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Friday, January 17, 2025
Trump plans an audacious grab for congressional ‘power of the purse’
Trump plans an
audacious grab for congressional ‘power of the purse’
He would trample what
the Founders intended.
January
17, 2025 at 11:55 a.m. ESTToday at 11:55 a.m. EST
As a presidential candidate last year, Donald Trump declared
that if California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) did not divert more of the state’s
limited water supply to farmers, “we won’t give him money to put out all his
fires. And if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got
problems.”
This is the cudgel of a monarch or heartless despot, which
is precisely why the Founders of this country invested the people’s
representatives in Congress — not the president — with the “power of the purse.”
The Constitution stipulates that money coming from the federal treasury has to
have been appropriated by the legislative branch, starting with the House, in
laws directing how those funds must be spent.
On the flip side, it is illegal for a president to
unilaterally withhold or needlessly delay disbursement of federal money once it
has been approved by Congress and signed into law. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was one of the most important of the post-Watergate
reforms, passed after skirmishes in which then-president Richard M. Nixon put
his signature on appropriations bills and then “impounded” — refused to spend —
money that had been allocated to programs that he opposed.
A half-century later, that will again become a flash point
in the second Trump administration. The incoming president and his team are
positioning to vastly expand the dominance of the executive branch; Trump’s
dubious claims to impoundment authority will be a key lever in achieving it.
“I am hard-pressed to think of what would be a more
substantial shift of power from the Congress to the president,” University of
Maryland public policy professor Philip Joyce,
a leading expert on the use of federal budget authority, told me.
Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020 came about because
he stalled $214 million in military assistance for Ukraine that had been
overwhelmingly approved by Congress, so he could pressure Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up incriminating evidence about the Biden family. The
nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency that reports to
Congress, found that the White House violated the law.
Trump’s intended nominee for a second stint as head of the
Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, reiterated at his confirmation
hearing Wednesday his and Trump’s claim that a president has the constitutional
authority to impound money — though courts have ruled otherwise.
Vought also refused to commit to spending $3.8 billion that
has been enacted for security assistance to Ukraine, telling the Senate
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs he would not “get ahead
of the president on a foreign policy issue.”
Trump campaigned on an explicit promise to “choke off the
money” that Congress has appropriated and press for the repeal of the
Impoundment Control Act. He portrays these actions as means of trimming
wasteful spending, though experience suggests he plans to use them to get his
political adversaries to bend to his will — with brazenly partisan use of
emergency aid being a case in point.
Last year, Politico’s E&E News reported that during Trump’s first term, he had “on at least
three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered
politically hostile or ordered special treatment for pro-Trump states.”
The article quoted Mark Harvey, who had been Trump’s senior
director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, as
saying that after wildfires hit California in 2018, Trump was persuaded to
release assistance only after being shown how many votes he had gotten in the
impacted areas.
Trump is the latest in “a succession of presidents who have
been increasingly high-handed in their assertions of executive power,”
said Douglas Elmendorf,
a former dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government who headed
the Congressional Budget Office from 2009 to 2015.
At the same time, Congress has grown more supine over the
years in resisting these end-runs by Democratic and Republican presidents. The
MAGA-fied House of Representatives can be expected to accelerate the trend.
Already, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), echoing Trump, has said “there should probably be conditions” placed on federal money that is sent to fire-ravaged
California, because “state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in
many respects.”
All of this comes as Trump and his allies are spreading false information about the causes of the current wildfire spread — for
instance, claiming that Southern California lacks water because of poor policy
decisions, when actually its state-run reservoirs are full. It should also be
noted that no strings were attached to the aid that Congress recently provided
to red states ravaged by hurricanes.
As Rep. Salud Carbajal, a Democrat from Southern
California, put it: “When this happens in Florida again — which it will happen;
when it happens in the Carolinas; when it happens with tornadoes in Oklahoma or
other places, we are going to provide them the aid that they need, because that
is what Americans do.”
The appalling politicization of tragedy is just one sign of
what lies ahead.
