stripped the security clearance of lawyers at such firms, denied entry to federal buildings, and barred government employees from having contact with the firms. As example, because Andrew Weissmann had been at Jenner & Block years before becoming lead prosecutor on the Mueller Russia probe, the whole firm was denied access to the U.S. government.
Fearful of losing clients who need access, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a major New York based firm with international clients, was first to cave. It agreed to perform $40 million worth of pro bono work on whatever Trump chooses. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom was next to succumb, but the ante was raised to $100 million in pro bono work. Seven other firms would follow suit. Their capitulation totaled close to a billion dollar shakedown.
Others began to fight back. Just over 500 smaller firms filed an amicus brief supporting Perkins Coie in its lawsuit that fights the government’s edict. Not the bigger firms, though. Quaking in fear of Trump, only 10 of the top 100 firms ranked by revenue signed the brief.
corporate world’s invasive species
Trump broke a law and inserted himself into the private sector the first day he entered office. Out of concern for national security, Congress had enacted a law that gave China-controlled TikTok 90 days to find an American buyer or be shut down. The platform had just gone dark when the ban, upheld by the Supreme Court, took effect. But Trump is fond of TikTok – he has 15 million followers — so that first day he ignored the law and the court and issued an executive order that extended the deadline another 90 days. He would do so twice more, allowing Beijing to continue gathering the personal data of Americans and airing propaganda that casts China in a favorable light. In utter violation of the law, Trump has now extended the deadline indefinitely.
In his intrusions into corporate American, money is the key demand. He sued CBS’s “60 Minutes” for editing of an interview with Kamala Harris before the election he did not like; CBS caved for $16 million rather than win an easy case because the pending sale of Paramount, which owns CBS, depended on Trump’s approval. A bribe many said. The sale was approved.
But it was the Intel episode that raised eyebrows. Trump had called for the immediate resignation of CEO Lip-Bu Tan out of concern for his ties with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Fair enough, but then Mr. Tan paid a visit to the White House. In a scene straight from Vito Corleone in “The Godfather” saying “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse”, Trump related what he said to Mr. Tan:
“I’d like you to give 10 percent of Intel to the United States of America — not to me, to the United States of America, and I said if you have them as a partner, the United States as a partner, I think it’d be a very good thing for Intel, and he thought about it…and he said ‘I like that idea very much, we have a deal’…I just made $10 billion or $11 billion for the United States of America… but I hope I’m gonna have many more cases like it.”
Concern for Tan’s CCP connections evaporated, and he kept his CEO job. Trump later boasted on social media that he would “make deals like that for our Country all day long.”
President Biden’s CHIPS Act had awarded roughly $11 billion to chip designer and foundry operator Intel in the interest of lessening reliance on offshore sourcing of sophisticated semiconductor product. Why shouldn’t the government get something in return, goes the government’s argument. But the CHIPS Act had conditioned the release of funds on achievement of milestones, with $8.9 billion yet to be earned. Trump tossed that aside and gave Intel the whole amount, oversight free.
The government says its stake will be “passive”, will not have any board seats or governance rights, but, as New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote, “That’s like letting a tiger into your house on the solemn promise that it won’t raid the fridge or eat your children”.
Trump already has “many more cases like it”, but none with any claim to Intel’s fair trade. In return for approving Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel, the administration helped itself to a “golden share” that gives the government veto power over plant closures and layoffs. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is thinking about taking shares in defense contractors, says Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, or even nationalizing Lockheed Martin on the grounds that 97% of the company’s revenue is from U.S. government contracts.
More treacherous is Trump selling indulgences at risk of national security. Two of our major chip producers, Nvidia and AMD have been restricted from selling chips into China in order to at least hinder that nation’s runaway military buildup and its race to win the artificial intelligence sweepstakes. For Trump, money takes precedent over national security. He reversed policy by allowing the companies to sell certain advanced chips to China in return for the U.S. pocketing 15% of the sales revenue. How is this not mob vigorish — taking a cut of the action as a kick-back?
The U.S. relies almost entirely on China for rare earth materials needed for the new electric age, which makes critical the development in the U.S. of its own rare earth deposits. The government has supported many industries with subsidies and tax relief — oil and gas, and sun and wind renewables are examples — but without taking any ownership. The Pentagon is now taking an altogether different tack. It is spending $400 million to buy a 15% stake in MP Materials, a large American miner of rare earths.
Mr. Trump ordered Coca-Cola’s CEO to replace the corn syrup the company uses in its sodas with cane sugar, with no scientific evidence that it is somehow better for us. By tailoring its products to suit Trump’s preference, the company is taking direction from him, not its board or shareholders.
“American conservatism under President Trump is changing into something unrecognizable”, writes Stephens. In Trump’s actions we are seeing a surprising blend of mafia coercion and the latter-day Maoism of Xi Jinping. Government control of publically-owned business is the state-managed capitalism practiced in China. The right constantly accuses the left of socialism, yet here is Trump dabbling in “government ownership of the means of production”, which is part of socialism’s definition. It’s an extraordinary turn for capitalist America. Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman are being tossed in the dustbin. Of course, Trump has read none of them. Greg Ip writes in The Wall Street Journal, “The US marches toward state capitalism with American characteristics”, a twist on the CCP’s “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”.
