As I have struggled to cope with the horror I feel at the prospect of a Trump presidency, I fear I may have underestimated the scope of the damage that he can do almost immediately upon assuming the office. As a consequence of the obduracy of the Congressional Republicans during much of his presidency, Obama has been obliged to use the rather considerable powers of the Executive to establish and implement policies for which he could not get Congressional approval. As my son pointed out to me, many of the dramatic advances made during the past eight years in the area of LGBT rights have come about as the result of executive orders, and these can be immediately undone by Trump. The same is true, I believe, for improvements in the rights and working conditions of Executive Branch employees, whose number is very, very large.
Trump himself, of course, is ignorant and feckless, but I fear that means that he will be a Potemkin Village President controlled behind the scenes by his Alt-Right neo-nazi anti-semitic advisors.
No doubt Mike Pence knows what your son knows and will quickly start utilizing that information to repress LGBTs
ReplyDeleteOh yes, I am sure. That and very much more.
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ReplyDeletehttp://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/who-is-in-president-trump-cabinet-231071
ReplyDeleteCheck this out, although not the most mind blowing:
"While Trump has called for eliminating the EPA, he has more recently modified that position, saying in September that he’ll 'refocus the EPA on its core mission of ensuring clean air, and clean, safe drinking water for all Americans.'
***Myron Ebell***, a climate skeptic who is running the EPA working group on Trump’s transition team, is seen as a top candidate to lead the agency. Ebell, an official at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has come under fire from environmental groups for his stances on global warming. Venture capitalist Robert Grady is also a contender.
Other potential candidates: Joe Aiello, director of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Environmental Safety and Quality Assurance; Carol Comer, the commissioner of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, who was appointed by Pence; and Leslie Rutledge, attorney general of Arkansas and a lead challenger of EPA regulations in the state."
It won't even be safe to breathe or drink the water....
Voici la tempête de merde....
Just listened to Nader on the radio. He talked about a scheme I had heard of a few years ago to get rid of the electoral college without amending the Constitution, but what I hadn't realized is how far along it is in its implementation. The idea is to get a number of states with a total electoral vote of 270 to pass laws saying their electors must vote for whomever wins the national popular vote. Presto! The surprising part to me was that, apparently, they're at 165 already. It sounded attractive, given the fact that twice in the last 16 years (Gore and Hillary) the Democrats have won the popular vote and lost the election. But now I'm seeing some articles that say that abolishing the electoral college would normally favor Republicans. So I'm no longer calling the electoral college an "irrational, antiquarian" system. (There are limits to my intellectual integrity.) But does anyone have more info than I on what the effect might be?
ReplyDeleteHe is undoubtedly "ignorant and feckless," as you say, but he doesn't defer, that much we know from his business career. And unlike Mike Pence, he's got no issues with LGBT people, that even came up during the campaign. He's a lifelong New Yorker, he's not scared of LGBT people. Will he stop his VP from making mischief? Hard to know. Also unknown is what role, if any, Steve Bannon, the Breitbart racist, will play in the administration. I strongly suspect Jared Kushner, a Jewish Democrat his whole life from New Jersey, is going to end up being the key player in things.
ReplyDeleteJust to be clear, this is all an unmitigated disaster, I'm not trying to downplay that. But the disaster may not play out in all the ways one might worry.