As James Madison wrote:
“This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and
effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate
representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and
for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”
Step up, Congress members. Make yourselves worthy of
the trust the Founders placed in you.
BONDI two articles
Pam Bondi Puts Loyalty to Trump First
The disturbing
priorities revealed in the attorney general nominee’s answers—and non-answers.
Jan 16, 2025
IF THESE WERE “NORMAL” TIMES, Pam
Bondi almost certainly would not be confirmed as attorney general. But these
are far from normal times, and with her leading the Department of Justice under
a re-elected Donald Trump, the times are likely to get a whole lot less normal.
On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary
Committee began confirmation hearings for the former Florida attorney general
Trump picked after the catastrophic collapse of his first choice for U.S.
attorney general, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, because of an investigation by
the House Ethics
Committee into allegations that Gaetz paid for sex, including
with a minor, and used illegal drugs while a member of Congress. Although it’s
almost certain that Bondi will be confirmed, there are at least three
disqualifying issues with her candidacy.
1. Potentially Grave Conflicts of Interest
Bondi is a career prosecutor who
served as Florida’s 37th and first female attorney general from 2011 to 2019,
after which she became a lobbyist for Ballard Partners in the firm’s
Washington, D.C. office. Her thirty corporate and
foreign clients included General
Motors, Uber, Major League Baseball, and Carnival North America. The Department
of Justice is currently investigating two of her other clients, Amazon and the GEO
Group, the latter of which is a private prison company that stands
to benefit heavily from mass deportations. Bondi’s firm also represents many
other clients with business before DOJ, such as Boeing, Blackstone, and Google.
Bondi also lobbied for a Kuwaiti firm and was registered as a foreign agent for
the government of Qatar.
In her Senate nominee questionnaire,
Bondi failed to disclose any of these potential conflicts of interest. Bondi
nonetheless emphasized during her testimony that she will not play politics as
attorney general. When pressed about acting as a registered foreign agent, she
insisted that the $115,000 monthly retainer was spread across several people at
the firm and that she is proud of the work she did for Qatar.
Bondi has yet to account for what is
perhaps the biggest stain on her credibility as a rule-of-law prosecutor. In
2013, Trump’s charitable foundation donated $25,000 to
And Justice for All, a PAC linked with Bondi. This donation came three days
after a spokeswoman for the Florida attorney general’s office said that Bondi
was reviewing allegations against get-rich-quick seminars associated with Trump
contained in a lawsuit by the state of New York. The lawsuit alleged that Trump
University and its affiliates were “sham for-profit” colleges and ripped off
5,000 consumers. Bondi subsequently declined to join the lawsuit against Trump
University and backed Trump in defending the donation.
In 2016, Citizens for Responsibility
and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint about the donation with the IRS. In
response, the Trump Foundation claimed—implausibly—that it had made an error
and that it had actually intended the donation to go not to
Bondi’s And Justice for All PAC but rather to a similarly named Kansas-based
anti-abortion nonprofit, Justice for All. In June 2016,
as Bondi faced increased criticism over the issue, her spokesperson stated that
Bondi had in fact solicited the donation from Trump several
weeks before her office had announced their contemplation of joining the Trump
University fraud lawsuit. In September 2016,
the IRS determined that the donation violated laws against nonprofit
organizations making political contributions and ordered Trump to pay a fine
for the contribution and to reimburse the foundation for the sum that had been
donated to Bondi. Neither Bondi nor her PAC were fined or criminally charged.
As Bondi well knows, Rule 1.7 of
the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct makes clear
that “loyalty and independent judgment are essential elements in the lawyer’s
relationship to a client” and that “concurrent conflicts of interest can arise
from the lawyer’s responsibilities to another client, a former client or a
third person or from the lawyer’s own interests.” Prosecutors pick and choose
which cases to pursue and which to drop. The law and facts are rarely cut and
dry. So far, Bondi has not adequately addressed concerns that she might put her
foot on the gas or pump the brakes based on loyalty to corporate or foreign
interests—or to the president-elect himself.
