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TRUMP ADMIN - Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. Apparently the Menendez brothers and Scott Peterson were not yet available.
We should never forget that Donald Trump is guilty as sin over his attempt at insurrection and trying to steal the election of 2020. Now that he is about to grasp power once again, he has to protect himself against lawful prosecution. Hence his pick of this loyalist and toady.
We are not alone in making these observations. Talking Points Memo refers to the Gaetz appointment as Trump's way of humiliating Republican senators:
"It’s Going To Get Worse Before It Gets Better: In a seismic move Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump announced the stunning decision to make the supremely unqualified, deeply compromised, and unfit Matt Gaetz his attorney general, placing in charge of the Justice Department a man who until last year was under criminal investigation for sex trafficking by the department he would lead.
"Will Senate Republicans Roll Over? The reaction to the Gaetz news among Senate Republicans was rich, but it’s not at all clear that they can muster the resolve to block the nomination of someone even as outrageously flawed as Gaetz."
The newly Republican United States Senate is going to be the subject of a lot of tea leaf reading over the next few weeks. The Republicans, by picking Sen. John Thune as their new majority leader, have declared just a teensy bit of independence from the Trump White House. Will they continue to act the way that Hollywood versions of the senate were supposed to act? You know -- a serious deliberative body that could consider the national good above the partisan passions of the moment. OK, have your laugh, but even senators like Lindsey Graham have to -- occasionally -- resent always playing second fiddle to the traitor in chief.
So here is one possible clue that we might look for: Will the new senate abolish the filibuster? To do so would be a way of taking complete control of the national government, since the Republicans will likely hold slim majorities in each house of congress. This would allow them to pass all the bills that Trump has promised with only a simple majority -- everything from border controls to mass deportations to tax cuts for the rich. But if the Republicans under Thune continue the filibuster, then it would allow Democrats some measure of veto power over the worst Trumpian excesses. It would, once again, turn the upper chamber into a place where it takes 60 votes to move a measure to the floor for a vote.
Notice that keeping the filibuster in place would not take any sort of dramatic pronouncement or heroic vote by the senators. It merely requires adopting the same rules as were used previously.
And it would be one quiet way for the Republicans to fend off the Gaetz nomination. Just leave it to the Democrats to disagree. It would only require 41 of them.
Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (no friend of Gaetz) is already predicting that the senate will reject the appointment, as you can read here.
Protecting Democracy
I notice that the governors of Illinois and Colorado have already announced a plan to defend freedom and democracy against the threatened inroads of the new presidential administration. You can read about it here. Think of it as akin to the actions of the free states back in 1860. There is a similar divide between free and non-free today. The difference is that it's reproductive freedom which is at issue rather than free vs. slave. In the current system, the reproductively unfree can travel to a free state, so there is that difference.
Trump's payment to Putin
Will Donald Trump be able to force a settlement on Ukraine where it gives up the territories conquered by Russia? Will there be no compensation for the thousands of Ukrainian men, women, and children killed by Russian missiles? For the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers killed while defending their country? For the mass destruction of Ukrainian cities and towns? That's what is at stake, and there is little reason for optimism regarding Trumpian policies. A lot depends on what other European countries decide to do. They could increase their military and financial support to Ukraine and thereby replace American donations. At a more extreme level, they could join in the battle against Russian aggression -- an admittedly dangerous move, but entirely justified by the history of this conflict. We'll see.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
