Trump thinks he’s still on The Apprentice. The dude has lost it biggly.
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From your keyboard to whoever’s running this crazy timeline…
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Yes he was and yes he did. I wrote the MF’er a letter and he actually responded. I could literally see that shitty don’t-give-a-shit grin seeping through the letter. (Despised the SOB over 40 years.)
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I listened to her for about 30 seconds and realized I will not be able to endure her press conferences. She makes Sarah Huckabee look like a paragon of honesty.
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This is sounding in the reverse of the old FDR ‘Make me do it’ scenario.
The First Felon just does things and forces us to make him reverse it or make someone else reverse it.
Most of what he’s doing will be reversed, but at what costs?
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His mission is to make people “go through stuff”. He knows it’s illegal, but watching innocent victims have to seek out the fix is his entertainment. Out legal system needs to be on top of it all within hours just to shut the jerk down.
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“President Donald Trump fired two Democratic commissioners on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission late on Monday night, likely violating legal statute.”
Likely?
From further down in the same piece:
David Lopez, Rutgers Law School co-dean and former EEOC general counsel, told Talking Points Memo… “It’s contrary to the statute.”
“The president does not have the power to fire a commissioner,” agreed Gaylynn Burroughs, vice president for education & workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center.
And: The statute itself states that members of the commission are appointed by presidents and confirmed by the senate for a five-year term, and “all members of the Commission shall continue to serve until their successors are appointed and qualified.” The article mentions nothing about successors being appointed and approved.
Sorry, TPM, but according to your own reporting there’s no “likely” about it.
Don’t start going squishy on us now, man. Equivocation in the face of the unequivocal is a creeping disease.
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The way it is going, we will need to give Donald Trump more laws to break.
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All wars have costs.
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https://www.axios.com/2025/01/28/trump-federal-workers-quit-severance
Axios says this is a scoop, but everyone is reporting that Donald Trump is offering buyouts to federal workers.
And I bet those buyouts are as worthless as the contracts that Donald negotiated while he was in business.
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Yes, let all the air traffic controllers quit. Donnie can land all the planes himself.
Such a tool…
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Just ask @ralph_vonholst His 2nd daughter received one of those offers.
ETA: To me “breaking news” is just happening, maybe even within an hour or so. This has been reported on for quite some time today.
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I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer mine. So I left.
I would suggest reading the entire substack post. However, posting here as a data point that indicates, IMO, that citizens were lied into 4 more years of Donald Trump.
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I think Trump’s just making Unitary Executive moves all over the place. These firings absolutely – because giving presidents full power to do that has been a goal of the UE crowd – and then the spending shutdown, too. But these things haven’t yet been fought to the death so the legal and constitutional ramifications seem to me to be still up in the air, though I guess I’m not sure about that.
My ninth-grade history understanding of the law and constitution on presidents and spending is that it’s always been a bit of a gray area and has become grayer as unitary-executive thinking has gained adherents, ramping up during the Nixon era. I think the traditional understanding of the powers granted in the Constitution was that Congress should have the sole power of appropriating money and deciding in general how it should be spent because they’re the closest people in the federal government to the American people, from whom that money will be taken and for whom the government is supposed to operate.
Presidents have always been free to spend less than Congress appropriates on any program, if the cuts result from efficiencies. And that was a norm that Congress tried to protect and that sometimes Presidents tried to breach. There’s a 1949 quote from House Appropriations Chairman George Mahon where he states that a president may not exercise “impoundment” of funds for a program if holding back the money causes “the abandonment of a policy and program of the Congress.”
Then, 25 years later or so, Nixon really went after that norm. His underspending repeatedly cut congressionally legislated programs in half or ended them altogether. Those Nixon impoundments mostly did go to court. Numerous intended recipients of the impounded funds sued and won. But tjere were no legal consequences except that the Nixon administration was banned from withholding the same funding streams in the future.
Congress was alarmed by Nixon’s brazenness at this point and in 1974 they passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act to clearly and significantly restrict presidents’ authority to spend federal tax dollars without specific congressional approval, which at the time was very widely held to be what the Constitution demanded, I think. And there haven’t been a lot of serious challenges to the 1974 law in the intervening years. BUT it’s something that’s been strongly opposed by the Unitary Executive zealots. … And while their opposition didn’t spur much actual challenge to that law for a long time, overturning it has always been part of the agenda they espouse.
As far as I know, this last Trump campaign has seen the most specific and determined-seeming unitary-executive gang threats to the law and the concepts it stands for. I don’t know if Trump ever talked about it specifically in any of his 2024 speeches, but on his campaign website and throughout the Project 2025 stuff and elsewhere the idea of him challenging that law as president was all over the place.
His website said he was going to push Congress to repeal parts of the 1974 law and that he intended to actively challenge Congress’s assertion that it alone has power over spending by unilaterally cutting funds for programs and demanding that all federal agencies identify large chunks of their spending that he can quickly cut.
So what’s going on here isn’t a surprise, but the constitutional and legal ins and outs have not been fully explored before this at all because this is the first time it’s so dramatically come to a head and because there is now an apparently growing ideological group out there really supporting a switch to a unitary-executive-based system, and this would definitely be part of that.
- List item
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I am a fan of the San Francisco Giants, and in that capacity I am terminating the contracts of the following members of the Los Angeles Dodgers:
• Shohei Ohtani
• Mookie Betts
• Blake Snell
• Freddie Freeman
Signed,
General Sternwood
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My discontent with the entire media sphere. Hesitation. The fear of getting sued; massive legal bill has everyone hunkered down in an abyss of qualifiers:
The lights are on or they’re off.
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Brazen is the new black.
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“They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!”
Of course the population was lied into 4 more years.
WILLINGLY.
They wanted to believe. They chose to believe.
I just do not know how to combat that.
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Not to be critical, but this makes sense as long as everyone understands that unitary-executive system is a shorthand for authoritarian.
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Ronnie didn’t care.
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