The Environment Will Go To Hell, and We Will Go To War

So Trump wants to increase military spending by $54 billion and slash environmental protections and strangle the State Department, because why would you even need diplomats when the Great Negotiator is in charge, and Steve Bannon wants war with Islam?

Clean air and water? You can always buy Trump bottled water.

“I don’t know how you take $54 billion out without wholesale taking out entire departments,” said Bill Hoagland, a longtime Republican budget aide in the Senate and now a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Trump's budget proposals were otherwise vague on detail, but supposedly he doesn't intend to touch Social Security or Medicare, thus giving Paul Ryan a serious nosebleed which still hasn't stopped.

But rest assured, Trump will not inflate the military like that without using it. We're going to war, folks. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon, and for the rest of our lives.

"Nobody Knew"

Trump on Sunday, in front of the nation's governors, talking about health care policy-making: “I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”

Well, what he meant of course was "I didn't know." Because he doesn't know anything about government and its complexities. And doesn't really appear educable or even really curious.

He dances on Steve Bannon's strings, and Bannon only tells him what he wants him to do or say.

Today's Protest at Virginia Foxx's Office

Part of the substantial crowd that showed up this afternoon outside Virginia Foxx's Boone office, demanding that she hold a public town hall meeting before the end of March. Will she? Why would you even ask?

"Enemy of the People" -- A Little History

The phrase Trump has been using and repeating about the news media -- they are "enemies of the people" -- was first used in a political context in France in 1789, while the revolution was busily guillotining anybody who opposed them. According to Andrew Higgins, "the term acquired a far more lethal and legalistic meaning with the adoption of a 1794 [French] law that set up a revolutionary tribunal 'to punish enemies of the people' and codified political crimes punishable by death. These included 'spreading false news to divide or trouble the people.' ”

The phrase earned new fame about a century later in 1882, when Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote "An Enemy of the People," a play set in a small town where a courageous whistle-blower goes up against the local power-structure, which is trying to cover up water pollution to protect the local economy. (Gosh. There's nothing new under the sun.)

Beginning in 1917 during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the term got its bloodiest and most modern remake under the regimes of Lenin and Stalin -- especially Stalin. Lenin revived the term, explicitly citing the French revolution as his inspiration, so as to rid the Russian people of “landowners and capitalists as a class.”

"Stalin, who took over as Soviet leader upon Lenin’s death in 1924, drastically expanded the scope of those branded as 'enemies of the people,' targeting not only capitalists but also dedicated communists who had worked alongside Lenin for years, but whom Stalin viewed as rivals." Thousands were branded "enemies of the people." The branding amounted to a death sentence, and thousands did perish.

Trump's love affair with Russian totalitarianism now includes the adoption of language once favored by one of the great tyrants and butchers of history. With that language goes also his dictator's attitude toward those who cross him.

Thank God for those courageous newsmen and -women who have the resources to burrow into this man's motives and actions and inform the rest of us, for the sake of our democracy.

"First, We Get the Power, and Then We Ban the Press"

"We have a respect for the press," said Sean Spicer, soon after his boss had won the presidency but before the inauguration, and we would never ever not ever ban any press from its own government. That would just be wrong.

But that was then.

Gonna Be a Busy Spring in Court

Jim Morrill and Michael Gordon have produced a useful primer on some major court challenges to  recently passed Republican laws in North Carolina:

HB2
March 28: The US Supremes will hear arguments in a related Virginia case involving a transgender student (the outcome of which could affect the future of HB2). In May, the 4th Circuit in Richmond has scheduled a hearing on a direct challenge to HB2 (Carcaño v. McCrory, a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal).

Gerrymandered NC House & Senate Seats
Covington v. North Carolina -- a lawsuit filed in May 2015. Some 31 North Carolina residents sued the state, leaders of the legislative redistricting committee, and state board of elections, contending that Republican lawmakers had packed African-American voters into nine Senate districts and 19 House districts in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

A three-judge panel last year ordered new legislative districts drawn by March 15 followed by a new election in those districts. The state appealed and the Supreme Court put the order on hold. The Supreme Court is expected to decide this spring whether to hear the appeal.

Voting Rights

NAACP v. North Carolina --Last year a three-judge federal panel struck down the monster law that rewrote in 2013 North Carolina voting rights -- imposing a photo ID, eliminating days of early voting and out-of-precinct voting and straight-ticket voting, among other changes.

While he was still governor, Pat McCrory appealed the three-judge ruling to the US Supremes. A hearing on that appeal is scheduled for March 3, but last week Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein withdrew McCrory's appeal on behalf of North Carolina, discharged the private lawyers hired to argue the case, and prompted Republican leaders in the NC House and Senate to now seek to intervene in the case.

Boards of Elections

The law passed and signed in the last minutes of the McCrory administration that snatches control of boards of election from Governor Cooper -- After two rulings against it (in Wake Superior Court and by a three-judge panel) and one ruling for it (by three anonymous judges on the NC Court of Appeals), the challenge to this noxious power-grab by the Republicans has been "plucked" by the NC Supreme Court which will soon hear arguments on its constitutionality.

The Governor's Power to Appoint

In another last-minute law passed to thwart newly elected Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, the NC Senate reserved for itself the right to confirm all of Cooper's cabinet appointments. Cooper sued (Cooper v. Berger and Moore), maintaining the new law is an unconstitutional intrusion into the separation of powers.

Cooper is hanging tough. He is refusing to allow his cabinet appointees to appear in the Senate for confirmation hearings. The issue will get a hearing on March 7.

Sweet Dreams, Citizens

You might be witnessing the destruction of American democracy if...

1. ...a president demonizes a free and independent press.

2. ...a president's chief of staff attempts to induce FBI officials to deny press reports that have implicated that president's inner circle in secret dealings with a foreign, hostile government.

3.  ...a president views more than half of the nation's population as a threat to his power, assaults his perceived enemies with violent rhetoric, and takes steps to isolate them (see # 1 above).

4. ...a president is compulsively more concerned about his own image than he is in consensus-building with a majority of the citizens who do not agree with him.

5. ...a president has nothing to fear from a complacent Congress in the way of oversight or investigation.

6. ...a president that claims he cannot have a conflict of interest.

7. ...a president that attacks the 3rd branch of government as "so-called judges."

Bannon's Bumptiousness

Yesterday in front of the CPAC audience -- a gathering of conservative warlords and high priestesses -- Trump's puppet-master Steve Bannon was not shy with his grandiosity: The “deconstruction of the administrative state” has just begun, Bannon declared.

“If you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction,” Bannon said.

How decorously he wrapped it up! But if you think a bunch of billionaires and Goldman Sachs bankers are going to smash government for the benefit of "common people," you're maybe too deep into the Kool Aid to climb out now.

The Mountain Has Moved Closer

"If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain."

For the nonce, "Muhammad" = Sen. Thom Tillis and all the other Republicans representing North Carolina who have refused to meet with their constituents during the current Congressional recess.

About 300 people held a "Tillis town hall" in Charlotte Tuesday night, and they supplied an empty chair for the non-attending Tillis and addressed their questions at it anyway. I'd say this particular town hall turned into an anti-Tillis rally, and that's on him.

For its part, the chair was silent, but no more silent than the absconded senator, who had said that setting up town halls was just too much trouble for his poor, overworked staff and he was afraid of a "scene."

He got his scene anyway.