#house republicans are corrupt

[contemplatingoutlander]

House Republicans censuring Adam Schiff says more about them than him

The Editorial Board of The Washington Post rightly calls out the House Republicans for weaponizing the House to punish one of Trump's enemies, after Trump threatened to primary the 20 Republicans who initially voted against censuring him.

Here are some excerpts from the editorial:

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) became on Wednesday just the third member of Congress to be censured in the past 40 years. The party-line vote reflected worse on the House Republicans who pushed it through than it did on Mr. Schiff. The resolution accuses the former House Intelligence Committee chairman of falsely claiming that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with the Russian government. Mr. Schiff responded that Paul Manafort, as chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign, provided internal campaign polling data to a Russian intelligence operative amid widespread Kremlin efforts to assist Mr. Trump. Experts can debate whether that technically constitutes collusion. But this semantic question is hardly the basis for a censure motion. Contrary to what many Trump supporters claim, the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III never exonerated Mr. Trump. Indeed, the special counsel’s report laid out significant evidence of obstruction of justice. It’s indisputable that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf. [...] After 20 Republicans voted last week with Democrats to table the censure resolution, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that he’d support primary challengers against them. (Mr. Schiff had spearheaded Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and played a leading role on the select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.) When the resolution came up again Wednesday, this time without a threat to fine Mr. Schiff $16 million, most of those Republicans capitulated. In so doing, they weakened the power of congressional censure as an official rebuke reserved for egregious conduct — and, in the process, made themselves appear to be the wrongdoers. [color emphasis added]

[randyite]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson/Political Cartoonist :: @Nick_Anderson_

Spreading like...

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 13, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 14, 2025

The incoming Trump administration is working to put its agenda into place.

Although experts on the National Security Council usually carry over from one administration to the next, Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller of the Associated Press today reported that incoming officials for the Trump administration are interviewing career senior officials on the National Security Council about their political contributions, how they voted in 2024, and whether they are loyal to Trump. Most of them are on loan from the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency and, understanding that they are about to be fired, have packed up their desks to head back to their home agencies.

The National Security Council is the main forum for the president to hash out decisions in national security and foreign policy, and the people on it are picked for their expertise. But Trump’s expected pick to become his national security advisor—his primary advisor on all national security issues—Representative Mike Waltz (R-FL) told right-wing Breitbart News that he wants to staff the NSC with people who are “100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”

Ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA) warned that the loyalty purge “threatens our national security and our ability to respond quickly and effectively to the ongoing and very real global threats in a dangerous world.”

But during Trump’s first term, it was Alexander Vindman, who was detailed to the NSC, and his twin Eugene Vindman, who was serving the NSC as an ethics lawyer, who reported concerns about Trump’s July 2019 call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to their superiors. This launched the investigation that became Trump’s first impeachment, and Trump appears anxious to make sure future NSC members will be fiercely loyal to him.

With extraordinarily slim majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans are talking about pushing through their entire agenda through Congress as a single bill in the process known as budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliation, which deals with matters related to spending, revenue, and the debt limit, is one of the few things that cannot be filibustered, meaning that Republicans could get a reconciliation bill through the Senate with just 50 votes. If they can hold their conference together, they could get the package through despite Democratic opposition.

House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican leaders have said that the House intends to pass a reconciliation bill that covers border security, defense spending, the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, spending cuts to social welfare programs, energy deregulation, and an increase in the national debt limit.

But Li Zhou of Vox points out that it’s not quite as simple as it sounds to get everything at once, because budget reconciliation measures are not supposed to include anything that doesn’t relate to the budget, and the Senate parliamentarian will advise stripping those things out. In addition, the budget cuts Republicans are circulating include cuts to popular programs like Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (more commonly known as Obamacare), the Inflation Reduction Act’s investment in combating climate change, and the supplemental nutrition programs formerly known as food stamps.

Still, a lot can be done under budget reconciliation. Democrats under Biden passed the 2021 American Rescue Plan and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act under reconciliation, and Republicans under Trump passed the 2017 Trump tax cuts the same way.