2. Adherence to the Big Lie
Bondi was repeatedly asked during the
hearing whether Joe Biden was legitimately elected; she refused to answer,
merely conceding that he is currently the president of the United States. When
pushed, she hinted that the Pennsylvania election in 2020 had problems with
fraud, a claim for which there is zero evidence. That she cannot admit that the
law has spoken on that subject in her audition for the job of the nation’s top
prosecutor is disturbing, to say the least.
All through the hearing, Bondi and
Senate Republicans hammered the idea that DOJ has been politicized and that
she’ll be the catalyst for much-needed reform. The undercurrent, of course, was
that Trump was supposedly wrongly investigated and prosecuted by Special
Counsel Jack Smith. By this metric, no politician could ever be legitimately
held to account for violating criminal laws because to even suggest a
politician committed a crime collides head on with politics. The argument also
ignores the possibility that the facts and the law pointed to criminal
activity, which the attorney general has a solemn duty to pursue.
3. Refusal to Disobey Illegal or Unconstitutional
Directives
Worse, Bondi refused to answer whether
she would refuse to follow illegal or unconstitutional orders, defensively
declaring that she has no reason to believe Trump would ask such a thing. Nor
would Bondi state that she’ll decline prosecutions of former Special Counsel
Jack Smith or former Rep. Liz Cheney, who has been a vocal critic of Trump and
was an outspoken member of the House January 6th Committee. When Sen. Mazie
Hirono (D-Hawaii) pursued this line of questioning, Bondi talked over her,
declaring with no sense of irony that the query itself only adds to the
politicization of the criminal justice system.
When asked about Trump’s
characterization of the January 6th insurrectionists as “hostages” and
“patriots,” Bondi claimed she was not “familiar” with those statements. This is
simply not credible. She also feigned ignorance regarding Trump’s assertion that
immigrants are “poisoning the blood
of our country.”
In Bondi’s defense, nobody who dared
answer these questions differently could possibly get the job. And she did make
a few promising admissions—including that presidents can only serve two terms
under the Twenty-second Amendment, and that there will be no “enemies list” at
the DOJ (while vigorously endorsing Kash Patel for FBI director, despite his
own well-known enemies list).
Bondi, like her incoming boss, knows
full well that despite what she says under oath to Congress, she will enter the
Trump administration effectively above the law. We can only hope that she
adheres to the values of decency that go along with what she called her
favorite part of the oath of office: “under God.”
Attorney general
nominee Pam Bondi: Qualified but questionable
Ruth Marcus
Better than Matt Gaetz
is not saying much.
January
16, 2025 at 3:27 p.m. ESTYesterday at 3:27 p.m. EST
The best thing about Pam Bondi is that she’s not Matt
Gaetz, President-elect Donald Trump’s initial pick for attorney general, who
blew up with supersonic speed. The second-best thing is that she’s not Kash
Patel, Trump’s outlandishly irresponsible choice to head the FBI, who, based on
Senate Republicans’ supine performance, looks likely to squeak through.
Bondi’s not-Gaetzness offers some comfort — but not much,
judging by her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
Unlike the disgraced former congressman, Bondi, a former Florida attorney
general, has the experience and demeanor to be the nation’s chief law
enforcement officer.
Testifying at her confirmation hearing, Bondi said many of
the things that a normal candidate for attorney general would say: that she
won’t use the Justice Department to launch prosecutions of political opponents;
that she will follow the facts and the law in bringing cases; that she will
exercise independent judgment if confirmed as the nation’s 87th attorney
general, which appears inevitable.
But, of course, Bondi is not a normal candidate for
attorney general, because she is the choice of a president with a decidedly
abnormal view of the Justice Department — specifically, that it should bend to
his will and punish those who dare to oppose him. She is the choice of a
president who values loyalty over all and who found himself so frustrated by
the two men who served in the role during his first term that he fired one and
denounced the other — a president who has proclaimed his “absolute right to do
what I want with the Justice Department.”
