Kansas Crimson

KUTradition wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2024 8:07 am Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) resigned from Congress just before the House Ethics Committee was set to hold a potentially pivotal meeting on its investigation into the Florida congressman…

i haven’t checked today, but i presume the trump transition team has still yet to submit all the necessary ethics declarations that are supposedly required by law

KUTradition wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2024 8:58 am if the gov’t was hiding the “truth” about aliens, it seems to me trump woulda been the one to pull the curtain back

twocoach wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2024 9:50 am Just wait until all these patriotic former military members have their benefits slashed.

While Trump is claiming a mandate to do as he wishes with the government, Republicans interested in their own political future are likely noting that he actually won the election by a smaller margin than President Joe Biden won in 2020, despite a global rejection of incumbents this year. And he won not by picking up large numbers of new voters—it appears he lost voters—but because Democratic voters of color dropped out, perhaps reflecting the new voter suppression laws put into place since 2021.

Then, too, Trump remains old and mentally slipping, and he is increasingly isolated as people fight over the power he has brought within their grasp. Today his wife, Melania, declined the traditional invitation from First Lady Jill Biden for tea at the White House and suggested she will not be returning to the presidential mansion with her husband. It is not clear either that Trump will be able to control the scrabbling for power over the party by those he has brought into the executive branch, or that he has much to offer elected Republicans who no longer need his voters, suggesting that Congress could reassert its power.

Falling into line behind Trump at this point is not necessarily a good move for a Republican interested in a future political career.

Today the Republicans are projected to take control of the House of Representatives, giving the party control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency, as well as the Supreme Court. But as the downballot races last week show, MAGA policies remain unpopular, and the Republican margin in the House will be small. In the last Congress, MAGA loyalists were unable to get the votes they needed from other Republicans to impose Trump’s culture war policies, creating gridlock and a deeply divided Republican conference.

The gulf between Trump’s promises to slash the government and voters’ actual support for government programs is not going to make the Republicans’ job easier. Conservative pundit George Will wrote today that “the world’s richest person is about to receive a free public education,” suggesting Elon Musk, who has emerged as the shadow president, will find his plans to cut the government difficult to enact as elected officials reject cuts to programs their constituents like.

Musk’s vow to cut “at least” $2 trillion from federal spending, Will notes, will run up against reality in a hurry. Of the $6.75 trillion fiscal 2024 spending, debt service makes up 13.1%; defense—which Trump wants to increase—is 12.9%. Entitlements, primarily Social Security and Medicare, account for 34.6%, and while the Republican Study Group has called for cuts to them, Trump said during the campaign, at least, that they would not be cut.

So Musk has said he would cut about 30% of the total budget from about 40% of it. Will points out that Trump is hardly the first president to vow dramatic cuts. Notably, Ronald Reagan appointed J. Peter Grace, an entrepreneur, to make government “more responsive to the wishes of the people” after voters had elected Reagan on a platform of cutting government. Grace’s commission made 2,478 recommendations but quickly found that every lawmaker liked cuts to someone else’s district but not their own.

Will notes that a possible outcome of the Trump chaos might be to check the modern movement toward executive power, inducing Congress to recapture some of the power it has ceded to the president in order to restore the stability businessmen prefer.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was himself a wealthy man, and in the 1930s he tried to explain to angry critics on the right that his efforts to address the nation’s inequalities were not an attack on American capitalism, but rather an attempt to save it from the communism or fascism that would destroy the rule of law.

“I want to save our system, the capitalistic system,” FDR wrote to a friend in 1935. “[T]o save it is to give some heed to world thought of today.”

TDub wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2024 10:46 am Europe is supposedly actively and vocally pulling back from alignment with the US and promoting Europe forward as a counter measure to "America first".

Not sure I love this timeline.

twocoach wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2024 9:50 am Just wait until all these patriotic former military members have their benefits slashed.

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2024 11:41 am every country's gov't should put their citizens first.

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2024 11:41 am every country's gov't should put their citizens first.

jfish26 wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2024 11:50 am

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2024 11:41 am every country's gov't should put their citizens first.

You have no conception of what would/will be lost by us losing our status as the top dog on the world stage.