A wrinkle in those plans is the Republicans’ hope to raise the national debt limit. As soon as they take control of Congress and the White House, Republicans will have to deal immediately with the treasury running up against the debt limit, a holdover from World War I that sets a limit on how much the country can borrow. Although he has complained bitterly about spending under Biden, Trump has demanded that Congress either raise or abandon the debt ceiling because the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tax cuts he wants to extend will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years, and cost estimates for his deportation plans range from $88 billion to $315 billion a year.

Republicans are backing away from adding a debt increase to the budget reconciliation package out of concern that members of the far-right Freedom Caucus will kill the entire bill if they do. Those members want no part of raising the national debt and have demanded $2 trillion in budget cuts before they will consider it. Tonight, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told Jordain Carney of Politico that Senate Republicans expect the debt limit to be stripped out of the budget reconciliation measure.

So Republicans are currently exploring the idea of leveraging aid to California for the deadly fires in order to get Democrats to sign on to raising the debt ceiling. Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Trump met with a group of influential House Republicans over dinner Sunday night at Mar-a-Lago to discuss tying aid for the wildfires to raising the debt ceiling. Today, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) confirmed to reporter Hill that this plan is under discussion.

Indeed, Republicans have been in the media suggesting that disaster aid to Democratic states should be tied to their adopting Republican policies. The Los Angeles fires have now claimed at least 24 lives. More than 15,000 firefighters are working to extinguish the wildfires, which have been driven by Santa Ana winds of up to 98 miles (158 km) an hour over ground scorched by high temperatures and low rainfall since last May, conditions caused by climate change.

On the Fox News Channel today, Representative Zach Nunn (R-IA) said: "We will certainly help those thousands of homes and families who have been devastated, but we also expect you to change bad behavior. We should look at the same for these blue states who have run away with a broken tax policy.... Those governors need to change their tune now.” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) blamed Democrats for the fires and said of federal disaster relief: “I certainly wouldn't vote for anything unless we see a dramatic change in how they're gonna be handling these things in the future.”

Aside from the morality of demanding concessions for disaster aid after President Joe Biden responded with full and unconditional support for regions hit by Hurricane Helene (although Tennessee governor Bill Lee is still lying that Biden delayed aid to his state, when in fact he delayed in asking for it, as required by law), there is a financial problem with this argument. As economist Paul Krugman noted today in his Krugman Wonks Out, California “is literally subsidizing the rest of the United States, red states in particular, through the federal budget.”

In 2022, the most recent year for which information is available, California paid $83 billion more to the federal government than it got back. Washington state also subsidized the rest of the country, as did most of the Northeast. That money flowed to Republican-dominated states, which contributed far less to the federal government than they received in return.

Krugman noted that “if West Virginia were a country, it would in effect be receiving foreign aid equal to more than 20 percent of its G[ross] D[omestic] P[roduct].” Krugman refers to the federal government as “an insurance company with an army,” and he notes that there is “nothing either the city or the state could have done to prevent” the wildfires. “If the United States of America doesn’t take care of its own citizens, wherever they live and whatever their politics, we should drop “United” from our name,” he writes. “As it happens, however, California—a major driver of U.S. prosperity and power—definitely has earned the right to receive help during a crisis.”

Today, Biden announced student loan forgiveness for another 150,000 borrowers, bringing the total number of people relieved of student debt to more than 5 million borrowers, who have received $183.6 billion in relief. This has been achieved through making sure existing debt relief programs were followed, as they had not been in the past.

Establishment Republicans continue to fight MAGA Republicans, and MAGA fights among itself: former Trump ally Steve Bannon yesterday called Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk “truly evil” and vowed to “take this guy down.” But even as their enablers in the legacy media are normalizing Republican behavior, a reality-based media is stepping up to counter the disinformation.

Aside from the many independent outlets that have held MAGA Republicans to account, MSNBC today announced that progressive journalist Rachel Maddow will return to hosting a nightly one-hour show for the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.