Trump knows what he wants in an attorney general — someone
who will do his bidding — and he chose Bondi, who represented Trump during his
first impeachment hearing and in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The
question Bondi could not convincingly answer was whether she would have the
fortitude, the strength of character, to stand up to him.
The panel’s ranking Democrat, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin,
framed the stakes. “At issue, I believe in this nomination hearing is not your
competence nor your experience,” he told Bondi. “At issue is your ability to
say no. More than any other Cabinet official, the attorney general has to be
prepared to put the Constitution first and even tell the president of the
United States, ‘You’re wrong.’”
Say no? Bondi couldn’t even tell Trump that he lost the
2020 election. Like so many other Trump acolytes, she has said no more than
that Joe Biden was “duly sworn in” as president. Truth-avoidance has apparently
become the price of admission to the Trump administration. But given that
Trump’s attorney general during that election, William P. Barr, found no “fraud
on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” this
coddling of Trump’s illusions is particularly concerning from a nominee for the
same position.
Where Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to head the Defense
Department, parried question after question from his confirmation panel on the
grounds that they were “anonymous smears,” Bondi’s go-to move was to profess
ignorance.
What about Patel’s comments that he would shut down FBI
headquarters on Day 1 and prosecute those who “helped Joe Biden rig
presidential elections?” asked Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal.
“Senator, I am not familiar with all those comments,” Bondi replied.
Did she agree with Trump’s characterization of the Jan. 6, 2021, defendants as “hostages” and
“patriots,” asked Hawaii Democrat Mazie Hirono.
Bondi: “I am not familiar with that statement, senator.
Hirono: “I just familiarized you with that statement. Do
you agree with it?”
Bondi: “I’m not familiar with it, senator.”
When claims of ignorance didn’t suffice, Bondi dodged by
claiming she was being asked hypotheticals. About a Trump directive to violate
ethical or legal rules. About whether she would prosecute former special
counsel Jack Smith or former congresswoman Liz Cheney.
“Senator, I will never speak on a hypothetical, especially
one saying that the president would do something illegal,” she told Delaware
Democrat Chris Coons.
But these are anything but hypothetical situations.
We know Trump pressured FBI director James B. Comey to drop
a probe into his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and fired Comey
after he refused. We know Trump berated attorney general Jeff Sessions for
recusing himself from a special counsel investigation and then fired him, as
well. It says something about Trump’s hold on his people that Bondi could not
bring herself to say straight out that she would stand up to such misconduct.
Trump has publicly called for Smith and Cheney to be
jailed; no hypothetical there. Bondi herself called Smith a “rabid dog” and told the Judiciary Committee
that “what I’m hearing on the news is horrible.” California Democrat Adam
Schiff had every reason to ask whether she believes there is a factual
predicate to launch a criminal probe.
She also evaded legitimate inquiry by simply rewriting
history. Asked about Trump’s 2021 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State
Brad Raffensperger pressing him to “find 11,780 votes,” Bondi disputed the
premise. “Senator, I have not listened to the hour-long conversation, but it’s
my understanding that is not what he asked him to do.” Seriously?
Read the transcript.
Bondi even rewrote her own chilling words: “At the Department of Justice,
the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” she told Fox News in 2023.
“The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state, last term for
President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows. But now they have a spotlight
on them and they can all be investigated.” Bondi’s translation on Wednesday: “I
said, prosecutors will be prosecuted, to finish the quote, if bad.”
That’s slicing off a lot of red meat.
Bondi could be worse. Trump made sure to show us that. But
we should not be satisfied with her. The Department of Justice and the country
deserve better.
DAYS OF BLUNDER
Starting Monday: The
Trump administration’s days of blunder
Talk of tattoos, Jesus,
enemies lists and a war with California mark the week before inauguration.
January
17, 2025 at 7:30 a.m. ESTToday at 7:30 a.m. EST
At a forum this week hosted by Politico, former top Trump
strategist and current MAGA loudmouth Steve Bannon said insiders have a name
for the first days of the incoming Trump administration. “We refer to it right
now as ‘Days of Thunder,’” he said. “And I think these Days of Thunder
starting next week are going to be incredibly, incredibly intense.”
