Author Archives: Sheila

The Big Picture

Every day, we Americans awake to another assault on the foundations of our governing system. As we attend to each day’s news, each day’s effort to deconstruct constitutional government, we are in danger of losing the big picture, the scope of the losses we’re suffering.

I don’t know whether this “firehose” approach is a conscious strategy; Trump’s already substandard intellect and mental health are declining at such a rapid rate that restraints on his impulsiveness–never strong–are similarly declining. Intentional or not, however, it’s working to distract us.

We simply cannot allow the rapidity with which MAGA is dismantling American government to obscure the big picture, the overall damage. Recently, Heather Cox Richardson included that overview in one of her essential “Letters,” and her description is worth citing:

Six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.

From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.

It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.

Richardson proceeded to enumerate the extent to which MAGA is implementing Project 2025–shrinking or abolishing  government programs that serve ordinary people while further enriching the wealthy. The party of “limited government” is dramatically expanding government’s power.

The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities.

There’s much more, as we all know– that daily firehose of assaults on the government of We the People, assaults aimed at replacing the America we thought we knew. substituting cronies for civil servants so that “royal court” can invite bribery and engage in open corruption with impunity.

We the People need to keep that big picture in mind. We need to ignore the self-engrossed pundits mucking around in the weeds, criticising various Democrats and focusing on perceived past errors. We have one job. ONE JOB. We need to take Congress back from the GOP invertebrates who will go down in history either as complicit fascists or disgraceful quislings.

ONE JOB. Saving America.

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Why Texas Gerrymandering Matters

Okay–better late than never…

Media has reported on the effort being mounted in Texas to re-gerrymander that state’s already-extreme gerrymander, in an effort to add five Republican seats, and potentially save the House for the GOP.

One of the things that national polling misses is the fact that a political party can win the national vote by millions, but thanks to our structure–elements like the Senate’s disproportionate representation and the Electoral College–the party garnering a minority of the vote can win control of Congress and the Presidency.

I’ve written a lot over the years about the pernicious effects of gerrymandering, and lest memories of those diatribes have faded, I’m going all the way back to 2001. This is what I wrote on May 1st of that year.

The Indiana General Assembly is preparing to embark upon what individual legislators call redistricting, and what the rest of us call gerrymandering. It will be an intensely partisan endeavor.
The goal of this exercise is to draw as many “safe” seats as possible—more for the party in charge, of course, but also for the minority party, because in order to retain control, the majority needs to cram as many of the minority into as few districts as possible. While gerrymandering is nothing new, the advent of computers has made the process efficient beyond the wildest dreams of Elbridge Gerry, the former Vice-President for whom it is named.
In gerrymandering, neighborhoods, cities, towns, townships—even precincts—are broken up to meet the political needs of mapmakers. Numbers are what drive the results—not compactness of districts, not communities of interest, and certainly not competitiveness.
Safe districts undermine the democratic process.
  • If one is guaranteed victory, it is easy to become lazy and arrogant, safe to scuttle popular measures without fear of retribution.
  • Lack of competitiveness can make it impossible to trace campaign contributions. When the folks with “Family Friendly Libraries” send a check to Representative Censor, who is unopposed, he then sends it to Senator MeToo, who is in a hot race.  Senator MeToo’s campaign report shows only a contribution from Rep. Censor.
  • Lack of competitiveness breeds voter apathy. Why get involved when the result is foreordained?  Why donate to a sure loser? For that matter, unless you are trying to buy political influence, why donate to a sure winner? Why volunteer or vote, when those efforts won’t affect the results?  It’s not only voters who lack incentives for participation, either; it’s not easy to recruit credible candidates to run on the “sure loser” ticket. The result is that in many of these races, voters have a choice between the anointed and the annoying—marginal candidates who offer no new ideas, no energy, and no challenge. Pundits describe voter apathy as if it were a moral deficiency; I suggest it is instead a rational response to noncompetitive politics. (Watch those “apathetic” folks fight an unpopular rezoning!)  Reasonable people save their efforts for places where those efforts matter. Thanks to the proliferation of safe seats, those places may not include the voting booth.
  • Gerrymandering exacerbates political polarization and gridlock. In competitive districts, nominees know they have to run to the middle to win in the fall. When the primary is, in effect, the general election, the battle takes place among the party faithful, who tend to be much more ideological.  Republican incumbents will be challenged from the Right and Democratic incumbents from the Left. Even where those challenges fail, they are a powerful incentive for the incumbent to protect his flank. So we elect nominees beholden to the political extremes, who are unwilling or unable to compromise.
Of the 150 members of our current legislature, 73 were unopposed in 1998. Most of the others had only token opposition.
Is this any way to run a representative democracy?
The assault on democracy has been going on for longer than we recognize. And it isn’t just Texas.