And today journalist Jennifer Rubin joined her colleagues who have abandoned the Washington Post as it swung toward Trump. She resigned from the Washington Post with the announcement that she and former White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen have started a new media outlet called The Contrarian. Joining them is a gold-star list of journalists and commentators who have stood against the rise of Trump and the MAGA Republicans, many of whom have left publications as those outlets moved rightward.

“Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission—defending, protecting and advancing democracy,” Rubin wrote in her resignation announcement. In contrast, the new publication “will be a central hub for unvarnished, unbowed, and uncompromising reported opinion and analysis that exists in opposition to the authoritarian threat.”

“The urgency of the task before us cannot be overstated,” The Contrarian’s mission statement read. “We have already entered the era of oligarchy—rule by a narrow clique of powerful men (almost exclusively men). We have little doubt that billionaires will dominate the Trump regime, shape policy, engage in massive self-dealing, and seek to quash dissent and competition in government and the private sector. As believers in free markets subject to reasonable regulation and economic opportunity for all, we recognize this is a threat not only to our democracy but to our dynamic, vibrant economy that remains the envy of the world.”

In what appears to be a rebuke to media outlets that are cozying up to Trump, The Contrarian’s credo is “Not Owned by Anybody.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[busterballsblog]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rocky Cavallaro (@rock_kava)

[poisonousquinzel]

"a dude in Texas legally changed his name to "Literally Anyone Else" and he's attempting to run for President against Biden & Trump" [source]

okay, but putting aside the comedic aspect of this, it is concerning the amount of people who are prompted to vote for candidates just because it's funny. I'm not the biggest fan of how his policy about the boarder sounds [Site], but I do implore anyone who is able to vote in the 2024 US election to please research other candidates.

The media is only going to continue pushing the idea it's inevitably going to be Trump vs Biden 2.0 and we have no other options, that we have to vote for Biden again because of Project 2025. Is that whole thing terrifying?

Yeah, fucking absolutely.

But voting for Biden will not solidify our safety from that. Biden is exactly like the rest of them. He always has been. You can't make the lesser of two evils argument when they're both just plain evil.

You cannot say that Biden is even mildly a better choice than Trump when he is currently directly involved in a genocide. That is not some little fucking thing. That in and of itself disqualifies him as a lesser evil. Biden is just as bad as him and he will not save us because he doesn't fucking care.

Cornel West [Site] is an Independent candidate running for President in the 2024 Election. [Policies]

Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia [Site] are running for President and Vice-President as the candidates of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the 2024 Election. [Policies]

There are options.

There are people trying to change the corrupt foundation our system is built on, but we have to help amplify them because the mainstream media will not.

[eugenedebs1920]

The level of criminality. The degree of corruption. The amount of fraud Trump has forever been engaged in would be impressive if it weren’t done at the expense of democracy and footed by the American taxpayer. I’ve said once, I’ll say it extensively. Trump is a burden upon our nation.

[nando161mando]

[progamerican]

The Trump Administration Betrays Women with its Cabinet Picks

Despite Trump claiming that he is the "protector of women," his picks betray a complete disregard for the well-being of women and survivors of sexual assault. #politics #news #Trump #MeToo

Despite Trump claiming that he is the “protector of women,” his picks betray a complete disregard for the well-being of women and survivors of sexual assault. By The White House – Official White House Facebook page, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55185771 The last several days of Donald Trump’s announced nominees have been disgusting. From nominating former…

[liberalsarecool]

Russian informant, propped up by Republicans, was a liar. A total fabrication.

Alexander Smirnov was cast by Republicans as one of the FBI’s most trusted informants, offering a “highly credible” account of brazen public corruption by Joe Biden that formed a pillar of the House impeachment investigation.

It was all a lie. Planted by Russian intelligence agencies. Repeated by conservative media.

Republicans routinely use Russian propaganda.

Republicans' Joe Biden impeachment and Hunter Biden investigation were all based on lies planted by high-level Russian officials.

