EVERY Democratic senator and congressman should raise this at every opportunity. Every speech on the floor of the chambers should start with, “Mr President [or Mr. Speaker] as I rise to speak the State Department continues to put our democracy at risk by blocking funds to oppose Russian intrusions into our electoral process.” Every statement in a committee hearing–whatever the topic–should start with the same words.
All of this inaction has me concerned about the anticipated ‘Blue Wave’ this coming election cycle. Reporting of this nature keeps surfacing, and I hear crickets regarding individual State election safeguards…just sayin.
~banging head against wall~
That money will reportedly be transferred to the State Department and it’s Global Engagement Center in April, which will counter Russian meddling efforts with anti-propaganda counter-attacks. Currently, the Global Engagement Center doesn’t have someone who speaks Russian on the team and it is primarily focused on countering jihadist and other forms of extreme propaganda, according to the Times.
Total ineptitude, or demonstration of compliance/service to help Russian election interference?
Shorter Republican
Why mess with something that helps us.
How do you expect us to win if we don’t cheat?
Sheesh ?
Inpoundment. Its a word that should be used by Congress every day in the wake of this news article.
Its also unconstitutional.
The money is appropriated by Congress to be spent in a specific way. The Executive Branch cannot choose to not spend the money after that happens. Nixon got into a lot of trouble for doing this, and SCOTUS ruled that the practice is unconstitutional.
Every single thing this administration has done in this regard brands them traitors. It’s the most damning thing of all. They want more help.
Even the previous congress realized this wasn’t a good idea. Because if the russians can intervene for you, they can intervene against you. (And logically speaking, will have to make an example of some republicans just to encourage the rest.)
BINGO!
And their ultimate aim is not to make America pure republican forever. Its to sow chaos and keep American fighting internally. So keep it close for both sides.
My guess is they are looking for a way to get the money put into Trump’s 2020 campaign. It’s just going to take them a little time to soothe all the Rs so they can get away with it
Trump just transferred it all into the Presidential Legal Defense Fund.
Doing nothing to stop a foreign power from its known intrusion into the fundamental mechanics of our democracy is supporting that foreign power over our Constitution.
LOCK 'EM UP!
Jared Kushner intervened and asked that Tillerson hold off on spending the money. He has a couple uses in mind he’s convinced would make more sense.
666
What are they doing here, saving taxpayer money? Well, as a taxpayer, I give my permission to spend this and more to stop foreign meddling - not meddling, too weak a word…attacks - to stop foreign attacks on our elections.
This is so damn depressing that I couldn’t even bring myself to read the NYT article last night. It’s reasonable at this point to wonder whether the bulk of GOP is colluding (there’s that word again) with the Trump Administration in its own collusion with Russia to steal yet another election from the American people.
It’s beyond belief — and yet somehow perfectly explainable — that years of talk radio and Fox have so polluted the minds of so many Americans that they would place our nation in the hands of a Russian madman rather than unite with other patriors to defend it. It’s even more disgusting that so many of our own wealthy and influential people are happily empowering this madness out of their greed for power, access and tax cuts.
Like when Mueller indicted 13 Russians and instead of saying anything about Russian interference, Trump wanted to know why more wasn’t being done about investigating the FBI?
Especially now that courts all over the country, especially in Red States, are actually invalidating Karl Rove’s gerrymandered federal and state legislative districts.
Maybe they can earmark this money to pay down some of Jar Jar’s debt…
Remember when Obama was President? There were many polls showing Republicans thought Putin was a better leader than Obama.
I will add that we should be seeing TV, radio and print ads from the Dems on this. It is pretty clear that there is no intention of protecting our voting systems and it needs to be brought out into the public for all to see. The facebook/twitter misinformation campaign is bad enough, but I really see no reason why this won’t escalate to hacking the vote count and I think the GOP seems fine with that–at the least, the Administration is.