Liz retweeted
Russell Vought has found a neat way to make Congress optional: hold approved money until the fiscal year ends, then pretend the calendar did the canceling. In September, OMB sought $810 million in rescissions. The GAO said the administration couldn't use that request to let the funding expire. Somehow the man who lectures everyone about constitutional government keeps misplacing Article I.
The stakes are Head Start, disaster relief, medical research, and the basic promise that laws passed by Congress mean something. Get the records. Put the officials under oath. Close the claimed loopholes. A president doesn't get a line-item veto just because his budget director knows how to wait until midnight.
Russell Vought is the most powerful Trump official most Americans have never heard of. And Democrats are coming for his power.
@crampell explains how Trump’s budget chief helped undermine Congress’s authority and why his reckoning may be coming.
lnk.thebulwark.com/4irI149?u…
Liz retweeted
Two guys who have been illegally writing checks and illegally withholding congressionally appropriated money at the same time. Subpoena Vought and Mrs. Beasley for a joint hearing so we can watch them try to throw each other under the bus.
Liz retweeted
I don’t know who needs to hear this but if the market is wildly selling off AI stocks because of the election results then it’s safe to assume the value wasn’t in the product but in the administrations willingness to let Silicon Valley fellate each other on your dime.
Liz retweeted
I've been in politics for a quarter century. It's hard to express how staggering it is to see a conversation like this on corporate US media. The Morning Joe panel gobsmacked by the directness of @AbdulElSayed's points.
(clip via @DropSiteNews)
Liz retweeted
You don't reach across the aisle to greet people who sold Alligator Alcatraz merchandise, you reach across the aisle to hand them a subpoena.
Liz retweeted
Wow. For years, an official in Arkansas allegedly tampered with bar exam scores, pulling points from some test takers and giving them to others.
This caused numerous failing exams to pass, and resulted in "at least one instance" where an otherwise passing exam fell below the requisite threshold.
cc: @BarExamTutor
Liz retweeted
We developed the drugs through the NIH and they think we're too stupid to figure out the manufacturing
Liz retweeted
The big lesson of the Biden years is that you have to prosecute these people. You can’t just move on. You need to make the next generation of grifters and hate mongers scared for their lives.
Liz retweeted
In the 80’s there were periodic television writers’ strikes. David Letterman made the decision to go on anyway, without the writers. The comedy suffered, and he would improvise with bits like “Hal Gurnee’s Network Time Killers.” The shows exposed the artifice of television; that what you think you know as a relationship with a host is in fact a shallow parasocial construct driven by dozens of professionals, all dancing for the sponsors. A fugazi.
The writers are no longer drafting new material for Trump. He’s a character without a support team because as the lamest of ducks, he’s now a man entirely without stakes.
He will drift around in the White House for the next two years, fiddling with his sad Washington DC Construction Playset (The Reflecting Pool! The Golf Course! The Ballroom! Trump-Kennedy Center! The Arch!) while Washington’s careerist mob turns its attention to those who might aid their advancement in the future.
The sad old man is not a mastermind or writer. He is a television character, animated by professionals. We may think we know him, and maybe we do, a little. But the architecture of his politics and the sources of our rage are constructed by off-camera craftsmen who are quietly moving on to their next projects.
It may seem unintuitive that the writers would leave his character without a grand finale, a final sendoff, or a “who shot JR?” cliffhanger. But he’s perhaps not worth the effort. This ain’t TV… it’s real life. In transactional Washington, his worth was always rooted in what he could deliver. He’s now shown he’s a liability, and the writers have moved on.
He may improvise, or try to. But the comedy will suffer, and we will all get a glimpse at the difference between the man himself and the complex Oz-machine we have called Trumpism as it, Terminator-like, oozes and morphs into its next carnation, leaving its old avatar behind.