[contemplatingoutlander]

This is another great column by Dana Milbank about how Republicans are now mimicking Trump as they circle the wagons to protect him, how they are “weaponizing” the power of the House to try to interfere with Trump’s indictment, and how they are pursuing ridiculous “investigations” with their new House majority. 

The link above is a gift 🎁link, so you can read the entire article, even if you do not subscribe to The Washington Post.  Below are some excerpts on how Republicans are imitating Trump in his defense:

It’s no surprise that House Republicans leaped to Donald Trump’s defense after news of his indictment broke late Thursday. What was striking, though, was how many elected GOP officials now sound like Trump.

“Political Persecution,” Trump alleged in his statement.

“Political persecution,” parroted Reps. Diana Harshbarger (Tenn.), John Brecheen (Okla.), Claudia Tenney (N.Y.), and Paul Gosar (Ariz.).

“Blatant Election Interference,” Trump announced.

“This is unprecedented election interference,” echoed GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.).

“An attempt to interfere in our Presidential election,” echoed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.).

“Witch hunt,” complained Trump.

“Witch hunt,” repeated Reps. George Santos (N.Y.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Ralph Norman (S.C.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.) and more, including House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.).

“Weaponizing our justice system,” Trump inveighed.

“Weaponizing,” chorused Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Reps. David Rouzer (N.C.), Austin Scott (Ga.), Rich McCormick (Ga.) and more.

Trump blamed George Soros. Reps. Wesley Hunt (Tex.), Mike Johnson (La.), Harshbarger, Gosar and Sens. Rick Scott (Fla.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) blamed Soros.

They aped Trump in other ways, too.

In their vulgarity:

“Enough of this witch hunt bulls---,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.)

“This is complete and utter bulls---,” asserted Rep. Brian Mast (Fla.).

In using ALL CAPS:

“WITCH HUNT!” screamed Rep. Ronny Jackson (Tex.) and “Alvin Bragg is a NATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT.”

In demanding vengeance:

“Hunter Biden: Call your lawyers,” suggested Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.).

“The House of Representatives will hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account,” declared McCarthy.

“When Trump wins, THESE PEOPLE WILL PAY!!” tweeted Jackson.

In voicing deep-state conspiracy theories:

“The Regime occupying our country and systematically killing America is most afraid of President Donald J. Trump,” warned Gosar.

And in stoking paranoia among the unstable:

“If they can come for him, they can come for anyone,” tweeted Rep. Andy Biggs (Ariz.). [emphasis added]

Most prominent Republicans today seem to have no shame. Unless they are stupid, they have to know that Trump is guilty as sin of not only the Stormy Daniels payoff but of all the other charges being considered in Georgia and by the DOJ. 

But they don’t care.

Winning is everything for them, no matter the cost to their integrity.

[randyite]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Michael de Adder

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 30, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 31, 2024

Today, according to Clare Foran, Manu Raju, and Morgan Rimmer of CNN, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told his Republican colleagues that he will not bring forward the bipartisan immigration bill senators have been working on for months, calling it “absolutely dead.” 

Although Johnson insisted in November that border security was so crucial that he wouldn’t bring up aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Gaza until such legislation was attached to it, Trump has made it clear he wants immigration and border security left on the table for him to use as an issue in his run for the presidency.

Instead of addressing border security through legislation, House Republicans instead are moving forward with their plan to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. They wrote articles of impeachment even before holding hearings. Today, members of the House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing to mark up those articles, which claim that Mayorkas committed high crimes and misdemeanors because he allegedly breached the public trust and refused to enforce immigration law. 

In all our history, only one cabinet officer has been impeached. William Belknap, whose eight years as secretary of war under President U. S. Grant had been marked by ostentatious displays of wealth and apparent kickbacks from army contracts, was charged with corruption in March 1876 just hours after he tearfully handed Grant his resignation. 

