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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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Mueller: "Remember the transition emails I requested?"
White House: "You mean the 630 we turned over to you?"
Mueller: "Good news. I found the other 50,000.
As Congress is poised to push through a historically unpopular tax bill, it’s worth revisiting a piece by our colleague Daniel Weiner, noting the forthrightness with which members of Congress have made clear that donors have been driving this process. A cynical public has long believed that “candidates who win public office promote policies that directly help the people and groups who donated money to their campaigns,” but rarely have we seen both officeholders and donors themselves state this so openly. It’s worth asking: Has something changed? We think so. ...
So what’s going on? We have a theory, and it relates to that most famous of Supreme Court campaign finance cases, Citizens United, decided in 2010. When people talk about Citizens United – which allowed unlimited “independent” spending in elections and indirectly led to now infamous super PACs – they often talk about how it has opened the floodgates to massive amounts of money in our politics. This is a misconception. In fact, while the amount of money spent in federal elections since Citizens United has increased, the increase has not been particularly dramatic.
What has been dramatic is the change in who funds elections. Increasingly our elections are financed by just a handful of donors who make multimillion dollar contributions to support candidates for federal office. In 2010, the top 100 individual donors contributed just of $73 million to federal candidates, parties, and other committees, including super PACs. In 2012, that number increased to $380 million, and by 2016, it reached over $900 million.
All of this means that a few donors matter much more than they used to, and those donors can make threats that genuinely terrify members of Congress. Whereas before Citizens Uniteddonors of $100,000 or more could make up as little as 5 percent of all individual contributions in federal elections, after Citizens United they could represent as much as one in four dollars. That’s power!
The very real threat for members of Congress is that if they don’t get tax reform done, they may face heavily financed challengers in primary races. Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff made clear he understood the power of such threats when he told donors they should reconsider their contributions in the event the tax bill fails. “f I were you, I would not only stop donating, I would form a coalition of all the other major donors, and just say two things. We’re definitely not giving to you, No. 1. And No. 2, if you don’t have this done by Dec. 31, we’re going out, we’re recruiting opponents, we’re maxing out to their campaigns, and we’re funding super PACs to defeat all of you.”
In recent years, as the Supreme Court has dismantled the nation’s campaign finance laws, it’s become fashionable in some quarters to argue that money in politics doesn’t matter because it doesn’t drive electoral outcomes – that is, https://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/undergraduate/module-outlines/ss/political-parties/PolP/JacobsenAnnRev15.pdf hasn’t really been changed by the huge influx of post-Citizens United big spenders. Last year’s election, which saw Sanders and Trump soar, despite raising far less money than their opponents, led to even more handwringing – with some arguing that “campaign money in 2016 has become meaningless.”
We’ve stated before that we find these analyses unconvincing. Candidates for federal office need a minimum amount of money to run competitive campaigns, even if they don’t need the most money of all candidates to win. And when members of Congress get used to raising money from just a few people, they give those people enormous power. The real impact of an unregulated campaign finance is on policy, and the proof is in this year’s tax bill.
Trump Ends the War on Christmas! (Video)
Trump Ends the War on Christmas!
It is the high season for fighting back against the “War on Christmas,” a war that doesn’t seem to actually exist. President Trump is determined to oppose said imaginary war with a full-throated defense of Christianity and all things Christmas.
Meanwhile, what is not imaginary are attacks on the social safety net. Health care for 9 million children is going unfunded while a 1.5 TRILLION dollar tax cut is speedily working its way through Congress. Republicans in Congress and the Tweeter-in-Chief are doling out tax breaks and other goodies to millionaires and billionaires.
And when they’re not doing that, they will surely try to make you forget they just endorsed an anti-gay, anti-Muslim, twice-removed judge who is facing very credible charges of child molestation. That’s the kind of thing we probably shouldn’t forget, even though African Americans in Alabama just saved our bacon and sent Roy Moore packing.
Trump Ends the War on Christmas!