Why would President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers compare
their return to power with a 35-year-old movie
about NASCAR? This can only mean they are expecting a series of
car wrecks. And, in fact, the pileups have already begun — a familiar mix of
incompetence, defiance of the law, infighting and tilting at windmills.
(“Windmills are an economic and environmental disaster. I don’t want even one
built during my administration,” Trump announced on Wednesday.)
Bannon himself is publicly feuding with billionaire Elon Musk, who
has attached himself, barnacle-like, to Trump. Bannon told an Italian newspaper
that Musk is “a truly evil person” who has the “maturity of a child” (fact
check: mostly true), and that “he should go back to South Africa,” where Musk
grew up during apartheid. Musk, in turn, has called his MAGA critics “subtards”
and “contemptible fools” (fact check: well, let’s not go there).
On the same day Bannon spoke about Days of Thunder, I was
in a hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, watching the most
extravagantly unqualified nominee I have ever seen. Pete Hegseth makes the
closest runner-up, Harriet Miers, George W. Bush’s ill-fated Supreme Court nominee, look like Oliver
Wendell Holmes. Hegseth has faced widespread and credible allegations of
drunkenness on the job, financial mismanagement at the two small charities he
ran, and sexual harassment and assault.
(He paid a woman who accused him of assault
while denying the accusation.) A weekend host for Fox News, Hegseth never ran a
large organization and held a junior rank in the military, and he has said
women shouldn’t serve in combat and disparaged the Geneva Conventions, which
govern the laws of war. He also appears to have no idea what he’s doing.
At Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Tammy
Duckworth (D-Illinois) sprung a pop quiz on him, asking the defense
secretary-designate how many nations are in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations. “I couldn’t tell you the exact amount of nations, but I know we
have allies in South Korea and Japan and in AUKUS with Australia,” Hegseth
ventured.
“None of those three countries that you’ve mentioned are in
ASEAN,” Duckworth informed him.
President Joe Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has
met annually with his counterparts in ASEAN, as did Trump defense secretaries
Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper before him. This is because ASEAN is crucial to
the United States in its geopolitical struggle against China — and Hegseth
doesn’t even know what it is.
The next day brought the confirmation hearing of Pam Bondi,
whose main qualification to be attorney general is that she’s not Matt Gaetz.
During her ferociously partisan appearance, she refused to acknowledge that
Biden won the 2020 election, left on the table prosecuting Liz Cheney, Jack
Smith and Merrick Garland, and delivered frequent taunts about Trump’s
“overwhelming” victory in November. (He won by 1.5 percentage points and got
less than 50 percent of the vote). “Look at the map of California,” she told
California Democrat Adam Schiff. “It’s bright red, the popular vote, for a
reason.” Trump lost California by 20 points.
The main driver of the car wrecks, of course, is the
president-elect himself. Fresh from his news conference announcing that he
would consider using military force to seize the
Panama Canal and to take Greenland from NATO ally Denmark, he reposted a social
media post this week from right-wing activist Charlie Kirk with a poll
purporting to show that “Greenland wants independence from Denmark.”
Now, he’s getting ready to go to war with California. Trump
fabricated a claim that Los Angeles doesn’t have enough water to fight
wildfires because Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom (whom the president-elect calls
“Gavin Newscum”) diverted water “to protect a tiny little fish,” the delta
smelt: “And for the sake of a smelt, they have no water.” In reality, Los
Angeles has enough water to fight the fires; hydrants have at times run dry
because the city’s water system, like all municipal systems, isn’t equipped to fight forest fires. The state’s
water policies have nothing to do with it.
Yet Trump keeps posting “RELEASE THE WATER” and, now,
congressional Republicans are threatening to withhold disaster relief from
California because of the president-elect’s bogus claims. After Trump’s (phony)
accusation that the Biden administration had refused disaster
assistance to Republican parts of storm-ravaged North Carolina, Republicans are
now proposing to do exactly that to blue California unless it abandons its
unrelated conservation policies. “We will follow the administration’s lead on
this,” House Speaker Mike Johnson declared this week, joining in the false
accusation that the fires came with the state’s “complicity” because of
“deliberative policy choices.”