The House charged Belknap with “criminally disregarding his duty as Secretary of War and basely prostituting his high office to his lust for private gain.” The Senate agreed that it had jurisdiction to hold an impeachment trial even for a former government official, for an officer should not be able to escape justice simply by resigning. After hearing more than 40 witnesses, a majority of senators voted to convict Belknap on each of five charges, but no vote reached the necessary two-thirds threshold for conviction, and he was therefore acquitted. 

Almost 150 years later, the impeachment of Mayorkas would be the second effort to impeach a cabinet member. Yet there is no suggestion that Mayorkas has done anything but try to implement the law, even as the administration has repeatedly asked for more funding to make it possible for him to do his job.

In the hearing today, Representative Seth Magaziner (D-RI) noted that “across the system, we are at and above capacity, and so, what should the secretary do? The secretary, because he has not received the funding to provide adequate detention capacity, has to use his judgment for who to detain and who to release. That is not illegal. It is certainly not impeachable. And it is the exact same kind of discretion that every other director before him has used. In the last two years of the Trump administration, 52% of migrants apprehended at the southern border were released, not detained…. Nearly a million people. I did not hear my Republican colleagues trying to impeach the secretary or acting secretary under the Trump administration during those years. But here they are, trying to impeach Secretary Mayorkas for doing the exact same thing.”

Rather than passing the laws the country needs, the extremist Republicans appear to be determined to tee up an issue on which Trump can run for president in 2024. House speaker Johnson has demanded “ZERO” illegal crossings into the U.S., but this is a standard that no previous homeland security secretary has met because it is impossible to wall off every single means of entering this country by water, air, or land. And—despite Republicans’ false claims that Biden has established “open borders”—immigrants were more likely to be released into the country during Trump's term than during Biden’s. 

What is going on here is an attempt of the extremist Republicans to undercut the administration by attacking a key cabinet officer not for actual misbehavior but on policy grounds.  

There is no chance the Senate, dominated by Democrats, will convict Mayorkas even if the House, with its razor-thin Republican majority, impeaches him, but the extremist minority in the House that is going after him is attempting to set a precedent that a minority can stop the government from functioning. 

The cost of that obstruction has been clear in domestic politics over government funding, but it has now become a global issue over the question of U.S. support for Ukraine. Johnson had said he would not bring forward a bill to provide supplemental funding for Ukraine unless it included measures for increased border security; now his rejection of a bill to provide that border security threatens Ukraine aid. 

Ukraine is defending itself against an invasion by Russia, but the struggle there is larger than one between two countries: it is the question of whether the rules-based international order put in place after World War II will survive, or whether the world will go back to a system in which stronger countries can gobble up less powerful ones. 

Military aid for Ukraine is widely popular among Americans and among American lawmakers, who recognize the larger questions at stake. But extremist Republicans are siding with Trump, who has made his preference for Russia and its autocratic leader over Ukraine clear. The realization that a few extremist Republicans are scuttling Ukraine aid has prompted officials from both parties to warn of the consequences if the U.S. stops providing support to Ukraine.

In Foreign Affairs today, Central Intelligence Agency director Wililam Burns noted that the war has weakened Putin’s Russia significantly. Aid to Ukraine has amounted to less than 5% of the U.S. defense budget, “a relatively modest investment with significant geopolitical returns for the United States and notable returns for American industry,” he wrote.

“For the United States to walk away from the conflict at this crucial moment and cut off support to Ukraine would be an own goal of historic proportions,” Burns said. The secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Jens Stoltenberg, has been in Washington, D.C., this week, urging Republicans to back the aid, if only on the grounds that most of the money appropriated goes to support jobs in the U.S. 

The man behind the extremists, Trump, was in the news today for the fact that the political action committees that back him spent about $50 million covering his legal bills in 2023. That money came from donors and arrived primarily in the months after the 2020 presidential election, when Trump lied that he had actually won the election and needed financial support to challenge the results.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[busterballsblog]

This assassination attempt was caused by President Biden and the democrat leadership calling trump a dictator who is going to destroy democracy. This caused hysteria by all citizens. Biden has to cut the fear mongering and stop the lies. Trump was President for 4 years and he was lawful and full filled his duties honorably.

