Presidential Powers

"What I do," said Our President, "is authorize my army."  Presumably, this follows consultation with "my generals."  L'état, c'est moi.

Tomorrow, another president who shares that attitude expects to formalize that same relationship with the state he leads.  Turkey will go to the polls to decide whether Recep Tayyip Erdogan may legally assert presidential powers that will serve to legitimize his authoritarian rule.  It is very probable that his referendum will succeed: according to international monitors, he has stacked the deck in his favor.  He has muzzled the press, arrested opposition leaders, and led a massive purge of potential adversaries from positions of influence — down to the level of schoolteachers.

In truth, though, his suppression of opposition may not have been necessary.  Most Turks, like most Americans, vote ideologically rather than rationally.  Conservative Muslims, Erdogan's "base voters," are more impressed by the symbolic value of the enormous new mosque under construction on an Istanbul hilltop than the potential for loss of personal freedoms or estrangement from NATO and the European Union.  Are conservative Christians in the United States any less impervious to reality? 

Why Tr*mp Attacked Syria

It should be obvious why Tr*mp ordered the attack on Syria: because Obama didn't.

More than anything, it was an exercise in ball-swinging.  Obama, the effete intellectual, responded to the crossing of his "red line" by enlisting Russian cooperation to negotiate the removal and destruction of 600 metric tons of chemical weapons.  It was an effective response, but sorely lacking in theatrical machismo.  Real men respond with cruise missiles.

The bombing of one of Assad's airfields offered emotional satisfaction to many, in both parties.  Still, there were a few effete intellectuals who noticed that the action was clearly illegal: the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (PL107-40), used by both Bush and Obama to justify military action, requires at least a hint of a connection between the people being targeted and the 9/11 attack.  The Assad regime is fighting against al-Nusra and IS.

What next?  Nobody knows, almost certainly including Tr*mp and his generals.  Congress has been ducking blame for America's military involvements since 2002, but maybe it's time for those with the "Power... To declare War" to accept their Constitutional responsibility.

Ethics

Sure, the USofA has always been plutocratic, but out and out kleptocracy is looking more and more likely.  With Tr*mp, the Kushners, DeVos, Mnuchin, Ross, and a long list of others, it's the richest administration in history.  So, how much can they steal?

We've had big money in the Executive Branch before, or course — poor people don't find their way into the upper reaches of power — but the ethical situation in Tr*mpland is especially strained.  Many of the Tr*mpistas would have us believe that giving over active control of their business interests should satisfy ethics requirements.  That would make sense if we were worried about them using their businesses to benefit the government.

That's not the problem.  As long as they own those businesses, their actions can benefit those businesses.  It really doesn't matter whether management is by close associates or total strangers if government action can boost corporate profits.  Donald Jr. and Eric are no more an ethical problem than some random managers hired off monster.com.

* * * * * * *

Speaking of ethics, Flynn's request for immunity probably is intended to avoid legal liability for shady and unreported business his company conducted with both Russia and Turkey.  I doubt it has anything to do with "the Russian connection" to the election.  Somebody on the Tr*mp team would have been smart enough to realize you don't assign delicate, illegal operations to an insane clown.

House Divided

 The Freedom Caucus, by making the thoroughly odious the enemy of the merely malevolent, is said to have nailed shut the coffin of Ryancare.  Impressively, the renegade Republicans stayed ideologically pure, resisting the temptation to give the rich a major tax cut and screw over millions of poorer folk who benefit from the expansion of Medicaid.  One wonders if the Koch brothers and Grover Norquist regret financing Tea Party primary challenges against more "moderate" Republicans.  (John Boehner, deposed by those same ideologues, must be smirking pretty hard today.)

In truth, though, the Ryan bill would have had a hard time even without the Republican schism.  It was pure Reaganomics, and despite compulsory genuflection at the shrine of Saint Ronnie, there are Republicans who understand it's not the 1980s anymore — and everyone can see that Donald is a far cry from Ronald.

Well, on to tax reform!  Sadly for Ryan, he was counting on the tax cuts from the failed health bill to make the numbers look vaguely reasonable in his tax package.  There's also quite a bit of division among his party's corporate contributors over those ideas for boosting exports and making imports more expensive.  There could be more chaos on the Hill forthwith.

