We Need To Think of Impeachments as Room Fresheners

 

"The first Attorney General to go to prison [John N. Mitchell] did so because he convinced himself that the ends justified the means and that the law was pliable in his hands. Pam Bondi should take that to heart, if she has a heart."

--Rick Wilson

And the way you consolidate and perpetuate power is by so thoroughly demonizing opponents — by blasting so much contempt at them — that your own failures, corruption and cruelty become irrelevant. You needn’t answer for your fatal thuggery in Minneapolis if you can render its casualties sufficiently contemptible. You needn’t answer questions from a “washed-up, loser lawyer” or a “failed politician” at all....

Pam Bondi opted for contempt. It’s the Trumpian way. But is it the American one? Has the country sunk quite this far? I don’t think so. She and her fellow insult mongers aren’t owning the libs; they’re beclowning themselves. And it’s a repellent circus.

--Frank Bruni 

“I don’t think Pam Bondi has confidence in Pam Bondi. She wasn’t confident enough to engage in anything but name-calling in a hearing. And so no, I don’t have confidence in her.”

--Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky 

From where I was sitting, it looked like the attorney general pretty much invited the United States Congress to impeach her.

--John Stoehr, Raw Story

 

Trump's Cabinet Reflects Trump's Values -- Surfaces Are Everything

 

It’s a paradox: If you choose your cabinet based on looks, you are likely to end up with a cabinet that makes you look bad.

--Maureen Dowd

 

How did Kristi Noem get her job at Homeland Security, and how's that going? Dowd supplies the short answer: "Even good-looking dodos are still dodos." What qualified Noem for her job? Not just good long hair and pouting lips but blind loyalty to Jethro, and the imagination to do what she thinks Trump will applaud -- not to mention a history of snap judgements, like shooting a puppy. Elevated to high office and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Noem has rotely done the trumpian things: fired a bunch of people, froze a bunch of money, insulted the press, demonized foreign brown people.

But as an administrator over crucial Federal disaster agencies, for which no one ever swore she was remotely qualified, she's been a disaster. She doesn't know what she's doing, though she obviously thinks she's doing right, executing Trump's threat to shut down FEMA. She had already fired hundreds of emergency call center workers, so that almost two-thirds of all calls from the Texas flood zone went unanswered. She had also demanded tight control -- her personal authorization -- of any expenditure over $100,000. Can you not guess what happened next? Her personal authorization means FEMA’s deployment of rescue teams to the Texas hill country didn't get the orders until more than 72 hours after the flooding began.

The Trump Cabinet: Absolute loyalty plus a good Q rating* on TV, which means Fox News, which means MAGA's gonna cheer another dodo named Pete Hegseth, a 2nd-tier Fox host. Most recently he likely thought he was doing something Trump would applaud -- cut off arms shipment to Ukraine -- but he only managed to embarrass Trump in public. At a White House press conference, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked the president who authorized the pause on weapons shipments to Ukraine. Trump replied, defensively: “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” Yikes.

And consider the blondie loyalty of Pam Bondi, who has played the MAGA crowd like a virtuoso choir director, but then she stepped on her weenie. She baited the conspiracy theory hook, promised a salivating MAGA a big Epstein scandal revelation, and then took it back: "There is no Epstein client list."  She's thereby and quite inadvertently reminded everyone of Trump's many connections to Epstein, and if there's one thing Trump wants everyone to forget, it's any connection he had to Epstein's life style and criminal activity. At a recent Cabinet meeting, with the press in the room, a reporter asked Bondi a followup Epstein question. But before Bondi could answer, Trump cut her off, turned on the reporter: “Are people still talking about this guy, this creep?” 

What's the old country saying? A hit dog will holler. "Are people still talking?" is a total self-own.

No end of Trump Cabinet brilliance. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins suggested people on Medicaid could replace deported immigrants as field hands. Some people think Robert Kennedy Jr. is beautiful like classic architecture, but he's leading us into a medical wilderness, starting with a spreading measles epidemic.

 * Q score is a measurement of the familiarity and appeal of a TV personality to a specific audience. 

A Tin Horn Dictator Corrupts Justice

 

If anyone out there was undecided on whether Trump is operationalizing a precise, coordinated plan to destroy our democracy so he can rule until he dies, the move to shut down ActBlue, the primary way Democrats’ campaigns are funded, should be the final proof point.

--Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)

The tool

So Trump did a new ExecOrder addressed directly to Blonde Avenger Pam Bondi -- the Department of Justice is now clearly an important arm for retribution (or just plain ole persecution). Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate ActBlue, the fund-raising platform that practically every Democratic candidate uses to raise campaign cash. Now, when Bondi takes the first step in complying with Trump's desires -- which she's undoubtedly already done -- this is not the pursuit of justice. This is using government to harass and intimidate political enemies.

ActBlue was founded in 2004. According to Wikipedia,

Both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential nominees, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, used ActBlue during their primary and general election campaigns. Bernie Sanders' 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns also used ActBlue for fundraising. Sanders' use of ActBlue was particularly notable as it represented the first time a major Democratic presidential candidate eschewed money from super PACs in favor of grassroots fundraising. This strategy would later be replicated by other Democratic political figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.If Pam Bondi does not only what Trump ordered, but also what Trump wants from an investigation of Act Blue, then we truly have arrived at a tyrant's picnic.

The cautious language of reporter Maggie Haberman et al.:

The Republican scrutiny of ActBlue has focused on claims — thus far unsubstantiated — that it allows straw and foreign donations. Federal election law bars straw donations [made in someone else's name], and it prohibits foreign citizens without permanent residency from donating directly to federal political candidates or political action committees.