[wilwheaton]

Reasons Trump is Unfit for Office, with Sources.

From this comment on Reddit:

Top reasons why Trump should not be president.

⁠⁠⁠⁠ Lost the election and lied about it.Source

⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sent an armed angry mob to Congress and told them they need to fight like hell. Source

⁠⁠⁠⁠ Approved of the mob saying “hang Mike Pence”. Source

⁠⁠⁠⁠ Was found liable for sexual assault.Source

⁠⁠⁠⁠ Was found guilty of defrauding his university students. Source

⁠⁠⁠⁠ Was found guilty of inflating his assets to get favorable loans.Source

⁠⁠⁠⁠ Admitted to walking in on pageant contestants’ dressing rooms.Source

⁠⁠⁠⁠ Allegedly Raped and beat Ivana Trump. Source

⁠⁠ Stole from a kids’ cancer charity. Source

Received $413 million inheritance despite claims that he’s a self made man. Source

Blocked his chronically ill infant nephew from getting any of that inheritance. Source

Is the first president to receive votes against him from his own party during impeachment. Source

Led us into being one of the worst hit during Covid despite our head start and resources, leading to high inflation. Source

Said the Democrats do better with the economy.Source

Was ranked as the worst president in history by bipartisan presidential historians.Source

Pushed a plot to have fake votes created and then used to make him President despite losing the election.Source

Ordered republicans to block a bipartisan immigration billso Biden would not get a win before the election.Source

Is a convicted felon guilty of falsifying records to influence an election.Source

Told the Department of Justice to “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”Source

His VP, Mike Pence said Trump should never be president again, and that Trump asked him to put himself “above the Constitution”. Source

Got Fox News successfully sued for repeating/pushing his administrations election lies. A $787M settlement. Source

Said he’d be a dictator for one day Source

Trump lied to, or misled the public 30,573 times in the four years he held office. Source

Also, just regarding some of the Trump administration that have been convicted of crimes:

Donald Trump was charged, convicted, and is awaiting sentencing.

Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

Trump’s former campaign vice chairman, Rick Gates, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

Trump’s former adviser and former campaign aide, Roger Stone, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

Trump’s former adviser and former White House aide Peter Navarro, was charged, convicted, and is currently in prison.

Trump’s former campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

The Trump Organization’s former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison.

Trump’s former White House national security advisor, Michael Flynn, was charged and convicted.

Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, was charged with wire fraud and money laundering, in addition to a conviction in a contempt case similar to Navarro’s. He’s currently awaiting sentencing.

Though he was later acquitted at trial, Trump’s former inaugural committee chair, Tom Barrack, was charged with illegally lobbying Trump on behalf of a foreign government. (Elliot Broidy was the vice chair of Trump’s inaugural committee, and he found himself at the center of multiple controversies, and also pled guilty to federal charges related to illegal lobbying.)

Two lawyers associated with Trump’s post-defeat efforts, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, have pleaded guilty to election-related crimes.

Source

And if your vote is based strictly on economic achievements, here is a TikTok video comparing Trumps economy by the numbers. Tiktok link

[auroraluciferi]

I feel George Santos is eventually going to burn for being possibly the dumbest asshole ever elected to the US House of Representatives, but if I am forced to see another article about him I may lose it

this is ultimately what you get supporting career charlatans and politicians like Donald Trump

so many people see Trump and go “oh wow - I too can be a spoiled, compulsive liar and get elected to Congress or the Judiciary or the White House for doing jack shit my entire life and then lying about everything else.”

one amazing thing about George Santos is that it is not currently illegal for House candidates to just lie about everything on their resume

as far as US law and the FEC is concerned, if you are elected by voters for saying anything you want regardless of evidence, That’s Just Democracy Baby

the other important thing to note about all this is that NY Democrats have long had full access to everything journalists are now unearthing about Santos, and did nothing to oppose his race

and as a direct result this lying dickhead has been elected to the most powerful legislature on the planet

well done