#CONGRESS CORRUPTION

[icubud]

[dosesofcommonsense]

5-page bills

Single topic/issue bills. If this, then that allowed only as it relates to the topic in the bill.

1 week public notice for all bills voted upon in either house of Congress

48 hours public review of final bills before final vote

Complete transparency

Live vote tallies by representative/senator

Super simple lingo so a high school kid can understand

Every known legal act included. Show us what’s changing or being layered on. One more law on top of 19 previous ones just sounds like y’all need to enforce the existing laws or strike them all down.

Common sense policies

No omnibus bills

[relaxedstyles]

[starsideblog]

Can someone PLEASE pull a "shoot the ceo" with Trump. This country is fucking doomed if he stays alive. It's only been 15 days, out of the four YEARS he's going to get, and this is awful. He's genuinely trying to become a dictator. So many things are being changed for the worse. And that's terrifying

Anyone who isn't Caucasian, queer people, disabled people, fucking hell even perisex cis women are in so much danger with him in power

We need him dead now or we're all 6 feet under

[meandmybigmouth]

Scotus is not the only judicial level willing to protect Trump outside of their oath sworn to uphold the law!

[thashining]

Trust Trump at your own peril

[godisarepublican]

So apparently California didn't screw up the water supply by accident. No, they spent $7.5 billion to make it as screwed up as it is now <link>

[sharp-silver4795]

Dear America…

JD Vance fucked a couch, btw.

One of the slides is phrased wrong. It should say “while claiming to remove government censorship.”

I’m not often political on here. I’ve been in the US for too long to let this fly.

Remember, the president is hard to reach. Start with your state representatives. Start with your mayors and governors.

We’ll work our way up.

Deny. Defend. Depose. ✊

[davidaugust]

The U.S. Congress passed a law about the data breach risk of TikTok.

The U.S. Congress has done nothing about the richest man in the world and his pet potus who launched the data breach of the U.S. Treasury, took control of it out of Congress’ Constitutionally empowered hands and just took the financial information of every single American and company and will keep, sell or use that data later for whatever they wish.

[mightyflamethrower]

[icubud]

Examples: The Lies about the Trump Russia dossier, the stolen 2020 election, the incarceration of people for the false story of Jan. 6 riot, the DOJ’s false charges against Trump which they unethically secured indictment, the fact that Comey and his cronies were not even brought up on charges, the DOJ prosecution of General Mike Flynn, the corrupt judge who insisted on pursuing charges against Gen. Flynn, etc.

[cleverercorn]

One of the last scrolls I could snatch before Alexandria fell (thank you @jaxwritessongs for gathering this information)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 20, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 20, 2024

Remember how American voters so hated Project 2025, the playbook for a second Trump term written by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing institutions, that Trump said he had nothing to do with it, and then one of its key architects, Russell Vought, told undercover filmmakers that Trump was only running away from the project as political cover? 

It appears Vought was right and the story that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 was, indeed, just political cover. Ed O’Keefe and Major Garrett of CBS News reported today that two sources close to the Trump transition team have told them that they expect Trump to name Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). 

Vought wrote the section of Project 2025 that covers the presidency, calling for “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and identifying the OMB as the means of enforcing the president’s agenda. Vought was Trump’s OMB director during the end of his first term and tried to remove the civil service protections that have been in place since 1883 to protect federal workers from being fired for political reasons. That plan, known as Schedule F, would have affected about 88% of the federal workforce. 

One of the first things Biden did when he took office was to rescind Trump’s executive order making that shift.

Like that earlier attempt, Project 2025 leans heavily on the idea that “personnel is policy,” and that idea illuminates the choices the Trump team is making. Trump has refused to sign the official documents required by the 2022 Presidential Transition Act. Those documents mandate ethics commitments and require the incoming president to disclose private donations. They also limit those donations. Without the paperwork, Trump appointees cannot start the process of getting security clearances through the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the team says it is planning to do its own vetting of its candidates instead.  