Trump, never one to stand still, has moved on to blaming
the fires on migrants. He posted a claim this week that taxpayer “funds are
diverted to illegal immigrants,” and then “an illegal immigrant comes and sets
your house on fire and the fire department doesn’t have the resources to put it
out.”
Trump is also considering, as one of his first acts in
office, overturning by fiat a law duly passed by
bipartisan majorities in Congress, signed into law by Biden, and on the verge
of being upheld by the Supreme Court. The people’s representatives determined
that China-owned TikTok poses a threat to national security. Trump’s own choice
to be secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), said this week that China is “the most
potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.” But
Trump has a higher priority: himself. He thinks TikTok is good for him
politically. So, he’s getting ready to set aside the law — and he’ll be hosting
TikTok’s CEO at his inauguration Monday.
The incoming administration is also poised to ignore the
law and the Supreme Court on government spending. Congress in 1974 passed the
Impoundment Control Act — which blocks a president from refusing to spend funds
Congress appropriates because he doesn’t like a particular program — after the
abuses of Watergate, and the Supreme Court upheld it. But Russell Vought,
Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, declared at his
confirmation hearing this week that “I don’t believe it’s constitutional,” regardless
of what the Supreme Court says. “The president ran on that view,” Vought said,
and “the incoming administration is going to take the president’s view on this”
— the law be damned.
Apparently, rules just won’t apply to the incoming
administration. Extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which Republicans plan to
do, would add $4.6 trillion to the national debt
over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But Trump
and Republicans have promised that, once in power, they would cut the national
debt. So, as The Post’s Jacob Bogage reports, they have come
up with a novel solution. They will simply decree, magically, that extending
the tax cuts won’t increase the debt! Saying so doesn’t make it true, of course
— but this is no longer a relevant consideration.
These coming car wrecks are in addition to the routine
fender benders that Trump tends to produce almost hourly. He announced on
social media this week that “I am today announcing that I will create the
EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that
come from Foreign sources.” Evidently, he was unaware that Congress had already taken care of this, in 1789.
It’s called “Customs.”
After the Justice Department this week released the final
report of the special counsel investigating Trump’s antics on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump posted: “To show you how
desperate Deranged Jack Smith is, he released his Fake findings at 1 a.m. in
the morning.” Well, yes, 1 a.m. is “in the morning.” So is 1:52 a.m., when
Trump posted his missive. But the report was clearly dated a week earlier, and
Smith had already left the Justice Department. The report was released at that
time because a Trump-allied judge had embargoed its release until midnight.
Such are the musings of the extremely stable genius. One
moment, he was attacking NBC late-night host Seth
Meyers. (“I feel an obligation to say how dumb and untalented he is.”) Another
moment, he was sharing a picture of himself labeled “God’s gift to America.”
And when Israel and Hamas reached their ceasefire deal, he
naturally claimed sole credit. “We have achieved so much without even being in
the White House,” he boasted.
Good point. Israel has reached ceasefires with Hamas and
Hezbollah. Inflation has calmed. Violent crime, border crossings and
opioid-overdose deaths have all plunged. The economy has added jobs for 48 straight months. Interest rates have fallen.
The stock market has hit dozens of record highs. Maybe Trump should simply
declare victory — and stay home at Mar-a-Lago.
After watching Bondi’s confirmation hearing this week, I
must respectfully disagree with The Post’s Editorial Board, which gave her a
thumbs-up and pronounced her qualified to be attorney general. She appeared to
take pride in how little she knows.
What were her thoughts on Trump calling those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,
“hostages” and “patriots”?
“I am not familiar with that statement.”
How about the recording of Trump urging Georgia’s secretary
of state to “find” him 11,780 votes?
“I’ve not heard it.”
Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, Kash Patel, saying he
would “come after” journalists “who helped Joe Biden rig
presidential elections”?
“I am not familiar with all those comments.”
