I was thinking of doing a review of the Logan movie, but my friends didn’t want to see it on a crowded opening weekend, so for this week I’ll go back to political observations.
Of course if you have a full-time job and only so much free time for an unofficial blog, you can’t really keep up with the news when King Donnie, the First of His Name is steadily leaping to greater heights of fuckuppery every single day. Apparently on Saturday March 3, he had a panic attack after realizing that he wasn’t in the news for a few hours and excreted an epic Twitstorm starting with the statement that he “just found out” that Obama was wiretapping Trump Tower just before the election. The problem was that people who actually know, like, government stuff started responding on social media, including Trump’s own feed. And they pointed out, first and foremost, that the president can’t order a wiretap. In an official Twitter response, Senator Ben Sasse (R- Nebraska), a conservative AND Trump critic, said that “(wiretapping) was either with FISA Court authorization or without such authorization. If without, the President should explain what sort of wiretap it was and how he (Trump) knows this. It is possible he was illegally tapped. On the other hand, if it was with a legal FISA court order, then an application exists for surveillance that the court found credible. The President should ask that this full application regarding surveillance of foreign operatives or operations be made available, ideally to the full public, and at a bare minimum to the US Senate.” (i.e. Sasse)
In other words, if Trump deserved the benefit of the doubt (which he has completely pissed away by now) then an accusation that Obama was acting against him for partisan reasons is deeply serious and needs to be investigated. It’s also true that if there was cause to investigate, the government agents would not have been able to get to this point unless existing evidence had caused a judge to agree that a warrant should be issued. This is not the sort of thing you want to bring up if you’ve got something to hide. And it would have been hidden, except that it was also pointed out on Saturday that only the president would have the authority to reveal such an investigation, which, unofficially, he just did.
So Saturday March 4th was officially Trump’s STUPIDEST DAY EVER. And as you know, stupid by Trump standards is like “Communist by Stalin standards.”
This all gets to a point I made after the election. There is a second worst case scenario besides the one happening now, where Trump is re-enacting tragedy as farce. The other worst case scenario is that the Republicans really are going to turn America into a one-party state. That one party being the Democrats.
Because either Trump is going to succeed in his goal of turning America into his personal banana republic, or he will fail and fail spectacularly. Even if he succeeds, his regime will last only until he gets a piece of well-done steak lodged in his throat and he ends up choking to death because no one at the table will give him the Heimlich Maneuver. Either way, the Republicans’ experiment in getting everything they want is doomed to end, and depending on how badly it all blows up, being Republican will be associated in the public mind with treason and/or subnormal intelligence.
Or maybe not. Despite their increasing unpopularity, Republicans controlled the vast majority of state governments and used that position to reinforce their advantage by gerrymandering districts to increase the number of “safe” seats. Of course liberals who point this out to me are blanking out the point that Democrats needed to lose the seats they had for this to happen in the first place. If all the voters (many of them conservative) who came to yell at Republican congressmen at their recent townhall meetings actually went to vote against them in 2018, the Party of Trump would be in deep, deep shit. That is, IF Democrats present challengers who are not so boring or repellent that they make even the incumbents look good. Aye, there’s the rub…
But given that each party wants to cement its position as soon as it gains a majority, I would have to suspect that when, not if, Democrats regain control, they’re going to try to switch off the edge Republicans currently have. Franklin Roosevelt broke the previous unwritten tradition of only running for two terms as president, and when he died, Republicans in Congress passed the 22nd Amendment forcing term limits on the office. And FDR was MUCH more competent, much more humane, and much better loved than Trump is. Once Trump/Pence is no longer in the picture, Democrats are going to look at some of the other unwritten traditions whose violation by Trump led us to this point, with an aim of banning them on the grounds that we can no longer give politicians benefit of the doubt.
For one thing, Trump’s expenses. During the campaign, it was pointed out in news articles that Trump used accounting maneuvers to make a profit for his businesses by having them cover things like campaign events and rent, using Trump campaign funds. It was pointed out at the time that if a campaign uses the services of a corporation, federal law requires that they be paid. “Federal election law, however, does not contemplate a mega-wealthy candidate like Trump.”
Since the election, Trump has gone on weekend getaway at least four times (January 20 was only five weekends ago). First Lady Melania Trump has decided, for some reason, not to live with Donald at the White House, so she and her son Barron are still at Trump Tower, requiring extra security from New York police (apparently $500,000 a DAY). Trump himself used private security in addition to Secret Service on the campaign trail. The Washington Post has assessed that Trump’s first three trips to Mar-a-Lago have cost the treasury about $10 million. If you take $500K for the New York expenses per day and multiply it by 365, it equals $182.5 million a year. If you take $10 million and multiply it by 12 months, you get 120 million dollars a year. Thus, over 300 million dollars to cover the Trump family over one year. Whereas that liberal rag Breitbart says that the conservative group Judicial Watch estimated Barack Obama’s personal travel expenses at 96 million dollars. Over eight years.
If you are a Trump, you are at core a grifter. Your goal is to pass off all your liabilities onto someone else so you can do as you please. It is quite possible that the man’s primary reason to run for president was to have the American taxpayer cover the expenses of his lifestyle. (And then he got upset when he found out the role requires, y’know, work and stuff.)
So this is my idea.
It’s a maximum income rule. That is, in order to qualify for the protection of the Secret Service, Coast Guard, et al., the president cannot make more in a year than a certain amount (for the sake of the proposal, let’s cap the president’s income from assets, salary, et cetera, at 1 million dollars a year). If you make more than that maximum amount, you don’t get those services. This is on the logic that if you’re Donald Trump and you’re rich enough to hire your own private security in addition to the Secret Service, then you really don’t need the Secret Service.
But, if this limit is based on a known income, how do we determine whether a president exceeds the limit? That’s the other part of the proposal. I Am Not A Lawyer, and someone with qualifications is going to have to review this idea, but the other part of the legislation establishing the maximum income rule would be that the president is assumed to be in violation of the rule if he does not report his income, and this law would also apply to all presidential candidates before they are elected. In other words, for a candidate or president to apply for Secret Service protection or reimbursement of expenses, HE HAS TO RELEASE HIS TAX RETURNS SO WE KNOW WHAT HIS INCOME IS. So if you’re too rich to live on the public dime, then you pay for all that stuff yourself, as we know (or assume) that Donald Trump is able to do. If it turns out your income is less than (say) 1 million a year, you get the services. But covering all this stuff or paying back the government shouldn’t be a big deal if you’re an honest-to-goodness billionaire, right?
To me, this is an essentially libertarian principle. Government should not be in the business of punishing the rich, but neither should it go out of its way to give them more advantages than they naturally have. Nor should it be imposing undue burdens on the private citizen, but if you are to be a public servant, there should be less benefit of the doubt, not more, especially if the public is paying your tab.
Just an idea. I propose it to the Libertarian Party, and also to the Democrats, assuming they could seize a good idea if it smacked them in the face, which they haven’t so far.