Nobamacare

Don't count on conservative "opponents" to torpedo the Ryan plan for ending Obamacare.  The Freedom Caucus is making noise, but at the heart of the current proposal is a goal dear to the far right: the destruction of Medicaid.

Most Americans who have health insurance enjoy it as an employee benefit, and are entirely indifferent to the cost of purchasing their own.  Nevertheless, the insurance exchanges got most of the attention in debates over the ACA — even though it was the law's expansion of Medicaid that was most significant in bringing health care to millions who lacked it.  The Republican "Patient's Choice Act" will not merely eliminate Medicaid for those enrolled in the expansion, but create a system of block grants to the states that will destroy the program entirely.

The single most important goal of the Obamacare repeal, like virtually every other piece of Republican legislation since Reagan, is to cut taxes on the rich.  Finding the money to do that inevitably involves reducing benefits for everybody else.  Ending Medicaid — which pays for half the babies born in the United States and half the elderly in nursing homes — uses a lot of money that otherwise might be lining rich people's pockets.  Sad.

The Patient's "Choice" Act will give poor patients a "choice" between medicine and food.  The chief hope for its failure is defections by Republican senators from states where Medicaid was expanded under the ACA, and where its elimination may do some real political damage.  Those senators now are working hard to figure out just how much damage might be done, and how well that damage might be offset by the gratitude of wealthy donors.

Tapping the Tower

Colbert called it "truthiness" — people believe things that feel like they ought to be true.  To those who distrust and despise Obama, the idea that he ordered communications tapped at Tr*mp Tower prior to the election is a perfect fit, and that is what sucked Our President down his latest rabbit hole.  He, himself, is no less impressionable than his "base."

I read the Breitbart report on the Mark Levin conspiracy theory that seems to have inspired the tweetstorm that initiated the latest political crisis. Breitbart makes Levin more "credible" by tacking on a time line.  The time line offers no actual evidence, but it looks like evidence.  For truthiness, that's good enough.  The proverbial fan was well-spattered at 7AM.

Congressional Republicans, some of whom are rational, had to respond — and Congressional investigations, which frequently stretch on until their original focus is forgotten, are the most rational course of action under the circumstances.  (Democrats are not the only ones struggling to survive the Tr*mp presidency.)  This latest bit of executive irrationality, though, leaves an extremely large lump under the carpet, and Democratic glee seems well justified.

In the meanwhile, though, Russian government interference in the recent election will be investigated by the very same committees investigating the "breach" of Tr*mp Tower, and it wouldn't hurt to remember that we haven't seen the evidence for that either — we base our belief on the "authority" of the intelligence agencies.  Okay, those agencies are more authoritative than Mark Levin — and anyway, it just feels right.

Regarding Jeff Sessions

We heard the question, we heard the answer, and no matter how hard Sean Spicer and Michael Mukasey and Paul Ryan try to spin it, it's clear that Sessions lied.  Does it really matter?

They couldn't get Al Capone for bootlegging, much less murder, but they got him for tax evasion — and that was good enough.  Jeff Sessions can get away with being a fascist; but if we can dump him for being a liar, that's good enough too.

Just before "the Russian connection" hit the news, Sessions was making something less of a stir for deciding the Justice Department no longer had to investigate racist police departments, nor enforce agreements already secured by Loretta Lynch to alleviate abusive practices by police in Baltimore and Chicago.  For Sessions (and for Tr*mp as well), the problem is that police haven't been aggressive enough.  Sessions also has shown no interest in protecting anybody's civil rights, unless you count the "religious rights" of Bible bigots to discriminate against the LGBT.  He will not prosecute infringements of voting rights, and backs the same old "states' rights" arguments that justified Jim Crow.

Speaking of fascism, Tr*mp's "VOICE" program, which will publicize crimes committed specifically by immigrants, is chillingly reminiscent of Hitler's program to publicize crimes committed specifically by Jews. Fascists always need an "enemy within" to justify authoritarian overreach; and as Dietrich Bonhoeffer would observe if he were here today, after they come for the immigrants, they'll be coming for you.