Patel’s threats to prosecute political opponents, including
some from the five-dozen-name enemies list published in an
appendix to his book that labels them members of a “deep state”?
“I don’t believe he has an enemies list. He made a quote on
TV, which I have not heard.”
Her feigned ignorance did not extend to the supposed
“weaponization” of the government by Democrats, of which she was most certain.
She and her Republican questioners brought it up two dozen times. Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-Texas) observed to her that “no president had previously been prosecuted
until the Biden-Harris White House came along, and in the last four years we’ve
seen Donald Trump indicted and prosecuted not once, not twice, not three times,
but four separate times.”
“And two assassination attempts,” Bondi added.
Thus did the incoming attorney general implicate the Biden
White House in the attempted murder of Trump.
But if Bondi was only playing dumb, Hegseth seemed to come
by this trait more earnestly. Even his supporters (which, thanks to Trump’s
threats, include virtually every Senate Republican) felt a need to acknowledge
his lack of credentials.
“Admittedly, this nomination is unconventional,” the Armed
Services Committee chairman, Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) allowed.
“Pete Hegseth is an out-of-the-box nominee,” submitted
former senator Norm Coleman, introducing Hegseth.
Freshman Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Montana) defended Hegseth’s
thin résumé by saying “I don’t think any board in the world would’ve hired
Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg when they founded their companies
either.”
So now, we’re treating the 3-million-person U.S. military
like a garage start-up?
Hegseth came armed with two strategies. The first was to
say that all of the accusations of alcohol abuse and sexual and financial
impropriety were fabricated by left-wing partisans. “What became very evident
to us from the beginning: There was a coordinated smear campaign orchestrated
in the media against us,” he spoke, using the royal “we.”
The second was to say that he has been “redeemed by my Lord
and Savior, Jesus Christ” for all of the bad things he was falsely accused of
doing by this left-wing smear campaign.
After the nominee’s third mention of Jesus, Sen. Markwayne
Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican, informed the committee that “our Lord and
Savior forgave me” — too, as did Mrs. Mullin. In fact, “the only reason why I’m
here and not in prison is because my wife loved me, too,” he disclosed.
Mullin condemned Democrats as hypocrites, accusing his
fellow senators of cheating on their wives and showing up drunk for votes. “The
man’s made a mistake and you want to sit there and say that he’s not qualified?
Give me a joke!” Mullin challenged.
Okay, Senator. A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar …
The real joke is going to be on the brave men and women of
the military, who will soon be led by a man who has referred to military
lawyers as “jagoffs” and who, at the hearing, left open the possibility that he
would use the 82nd Airborne to conduct law enforcement in D.C. Hegseth was
contemptuous of his questioners; he refused to meet with all but one of the
Democrats, and Wicker restricted the questioning time over Democratic
objections.
Instead, the secretary-designate engaged his bros on the
GOP side in high-testosterone talk.
“How many push-ups can you do?” Sheehy asked.
“I did five sets of 47 this morning,” the nominee replied,
in apparent homage to the 47th president.
He repeatedly vowed to return the “warrior ethos” and
“warrior culture” and to rebuild the military after the “defense cuts under the
Biden administration.” Defense spending grew nearly 15 percent under Biden from
Trump’s final year in office, and the men and women of the military never
stopped being the most powerful warriors on the planet.
But you wouldn’t know that from Hegseth and his Republican
interlocutors, who spoke endlessly about the supposed “wokeness” in the
military.
As an example of this wokeness, Hegseth claimed that he was not allowed to offer
protection during Biden’s inauguration in 2021 because he has a Christian
tattoo. Pointing to his chest, he said “it’s called the Jerusalem Cross,” or
Crusader’s Cross. He did not mention that he also has a tattoo proclaiming “Deus Vult” —
“God wills it” — which was displayed during the white supremacist rally in
Charlottesville in 2017 and during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
It’s not clear whether the tattoos caused Hegseth to be
rejected from security duty. But if they did, that happened before Biden
took office, during the woke Trump administration.
Days of Thunder? More like days of blunder.
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