There are multiple causes for alarm. Will the government be reluctant to exit a company it partly owns, chasing the original taxpayer-dollar investment with taxpayer subsidies to prop up a failing company? In an election year to avoid bad publicity will the government block layoffs a company needs to make to prevent loses? Won’t government ownership tilt the playing field and inhibit investment in rival companies? If chips and steel are so important as to need government involvement, won’t lawmakers decide that so are food and medicine?
schools dazed
The outbreak of antisemitism on college campuses that followed the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel two years ago was grounds for Trump’s attack on the nation’s universities, but the scope of the assaults has gone far beyond antisemitism.
Going after the elite universities plays to his base of resentful non-college-educated voters, to be sure, but what Trump is after is dominance. He wants these institutions to be obedient to his dictates — to alter their curricula, to scrub DEI policies, to achieve “viewpoint diversity” in academic staffing, to get rid of left-wing cultural wokeism. He wants to oversee admissions, scrutinize the social media of foreign students to look for criticism of America, cancel their visas if such free speech is found.
And he wants the universities’ money. The template is to retract government research funding, dictate changes they must make, and hit them, absent any due process, with colossal fines they must pay to get their research money restored.
Harvard in particular has incurred Trump’s wrath for daring to fight back with lawsuits. One seeks return of the $2.2 billion in funding withdrawn or frozen, the second is against Trump’s attempt to block international students. A federal judge in Massachusetts just ruled in the university’s favor on the first suit, deciding that Trump illegally cancelled the research grants.
But Trump’s psychological illness makes losing inconceivable so he will push for unconditional surrender, even threatening to pull Harvard’s tax exempt status and void its patents. There was talk of Harvard considering paying the government $500 million, but that may have been shelved as a result of ten thousand alumni signing a letter demanding that the Crimson remain defiant.
Columbia University saw $1.3 billion in annual federal grant funding withheld over antisemitism and pro-Palestinian demonstrations but there was no demand for a money heist — that is, not until a May meeting when Trump was told of a deal worked out by cabinet officials and aides. The Times reported that Trump impulsively made a new demand. The opportunity of money had occurred to him:
“The university’s cost for a deal suddenly went from zero dollars to nine figures in the course of a single meeting.”
Trump wanted the university to pay $200 million. The amount was far less than Harvard’s penalty because Columbia had taken itself “off the hot seat”, said Trump, by making no legal challenge. “Every time they fight they lose another $250 million”, he had said about Harvard.
These wildly outsized dollar amounts bear no relation to student antisemites. This is outright extortion, like a Mafia “protection” racket where businesses must pay the mob, and are warned “it’s a nice business you’ve got here, it would be a shame if something happened to it”.
The administration froze $790 million of research funding to Northwestern without concern for halting hundreds of projects such as active clinical trials of potentially life-saving drugs. For now, the university is paying to keep the programs alive with its endowment funds, but President Michael Schill, twice hailed to testify before a congressional committee about campus antisemitism, has resigned.
Discovering how easy the shakedown racket is — far in excess of anything he would have observed in the Mafia’s dealings — Trump most recently has stunningly demanded $1 billion from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while freezing $300 million of its funding.
Universities are being told that these capriciously arrived-at amounts are not negotiable, just raw shakedowns, as said by California Governor Gavin Newsom:
“A billion-dollar political shakedown from the pay-to-play president…disgusting political extortion.”
Newsom has threatened that the state will sue, to which the 28-year-old power-drunk press secretary Karoline Leavitt replied, “Bring it on, Gavin”.
It won’t stop there. The Trump administration had listed over 60 universities it intends to fleece. Higher education is to pay for his government’s deficit, expected to be $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2026. Lutnick angrily said to Axios’s Mike Allen,
“Universities, who are getting all this money. The scientists get the patents, the universities get the patents, and the funder of fifty billion dollars, the U.S. government, you know what we get? Zero!”
He thinks the government should get half of whatever the universities make from their research. Lutnick and unnamed others are thinking of a “master global” revenue or profit-sharing deal that all universities must sign onto in order to get research funding — funds to do what the government itself has asked universities to do for the good of the nation.
scam alert
Universities paying extortion in return for restoration of research funding should be wary of Trump honoring his end of the deal. He has a long history of stiffing creditors and then, when he came into office, abrogating even international agreements. He has twice had the U.S. withdraw from the Paris climate accords, and has imposed stiff tariffs against trading partners Canada and Mexico in blatant violation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that Trump himself negotiated during his first term. Universities may pay and then find themselves wondering if the research money will ever show up.
Suresh Naidu, who teaches economics and international and public affairs at Columbia, says that even if Trump honors current deals, Trump is “unlikely to end the attacks”:
“The federal government and this administration are simply too powerful and too arbitrary to be credibly bargained with. Do we really think this arrangement, however destructive of academic autonomy it is, will prevent the Trump administration from stopping the money again?”
And like the mafia extorting protection money every month, reasons would be fabricated for the megadollar shakedowns to resume.
Sep 11 2025 | Posted in
Governance |
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