A joint statement from the DNC, the DSCC, and the DCCC stated that Trump’s ExecOrder was “designed to undermine democratic participation .... He’s trying to block lawful grass-roots donations from supporters giving just $5 or $10 to candidates who oppose him while further empowering the corrupt billionaires who already control his administration.”

You see why Trump set out early to discredit and/or silence the judiciary. He's becoming invincible, he thinks. He can't be criminally charged for anything (thank you, John Roberts), and he has the entire mechanism of official prosecution at his beck and call. Good God Almighty! The midterms can't come fast enough.

When the Department of Justice Becomes an Insult Comedian

 

Assessing whether, when and how much [Trump] is defying the courts is complicated by a new phenomenon ... a collapse in the credibility of representations by the Justice Department. These days, its lawyers are sometimes sent to court with no information, sometimes instructed to make arguments that are factually or legally baseless, and sometimes punished for being honest .... It may be an appearance by a hapless lawyer who has or claims to have no information. Or it may be a legal argument so outlandish as to amount to insolence.

 --Adam Liptak, NYTimes 

Back in February, after the Associated Press continued to refer to the Gulf of Mexico in its reporting, thus ignoring Donald Jethro Trump's preferred new name for it, Jethro barred them from White House events. The AP went to court, and a Federal judge in Washington told the government that it cannot punish the news organization for the content of its speech. 

But as of this week, the AP was still being turned away. Most recently, they weren't allowed into the infamous club act between Jethro and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, when both presidents claimed (as bald-faced as any two leaders have ever lied) that there's not a thing either of them can do to return a mistakenly deported man to his wife.

More. "Long after judges ordered the administration to unfreeze funding from contracts and grants disbursed by U.S.A.I.D. and FEMA, contractors and states led by Democrats repeatedly reported that payments were still being held up. Twice in February, judges granted motions to enforce their orders, finding that the administration was dragging its feet." 

Jethro started a whole cascade of disrespect when he defied a judge's order to turn around the plane carrying Abrego Garcia to the gulag in El Salvador. That court ordered Garcia brought back. Trump appealed to his gang on the Supreme Court, and apparently all nine justices agreed that the president needed to do what the lower court said, "facilitating" the return of Garcia. The definition of "facilitate" proved slippery. The Federal judge in Maryland wasn't amused. Last Thursday, she asked the government three questions: Where was Mr. Abrego Garcia being held? What steps had the government taken to get him home? And what additional steps did it plan to take?

Trump's marionette at DOJ

Trump's DOJ lawyers refused to respond, at first, saying in a court filing last Friday that they needed more time, and then at a hearing that day that they had no answers to the judge’s questions. No answer to even where Garcia was? "You've failed to comply with this court’s order,” the judge noted and demanded daily updates by 5 p.m., "a deadline the administration has treated as a suggestion" (according to Liptak).

On Saturday, an administration official grudgingly acknowledged that “Abrego Garcia is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.” The official said nothing about what the government was doing to facilitate the prisoner’s return.

Garcia’s lawyers have urged the judge to consider holding the government in contempt. Seems appropriate. The Trump DOJ's contempt for the law must be apparent from the deepest space.

Pam Bondi--"All Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves"

 

We saw Pam Bondi the mean girl coming a mile off -- that polished gleam of pure contempt for everyone not blond enough. Or not trumpy enough.

Within hours of being sworn in as US Attorney General, Bondi sent a memo to all employees at the Department of Justice that the goal formerly known as impartial justice is now replaced by "whatever Trump wants," and any lawyer previously sworn to uphold the Constitution is now expected to uphold Donald Jethro Trump. Anyone who resists the whims of Trump will be harshly dealt with:

“Any attorney who because of their personal political views or judgments declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the Department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination, consistent with applicable law,” Bondi wrote in a memo.

It's every bit as bad as we all predicted: Trump has guaranteed himself a secret police force to serve his ambitions and a complacent and compliant justice department to wink approvingly. He is hollowing out our government and replacing it with a cow he can milk. Jethro often vowed on the campaign trail that he would use the Justice Department to exact retribution on his political enemies. It's happening. We have our petty tyrant, served slavishly by his ass-kissers.

One Wrong Man for a Right Important Job

“He brought 'norms' to a trump fight and democracy suffered.”

--Democratic lawyer Marc Elias describing why Biden's A.G. Merrick Garland was the “wrong man for the job” 

Trump’s nominee for Attorney General Pam Bondi testified at her Senate confirmation hearing that the Justice Department’s prosecutors had in her opinion targeted what she identified as "political opponents" by whom she meant trump. “That’s what we’ve seen for the last four years in this Administration,” she said.

So we know what's coming. Pam Bondi will conduct the first purge of trump2.0, the first of several, we would guess, as cabinet departments important for allowing the loot to leave the building will be firing or sidelining any career lawyers/scientists/experts who seem likely to resist dictatorship, question lies, or refuse unlawful orders. He intends to clear out the Justice Department, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, law enforcement itself, and foreign service, as he tightens his grip on anyone who can oppose him in a meaningful way.

Merrick Garland was a crucial misfire. Garland actually lived the famous moral dilemma -- would you kill the baby Hitler in his cradle if you could? He could have killed the future of trump during the last four years, and saved the world the pain and the disgrace. Instead, we're to be ruled by Colonel Blimp, the convicted felon of enormous appetite and zero ethics or moral qualms. 

Merrick Garland may have single-handedly let the dictator loose when he could still have been confined.