Claiming they have a mandate, Trump’s people have said they are launching “a hostile takeover” of the American government “on behalf of the American people.” But as voting numbers continue to come in, Trump’s majority has fallen below 50% of voters, meaning that more voters chose someone else than chose Trump on November 5. These results are far from being in “mandate” territory.

The U.S. Constitution charges Congress with writing the laws under which the American people live, and the president with taking “care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Since 1933, Congress has created an extensive system of agencies that regulate business and provide a basic social safety net. Congress will say, for example, that the U.S. needs an agency to protect the environment (like the Environmental Protection Agency, established under Republican president Richard M. Nixon), appropriate money for it, oversee its leadership, and then trust those leaders to hire the personnel necessary to carry out its mission. 

Regulations and social welfare programs and the agencies that provide them are broadly popular—think how hard it has been for members to get rid of Social Security, for example—so Congress trims at the edges rather than abolishing them. As the U.S. budget has grown, they often bear the brunt of accusations that the government spends too much, although what has really caused the budget to operate deeply in the red is the tax cuts for the wealthy put into place by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump.  

Right-wing leaders who want to continue cutting regulations and taxes are newly empowered by Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, and they are turning to a quirk of the government to enable them to work around Congress. 

Since the first administration of President George Washington, agencies created by Congress have lived in the Executive Branch. If, as Vought and others argue, the president is the absolute authority in that branch, Trump can do whatever he wants with those agencies and the civil servants—the bureaucrats—who run them.  

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out their plans for cutting the U.S. government. Neither of them has ever held elected office, but they see that as an advantage, not a downside: “We are entrepreneurs, not politicians,” they write. “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees.” Trump has named them to the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE. Despite the “department” name, DOGE is not an official government agency—which would require ethics disclosures—but rather an advisory panel. 

Their op-ed begins by redefining congressional authority to create agencies to suggest that agencies are illegitimate. “Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees,” they write, “but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.” This, they say, “imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers.” 

“Thankfully,” they continue, “we have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On Nov. 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it.”

While “politicians” have “abetted” an “entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy,” they write, they will work with the OMB to identify regulations that, they claim, Trump can issue an executive order to stop enforcing. “This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy,” they write. Should Trump want to cut things that Congress wants to fund, they claim that Trump will simply refuse to spend those appropriations, challenging the 1974 Impoundment Control Act that declared such withholding illegal. 

Musk and Ramaswamy reiterated their support for cutting programs that are not currently authorized, although budget experts note that such a lapse is a tool to permit adjustments to programs Congress has, in fact, authorized and have also pointed out that one of the top items on that list is health care for veterans. Cuts to all these programs will naturally mean extensive cuts to the federal workforce. 

“With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6–3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court,” they write, “DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government. We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action.” 

They conclude by asserting that “[t]here is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud,” which is one heck of a conclusion to a blueprint for taking the power of American lawmaking from the Congress, where the Framers put it, and delivering it into the hands of an extraordinarily powerful president acting on the advice of two unelected billionaires, one of whom wasn’t born in the United States.  

In the vein of getting rid of regulations, today the chief executive of Delta Air Lines said he expected the Trump administration would be a “breath of fresh air” after the Biden administration’s consumer-protection laws that he called government “overreach.” 

Meanwhile, in Washington, the Senate has been confirming President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, with the absence of Republican senators making the confirmations easier.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

With current drone-countering authorities set to expire on Dec. 20, the sudden surge in purported drone sightings and the accompanying MSM and social media panic might make a bit more sense.

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/government-corruption/nj-drone-invasion-just-in-time-for-congress-to-reauthorize-orwellian-law

#TheFreeThoughtProject

[captainxtra]

Musk Rat’s goons have access to the Treasury.

Pretty sure that’s not legal and congress should be investigating it.

[thashining]

Are we surprised?