It is the high season for fighting back against the “War on Christmas,” a war that doesn’t seem to actually exist. President Trump is determined to oppose said imaginary war with a full-throated defense of Christianity and all things Christmas.
Meanwhile, what is not imaginary are attacks on the social safety net. Health care for 9 million children is going unfunded while a 1.5 TRILLION dollar tax cut is speedily working its way through Congress. Republicans in Congress and the Tweeter-in-Chief are doling out tax breaks and other goodies to millionaires and billionaires.
And when they’re not doing that, they will surely try to make you forget they just endorsed an anti-gay, anti-Muslim, twice-removed judge who is facing very credible charges of child molestation. That’s the kind of thing we probably shouldn’t forget, even though African Americans in Alabama just saved our bacon and sent Roy Moore packing.
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American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact.
— Henry A. Wallace, America’s 33rd vice president (1941-1945)
During the hearing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Wednesday, some members of the House Judiciary Committee did not try to conceal their attempt to discredit and derail Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The way that the Russia investigation has been framed has made it easy for them to do that: Its legitimacy appears to rest on finding a smoking gun of criminality – a simple yes or no on whether any of the cast of characters in this saga committed a serious federal offence.
But making this merely about the bright line between illegality (criminality) and legality means that most Americans are missing what is right under our noses. To wit, there is no question that Russia made multiple, unprecedented attempts to penetrate a U.S. presidential campaign, that its approaches were not rebuffed, and that its contacts were sensitive enough that everyone, to a person, has concealed them. These facts might never be adjudicated inside a courtroom – they may not even be illegal – but they present a clear and present national security threat that we cannot ignore. We write here to broaden the public understanding of that security threat, and to underscore why the principal part of Mueller’s investigation—which is a counterintelligence probe not a criminal one—is performing a vital role for our country.
Is Collusion a Crime?
Most of the things intelligence officers and assets do—particularly during the process of recruiting someone—aren’t necessarily illegal. In the context of the Russia investigation, First Amendment concerns and the powers afforded to the office of the President make it especially difficult to pin down a crime. For instance, frequently meeting a known intelligence officer, while certainly unwise, is not itself a crime. Neither is it clear that listening to what information a foreigner may have to offer a campaign crosses the tripwire of campaign finance laws. And given the president’s almost unfettered discretion in the area of foreign affairs, disputing his decision to remove or not enforce sanctions wanders into a constitutional thicket.
This isn’t to say that Mueller won’t find evidence of criminal acts in his investigation. Based on the indictments and plea deals we’ve seen so far, it’s clear that at least some of the people associated with the Trump campaign have committed crimes. But the U.S. criminal code is narrow: It encompasses specific activities like computer hacking, or money laundering, or lying to federal agents. Mueller will also proceed cautiously, only bringing charges where both the law and evidence are extraordinarily clear. What becomes public through the criminal justice system, then, will only be a sliver of what actually took place between Russia and the Trump campaign behind the scenes.
The only crime that might reveal a larger effort is conspiracy, which is an agreement among two or more people to commit a crime. But it’s unlikely that there would be evidence of an explicit quid pro quo in the intelligence world. This is because intelligence operations are “compartmentalized”—that is, each asset only knows their own role, but not necessarily to what extent others might be involved – so no one asset would understand or know the full breadth of an entire operation. And since the recruitment process typically happens with a wink and a nod, rather with a brute insistence on favors, the trail of evidence needed to prove conspiracy (as well as an underlying crime) may be sparse.
But the truth is that “collusion” with the Kremlin doesn’t have to be criminal to be dangerous. If the Trump campaign received offers of assistance from Russia, and they did nothing to discourage that help (or even encouraged it), they are indebted to a foreign adversary whose national interests are opposed to those of the United States. You can be sure that at some point, Putin will come to collect, if he has not done so already – and when it comes to protecting our democracy the administration will be a puppet of a foreign adversary, not our country’s first line of defense. While the potential criminal aspects of this case need to be investigated, we need to take a good look at what we already know. The national security threat is staring us right in the face.