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Waste And Fraud

This will be brief, since sitting still isn’t my strong point.

The idiots who believed–or pretended to believe–that DOGE was all about rooting out “waste and fraud” from the federal government will dismiss the truth, much as Trump has responded to economic data by firing the workers who reported it, but numerous outlets are reporting the all-too-predictable facts.

DOGE cost taxpayers a fortune. Far from finding waste and fraud, DOGE was waste and fraud.

Billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump tried to take a chainsaw to federal government spending, but it turns out they actually wasted tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.

The Department of Government Efficiency generated some $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government in the first six months of the year, according to a new report from the minority staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI).

As Talking Points Memo reported,

Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations yesterday released a jaw-dropping report attempting to document the scope and scale of financial waste, personnel upheaval, and human suffering caused by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk’s giddily uninformed strike force of Peter Thiel acolytes. In all, the Democrats, led by Richard Blumenthal (CT), estimated DOGE cost the government $21.7 billion.

“DOGE-generated waste could also have easily funded monthly food assistance for the 5.3 million families losing an average of $146 in monthly food security assistance ($9.3 billion per year) under the new budget; or it could have been used more broadly to support the 40 percent of taxpayers that will see a net increase to their taxes as a direct result of the Trump tax plan,” the report contends….

Neither the buyouts nor paying workers while on administrative leave (costing an additional $6.1 billion) increased government efficiency, as was always obvious and predictable. The report details many other costs, from the petty and pointless (millions of hours of wasted employee time writing the Musk-required email listing their weekly accomplishments) to the catastrophic (the elimination of the United States Agency for International Development, “projected to cause millions of additional deaths globally while simultaneously endangering domestic public health by reducing essential medical staff and programs.”)

There is much more, and you really need to click through and read the depressing details, but this is what happens when people who have absolutely no idea what they are doing–in this case, children in their early 20’s armed only with ideological platitudes–are given entry into sophisticated systems without any understanding of either the missions of the agencies involved, or the data relevant to that mission.

A perfect example of Trump/MAGA….

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Indiana’s Despicable Senators

The Trumpian assault on the rule of law has been unremitting. With the assistance of Mitch McConnell, Trump turned the highest court in the land into his personal lapdog, and now he is aiming to pollute the lower courts that have valiantly opposed his unconstitutional efforts.

The most recent and most blatant effort to replace dispassionate jurists with biased and unqualified sycophants was the nomination of a slimy creature named Emil Bove to a federal judgeship–a lifetime appointment.

Charlie Sykes, among others, reports. He begins with a quote.

Tonight Senate Republicans cast away their Constitutional obligations to rubber stamp [Emil Bove] an outrageously unfit nominee to the Third Circuit. The Senate, the country, the judiciary will suffer for this. And the conservative legal movement will not recover.” — Gregg Nunziata, Exec Dir, Society for the Rule of Law.

Last night, the US Senate blithely ignored the pleas of the legal community, the evidence of multiple whistleblowers, and whatever tattered remnants of self-respect they had, to confirm Emil Bove to a lifetime position on the Court of Appeals. As I wrote a few days back: It’s not easy these days to single out the worst of the worst appointments, but certainly the elevation of the thuggish Bove to the federal appellate bench has to rank right up there. Other churls and chodes will come and go, but federal judges are forever. 

The Senate’s surrender came the same day the Wapo reported: “Whistleblower evidence suggests Trump judicial nominee Emil Bove misled Senate.”

The vote was 50-49, indicating that J.D. Vance once again had to break the tie. Two Republicans defected. But not Indiana’s GOP Senators. If there was any lingering doubt about the lack of integrity–and the lapdog status–of these two “law and order” Republicans, this inexcusable vote certainly erases it. Their fuhrur told them to vote for a demonstrable liar who has made it clear he will support whatever his fuhrur wants, irrespective of the Constitution or legal precedent–and they obeyed.

Banks, of course, is a gung-ho member of the SS. Young, it appears, is just a feckless, integrity-free “Good German.” Neither of them deserves public office or respect.

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